the days after what she termed to herself ‘the discovery’ the forgotten author’s words came back to her, relentlessly keeping pace with her steps as she walked the streets of Venice.
She had lived most of her life alone. Her mother had borne her late in life and Julia believed that that, and the strain of trying to please her tyrannical father, had probably contributed to her mother’s early death. When her mother died, a few weeks after her sixtieth birthday, Julia was not quite fifteen.
She had escaped from her father as soon as she could, going to Girton College, Cambridge on a scholarship. Although he had tried to make her departure from the family home as unpleasant as possible, there was not much he could do to prevent it and once away from him a part of her had felt she could never again face living with another man. There had been female friends, such as Vera, and there had been Harriet whom, she now concluded, pounding the streets, she had not treated as well as she could have done. Harriet had been more than a friend; but, blindly, she had taken Harriet for granted. Yet she had loved Harriet, she now knew, and she knew it because she had learned to love someone else.
If you spend most of your life alone often you do not know that you are lonely. It was not until ‘the discovery’ that Julia Garnet knew that she was lonely and that she had been so for most of her life. She had known Carlo for less than five weeks and yet it was as if he acted as a major artery to her heart.
It was the mystery of this which partly forced her out onto the streets as if the puzzle of her swift and intense involvement with this man might be solved by the most thoroughgoing of external explorations. She woke early and walked, avoiding any area where she might encounter anyone she knew, until she found some anonymous-seeming bar, where she drank coffee amid men in woollen hats who reminded her of the glass-cutter, the man with the red hat who, like a figure in some child’s tale, seemed to be gate-keeper to new experience.
The reminder of the first meeting with Carlo did not bother her; even, she found, she began to hanker after it. She strained to recover what he had been wearing. Was it his dark grey coat? (She could almost swear to his red scarf–or had the red of the glass-cutter’s hat become transposed in her mind?) Driven by a hungry desire to garner every scrap of time spent with him, she combed her memory for forgotten moments: the time he bought her an ice cream; the aspirin he had offered her when she had complained of a mild headache; the water-taxi home when she was tired. Had all the trouble then been merely towards establishing a connection with Nicco? For the discovery that her friend’s proclivities were not for women had not detracted one jot from her own feelings.
At first she had been horrified, revolted even. ‘Disgusting!’ she had spat angrily when finally she had dully shifted her weight off to bed that first night. And she had lain, fully clothed, in the dark holding her sides. But love is notorious for its refusal to observe prejudice and gradually the eyes of Carlo, as she had last seen him, reinstated themselves. They no longer seemed cold. Sad, yes, she was sure that what she had seen was sadness, sadness and dismay. Did he miss her at all? Her heart hurt when she thought of him and she thought of him most minutes of most hours of most days.
Once on her wanderings she had caught sight of the Cutforths, arm in arm, Cynthia looking in a furrier’s window–he comfortably lighting one of his perpetual little cheroots–and she had drawn back into the shadow of an alley. To witness such linked and homely familiarity (for the strongest impression she had carried with her from the Gritti was of the Cutforths’ close and, somehow, practical intimacy) was starkly painful. Seeing them so unquestioningly together, it was as if the polite pair had put their hands on their spare hips and jeered at her uncoupled state.
In an effort to avoid all known contacts she roamed far from her usual patch. One day, penetrating to the Arsenale, the fortified area where Venice built its ships, forgetting that this is where she and Carlo had drunk the flat prosecco, she encountered a middle-aged woman sitting beside one of the lions which guard the entrance of the old archway. Caught by something in the woman’s expression Julia stopped by the lion. ‘Do you speak English?’
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