Miss Garnet’s Angel

Across Miss Garnet’s memory paraded the several coloured advertisements for far-flung places which, along with some magazine cuttings concerning unsuitable hair dye, she had cleared from Harriet’s oak bureau and which (steeling herself a little) she had recently placed in the dustbin. One advertisement had been for a cruise around the Adriatic Sea, visiting cities of historical interest. The most famous of these now flashed savingly into her mind.

‘Venice,’ she announced firmly. ‘I shall be taking six months in Venice.’ And then, because it is rarely possible, at a stroke, to throw off the habits of a lifetime, ‘I believe it is cheaper at this time of year.’

It was cold when Miss Garnet landed at Marco Polo airport. Uncertain of all that she was likely to encounter on her exotic adventure she had at least had the foresight to equip herself with good boots. The well-soled boots provided a small counter to her sense of being somewhat insubstantial when, having collected her single suitcase with the stout leather strap which had been her mother’s, she followed the other arrivals outside to where a man with a clipboard shouted and gestured.

Before her spread a pearl-grey, shimmering, quite alien waste of water.

‘Zattere,’ Miss Garnet enunciated. She had, through an agency found in the Guardian’s Holiday Section, taken an appartamento in one of the cheaper areas of Venice. And then, more distinctly, because the man with the clipboard appeared to pay no attention, ‘Zattere!’

‘Si, si, Signora, momento, momento.’ He gestured at a water-taxi and then at a well-dressed couple who had pushed ahead of Miss Garnet in the shambling queue. ‘Prego?’

‘Hotel Gritti Palace?’ The man, a tall American with a spade-cut beard, spoke with the authority of money. Even Miss Garnet knew that the Gritti was one of the more exclusive of Venice’s many expensive hotels. She had been disappointed to learn that a Socialist playwright, one whom she admired, was in the habit of taking rooms there each spring. Years ago, as a student teacher, Miss Garnet had, rather diffidently, joined the Labour Party. Over the years she had found the policies of succeeding leaders inadequately representative of her idea of socialism. Readings of first Marx and then Lenin had led her, less diffidently, to leave the Labour Party to join the Communists instead. Despite all that had happened in Europe over the years she saw no reason now to alter her allegiance to the ideology which had sustained her for so long. Indeed, it was partly Venice’s reputation for left-wing activity which had underpinned her novel notion to reside there for six months. Now the long plane flight, the extreme cold rising off the grey-green lagoon waters and the extremer fear, rising from what seemed more and more like her own foolhardiness, joined force with political prejudice.

‘Excuse me,’ Miss Garnet raised her voice towards the polished couple, ‘but I was first.’ As she spoke she lost her footing, grazing her leg against a bollard.

The woman of the couple turned to examine the person from whom these commanding words had issued. She saw a thin woman of medium height wearing a long tweed coat and a hat with a veil caught back against the crown. The hat had belonged to Harriet and although Miss Garnet, when she had seen it on Harriet, had considered it overdramatic, she had found herself reluctant to relegate it to the Oxfam box. The hat represented, she recognised, a side to Harriet which she had disregarded when her friend was alive. As a kind of impulsive late gesture to her friend’s sense of the theatrical, she had placed the hat onto her head in the last minutes before leaving for the airport.

Perhaps it was the hat or perhaps it was the tone of voice but the couple responded as if Miss Garnet was a ‘somebody’. Maybe, they thought, she is one of the English aristocracy who consider it bad form to dress showily. Certainly the little woman with the delicately angular features spoke with the diction of a duchess.

‘Excuse us,’ the man spoke in a deep New England accent, ‘we would be honoured if you would share our taxi.’

Miss Garnet paused. She was unaccustomed to accepting favours, especially from tall, urbane-mannered men. But she was tired and, she had to own, rather scared. Her knee hurt where she had stupidly bashed it. And there remained the fact that they had, after all, pushed in front of her.

‘Thank you,’ she spoke more loudly than usual so as to distract attention from the blood she feared was now seeping observably through her thick stocking, ‘I should be glad to share with you.’

The American couple, concerned to undo any unintentional impoliteness, insisted the water-taxi take Miss Garnet to the Campo Angelo Raffaele, where the apartment she had rented was located. Miss Garnet had chosen the address, out of many similar possibilities, on account of the name. Devout Communist as she was, there was something reassuring about the Angel Raphael. She found the numerous other saintly figures, whose names attach to Venice’s streets and monuments, unfamiliar and off-putting. The Angel Raphael she knew about. Of the Archangels of her Baptist childhood, Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, the latter had the most appeal.

The water-taxi drew up at shallow broad stone steps, covered in a dangerous-looking green slime. Miss Garnet, holding back the long skirts of her coat, carefully stepped out of the boat.

‘Oh, but you have hurt yourself!’ cried the American woman, whose name, Miss Garnet had learned, was Cynthia.

But Miss Garnet, who was looking up, had caught the benevolent gaze of an angel. He was standing with a protective arm around what appeared to be a small boy carrying a large fish. On the other side of the angel was a hound.

‘Thank you,’ she said, slightly dazed, ‘I shall be fine.’ Then, ‘Oh, but I must pay you,’ she shouted as the boat moved off down the rio. But the Americans only waved smiling and shouted back that it could wait and she could pay what she owed when they all met again. ‘Look after that leg, now,’ urged the woman, and, ‘Come to our hotel,’ boomed the man, so loudly that three small boys on the other side of the canal called out and waved too at the departing boat.

Miss Garnet found that the departure of the newly met Americans left her feeling forlorn. Impatient with what seemed a silly show of sentimentality in herself, she caught up her suitcase and her hand luggage and looked about to get her bearings. Above her the angel winked down again and she now took in that this was the frontage of the Chiesa dell’Angelo Raffaele itself, which lent its name not only to the campo but also, most graciously, to the waterfront before it.

‘Scusi,’ said Miss Garnet to the boys who had crossed the brick bridge to inspect the new visitor, ‘Campo Angelo Raffaele?’ She was rather proud and at the same time shy of the ‘Scusi’.

‘Si, si,’ cried the boys grabbing at her luggage. Just in time Miss Garnet managed to discern that their intentions were not sinister but they wished merely to earn a few lire by carrying her bags to her destination. She produced the paper on which she had written the address and proffered it to the tallest and most intelligent-looking boy.

‘Si, si!’ he exclaimed pointing across the square and a smaller boy, who had commandeered the suitcase, almost ran with it towards a flaking rose-red house with green shutters and washing hanging from a balcony.

The journey was no more than thirty metres and Miss Garnet, concerned not to seem stingy, became confused as to what she should tip the boys for their ‘help’. She hardly needed help: the suitcase was packed with a deliberate economy and the years of independence had made her physically strong. Nevertheless it seemed churlish not to reward such a welcome from these attractive boys. Despite her thirty-five years of school teaching Miss Garnet was unused to receiving attentions from youth.

‘Thank you,’ she said as they clustered around the front door but before she had settled the problem of how to register her thanks properly the door opened and a middle-aged, dark-haired woman was there greeting her and apparently sending the boys packing.

‘They were kind.’ Miss Garnet spoke regretfully watching them running and caterwauling across the campo.

‘Si, si, Signora, they are the boys of my cousin. They must help you, of course. Come in, please, I wait here for you to show you the apartment.’

Signora Mignelli had acquired her English from her years of letting to visitors. Her command of Miss Garnet’s mother tongue made Miss Garnet rather ashamed of her own inadequacies in Signora Mignelli’s. The Signora showed Miss Garnet to a small apartment with a bedroom, a kitchen-living room, a bathroom and a green wrought-iron balcony. ‘No sole,’ Signora Mignelli waved at the white sky, ‘but when there is…ah!’ she unfolded her hands to indicate the blessings of warmth awaiting her tenant.

The balcony overlooked the chiesa but to the back of the building where the angel with the boy and the dog were not visible. Still, there was something lovely in the tawny brick and the general air of plant-encroaching dilapidation. Miss Garnet wanted to ask if the church was ever open–it had a kind of air as if it had been shut up for good–but she did not known how to broach such a topic as ‘church’ with Signora Mignelli.

Instead, her landlady told her where to shop, where she might do her laundry, how to travel about Venice by the vaporetti, the water buses which make their ways through the watery thoroughfares. The apartment’s fridge already contained milk and butter. Also, half a bottle of syrop, coloured an alarming orange, presumably left by a former occupant. In the bread bin the Signora pointed out a long end of a crusty loaf and in a bowl a pyramid of green-leafed clementines. A blue glass vase on a sideboard held a clutch of dark pink anemones.

‘Oh, how pretty,’ said Miss Garnet, thinking how like some painting it all looked, and blushed.

‘It is good, no?’ said the Signora, pleased at the effect of her apartment. And then commandingly, ‘You have a hurt? Let me see!’

Miss Garnet, her knee washed and dressed by a remonstrating Signora Mignelli, spent the afternoon unpacking and rearranging the few movable pieces in the rooms. In the sitting room she removed some of the numerous lace mats, stacked together the scattered nest of small tables and relocated the antiquated telephone–for, surely, she would hardly be needing it–to an out-of-the-way marble-topped sideboard.

The bedroom was narrow, so narrow that the bed with its carved wooden headboard and pearl-white crocheted coverlet almost filled it. On the wall over the bed hung a picture of the Virgin and Christ Child.

‘Can’t be doing with that,’ said Miss Garnet to herself, and unhooking the picture from the wall she looked about for a place to store it. There were other pictures of religious subjects and, after consideration, the top of the ornately fronted wardrobe in the hallway seemed a safe spot to deposit all the holy pictures.

Going to wash her hands (in spite of the high cleanliness of the rooms the pictures were dusty) she found no soap and made that a reason for her first shopping expedition.

And really it was quite easy, she thought to herself, coming out of the farmacia with strawberry-scented soap, because Italian sounds made sense: farmacia, when you heard it, sounded like pharmacy, after all.

After three days Miss Garnet had become, surprisingly (for she was unused to forming new habits), familiar with the neighbourhood. She shopped at one of the local greengrocers who spoke English, where the stacked piles of bright fruits and vegetables appeared, to an imagination nourished among the shops of Ealing, minor miracles of texture and colour. At the husband and wife grocers, the parmigiano cheese and the wafer-sliced prosciutto made her stomach rumble in anticipation of lunch and at the bakers she dithered almost frivolously over whether to buy one of the long crusty loaves which must be consumed within a day’s span or the olive-bread, doughy and moist, which lasted if wrapped tight in a polythene bag.

Miss Garnet had not, so far, done more than wander around the neighbourhood and sleep. Before her departure she had gone to Stanfords of Covent Garden where she had purchased a learned-looking book, Venice for Historians by the Reverend Martin Crystal, MA (Oxon.). A brief survey suggested the content was sensibly historical and in view of the MA (Oxon.) she was prepared to overlook the title of ‘Reverend’. But when with a sense of sober preparation she opened the Reverend Crystal, on more than one occasion she found herself falling asleep. She was rather ashamed of this new tendency for sleeping: nine or ten hours a night and, in addition, often a doze in the early afternoon, but nothing worked to abate it. In an effort to rise at eight, she set her alarm and woke at ten to find, defiant in half-sleep, she had depressed the switch to turn the ringer off. After that she succumbed to the narcolepsy and allowed it to overtake her.

It was after one such heavy afternoon doze that Miss Garnet woke to voices in the campo outside. Pulling on a cardigan she went to the window. A procession. Children running, singing, blowing squeakers like rude tongues and toy trumpets; mothers with babies in their arms and older children in pushchairs. Amid them, magnificent in scarlet, blue and gold, walked three crowned kings.

One of the kings turned back towards her window and she recognised him. It was the tallest of the three boys who had helped her on the first day. She had half looked for the boys since. Seeing one of them now gave her her first sense of belonging. The boy-king smiled and waved up at her and she tried to open the window to the balcony. But, oh how maddening, it was stuck. She wrestled with the catch, pulled and wrenched, swore quite violently and had torn her thumbnail before she heaved her way outside and onto the balcony.

But the procession had left the campo and the last edges of it were already trailing over the brick bridge which crossed the Rio dell’Angelo Raffaele.

‘Damn, damn, damn.’ Miss Garnet was almost in tears at the disappointment of having missed the spectacle. She wondered if she ran downstairs at once and across the square after them all whether she could perhaps catch up with the colourful parade. But she felt fearful of making a fool of herself.

The loss of the procession produced a sudden drop in Miss Garnet’s mood. She had been proud of her acquisition of local information which had produced a competence she had not foreseen. The regular, easy trips to the shops had begun already to create for her a stability, a base which had taken thirty-five years to build in Ealing. But now, the image of the smiling scarlet-robed boy, who had conducted her so courteously to Signora Mignelli’s, threatened that security. Miss Garnet was not given to fancifulness but she felt almost as if the boy had picked up a stone from the dusty floor of the campo and hurled it deliberately at her. The laughing and chattering of the locals had about it the sharp ring of exclusion. It was not, she was sure, that they intended to exclude her–the few days Miss Garnet had already spent were sufficient to establish that these were not excluding people–but that she was entirely ignorant of what was of real importance to them. The event that had passed so vividly over the bridge had some meaning, to be sure, but what that meaning was remained a blank to her.

There was no refuge in a return to the soft, sagging bed from which she had recently awakened. She had slept too much already and the heavy-limbed lethargy, which had become familiar and acceptable, was replaced by a different quality of heaviness. Unpractised at introspection Miss Garnet nevertheless began to suspect she might be missing Harriet. The faint insight stirred a desire for physical activity.

Miss Garnet, who had been enjoying what Harriet would have called ‘pottering about’, had so far not ventured beyond the area around the Campo Angelo Raffaele. But now she felt it was time to assert her position as visitor. It was naive to pretend, as she had been doing, that in so short a space of time she had somehow ‘fitted in’. She was a foreigner, after all, and here principally to see and learn about the historic sights of Venice.

The light afternoon was filled with mist, and Miss Garnet hesitated a moment before taking down Harriet’s hat. ‘A third of body heat is lost through the head,’ her father, a fund of proverbial wisdoms, had used to say. It was cold and Harriet’s hat, with its veil, might, after all, prove serviceable. Glancing at the looking-glass in the tall yellow wardrobe she gained a fleet impression of someone unknown: the blackspotted veil falling from the sleek crown acted as a kind of tonic to her herringbone tweed. The once unfashionably long coat, bridging the gap between one well-booted and one veiled extremity, had somehow acquired a sense of the stylish rather than the haphazard.

Miss Garnet was the reverse of vain but the sight of herself framed in the speckled looking-glass boosted her spirits. She felt more fortified against the sudden sweeping sense of strangeness which had assailed her. Taking from the bureau drawer the map of Venice she had purchased along with the Reverend Crystal, she unfolded it to plot a route.

But where to start? The glint of introspection which had just been ignited began to illuminate an insecurity: her parochial tendencies had been born of timidity, rather than a natural aptitude with the new locality. For all its apparent clarity she found the map bewildering. One location alone had any resonance for her: the Piazza San Marco, Venice’s focal point. At least she knew about that from her teaching of history. She would go to the Piazza, from where the doges had once set out to wed the seas with rings.

Miss Garnet had chosen one of the further reaches of the almost-island-which-is-Venice to stay in and from this remoter quarter the walk to the Piazza San Marco takes time. Despite Signora Mignelli’s instructions Miss Garnet did not yet feel equal to experimenting with the vaporetti and besides, exercise, she felt, was what was called for. She walked purposefully along the narrow calle which led down to the Accademia (where, the Reverend Crystal promised, a wealth of artistic treasure awaited her). At the wooden Accademia bridge she halted. Ahead of her, like a vast soap bubble formed out of the circling, dove-coloured mists, stood Santa Maria della Salute, the church which breasts the entrance to Venice’s Grand Canal.

‘Oh!’ cried Miss Garnet. She caught at her throat and then at Harriet’s veil, scrabbling it back from her eyes to see more clearly. And oh, the light! ‘Lord, Lord,’ sighed Julia Garnet.