Miss Garnet’s Angel

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 adventurousness which the loss of Harriet 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 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.

Moving closer to determine the purpose of the building better, Julia Garnet was startled by a shout.

‘Hey, watch it! Mind out!’

The voice came from above her head and for a second it flashed across her startled mind that the archangel himself had addressed her, before a blue-clad pair of legs brought a distinctly human shape into sight.

‘Didn’t you see the notice?’

‘Notice?’ Julia Garnet’s first reaction was one of annoyance. For the second time she had been ‘found out’ as English: the stranger who had descended in so surprising a way from the scaffold above had instinctively addressed her in her own tongue–but with none of the courtly civility of Carlo. Who was this person in the dirty overalls? It was not even possible to discern their sex, for whoever it was wore goggles and the woolly hat beloved of Venetian workmen.

‘Look! See!’ The blue-clad person pointed at a yellow sign indicating falling stones hanging on the scaffolding which Julia Garnet had failed to take in. ‘If you get hurt there’s hell to pay. We’re working here.’ The person pulled down the goggles to reveal indignant pale blue eyes.

‘I’m sorry.’ Though in truth she wasn’t. ‘I didn’t see the notice.’

‘What’s the trouble?’ A second voice, lighter than the first. A figure also wearing goggles swung down. Pulling off an almost identical hat and pushing down the goggles it revealed itself as a fair-haired young woman. ‘What’s up, Tobes?’

‘I fear I am trespassing.’ Julia spoke coldly.

‘Don’t worry,’ the girl spoke soothingly. ‘He was just worried we might drop something on your head. We were breaking for lunch anyway. I’m Sarah, by the way. This is Toby.’ She gestured at the other figure and then as Julia Garnet made no remark, ‘We work together.’

The tone was propitiating and Julia unbent. ‘It was silly of me. I didn’t think.’ Really she wanted to scuttle away from the aggressive young man but the girl seemed pleasant enough. She struggled to find an answering politeness. ‘What is your work?’ She found, as she asked the question, she indeed wished to know.

‘We’re restorers. This is one of the English restorations.’

‘And do you work always together?’ How exhilarating it might be to work high up. One could look out over the city, like a bird–or an angel.

‘We’re twins,’ said the girl as if in explanation and indeed her eyes were the self-same pale blue as her brother’s.

Julia Garnet had taught twins and the experience had not been comfortable. For the whole of one fraught year the Stevens twins had reduced a class to chaos by answering in unison when either was asked a question or (worse) singing in a peculiar toneless syncopation when neither was. There was a brazenness and self-sufficiency about twins which challenged her composure. Instinctively, she made as if to depart.

‘Would you like to see round?’ Again it was the girl who spoke while her brother only watched silently. His lashes, Miss Garnet noticed, were long and fair.

‘How kind of you but I must–’

‘If you want, you can come up on the platform and see Himself.’ It was the young man speaking and he had also pulled off his woolly hat to reveal long blond locks and an earring.

‘Himself?’ Julia Garnet found her face was reddening. How provoking that she should blush so easily before these young people.

But the young man, who appeared to have forgotten his former discontent, was not looking at her face but was extending a gloved hand. ‘Here, it’s quite safe.’ And to her own surprise Julia Garnet found herself being gripped by the elbow and swung up and onto a wooden-planked platform along the building’s side. ‘Look,’ said the young man, and then as if by way of introduction, ‘the Angel Raphael.’

Surrounded by scaffolding a serene face cut into stone smiled out at her. Whatever did one do when faced with the smile of an angel?

‘He’s great, isn’t he?’ The young man spoke with enthusiasm; his earlier antagonism had apparently melted away.

Reassured, Julia Garnet asked, ‘How do you know he’s a he?’

‘It’s a convention.’ It was the young woman, Sarah she had called herself, who had swung her own way up and had now joined them on the platform. ‘They’re sexless, angels. Look, see the face is quite androgynous.’ And inwardly Julia Garnet observed that the young woman herself, and her brother, were, like the angels, also somewhat androgynous in their appearance.

It was a strange encounter, she thought a little later, as she left the twins eating ciabatta with tomatoes and the elongated rubinous onions she had seen on the street market stalls. Their legs had dangled over the edge of the platform. But a feeling like the warmth of Nicco’s cousin’s brandy crept through her: she was pleased with herself. She had made another acquaintance.

‘Two, really,’ she said that evening. ‘Though somehow one thinks of twins as one.’

Carlo and she were eating near the Arsenale. Julia’s previous diet had consisted of the plainest fare. On the rare occasions they had entertained, Harriet had cooked a chicken using a spoonful of dry sherry in the gravy. After Harriet’s death Julia had shopped at Marks and Spencer–dinners for one, compartmented as to meat or vegetables and encased in cardboard and foil. The experience of coming to Venice had not only opened her eyes–it had challenged her appetite. She was learning to enjoy food–especially with Carlo.

‘And they are restorers? I must go and look.’ A jug of prosecco was smacked down on the table. ‘Some prosecco? They serve it quite flat here without the sparkle, but very refreshing.’

Later, after they had eaten tiny clams and slabs of polenta cooked in sage and garlic, she asked, ‘It’s a chapel they are restoring?’

Carlo had taken a silver toothpick from his wallet. Watching him Julia thought, How funny that I am not revolted!

As if he had read her thoughts Carlo put the toothpick away. ‘Yes. It was known as the Chapel-of-the-Plague because it was built for a child–though others say it was for a mistress–dying of the plague.’

‘Is that why the angel is there?’ She remembered from the leaflet in the church his name in Hebrew meant ‘God’s healing’.

‘I guess so–he is around Venice.’

‘I like him.’ How odd that she was already so sure of this.

‘Oh, yes–he is nicer, with the smile, than the fierce Michael or the virtuous Gabriel!’ He pulled a long face, then laughed. Julia who could not quite rid herself of the belief that it was bad form to laugh at one’s own utterances, laughed too, a trifle uneasily. ‘But you know, they must be exceptional at their craft, your twins, to be employed on this project. It is unusual for the Soprintendenti to employ foreigners. I must visit–poke my nose in! Now, there are crayfish or there is lobster. Which shall we try?’

A few days later Julia Garnet, walking her habitual route down the Calle Lunga, remembered the short cut. She felt, in making a detour past the little brick edifice which bristled with scaffold poles, she was doing something slightly eccentric, if not intrusive, but in fact there was no sign of the twins.

That the twins were not there made Julia Garnet aware that she was disappointed. Without acknowledging it she had been looking forward to renewing acquaintance with the androgynous pair. There was something about the way they swung with easy confidence among the scaffolding (rather like the gibbons she had once seen in a tree at Whipsnade Zoo) which stirred her. And they had trounced her experience with the Stevens twins by being unexpectedly friendly–letting her up there to see the face of the Archangel. Perhaps, she thought, becoming fanciful, it was some form of ‘angelic’ communication that had prompted Toby’s suggestion? For it was he and not the more approachable girl who had made the offer which had led to her meeting with the smiling Raphael.

On the way home she passed two small girls taking something from a basket which hung suspended by a rope from an upper storey. ‘Grazie, Nana!’ the girls called, and looking up Julia Garnet saw the face of an elderly woman at an open window. The woman blew a kiss at the girls and, with elaborate pantomime, they returned the blessing.

The episode left Julia Garnet rather low. The elderlywoman had grandchildren–to whom she could send down sweets or pocket money in a basket–who loved her. Whatever other drawbacks age had brought the old Venetian lady, she had a family to be attached to–a reflection which contributed, back at the apartment, to a general feeling of being at a loose end. There were letters to write and books she had brought to read but these activities felt uninviting: it was company she wanted and she was grateful when Signora Mignelli called by with an enamel teapot.

‘For to make tea in!’ said the Signora, pointing at the teapot. ‘Sorry, I forget it.’

Julia herself had forgotten that she had ever felt the lack of such a thing. Signora Mignelli stayed and talked, resting her behind on the arm of the sofa. Her husband had had an operation for a ruptured hernia and dramatically the Signora enacted how he had been carried off in the ambulance boat in the dead of night to the hospital. She refused tea but stayed to recount a war between the fishmonger and the local priest. The fishmonger, Julia inferred, had a reputation for favouring other men’s wives and the priest had attempted to discuss the matter with him. ‘He is a Communist–so he not like,’ the Signora explained. ‘He say he go to another church.’

‘But if he is a Communist why is he going to church at all?’

‘Of course he go to church,’ the Signora said, dismissive at the suggestion of other possibilities.

Concerned lest she had affronted her landlady Julia diverted the conversation. ‘Do you know the Chapel-of-the-Plague?’

Signora Mignelli nodded approvingly. ‘Very old,’ she said, ‘and very holy. Much miracles there once. Now, no more.’ She shrugged. ‘It is the TV, I think.’

Nicco was not making much progress with his English. Carlo, who had called to tell her he had been as good as his word, and been by the chapel and spoken with the twins, narrowly missed one of the English lessons.

‘Do excuse me.’ Julia Garnet hastily cleared away a pile of books. One of them, The Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck, made her feel embarrassed: it betrayed the fact that she had bothered to bring it with her from England. She had not quite got over her tendency to become unnerved by Carlo’s presence and the children’s book added to the feeling of immaturity. ‘It’s the boy I give lessons to.’ She shoved Jemima Puddle-duck under a copy of Hello magazine donated by the Signora.

Carlo’s manners were exemplary. If he had spotted the story about the credulous duck and the predatory fox, which Julia had preserved since childhood, he gave no sign. He seemed to want to ask questions about Nicco but she was more interested in hearing what he had to say about the restoration.

‘So, I have met your friends.’

But this she felt she must correct. ‘Hardly friends!’

‘It is fascinating,’ ignoring her protests. ‘As always the problem is the salt. Venice has its feet for ever in water, you see, and they must refashion the floor. The boy is doing this, on his knees, while the girl is perched above him, working as stone mason. Modern youth, eh? They were most charming, I should say. They allowed me to look.’

‘Did they show you Himself?’ Julia felt slightly jealous. It had felt free up on the scaffolding.

‘Himself?’ Carlo looked puzzled.

‘The Archangel. Raphael.’ More than the humans she had met at the chapel, the angel seemed her friend.

‘Oh indeed. This is where the restoration must be most delicate. The girl is trained by a most marvellous man from your V & A who came over in ‘66 after the great floods. I know him a little. There is nothing to match you English with the chisel.’

‘Such a beatific smile.’ Julia was thinking of the angel.

‘Indeed. She is most charming, your young friend,’ said Carlo, politely misunderstanding.

Julia Garnet, calling to collect a parcel of linen, met Sarah outside the launderers. Sarah was not wearing her goggles or her woolly hat–but she still wore the blue overalls.

‘Hi! Isn’t it absolutely glorious?’

And indeed the day had turned into a painting of apricot and blue. Brilliant pillars of light were almost tangibly striking the enclosed corner where they stood.

‘Glorious.’ Julia Garnet agreed, weighing the brown parcel. (She wanted to offer some reciprocal hospitality and was simultaneously weighing in her mind how to accomplish this.) ‘I don’t suppose you would like a cup of tea?’

‘That’s sweet of you. I get dry with the stone dust and if you breathe near a café here it costs an arm and a leg.’

‘Don’t you take a flask?’

‘Too lazy!’

The girl had a seductive giggle. Julia, as the two of them made their way towards Signora Mignelli’s, speculated that with a laugh like that one might get away with murder. So it turned out to be quite easy, she reflected further, Sarah chattering away at her side: you asked someone to tea and they answered; as simple as that. She thought of the years through which she had asked no one (except occasionally Harriet–whom, she now saw, she had tended too much to consider in the light of ‘only’ Harriet) anything at all. Fearful of rejection she had presented to the world a face of independence which was a sham. Had she been capable of formulating the words to herself during those dull years she would probably have opined that she was too unattractive for anyone to want to be friends with her. Yet nothing in her appearance had, in fact, altered: any difference in Julia Garnet’s demeanour was a consequence of other changes.

In honour of the apricot-fingered sun Julia served tea on the balcony. Although the temperature was within a hair’s-breadth of being too cold she took a pride in being equal to it. The blue enamel teapot which had superseded the saucepan was brought out and christened. Julia, in fact, rather missed the saucepan which had given substance to her own sense of a daring relaxation of standards. Her father could have made no objection to the teapot which burned her hand and was hard to pour from.

‘Sugar? Milk?’ she asked, and was pleased when her guest requested lemon for it provided just that slight extra trouble with which to prove herself the part of hostess. They sat looking over towards the church.

‘So that’s the Angelo Raffaele. D’you know, it’s awful, but although I can see the towers from the scaffolding this is the first time I’ve seen it properly. By the end of the day I’m pretty sick of churches–say it not in Gath!’

‘Tell it not…’

‘Eh?’ Sarah had screwed up her eyes, which made her look less attractive. What is it, Julia wondered, which makes one woman attractive, another not? Sarah’s face when you analysed it was rather weasel-like, yet one knew for certain she was attractive to men.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry, it’s being a teacher!’ Julia, blushing at the unthinking correction, hurried to explain. ‘I was brought up, unfortunately, on the Bible, which sticks when all kinds of other things don’t. I believe the quotation is Tell it not in Gath…Most people get it wrong.’ This would never do–it was socially inept, as well as impolite, to correct one’s guest. Trying to bring the conversation to safer ground she said, returning to the subject of the Angelo Raffaele, ‘It has some rather lovely Guardis,’ then felt abashed at her own cheek, for until lately she had never even heard the name ‘Guardi’.

If Sarah had minded being corrected she did not show it. ‘Oh yes, the disputed organ panels. I should really look at those.’

Frustrated in a chance to show off her freshly acquired knowledge Julia tried to think of some new topic but her visitor, perhaps picking up her hostess’s disappointment, said, ‘Remind me what’s on the Guardis. I ought to know…’

‘It’s an Old Testament story. There I go again–you’ll be imagining I’m an expert on the Bible but actually I’m stupidly ignorant. (Would you like some more tea?) My friend calls the story “Tobiolo”. I think we call it “Tobias and the Angel”.’

‘No more tea, thanks. Your friend?’ Sarah shaded her eyes. Her funny hostess appeared to be blushing.

‘You met him. He’s called Carlo. He came to see your work.’

‘Oh yes! The art historian with the moustache’–peering a little too hard at Julia’s face; and then, as her hostess seemed really very engrossed with the teapot, ‘Go on about Thingy and the angel. I expect I should know the story but if I ever did I’ve forgotten.’

Julia disliked Tobias being referred to as ‘Thingy’. ‘I’m afraid I don’t really know it myself.’ Confusion made her bend further over the teapot. ‘My friend told it to me. But you can work most of the narrative out from the paintings. There’s a dog.’

Sarah helped again. ‘A dog?’

‘Yes. That’s what caught my attention–rather a contrast, it seemed to me, a dog and an angel. It’s a Dalmatian dog.’

‘We had a Dalmatian at home.’ The girl’s face–and really it was quite changeable–looked almost sad.

‘At home?’

‘Yes–it was my father’s dog. Hey, talking of angels, I must fly!’ looking at her watch, ‘Listen, it’s so nice of you to invite me.’