Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind

by Anne Charnock

  “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.

  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 a
nd 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.