Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind

by Anne Charnock

  “I’ve seen a job I fancy, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “And you can’t think straight because of Maximillian.”

  “And I daren’t discuss the job with Poppy. She’d freak out.”

  She explains that her job at the Academy has taken a sour turn. The Gauguin project, which she didn’t want to be involved with in the first place, has leaked. Found its way to the Ministry of Culture in France, no less. And now she’s been told to drop her quattrocento work and join the Gauguin team for the foreseeable future, possibly for the rest of her contract. She’s in the rearguard.

  “Yesterday, the real meltdown started,” she says. “The French ambassador in London contacted our vice president, Elodie Maingey. The French are incandescent that Gauguin’s being considered for reassessment. They’re threatening to cut off all their funding to the Academy. So, you see, it’s all politics in the end.”

  “Who leaked the report?”

  “It hardly matters now. It could have been anyone on the Gauguin team. Let’s face it: if you’ve spent a chunk of your career specializing in his work, you’re going to be pretty pissed off if his reputation is butchered.”

  “So what’s the other job? It’s within the Academy?”

  “No. It’s a university posting. Not as prestigious as the Academy, but . . .” Her face is alight. “I actually feel the job was created for me. It’s a perfect match with my doctorate, and I’d have my own budget for the first time. But the thing is . . . it’s in Beijing.”

  “So . . . ? Beijing isn’t Mars.”

  Ben sticks his head around the door of the New Inn in Winchelsea and reports back. “Looks good. Serves Abbot Ale and Old Speckled Hen, and they do food.”

  “Beer first? Or the church?” says Toniah.

  “Let’s do the church.”

  “Save the best till last?”

  “I like churches. And let’s walk around the village. I’ve never seen a place like this—not in this country.”

  They turn away from the pub and face the thirteenth-century church dedicated to Saint Thomas the Martyr of Canterbury. It stands at the centre of an expansive grassy square with a random scattering of graves. To the left of the square, looking down the village’s main street, there’s a fine view over marshland to the waters of the English Channel.

  Winchelsea has none of the higgledy-piggledy streets typical of settlements dating back hundreds of years. It’s laid out on a grid pattern with wide streets. In the tradition of appropriating good ideas from elsewhere, Edward I copied the street pattern from the bastide system in France, from his lands in Aquitaine.

  “Saint Thomas the Martyr? That’s Thomas Becket, yes?” says Ben. “Slain at the altar.”

  “‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’”

  “One of the history lessons I do remember.”

  They walk across the square towards the church, which—from the outside—seems to comprise a main nave and two large side chapels, with ruins either side. Toniah comes to halt by a memorial set into the exterior wall. It’s the date that pulls her up—1888, one of those marker years that stand out on Toniah’s art history timelines. The year that Émile Bernard painted his Breton Women in the Meadow. The year that Bernard and Gauguin exhibited with the French avant-garde at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris—when the critic Édouard Dujardin coined a new term for the two men’s departure from impressionism. Cloisonnism, referring way back to Byzantine jewellery making, when wires were used to separate areas of colourful enamel. And memorialized here in Winchelsea—in that same year—the twenty-four-year-old son of the local surgeon, who died “after a few hours’ illness from cholera at Rawal Pindi, East India.” Chiselled in marble. If she were to have a memorial stone, she’d want her name to stand in relief, to have substance.

  She adds Rawal Pindi to her timeline marker for 1888. This is how Toniah absorbs world history.

  Ben has gone ahead into the church. She makes her way around to the church porch and feels that familiar thrill of anticipation. This is the moment she adores—she turns the circular iron handle and pushes the heavy oak door. What will she find? And in this moment, when the door is open by a crack, she brings to mind, as she always does on the threshold of a church, the marble statue of the Virgin Mary in Venice—she can’t remember the name of the church; she should note these things down, but it was such a hot day—a statue dressed in real white robes. Adding another layer of macabre gothic, the Virgin Mary’s robes were greying.

  Today, however, Toniah steps into a field of colour. Ben is already standing at the altar rail, and he slowly turns around, mesmerized. Toniah has never seen so much stained glass in a church of this size, or even in a church twice this size. The stone walls seem to melt away. And from the bold geometric style and the intensity of the colour, she guesses the glasswork is a twentieth-century addition.

  Three altars are visible from the entrance, plus three ancient tombs, which are set into the wall below three large expanses of stained glass. She and Ben are the only people present. They take separate paths around the church, and Toniah finds herself in front of a window with both swirling and geometric waves, and a boat. For a moment, she interprets the scene as the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, but then she realizes it’s a more modern scene. It’s a sea rescue. Women and children stand on a harbour’s edge looking out to sea. Across the bottom panes of glass, there’s text painted in black capital letters. It’s partly obscured by the window’s stonework, but she gets the gist of the story:

  MEN OF RYE HARBOUR, CREW OF THE LIFEBOAT MARY STANFORD . . . QUICK TO HEAR THE CRY OF HUMANITY ABOVE THE ROARING OF THE SEAS . . . STAYED NOT TO WEIGH DOUBT OR DANGER BUT . . . THEIR PORTION IN THIS LIFE FOR THE RANSOM OF MEN WHOM THEY HAD NEVER KNOWN . . . WENT BOLDLY INTO THE LAST OF ALL THEIR STORMS.

  Ben strolls across to stand beside her. “You know, this church is one huge war memorial.”

  “Except for this window. Look, it’s the story of a local lifeboat disaster.”

  In the pub, over cheese sandwiches and beer, they compare notes; they’re each scanning the history of Winchelsea.

  “Hellfire. It’s been one disaster after another,” says Ben. “I didn’t realize. All the holidays we had along this coast . . . Listen to this trail of mayhem: French raiding parties, burning and pillaging, the Black Death, drownings—”

  “And when you were dead, that was it. No avatars, no photographs. You know, I sometimes feel that Poppy should get an avatar of Mother.”

  He drains his glass. “I’ll get another round.”

  “So what about this job?” he asks when he settles the pint glasses on the table. He sits and knocks the table leg with his knee; beer slops onto the table.

  “It’s a full-time senior lecturer’s post in a new European Studies department, focusing on early women artists and writers. I don’t want to apply unless I’m prepared to go. I honestly think I’ve a good chance of being appointed.”

  “Would you go if you didn’t have to consider Poppy?”

  “That’s a big if.”

  “It wouldn’t be the end of the world. It’s not like going to war. Look at those poor sods listed in the church.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. I do feel ready for an adventure.”

  “If you’re asking for my opinion, I’ll say this: you’re a long time dead.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  London, 2015

  Fourteen of Toni’s friends have each sent her a photograph of a dead relative. She now reckons she’ll get an A-plus for her history project. So there’s no point in doing any more work on it; she can’t do any better than A-plus. She’s disappointed that twelve of the fourteen dead relatives are men, though, and only one died outside Europe. She’d like a better spread of photos across the map. And, she admits to herself, she had hoped someone would send her a woman who died in childbirth—to make the point that in the old days, young women didn’t have to go to war to end up in a coffin.

&nbs
p; From the desk in her bedroom, she looks out onto the back garden. It’s a warm evening, and the door to her dad’s shed is open—he refuses to call his shed a studio. There’s a green flag in the beer bottle on his windowsill. A green flag means he can be disturbed. A red flag means don’t disturb him unless it’s an emergency. A yellow flag means if anyone’s going over to see him, bring a cup of tea. Toni suspects he’s forgotten his flag system, because the green flag has stood in the bottle for months. In any case, they send texts to one another.

  She scrolls through the causes of death: seven died in action in World War I, three in World War II. One drowned in a canal—a woman. One fell from scaffolding. One drowned at sea. One died of diphtheria—a girl, in India. All these deaths happened more than fifty years ago, so she wonders if she could slip in some historical figures; it would be easy to find the names of famous people who died in disasters like the sinking of the Titanic. That would give her a pin in the North Atlantic.

  But the deaths of her friends’ relatives would then seem less important, so she ditches the idea. Her teacher, Mrs. O’Brien, also sent her a photo—it showed her great-uncle in his Royal Navy uniform—and she remembered to write an interesting thing about him: he was the fastest runner in his school. He died in World War II.

  Last week, Mrs. O’Brien stopped Toni in the corridor at school and remarked that her history project was “very engaging” but asked if Toni didn’t find the subject matter upsetting. Caught off-guard—Toni wasn’t sure what Mrs. O’Brien was implying—she blurted, “I’m going to be late for French.” Mrs. O’Brien blocked her way and said that anytime Toni wanted a chat, she’d be happy to spend some time with her, maybe during lunch break.

  Toni prayed no one overheard this remark and, in desperation, backtracked; she said she found it sad about the little girl in India who died of diphtheria. The last thing Toni wants is anyone in school thinking she’s teacher’s pet, because someone will then call her a bitch. So there’s no way she’s going to meet Mrs. O’Brien for a lunchtime chat, even though Mrs. O’Brien is her favourite teacher in the whole school. Toni doesn’t want to tell her anything private. She reckons all the teachers gossip about the kids when they’re in the staffroom.

  There’s a familiar clattering outside as her dad locks up his shed. He slides a big bolt and fastens the padlock. Toni likes this sound. She jumps up, leans out of her window and shouts, “Want a hand with dinner?”

  “No need. I’ll barbecue.”

  That’s enough schoolwork for one day, she thinks. She opens her desk drawer and brings out Mr. Lu’s aphorism cards and a red notebook, the first page of which is titled “My Life in Aphorisms by Toni Munroe.” None of Mr. Lu’s cards capture her most recent revelation; namely, that since she started “Toni’s History Project—Persons Unknown,” she hardly ever stresses about her dad having an accident.

  She’s struggling to write her own aphorism, and the best so far is this: Do not waste time imagining improbable disasters, for the worst disasters are always a surprise. She reckons she can do better; she wants to write something more poetic. She tries again: Do not waste time imagining improbable disasters, for the worst disasters are beyond imagination. And again: Premonitions of disaster are never as shocking as the real thing. To make a premonition is to waste . . . She doesn’t know how to finish that one.

  It’s far more difficult to write an aphorism than she expected. She writes: The sign of true genius is making an incredibly complex task look ridiculously easy.

  She hears her dad press the ignition button on the barbecue, and she hopes he makes some veggie skewers; he cooks more red meat than her mum ever did. In fact, she’d like to go vegetarian, but she’s holding back from mentioning anything to her dad. What’s that phrase she heard recently? Taking . . . ownership. Next time they have a barbecue, she’ll tell her dad she’ll make veggie skewers.

  With her homework finished, she pulls out a plastic storage box from under her bed. She discards the lid and slides her hands under a neatly folded denim jacket—a surprise present from Natalie. She lifts the jacket onto the bed. It’s vintage; it’s an absolutely brilliant find. Natalie found it in the charity shop near her office. She’d spotted a tangle of unsorted denim in the chaotic sorting room at the back of the shop, and she had the cheek to ask if she could have a rummage.

  Toni reckons that Natalie must be psychic, because this jacket’s the perfect colour, and it’s exactly what she wanted. She smooths her hand across the denim and pokes her little finger through each of the buttonholes in turn. She’s going to take her time with this jacket. Not like her first one, which was a size too big in the first place. She didn’t realize how much time she’d spend on the project, how much work it would involve. So this time, she’s making sure she has the following: the right jacket—cropped and not unisex; the right shade of blue—the lightest; the right kind of wear—mainly on the cuffs and collar. And she wants all her ideas sorted out in her head before she begins. Because she’ll never be happy with the end result if the starting point isn’t right. For sure, she’ll cut a strip off her mum’s psychedelic dress and stitch it to the underside of the collar.

  Mainly, though, she wants this jacket to be a memento of her trip to China, so cherry blossoms will have to figure in the design. When she asked her dad if pink and purple embroidery would work against the pale-blue denim, he suggested she do some colour tests with pastel sticks. It wouldn’t be his style to say, simply, yes or no. And her pastel tests are now pinned to her corkboard. She stands in front of them, closes her eyes and counts to sixty in her head, hoping that when she opens her eyes, the best colour combo will jump out.

  She opens her eyes and glares at the gaudy, pulsating colours. Purple—it’s clear now—is too close to the denim colour, because purple is made by mixing blue and red. But pink on pale blue looks a bit flat. She rummages in her box of pastels, finds the purple stick and cleans the end on a piece of scrap paper. She adds a few specks of purple on top of the pink. That’s probably the answer, but she’ll do some more tests. After all, it’s going to take at least a month to embroider a branch of blossoms across the jacket, so she’s determined to get it right. The blossoms, she reckons, will start on the back by the waistband, and one branch will curve around and stretch along one arm, and another branch will reach across to the shoulder and curl over, to end roughly by her collarbone.

  Her dad whistles from the garden. Her mum would never do that. Instead, she’d call Toni’s name up the stairs and shout, “Set the table, please.” Toni admits she prefers the whistle; it never sounds impatient. She lays the jacket face down on the bed and imagines the whole design. She fancies sewing a Chinese sword from cloth scraps, and she thinks she’ll position it vertically from the collar to the waist. It’s likely to look more like a dagger than a sword, but that’s all right, she thinks. And she’ll embroider birds and musical notes along the blossoming branch to remind her of the music in the trees of the hotel garden in Suzhou. Everyone will think that’s cute, but Toni and her dad will know it’s a joke. The question is: What species of bird?

  Her dad whistles again.

  “Sadly, Anna took the hint,” says her dad. “So there’s no pudding this evening.”

  “Very funny,” says Toni.

  He laughs softly, and Toni’s smirk softens. There’s nothing better than a barbecue before the beginning of true summer.

  “Maybe, Dad, you should bake something for Anna. Then she’ll know you were serious.”

  “Serious about baking?”

  “What else?” She pulls a face. She can feel herself blush—not because her dad is embarrassing; that’s a given. She’s blushing because whenever she’s at home, she imagines her mum can hear everything they say to one another. She’s always wondering if her mum thinks they’re doing the right or wrong thing. Like, for example, her dad joking about Anna Robecchi. If her mum were standing next to them, would she be smiling about the puddings, or would she think they were being ru
de and ungrateful? Her mum and Anna were pretty good friends.

  “Listen, Toni. I might rent a studio for a month, because this painting for Mr. Lu will be a tight squeeze for the shed. So . . . the point is, I might not be home when you get back from school.”

  “I’ll get on with my homework.”

  “Good girl. I’ll have his painting finished before the summer holidays. Talking of which . . . I have some news.”

  Toni puts down her knife and fork, sits back and frowns. “Good or bad?”

  “I’ve booked a ferry crossing to France for the first week of your summer holidays. And . . . I’ve booked a small hotel near Arras.”

  “Where’s Arras? Is there a beach?”

  He shakes his head and laughs. “It’s near the war graves. I thought we should look for Arthur.”

  He opens out the map of France and spreads it across the kitchen island. On his laptop, he opens a folder of bookmarked links: several pages on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, a map showing Arthur’s grave with coordinates, hotels in the area, cycle routes between the cemeteries, the Canadian war memorial. He also opens a bunch of files: the cemetery’s historical information, the route from the ferry terminal to the small hotel, the hotel’s details.

  Toni stands with hands on hips. How did he keep all this preplanning to himself? she wonders. She looks at him. Sometimes grown-ups are a real surprise.

  “I thought we’d have an adventure instead of going to a beach. We can make picnics and cycle around the countryside.”

  “Is it hilly?”

  “Rolling countryside. Not too hilly. I reckon we’d have a great time.”

  “But your bike is better than mine. I won’t keep up with you.”

  He taps the side of his nose. “How would you . . . like an early birthday present? I thought we could sell your old bike, and”—he looks at her, eyebrows raised—“maybe we should sell your mum’s bike, too.”