Miss Garnet's Angel Read Free

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.
    â€˜Thank you,’ she said as they clustered around the front door but before she had settled the problem of how to registerher thanks properly the door opened and a middle-aged, dark-haired woman was there greeting her and apparently sending the boys packing.
    â€˜They were kind.’ Miss Garnet spoke regretfully watching them running and caterwauling across the
campo.
    â€˜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 know 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 thewatery 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.
    â€˜Oh, how pretty,’ said Miss Garnet, thinking how like some painting it all looked, and blushed.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 ornatelyfronted wardrobe in the hallway seemed a safe spot to deposit all the holy pictures.
    Going to wash