Читать книгу Miss Garnet’s Angel - Salley Vickers - Страница 11

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 elderly woman 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.’

‘You must come again.’ How odd that the thought of the girl’s departure felt like a loss.

‘Course I will. May I use your bathroom?’ She was up and inside the apartment before Julia had answered.

Coming out again rubbing her hands together Sarah said, ‘I used your hand-cream, my hands get like sandpaper, I hope you don’t mind?’

Julia, who had bought the scented hand-cream for Carlo, struggled to suppress a sense of invasion. She was thrown by such familiarity so soon. But this must be the modern way and she wanted to be friends with the girl. ‘I got it in the farmacia by the launderers–it wasn’t expensive.’ For goodness’ sake, though, why was she apologising? Trying to recover she said, ‘Bring your brother, next time.’ And then, suddenly minding that the boy came, ‘Bring Toby to tea, won’t you?’

‘I will if he’ll come.’

Two at a time the girl jumped down the stairs. There was something engagingly childish in her exuberance. From the balcony Julia Garnet watched her wave and walk across the campo (quite as if she owned the world) until the boyish shape turned across the bridge and out of sight.

No doubt it was the partial success of this foray into socialising that prompted Julia Garnet to take an evening stroll towards the quarter of the city where the Hotel Gritti Palace was located. She did not go with any fully formed purpose–but the invitation of the departing Americans, issued from the bows of the water taxi, remained guiltily at the back of her mind. She had been remiss in not responding sooner; and besides, she owed them still for the taxi fare.

Maybe it was the opulence of the interior of the hotel, or the subconscious wish not to be reminded of anything which connected her with what she increasingly was coming to regard as her old life, but at the reception desk she found that her memory had played her false: by no wise was she able to recall the Americans’ name.

‘They are friends, no?’ asked the porter. He was bald and not much interested.

‘Not friends, no,’ said Julia Garnet, flustered.

The porter evinced a lazy surprise. ‘So if not friends, please, what is it?’ His expression verged on the insolent.

‘Acquaintances,’ said Julia Garnet, annoyed that her efforts at social intercourse were being thwarted. ‘I met them on my way here. In a taxi,’ she added unnecessarily.

‘A taxi?’ The man lifted his eyebrows as if hinting at an impropriety peculiar to foreigners. But as he spoke the situation was remedied for the voice of Cynthia Cutforth came distinctly down the stairway.

Julia Garnet, turning from the porter’s disbelief prepared for blank looks, was pleasantly surprised when Cynthia cried out, ‘Why hello! We saw you in St Mark’s but you know we didn’t like to…’

Julia explained, rather sheepishly, about the fare she had come to repay but the tall pair wouldn’t hear of it.

‘We took your place,’ Charles said. ‘It was so rude of us. We have hoped to meet with you again and apologise.’

‘Do let us make up for it now,’ his wife said. ‘Please won’t you dine with us? The food here is quite reasonable. And how is your leg? I was horrified when I saw how you had hurt it.’

The dining room of the Gritti was all marble grandeur. Soundless waiters pulled back chairs and whisked linen napkins dramatically from table to lap. But Julia Garnet, in spite of being unprepared for the occasion, found that something had changed within her. She had ceased to be inhibited–at least in these present surroundings. Maybe it was because she did not mind what these people thought of her. Rich and groomed as they were they had no power to disturb her. In any event she became something of the life and soul for the evening.

‘No, really!’ she exclaimed as the waiter brought silverdomed dishes under which lay inky cuttlefish, stout portions of turbot and serried ranks of tiny exotic vegetables, ‘I had to resort to walloping. It was him or me!’

She was describing her relationship with Michael Morrell, a pupil whose naughtiness had so plagued her that one day–driven to distraction by his refusal to sit still in class–she had chased him into the corridor and whacked him hard on the behind.

The Cutforths listened apparently fascinated to this piece of British anthropology. Cynthia vaguely indicated that in Philadelphia they had other ways of doing things, but their demeanour was respectful, even deferential. And Charles ventured, ‘I was whacked good and often as a kid. I can’t say it did me harm. I wonder sometimes if we are too liberal in our educational policies?’

Julia Garnet no longer knew if hers was a behaviour she herself could now endorse. Michael Morrell, it is true, had responded to the episode with surly respect. And he had ceased to be so disruptive a force in the classroom. Maybe she had done the boy no harm? She couldn’t tell. What was apparent was that she had made a hit with the Americans. He, she learned, was an academic whose subject was Venetian trade with the Levant. He described a house with a picture of a camel raised in relief on the outside. A twelfth-century merchant from the Levant travelled to Venice to set up a trading business. His fortunes having prospered he built a house and sent for his young wife to join him. Through a scribe she wrote: But how shall I find you when I arrive in Venice?–I cannot read. Her husband wrote back to her: When you arrive in Venice ask for the camel–everyone will know it and therefore where our house is.

‘Not very liberated,’ Cynthia laughed.

‘Or perhaps very?’ Julia countered, thinking it might have been fun to be the Levantine merchant’s wife and have a camel waiting for her, a landmark of home, as she set out on her own to a strange environment.

In return for the camel she told them about the Chapel-of-the-Plague. Charles, who had lighted a series of little cheroots (‘I’m afraid I’ve given up trying to get him to stop!’ his wife interjected as he lit the second), was intrigued. ‘I don’t know it but I must look it up. That would be the Black Death, I guess, which wiped out half of Europe. Giuseppe will know all about it, I’ll ask him.’

‘Charles has made terrific friends with a dubious Catholic priest,’ Cynthia laughed.

Listening to their banter Julia realised that prejudice had led her to an assumption that the rich were stupid. The Cutforths were, in fact, highly cultivated. They told her where to find the camel in the region of Tintoretto’s parish church. ‘That has also been restored by your Venice in Peril people.’ Charles was enthusiastic. ‘They’ve done a fabulous job. You should go. Tintoretto’s buried there and there was a Bellini once. An early one but a beaut nonetheless. Some hooligan stole it. I’d sentence those guys to the electric chair!’

The Cutforths were amused–delighted, even?–to discover that their guest was a Communist sympathiser. (‘And there I was,’ cried Cynthia, ‘imagining you were a duchess. I was going to write to all my friends!’ ‘Didn’t I always say it–scratch a Democrat and you get to find a snob!’ her husband had remarked, rubbing his wife’s knee affectionately.)

‘Which only goes to show,’ Julia said to herself on leaving the hotel to walk home, ‘that it is possible to have spent a lifetime being wrong.’

Politely, she had declined Charles’s offer to go with her. ‘No, no, it is quite safe and I enjoy the walk!’–for it was her private luxury that there was only one tall man she wished to have accompany her.

Walking home, she actually laughed aloud, recalling her faithlessness to the Reverend Crystal. Before coming to Venice she could never have imagined such an evening.

The next day Signora Mignelli said something incomprehensible and when it became apparent she had not been understood went and fetched a tall bees-wax candle and pointed to the Angelo Raffaele. ‘For Our Lady,’ she said, working her lips in an effort to make herself understood. ‘It is to clean?’

Some ritual to cleanse the church, perhaps? The ochre candle looked enticing, and later that afternoon Julia walked round to the fondamenta where the Archangel had first smiled down upon her. Looking up at him again, on his shelf above the chiesa door, she saw the sculptor had given him wrinkled stockings. What a comforting sort Raphael was! Somehow the stockings made her think of the Levantine merchant’s wife travelling across the seas to find her husband.

The dark green water-weathered doors lay open back. Stepping through the vestibule she made out a procession of candles punctuating the fine gloom with little swaying hollows of light. As she stood the notes of a chant started up. What a world she had entered coming to Venice; a world of strange ritual, penumbras, rapture. Timidity crept over her, the old insidious sense of not belonging, and she stepped back out of the wax-laden smell into the harshness of the foggy air.

Outside Nicco was dribbling a football across the campo.

‘Ciao, Giulia!’

‘Ciao, Nicco. Nicco, the chiesa. What is happening? What are the candles for?’

Nicco frowned. His father’s promise to send him to London was proving an inadequate spur to his mastery of English. ‘For Maria,’ he explained.

‘But the candles…?’

Nicco smiled. ‘I visit tomorrow.’ He scuffed at the football, too polite actually to run off.

Sensing his impatience she let him go. ‘All right, Nicco. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

It was Carlo when he called by who enlightened her. ‘It is the

feast of the purification of the Blessed Virgin,’ he explained. ‘Candlemas, if you prefer.’

Julia did prefer. ‘Why ever does she need purifying? Isn’t she dripping with holiness already?’

‘It was the custom after childbirth. Six weeks after the birth the woman must undergo the rites of purification. How is the boy you are teaching? I never see him here. You see him often?’ For the first time in their acquaintance Carlo’s face seemed to her to have an unfriendly aspect.

‘How very chauvinist,’ said Julia, more tartly than she felt, worried that she had maybe shocked him. ‘Nicco is extremely lazy, thank you for asking. I’m wondering whether I should really bother to go on teaching him.’ She began to tell him of her visit to the Cutforths but the evening which had gone so swingingly became boring in the recounting. For some reason there was none of the usual flow between them and he left more abruptly than usual.

I suppose they’re all touchy about their faith, even if they don’t make a song and dance about it, she thought, undressing for her bath. Waiting for it to fill (you could not hurry Signora Mignelli’s bath–the water pressure was low and the water arrived in trickles) she examined herself in the wardrobe looking-glass. Her body stared out at her, stringy, like a plucked fowl.

The water when she climbed in was hot and watching the heat turn her skin red she felt more than ever like ‘an old boiler’. Observing the limbs floating before her–almost as if they did not belong to her at all–she pondered on the unpredictability of human relationship.

She had spent her life avoiding people, afraid, as she now saw, of their dislike or disapproval. With her firm mind and her astringent views she had provided herself with the means to confound intimacy. If people had wanted to know her–and really she couldn’t tell whether they had or not–she had found ways of ensuring that they never approached too far. Carlo had been an exception–a delightful one–for if he had noticed any attempt at ‘confounding’ he had given no sign but had simply advanced, with long-legged aplomb, into relationship with her. And in so doing he had made out a way for others to follow.

And it was the case she had begun to take his good opinion for granted. Surprise at his seeming to want to go on seeing her–even to see more of her–had given way to the pleasures of anticipating his next appearance and the planning of their next expedition. And yet, today, something had, if not exactly gone wrong, certainly not been right between them. As if by some invisible and malignant presence she felt pulled down. The superstitious part of her related the small reversal in her relationship with Carlo to her pride in it the evening she spent with the Cutforths. Even to yourself, she thought, it wasn’t safe to boast.

Lying in the small bathroom the peeling yellow walls suddenly appeared drab and ugly. The book–she had made such slow progress with it, a book on Garibaldi about whom she found she did not much care–which she had taken to read while bathing, had got wet and she laid it down and began to think about her pupil, Michael Morrell. Where was he now? Had he become a crook or a bank manager? (Either seemed equally possible.) If he had not prospered no doubt it was in part due to her: she had been an indifferent teacher. It was evident that Nicco, polite as he was, found her so. And she had been so cocky about teaching him. After a while she nodded off and woke, knees bent, to feel her mouth beneath cold water.

Now that was unwise, she said to herself as, half covered in a towel, she poured some of the brandy from the square bottle which she had purchased after her lunch at Nicco’s cousin’s. The experience of sliding so easily towards death frightened her. Somehow she associated it with Carlo and her unclear sense of his possible displeasure with her.

Let us speak of exile. There are two ways with exile: you can fit in, lie low, ‘do as the Chaldeans do’, as we say–or you can stick out like a lone crow. No prizes for guessing which my renegade kinsfolk chose!

But I must own in the early days of exile I was glad enough to be in Nineveh once the shame of conquest was over. I missed the rolling hills and the pleasant pastures of Galilee. But I had a piece of luck early on in my time in Nineveh: the king took a fancy to me and made me his Purveyor of Goods, so that in those first years of exile I got to travel far over the mountains to the country of Media, bartering and purchasing for the king of Assyria, and often I met the children of Israel there. We are a shrewd people and our swift reasoning and inventive minds proved useful to our captors. Therefore, many found themselves, as I did, well settled in the new life into positions which commanded respect.

But the king of Assyria died, as kings do, and not long after I lost my place at the old court. The old king had had a great new palace built by many slaves with gardens of sweet herbs and tulip trees and broad, high walls built around the city by the River Tigris. In the old days I had lived within these walls with my wife and had walked in the gardens with my son among the monkeys and the peacocks. When the old king died the tribes of Judah made wars against the new king so that when he returned from battle, defeated, he took his rage out on those of us who had been settled in Nineveh. One day, in his chariot, he drove past me walking in the gardens and lashed at me with his whip. It had become dangerous to be one of the chosen people.

Brutal purges began, with the bodies of our people left unburied to stink on the city walls for scavenging dogs to devour. I hated those dogs. I still recall a certain yellow brute; head of a pack he was and I called him Khan after one of the devils in these regions who is reputed to relish dead flesh. This yellow canine devil got scent of what I did and would follow me around snuffing out corpses. Then it was often a struggle between him and me–whether I would get to bury the body or he would grab it for his pack. He bit me once and the Rib had me bound up with flax and crocodile dung for a month against the foaming sickness. She was a follower of the local medicine man’s magic–I couldn’t have stopped her consulting him even if I’d wanted to. But I didn’t want to; she needed every prop she could find.

With the death of the old king my heart began to dwell on Jerusalem and the days I had travelled there to offer tithes. It came to my mind then that we had been punished by the Lord God for our failure to do as He had commanded: we had not kept faith with the law, the rituals and the rites–therefore we had been taken into exile. Yet all around me I watched our people forgetting the law of the book, the prayers, the observances, the dietary requirements, alms-giving, the warning words of the prophets. And for us the observances of death are strict; it is sacrilegious that one of our own should lie breeding maggot-flies in the sun. Therefore, when I came across one of my kin murdered by the king or his officers, I would make it my business to take the corpse into our own house until sundown, away from the mouths of the yellow dog pack. When the sun dropped, lone-handed I would bury the body.

It is a business, digging the ground in these parts. The dragging and the heaving are enough to tire you out. And then the flies, and the vile stink if the corpse has been exposed long. No, it was not a task to take on lightly, especially since the royal guard were on alert to catch the corpse-snatcher. And in the end a certain one of our tribe in Nineveh, doubtless seeking advancement or immunity for his own family, went and informed on me. With the news that I was a wanted man and that I would be hunted to be put to death I left the city in haste and went into hiding. My house was entered, my possessions stripped from me, all that we had worked to acquire, the chased silverware I had bought from the Aramaean traders, the linen from Egypt, the bolts of dyed cloth from Tyre, the carved boxes and furniture of sandal- and cedar-wood from the caravan traders, even the worked crimson slippers my wife wore on feast days, were all seized; there was nothing which was not taken off to the Royal Treasury; only the lives of my wife, Anna, and my son were spared.

But before long this king got himself killed by two of his sons–I praise the Lord for my own son, Tobias, for surely there can be no worse sorrow than to have a son turn against his father, as Absalom did against his father David. There came a time when I recalled the words of King David as he wept for his son. ‘O my son Absalom, O Absalom my son, my son!’