Before he left, Carlo had enquired, casually, where Sarah was to be found. ‘Of course I do not want to trouble her while she is unwell, but there was a number she wanted from me. A contact in the art world. I must call her sometime to give it to her.’ So no doubt a means would be constructed for Carlo to return the stolen panel.
She walked on, past the Bridge of Sighs, past the Doge’s Palace, where she was glad to see her old doge, with his naval cap, back ensconced in his former quarters, past the column of St Theodore beside his crocodile and the winged lion who keeps them company, into the Piazza.
And all this too will pass, she reflected, if man does not find a way to keep it from sinking back into the sea. The great basilica gleamed in the lamplight, testifying to the power of man’s creation. All beauty can be saved, she thought, if we learn to fight, to keep it from the forces of corruption and darkness. Which are, she concluded, often no more than indolence and fear, greed and cowardice, although that quaternity can do harm enough if one thinks of the Nazis—or the Nasu.
The Nasu spread their plague across the vistas of the years, centuries after centuries, since as long as men had learned to kill and cast blame and seek power over others. But alongside them, undeclared, came too the angel whose name means ‘God’s healing’. And today the victory had been to him.
‘Sara! Sara, my sister, my beloved. Sara my wife.’
IV
THE FEAST OF RAPHAEL
1
It took some time for the letters to catch up with Julia at her quarters at the Cutforths’. Signora Mignelli had given the post to Nicco who had called by and given it to Toby who had put it aside. He was apologetic when he rang.
Julia, trying not to mind that she had been forgotten, said, ‘Come over, if you would like it—or I can come to you…?’ and waited.
Toby sounded unsure. ‘Um, I’m not sure if Sarah…’
‘Of course,’ she said, smoothing over his unease. ‘If it’s not too much trouble for you why don’t you bring them over here?’
As it happened the Cutforths were both out when Toby arrived and she was able to take him out alone onto the balcony. ‘Wow,’ he said, gazing across. ‘Cool view.’ He was definitely nervous.
‘Some tea, Toby? We’ve drunk enough of it together!’
‘Tea’d be great. Thanks.’
She allowed him to settle outside while she made herself busy with the tea-things. Having him there, so like his twin (and she could not get out of the habit of viewing the pair of them in that way), reminded her of the times she had spent having tea with Sarah.
Poor girl, it had all been lies; lies on lies. Sarah’s father had died—hanging from a rope—because his daughter had believed a lie: one of those rational-seeming lies which pose as morality because human beings like to think the worst of each other. And Sarah had had to justify the atrocity, peddling more falsehoods to keep the frightful knowledge from herself. And so it had gone on, gathering force, until the lie had permeated all she did. What was it Harriet had used to chant? ‘Beware, beware of those who “care”.’ If only we human beings could learn, Julia thought (pouring boiling water onto green leaves in the Cutforths’ elegant china teapot), to leave each other alone.
Outside, Toby was smoking one of his roll-ups and the sight of his hunched shoulders brought an access of tenderness. Setting the tray down she said, with a sense of taking bulls by horns, ‘It seems an age since we did this together.’
‘Yeah. Look, Julia, oh, thanks’—he slurped noisily—‘what I said to you that night…’
‘It’s all right. I shall tell no one—have told no one.’
‘Thanks.’ Visibly he relaxed. ‘Only she’s touchy about it. She asked if I had talked to you and I’m afraid I said I hadn’t.’
‘It’s all right,’ she assured, ‘it can be our secret.’ She was becoming quite a repository of secrets. ‘Toby, have you found the panel?’
And at this he brightened. ‘Yeah! It was in the passage. Sarah forgot she had put it back there.’
‘The passage?’
‘It’s where we found it in the first place. There’s a passage runs down the side we think led to an old palazzo that was there once. It was blocked up, full of stones and rubble and that, and when I was clearing it I found the panel high up in an alcove, wrapped in a blanket. I was knocked out when I discovered it!’
The Monsignore’s passage. So she had been right about that too. ‘Why didn’t you report it at once?’
Looking sheepish he said, ‘Yeah, I know. I wanted to say about that too—if you wouldn’t mind keeping quiet about how long, you know, we’ve kind of known about it.’ All those years her taciturn self had had nothing to ‘keep quiet’; now every silence might conceal a veritable treasure-house! ‘That was what the row was about, as a matter of fact. Remember the day you asked us to tea and I went off? You must have thought me rude.’
‘I thought it was a girl.’
‘Yeah, well, it was in a way. Sarah. She wanted us to hang on to the painting—she kept saying, “Let’s keep it to ourselves just for a while—our secret.” I didn’t know what she was playing at and I got really worried. That’s why I showed it to you.’ His love wasn’t as blind, then, as her own had been for Carlo—Toby had guessed something of the nature of Sarah’s plans for the panel. ‘We had this massive row about it and I went off to England—I felt like jacking the whole thing in, if you want to know. I love her but, you know, a priceless picture…she could have got us both into deep shit!’
‘I’m glad you showed it to me. It meant, well, I got involved in something which mattered—for once in my life.’
And how she had been rewarded: that unforgettable, limitless gaze she had witnessed in the chapel.
‘Yeah—the painting mattered—matters. I dreamed about it while I was away. It’s why I came back—it and Sarah.’
…the nearest thing to heaven I’ll ever see on earth, he had said to her. ‘Toby, did I see you once at the Madonna dell’Orto?’
Toby went crimson. ‘Oh? Yeah, I went there some times. I sort of like her.’
‘I should think she’s comforting.’ The stone Madonna with the kind lap. This is a tragic phase of civilisation, Julia thought, where we are ashamed to be found to pray. ‘I saw you at the airport too!’
‘Hey!’ he grinned at her and she saw again how attractive he could be. ‘You must be my guardian angel—following me around. I certainly would never have gone to the chapel that night if it wasn’t for you.’ Toby’s manner had lost its nerviness and become confiding—like the night they had sat on the double bed and talked together. She could never tell him that this was the sole occasion in her life she had passed a night with a man! ‘Funny thing,’ he said. ‘She saw Plush.’
‘Plush?’ But she guessed what was coming.
‘Yeah, Uncle Bill’s Dalmation. He had to be put down after, you know, Bill…Sarah swears she saw him that night in the chapel. Guess she was pretty spooked.’
‘But she’s all right now?’ The vision of the pathetic broken bird she had seen that night—that was what she must hold on to.
‘She’s doing fine. It all came out, all the tales she’d been spinning. She’s guilty as Hell, of course, over her dad’s death—that’s what it’s about. I’ve been telling her she has to forgive herself. I hate those creepy “therapy” terms but it’s true, you have to forgive yourself or you can’t go on.’
‘Self-indulgent not to, perhaps?’
‘Yeah, I reckon. Anyway, Bill shouldn’t have done what he did. He should have stuck it out—sued, got the mad cow struck off from her professional body, or whatever it is you do to these people, taken her for all she was worth—but I didn’t say that to Sarah.’
‘Yes, it’s giving in to it, isn’t it?’ And maybe that was the way: you didn’t give in to a lie—you found resistance to it by establishing your own truth. ‘And the panel?’ She could not rid herself of a protective feeling for the fragile painted wood.
&
nbsp; Toby explained that Aldo had brought the Soprintendente in charge of paintings along to see it, and he had almost fainted away so great was his excitement. It had been provisionally identified as one half of the diptych by the fourteenth-century anonymous master who, according to local legend, had with his own eyes seen the Angel Raphael in the little chapel. (‘And when you look at it,’ said Toby, ‘you kind of believe that don’t you? He’s so real!’)
The news was to be released to the press when all the appropriate tests had been carried out but there was no serious question that it was part of the treasured diptych believed to have gone missing during the war.
Julia, sipping gunpowder tea, wondered whether to mention the Monsignore and decided against it. ‘There’ll be quite a to-do then, in the press?’
‘Yeah. They thought the Nazis had got their mitts on it. I’ve asked them to hold the press release till Sarah’s really better. I want her to tell the story.’
‘But it was you who found it?’
Toby shrugged. ‘Yeah, but I hate publicity. Anyway, I kind of want it to have been her—call it a betrothal present!’
‘Oh, your marriage! I was forgetting. That’s the most important news of all. Are you going to get married in the chapel?’
But Toby thought not. ‘I don’t want us to wait and I reckon we should go home for it anyway. We might do it in a synagogue—smash glasses!’
‘That would be fun!’
When he had gone she opened her letters.
One was from Vera who had decided to retire to Hastings. The property there is very reasonable, she wrote, and there are not too many Tory voters, thank God, in those parts these days.
A second letter was from the bank and the third, rather bulkier, contained a note and a further envelope inside it.
The note was from Mr Akbar.
Dear Madam,
I would like to purchase from you your very nice flat. If you would accept an offer from me I would pay £170,000. Please let me know if your are interested.
Yours faithfully, A. D. Akbar.
Included with Mr Akbar’s offer was another letter, from a firm of solicitors who informed her that probate had been completed on the will of the late Miss Harriet Myra Josephs and that shares and bonds to the approximate value of £228,000 formed the portion of the estate which had been left to Miss Julia Ann Garnet.
Julia had surmised that Harriet had planned to leave her something in her will because from time to time her friend had alluded to what she called ‘my Post Office savings’. ‘I’m saving up for a rainy day,’ she had used to say. ‘And if the weather holds out till I retire, then “What larks!” Otherwise, you must have the larks for both of us.’
In the aftermath of losing her friend Julia had forgotten these elliptic remarks of Harriet’s, but had she thought about them she would have assumed they hinted at no more than a few thousand pounds. Harriet’s brother’s boy, a tall young man with specs, had called at the flat, slightly awkward in his role of his aunt’s executor, and removed the shoebox into which Julia had packed Harriet’s few obvious valuables—her gold watch, a mother-of-pearl cigarette case, some earrings and the diamond-clasped double string of cultured pearls. Julia’s own accumulated building society savings had been sufficient to cover her stay in Venice; after that (she had been putting off the thought along with her return to England) it was to be a resumption of a lifetime’s habit of frugality. Now with this influx of Harriet’s undisclosed wealth, everything was altered.
Harriet, dark horse, must have been dabbling in stocks and shares. No, that was patronising, it was more than ‘dabbling’—clearly she had been proficient in her management of the money market. And no doubt she had been too mindful of her companion’s socialist principles to let on what she was at.
What an ass she had been! And how merciful life was that it bestowed opportunities to change one’s mind.
Swiftly she calculated. Almost four hundred thousand pounds. Along with her pension, more than enough to live out her days here. There was no need to return to England and narrow loneliness. Suddenly she saw that her friends were here too: the Cutforths, the twins, the Signora, Nicco, the Monsignore, even Aldo—more friends than she had made in England in a lifetime. She walked inside and took up the pad of paper which lay on Charles’s desk.
Dear Mr Akbar, she wrote.
It is many years now since I travelled to Media where I found Sara; she who lives now as my wife in Nineveh speaks only occasionally of her home in Ecbatana. But telling you this story has caused me to ponder: it is in my mind that when my father leaves us to cross the bridge to the other life, I shall take my wife and our children and go at last to the holy city of Raghes, by the far sea, where I once was to travel to collect my father’s debt.
I never did get to Raghes, for at my father-in-law’s request we stayed fourteen nights (twice the customary period for feasting) in celebration that I had survived my wedding night and his daughter was at last married.
My father-in-law dug a grave for me on my wedding night so sure was he I would die! You could see how like he was to my own father in this—always harping on death. For myself I learned something during those days which I kept in my heart and never told my father.
It was Azarias, as ever, who showed me the way. That first morning we came downstairs, Sara laughing and her parents weeping, her father ready to thrust half his wealth on me, I looked about for Azarias. Later, the maid came with a message that I should go outside.
Azarias stood there and I opened my arms to embrace him but he stepped aside. ‘Brother Azarias,’ I said, ‘I owe my life to you I reckon, and what is more I owe you my wife!’
Azarias smiled one of his smiles. ‘You chose well, brother, for you chose life.’
I didn’t understand this but now I remembered ahout the evil spirit who had possessed the hody of my wife. ‘Azarias,’ I asked, ‘what happened in the bed-chamber? I remember you were there and…’ for suddenly I recalled there was another there with us. ‘Kish was there too. Why was that?’
Azarias fell silent; it was as if we stood an hour or a day or a week with nothing said between us. Then he spoke and now all this time later I feel the awe which his words aroused.
‘You know of one Lord whom you worship and that is right. But He has an Adversary, and against that adversary a man must struggle each day of his life; in this life every good thing is matched with its opposite. The evil spirit was known to me and I to him. The smoke of the fish has baffled him and he has fled to the utmost part of Egypt and there he is bound. But a dog was needed to smell him out.’
‘Kish?’
‘Dogs have good instincts—better often than their masters. That is why they are man’s friends.’
‘Azarias, who are you?’ For by now I knew in this matter, too, the master’s instincts were lesser than the one who served him.
But Azarias just smiled that smile of his and said, ‘Enough questions. If I am to get to Raghes to fetch your father’s debt I must go and see to the camels,’ which made me feel shame as I had forgotten all about the debt and that my father and mother must be counting the days to my return.
But for the time being I had enough to occupy me; it came to me that whatever the nature of the baleful spirit which had been dislodged from the body of my wife, it had left place for more passion than was usual in a virgin!
2
The twins’ wedding was to take place in late August and Julia decided to use the occasion to return to London. There were matters to attend to: the solicitors, Mr Akbar. And it’s right too, she thought as the plane taxied out at Marco Polo and up and off over the sea. There is a life to close down.
London was dirty and hot after a cold July, and Ealing particularly stuffy. Mr Akbar, however, was overjoyed to see her.
‘Madam, come in, come in,’ he gestured hospitably down her own hall. ‘It is wonderful that you have come.’
He made sweet mint tea and they sat on the balcony overlooking the
gardens. The gardens, which had been a source of pride to Julia during her years at Cedar Court, looked seedy: the turf parched and the flowerbeds municipal. ‘These I love,’ said Mr Akbar, pointing at a pair of bedraggled mallard ducks which had wandered onto the lawns.
‘Do you, Mr Akbar? Then I am happy you are going to buy my flat.’
‘You accept my price?’
Julia had taken the precaution of visiting a local estate agency before their meeting and had gleaned that the sum he was offering her was rather below the market value. She had come intending to be firm on this point. But the eyes of Mr Akbar, looking pleadingly at her, made her waver. She had bought the flat for a thousand pounds, after the original landlord died, leaving her with a sitting tenancy. It seemed greedy to take advantage now of her own good fortune and besides, had Mr Akbar not made overtures to her she might never have had the idea to sell up. He did not have the appearance of wealth. And the hassle of selling the place elsewhere would delay her. Anyway, she owed him something for putting the idea of her permanent remove to Venice into her head. Him and Harriet.
Thinking of Harriet, she glanced through the glass doors into the sitting room which she and her friend had shared for thirty years. It hardly resembled the flat they had known, so adorned was it with coloured rugs, with brass ornaments, and pastel portraits of improbably nubile young women.
Mr Akbar was watching her with anxious attention. ‘It is a good price? It stretches me, I promise, dear lady, to’—he demonstrated with eager hands—‘as much as I can afford.’
‘I accept, Mr Akbar.’ He was probably lying but who cared? A sense of enormous and expansive freedom had begun to seep through her.
‘Madam, I thank you.’ Mr Akbar rushed inside and came out with a bottle of sparkling wine. ‘Champagne!’ he said, untruthfully. ‘We must drink a toast for luck. Listen, I play you my Elvis album.’
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