Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind (21 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

Fontaine-au-Bois, France, 2015

Long car journeys used to be Toni’s pet hate, but it’s different now that she sits up front. Driving through France side by side with her dad, with bikes on the bike rack, she feels like an equal partner in a Continental escapade. According to her dad, she’s the copilot.

“Man with baguette,” says her dad. He points.

“That’s four this morning, but we’ve only spotted one beret.”

The window is down, and Toni splays her hand to catch the breeze.

Neither she nor her dad trusts the sat nav to find their destination—a small cemetery in the middle of nowhere. So Toni has a road map in her lap and a printout of the road junction in detail. It’s called Cross Roads Cemetery, and it’s two or three miles away.

She twists around suddenly, stares out the window behind them. “You’ve got to stop—”

“I can’t just stop—” But he brakes hard, swings the car into the side street on the right and pulls up in a residential parking place. “We’re almost at the cemetery. What’s so important?”

“You’ll love it.” She opens the car door. “Come on.”

She’s well ahead of him. He calls out as he locks the car, “Give me a clue.”

“It’s purple,” she says over her shoulder, and she waves for him to follow.

She turns left at the main road, past a forecourt stacked with marble gravestones, and she heads towards the road junction. Arthur will wait another ten minutes, she thinks. What’s ten minutes as a fraction of ninety-seven years?

They’re in the small town of Landrecies, the last urban area before the war graves cemetery at Fontaine-au-Bois. She’s a couple of paces ahead of her dad when she reaches the junction. She points to the right. He lunges and grabs her shoulder to stop her stepping off the pavement. When he looks along the side road, he sees it, the third house on the right. An advertisement, the kind that covers the entire side of a house. Expanses of purplish-blue and ghosted-white lettering, with burnt sienna brickwork showing through. Evidently delighted, he reads the sign aloud, “DUBONNET.”

“I want a close-up photograph. It’s the perfect purple.”

He keeps his hand on her shoulder as they cross to a triangular traffic island.

“I’ll take a snap from here, first,” she says.

They cross the road and walk towards the house.

“People collect photos of these ghost advertisements. They’d love this one,” he says.

“Ghost advertisements? That’s a
thing
?”

He laughs. “They’re a leftover from the early days of advertising, before billboards came along. Companies leased the sides of houses and painted their adverts. And when the lease ended, they either repainted the original or painted a new advertisement on top. These days, they’re left to the elements, and you sometimes see older advertisements showing through.”

They reach the house. The strongest patch of colour on the brick gable end is conveniently close to the pavement, and Toni takes a close-up snap.

“In fact, I think the colour is lapis,” her dad says. “Lapis lazuli. The ground pigment is called ultramarine.” He leans forward and rubs the paint surface with his index finger. “It’s lasted well; the pigment content must be high.” He looks at his fingertip, and there’s a hint of the lapis. “You could go online and search for the Pantone colour of the old Dubonnet adverts. Some nerd will have blogged about it.”

Toni knows about Pantone. Years ago, her mum bought a set of mugs with coloured stripes and Pantone numbers—an arty birthday present for her dad. He liked them, but now everyone’s got them.

She stands back and photographs the full gable. The word
DUBONNET
—in faded, stretched white capitals—is repeated three times at different heights. Two are stacked close together, high on the wall, while the third almost sits on the ground. And each
DUBONNET
stretches the full width of the brickwork.

“It looks like three different adverts,” says Toni.

“It’s one advert. I’m sure of it.”

“But why did they paint the name Dubonnet three times?”

“It’s an old advertising trick. Reinforcement through repetition. Your brain registers the word three times.”

“The more you hear a name—”

“The more you remember it. I think the same company made Cinzano, and I’ve seen one of its adverts. It says, ‘Cin Cin Cinzano.’ Same kind of idea.”

She offers him her phone to see the photos. He swipes through them. “That’s a good one. Email it to me, will you? Full size. I’ll play around with it.”

They walk back to the car. Toni does a skipping walk. Her dad puts his arm around her and kisses her head. She doesn’t mind; they’re in France—no one knows her. That’s the best thing about holidays.

“I have a plan.” He slows down and takes a left turn off the main road. They’re driving along a country lane that’s hardly wide enough for two cars to pass. Toni looks at him, sceptical. “I’m going to park in Bousies. Last year, it won the competition for best-kept village. We can take a look around and then cycle to the cemetery; it’s a mile or so from Bousies.” Toni wonders if she can trust her dad’s estimate of distance. He says, “I thought . . . instead of driving straight to the cemetery, it might be nice if we approached it, you know, at a slower speed.” He glances at Toni to gauge her reaction.

“You want to sneak up on it?”

“I’ve had this image in my head . . . We’re cycling around a bend in the road, and we come across the graves in the middle of a field, almost by accident.”

Toni nods her head, though she wishes he hadn’t used the
accident
word.

“Arthur must have walked around all this area,” he says. “He died in the Forest of Mormal, but I can’t work out where that is. It can’t be far away.”

They sit quietly for the rest of the journey to Bousies. Toni looks out across fields planted with maize. She finds it difficult to imagine trenches and bomb craters. She can’t picture the mud. She sees a farmhouse in the distance and wonders how it survived. Had other buildings surrounded the farmhouse before the war?

The road through Bousies is lined by hanging baskets heaving with flowers, which reminds Dominic that next year, he’ll make more effort with the garden and particularly the patio. He feels he let Toni down this year. Connie always replanted the tubs and baskets during May, but he was too busy when they arrived home from China. Toni hasn’t passed comment; maybe kids don’t even notice these things. Still, he can’t keep everything the same. In one or two ways . . . Hell, he won’t say
anything
is better than before, but he’s relieved they’re finding their own ways of doing things.

Case in point: since he bought the new road bike for Toni, they’ve been out cycling three Sundays out of the past four. They headed off through the suburban back streets to a different park each Sunday. He’s wondering if he and Toni might have regular biking holidays—a fun way for a dad and a young teenage girl to spend time together. And, God knows, he has to look after his health, more so than ever. For Toni’s sake.

He lifts the bikes down from the bike rack and checks the contents of his backpack: camera, maps and the basic picnic he bought near their hotel this morning—four croissants plus two fruit tarts, which he hopes will survive intact. As an afterthought, an attempt to elevate his picnicking standards, he grabs some paper tissues from the back seat of the car.

“Sunblock?” he asks. She nods.

Toni stands astride her bike frame. He smiles. She looks the part—cycling shorts, breathable top with reflective strips. He passes her a water bottle to slot on her bike frame. She tightens the string keeping her sunglasses in place; fastens her helmet and tucks in the dangling strap; puts on her fingerless gloves and checks the Velcro fastenings. She’s in the moment—he can see that.

“Let’s head out, then,” he says.

A mile out of town, it dawns on Toni that she’s about to do something remarkable. She’s only thirteen years old, and she’s the one who started this adventure. This was her idea in the first place, even if her dad was the one who made the travel arrangements. If it wasn’t for her history project, Arthur would remain stuck in the middle of nowhere,
unvisited
. And now, they’re nearly there.

She shifts down a gear for the long, slow incline ahead; the gears are so smooth. She shifts again, and again, as she feels pain rising in her thighs, and then she changes down to her easiest crank gear. She’s halfway up the incline, and she still has three gears to spare. Until her dad bought this bike, she thought she was a crap cyclist; she always had to dismount on long hills. Clearly, she needed a lightweight frame and road tyres. Her mum had the wrong kind of bike, too.

Her dad is slowing down. When she reaches him, they cycle side by side. “Got a problem?” she says.

“I want you to see it first, so you go ahead. It’s not far. When you come to the junction, there’s a house on the right, but look over to your left across the field, and you should see the cemetery.”

Within a minute, the house comes into view. She catches sight of the top of a memorial. Then, as she approaches the junction, she sees a low, neat wall around the cemetery and the curved tops of the headstones.

They stop at the junction; the road is narrow, and a muddy quad bike splutters towards them. The driver is a middle-aged man wearing rough clothes and heavy boots. He passes and gives them a barely perceptible nod. Toni sets off, standing on her pedals. At the cemetery, she leaps off her bike.

There’s no boundary wall at the front of the cemetery—just a newly mown grass verge, which is inset with wide stone steps leading up to the graves. It’s so unlike English church cemeteries, with their weathered and leaning headstones. The headstones here are a yellowy white; the lettering and insignia are sharp, as though carved yesterday. And a neatly clipped, flowering shrub, tended by the war graves’ gardeners, nestles in front of each headstone. A wide, grassy path separates two sets of graves.

Toni looks across the cemetery to the surrounding fields and to a far distant horizon. She turns, and her dad is fishing a piece of paper from his backpack. “Where’s Arthur?” she calls.

“Row H.”

She finds the row and walks slowly along the line of graves: Lancashire Regiment, Royal Army Medical Corps, Coldstream Guards, New Zealand Rifle Brigade, Lancashire Fusiliers, Royal Field Artillery, Essex Regiment, Gloucestershire Regiment, Somerset Light Infantry, Royal Welch Fusiliers and then Manchester Regiment. Not the first one, but the third Manchester Regiment headstone: “PRIVATE A. GEORGE.” At the foot of the headstone is a small rosebush with orange buds.

Her dad joins her. “You found him,” he says.