Salley Vickers - Miss Garnet’s Angel

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.