Free Caravaggio's Angel by Ruth Brandon

abandon me. ‘But when I rang the bell no one answered.’
    The woman put down her basket, opened the door by simply turning the handle – so it hadn’t even been locked! – and motioned me to enter. The alsatian bounded out and rushed towards me, barking furiously. The woman shouted, ‘ Amos, viens là! Couché! ’ and it subsided. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said. ‘It’s too wet to talk outside. Don’t worry about him, he won’t touch you.’
    Hesitantly, I followed her. Inside was a room perhaps four metres high, with white limestone walls and a floor of round pebbles, some white, some different shades of pinkish and bluish grey, laid in a pattern of concentric circles. Orange and lemon trees in tubs lined the walls, in the middle stood a large white dining table made of cast iron in a chinoiserie pattern with six elegant matching chairs, and around the room were scattered a number of cushioned armchairs and sofas in white wicker. The woman dumped her shopping on the table, where the alsatian avidly sniffed it. ‘ Amos, arrète! You were saying, madame?’
    I held out my letter. ‘This was the arrangement I made.’
    The woman took it and scrutinized it. ‘Did you telephone?’ It was definitely the person I’d spoken to. I recognized the voice.
    ‘Yes, before I sent this. I believe it was you I spoke to. And then I phoned again and spoke to Madame Rigaut. The letter was just to confirm the arrangement we’d made.’
    The woman nodded. ‘I remember now. That was me, and I did tell her. But what with all that’s happened . . . But of course you weren’t to know about that.’
    I didn’t contradict her. ‘Is she here?’
    ‘As far as I know. She was here this morning when I went out.’
    ‘But surely she’d have heard the doorbell?’
    ‘Even if she did she’s arthritic, it’s hard for her to get downstairs without someone to help her. But she probably didn’t. She’s very deaf. Doesn’t hear a thing unless she has her hearing aid. And she never puts it on unless there’s someone there she wants to listen to.’
    ‘Will she see me, do you think?’
    ‘I’ll go and tell her you’re here.’ And she clumped out of the room, followed, to my relief, by the dog Amos. A few minutes later her heavy footsteps could be heard approaching again. ‘She’ll see you now. Follow me.’
    She led the way to a vestibule from which ascended a grand staircase in white stone. Only one picture adorned the walls here – bizarrely, an inscribed photo of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. We swept past it without comment, to the floor above. Here the rooms were less cavernous, and the walls, though still white, of painted plaster rather than bare stone, while the floor was parquet, laid in an elaborate pattern of hexagons. We turned left into a salon, perhaps eight metres long, furnished with a mixture of old and modern pieces, including a walnut-cased grand piano and, on either side of a great stone fireplace, the pillar-like wooden screws of two ancient wine-presses, each topped with a great bowl of cascading pale-blue plumbago. Walking briskly to a door set directly opposite the one by which we had entered, the woman opened it, said, ‘ Madame, voilà la dame qui est venue vous voir ,’ and left, shutting the door behind her.
    This room, a study-cum-sitting room, was much smaller – almost cosy. The walls were covered with bookshelves and pictures, the floor with faded Persian rugs; there was a sofa and a television, and to one side of the window, a writing table. In an upright armchair on the other side of the window sat a tiny, ancient lady, frail but elegant even in mourning, a lifetime’s habit of chic surmounting all cir-cumstance. She wore a black cotton blazer over a straight black dress, and her gaze was fixed on the rain-soaked garden. Her white hair ( tondue , tondue , but thick now even in extreme old age) was cut in a neck-length bob and held back with a black velvet band; her hazel eyes,