Miss Garnet’s Angel. Salley Vickers
thank him, Nicco, just the bill.’
Miss Garnet felt unusually jolly as she and Nicco walked single file along the side of the green canal back to the glass-cutter. The light, refracting off the water on to the shabby brick frontages of the houses, bathed her eyes. The brandy had warmed her and a sense of wellbeing suffused her body.
Re-entering the glass-cutter’s Miss Garnet nearly knocked into a man on his way out and almost dropped the purse she had ready, so eager was she to complete the transaction which would restore Signora Mignelli’s picture. The glass-cutter had the repaired Virgin out on his bench but when Miss Garnet began to count the notes from her purse Nicco, who had been exchanging some banter with the departing customer, stopped her.
‘Is free,’ he explained.
Miss Garnet did not comprehend. ‘Three what, Nicco? Thousand, million?’ She prided herself on her mental arithmetic but the huge denominations of Italian currency still tripped her up.
‘No, no, is free.’
‘Oh, but I can’t…’
The glass-cutter was holding up the picture, excitedly stabbing at the Virgin’s face. ‘Bellissimo,’ he insisted, ‘per niente–is now charge. I give yow.’
Following Nicco back along the fondamenta Miss Garnet felt both subdued and elated. The refusal of the glass-cutter to accept a fee troubled her; and yet his powerful assertion of his own autonomy was also exhilarating. Karl Marx, she couldn’t help thinking, would have approved even if he would have deplored the glass-cutter’s motive. A love of the Virgin Mary would have struck Marx as a sign of subjection and yet one could not, really one could not, Miss Garnet mused, trying to keep up with Nicco’s pace, describe the man she had met as subject to anyone.
‘He like this artist,’ Nicco had explained. But Miss Garnet, in whom insight, like an incipient forest fire, was beginning to catch and creep, sensed suddenly there was more to it than that. The glass-cutter, she guessed, also liked the subject of Bellini’s painting and his love of Mary, and the bambino in her arms, was stronger than his love of money. How would Marx or even Lenin have explained that, she wondered as they arrived on the fondamenta alongside the Chiesa dell’Angelo Raffaele.
The Archangel smiled down at her and she remembered she had questions about the boy with the fish and the hound.
‘Nicco, who is the boy up there with the dog?’ She pointed to the stone effigies which were lodged two-thirds up the church’s façade.
But Nicco had other appointments. His pride in his new role as translator and guide was now giving way to peer anxiety. There was a football fixture he could not afford to miss. He shrugged.
‘Tobiolo?’ he said, uncertainly. ‘I see you again. Ciao, Giulia!’
And, ‘Ciao!’ Julia Garnet called after him watching his young shoulders as he ran across the bridge and disappeared behind the church.
The sun was a pale gold disc in the sky. Some words filtered into memory.
When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire, somewhat like a Guinea? O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy!’…I question not my Corporeal Eye any more than I would Question a Window…I look thro’ it and not with it.
William Blake. Years ago she had been invited to contribute a chapter on Blake for a book on Radical Thinkers but somehow the project had never got off the ground. William Blake had been a revolutionary but had he not also been whipped by his father for seeing angels in the trees? Oro pallido, she thought to herself, crossing, in the lowering light, the bridge where Nicco had sped before her. This was not a morning sun on fire, like Blake’s, but pale wintery gold–oro pallido.
The letters which had been delivered from England were from Brown & Noble, the estate agents who had let the flat, and her friend, Vera Kessel. Vera, a fellow member of the Communist Party, had been at Cambridge with Julia Garnet. They had not been close as students but a few years later had recognised each other at a Party meeting and, thereafter, had occasionally gone on holidays to Dubrovnik or to the Black Sea together. The holidays had been bleak affairs, nothing like the trips Harriet had planned for their retirement.
The letters had been, in fact, forgotten until looking for her left glove she found them stuffed into the pocket of her coat. She opened them while the kettle boiled for tea.
Dear Miss Garnet,
This letter confirms a tenancy of six months to Mr A. D. Akbar at a rental of £1,200 p.c.m. We remind you of our terms of 12% to include insurance and collection fees. £1,006.00 (plus one month’s deposit) has been transferred to your account today and thereafter £1,006.00 until 3 June. Trusting in your continued satisfaction.
Yours etc.
‘To the eye of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun,’ murmured Miss Garnet, recalling some more of the words of the visionary poet which had come to her by the canal, and she opened the other envelope.
Dear Julia,
Just a brief card to wish you well in benighted Italy! How are you getting along with the RC God squad? Pretty oppressive I should imagine but I hope the history makes up for it.
We had a disappointing meeting about the unions last week. Ted spoke well as usual but much of the life has gone out of the comrades. All send greetings and solidarity.
Best, Vera.
For a moment Julia Garnet remembered the impoverished little ceremony with which she had bidden Harriet a final farewell, and the utilitarian stone with the severely practical information carved upon its stony face, with which she had chosen to mark the passing of her closest friend’s life. She wished now she had paid the funeral more attention. Harriet’s large, mild face hovered before her–somehow she could not quite get used to the idea that Harriet was no more.
She turned down the flame beneath the saucepan of water and added two tea bags. The kitchen was equipped with neither kettle nor teapot. At first she had minded, her cup of tea being a regular point in her routine, but now she enjoyed the slightly Bohemian feel to her saucepan tea-making. No ‘love’ in Vera’s letter. After nearly forty-five years’ acquaintance ‘Best’ was all Vera could manage.
The following morning Julia Garnet, this time with the Rev. Crystal in the pocket of her tweed coat (‘For really I must,’ she insisted to herself, ‘find out about this city’), returned to the basilica of St Mark. She entered not by the main door but by a less frequented doorway on the north side. It did not deter her that this side-slip into the cathedral was marked ‘Per Pregare’–‘For Prayer’.
Inside, by long, hanging red and silver lamps, a door was open onto a side chapel. With no special thought in her mind she entered.
About a dozen people sat, in the vaulted, ancient-looking surroundings, listening to a priest reading from a leather book. Julia Garnet looked around. At one end of the chapel a blue mosaic of a huge Madonna gazed down; at the other, a tomb on which rested an inclined marmoreal figure observed by an angel. Twelve candles burned on the table before the tomb.
The priest came to the end of his reading and sat down. There was a pause during which Julia Garnet waited for something to happen. After a while it became apparent that nothing was going to happen, except the silence.
Her first response was annoyance. The Vespers in St Mark’s had been dramatic: the flute voices of the clerics, the melodic bells, the incense, the enthralling rhythmic passing and return of the litany-chant thrown between priest and congregation–compared with the threnodic splendour of all that, this abrupt nothingness felt like a cheat. But after a while she began to enjoy the silence. She looked round at the mosaics which seemed to depict some awful martyrdom–certainly there was a body and a tomb and, yes, surely that was the same body being removed from the tomb, and