The Master of the Angels

When Lorenzo di Prato heard the rumour that his only daughter considered herself betrothed to the young painter Tancredi, he was not pleased. He considered it entirely unfitting that he, a prosperous and respected cloth-merchant, should have his family linked by common gossip to a struggling, penniless artist. This was not the future he intended for his child. So when he confronted Gianetta, and she could not deny her friendship with the young man, he had the girl shut away in a convent until she should come to her senses.
Tancredi was saddened, and also insulted. Admittedly he was as yet unknown, but he was sure his prospects were good. Had he not been commissioned to work on the altarpiece at the new church? It would depict the Adoration of the Virgin, and he was to paint one of the side panels. He was certain that this would establish his reputation as a painter, and quickly lead to fame and wealth. But also he truly loved Gianetta, and now he missed her greatly. As the days and the weeks passed by without her, he became more and more depressed. He began to neglect his work. Increasingly he became aware that it was dull and uninspired, and yet he was unable to do anything to improve it. He took to hanging around the gates of the convent for hours at a time, hoping for just a glimpse of his beloved; but the walls were high and windowless, and no man could enter without permission.
Gianetta was also very lonely and unhappy. To ease her grief, she took to praying in quiet places away from the nuns. Especially she liked to climb to the top of the campanile, where there was a small platform: the only place in the convent from which it was possible to catch any glimpse of the city outside. Here she would pray fervently for help and deliverance. And here one day her prayer were answered; as two Beings descended in majesty from the skies and took her hands; and then in an overwhelming miracle glittering wings grew from her own shoulders, and together the three of them rose beyond the prosaic earth and soared upwards into the cloudless blue.
The only person who saw them was Tancredi, from his lonely vigil outside the nunnery gates. As soon as they had risen beyond his sight, he rushed back to his church and seized his brushes; and he painted his panel before the vision could fade from his memory. It showed three angels in brilliant colours. It was much the best part of the altarpiece, and its fame spread far and wide, so that his reputation was established and he was known ever after as the Master of the Angels. But he never married Gianetta, for the poor girl was now incurably insane, and was never again able to leave the shelter of her convent. Most of the time she was quiet, but occasionally she would escape the vigilance of the nuns, and then she would climb the tower of the campanile, and would be found there, wildly invoking the heavens with tears in her eyes.
"Fly!" she would call, "Oh, fly! Please, fly!"

The Library Van: a true story

Between leaving school and going to university, I worked for six months at the Cumberland County Library. One of the tasks there was to go round remote parts of the county on the travelling library van. For some of the tiny villages and remote farmhouses, seeing us every three weeks was one of  their few contacts with the outside world.
               One woman had an invariable procedure. “I want 5 murders, 3 romances and a western”, she would say, and leave us to choose them for her. She would then cast her eye over our selection, discarding a few because “they didn’t look very good“, or because she thought she might have read them before. Other customers had their own systems for dealing with the latter problem; such as making a pencil mark on a certain page once they’d read one of our books. In cold weather some kind ladies would bring us mugs of tea, though since they invariably stirred in large quantities of sugar, I could never drink mine.
She wasn’t the only customer who let us choose her books, and some of the choices we made must have caused some surprise. Harold the van driver once persuaded a lady at a remote farm to take home James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. “Is it a good book?” she asked. “It’s a very famous book”, said Harold. “I want something I can read in bed”, she said. “It’s probably best if you read this in bed”, Harold told her. I never found out what she made of it, since I don’t recall we ever saw her again.

Harold explained to me the perils of engaging these people in conversation. They probably never saw anyone except us and the postman for weeks at a time, and they were often desperate for a talk, but we had a tight schedule to keep, and if we let them stay on the van for too long, we’d never get round in time. Harold’s policy was to agree with everything they said. “You can’t have a proper conversation with someone who always agrees with you”, he said. I witnessed this technique in action at an isolated farmhouse up near Kershopefoot on the Scottish border; the home of an artist who was in fact a Nazi. He clambered onto the van in his paint-stained overalls. “Things is bad!” he told us, “There’s Jews in high places bleeding this country white!” “You’re right there!” said Harold. The man soon went away. But I’m afraid I forgot Harold’s advice on one occasion, when once an old farm labourer got on the van and told us, with no introduction, that all farm land should be nationalised. “You’ll be a socialist then”, I dutifully said. Oh no, he always voted Conservative. I couldn’t retrain myself from asking why, and he told me this long story about how, when he was a boy on the Earl of Lonsdale’s estate back before the First World War, he once opened a gate for the Earl’s carriage to come through, and there sitting beside the Earl was the Kaiser, who had come to spend Christmas up at the castle. The Earl had given him half-a-sovereign and said, “You look a promising young chap. If you ever want a job, come up to the hall and see me“. But then he’d gone off to the trenches, and it was only in the 1920s that he’d met the earl at a county show and the earl had said to him, “I recognise you! You’re the lad who opened the gate for me back before the war! Why didn’t you come up to the hall and take the job I offered you?” And ever since then he’d voted Conservative. Politics is a bit primitive up on the Border. I’ve often reflected that my vote could be cancelled out by someone like that.