‘Oh dear! Does anything help?’
‘Yes,’ said Sarah baldly. ‘Sex helps. That’s why I do it. Still, it’s better than doing drugs, I suppose.’
She jumped up and walked over to the window again. Looking at her long, youthful back Julia thought, I can’t blame him. She’s lovely!
With her back still turned Sarah spoke; she sounded angry. ‘Look, I’m sorry, Julia, this isn’t your thing at all. Let’s talk about how we get your things over here, shall we?’
And here memory becomes blurred: I do not rightly remember how I spent most of the days in Ecbatana. What I do remember is the sense of difference.
For one thing there was more merriment than I was used to at home. They say their prophet Zarathustra was born into the world laughing, and the need for good cheer among men is part of what he taught. And they despise death which to them is the victory of the Lord of Lies and Darkness—the Adversary they call him. This I remember.
I remember, too, that I began to wonder about my father putting the bodies to rest in the ground. Here they build high towers—the Towers of Silence they call them—where they lay out the bodies of the dead and the wild dogs and vultures come and strip the corpses clean so that their own hands do not touch death. They laughed at me (they are great laughers) when I spoke of the one God, for they have their ‘Wise Lord’ the Lord of Light, who is tolerant in the ways and the gods of foreigners. It came to my mind, here in Media, he was a more easy-going god than ours whose name I had so often heard is ‘Jealous’, and I wondered about my father in the days of his youth when he travelled here as the king’s Purveyor. Had he too felt his spirits lighten when he came to the city of Zarathustra, the holy city of Raghes?
Sara did not like me and she made it plain. I never knew if it was my face, or my origins (for although we were of the same tribe she had lived all her life in Media). Maybe, I came miserably to think, she is born a hater of men; certainly her tongue was waspish.
I’d hardly been in the company of a young woman before and certainly not one so beautiful as Sara. So it came as a shock to hear her speak. I had supposed from her appearance her voice would be gentle and low but instead it had an edge which set your teeth. She laughed at everything I said but not with joy. I felt she was laughing at me rather than at what I had to say to her. ‘So you want to marry me?’ she said, and there was something in her way of speaking which diminished me. ‘You’d better be careful, I’m not safe, you know!’
Of course there were the stories of the men who had tried to marry her before. Apart from Sara’s hints there were sinister mutterings elsewhere: in the town they spoke of a death, seven deaths even, some said; but although they had blended with the local community Sara’s family were still foreigners and you know how people love to spread rumour especially about those who do not wholly fit in? I hazarded that Sara had broken the spirits of the men who had courted her, so that they became faint-hearted and weak-kneed, and you might as well kill a man as take his resolution from him. I did not intend to ‘die’ that way!
Meanwhile Azarias, from whom I expected help, had turned unforthcoming. He spent so much time with Sara’s maid that I began to suspect some amorous entanglement and one day challenged him with it. ‘Hey!’ I said, speaking more sharply than was usual, perhaps because I’d had a particularly sore time of it with Sara. ‘You’re supposed to be helping me to marry the mistress, not bedding the mistress’s maid yourself!’ After all this whole enterprise was his idea.
But you couldn’t get a word out of Azarias that he didn’t want to give. He just grinned at me in a manner which I might have found insolent if it didn’t also somehow hurt. I had come to think of Azarias as more of a friend than a servant but now, seeing him grin like that, I was tempted to remind him of his place again. Only this time I couldn’t quite bring myself to it.
That evening it was a brilliant sunset. I had not paid much attention to such things in the past but the shock of meeting Sara had altered me. I went for a walk alone outside, to enjoy the cool air after the heat of the day but also, let me admit it, to consider whether I had done the right thing in asking for Sara’s hand in marriage. Kish was out with me—oh, and that was another thing. Kish did not like Sara. From his first sight of her he had bared his teeth and growled a low disconcerting growl; it was out of character and I confess it troubled me. That dislike of Kish’s was preying on my mind too—though one should not look to one’s dog to choose one’s wife!
I had thrown Kish a stick and he had come bounding back with it in his mouth and I was preparing to throw it a second time. My hand was poised over my head, ready to throw, and Kish was panting in anticipation, when I happened to look across to Sara’s chamber-window in the high tower.
There was an oil-lamp lit within and a figure came to the casement and looked out. For a second I thought it was Sara and was considering whether to risk more rejection and wave to her. Then I saw it was not Sara at all, although certainly it was her chamber. It was Azarias I had seen at the window.
Have you ever had your world turned upside down? I lost my known world in that moment in which it appeared Azarias had played me false. My betrothed wife with my manservant! Kish came yapping up and I did something which it shames me to tell: I kicked Kish hard in the flank so that he gave a sharp yelp and scurried off with his tail between his legs. I felt a rat. A rat and an ass and a cuckold to boot (if you can be cuckolded before a woman is yet your own). So that is why, I thought, angrily, Azarias wanted me to offer for her in marriage—to beat a path for his own entrance into my property!
Kish’s bark must have alerted Azarias because when I looked again across the water he had stayed at the window and was looking out. Suddenly he saw me and I felt my face begin to colour—Noah knows why, but I felt for him, being found out in his master’s mistress’s chamber. But to my utter astonishment the man seemed not to be discomfited at all. Instead he gave a wave of his long hand and even that distance across the water I swear I could see that blessed smile!
2
Julia had not walked back to the Campo Angelo Raffaele. The sun was already too warm, she felt wrung out and exhausted and after the talk with Sarah she wanted brandy and a bath. Waiting for the various vaporetti, by which she made her way back across the city, she allowed nothing to penetrate her unthoughts.
It was a relief, after the dreadful, unwelcome intimacy, to reach the security of her apartment and she sat on the sofa for a while simply looking out of the window, too tired even to fetch the brandy bottle. It was Saturday and she could hear Nicco and his friends outside playing football. I don’t want to go, she thought. This is my home. I don’t want to leave here. But her ‘home’ was where Signora Mignelli’s new tenants were arriving on Monday evening. Severely she reproved herself. You can’t have whatever you want. Life isn’t like that! Not even for Sarah who had had, she presumed, what she wanted with Carlo.
It took only a short time to pack her suitcase. The unworn lilac dress and the silk underwear she wrapped in tissue and laid on top of the black skirt and cream blouse. She had purchased an additional bag, a voluminous navy affair, in one of the cut-price shops near the Rialto, and into this she placed the overflow accumulated during her stay: some winter woollies, shoes, her wash-bag, a spare towel, Harriet’s hat, some papers and her books. That left only the book about the Apocrypha and other ancient Jewish writings, too bulky for her luggage, to deal with.
Randomly, now, she opened the large volume which Vera, with unexpected good humour, had lugged all that way from London. There were other books of sacred Jewish writings printed at the back:
And these are the names of the holy angels who watch. Uriel, one of the holy angels who is over the world and over Tartarus. Raphael, one of the holy angels who is over the spirits of men. Raguel, one of the holy angels who takes vengeance on the world of the luminaries. Michael, one of the holy angels, to wit, he that is set over the best part of mankind and over chaos. Saraqûel, one of the holy angels
who is set over the spirits who sin in spirit. Gabriel, one of the holy angels who is over Paradise and the serpents and the Cherubim. Remiel, one of the holy angels, whom God sets over those who rise.
The Book of Enoch, she read. So those were the ‘seven angels’. Whatever were ‘spirits who sin in spirit’? And Raguel ‘who takes vengeance on the world of luminaries’ (why did the sun and moon and stars need vengeance taken on them?)—wasn’t ‘Raguel’ also the name of the father of the girl who kills off her men in the Book of Tobit? The slight red volume of the Apocrypha was visible on the top of the navy bag and opened readily at the now familiar story:
It came to pass the same day, that in Ecbatane a city of Media Sara the daughter of Raguel was also reproached by her father’s maids;
Because that she had been married to seven husbands, whom Asmodeus the evil spirit had killed, before they had lain with her.
Those were simpler times, when a girl’s malice could be referred to as an evil spirit. But in the story the holy angel Raphael came to heal the possessed girl.
The phone rang, making her jump.
‘Hello,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s me. Look, when do you have to be out of there? Only I was wondering—would you mind if we moved your stuff tomorrow?’
‘As a matter of fact I don’t have to be out of here until Monday.’ Julia tried not to sound as if she wanted to drop the phone.
‘Oh, that’s a relief. Could we do it tomorrow then? Only various things have sort of cropped up.’
Sarah giggled and Julia, who presumed that ‘things’ meant Carlo, finished the conversation curtly and rang off.
A reprieve! She lay down on the sofa, pushing off her shoes. What were the names of the seven angels? Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, Michael, Saraquel, Gabriel. Damn! She couldn’t remember the last one. Trying to, she fell asleep.
A young man with a dog stood on a river bank watching up at a window. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s not what you think. Nothing ever is.’
The boy was Toby. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked. ‘We’ve been worried about you.’
‘I had to go to Raghes,’ he explained. ‘For my father.’
‘But the angel?’ she asked. ‘Where is the angel who was to go with you?’
The phone rang again and woke her. This time it was Cynthia. ‘We’re having a scrap supper,’ she said. ‘Bits and bobs rescued from the party. Come over if you don’t mind left-overs.’
‘Thank you,’ said Julia, confused with sleep. ‘I’m supposed to be packing. But maybe I’ll be finished by supper time.’
‘If you feel like it then,’ said Cynthia, ever hospitable. ‘Are you really moving in with that young mermaid?’
‘It was a very good party.’ Julia did not wish to be drawn on the subject of Sarah. ‘Thank you for inviting me.’
‘Oh, the pleasure is entirely ours! You were our star guest.’ Cynthia was jubilant. ‘I heard you discussed Dante with Joyce’s boy—he was lyrical about you. You’re a miracle. It must be all those years of teaching. The boy is usually autistic in company!’
Julia, who had been genuine in her wish to discover the source of the lines of the Yeats poem which had beaten in her mind, felt annoyed that sincere interest had been perceived as mere social skill. The conversation had been instructive. ‘It’s a reference to the penultimate circle in Hell,’ the young Dante scholar had told her. ‘Count Ugolino—he’s shut up in a tower with his children and in the end he’s forced to eat their dead bodies.’ ‘But how unfair,’ she had said, ‘to make him suffer in Hell for merely trying to stay alive.’
There was little, in fact, left to do in the apartment. Julia swept the floors a second time and dusted the furniture. Tomorrow she would put bleach down the lavatory and rinse out the tea towels. But really there was nothing else to attend to. And to sit inside, or even on the balcony, waiting for tomorrow seemed suddenly intolerable. She tried to repack the Apocrypha, then, not managing to get the book to fit, tipped others out onto the floor.
A programme for a Baroque concert fell out of one of the books: a memento of an early outing with Carlo. She was on her knees and, overwhelmingly, ‘Oh, my love, my love…’ she rocked back and forth, missing him as much—no, more bitterly than ever.
Suddenly it entered her mind that she wanted, urgently, to see the Monsignore. There was something about him which acted as a deterrent to plaguing thoughts. She hardly knew him—could she turn up at his door out of the blue? But, why not? Why not do just that? Why not turn up out of the blue—he could only send her away again!
* * *
Few people were out in the virulent sun. Tomorrow was the first day of July. Exactly six months since her arrival in Venice the weather had swung to its opposite pole. A crowd of Japanese tourists, in the same position on the bridge near the Monsignore’s calle as they had been the day Charles brought her there, blocked her way. Indefatigable! Was it the self-same party, endlessly recycling itself?
Near the gate with its crest of roses apprehension clawed her stomach. Maybe the Monsignore was asleep? Very likely he would be on such a hot afternoon. If so her visit would be an intrusion. She had better go away.
As she stood, weighing what to do, the bolt of the gate was pulled back and Constanze was there.
‘Oh,’ said Julia, ‘I am so sorry. I wondered if the Monsignore might perhaps…?’
‘Ingresse, prego!’ Constanze jerked her head towards the courtyard and marched away, leaving Julia at the gate.
A hesitation—then she stepped inside. ‘Monsignore Giuseppe?’
‘Who is this?’ A voice called back.
‘It’s Julia Garnet. I was passing so I…’
The Monsignore came forward, holding out his hands. He was wearing only a black gown and a round straw hat on his head. The pug dog, which had been lying on the veranda, got up and trotted over. ‘See, Marco, a visitor! But this is a marvel! Just as I become bored you arrive like one of the holy angels of heaven!’
‘Oh,’ said Julia, flustered by the extravagant welcome, ‘I was just reading about those.’
‘Indeed? What is it you read? I am on the angels’ side.’
‘It was the Book of Enoch.’ Whatever else she had expected last January it most certainly was not that she would one day talk of the heavenly host to a Catholic priest.
‘Ah, the seven holy angels, you mean.’
‘Yes. What are the spirits who sin in spirit, do you know?’
‘Perhaps like our Catholic sin against the Holy Ghost? The defiance which denies the good yet knows it is good as it does so. May I pour you a glass of prosecco?’
‘Thank you. I wonder why they set an angel in charge of that?’
‘To sin in this way is not inconsiderable—maybe the worst? It is an interesting topic; I must think more about it. And you, you are well after the great party? For myself I drank too much—but my excuse is that I knew I would. At least I did not pretend it was by mistake!’
Julia, who had been going to say she was ‘fine’, said instead, ‘I’m not too well, actually.’
‘I am sorry to hear this,’ said the Monsignore.
He said nothing else and they sat in silence. A pair of doves landed in the courtyard; there was no other movement in the implacable afternoon heat. Julia, who wished she had not come, sat unable to speak or move.
After a while she said, ‘I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have bothered you,’ and got up to go.
‘I, too, am sorry you do not feel able to tell me whatever it is,’ said the Monsignore.
‘I don’t know how,’ said Julia, miserable.
‘Maybe I can guess,’ said the Monsignore. ‘Mostly when people come to make confession, people who are not used to making confession that is, it is for one of two reasons—either it is about some wrongdoing or it is a matter of the heart.’
‘I suppose it is about my heart, then,’ said Julia, sitting down again.
‘So,’ said the Monsignore, pushing the jug of wine towards he
r. ‘I know a little about the heart.’
There was silence again. ‘The thing is,’ said Julia, ‘I don’t know where to begin. I’m embarrassed.’
‘Of course.’ The Monsignore was matter-of-fact. ‘The heart is a breeder of embarrassment. But we are all of us imbeciles in that area, that you can rely on. We all at times put up our hands before our cheeks in shame.’
‘All right,’ said Julia. ‘I’ll try and tell you.’
There was another silence.
‘Say nothing,’ advised the Monsignore. ‘Let us sit, just. Take some repose.’
They sat. The pug, who had settled himself beneath the skirts of the priest, began to snore. After a bit Julia said, ‘When I came to Venice I’d never really seen beauty before. I had, of course, some aesthetic appreciation but I’d never really let it inside me, if you see what I mean? I met someone, a man, who showed me beautiful things—who explained the beautiful things of Venice to me—and I fell in love with him.’
‘That is good,’ said the Monsignore.
‘No—but you see I thought he liked me too. Not loved me, I knew he didn’t love me, but I thought he liked me. I thought it was my company he enjoyed.’
‘And it wasn’t so?’
‘No. It was a boy. A young Italian boy I was friendly with he wanted to get to know.’
‘Ah!’
‘Yes. At least I thought that was the case. I was very angry and very upset and then I became very ill—I was silly about it all, I’m afraid.’
‘Perhaps. But I think no love is really “silly”, as you call it.’
‘Well, anyway I had just about got over it when I met him again.’
‘When did you meet him?’ Then, answering her silence, ‘At the party, was it at the party?’
‘Yes. He was awkward and I was awkward and it was quite ghastly.’ Such inadequate words to describe that heart-stopping encounter on the Cutforths’ terrace. ‘But then…’ How could she explain to this man of God what had happened next. ‘There is a girl.’
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