Miss Garnet's Angel

by Salley Vickers

  Outside, in the cold sunlight, the boy was waiting.

  ‘You want glass?’ he asked.

  Miss Garnet was astonished. ‘You speak English!’ she cried and then, thinking this sounded too like an accusation, ‘you speak very well.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The boy lowered his eyelashes in appreciation. ‘My father say if I speak English good he send me to Londra.’

  ‘Oh, then perhaps you would like to speak it with me?’

  She spoke slowly but the boy did not immediately understand. Then he favoured her with a perfect smile. ‘Si, Signora, I speak with you. My name is Nicco.’

  Miss Garnet, unused to such physical charm, blushed. ‘Hello, Nicco, my name is…’ but how was the child going to manage ‘Miss Garnet’? So, ‘Julia,’ she concluded and blushed again.

  Nicco smiled, showing stunning teeth. ‘You want glass, Giulia?’

  With a child’s acceptance he did not ask her how the accident had occurred but simply led her over bridges and along a calle until they reached a shop on the fondamenta where a man with a workman’s rubber apron and a red woollen hat sat over a wide sheet of brilliant blue glass. Nicco turned to his companion. ‘Here,’ he said, proudly, ‘glass.’

  Miss Garnet offered the broken Virgin awkwardly to the man in the hat to whom Nicco was speaking rapidly. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘can you mend?’

  Seeing the picture the man smiled broadly. Miss Garnet was relieved to notice that his teeth, unlike Nicco’s, were in a state of bad repair. ‘Bellini!’ he exclaimed, ‘Bellissimo Bellini,’ and he kissed his fingers in a way that Miss Garnet had seen only in films or on TV.

  ‘He likes very much,’ Nicco gravely explained.

  ‘But he can do it, he will mend the glass?’

  In reply the man with the woolly hat held up a thick forefinger. ‘Si, Siynora, in wan ower, OK?’ He spoke with exaggerated enunciation, displaying his tarry teeth.

  What a relief, Miss Garnet said to herself and then, because she was jubilant that she had negotiated her first Venetian disaster, ‘Nicco, may I buy you lunch?’

  * * *

  Nicco, who did not at first understand her suggestion, became enthusiastic when the penny dropped. He led her to a Trattoria-Bar where he ordered a toasted cheese and ham sandwich and a Coke. Miss Garnet, daringly, chose gnocchi. The gnocchi came in a pale green sauce and was the most delicious thing she thought she had ever tasted. ‘Carciofi,’ Nicco said, when asked for the name of the green ingredient and cupped his hands in an effort to mimic an artichoke. She did not understand and then became distracted by the sudden appearance of a large glass of what appeared to be brandy.

  ‘For you,’ Nicco said proudly. ‘Is my cousin.’ He pointed at the young man who had produced the drink. ‘He say, “Hi!”’

  ‘Freddo!’ Nicco’s cousin clapped his arms around himself to indicate cold.

  Miss Garnet was not a teetotaller but she rarely drank. A lifetime of abstemiousness had bred in her a poor head for alcohol. Nevertheless it seemed impolite to decline the courtesy. And really the brandy was most acceptable, she thought, as she sipped the contents of the big-bellied glass.

  ‘My cousin say, you like another?’

  ‘No, please, it was delicious. Please thank him, Nicco, just the bill.’

  Miss Garnet felt unusually jolly as she and Nicco walked single file along the side of the green canal back to the glass-cutter. The light, refracting off the water on to the shabby brick frontages of the houses, bathed her eyes. The brandy had warmed her and a sense of wellbeing suffused her body.

  Re-entering the glass-cutter’s Miss Garnet nearly knocked into a man on his way out and almost dropped the purse she had ready, so eager was she to complete the transaction which would restore Signora Mignelli’s picture. The glass-cutter had the repaired Virgin out on his bench but when Miss Garnet began to count the notes from her purse Nicco, who had been exchanging some banter with the departing customer, stopped her.

  ‘Is free,’ he explained.

  Miss Garnet did not comprehend. ‘Three what, Nicco? Thousand, million?’ She prided herself on her mental arithmetic but the huge denominations of Italian currency still tripped her up.

  ‘No, no, is free.’

  ‘Oh, but I can’t…’

  The glass-cutter was holding up the picture, excitedly stabbing at the Virgin’s face. ‘Bellissimo,’ he insisted, ‘per niente—is now charge. I give yow.’

  * * *

  Following Nicco back along the fondamenta Miss Garnet felt both subdued and elated. The refusal of the glass-cutter to accept a fee troubled her; and yet his powerful assertion of his own autonomy was also exhilarating. Karl Marx, she couldn’t help thinking, would have approved even if he would have deplored the glass-cutter’s motive. A love of the Virgin Mary would have struck Marx as a sign of subjection and yet one could not, really one could not, Miss Garnet mused, trying to keep up with Nicco’s pace, describe the man she had met as subject to anyone.

  ‘He like this artist,’ Nicco had explained. But Miss Garnet, in whom insight, like an incipient forest fire, was beginning to catch and creep, sensed suddenly there was more to it than that. The glass-cutter, she guessed, also liked the subject of Bellini’s painting and his love of Mary, and the bambino in her arms, was stronger than his love of money. How would Marx or even Lenin have explained that, she wondered as they arrived on the fondamenta alongside the Chiesa dell’Angelo Raffaele.

  The Archangel smiled down at her and she remembered she had questions about the boy with the fish and the hound.

  ‘Nicco, who is the boy up there with the dog?’ She pointed to the stone effigies which were lodged two-thirds up the church’s façade.

  But Nicco had other appointments. His pride in his new role as translator and guide was now giving way to peer anxiety. There was a football fixture he could not afford to miss. He shrugged.

  ‘Tobiolo?’ he said, uncertainly. ‘I see you again. Ciao, Giulia!’

  And, ‘Ciao!’ Julia Garnet called after him, watching his young shoulders as he ran across the bridge and disappeared behind the church.

  The sun was a pale gold disc in the sky. Some words filtered into memory.

  When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire, somewhat like a Guinea? O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy!’…I question not my Corporeal Eye any more than I would Question a Window…I look thro’ it and not with it.

  William Blake. Years ago she had been invited to contribute a chapter on Blake for a book on Radical Thinkers but somehow the project had never got off the ground. William Blake had been a revolutionary but had he not also been whipped by his father for seeing angels in the trees? Oro pallido, she thought to herself, crossing, in the lowering light, the bridge where Nicco had sped before her. This was not a morning sun on fire, like Blake’s, but pale wintery gold—oro pallido.

  * * *

  The letters which had been delivered from England were from Brown & Noble, the estate agents who had let the flat and her friend, Vera Kessel. Vera, a fellow member of the Communist Party, had been at Cambridge with Julia Garnet. They had not been close as students but a few years later had recognised each other at a Party meeting and, thereafter, had occasionally gone on holidays to Dubrovnik or to the Black Sea together. The holidays had been bleak affairs, nothing like the trips Harriet had planned for their retirement.

  The letters had been, in fact, forgotten until looking for her left glove she found them stuffed into the pocket of her coat. She opened them while the kettle boiled for tea.

  Dear Miss Garnet,

  This letter confirms a tenancy of six months to Mr. A. D. Akbar at a rental of £1,200 p.c.m. We remind you of our terms of 12% to include insurance and collection fees. £1,006.00 (plus one month’s deposit) has been transferred to your account today and thereafter £1,006.00 until 3 June.

  Trusting in your continued satisfaction.

  Yours etc.

/>   ‘To the eye of a miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun,’ murmured Miss Garnet, recalling some more of the words of the visionary poet which had come to her by the canal, and she opened the other envelope.

  Dear Julia,

  Just a brief card to wish you well in benighted Italy! How are you getting along with the RC God squad? Pretty oppressive I should imagine but I hope the history makes up for it.

  We had a disappointing meeting about the unions last week. Ted spoke well as usual but much of the life has gone out of the comrades. All send greetings and solidarity.

  Best, Vera.

  For a moment Julia Garnet remembered the impoverished little ceremony with which she had bidden Harriet a final farewell, and the utilitarian stone with the severely practical information carved upon its stony face, with which she had chosen to mark the passing of her closest friend’s life. She wished now she had paid the funeral more attention. Harriet’s large, mild face hovered before her—somehow she could not quite get used to the idea that Harriet was no more.

  She turned down the flame beneath the saucepan of water and added two tea bags. The kitchen was equipped with neither kettle nor teapot. At first she had minded, her cup of tea being a regular point in her routine, but now she enjoyed the slightly Bohemian feel to her saucepan tea-making. No ‘love’ in Vera’s letter. After nearly forty-five years’ acquaintance ‘Best’ was all Vera could manage.

  * * *

  The following morning Julia Garnet, this time with the Reverend Crystal in the pocket of her tweed coat (‘For really I must,’ she insisted to herself, ‘find out about this city’), returned to the basilica of St Mark. She entered not by the main door but by a less frequented doorway on the north side. It did not deter her that this side-slip into the cathedral was marked ‘Per Pregare—‘For Prayer’.

  Inside, by long, hanging red and silver lamps, a door was open onto a side chapel. With no special thought in her mind she entered.

  About a dozen people sat, in the vaulted, ancient-looking surroundings, listening to a priest reading from a leather book. Julia Garnet looked around. At one end of the chapel a blue mosaic of a huge Madonna gazed down; at the other, a tomb on which rested an inclined marmoreal figure observed by an angel. Twelve candles burned on the table before the tomb.

  The priest came to the end of his reading and sat down. There was a pause during which Julia Garnet waited for something to happen. After a while it became apparent that nothing was going to happen, except the silence.

  Her first response was annoyance. The Vespers in St Mark’s had been dramatic: the flute voices of the clerics, the melodic bells, the incense, the enthralling rhythmic passing and return of the litany-chant thrown between priest and congregation—compared with the threnodic splendour of all that, this abrupt nothingness felt like a cheat. But after a while she began to enjoy the silence. She looked round at the mosaics which seemed to depict some awful martyrdom—certainly there was a body and a tomb and, yes, surely that was the same body being removed from the tomb, and here how eagerly it was being hauled away. There was a kind of ebullience in the narrative which she made out on the chapel walls as if the dead man had, if not enjoyed, at least participated energetically in his own persecution.

  She twisted her neck to look back at the blue Madonna and found a man in a serge suit staring beadily at her, as if his was the task of checking her credentials to be present at the ceremony and was hopeful of finding them wanting. Abashed, she turned from the Madonna to examine the other attenders.

  All were women and one, two, three, four, five, six—no seven of them in furs. Now there was a thing! Feeling in the pocket of her own tweed she remembered Vera’s letter and almost she started to laugh. What would Vera make of her sitting here in church among seven furs? And which would Vera abhor most? The chapel or the wealth? All the furs were elderly save one: a woman with a long daffodil pony-tail and high gold heels. ‘Tarty,’ Harriet would have called her. (Vera very likely would not have known how to use the word.) But Mary Magdalene had been a tart, hadn’t she? It was surprising how much you remembered of your school scriptures, thought Julia Garnet.

  There was a disturbance now at the door and three nuns dressed in white robes entered. They looked like an African order with their smooth brown skins—but so young! The nuns, and really they were no more than children, heavily crossing themselves knelt, so that Julia Garnet could see their thick-soled boots. Now one of them was elaborately prostrating herself and kissing the ground while the grave fur-clad ladies sat decorously in impeccable silence. How irritating the young nuns were, and how out of place the kissing and the boots amid the unspeaking elegance. She was relieved to see them depart, noisily snatching at the water in a carved high stoup by the door. Around the bowl more angels.

  One of the silent furred ones was wearing a wide-brimmed emerald hat. The woman was no younger than herself and Julia Garnet found she wanted just such a hat too. But surely this was not what the silence was for? Designing a wardrobe! Gently, like dripping honey, the quiet filled her pores, comforting as the dreamless sleeps she had fallen prey to. The angel over the inclining man gestured at the heavens; beneath him, another angel on the tomb looked with all-seeing, sightless eyes towards the angels on the holy-water stoup…I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy!…’ The silence was holy. What did ‘holy’ mean? Did it mean the chance to be whole again? But when had one ever been whole? Silently, silently the priest sat and in the nameless peace Julia Garnet sat too, thinking no thoughts.

  A slight stir on her right and someone had entered and was wanting to take the place beside her. A man crossing himself, but discreetly, thank God. Removing the Reverend Crystal from the seat she smelled tobacco and instantly her father was there, not in the days when he would remind her that cleanliness was next to godliness but in those last days when he was losing his mind and could smoke only under supervision. She had had to apologise to the nurses. ‘I am so sorry, he doesn’t know what he is saying,’ she had said, hearing with shame her self-righteous father’s demonic curses. And they would smile and tell her not to worry, it was all in a day’s work. But he did know what he was saying, Julia Garnet thought. And the nurses knew he knew.

  And now the priest had risen to his feet and they were all on their feet a little after him and a man with a bell had arrived and incense. Fervently, praise was given to ‘Signore’, (how nice that God should be a humble mister!) and there was singing and the amen. And then the furs were chatting to each other while she stood and drank in the blue Madonna and her stiff, truthful baby.

  ‘You like our treasures?’

  It was the man who had sat beside her.

  ‘How did you know I was English?’

  As if it were a reply the man said, ‘I have friends in England.’ Then, nodding at the mosaics, ‘Do you know the story?’ and enlivened for her the story of the removal of the saint’s remains. ‘We Venetians always take what we want,’ he laughed, and his eyes crinkled; a tall man, with white hair and a moustache.

  Coming down the steps beside her into the darkening Piazzetta he said, ‘Look, another example of our looting,’ pointing to the two high columns. ‘St Theodore with his crocodile was once our patron saint. But in fact this is not St Theodore at all—it is a Hellenistic statue which we have taken for our own. And opposite, you see, the lion of St Mark is not a lion at all—a chimera from the Levant we stuck wings on. All stolen! The columns too. Would you honour me by taking a glass of prosecco, perhaps?’ And he smiled, so that she omitted to say she had suddenly remembered she had left the Reverend Crystal behind on the chapel floor.

  Instead, why not? she decided, for no one waited for her return but aloud she said merely, ‘Thank you very much. That would be delightful,’ and felt proud of herself that she had added no objection.

  ‘Good. I take you to Florian’s.’

  * * *

  ‘But is this not very expensive?’ she could not
prevent herself saying ten minutes later, as they sat, all gilt fruit and mirrored warmth, under the wreathed colonnades surrounding the Piazza.

  ‘But of course!’ The man who had introduced himself as Carlo crinkled his eyes again. ‘Next time I shall take you to the bar where the gondoliers meet. But for a first meeting it must be Florian’s.’

  Julia Garnet felt something she had felt previously only under pressure or fear. It was as if the bubbles in the pale gold glass had passed through her stomach up into her heart. ‘Oro pallido,’ she said, speaking the words aloud.

  Her companion frowned. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I was trying to say the words for pale gold—the drink. It is delicious.’

  ‘Ah! Oro pallido, I did not understand. Prosecco is our Italian secret. I think it is nicer than champagne but my French friends will kill me if they hear this!’

  ‘Your English is very good.’

  He was, he explained, an art historian, who had worked at the Courtauld Institute in London for several years. Now he was a private art dealer, buying and selling mainly in Rome, a little in London, sometimes Amsterdam. But Venice was his home. His mother was dead but he had kept on her old appartamento—he returned when he could—he had cousins, an aunt.

  ‘And you?’ he asked. ‘You have a husband, children?’ And she was grateful for she felt sure he could see that she did not. ‘But what a shame!’ He spoke lightly. ‘You are such a pretty woman.’

  She hardly blushed at all but said, ‘Thank you very much,’ gravely, as if he had opened a door for her, or gathered up a dropped parcel. And she did not ask if he were married.

  Carlo asked where she was staying and she explained about Signora Mignelli and the Campo Angelo Raffaele. Perhaps it was his enquiry about the husband and children she did not have which found her telling him also about Nicco. ‘I seem to have acquired a young pupil here,’ unaware of the covert pride in her voice. And when he nodded and smiled encouragingly, ‘I am teaching him English,’ she explained, conscious of some exaggeration in this claim, for Nicco so far showed little enthusiasm for learning her language.