Miss Garnet's Angel (16 page)

‘I thought of that, too. I've left messages on his mobile but he's not answering. I don't know what to do. I should tell someone but then that'll mean the police.'

‘But you say only the two of you can get inside the chapel? Was there any sign of a break-in?' Instinctively, Julia rejected the notion of the police.

Sarah shook her head; she had on her forlorn-child look which meant Julia had to fight exasperation.

‘Where does the girl live? Can you ring her?'

But Sarah didn't know the address of Toby's unresponsive lover. She sat on Signora Mignelli's sofa, cradling the brandy.

Julia said, as gently as she could manage, ‘I wouldn't bring the police in, you know. Not for family. Wait a bit, I would, and see. You can always say you didn't notice the painting was gone.'

‘Only you know about it, actually.' Sarah's voice brightened.

‘Only me? Surely not!' Julia felt a stab of anxiety for the fragile wooden piece with its blue-winged angel. The Cutforths' card had brought the story of the missing Bellini to her mind.

‘We'd only come across it the day you visited us. It's not listed with all the stuff which got stored years ago before any restoration work started. I checked.'

Julia wondering, Did Carlo know about it—he visited the chapel?—said aloud, ‘I can't believe I am the only other person who knew it was there. But if I am, then surely there is no need to inform the authorities—at least until you have a better idea of what has happened.' She couldn't bring herself to ask Sarah if she had ever mentioned the panel to Carlo.

*    *    *

Dear Vera,
Julia wrote,
I wonder if I might trouble you to bring over a book I need.
She crossed out ‘need' and substituted ‘want'.
It is not in print but I have telephoned the London Library so if you could
manage to collect it for me I will write and reserve it with them. I enclose a note to say you have my permission to collect. You will need this, I think, as they have begun to be particular.
After reading this through she added,
It will be very good to see you and to catch up.
She found this last sentence difficult to write and hesitated, wondering if she could cross out the ‘very'. But it was not all untrue. She was fond of Vera. Unable to find anything else to say she concluded the letter abruptly,
Love Julia.

At least she had managed ‘love'—even if, she suspected, it was not wholly sincere.

But what ‘love'
is
wholly sincere? she pondered to herself, simmering tomatoes for her supper. Was it ‘love' which had driven the boy Toby from his sister and the bat-filled chapel to his unknown destination? And had he taken with him, for companion, the long-footed angel? Nothing had been heard of either of them. Did Toby ‘love' his girl and had, perhaps, that love deranged him? Certainly she herself had suffered such a derangement. And was it this, she wondered—chopping basil into the simmering sauce, to which she had added (learning from Signora Mignelli's instruction) just a dash of vinegar, a pinch of sugar—that had brought about the acute and astonishing experience as she had walked out of the chapel that day into the sunlight? The sight itself—of this she was wholly sure—was not the stuff of madness. But maybe a kind of madness had been necessary to pull apart her faculties of perception.

To let the light in, she concluded, pouring steaming scarlet sauce over green ribbons of pasta.

I
never asked how Azarias came by Kish. The first stage of our journey was along the eastern bank of the Tigris—the great grey-green river which flows from Nimrod down to Nineveh and thence to the far coast where traders come who bring the dyes. (My mother loved those dyes in the days when she could afford fine cloth.) Kish liked to run on ahead, sniffing out water rats, but when Azarias decided we should stop for the night Kish always met us round the next bend, panting. So it was he, often, who chose finally the place we should halt. They were like-minded, Azarias and Kish.

The first night we set up the tent and Azarias looked at my feet which had swelled up and sent me off to the river
to bathe them (I was unused to walking and felt laggardly besides his swift strides). The water was reedy but quite clear and I was lowering myself in when a great perturbation set up and something grabbed at my foot. Whatever it was was sharp-toothed and I was about to yell out when I felt myself slipping under the water. I was struggling for breath and I must have lost consciousness because all at once there was a blazing light in my head and I half thought, half felt, ‘I must not die!'

I came up thrashing, and Azarias was there hauling me onto the bank with Kish yapping beside him. I lay on the bank for a bit gasping and when I got up Azarias was above me, a huge grin on his face. Feeling a fool I said, ‘What's there to grin about?' and he pointed and said, ‘You've caught us our dinner, I see!' And there at my feet lay the biggest fish I had ever seen!

We roasted and ate the fish—I say ‘we' but I never saw Azarias eat a thing: strong as he was, it was as if he lived on desert wind—by the fire which we lit to keep the wild dogs at bay. Azarias salted the remainder down. (I think had my mother seen the skill with which he did it, she might have softened in her distrust.) And then Azarias did a strange thing: he did not throw out the belly-guts of the fish: the liver, or the heart or the gall. We must keep these, he told me: they are medicaments, powerful cures; and he wrapped them in leaves and made me stow them away in the leather pouch I carried at my belt. Although he was the hired hand and I the master, I did as he instructed. He had
a way with him which made you do as he said. But I began to wonder, as I drifted off to sleep, Kish beside me, Azarias keeping silent watch, who he was, and why he had undertaken this journey with me.

V
era wrote back:
It is fine about the London Library and there was no need for you to write—I have telephoned and they are reserving the book for me.
(This prompting an exasperated sigh from Julia.)
Our hotel is the Bellini. I am pleased to say my friend, Peggy, who lost her husband last June, is my roommate—I don't think I should have liked to share with a stranger!

Signora Mignelli had news of the fishmonger's war—‘He leave fish outside the priest's house. Big fish, big smell!' Here the Signora held her nose. ‘Then'—amid laughter—‘he say the father go with prostitute! Because of smell!' More laughter.

She told Julia where the Hotel Bellini was situated—over near the Strada Nuova, near the gondoliers' bar. Julia, who had gathered that the reference to fish was intended to be lewd, was flattered to be included in the bawdy. She amused herself as the Signora talked on—about her cousin's son who had shocked the family by leaving his fiancée for a man, but was now making a success of his shoe shop on the Strada—imagining Vera's reactions to the conversation. Vera, she felt sure, would treat the Signora with all the condescension of
her democratic ‘principles'. As she no doubt would once have done herself.

What a time it seemed since she had first entered the apartment, Nicco and his friends carrying her case. There had been dark pink anemones in a blue vase. Thinking of the flowers she remembered the Cutforths' lilies. They had been kind. Suddenly she remembered she had never looked for Charles's camel. Now there was a site she might ‘do' with Vera, for it was exercising her how she was to keep Vera away from those places in Venice which had become associated in her mind with—well, with what she did not feel able to bear being treated to a dose of Vera's ‘common sense'.

*    *    *

‘Peggy is lying down. She gets tired since Bob died.' Vera, Julia couldn't help noticing, had a knack of making concern sound like disapproval.

‘Has he been dead long?' Despite her resolutions to try to make the best of the visit, Julia was feeling desperate. Conversation was flagging already and Vera had only been in the apartment ten minutes.

‘Last June. I told you in my letter.' Vera's disapproval became visible. ‘It was very sudden. A stroke.' She had a frown which Julia had not remembered.

‘Oh yes,' said Julia meekly. She had met Peggy and wondered if maybe her husband had died to escape his wife's constant talking.

But Vera was rootling in her bag and hauling out a massive tome. ‘Your book,' she said. ‘I must say it weighs a ton.'

‘Vera, you never carried it here? I had no idea!' Guilt displaced speculation about the departed Bob. The book she had requested Vera bring over must have weighed half a stone.

Unexpectedly, Vera gave a guffaw of laughter. ‘No one's taken it out since 1952. I told them I thought you had gone a bit potty.' For once she sounded almost cheerful.

‘And what did “they” say?' Julia wasn't really listening but had opened and was flicking through the pages of the book to the section on Tobit. Hungrily her eye lit upon tantalising terms and phrases:
Magi—rites of death—consanguineous marriages.
If only Vera would go away so that she could read it. And how ungrateful after her visitor had gone to such trouble! Reluctantly she put the volume down and said with what she hoped sounded like brightness, ‘Now lunch. Where shall I take you?'

*    *    *

‘There's Tintoretto's parish church nearby. Would you like to see that?'

They had lunched near the Fondamenta Nuova, across the water from the invisible cloud-shaped Dolomites. The meal had not been a success. Vera had argued with the waiter over the cost of a soft drink. ‘It doesn't matter,' Julia had said. ‘Please don't worry—I'm paying.' But Vera had talked of the ‘principle of the thing' in a manner which, for Julia, was too reminiscent of her own former self. Casually she had attempted, ‘Principles are not infallible guides…' but the effort had fallen away. Why should she disturb Vera's morality after all? Who could tell what else it bolstered up?

Afterwards they had walked in search of Charles Cutforth's camel. This had turned out more successful. Vera enjoyed the story which gave her something to take back to Peggy and the other WEA students. ‘My friend knows a historian from Princeton,' Julia guessed she would have declared, with more than a tinge of the boastful. Here was proof of the historicism! A portrait of a Levantine camel offered the right degree of scholarship and political correctness. And Tintoretto—the Dyer—was sufficiently renowned as a painter to excuse a visit to his church.

‘I see no reason not to,' Vera said when Julia proposed they visit, and again Julia had to suppress irritation. Why did Vera have to speak in that ridiculous, roundabout way?

The church lay within its own sequestered courtyard. It stood, sculpted by shadows, its high brick façade overlooked by a domed campanile. The two women halted outside as bells rang. Even Vera seemed a little daunted by the magisterial peacefulness of the atmosphere.

Inside, over the high altar, there was a vast canvas on which Ruskin had apparently lavished praise. Grim, twisted bodies writhed under the spell of infernal damnation. Vera who had been consulting her guide became energetic. ‘His wife couldn't take it,' she announced with relish. ‘It's
The Last Judgement,
you know!'

Julia discarded the impulse to ask Vera what she imagined a ‘last judgement' might consist of. What did it mean to be weighed in a balance and found wanting? And was it your deeds or your thoughts which counted, because, if little else,
her study of history had shown her that intentions counted for next to nothing when it came to improving things. Wasn't the way to Hell paved with them, anyway? But intentions must, surely, count for something?

‘It says here she ran out screaming. She was virgin, you know, his wife.'

Julia, wandered off to investigate the rest of the interior. Was Vera, then, not a virgin? Possibly not, judging by the note of superiority in her tone over the unfortunate Mrs Ruskin. Maybe the dig also constituted some slight revenge on Julia? She imagined Vera rolling robustly naked in a field,—or perhaps on a hillside?—with one of the comrades. At least Vera would know what sex was like.

Turning from a pellucidly-coloured Cima Julia halted. Across the church, at an altar opposite, she recognised, like a friend spotted in an unexpected environ, Signora Mignelli's Bellini with the almond eyes. But why ever was it on an easel? Then she saw. It was not the painting but a reproduction; a print of the original which had, so the inscription told as she came closer, been stolen. She remembered again the Cutforths had mentioned it the day she dined with them at the Gritti. Recalling her first response to the picture she experienced renewed remorse. How sad now the notice of its disappearance made her feel—like those police pictures of missing children. It made her think of Toby, of whom there was still no word.

But now Vera had returned, stimulated by her encounter with damnation, and thankfully it was time for her to make
her way back to meet her party. Apparently, they were to visit the Doge's Palace. Julia, who had never ventured inside the great Palazzo Ducale which adjoins St Mark's, found herself, by inference, lying. ‘Oh you mustn't miss it. It's quite superb. Let me come with you to the
vaporetto.'