Miss Garnet’s Angel

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.

She did not know why she had used those words as she moved off, frightened to stay longer lest the unfamiliar beauty so captivate her that she turn to stone, as she later amusingly phrased it to herself. But it was true it was a kind of fear she felt, almost as if she was fleeing some harrowing spectre who stalked her progress. Across another campo, then over bridges, along further alleys, past astonishing pastries piled high in gleaming windows, past shops filled with bottled liquor, alarming knives, swathes of patterned paper. Once she passed an artists’ suppliers where, in spite of the spectre, she stopped to admire the window packed with square dishes heaped with brilliant coloured powders: oro, oro pallido, argento, lacca rossa–gold, silver, red, the colours of alchemy, thought Miss Garnet, hurrying on, for she had read about alchemy when she was teaching the Renaissance to the fifth form.

At the edge of the Piazza she halted. Let the spectre do its worst, for here was the culmination of her quest. Before her stood the campanile, the tall bell-tower, and behind it, in glimmering heaps and folds, in gilded wings and waved encrustations, emerged the outline of St Mark’s. People might speak of St Mark’s as a kind of dream but Miss Garnet had never known such dreams. Once, as a child, she dreamed she had become a mermaid; that was the closest she had ever come to this.

Measuring each step she walked across the Piazza. Although still afternoon the sky was beginning to darken and already a pearl fingernail clipping of moon was appearing, like an inspired throwaway gesture designed to point up the whole effect of the basilica’s sheen. Reaching the arched portals Miss Garnet stopped, wondering if it was all right to go on. But it must be, look there were other tourists–how silly she was, of course one didn’t have to be a Christian to enter and inspect a renowned example of Byzantine architecture.

Inside the great cathedral before her a line of people shuffled forward. Above her, and on all sides, light played and danced from a million tiny surfaces of refracted gold. A dull smell of onions disconcertingly filled her nostrils. What was it? Years of sweat, perhaps, perfusing the much-visited old air.

There appeared to be a restriction on where one might walk, for barriers and ropes were prohibiting entrances here, blocking ingress there. ‘But why are those people allowed?’ queried Miss Garnet. For there were men and women but mostly, it must be said, the latter, moving into the great interior space from which the swaying line of visitors was debarred. She stopped before an official in navy uniform. ‘Vespero?’ he enquired and ‘Si, si,’ she found herself replying for whatever it was she was not going to be shut out a second time that day.

The official detached the wine-coloured rope from its catch and ushered the Signora in the black veil through. ‘Look, it’s our little duchess,’ Cynthia Cutforth exclaimed to her husband. ‘She’s joining the service, she must be a Roman Catholic. See how cute she looks in her veil.’

But Miss Garnet was oblivious to all but the extraordinary surroundings in which she now found herself. Silver lamps burned dimly in the recesses. Above her and on all sides loomed strange glittering mosaic figures, in a background of unremitting gold. A succession of images–lions, lambs, flowers, thorns, eagles, serpents, dragons, doves–wove before her startled eyes a shimmering vision, awful and benign. Like blood forcing a route through long-constricted arteries a kind of wild rejoicing began to cascade through her. Stumbling slightly she made her way to a seat on the main aisle.

There was a thin stapled book of paper on the seat and picking it up she saw ‘Vespero Epifania’. Of course! Epiphany. How stupid she had been. January the sixth was the English Twelfth Night when the Lord of Misrule was traditionally abroad and one took down one’s Christmas decorations to avert ill luck. But here, in a Catholic country, the journey of the Magi, who followed the star with their gifts for the baby who was born in the manger, was still celebrated. That was the meaning of the three kings who had graced the Campo Angelo Raffaele that afternoon.

Later, as Miss Garnet emerged from the service the crescent moon had vanished from the sky and instead a lighted tree was shining at the far end of the Piazza. Along the colonnades, which framed the square, hung lavish swags of evergreen, threaded and bound with gold and scarlet ribbon. They do not bother to avert ill luck here, thought Miss Garnet as she retraced her way home. There was a peace in her heart which she did not quite understand. But, as she paced unafraid towards the Campo Angelo Raffaele she understood enough not to ask the meaning of it.

When she had returned to Signora Mignelli’s apartment, Miss Garnet, who had never in her life gone to bed without first hanging up her clothes, had simply stepped out of them, shoes, coat, hat, blouse, skirt, petticoat, underwear, all, and left them, an untidy pool, in the middle of the marble floor. They were the first thing she found the following morning. Reaching up to the top of the wardrobe to put away Harriet’s hat, her hand knocked against something and the picture of the Virgin and Child crashed to the ground.

The picture itself seemed unharmed but the glass was broken. Dismayed, Miss Garnet examined it. The Virgin’s calm visage stared out through shards of glass. I will have to find a glass-cutter, determined Miss Garnet.

Outside some boys were kicking a football and among them she recognised the tallest Magi. ‘Scusi,’ called Miss Garnet from the balcony and the boy ran across and stood politely below. She held up the fractured glass. ‘Scusi. Broken.’

Surprisingly, the boy appeared to comprehend. He beckoned vigorously, indicating that she should join him. Miss Garnet bundled herself back into her coat and hat. Shoving the Virgin and Child into a polythene bag she hurried down the stairs. Some letters on the mat caught her attention; two had British stamps and she pushed them into her pocket, adjusting Harriet’s veil with her other hand.

Outside, in the cold sunlight, the boy was waiting.

‘You want glass?’ he asked.

Miss Garnet was astonished. ‘You speak English!’ she cried and then, thinking this sounded too like an accusation, ‘you speak very well.’

‘Thank you.’ The boy lowered his eyelashes in appreciation. ‘My father say if I speak English good he send me to Londra.’

‘Oh, then perhaps you would like to speak it with me?’

She spoke slowly but the boy did not immediately understand. Then he favoured her with a perfect smile. ‘Si, Signora, I speak with you. My name is Nicco.’

Miss Garnet, unused to such physical charm, blushed. ‘Hello, Nicco, my name is…’ but how was the child going to manage ‘Miss Garnet’? So, ‘Julia,’ she concluded and blushed again.

Nicco smiled showing stunning teeth. ‘You want glass, Giulia?’

With a child’s acceptance he did not ask her how the accident had occurred but simply led her over bridges and along a calle until they reached a shop on the fondamenta where a man with a workman’s rubber apron and a red woollen hat sat over a wide sheet of brilliant blue glass. Nicco turned to his companion. ‘Here,’ he said, proudly, ‘glass.’

Miss Garnet offered the broken Virgin awkwardly to the man in the hat to whom Nicco was speaking rapidly. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘can you mend?’

Seeing the picture the man smiled broadly. Miss Garnet was relieved to notice that his teeth, unlike Nicco’s, were in a state of bad repair. ‘Bellini!’ he exclaimed, ‘Bellissimo Bellini,’ and he kissed his fingers in a way that Miss Garnet had seen only in films or on TV.

‘He likes very much,’ Nicco gravely explained.

‘But he can do it, he will mend the glass?’

In reply the man with the woolly hat held up a thick forefinger. ‘Si, Signora, in wan ower, OK?’ He spoke with exaggerated enunciation, displaying his tarry teeth.

What a relief, Miss Garnet said to herself and then, because she was jubilant that she had negotiated her first Venetian disaster, ‘Nicco, may I buy you lunch?’

Nicco, who did not at first understand her suggestion, became enthusiastic when the penny dropped. He led her to a Trattoria-Bar where he ordered a toasted cheese and ham sandwich and a Coke. Miss Garnet, daringly, chose gnocchi. The gnocchi came in a pale green sauce and was the most delicious thing she thought she had ever tasted. ‘Carciofi,’ Nicco said, when asked for the name of the green ingredient and cupped his hands in an effort to mimic an artichoke. She did not understand and then became distracted by the sudden appearance of a large glass of what appeared to be brandy.

‘For you,’ Nicco said proudly. ‘Is my cousin.’ He pointed at the young man who had produced the drink. ‘He say “Hi!”.’

‘Freddo!’ Nicco’s cousin clapped his arms around himself to indicate cold.

Miss Garnet was not a teetotaller but she rarely drank. A lifetime of abstemiousness had bred in her a poor head for alcohol. Nevertheless it seemed impolite to decline the courtesy. And really the brandy was most acceptable, she thought, as she sipped the contents of the big-bellied glass.

‘My cousin say, you like another?’

‘No, please, it was delicious. Please thank him, Nicco, just the bill.’

Miss Garnet felt unusually jolly as she and Nicco walked single file along the side of the green canal back to the glass-cutter. The light, refracting off the water on to the shabby brick frontages of the houses, bathed her eyes. The brandy had warmed her and a sense of wellbeing suffused her body.

Re-entering the glass-cutter’s Miss Garnet nearly knocked into a man on his way out and almost dropped the purse she had ready, so eager was she to complete the transaction which would restore Signora Mignelli’s picture. The glass-cutter had the repaired Virgin out on his bench but when Miss Garnet began to count the notes from her purse Nicco, who had been exchanging some banter with the departing customer, stopped her.

‘Is free,’ he explained.

Miss Garnet did not comprehend. ‘Three what, Nicco? Thousand, million?’ She prided herself on her mental arithmetic but the huge denominations of Italian currency still tripped her up.

‘No, no, is free.’

‘Oh, but I can’t…’

The glass-cutter was holding up the picture, excitedly stabbing at the Virgin’s face. ‘Bellissimo,’ he insisted, ‘per niente–is now charge. I give yow.’

Following Nicco back along the fondamenta Miss Garnet felt both subdued and elated. The refusal of the glass-cutter to accept a fee troubled her; and yet his powerful assertion of his own autonomy was also exhilarating. Karl Marx, she couldn’t help thinking, would have approved even if he would have deplored the glass-cutter’s motive. A love of the Virgin Mary would have struck Marx as a sign of subjection and yet one could not, really one could not, Miss Garnet mused, trying to keep up with Nicco’s pace, describe the man she had met as subject to anyone.

‘He like this artist,’ Nicco had explained. But Miss Garnet, in whom insight, like an incipient forest fire, was beginning to catch and creep, sensed suddenly there was more to it than that. The glass-cutter, she guessed, also liked the subject of Bellini’s painting and his love of Mary, and the bambino in her arms, was stronger than his love of money. How would Marx or even Lenin have explained that, she wondered as they arrived on the fondamenta alongside the Chiesa dell’Angelo Raffaele.

The Archangel smiled down at her and she remembered she had questions about the boy with the fish and the hound.

‘Nicco, who is the boy up there with the dog?’ She pointed to the stone effigies which were lodged two-thirds up the church’s façade.

But Nicco had other appointments. His pride in his new role as translator and guide was now giving way to peer anxiety. There was a football fixture he could not afford to miss. He shrugged.

‘Tobiolo?’ he said, uncertainly. ‘I see you again. Ciao, Giulia!’

And, ‘Ciao!’ Julia Garnet called after him watching his young shoulders as he ran across the bridge and disappeared behind the church.

The sun was a pale gold disc in the sky. Some words filtered into memory.

When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire, somewhat like a Guinea? O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy!’…I question not my Corporeal Eye any more than I would Question a Window…I look thro’ it and not with it.

William Blake. Years ago she had been invited to contribute a chapter on Blake for a book on Radical Thinkers but somehow the project had never got off the ground. William Blake had been a revolutionary but had he not also been whipped by his father for seeing angels in the trees? Oro pallido, she thought to herself, crossing, in the lowering light, the bridge where Nicco had sped before her. This was not a morning sun on fire, like Blake’s, but pale wintery gold–oro pallido.

The letters which had been delivered from England were from Brown & Noble, the estate agents who had let the flat, and her friend, Vera Kessel. Vera, a fellow member of the Communist Party, had been at Cambridge with Julia Garnet. They had not been close as students but a few years later had recognised each other at a Party meeting and, thereafter, had occasionally gone on holidays to Dubrovnik or to the Black Sea together. The holidays had been bleak affairs, nothing like the trips Harriet had planned for their retirement.

The letters had been, in fact, forgotten until looking for her left glove she found them stuffed into the pocket of her coat. She opened them while the kettle boiled for tea.

Dear Miss Garnet,

This letter confirms a tenancy of six months to Mr A. D. Akbar at a rental of £1,200 p.c.m. We remind you of our terms of 12% to include insurance and collection fees. £1,006.00 (plus one month’s deposit) has been transferred to your account today and thereafter £1,006.00 until 3 June. Trusting in your continued satisfaction.

Yours etc.

‘To the eye of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun,’ murmured Miss Garnet, recalling some more of the words of the visionary poet which had come to her by the canal, and she opened the other envelope.

Dear Julia,

Just a brief card to wish you well in benighted Italy! How are you getting along with the RC God squad? Pretty oppressive I should imagine but I hope the history makes up for it.

We had a disappointing meeting about the unions last week. Ted spoke well as usual but much of the life has gone out of the comrades. All send greetings and solidarity.

Best, Vera.

For a moment Julia Garnet remembered the impoverished little ceremony with which she had bidden Harriet a final farewell, and the utilitarian stone with the severely practical information carved upon its stony face, with which she had chosen to mark the passing of her closest friend’s life. She wished now she had paid the funeral more attention. Harriet’s large, mild face hovered before her–somehow she could not quite get used to the idea that Harriet was no more.

She turned down the flame beneath the saucepan of water and added two tea bags. The kitchen was equipped with neither kettle nor teapot. At first she had minded, her cup of tea being a regular point in her routine, but now she enjoyed the slightly Bohemian feel to her saucepan tea-making. No ‘love’ in Vera’s letter. After nearly forty-five years’ acquaintance ‘Best’ was all Vera could manage.

The following morning Julia Garnet, this time with the Rev. Crystal in the pocket of her tweed coat (‘For really I must,’ she insisted to herself, ‘find out about this city’), returned to the basilica of St Mark. She entered not by the main door but by a less frequented doorway on the north side. It did not deter her that this side-slip into the cathedral was marked ‘Per Pregare’–‘For Prayer’.

Inside, by long, hanging red and silver lamps, a door was open onto a side chapel. With no special thought in her mind she entered.

About a dozen people sat, in the vaulted, ancient-looking surroundings, listening to a priest reading from a leather book. Julia Garnet looked around. At one end of the chapel a blue mosaic of a huge Madonna gazed down; at the other, a tomb on which rested an inclined marmoreal figure observed by an angel. Twelve candles burned on the table before the tomb.

The priest came to the end of his reading and sat down. There was a pause during which Julia Garnet waited for something to happen. After a while it became apparent that nothing was going to happen, except the silence.

Her first response was annoyance. The Vespers in St Mark’s had been dramatic: the flute voices of the clerics, the melodic bells, the incense, the enthralling rhythmic passing and return of the litany-chant thrown between priest and congregation–compared with the threnodic splendour of all that, this abrupt nothingness felt like a cheat. But after a while she began to enjoy the silence. She looked round at the mosaics which seemed to depict some awful martyrdom–certainly there was a body and a tomb and, yes, surely that was the same body being removed from the tomb, and here how eagerly it was being hauled away. There was a kind of ebullience in the narrative which she made out on the chapel walls as if the dead man had, if not enjoyed, at least participated energetically in his own persecution.

She twisted her neck to look back at the blue Madonna and found a man in a serge suit staring beadily at her, as if his was the task of checking her credentials to be present at the ceremony and was hopeful of finding them wanting. Abashed, she turned from the Madonna to examine the other attenders.

All were women and one, two, three, four, five, six–no seven of them in furs. Now there was a thing! Feeling in the pocket of her own tweed she remembered Vera’s letter and almost she started to laugh. What would Vera make of her sitting here in church among seven furs? And which would Vera abhor most? The chapel or the wealth? All the furs were elderly save one: a woman with a long daffodil pony-tail and high gold heels. ‘Tarty,’ Harriet would have called her. (Vera very likely would not have known how to use the word.) But Mary Magdalene had been a tart, hadn’t she? It was surprising how much you remembered of your school scriptures, thought Julia Garnet.

There was a disturbance now at the door and three nuns dressed in white robes entered. They looked like an African order with their smooth brown skins–but so young! The nuns, and really they were no more than children, heavily crossing themselves knelt, so that Julia Garnet could see their thick-soled boots. Now one of them was elaborately prostrating herself and kissing the ground while the grave fur-clad ladies sat decorously in impeccable silence. How irritating the young nuns were, and how out of place the kissing and the boots amid the unspeaking elegance. She was relieved to see them depart, noisily snatching at the water in a carved high stoup by the door. Around the bowl more angels.

One of the silent furred ones was wearing a wide-brimmed emerald hat. The woman was no younger than herself and Julia Garnet found she wanted just such a hat too. But surely this was not what the silence was for? Designing a wardrobe! Gently, like dripping honey, the quiet filled her pores, comforting as the dreamless sleeps she had fallen prey to. The angel over the inclining man gestured at the heavens; beneath him, another angel on the tomb looked with all-seeing, sightless eyes towards the angels on the holy-water stoup…I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy!’…The silence was holy. What did ‘holy’ mean? Did it mean the chance to be whole again? But when had one ever been whole? Silently, silently the priest sat and in the nameless peace Julia Garnet sat too, thinking no thoughts.

A slight stir on her right and someone had entered and was wanting to take the place beside her. A man crossing himself, but discreetly, thank God. Removing the Rev. Crystal from the seat she smelled tobacco and instantly her father was there, not in the days when he would remind her that cleanliness was next to godliness but in those last days when he was losing his mind and could smoke only under supervision. She had had to apologise to the nurses. ‘I am so sorry, he doesn’t know what he is saying,’ she had said, hearing with shame her self-righteous father’s demonic curses. And they would smile and tell her not to worry, it was all in a day’s work. But he did know what he was saying, Julia Garnet thought. And the nurses knew he knew.

And now the priest had risen to his feet and they were all on their feet a little after him and a man with a bell had arrived and incense. Fervently, praise was given to ‘Signore’, (how nice that God should be a humble mister!) and there was singing and the amen. And then the furs were chatting to each other while she stood and drank in the blue Madonna and her stiff, truthful baby.

‘You like our treasures?’

It was the man who had sat beside her.

‘How did you know I was English?’

As if it were a reply the man said, ‘I have friends in England.’ Then, nodding at the mosaics, ‘Do you know the story?’ and enlivened for her the story of the removal of the saint’s remains. ‘We Venetians always take what we want,’ he laughed, and his eyes crinkled; a tall man, with white hair and a moustache.

Coming down the steps beside her into the darkening Piazzetta he said, ‘Look, another example of our looting,’ pointing to the two high columns. ‘St Theodore with his crocodile was once our patron saint. But in fact this is not St Theodore at all–it is a Hellenistic statue which we have taken for our own. And opposite, you see, the lion of St Mark is not a lion at all–a chimera from the Levant we stuck wings on. All stolen! The columns too. Would you honour me by taking a glass of prosecco, perhaps?’ and he smiled, so that she omitted to say she had suddenly remembered she had left the Rev. Crystal behind on the chapel floor.

Instead, why not? she decided, for no one waited for her return but aloud she said merely, ‘Thank you very much. That would be delightful.’ and felt proud of herself that she had added no objection.

‘Good. I take you to Florian’s.’

‘But is this not very expensive?’ she could not prevent herself saying ten minutes later, as they sat, all gilt fruit and mirrored warmth, under the wreathed colonnades surrounding the Piazza.

‘But of course!’ The man who had introduced himself as Carlo crinkled his eyes again. ‘Next time I shall take you to the bar where the gondoliers meet. But for a first meeting it must be Florian’s.’

Julia Garnet felt something she had felt previously only under pressure or fear. It was as if the bubbles in the pale gold glass had passed through her stomach up into her heart. ‘Oro pallido,’ she said speaking the words aloud.

Her companion frowned. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I was trying to say the words for pale gold–the drink. It is delicious.’

‘Ah! Oro pallido, I did not understand. Prosecco is our Italian secret. I think it is nicer than champagne but my French friends will kill me if they hear this!’

‘Your English is very good.’

He was, he explained, an art historian, who had worked at the Courtauld Institute in London for several years. Now he was a private art dealer, buying and selling mainly in Rome, a little in London, sometimes Amsterdam. But Venice was his home. His mother was dead but he had kept on her old appartamento–he returned when he could–he had cousins, an aunt.

‘And you?’ he asked. ‘You have a husband, children?’ and she was grateful for she felt sure he could see that she did not. ‘But what a shame!’ He spoke lightly. ‘You are such a pretty woman,’ and she hardly blushed at all but said, ‘Thank you very much,’ gravely, as if he had opened a door for her, or gathered up a dropped parcel. And she did not ask if he were married.