Carlo, however, listened with polite attention. He gave her his card and insisted on escorting her home by the vaporetto which dropped them at S. Basilio, the stop nearest to her new home.
‘I won’t ask you in.’ Julia Garnet spoke carefully. The combination of the water-journey and the prosecco had gone to her head (that was twice in two days she had been tipsy). ‘I have nothing to offer you but tea and I am sure you have a supper to go to.’
‘Another day I should be charmed. You stay in one of the most beautiful campi in Venezia!’
Easy, murmured Julia Garnet inwardly, and she thanked her handsome host and hurried across the bridge past Veronese’s church where they were too poor to have a sacristan. ‘Easy, girl,’ she said aloud later, taking off her stockings. It was a manner of address the rag-and-bone man, who had driven about Ealing when she was still a young teacher, had used to his horse. A white horse, called Lily, she seemed to think, as she stood, barefoot on the cold floor, running a bath.
* * *
The following morning, passing the side-door of the chiesa, she saw a man with an oversized key unlocking the church.
In reply to her finger pointing questioningly at the interior, he indicated that she should enter. ‘Prego!’ He shuffled ahead of her, attending to duties in the dimness of the interior.
One by one small pools of illumination flicked on and Julia Garnet stood amid the gathered half-light. She turned around. It was the first time she had been in a proper church (you couldn’t really count St Mark’s) since she didn’t know when. The funeral of a colleague at school in an ugly C. of E. church in Acton; that must have been the last time. And how cold it had been then, and how she had resented the Actonish odour of bourgeois sanctity. But why was this different? For a second her mind flickered guiltily to the Reverend Crystal. He, to be sure, would have had safe and solid information to convey on such points.
She sniffed the hazy air. The odour here was dry and musty too but there was a fragrance about it. How sensible to scent your place of worship. The incense, of course, it was the incense, like the frankincense brought by one of the kings. Gold, frankincense and myrrh. Were there reasons for the gifts? She couldn’t remember.
The sacristan came forward now, pointing to an organ above the door which opened on to the water-front and then at an assortment of leaflets on a small table. To please him she picked one up from the pile marked ‘English’. ‘Tobiolo and the Angel Raffael.’ Looking up, painted on the organ loft, she saw an angel with azure wings.
Despite his wings the angel seemed to be marching forward, grasping the hand of a young man who, in turn, was looking back, his hand stretched beseechingly after an old man who stood staring after the departing pair. Beside him, her head averted, a woman—perhaps his wife? And look! Before them all a small black and white spotted dog. She followed the story round.
Now the boy Tobiolo appeared to have caught a giant fish in his handkerchief while the dog looks on admiringly. And the angel, this time wearing a handsome and surely anachronistic blue waistcoat, stands rather like a proud parent at speech day in the background.
Here was another scene: the young man kneeling with a young woman now, she dressed in gauzy clothes. And now the young pair are kneeling before the angel by a bed, a mysterious fire burning in a pan while the dog huddles as if scared in a far corner.
In the next scene the young man is back with the older man, who lies back as if in astonishment, and now the young woman is there too. Over them the angel broods with azure wings.
In the final scene the angel seems to be taking his leave: unfurled and aloft, a cloud of pink and blue; his lovely limbs and sturdy feet are displayed in glory, as the young and the old man marvel and the dog looks longingly after him.
Something rusty and hard shifted deep inside Julia Garnet as she stood absorbing the vivid, dewy painting, the joyfulness of the conception and the unmistakable, compassion in the angel’s bright glance. Her eyes filled. The door of the church opened and light streamed into the interior, bringing with it a tall figure. To her horror she saw that it was the man she had met the previous day at St Mark’s and hastily she pushed away tears.
‘My friend!’ He was smiling again and for a second she was irked: it wasn’t, well, manly to smile quite so often. Then, ashamed of her xenophobic instincts, she tried to smile back herself.
‘I was looking at these.’ Such feeble language to describe the treasures she had stumbled on.
‘Ah! The Guardis!’
‘You know them?’ But why should she be surprised? He was an art historian and probably everyone in Venice knew of the paintings. Julia Garnet was annoyed to find herself possessive of her new discovery.
‘Oh, indeed. They are famous. There exists a famous quarrel, also, about their authorship. There are two Guardis, you see, an elder by many years, Giannantonio, and a younger, Francesco, who never did any known painting of a religious nature. Some authorities, because of the superb style, ascribe it to the younger, better-known brother. But others, of whom I am one, are passionate for the elder. It is a great dispute!’
‘And the story?’ She did not so much care who painted the angel—it was the fact that he had been painted that was so miraculous.
‘It is from the Jewish Scriptures—you call it, I think, Tobias and the Angel?’
He took the crook of her arm and they walked about the tall, theatrical, shabby church while he recounted the story of the young Tobias who travels, unaware he is accompanied by the Archangel Raphael, seeking a cure for his father’s blindness.
‘The cure is found in a great fish but before this Tobiolo has married and saved a young woman, cursed by a demon. The demon rests inside her, killing, on their wedding night, the young men who try her virginity. Seven men have died before Tobiolo arrives but, of course, he has the Angel Raphael to help him.’
‘And does he help?’
‘Certainly. He instructs Tobiolo how he must burn the heart and the liver of the fish and so’—like a conjuror, Carlo waved a hand—‘the demon is driven out, cursing.’ He grimaced, imitating the departing spirit.
‘And this is in the Old Testament?’ Surely this was some racy Catholic version of the Bible. His sudden impersonation of the demon slightly disconcerted her.
‘Oh, indeed, I assure you. It is a tale of wonder, is it not?’ ‘More like magic, I should think. Why does the angel help?’
But Carlo gave a little shrug as if he had become bored with the topic. He had called, he explained, to find out how she was and to invite her, if it would amuse her, to a concert that evening. Julia Garnet could think of no reason why she should not accept the invitation. The Reverend Crystal could never have instructed her so entertainingly—nor, perhaps, with such authority. Later, as she stood before the sparse collection which made up her wardrobe, exercised by what to wear for the evening’s entertainment, she allowed herself to wonder what so personable a man wanted with so dowdy a companion as herself?
I am an old man near the end of my life—although my son lies and protests this is not so. (He is a good son, in spite of the lies.) You may ask what an old man of one hundred and eighty-five years can have to say to interest you? The secret of my longevity, perhaps? Well, it may be that our years are not reckoned as you reckon yours. But even allowing for differences I would say we live close to the cycle of the sun and moon, we rise and go to bed with the birds, labour hard, eat frugally and these things conspire towards longevity; but I will hazard there is another thing more important than these: it may be we may live long because there is something we value above human life—I shall not give it a name!
Among our people the old are respected for their wisdom—I hope it may be the same with yours. However it is with you, if you are young now you might hold it in your mind that one day you too will be old and may find yourself glad then to be heard; if you are already old, perhaps like me you already have a story to tell (for all lives, I think, have some sort of a story in them)? Yet I do
not tell my own because I wish it, or because I wish to instruct you in how to live, though I’ll admit that might once have been my purpose. No, I tell you this because I was told to tell it—by what you might call ‘a higher authority’—and truth is, the thought of how to tell it has taxed me for many years.
I promised so long ago to set all this down but you know how it is when you make a promise? There is that small serpent voice inside which says, ‘No need to bother about it now,’ or ‘Later will do better,’ or (most true in my case) ‘Give me time to understand.’ Thinking leads to a kind of weighing of words which holds back action. But now I feel the shadow or the Angel of Death upon me and I do not think I have much more time.
At first it was not only that I did not understand but that I did not even know how to begin to understand. What happened to me and my family was so remarkable that I believed I should bungle the telling of it. But I was only a third through my life when these events took place. Nowadays I have come to see that bungling is what all of us do; perhaps bungling is what we are here for?
I would like to begin at the beginning if I only knew when the ‘beginning’ starts. Some might say it was when we were first fashioned out of the mud of the great River Tigris, before our wives were pulled out of our ribs to create a source of perpetual reproof to us! (That is my little joke: I call my wife, Anna, ‘Rib’; I have an idea this oft-repeated joke of mine annoys her but she is a generous woman and mostly puts up with her husband’s trying ways.)
Or maybe the ‘beginning’ was later, when our first parents lost their paradise (which some say was here between the two rivers, which the traders still call ‘garden’ on account of its great fertileness) and had to make their way in the world? From the time of our first parents our people were wanderers—until the patriarch Abram came from Ur into the land which was then called Canaan. Later our people found their way into Egypt—and out again, through the vision of Moses, who we call ‘Liberator’, by a path through the Sea-of-Reeds. In time we returned to the land which was promised us, provided we did not ‘play the harlot’ with other gods.
In those days the twelve tribes inhabited two kingdoms and there was bad feeling between the northern country and the south. Perhaps northerners will always be slow to toe the line where the south is concerned? Among the northern tribes there were many who did play the harlot. In my own young days already my own tribe of Naphtali had begun to sacrifice in secret to the old gods (more persuadable than our own with gifts of oil or barley) and I alone travelled to the kingdom in the south, to Jerusalem, the holy city, to the temple with the brazen pillars, the ornaments of gold and ivory and lapis lazuli, and the walls lined in cedar-wood from Lebanon by Solomon, son of David, who ruled over both our kingdoms. I alone kept faith and went with my first fruits and firstlings and the first shearings of sheep and one tithe of all my corn and wine and oil and pomegranates; but my kin openly gave their tithes to the heifer Baal, and in the end my own tribe was led captive, to Nineveh, in the land of Assyria, and the other tribes were scattered among the far cities of Media, a proverb of reproach to all the nations among whom we are dispersed. But you see, from the first it was our way to be sojourners and strangers!
2
When Julia Garnet looked back on this period of her life she remembered it as a time in which she discovered excitement. The concert to which Carlo took her, that first evening, was in an old scuola, with dark, painted ceilings, coffered, gilded and carved. She sat listening to Vivaldi, Albinoni, Corelli—triumphant musical spirits of Venice—played by a quintet of pretty girls in long frocks and wild-haired young men.
The musicians looked too young to understand the gaiety of the music they played. Yet when they attacked their fiddles, their violas and their cellos they communicated an energetic vibrancy which sent the blood around the body leaving one, Julia Garnet reflected, positively tingling. Thinking of the dismally picked-out hymns of her childhood piano lessons she became humble. ‘I could never have played like that!’ She stood, slightly chilly, in the marble hall during the interval. Beside them, around white Venetian necks, luxuriated copious fur tippets and wraps.
‘This I do not believe.’ Carlo took off his jacket and whisked it, with the adroitness of a matador, around her shoulders and when she tried to demur: ‘No, no,’ smiling as ever, ‘this is our Venetian way. The woman is for cherishing!’
This was the first of many outings—more than she could ever have believed anyone would want to take with her, let alone this tall, cultivated man who—though nearing seventy, he assured her—was, in the old-fashioned style, undeniably handsome. Sometimes they would go to a concert and afterwards they would dine at one of many out-of-the-way restaurants where he was greeted like a long-lost son; or he would suggest a visit to a church where in rich glooms he pointed out altarpieces with obscure stories from the Catholic scriptures, unknown to Protestant histories; or he steered her, always charmingly holding the crook of her arm, through rooms of the Accademia, where she learned to look at painters whose names were formerly not even names to her, Bassano, Longhi, Vivarini. Their reds and golds and blues, in tones she had been used to deriding as ‘showy’ (for the paintings of Lowry had formerly been her highest notion of art), somewhat dazed her eyes. In one room she stopped, overcome by the eight great canvases which lined the four walls. ‘Carpaccio,’ he said, amused at her evident delight. ‘Carpaccio, I always say, is the prosecco among painters—he is another of our Venetian secrets!’
One of the canvases in particular held her attention: a high, square room infiltrated with a quiet dawn light; on one side of the painting a simple bed, with a woman tranquilly asleep—opposite, at the threshold of a lighted door, an angel in blue with dusky wings, just standing. Looking at the angel waiting with such stillness, Julia Garnet felt something like a small shudder pass through her.
On another occasion, at the Peggy Guggenheim museum, he had made her blush horribly by pointing out the tumescent angel who exposes his proud member in all its glory to the passing watercraft. (‘Oh, I assure you, it unscrews when visitors from the church come!’) Afterwards he had bought her marigolds from a narrow shop crammed with flowers, and she knew it was by way of apology for having embarrassed her. That night she lay awake, hating herself for her damnable strait-laced upbringing, so that by morning she had schooled herself not to expect him (for how could so urbane a man put up with such unsophistication in a grown woman?). But he had appeared, as usual, across the campo, smiling as if nothing had happened, and her heart had turned over and over in joy as she stood waving from the balcony.
Once she had succumbed to a fit of sneezing and he had pressed his handkerchief upon her, warm from his trouser pocket. She had tried not to use it, trusting to his impeccable manners not to ask for its return, aware already that later she would put it away unwashed in her drawer beside the book which pressed one of the embarrassing marigolds.
Although she kept his card in her handbag, she held back, unwilling to put his desire to see her to the test, from ever initiating their meetings. And yet he gave ample proofs of seeking out the friendship.
Usually it was the afternoons when Carlo would come by looking for her. Signora Mignelli, made familiar by the leveller of sex, got to teasing her about her ‘friend’.
In Carlo’s company Julia Garnet felt herself become more feminine: she bought a black skirt and a daringly wide-lapelled cream silk blouse—to wear at the concerts. She even patrolled the back streets, half-looking for an emerald hat such as she had seen on the woman in the little chapel in St Mark’s, but found nothing she liked well enough to fuel the courage necessary for the purchase.
One day, returning home after such a search (she had hovered over a red hat but prudence finally had overruled her) Julia Garnet paused outside a shop which sold linen and embroidered tablecloths. The tablecloths reminded her of her mother, whose only acts of rebellion against her husband had been expressed in an obsessive purchase of linen. Julia Garnet had stood,
rather yearningly, gazing at the flowers picked out in coloured silks, until the proprietor, sensing a sale, had come out and pestered her and she had hurried on down a small alley which ran beside the shop.
* * *
It was many years since Julia Garnet had risked taking a short cut (short cuts she associated with laziness) and she felt a slight agitation at having left her familiar route. And yet there was that sense of exploration too, which had been developing since her arrival in Venice.
The first month had almost passed, accelerated by the novelty of her new companion. And he had aided that adventurousncss which the loss of Hariet had first sparked. Almost, Julia Garnet thought as she hurried down the dark alley (as if the tablecloths had taken off and were in ghostly pursuit), almost it was as if Harriet’s soul had poured down Harriet’s own meagre stock of boldness upon her, a last gift to the friend she was leaving for ever.
Goodness, how fanciful she was getting! And yet the idea of possessing a soul no longer seemed quaint. And, to be sure, if one had a soul how much nicer to let it wander here in Venice. As she ruminated upon the desirability of a good environment for one’s afterlife, the alley turned into a narrow campo, one which she had never penetrated before.
One of the old stone-carved wellheads with which Venice is endowed was situated slightly off the centre of the area, and to its left stood a small, rounded Romanesque building, with what seemed to be a statue of an angel on the roof, half-covered in scaffolding.
Miss Garnet, moved by her new spirit of adventure, walked slowly round seeking some clue to the building’s function. It was unclear whether it was a church, although the general shape of the architecture indicated that it was built for some devotional purpose.
Miss Garnet's Angel Page 4