Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind

by Anne Charnock

  She jumps two steps at a time down the long staircase to the ground-floor coffee shop and slips past a group of suited men, beating them to the queue. She orders a banana milkshake, and while she waits by the counter, her phone pings. It’s a notification saying that Mai Ling has pinned a photo to the project “Toni’s History Project—People Unknown.”

  That’s the eleventh pin: target exceeded, total success. She touches the app icon, but it doesn’t open; the free Wi-Fi is pathetic. She wonders if Mai Ling remembered to write one interesting thing about her dead relative. And it now occurs to Toni that her request for a micro-snippet of information is a bit rude. It shouldn’t be possible, she thinks, to reduce a lifetime to a single sentence. What could she say in a sentence about her mum, or about her dad, or Natalie? One day, far in the future, someone might abbreviate her life. Toni Munroe . . . a renowned embroiderer of vintage denim.

  She takes her milkshake to a long, marble-topped counter and perches on a bar-stool. She faces three large Georgian windows with wooden shutters folded back—the shutters match the room’s head-height wood panelling, which is painted black. This would make a great movie set, she thinks, for a spy thriller. She’s scanning the coffee shop, working out where two spies would make a live drop, when the hulking men in suits walk across the room with tiny cups of espresso and sit directly opposite her, blocking her view. She feels she’s sitting in the middle of their group, but they don’t seem to notice her—she’s an invisible junior member of the species.

  She frowns at her phone as though a crucial email has just that second landed in her inbox. But it’s hard work maintaining the frown, so she pushes her phone into her pocket; it’s not as though she ever receives world-redefining communications. She lifts the straw to the top of the milkshake and sucks off the bubbles. Maybe she’ll ask her dad how many earth-shattering emails he receives in a year, but on second thought, she drops the idea. After her mum died, he didn’t check his email for at least a month.

  She’s not sure why. It seemed to her that email would be the least painful way of dealing with people. But, oddly, her dad talked with anyone who telephoned—he didn’t even let the answering machine take a message—even though he always cried when he talked about her mum. She overheard Natalie telling him to put an out-of-office notice on his mail. So Toni sent him an email to see what he’d written. He wrote that due to a family bereavement, he was taking extended leave.

  It was all right for him. He made her go back to school even though the long summer holiday started only three weeks later. He said it would be best if she went back before the holidays, but she thought he was wrong about that. She should have stayed home to look after him. The house got into a mess, and she suspected he spent half the day in bed.

  Anyway, she reckons that the subject of earth-shattering emails would make a brilliant feature article for a Sunday newspaper. She’d ask famous—no, she would ask nonfamous people—to recall the most important email they had ever received. “The Email That Changed My Life.” She’d tell them she wanted happy stories. She’d pitch the feature as a New Year special, full of optimism for the coming year. In any case, why go out of your way to write sad stories? she says to herself. Unless it’s a historical feature; then it’s bound to be all misery.

  Toni stands at the entrance to Room 54. She watches her dad at work and spontaneously feels the warmth of reflected glory, for two young men—art students, she guesses—are whispering to one another and taking sideways glances at her dad. Toni strolls past them, stands by her dad and puts a possessive hand on his back. “How’s it going, Dad?”

  “Fine. Not so difficult, this one. Uccello’s approach is straightforward. It’s just a coloured-in drawing. Not like the Venetian school.”

  “Hmm. How much longer will it take?”

  “Bored already? Why don’t you find a painting you like?”

  As she leaves the room, she steals a backwards glance at the two students. They’re looking at her. They must be wondering what it’s like to have an artist for a father. She wants to tell them it’s pretty amazing. Her dad takes her to loads of artists’ studios. In fact, she doesn’t know any other teenager who goes to open-studio weekends, and her favourite part is seeing her dad drinking beer from the bottle with his art mates.

  What’s more, he’s made her realize that all these paintings are her paintings; all the big museums belong to her, and she can regard them as her own treasure trove. And years ago he taught her this: in a big gallery, you don’t study everything. All you do is pick one painting in each room for a closer inspection.

  In the next room she picks a small painting—the one that isn’t a Madonna and Child. There’s a man on a horse in a landscape full of animals—hounds, deer, stags, a heron, swans and two ducks. The stag has a crucifix growing out of his head, though Toni has absolutely no idea what the artist is trying to say.

  The next room is utterly dismal. She sighs. It’s a Dutch room, full of portraits of miserable people. She looks down at the wooden floor and moves on to another Italian room where the sun is shining in all the paintings. She’s surrounded by bright blues, startling reds and happy, skipping angels.

  However, in the far right corner, she sees a long, thin painting; it’s like ultra widescreen, and it draws her in. To a scene of carnage: half-human, half-animal creatures are rampaging through a group of beautiful men and women who are caught unawares in the midst of a fancy picnic. The creatures are whacking the humans with clubs, biting their necks.

  Toni steps forward to inspect the gore. Basically, it’s a kidnap story—the naked women are being dragged away from their boyfriends and husbands. This is definitely the best painting in the National Gallery, she says to herself. Humans versus . . . What are they? She reads the title—The Fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs. She hunts around the painting to see if there are any female centaurs. None. Why is it that women are always the ones being dragged off? Why aren’t they the ones doing the clubbing and biting?

  On a distant field, she spots a centaur dragging a man by his foot towards a cave. He must be a gay centaur, if there is such a thing . . . unless they’re cannibals and this horror scene has nothing to do with sex. Toni decides the story would make a great movie, but only if the director insisted on having a few female centaurs. “Hollywood Cashes In on 500-Year-Old Painting!”

  No, she says to herself. No exclamation marks in headlines. That’s amateur!

  Dominic packs away his sketchbook and texts Toni, telling her to meet him at the Portico entrance. But before leaving, he turns to take a last look at the painting from the far end of the room. He finds it difficult to comprehend the audacity, the sheer nerve, of the ruling Medici family in Florence. They admired this painting and its two sister paintings so much, they stole them.

  That’s what you call artistic appropriation, he says to himself. He imagines the Medici militia forcing its way into the residence of the Bartolini family, taking The Battle of San Romano paintings down from the walls. He wonders if the frames were damaged in the process, if repairs were needed. He imagines the militia marching back with the paintings through the streets of Florence to the Medici palace on Via Larga. Dominic decides that when he gets home, he’ll find the address of the Bartolini residence online and follow the paintings’ route on Street View.

  Finally, plucking up the courage, he looks at the far right of the painting—at the glancing blow of a lance across the chest of a Sienese knight. Back in Suzhou, Dominic had willed Mr. Lu to choose Water Lilies.

  The bus is packed on the journey home. Toni and her dad sit several seats apart until, three stops from their destination, the seat next to him comes free. She dives forward to take it. “I’ve been wondering,” she says as she drops in beside him. “And I’m not being rude . . . I’ve been wondering why you don’t make your own paintings instead of just copying other people’s.”

  “Just copying . . . ? It’s not exactly easy.”

  “I don’t mean just
.” She taps his arm in apology. “But, you know, don’t you have any . . . haven’t you got your own ideas for paintings? You used to paint your own. There’s that yellow and green one in your bedroom.”

  “The yellow and green one . . .” He frowns at her. “The abstract, you mean?”

  “All right. The abstract in your bedroom, which happens to be mainly yellows and greens, by the way. Don’t you want to paint more abstracts?”

  “I haven’t thought about it for a while.”

  “So you might?”

  “If I ever retire, I’ll do some more. I do enjoy copying paintings, you know. I’ll let you in on a little secret.” He leans into her. “It’s a good feeling when you’re good at something. It’s good for the soul. And, here’s the real secret—it doesn’t really matter what it is you’re good at.”

  “You’re not disappointed, then?”

  He shakes his head. “I have interesting clients. They usually pay on time. I like art history, and . . . I paint most days.”

  “That’s all right, then.”

  “So what do you fancy for dinner?”

  She shrugs. “And another thing, Dad . . . Have you ever copied a painting by a female artist?”

  He looks out of the window for a few moments. He turns back to her. “No. I haven’t.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Florence, 1469

  Antonia leaves the confines of their home on Via della Scala and looks to see if the ground is wet, for it feels surprisingly fresh outdoors, as though a passing rain shower has narrowly avoided their own inner courtyard but doused the street and cleared the air of dust. However, the ground is dry, and Antonia realizes she has simply grown accustomed to the still air indoors.

  She and her mother climb into the waiting carriage. It belongs to her father’s cousin, who insisted—on hearing the news that Antonia’s future was settled—that this feast-day visit to the convent of San Donato in Polverosa should take place in comfort and style. Antonia suspects this gesture is more than a treat; it’s a reward. She and her mother each hold a basket covered in muslin to protect their sweetmeats from the summer’s fattened flies. Antonia’s mouth is watering, but she knows her mother would scold her if she tried to sneak a fricatella on the journey.

  They emerge from the long Via della Scala into a grand piazza, dominated at the far, northern end by the newly finished church of Santa Maria Novella. The carriage rumbles across the cobbles of the piazza and cuts in front of the church. The Rucellai family paid for the completion of the church’s edifice, and Antonia adores the small sculpted reliefs of billowing sails—the emblem of the Rucellai family—that stretch across the façade. She feels a great sense of pride, too, because Giovanni Rucellai himself commissioned several paintings from her father, before she was born. She strains to glimpse the baby-faced sun inlaid at the apex of the church—an innocent face that allows Antonia to forget, momentarily, the stormy sermons she hears within, week after week.

  Beyond the church and the city walls, the carriage heads out on the road towards Pistoia, gradually climbing away from the city. It’s just a half-hour journey to the convent, and Antonia decides, looking out across wheatfields, that if she had a choice of all the convents in Florence—inside or outside the city walls—she would choose the convent of San Donato in Polverosa, because it stands in the countryside where the air is clean, and in the height of summer, it is cooler than any convent huddled within the city.

  Her great-aunt, Sister Giustina, has lived enclosed in the convent since the age of eight, and professed as a nun at the age of fourteen. Antonia feels sorry for her; she has surely forgotten everything of her childhood before the cloister. For her aunt, Florence is a city that exists only in her mind’s eye, in images conjured by the letters from her family and by stories she hears in the convent’s parlour.

  The carriage reaches a rise in the road, and the convent’s church tower comes into view. In the past, at the first sight of this tower, Antonia would be excited, eager to see her friends, since she had no young brothers or sisters to play with at home. She looked forward to their games, played in the cloisters and courtyards of the convent. Today, however, her stomach is knotted; this might be her last visit, the last time she’ll be able to return home.

  One of the carriage’s wheels hits a pothole in the dirt road, and they jump in their seats. Her mother looks under the muslin to see if any of the canisiones have broken. But for Antonia, the jolt brings tears to her eyes. She takes her mother’s hand and holds it tight. She doesn’t utter a word, despite her mother’s quizzical look.

  The gate officer at the convent admits them through the first set of heavy doors. They wait while she shuts the doors behind them and then opens a second set of doors into the convent. They are led to the parlour by Jacopa, a young servant nun, whom Antonia has seen often enough but has never spoken to. It was in the boarders’ dormitory that Antonia learned from the older girls of Jacopa’s circumstances—how she was admitted to the convent as a servant nun, with little chance of ever professing; she would never wear a choir nun’s habit.

  Jacopa came from an artisan family—mostly stonemasons—but her father, uncle and older brother died when the plague returned to Florence. Her mother had already died in childbirth, and so the girl was left destitute. According to the older girls at the convent, she was saved when her father’s guild brought her plight to the attention of a wealthy Florentine merchant, who paid a small spiritual dowry to the convent to allow her admission.

  “Tell Sister Giustina that her niece and great-niece have arrived,” Antonia’s mother instructs Jacopa when they reach the parlour door. Jacopa inhales the sweet aroma of almonds and sugared pastry, and for a moment seems reluctant to leave. “When you return, you must offer these pastries and treats around the parlour. At the end of our visit, take whatever remains to the refectory for the sisters to share.”

  Entering the parlour, they acknowledge three female visitors, members of the Lenzi family, who sit together with their cousin Sister Zanobia—a wealthy woman who took the veil two years ago on the death of her husband, Francesco Lenzi. Her piety was well known, and this tipped the balance when weighed against the prospect of burdening her brother’s household.

  Antonia tugs her mother’s sleeve as a tall woman wearing white enters the parlour. An ornate brooch is pinned at her left shoulder. Her hair is plucked high on her forehead, and she wears a small turban-like balzo. “Ah! Tomasa di Benedetto Malifici. I see your daughter Antonia is still keeping you company,” she says so that everyone in the parlour might hear. Antonia understands the implication of this remark, and she blushes. Maria degli Albizzi is suggesting that either the Uccello family is confident of securing a marriage for Antonia, or they’re lax in delaying her entry to a convent.

  “She’s young for her age,” says her mother.

  Antonia accepts the slight, for she has no choice, and bows her head. She knows Maria degli Albizzi has steered commissions to her father’s workshop. Only last week, Donato mentioned her name in the sala. Antonia steps back slightly, that the conversation might veer in a new direction, but the ploy fails.

  “Let’s hope the whole of Florence doesn’t follow your lead,” says Maria degli Albizzi, “or we shall be short of novices to pray for the salvation of our city.”

  Her mother winces. “We do have good news from my son, Donato,” she says quietly. “He recently returned from Urbino, and he is now expanding his workshop under the guidance of his father.”

  “Then tell Donato to visit my husband. I’ll tell him to expect a visit in the coming week. And Donato should bring examples of his work. I will look at them myself.”

  “You make a gracious offer, and our son will be grateful.” She lowers her voice. “When Donato visits your husband, I will send a note for your attention regarding Antonia.”

  Sister Giustina enters the parlour. She waves discreetly to Antonia and walks as briskly as decorum might allow to greet her great-niece. “I’ve mis
sed you, Antonia, so much. We all have.”

  Antonia whispers, not wishing Maria degli Albizzi to hear, “Mother has news for you. I shouldn’t be the one to tell you.” From her aunt’s calm, smiling, incurious expression, Antonia knows the news has already reached the convent. Her mother joins them and places her hand firmly on her daughter’s shoulder, as though cautioning her. “Antonia, take one of the servants as a chaperone and go to the church. Say your prayers to Saint Martha. Your aunt and I need to talk for a while.”

  Her aunt raises her hand to the servant. “Leave the baskets, Jacopa, and take this child to the church.”

  Jacopa covers the food carefully with the muslin and places the baskets on the table at the back of the parlour. She follows Antonia out of the room, and when they’re out of sight, she nudges Antonia, dips her hand into the pocket in her tunic and reveals a fricatella. Antonia bursts into giggles; she’s shocked more than amused.

  “I’ll save it for later,” says Jacopa. She licks her fingers.

  “You mustn’t eat in church.”

  “I’m not that wicked.”

  They slip into the back of the church. Antonia kneels in a pew, and Jacopa kneels in the pew behind. It’s Antonia’s guess that Jacopa will not be saying any prayers.

  On her occasional visits to the convent’s church, Antonia has always wished she could kneel facing the large fresco by Cenni di Francesco on the right-hand side of the nave rather than the altar. Her great-aunt once told her that this nativity scene had been painted long before she ever arrived at the convent. Antonia convinces herself she’s showing no disrespect to Christ on the crucifix when she shifts her gaze to the fresco. It can’t be wrong, surely, to choose his nativity over his death as a source for her meditation. But she admits to herself that she’s less interested in praying this morning than in reassessing Cenni di Francesco’s work in the light of her father’s lessons.