Miss Garnet’s Angel

‘Well, whatever was that about?’ Julia Garnet turned to her friend, ready to share an adult’s humorous incomprehension at the doings of a quixotic child; but Carlo was watching the boy intently as he ran over the bridge.

When intuition finally strikes the unintuitive it can be blinding: Julia Garnet had been taken, during one of her visits to the Accademia, by a painting from one of the many minor masters whose works fill the art collections of Italy. The painting was of St Paul on the road to Damascus and what had forced itself onto her newly awakened sensibilities was the look of puzzlement and fear on the savagely enlightened face of the tentmaker. Had she been in a position to observe herself, she might have seen just such a look on her own face now. But only the Angel Raphael, looking down from his position on the chiesa, could have seen the corresponding flash of terror across her heart.

Intuition is also a prompt of memory. Out of her memory, clear and unprocessed, came the recollection of the day she had gone with Nicco to the glass-cutters. A man. A man had come out as she had been worrying about paying for the picture, fussing with the Italian currency. The man and Nicco had collided and there had been a moment when Nicco had spoken with agitation, as she heard it now in memory, before the man had walked away. The man, tall and silver-haired, she suddenly perceived was Carlo, and in a moment of painful understanding she saw, watching his hungry, yearning look after the retreating Nicco, that she had been the unwitting dupe of his wish to find the boy who had accompanied her that day. It was not her whom Carlo had wanted to befriend–it was Nicco.

She stood, dumbly unprepared by anything in her previous life for the awful moment of negative intimacy which the recognition brought. And Carlo stood too, aware, as the high red spots on his cheekbones signalled, that something momentous had occurred to his companion. But they were civilised people, Carlo and Julia Garnet, and the sharp rent which had appeared in the fabric of their acquaintance was left unremarked between them.

Carlo spoke first. ‘A concert tonight…they are playing Albinoni?’ His eyes did not look at her directly.

‘Thanks, I think I’ll stay in. I’m a bit tired.’ So lame the words came out; it was all she could do to refrain from crying aloud.

He walked back with her to the apartment, full of the usual courtesies. But his smile was strained. At the door of the apartment he dropped her with a pleasantry–his eyes cold and repelling; she had to stop herself from calling after him.

She did not, however, call after him. Instead she sat at the kitchen table until it grew dark.

Many years ago Julia Garnet, who was blessed with a retentive memory, read somewhere these lines.

Remember this: those who give you life may take it back, and in the taking take from you more than they gave.

She did not recall the source but she recalled, quite distinctly, the sensation with which she read the words. She had known that she did not understand them but, obscurely, they had frightened her.

During the days after what she termed to herself ‘the discovery’ the forgotten author’s words came back to her, relentlessly keeping pace with her steps as she walked the streets of Venice.

She had lived most of her life alone. Her mother had borne her late in life and Julia believed that that, and the strain of trying to please her tyrannical father, had probably contributed to her mother’s early death. When her mother died, a few weeks after her sixtieth birthday, Julia was not quite fifteen.

She had escaped from her father as soon as she could, going to Girton College, Cambridge on a scholarship. Although he had tried to make her departure from the family home as unpleasant as possible, there was not much he could do to prevent it and once away from him a part of her had felt she could never again face living with another man. There had been female friends, such as Vera, and there had been Harriet whom, she now concluded, pounding the streets, she had not treated as well as she could have done. Harriet had been more than a friend; but, blindly, she had taken Harriet for granted. Yet she had loved Harriet, she now knew, and she knew it because she had learned to love someone else.

If you spend most of your life alone often you do not know that you are lonely. It was not until ‘the discovery’ that Julia Garnet knew that she was lonely and that she had been so for most of her life. She had known Carlo for less than five weeks and yet it was as if he acted as a major artery to her heart.

It was the mystery of this which partly forced her out onto the streets as if the puzzle of her swift and intense involvement with this man might be solved by the most thoroughgoing of external explorations. She woke early and walked, avoiding any area where she might encounter anyone she knew, until she found some anonymous-seeming bar, where she drank coffee amid men in woollen hats who reminded her of the glass-cutter, the man with the red hat who, like a figure in some child’s tale, seemed to be gate-keeper to new experience.

The reminder of the first meeting with Carlo did not bother her; even, she found, she began to hanker after it. She strained to recover what he had been wearing. Was it his dark grey coat? (She could almost swear to his red scarf–or had the red of the glass-cutter’s hat become transposed in her mind?) Driven by a hungry desire to garner every scrap of time spent with him, she combed her memory for forgotten moments: the time he bought her an ice cream; the aspirin he had offered her when she had complained of a mild headache; the water-taxi home when she was tired. Had all the trouble then been merely towards establishing a connection with Nicco? For the discovery that her friend’s proclivities were not for women had not detracted one jot from her own feelings.

At first she had been horrified, revolted even. ‘Disgusting!’ she had spat angrily when finally she had dully shifted her weight off to bed that first night. And she had lain, fully clothed, in the dark holding her sides. But love is notorious for its refusal to observe prejudice and gradually the eyes of Carlo, as she had last seen him, reinstated themselves. They no longer seemed cold. Sad, yes, she was sure that what she had seen was sadness, sadness and dismay. Did he miss her at all? Her heart hurt when she thought of him and she thought of him most minutes of most hours of most days.

Once on her wanderings she had caught sight of the Cutforths, arm in arm, Cynthia looking in a furrier’s window–he comfortably lighting one of his perpetual little cheroots–and she had drawn back into the shadow of an alley. To witness such linked and homely familiarity (for the strongest impression she had carried with her from the Gritti was of the Cutforths’ close and, somehow, practical intimacy) was starkly painful. Seeing them so unquestioningly together, it was as if the polite pair had put their hands on their spare hips and jeered at her uncoupled state.

In an effort to avoid all known contacts she roamed far from her usual patch. One day, penetrating to the Arsenale, the fortified area where Venice built its ships, forgetting that this is where she and Carlo had drunk the flat prosecco, she encountered a middle-aged woman sitting beside one of the lions which guard the entrance of the old archway. Caught by something in the woman’s expression Julia stopped by the lion. ‘Do you speak English?’