Miss Garnet’s Angel. Salley VickersЧитать онлайн книгу.
But why was this different? For a second her mind flickered guiltily to the Reverend Crystal. He, to be sure, would have had safe and solid information to convey on such points.
She sniffed the hazy air. The odour here was dry and musty too but there was a fragrance about it. How sensible to scent your place of worship. The incense, of course, it was the incense, like the frankincense brought by one of the kings. Gold, frankincense and myrrh. Were there reasons for the gifts? She couldn’t remember.
The sacristan came forward now, pointing to an organ above the door which opened on to the water-front and then at an assortment of leaflets on a small table. To please him she picked one up from the pile marked ‘English’. ‘Tobiolo and the Angel Raffael.’ Looking up, painted on the organ loft, she saw an angel with azure wings.
Despite his wings the angel seemed to be marching forward, grasping the hand of a young man who, in turn, was looking back, his hand stretched beseechingly after an old man who stood staring after the departing pair. Beside him, her head averted, a woman–perhaps his wife? And look! Before them all a small black and white spotted dog. She followed the story round.
Now the boy Tobiolo appeared to have caught a giant fish in his handkerchief while the dog looks on admiringly. And the angel, this time wearing a handsome and surely anachronistic blue waistcoat, stands rather like a proud parent at speech day in the background.
Here was another scene: the young man kneeling with a young woman now, she dressed in gauzy clothes. And now the young pair are kneeling before the angel by a bed, a mysterious fire burning in a pan while the dog huddles as if scared in a far corner.
In the next scene the young man is back with the older man, who lies back as if in astonishment, and now the young woman is there too. Over them the angel broods with azure wings.
In the final scene the angel seems to be taking his leave: unfurled and aloft, a cloud of pink and blue; his lovely limbs and sturdy feet are displayed in glory, as the young and the old man marvel and the dog looks longingly after him.
Something rusty and hard shifted deep inside Julia Garnet as she stood absorbing the vivid, dewy painting, the joyfulness of the conception and the unmistakable compassion in the angel’s bright glance. Her eyes filled. The door of the church opened and light streamed into the interior, bringing with it a tall figure. To her horror she saw that it was the man she had met the previous day at St Mark’s and hastily she pushed away tears.
‘My friend!’ He was smiling again and for a second she was irked: it wasn’t, well, manly to smile quite so often. Then, ashamed of her xenophobic instincts, she tried to smile back herself.
‘I was looking at these.’ Such feeble language to describe the treasures she had stumbled on.
‘Ah! The Guardis!’
‘You know them?’ But why should she be surprised? He was an art historian and probably everyone in Venice knew of the paintings. Julia Garnet was annoyed to find herself possessive of her new discovery.
‘Oh, indeed. They are famous. There exists a famous quarrel, also, about their authorship. There are two Guardis, you see, an elder by many years, Giannantonio, and a younger, Francesco, who never did any known painting of a religious nature. Some authorities, because of the superb style, ascribe it to the younger, better-known brother. But others, of whom I am one, are passionate for the elder. It is a great dispute!’
‘And the story?’ She did not so much care who painted the angel–it was the fact that he had been painted that was so miraculous.
‘It is from the Jewish Scriptures–you call it, I think, Tobias and the Angel?’
He took the crook of her arm and they walked about the tall, theatrical, shabby church while he recounted the story of the young Tobias who travels, unaware he is accompanied by the Archangel Raphael, seeking a cure for his father’s blindness.
‘The cure is found in a great fish but before this Tobiolo has married and saved a young woman, cursed by a demon. The demon rests inside her, killing, on their wedding night, the young men who try her virginity. Seven men have died before Tobiolo arrives but, of course, he has the Angel Raphael to help him.’
‘And does he help?’
‘Certainly. He instructs Tobiolo how he must burn the heart and the liver of the fish and so’–like a conjuror, Carlo waved a hand–‘the demon is driven out, cursing.’ He grimaced, imitating the departing spirit.
‘And this is in the Old Testament?’ Surely this was some racy Catholic version of the Bible. His sudden impersonation of the demon slightly disconcerted her.
‘Oh, indeed, I assure you. It is a tale of wonder, is it not?’
‘More like magic, I should think. Why does the angel help?’
But Carlo gave a little shrug as if he had become bored with the topic. He had called, he explained, to find out how she was and to invite her, if it would amuse her, to a concert that evening. Julia Garnet could think of no reason why she should not accept the invitation. The Reverend Crystal could never have instructed her so entertainingly–nor, perhaps, with such authority. Later, as she stood before the sparse collection which made up her wardrobe, exercised by what to wear for the evening’s entertainment, she allowed herself to wonder what so personable a man wanted with so dowdy a companion as herself?
I am an old man near the end of my life–although my son lies and protests this is not so. (He is a good son, in spite of the lies.) You may ask what an old man of one hundred and eighty-five years can have to say to interest you? The secret of my longevity, perhaps? Well, it may be that our years are not reckoned as you reckon yours. But even allowing for differences I would say we live close to the cycle of the sun and moon, we rise and go to bed with the birds, labour hard, eat frugally and these things conspire towards longevity; but I will hazard there is another thing more important than these: it may be we may live long because there is something we value above human life–I shall not give it a name!
Among our people the old are respected for their wisdom–I hope it may be the same with yours. However it is with you, if you are young now you might hold it in your mind that one day you too will be old and may find yourself glad then to be heard; if you are already old, perhaps like me you already have a story to tell (for all lives, I think, have some sort of a story in them)? Yet I do not tell my own because I wish it, or because I wish to instruct you in how to live, though I’ll admit that might once have been my purpose. No, I tell you this because I was told to tell it–by what you might call ‘a higher authority’–and truth is, the thought of how to tell it has taxed me for many years.
I promised so long ago to set all this down but you know how it is when you make a promise? There is that small serpent voice inside which says, ‘No need to bother about it now,’ or ‘Later will do better,’ or (most true in my case) ‘Give me time to understand.’ Thinking leads to a kind of weighing of words which holds back action. But now I feel the shadow of the Angel of Death upon me and I do not think I have much more time.
At first it was not only that I did not understand but that I did not even know how to begin to understand. What happened to me and my family was so remarkable that I believed I should bungle the telling of it. But I was only a third through my life when these events took place. Nowadays I have come to see that bungling is what all of us do; perhaps bungling is what we are here for?
I would like to begin at the beginning if I only knew when the ‘beginning’ starts. Some might say it was when we were first fashioned out of the mud of the great River Tigris, before our wives were pulled out of our ribs to create a source of perpetual reproof to us! (That is my little joke: I call my wife, Anna, ‘Rib’; I have an idea this oft-repeated joke of mine annoys her but she is a generous woman and mostly puts up with her husband’s trying ways.)
Or maybe the ‘beginning’ was later, when our first parents lost their paradise (which some say was here between the two rivers,