Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind (22 page)

Toni and her dad have walked along every row of graves. In case, as Toni said, there was another soldier who had never had a visitor. Toni tried to speak the name of each soldier in her head, but there were so many—over six hundred.

Her dad says this is small compared to most of the war grave cemeteries. What stabs Toni’s heart is that all these soldiers died within a month of one another, between early October and the eleventh of November, 1918, when the armistice was signed. Arthur died on the fourth.

She’s pleased Arthur has a beautiful resting place, though she knows it’s a stupid thing to think; it’s not as though he can see this lovely view. A tractor trundles past. She likes the idea that the soldiers have some company; everyday farming chores are going on around them. And she wonders if the tractor driver’s family has lived in this area for a long time. Maybe they farmed this land before World War I. They’ll have different stories to tell, she thinks, but she can’t imagine how they would start or end.

Toni wanders to the end of the cemetery to a small brick shed. She looks through a grill and sees garden implements. She turns, and at the end of a line of headstones, set against the back boundary wall, she notices two that are slightly set apart. “Dad,” she shouts. “You’ve got to see this.”

Chinese characters are carved into the two headstones. English words, too. At the base of each: “CHINESE LABOUR CORPS.” But each one has its own epitaph: “A GOOD REPUTATION ENDURES FOREVER” and “THOUGH DEAD HE STILL LIVETH.”

Her dad stands beside her.

“Isn’t that sweet?” she says, pointing at the miniature bamboo planted between the two graves. “Isn’t that kind?” She doesn’t understand why her eyes are filling with tears. It seems she’s more upset about the dead Chinese labourers than about her own great-great-uncle.

“It’s a shame we can’t read their names. And look at the dates,” says her dad. “They died after the war ended. This one died three days after the armistice, and this one died in the following year. I suppose they died in accidents.”

“They’re such a long way from home. Photograph them, Dad, and send the photos to Mr. Lu. Send them home that way.”

They sit cross-legged on the grass in front of Arthur’s headstone, and her dad lifts the bag of croissants from his backpack.

“Do you think anyone will mind?” says Toni.

“No one’s going to see. Anyway, Arthur wants us to stay awhile. He can join our picnic.”

“Next time we come here, we should bring a little flag and put it in the ground by his grave,” she says. “Like other visitors have done. I didn’t think about leaving something.”

He pulls a face. “It seems a shame to leave anything plastic. I’ll paint a flag on a stone.”

“You know what’s amazing? If we drove away from our house immediately after breakfast and drove straight to Dover, and straight on a ferry, we’d be here by early afternoon.”

“We’ve actually driven within half an hour of this spot in the past, on our way south. It’s a real shame we didn’t come with your mum.”

“We can tell Natalie how to get here,” says Toni immediately. It’s sad enough without bringing her mum into it.

Toni takes a selfie in front of Arthur’s headstone. Her dad picks up his camera. “Let’s do this properly. Stand behind the grave.” He stands and frames the picture. “That’s great. I’ve got you and the headstone, most of the cemetery and a long view towards the woods in the far distance.”

Toni places her fingertips on the top of Arthur’s headstone, and her dad takes the shot.

Rolling countryside
isn’t the right description, Toni decides, because the hills are nothing like a roller-coaster. The inclines are ridiculously long, but they’re gentle. And she loves the French country lanes—they’re far better than English ones, because she can see for miles; there are no hedges to block the view.

Since leaving the Cross Roads Cemetery, they’ve cycled to three more war grave sites. She made her dad put a circle on the map for each cemetery so that when they return to London, she can start a new history project with exact location details.

They stop for a breather, and Toni takes a swig from her water bottle. Her dad opens out the map across his handlebars. Then he lifts it up for a closer look. Toni knows he’s looking at the contour lines. He doesn’t want to put her off cycling by choosing a tough route. He needn’t worry so much. She reckons cycling is going to be her next big hobby, and she’s considering a new embroidery project, too. This time, she’ll pimp up a sleeveless denim jacket, which will be easier to wear when she’s cycling.

Her dad says that when they reach the top of the hill—the one with the wind turbine—they’ll eat the fruit tarts. She reads the implication: it’s a killer hill.

Refreshed, they mount their bikes, and Toni sets off ahead of her dad. She prefers to lead. But on the long rise, he overtakes her and steadily pulls away. The wind turbine isn’t far now. Toni is cycling slowly on her lowest crank gear.

She tightens her grip on the handlebars and tucks in her chin. She breaks into a sweat. Her dad’s so much stronger; it’s no effort for him. She looks up. She can’t bear to see her dad so far in the distance. If he were to have an accident, she’d see it happen right in front of her eyes. There’d be nothing she could do. She could shout to warn him, but he wouldn’t hear. Her French isn’t good enough to call for an ambulance, and in any case, her phone won’t have a signal. And she doesn’t know the password for her dad’s phone.

There’s a pothole in the road, and Toni rides straight into it, jarring her arms; her teeth nip the side of her tongue. Her eyes fill with tears, but she blinks them away. She wipes her face with one hand and keeps pedalling. Don’t be stupid, she thinks. She looks up again; her dad has stopped at the top of the hill. He rests his bike on the ground and waves. The wind turbine towers above him, and the blades sweep through the perfect blue sky.

It’s not going to happen, she tells herself. The turbine blade will not shear off and fall on him; he won’t step on an unexploded mortar shell; a tractor won’t come over the brow of the hill and flatten him. Everything is normal. Totally.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Florence, 1469

With heavy hammer blows, Donato nails his panel into the dowry chest; his self-portrait faces
into
the chest. Antonia reaches to grab his arm. She tries to call out: Don’t be a fool, Brother. The words stick in her throat. She awakens and realizes that one of two knocking sounds has prompted her dream; loose roof tiles are clacking in the wind, and there’s a tapping on her cell door. She leaps out of bed and opens the door by a crack, though she knows the visitor must be Jacopa.

“I can’t believe you’ve slept through this din. You’ll be late for lauds,” Jacopa whispers. She waits on the threshold of the cell while Antonia throws on her robe, then eases the door open and squeezes into the cell. The cell is cramped, because the abbess decided last week that Antonia needed a desk. She instructed Antonia that any commissions should be painted in her cell, in isolation, away from the prying eyes of other novices and the servants. Portraits, she said, were too personal to be kept in the workroom for all and sundry to see.

Even in the early-morning gloom, a spillage of paint-stained water is visible on the floor by the side of her desk. Above the desk, new paint flecks have appeared on the wall. Papers, chalks, shells and bowls are scattered across the desk’s surface. Jacopa steps up to Antonia and straightens the young girl’s robe. “You’ve been working half the night, haven’t you? You’ll lose your eyesight before you take the veil. I’ll mop up the spillages after lauds.”

Antonia smiles at the realization that one blanket, one act of kindness, has forged such a friendship, such loyalty. Jacopa checks her cell every morning to see if Antonia has heard the chapel bells and is dressed and ready for daybreak prayers. Antonia is grateful. She loves to sleep until Jacopa’s tapping at the door; if she wakes beforehand, unwelcome thoughts creep into her mind. About home. She imagines that Clara will be starting the fire in the kitchen. She imagines the sparrows and blackcaps warbling in the honeysuckle in the courtyard.

“I like working at night,” she says. “The abbess told me it’s God’s gift . . . that I need so little sleep.”

Jacopa listens at the door. She looks over her shoulder at Antonia. “If it’s such a gift, why do you have dark rings around your eyes?”

Antonia slowly pushes her fingers through her short-cropped hair, hoping to discover that during the night her hair had regrown. She ties her novice’s headscarf. “I get so much done in the night—when I’m not jumping up every five minutes to say prayers. I wish I could do all my praying in the morning and then paint for the rest of the day.” She turns to her desk, gathers her night’s work and takes it over to her dowry chest, which is covered by a cloth for protection. She pushes the cloth aside, lifts the lid an inch and slips the papers inside. She doubts the abbess would approve of these colour exercises any more than her father did.

“You weren’t working on the girl’s portrait, then?” says Jacopa.

“The candlelight’s too dim for that.”

Jacopa puts a finger to her lips, and they leave the cell. They make their way, in step, swiftly and silently, downstairs to the Great Cloister, on to the small courtyard and towards the chapel, which forms the segregated choir of the public church. Antonia has walked this same path with her great-aunt, hand in hand, so many times at daybreak. As a young boarder, she often crept to her aunt’s cell in the night and shared her bed. At first, it was homesickness that kept her awake in the dormitory, but as time went on, her sleeplessness became fixed, unshakable. She always found sleep in her aunt’s bed, and during the darkest hour of the night, when her aunt slipped away for matins, Antonia kept the bed warm.

As a novice, Antonia has learned to embrace her sleeplessness. She feels free to dabble with her own experiments using the pigments and papers provided by her father. After all, if God expects their community to sleep between evening compline and matins, she feels she may spend the time as she pleases. She tells herself she is painting as a form of meditation; it’s something she recalls her father once saying. And during her painting vigils, she finds the convent’s silence perfectly natural. It’s the daytime silence she finds oppressive, when the noises of the outside world penetrate the convent, teasing and tempting her to cough, to hum a tune.

So the pattern of her night-times is established; she works until matins and sleeps for three hours between matins and lauds.

As they reach the chapel, Jacopa pushes Antonia ahead of her, so that if anyone gets the blame for being tardy, it will be the servant and not the novice.

Though she’s bone-tired, Antonia prefers these daybreak prayers to any later in the day. With her mind still lingering at the edge of her dreams, and before the duties of the day invade her thoughts, she finds that the questions she took with her to bed tend to answer themselves, as though an angel listens to her thoughts as she falls asleep, and whispers a resolution in her ear at lauds.

This morning, as she recites familiar psalms that require little concentration, she reflects on the coloured grid she painted last night. A moment of clarity seems within reach. The angel whispers: there’s no reason she should only paint squares. She may paint any shape she likes. Odd shapes. Like the glass artist who pours colour and then binds his pools of pure vermilion, pure azurite, with lead strips. She holds this thought and hopes she won’t lose it before nightfall.

Following noon prayers, the convent community gathers in the refectory for the main meal of the day. It is the turn of Sister Innocence, the novicemistress, to read a religious text.

“Beloved sisters, open up your hearts and take heed of the holy teaching of Caterina dei Vigri, abbess of the Poor Clares in Bologna, God rest her soul. Allow Caterina to guide you towards sanctification, today and through all your days, through quiet contemplation of her
Seven Spiritual Weapons
.

“One: always take care to do good.

“Two: remember that we can never achieve anything truly good by ourselves.

“Three: trust in God, for we should never fear the battle against evil, either in the world or in ourselves.

“Four: meditate frequently on the life of Jesus.

“Five: remember that we must die.

“Six: remember the benefits of heaven.

“Seven: let the Holy Scripture guide all our thoughts and deeds.”

None of the weapons sound remarkable to Antonia, and she wonders why Caterina should need to write them down. She looks up from her broth, but Sister Innocence sees her and with a scowl instructs her to look down. She immediately bows her head, but the table seems to shift sideways. Her head swims. Too little sleep, an empty stomach.

“Today, we will consider Caterina’s fifth spiritual weapon,” Sister Innocence continues. “Remember that we must die.” She continues to recite Caterina’s lengthy exposition on death and dying, but Antonia concentrates on her bean broth, which is thick, and hot, and contains large chunks of carrot. If she eats quickly, she’ll feel better, revived, and she’ll be less likely to faint.

Her tiredness has already landed her in trouble. For last week, she confessed to the abbess that she had catnapped in her cell while working on the portrait of Maria degli Albizzi’s granddaughter. Her tiredness was the result, she told the abbess, of concentrating so hard on drawing the outline of the composition. She confessed, specifically, that she sat back to assess the outline and allowed her eyelids to close, and that she awoke because of her own loud snoring.

She made the admission out of anxiety—that someone had heard her snoring and might denounce her to the abbess. Rather than rebuke her for the catnap, the abbess inquired if she was satisfied with the composition. As an afterthought, it seemed, the abbess punished her for succumbing to tiredness, instructing her to attend early prayers before vespers.

Sister Innocence is evidently inspired by the fifth spiritual weapon. She adds great emphasis to each of Caterina’s shorter sentences. Antonia stalls, her spoon almost touching her lips, as Sister Innocence announces, “Let us do good while we have time.” Antonia’s heart beats hard. Yes, she wants to do good. Good
work
, that is. Good
painting
. The refectory table seems to shift again. She drops her head low as if in prayer, and she breathes deeply. She must not faint.

“From my memory of the girl, it seems a fair likeness,” says the abbess. She peers down at the portrait on Antonia’s desk. “Is it finished? The girl’s grandmother grows impatient.”

“I’m sorry, Mother Abbess, but I still have work to do. The final adjustments . . .” She feels herself blush. “My father taught me not to rush.”

“Then I shall tell Maria degli Albizzi that the portrait is progressing well. Before I release the portrait to the family, I will need your brother’s approval. I shall write to him and request his attendance in the parlour in . . . ?” She looks to Antonia and raises her eyebrows. “Surely, two weeks will give you sufficient time.”

Antonia nods, embarrassed to be in negotiation with the abbess.

“If everyone is happy with your work, I will invite other parents to commission portraits. If their daughters are boarding here, it would be a convenient opportunity for all concerned.” The abbess turns to leave, but hesitates. She looks back. “Antonia, have you slept at all this past week?”

She sits in the candlelight in her cell and casts her thoughts back to her father’s lessons. Colour is such a puzzle. She wishes she could ask her father for one more lesson. She closes her eyes and tries to tease out from all his lessons the specific points he made about colour.

He told her that terre-verte created a muted effect in his painting of Noah and the flood, that terre-verte unified his entire fresco cycle in the cloister of Santa Maria Novella. And he often painted elements in his composition in a white colour tinged with yellow; in
The Battle of San Romano
, he used this colour for the horse, the lance, the soldiers’ hose. It emphasized his composition. And he used this same colour, as well as blue, in the same manner for the hunting scene on her dowry chest; it unified the composition of a long panel painting.

She can’t remember her father ever talking about colour for its own sake. With hindsight, she sees that the composition always came first for him. The composition, and the story.

She spreads out her five small paintings. Since her angel whispered to her a week ago, Antonia has worked hard each night, and now she assesses the results. She touches the paintings, lightly, as though her fingertips might divine some insight. In one painting, she created a twisting pattern of coloured shapes. In another, she made triangular shapes of colour. And in another, she combined circles of different sizes. The coloured shapes touch without any paint bleeding across to infect their neighbours. Each colour is pure. In the last two of the five paintings, she repeated the twisting pattern, using different combinations of colours.

Antonia tidies her mussel shells of pigment into a neat row. She notices she’s running low on vermilion and azurite—she’ll need to pound and grind some more tomorrow. There’s still a full shell of boneblack; she picks it up and cups the shell in the palm of her left hand. She frowns and looks back at her paintings. Her favourite paintbrush is propped against her father’s ivory rest. She picks up the brush, mixes some of the pigment with egg yolk, adds a touch of water and strokes a thick line of boneblack around the edge of a vermilion triangle. She continues to stroke the paint until the painting becomes a black swamp with isolated, shimmering pools of pure colour. She repeats this for a second painting, and as she does so, she smiles and recalls her father’s warning:
First and foremost, you must enjoy loading your paintbrush with paint.