Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind (7 page)

“Not how it is made, but how it is composed.”

“So you thought carefully about how to . . . compose the painting before you . . .”

“Of course. Do you think that an artist imagines the final painting in an instant? That the painting composes itself through a moment’s inspiration? The artist must have a strategy every bit as cunning as that of the commander of a great army. Like Niccolò da Tolentino, here, in this painting. Remember that!”

She looks back to the drawing. “You’re right, Father. You guided my eyes. I had no idea you could do that.”

“And the lesson is not over yet, because there’s something else that connects all these points on the drawing—the rearing horses, the lance between them, the soldiers on the distant hills, the swirling flags and the lances pointing skyward . . . In the painting, I applied the same colour to all these elements. They’re all white, or close to white. There’s a yellow cast to the white.”

She stares. She lifts her outspread hands to her cheeks. “Father, that is so clever. And it would be so plain to see if I were standing in front of the painting . . . But did the soldiers really wear yellow-white hose?”

He laughs with a slow shuddering in his chest, which prompts a coughing fit. Antonia pours ale from the pewter jug on his table.

He repeats her words, “‘Did the soldiers really wear yellow-white hose?’” He laughs again. “It’s a fiction, Antonia. I can make the soldiers wear any colour that suits my strategy. And now, you can perhaps understand that my greatly esteemed, but guileless, patron is entirely under my control when I present my finished work. He sees what I want him to see, as surely as if I’d set off firecrackers across the painting. So, what do you say to that, Antonia?”

She hesitates. “But why do you want to be in control?”

He seems stumped. He looks up for several moments. “I’ll answer your question with another question. What’s the point of making a large painting if people only look at one small part of the composition? They won’t feel excited, and they won’t read the whole story.”

“Did Lionardo Bartolini like the way you told the story?”

“Well enough. He insisted on one change, when he saw the early preparatory drawings, but that usually happens.”

“What didn’t he like?”

“The lance. Originally I had the lance impaling the knight, through his chest.”

“He wanted the lance to miss him?”

“That’s right. It didn’t affect the composition, so I agreed.”

“I’m still confused. I only ever think of the story when I look at a painting.”

“If you want to be an artist, Antonia, you must think like one. For me? It’s all about bringing together the many individual elements. That’s why I left my bed early in the morning for so many years, and why I worked long hours, with so many years spent away from home. Do you think I care about Niccolò da Tolentino and his army? I’ll paint anything for the right coin. I care that the Florentines defeated the Sienese, of course, but the story doesn’t excite me. It’s the
painting of it
that excites me and keeps me awake at night.”

Antonia slips into the kitchen in the late afternoon and sits in a chair under the window. A sheet of paper rests on a board in her lap. She holds a stick of red chalk in one hand, and she grips the board tightly with her other hand. She glares at Clara, who is preparing the family’s dinner at the large table in the centre of the kitchen.

“Clara, Father has set me a difficult task for tomorrow. I have to make a likeness of Mother. So I’d like to . . .”

“Yes?”

“Practise. I need to practise. So . . . may I draw you again?”

“I’ve got a meal to prepare.”

“I’ll try to draw you while you’re working.”

“When I’m skinning this rabbit?” she says, gesturing with her knife.

“Yes. You’ll be stood in one place while you do that. Can I sit closer?”

Clara gestures with her head, and Antonia pulls her chair across the kitchen. With her foot, she drags a stool out from under Clara’s table. It’s Antonia’s own stool, kept in the same place since her childhood, when she spent so many hours in the kitchen during her mother’s bouts of illness. And now, she uses the stool as a footrest so that her drawing board sits higher in her lap.

There’s no need for Clara to pull her face like that, just because she’s using a knife, Antonia thinks. She struggles to capture Clara’s grimace. After several attempts and repeated smudging out, she says, “Can you keep your face relaxed while you’re cutting?”

“It is relaxed.”

Antonia feels she ought to be able to draw anything in this room from memory, even Clara, but she’s learned that her memory is fickle. When she lies in her bed at night, she can conjure the kitchen smells so easily, but she can never fix the detail she needs for a drawing.

“It’s so difficult, Clara.”

“It must be my ugly face. Here, let me look.” She comes around the table, wiping her hand down her work smock, and stands behind her young mistress. “I look like a man.”

“I’m sorry.” And they laugh. Clara touches the backs of her fingers against Antonia’s forearm and rubs gently. She raises her hand to her mouth. She kisses and makes the sign of the cross. Clara’s superstitious impulse has been normalized by repetition. All the servants in the Uccello household know how close the family came to losing Antonia to the plague. They believe she passed over, that she reached Saint Peter’s gates, that her return to them was due to the sincerity of their prayers. She came back and brought good fortune, not only for the family but for all the family’s servants.

Antonia doesn’t mind Clara’s superstitions. At least Clara no longer asks which saints she met at the gates of paradise. The truth is that Antonia didn’t see anyone or anything, and she wonders if she wasn’t as sick as everyone thought. She’d love to tell Clara that she’s seen paradise exactly as it’s painted in the church of Santa Maria Novella. She loves the fresco, by Nardo di Cione, in the Strozzi Chapel—with all the saints huddled together, row upon row, with their haloes nearly touching. The saints look so pleased to see one another; many look around aghast—wide-eyed in holy rapture.

Even if she had seen paradise, Antonia believes, God couldn’t have allowed her to return home with her memories. How could God test mankind if revelations were handed down so freely? Men and women must earn their place in paradise through faith.

Antonia wishes she
had
stepped through the gates, but she can’t convince herself it happened. No, she didn’t see the saints. Nor any thrones, nor angels. She didn’t see her earthly family mourning by her bedside. She didn’t gaze down from great heights.

CHAPTER SEVEN

London, 2113

“Please, Auntie Toniah. Let me go up with you,” says Eva, pleading.

Toniah pulls the extending attic ladder down to the landing. “Okay. You can stand at the top of the ladder and take a peek. Put some shoes on.” Eva rushes to her bedroom. Toniah calls after her, “I don’t want you crawling around in the attic. I haven’t been up in years—it may not be safe.”

It’s midmorning on Saturday, and classical music permeates the entire house from downstairs. Toniah would prefer something a tad more current, but Carmen likes to start the weekend with piano or clarinet. Today, it’s a concerto that Toniah has heard several times since returning home—Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio.

She’s content to go along with Carmen’s music ritual; it generates a genial current. A few bars of Clara Schumann transport Toniah towards sunny beach breezes, undermining any intention of tidying her bedroom or sorting her laundry. But this morning, she has a task that’s not a chore; she wants to hunt out her student sketchbooks.

Eva reappears wearing black school shoes below blue polka-dot pyjamas. She steps onto the first rung of the ladder and twists around. “What’s up there? Any of your old toys?”

“It’s mostly junk. I need to go through it all.”

Clearing the attic was one of many jobs Toniah’s mother had repeatedly postponed. She eventually gave up any pretence that the clear-out was imminent. She’d simply say, “I’ll do that when I’m retired.” Toniah can sympathize. For her mother, a teacher, retirement must have beckoned like a walk across open, rolling countryside. That’s how Toniah regarded summer vacations during her undergraduate days, but somehow, summers soon became cluttered. From a distance, the future always seems serene.

The smell of dust and neglect seeps down onto the landing, and Toniah sneezes.

Her mother died before reaching her retirement, so the contents of the attic were never sorted. Toniah made one attempt, three summers ago; she lifted down a plastic container filled with framed pictures, hoping to discover photographs of Nana Stone—they had only a handful. All she found were cross-stitch samplers and a set of washed-out watercolours. Her mother had grown tired of them, presumably, but why did she hold on to them? Toniah dismantled all the frames and thought about saving the watercolours, but in the end everything went into the recycling bins. She felt disrespectful, as though she were labelling a part of her mother’s life as inadequate.

It has become clear to Toniah in the years since her mother’s death that household organization was low on her mother’s agenda, perhaps because the requisite talents were sapped by her schoolwork. She had other priorities. It seems to Toniah that her mother dedicated herself to keeping in contact with everyone she had ever met—school and college friends, work colleagues who had long since retired. She kept conversations alive with local friends who had moved overseas, and even kept track of Nana Stone’s ageing friends.

As Eva steps up the ladder, Poppy appears from the bathroom. “Hurry up, Eva. It’s your swimming lesson, and I don’t want to be rushing for the bus again.”

“Do you need anything from up there, Poppy?” says Toniah.

“Nope.”

Toniah notes the resemblance. Her sister is fixed in the here and now, just like their mother. She wonders if a longer view might give Poppy a sense of perspective; a bit harsh, she knows. But a feeling for history, even family history, can alter one’s world view. She had hoped motherhood would give her sister a new sense of herself, create an aura of calmness; it was a romantic notion, perhaps. It has even occurred to Toniah—and the idea is solidifying—that Poppy rushed into motherhood, almost in desperation, as a way of shoring up their disintegrating family. Nana Stone dead, Mother dead two years later. Toniah could have returned home a little more often from university—she wonders if she let Poppy down by not doing so.

Eva pokes her head into the attic. “I can’t see anything.”

“There’s a sensor inside the attic, near the hatch. Wave your hand around.”

When the light comes on, Eva steps up. “It’s a bit untidy up here.”

“Don’t go any higher.”

“Right at the end, I can see some rackets, tennis or—”

“They’ll be ancient, Eva. You won’t want them.”

“Yes, I will. Are they yours?”

“Probably. I’ll try to reach them—but later, when I’ve found my sketchbooks.”

Eva sneezes. She steps down the ladder. “Please bring them down. What’s the point of keeping them up there?”

“I think your nana put them up there when Poppy and I bought our own rackets, more modern ones.”

“Why didn’t she sell them?”

“I guess she was busy, or she thought she might have grandchildren one day.”

“So they’re actually meant for me?”

Toniah laughs. “You’re right. I suppose they are.”

Toniah climbs the ladder, pulls herself into the roof space—rarely disturbed these past ten years. Such a waste. All their neighbours have long since extended their homes upwards into their attics. Toniah doubts she’ll persuade her sister it’s worth the expense or disruption. She’d have to drive the whole project herself, sort out all this junk. Maybe if she won a couple of promotions and Poppy advanced, maybe then they’d take out some more finance. They’ve already remortgaged to update the house since their mother died. It’s a small mortgage, but Poppy regards it as a noose.

Toniah averts her gaze from the boxes of unsorted papers otherwise known as “the family archive.” The archive isn’t Toniah’s designated responsibility, but she is the older sister. And she is, after all, the historian in the family.

A large suitcase has been pushed into the attic since Toniah last looked up here. Probably Poppy’s and Eva’s winter clothes. She shoves it aside and scans across the attic. No two boxes are the same size. Toniah wonders if she should buy some plastic containers. Then at least they could see the contents, and they could stack them, add labels. She’s embarrassed by the lack of order.

Her oldest sketchbooks were packed in an empty duvet box, and she spots it halfway along the kinking path that leads to the eaves. She stoops to avoid the roof timbers as she makes her way along the attic, squats by the box. It’s funny, she thinks, after all these years, she can remember the shape and backing of each of her student sketchbooks. The Paris sketchbook is square, and it’s covered in a pale-green fabric, resplendent with swirling black doodles.

She empties the duvet box and there it is. She feels the stab, the thrill revisited, when she finds her sketch of the Émile Bernard painting.
Breton Women in the Meadow.
A simple line drawing of Bernard’s composition with her handwritten scrawl. She anticipates the words:
flat yellow, thick black lines, white headdress, seated figures float in space, no aerial perspective.

She closes the sketchbook and sits quietly on the old chipboard flooring, feeling relieved and even pleased with herself—it took some pluck to come up here. And, with eyes closed, inhaling the disturbed dust, she imagines a doll’s house with a small figure sitting cross-legged in the attic. She imagines three standing figures in the kitchen of the doll’s house—two women and a girl—and four tiny plastic hens pecking by the side door. What a peculiar thing a home is, she says to herself.

More than once in the past few years, she’s imagined coming home to find the attic stripped bare. She wished Poppy would simply do it, without asking. After all, there are house-clearance people, so-called estate-furniture specialists, who will do the dirty deed. Absent-mindedly, she opens the lid of a large, lopsided cardboard box that sits at arm’s length. It’s one-quarter filled with empty glass bottles without lids.

Whose crap is this? she wonders. Mother’s? Nana’s? She struggles back to her feet and edges towards the tennis rackets. Three of them, hung by their strings on square-ended nails—nails as old as the house. She reaches, grabs a leather handgrip, and she’s back in school on a Wednesday afternoon walking across the top tennis court by the dining hall.

A second racket twists free of its nail and drops down. Stooping to pick it up, she sees a small leather suitcase, scuffed, missing its handle, and when she looks closer, she can see that some of the stitching has been mended with bright-yellow thread that doesn’t match the original. She drags it closer and pushes the metal buttons beside the two locks; one latch flicks open. She lifts the stubborn second latch and opens the suitcase: a jumble of envelopes, flat peppermint tins, rolls of paper held by elastic bands. She sneezes. She can see her mother pushing this suitcase farther and farther back in the attic as she shoved more boxes up here. Toniah sees a graph: a linear relationship between the number of indecisive years and the distance from the attic hatch. When her mother was dying—she tries to smother the thought, but she gives in—did she lie there in hospital, at the very door of death, and think, Oh dear, I’m leaving the girls to sort out the attic.

Toniah shudders with silent laughter, and when she stills herself, she feels suddenly sickened by her own blatant omissions. The merest scintilla of curiosity would have surely prompted her to say, “Hey, Mum, tell me about your childhood with Nana Stone.” Or, “Tell me, Nana, about your father.” Toniah isn’t even clear why her nana chose parthenogenesis. As a child, Toniah sensed a sad, almost angry vibe around Nana Stone’s past. She recalls her nine- or ten-year-old self, conjuring a simple explanation: Nana Stone had been jilted at the altar. This satisfied a child’s curiosity and also instructed her not to pry. Why would she want to remind Nana Stone of the worst day of her life?

What is clear in her memory is Nana Stone saying, more than once, “Don’t talk to me about men.”

The piano concerto has been switched off. Carmen has left for her yoga session, and Poppy is racing around searching for Eva’s goggles.

The Paris sketchbook lies discarded on the floor. The battered suitcase is open on the large square coffee table with its contents strewn and picked over. Toniah found a greetings card in one of the envelopes, and she rereads it for a third time. She can’t make sense of the handwritten message, from Hildi, their old family friend, to Leah—that is, to Nana Stone. It’s a thank-you note for a day they’ve spent
doing the galleries
, but the ending of Hildi’s note is enigmatic:

I’ve been mulling over what we were talking about, and you know I’ll always have your interests at heart. I just feel, Leah, you should be more open. You’ve done nothing wrong!

Toniah doesn’t show the card to Poppy. Maybe later. She wonders if their mother ever read it. If she did open it, she might have glanced at the first sentence, assumed it was trivia and closed it again. Did she even open the suitcase?

“We’re off. Back by lunchtime,” Poppy shouts from the hallway. Toniah hears the front door slam, and in the silence, she can hear her blood circulating through her head. She closes Hildi’s card. The picture on the front is one of those innocuous but seductive images that suggests to Toniah that the sender appreciates a certain type of art: nothing too challenging, a field of ripened wheat swaying in an imagined breeze, under a false blue sky. She slips the card back in its envelope, which is addressed to Nana at this house and makes Toniah feel like a squatter.

She walks over to the window and sees the bus pull up at the bus stop. All to a schedule; everything in the street is exactly as it should be. Eva will be on time for her swimming lesson, and they’ll be home for lunch for Eva’s Saturday favourite—hot chocolate with Welsh rarebit. Toniah has slotted back into the warmly familiar routines of the house.
You’ve done nothing wrong!
She feels she should quarantine herself with Hildi’s puzzling note. Why share it until she can make some sense of this singular sentence?

She returns to the suitcase and kneels down for an item-by-item inspection. It all appears to be Nana Stone’s stuff. There’s an incense stick holder, a glass paperweight, a crab made from shells—surely bought by a child at the seaside—a pendant stating “First Prize,” but for what? Tins, most of them empty. And tight rolls of papers, which haven’t uncurled even though the elastic bands which once bound them are now desiccated. They’re quaint paper receipts, and the ink is all but faded. Toniah smiles, remembering the story of Nana Stone returning faulty hair straighteners twelve years after she made the purchase, because she still had the receipt.

She picks up a small, roughly carved wooden box—a cheap jewellery box, most likely—turns it over, gives it a shake. There’s no rattle. She tries the lid, but it’s locked, and she can’t find a key among all the jumble.

The utility room by the kitchen, in contrast to the attic, is well ordered, and Toniah goes straight to the toolkit at the far end of the work surface. She stands the small wooden box on its hinged side, eases the sharp edge of a flat screwdriver under the lid and taps the end of the screwdriver with a hammer—small taps escalating to bigger taps and then a whack. The lid tears away from the flimsy lock. Toniah stares at the contents—a single small photograph, its colours as vibrant as the day the box was locked. It’s a young Nana Stone holding an infant on her lap. A boy.