Miss Garnet's Angel

by Salley Vickers

  But for such as herself there could be only one category and (this was the conclusion of her thought in the days during which, like a ship coming in to port after a storm, she made her way towards tentative recovery) it was not possible to alter the category you had been born into. The children at school, she knew, had found her repelling and fierce. And Harriet, too—rueful as the thought made her now—had been misled by her brusque manner. But the truth was, for her it had always been a matter of taking what she was given: she would never defy injunctions or make waves. And Carlo, who had seemed to ply her with every affectionate attention, had done so, as she now most nakedly saw, in order to further desires over which he himself possibly had no control. Who was to say that Carlo was not also one of those who suffered at the hands of his own fate? The trick was—and Julia Garnet, by now sufficiently recovered to be reclining on the sofa in the living room, tried for words to express the simplicity of it—yes, the trick was to assume that all one’s experiences were somehow necessary.

  And tribulation had brought compensations. Adrift as she was among emotions she did not really understand, life—she had to admit it—had nevertheless become more enthralling.

  It was the influence of this idea which, when she had improved enough to be able at last to dismiss Signora Mignelli’s care, took Julia out in search of the twins again. It did not matter that she had, stupidly, suffered—that was no reason to avoid things. Obscurely, too, she wished to seal up the slight gap in her consciousness which was the relic of the peculiar experience which had occurred on the twins’ last visit—an experience she had held off, even in the days of her recovery, from yet examining. Her time in bed had blotted out many recollections—she could not be sure that she had not been rude to the girl when, that day when Toby had left so abruptly, she had hustled his sister, almost violently, inside. And she found, as a consequence maybe also of the illness, that she had become curious about the boy who had the unsatisfactory love-life.

  But it was his sister who hailed her outside the little chapel. ‘Hi, how are you? We heard you’ve been sick.’

  Julia made short shrift of this. ‘I was silly, I’m afraid. I caught a cough and neglected it and made a nuisance of myself. My landlady has been most patient.’

  ‘I expect she enjoyed it. Give her a chance to behave like an Italian momma!’

  Toby coming out of the open door frowning said, without any greeting, ‘D’you want to see a painting of an angel?’

  That made a second time he had offered to introduce her to an angel. Perhaps, unknowingly, Toby had found out a connection between them—for wasn’t he also a casualty of unrequited love? Comrades in misfortune! Julia’s heightened sense of the workings of distress made her try for a warmer tone than usual. ‘I’d love to, Toby.’

  ‘Toby!’ Sarah sounded reproving. ‘Julia’s not been well. We mustn’t keep her in the cold!’

  Toby gave no sign of having heard his sister. His pale blue eyes stared into Julia’s as if trying to make some urgent communication. ‘There’s a dog in it.’

  ‘Toby!’ Sarah’s tone was really severe—quite different from the charming child she had seemed on previous meetings. Maybe, Julia guessed, she is the older twin and is in the habit of bossing him about.

  Wanting to reassure Toby she asked, ‘Like in the Raffaele?’ In her notebook she had written: Why the dog? I have never liked dogs. Cats, because of Stella, she had developed an affection for. But there was something boisterous and nakedly animal about dogs which ruffled her. Yet for Tobias’s dog she had acquired a fondness: he was part of the welcoming party which had greeted her arrival in Venice, the group of stone figures which fronted the Chiesa dell’Angelo Raffaele.

  Toby simply said, ‘Come and see!’ and ducked back inside.

  Julia, still a little stooped after her illness, stepped awkwardly into darkness and paused to let her eyes adjust to the suddenly reduced light. It was hard to imagine the humble, bare-bricked space as a sumptuous Venetian interior. Falling back on her history she asked, ‘It’s Romanesque, isn’t it? What date?’ There was something almost biblical about the atmosphere inside the chapel.

  ‘Probably about 1350.’ Sarah, who had come in from outside, still sounded out of sorts. ‘Even though the Gothic style was well under way by then they still occasionally used the Byzantine model.’

  Julia gestured at the scaffolding with a barred working lamp on the side. ‘Is this part of your restoration too?’

  Sarah still sounded impatient. ‘Yup—I’m just about to move on to these.’

  The grey-whorled columns with their leafy capitals shone faintly iridescent in the fragmented light. They formed a kind of protective arc, like a semi-circle of grained-silk trees, around what was obviously the altar, and above them she could see a narrow window set high up, through which sunlight was stippling and dappling the remnants of a mosaic floor.

  ‘So it’s just the two of you? You on high and Toby down on the floor?’ Julia felt a pang; what the twins were doing here touched real history—her own lessons at St Barnabas seemed milk and water by comparison.

  ‘When Tobes finishes the floor there’ll be others coming. It’s too small for many of us to work together so for the moment we have it to ourselves.’ A yellow mackintosh and a sleeping bag were laid out on some wooden planks. Noticing the direction of her visitor’s glance Sarah said, ‘Tobes sleeps there sometimes,’ then dismissively, ‘with the bats—but of course he is bats himself!’ and laughed unhumorously.

  There was something uncomfortable in all this. Julia, who did not feel she was yet up to bats, changed the subject back again. Smelling the musty air she asked, ‘1350 must be round about the end of the Black Death, isn’t it?’ She knew the answer to this in fact: Charles Cutforth had spoken of it in the lavish grandeur of the Gritti Palace, in those last days of her innocence.

  But Sarah had apparently had enough of questions, specious or real. ‘Look, it’s bloody crazy you being in here, Julia. Sorry, but damp’s fatal for chests.’

  If only it were, Julia thought. Aloud she said, withdrawing her elbow on which the girl had taken too tight a grip, ‘Please, it’s all right, I’m fine.’ Out of the darkness Toby appeared suddenly with something cradled in his arms. ‘Oh, the painting—is it him, d’you think?’ Sarah’s mood was making Julia feel inhibited: she found she did not like to speak the archangel’s name.

  Toby was carefully unwrapping a grey blanket to reveal an oblong panel of wood. ‘I guess so. Raphael was popular with the sailors. He’s s’posed to have visited this area.’

  The blanket revealed a panel, about two foot by three and two or three inches thick, giving it for all its obvious fragility a substantial look. Around the splintered edge an arch effect was visible, as if the scene depicted were also inside the chapel. But what drew the eye inexorably was the figure within.

  The artist had painted the angel with an enquiring look, the great wings folded behind, the darkly lustrous blue of a peacock’s tail. Long ago, as a child, Julia had been taken to a stately home into the grounds of which peacocks had been introduced. One had opened its tail before her with a violent rattle, and in fear and wonder she had cried out, her mother rushing to comfort her.

  It was the only occasion she could firmly recall on which comfort had been offered, although she supposed, if only by the law of averages, there must have been other such moments available to her. And yet the irony was that, on that particular occasion, it was not comfort she had needed—any more than she needed it now.

  ‘I didn’t know he was a visitor here?’ Her suggestion sounded faintly absurd as if the angelic being had been a customer on a Thomson City Break.

  ‘The sailors mostly stayed round here. Raphael’s their totem—I don’t know why. He’s good, isn’t he?’

  Better than ‘good’, Julia thought. ‘Who was the artist?’

  Even in the semi-dark she saw the flush and thought, ‘Damn, I’ve made him feel ignorant.’

  ‘Pr
obably some unknown.’ Toby sounded embarrassed, then, changing the subject, ‘Look, see the dog?’

  He indicated with his finger a smudge of black and white at the feet of the figure. The feet were elegant and long, pointing out beneath the gold and white pleated gown. Julia, looking, wanted to reach out and touch them but Sarah almost pushed her aside.

  ‘Toby, don’t you need that new blade?’

  ‘Yeah, OK, OK. I was going to get Francesco to sharpen this one.’

  Francesco, it turned out, was the name of the red-capped glass-cutter. Waiting outside the chapel while the twins exchanged words Julia reflected that it was not biological bacteria you needed a cure from, it was the emotional kind: fear, humiliation, loss. For a brief moment, looking at the angel-painting, a promise of some alternative had hovered over the crater in her heart.

  ‘Will you come to tea afterwards?’ she asked Toby, not wanting him to go, and was disappointed when his sister spoke across him. ‘Tobes has to get home but I’ll come if you’d like.’

  Toby had gone off with an expression on his face which Harriet would have described as ‘taking the hump’. Clearly the twins were engaged in some kind of row. Watching his bent shoulders Julia wanted to call after him, ‘There’s brandy, if you’d prefer!’ (Brandy, she knew from her own experience, being more tempting than tea to the love-lorn.)

  Since her thoughts followed Toby to the red-hatted Francesco it wasn’t surprising, perhaps, that they should meet Nicco on the way across the campo. It was not the first time she had seen the boy since the day they, too, had set out together on the aborted visit to the glass-cutter’s. But always since, she had contrived their paths should not cross. Of Carlo she had seen nothing—he had vanished out of her life. Like a thief into the night, she thought, and then felt contempt for herself at the triteness of the cliché.

  About Nicco she no longer felt angry—merely ashamed. She had dropped him; and, sensitive as herself, she was aware now that the boy was conscious of having been dropped. And she was aware, too, that the friendliness with which she was addressing Nicco was partly dictated by a wish to impress Sarah with her easy style with the locals.

  ‘Ciao, Nicco! How’s the football? Are Venezia winning?’

  Too polite to allude, even internally, to the fickleness of his elderly friend, Nicco was unable not to respond. ‘Si! They play Hamburg team last week.’

  ‘That’s wonderful, Nicco. How did they do?’

  ‘I not know yet. Later I tell you.’

  Realising the error Julia said, ‘It’s next week the boy means,’ and she called after him as he ran on, ‘Next week, Nicco, not last week. Next…’ And then, not quite as an afterthought, ‘Nicco, come and see me soon, won’t you?’

  * * *

  ‘Once a teacher always a teacher, I guess!’ said Sarah later on the balcony. ‘Here, can I help?’

  Julia, feeling the need for activity, had begun to shell some broad beans she had spotted on a stall that morning. Harriet had liked broad beans. Remembering this Julia had bought half a kilo and planned to eat them with lemon juice and olive oil for supper.

  ‘Not a very good one I fear.’ Her teaching, Julia had concluded, during the weeks of illness, had been barren, barbarous even. Ever before ‘the discovery’ Nicco had felt it; she must try to make that up to him.

  The girl’s mood seemed to have cleared with the departure of her difficult twin. ‘Really? I should think you were great! He’s lucky to have you, that kid. But kids are ungrateful, aren’t they?’

  Julia Garnet, slipping the tender green pulses out of their fleece-lined pods, knew otherwise. Nicco was not ‘lucky’ in being the recipient of her pedagogic attentions. With a natural courtesy he had endured what was very likely a torture for him. Among other things, the discovery of Carlo’s true intentions had taught her that it was not desirable to imagine you were better than you actually were. But she had been thinking, too, that there was something not right either in a single policy of plain speaking. To contradict this new young friend, whose intentions were no doubt of the best, would be a version of that impulse to criticise from which Nicco had obviously longed to escape. ‘Let’s say I wasn’t as good as I thought I was,’ she after a time offered.

  ‘I gave my teachers hell!’ Sarah laughed. Under the evening sun her changeable features had become pretty again and had lost the weaselish look they had taken on in the chapel. It had been somewhat shocking coming across the twins bickering like that—but maybe it wasn’t so rare for people to quarrel? She and Harriet certainly had done so—though this was one of those things she might have denied to herself before.

  ‘Did you go to boarding-school?’ That easy confidence suggested Roedean or Cheltenham Ladies.

  Sarah shook her head. ‘Nope. I wouldn’t. My…’ for a second she hesitated as if not sure what, quite, she wanted to say, ‘…my parents wanted me to go though—typical!’

  ‘Why didn’t you want to?’

  ‘I did when it was too late.’ The girl’s mood seemed to have darkened again. Maybe it wasn’t only her brother who was tricky? ‘When things got unbearable at home.’

  Julia Garnet was surprised. The girl seemed too poised to have come from a difficult home background. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry.’ She found herself flushing again. Such an abomination, shyness!

  Sarah, if she noticed, made no acknowledgement of the other’s discomfort. Instead she said rather too brightly, ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s true for lots of people, isn’t it, frightful skeletons in the home cupboard? How about you? What was yours like?’

  Julia Garnet had never, until recently, thought about upbringing in a general sense. Only vaguely had she been aware of deficiencies in her own and that, for her, had been a matter for concealment rather than conversation. ‘Upbringing’ was not a topic she had been ‘brought up to consider,’ she had once (rather wittily, she had thought at the time) declared. ‘I’ve never thought about it much.’

  She must have conveyed some disapproval at the question for what the girl now said had an edge of admonishment. ‘Well, I was sexually abused. No one believed me, of course, but there’s masses of evidence now. Hundreds of cases of it are turning up everywhere.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ Uncrossing her legs in alarm Julia Garnet knocked an ankle against the enamel teapot, sending it rolling. ‘Damn! I’m so sorry!’ She didn’t know whether it was the subject matter or her own clumsiness she was apologising for.

  ‘Here, let me fetch a cloth.’ Sarah had sprung up and was off into the kitchen and back again in a moment. ‘Did you burn yourself? Are you all right?’

  ‘No damage done.’ She wished the girl would not fuss. Her startling admission had made her more alien just as they had seemed about to be friends. Did every well-intended action come to this? The savageness of the old mood flickered up again. For that brief moment in the chapel it had abated; but the prowling despair was waiting to leap back and destroy all that promised well. Tea had seeped from the tray over the balcony and the tea-things looked dismal in their disarray. Dust and ashes. Dust and ashes. Profoundly she wanted the girl to go away.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Sarah mopped at the tea-tray. ‘It’s not a subject I like to talk about. Tobes and I never discuss it. I’d rather you didn’t tell him I said anything, by the way.’

  As if I would, thought Julia Garnet in indignation. ‘Naturally not,’ she said, uncomfortable. She wished she was back in the cold, shadowy interior of the chapel with the boy showing her the angel and the dog. He had nice hands—square and capable. A picture came into her mind of him lying there alone in the dark in his sleeping bag thinking of his recalcitrant lover. ‘How is your brother’s girlfriend?’ She hoped the change of subject was not too obviously nosy. It was his sister who had mentioned him after all.

  Sarah raked an open pod clean of beans with an efficient thumb. ‘Oh, that! That’s why he goes walkabout all over the place.’

  Julia’s half-conceived sense of identification with Toby q
uickened. The walking-cure; she had behaved that very way herself. ‘Do you know her, the girl?’

  But her guest didn’t answer. Maybe she had put her foot in it again? She was so unversed in the etiquette of modern relationship. Perhaps although it was all right to mention sexual abuse it wasn’t acceptable to probe the nature of a young man’s grief? Well, she understood that—most emphatically, she would not like it done of her own.

  But Sarah had apparently only been lost in thought. ‘Nothing special, but that’s often what we think of other people’s lovers, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it? I wouldn’t know, I’m afraid.’ Julia, who had just had a fleeting vision of the gold-skinned Nicco fleeing from Carlo across the Ponte de Cristo, bent her head toward the last beans. ‘What a tiny amount these dwindle down to. I was going to ask if you’d care to stay and eat them with me but they hardly seem worth—’

  ‘I can’t, anyway.’

  Although she didn’t really want the girl to stay Julia felt rebuffed by her rapid response. But she was a girl who did things fast. Julia remembered watching her walk across the campo the first time she had come for tea. ‘More haste less speed’ she might have said to Sarah had she been a pupil, in the days when she had some belief in her own precepts. Sarah now explained she was off to see the architect in charge of the Chapel project. ‘Luckily he’s a bit gone on me—mainly because the man who trained me is a kind of legend which is useful for managing the Soprintendente. She’s not in favour—against if anything—especially me. She’s not exactly an oil painting—ugly old cow!’ Sarah’s face, oblivious to the possible sensitivities of a less attractive woman, looked almost cruel in its youthful radiance.

  Julia, however, preferred not to join in a conspiracy against the plain Soprintendente. ‘Maybe she’s just unused to a pretty young woman being good at her job. It’s rather bold, doing what you do. Do you mind being so high up?’

  Sarah stood up. ‘I like being “high up” as you call it.’ She laughed again and Julia saw how the ugly Soprintendente might envy that fair hair and slight form. ‘Tobes says I must have been a goat in another life.’ Sarah crooked two fingers over her head to imitate horns. ‘Look, I must be off and change!’