Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind Read online

  As the vice president approaches them, Toniah realizes that, subconsciously, she expected a tall woman. Elodie Maingey is slight and shorter than any of the new recruits.

  She launches straight in. “I wanted to meet you all here instead of the conference room for a specific reason. Look around this imposing foyer.” She carelessly sweeps her hand. “Isn’t it begging for more sculptures? If you prove yourselves over the coming twelve months and take a permanent post with us here at the Academy, you must think big. That’s what I want you to take away from our first meeting. Imagine. Any one of you, through your own research, could secure the overdue recognition of one woman’s life’s work. But you’ll only achieve that”—she wags her finger—“through persistence. Dogged persistence.”

  She turns, walks ahead and, with a forward wave, evidently expects everyone to fall in behind her. Toniah is accustomed to a solitary working life and feels out of place playing follow-my-leader. It seems childlike. But she reminds herself for the second time today—the first time was when she climbed the twenty-one stone steps to the Academy’s entrance—that well-paid jobs for art historians are as rare as hen’s teeth.

  They shuffle in and take seats around an antique mahogany table, positioned diagonally across the conference room; it’s clearly the only way the table will fit. Historical rarity valued above common sense, thinks Toniah. She’s quick to grab a seat facing the floor-to-ceiling window so she can look out towards Tower Bridge. Elodie remains standing.

  “So . . . now that you’ve completed the Academy’s induction process, let’s consider how you might get started on the real work. Maybe you already have specific women within your sights from your previous research—women who deserve to be lifted out of obscurity. If not, you can take as your starting point one of the Posthumous Awards granted by your own professional organizations.” She places her fingertips on the polished table and leans forward. “You see, my mother was a damned wily character. She wasn’t out to chastise, because she knew that would be counterproductive. When she launched the Decade of Professional Reflections, she knew the professions would oblige. It was simple enough to acknowledge a few names—women who’d been inadvertently overlooked. Today, we are still building on those formal acknowledgments.”

  She clasps her hands together. “Now, let’s face up to something.” She slowly scans the faces around the conference table. “Some of you will discover over the coming year—and you may not care to admit it to yourself, but we will point it out for you”—she allows herself a smug twitch of her shoulders—“that you are best suited to deconstructing and trimming down the reputation of a man who has been unfairly elevated by past historians. On the other hand, you may find you’re better at piecing together shards of information to revise and enhance a woman’s reputation. We’ll try you out in both areas, but you mustn’t feel that one skill is more highly valued than the other, despite what I told you in the foyer. We need both skills, though we tend to keep the two missions in separate silos.”

  Toniah looks around at her colleagues, all smiling.

  “Bear in mind, I would like each of you to play a substantial role in achieving a Top Outcome over the coming year. It’s our aim to promote five Top Outcomes every quarter, coinciding with our appeals for donations.”

  There’s a raised hand. “Do we have to stick to our specialisms?” Good question, thinks Toniah.

  “In theory, you may roam outside your discipline. We like you to follow your instincts. It’s not for the Academy’s board to tell you, it’s for you to tell the board.”

  Oh dear, thinks Toniah. That sounds a bit rehearsed.

  “I’ll speak to you individually over the coming weeks. I like to be familiar with your interests.”

  As they stand to leave, she says, “Toniah, I’ll have a word with you now if that’s convenient.”

  They sit facing one another across the conference table.

  “You mentioned in your application that you live in a parthenogenetic household.”

  “I wasn’t sure about mentioning that.”

  “It didn’t do you any harm. Put it this way: How much do you know about our funding sources?”

  Toniah throws Elodie a quizzical look. “Just the public information—government sources, United Nations, charities, private donations.”

  “I’ll elaborate. A significant and growing source of small private donations comes from individual parthenogenetic women.” Her lopsided smile makes Toniah uncomfortable.

  “I’m actually second-generation. My grandmother was a trailblazer in the 2040s,” says Toniah.

  “Well, your partho background helped the board to push through your appointment. Recruitment felt we had enough art historians.”

  “And, so . . . ?”

  “So, you’ll need to make a good impression if you want to stay at the Academy. Only two among the current intake will be offered a permanent contract, and we’re under par in economics and medical science. What I suggest is that you have an immediate input on the Paul Gauguin project—there’s a final assessment nearing completion. I want you to look over the paper before the team makes its presentation to colleagues in the department. They’ll pick up any major issues before the paper goes to outside referees, but I’m curious to know your opinion.”

  “Gauguin?” asks Toniah, incredulous. Her palms feel clammy, and she wipes them along the arms of her chair. “Not my area by a long chalk. I’m Early Renaissance. And there’s no doubting his contribution, surely.”

  “Excellent. You’ll need convincing.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Shanghai, 2015

  Toni dares herself to go outside, but she’s caught by a queasy feeling—she knows they’ll all stare at her like she’s suddenly appeared out of nowhere, beamed down by aliens. So although she’s itching to walk along the Bund and watch the river traffic up close, it’s easier to say, Why bother? She has a fab view of the Huangpu River from her suite—her own frikkin’ suite!—seven floors up at the corner of the hotel. From the side window of her bedroom, she can see the river flowing northwest. From the front windows, stretching across the bedroom and sitting room, she can see the river sweeping north and then eastwards in a deep loop to the Yangtze and the open sea. Her dad sketched a map of the river for her, and she’s committed it to memory. She never has any idea which way she’s facing. She feels, looking out of the front window, that she’s facing south, towards . . . where? Hong Kong? But apparently she is not.

  This is stupid. Halfway around the planet, and she’s hanging around her hotel room. She grabs her denim jacket, her bespoke denim jacket, embellished with her own handiwork—flowers embroidered in the armpits and red-headed woodpeckers along the sleeves—perfect for the Bund not simply because it’s chilly in the late afternoon in spring but because fashion is a big thing in China. Her dad says people have their clothes made to measure in the market so everyone’s more individual.

  Toni thinks this is amazingly cool—everyone wants to be a bit different in the most populated country on earth. She walks along the darkened corridor towards the elevators and stops to snap a photo of these really weird glass boxes set into the wall along the corridor, like fish tanks without the water. Inside each glass box, there’s a rock. Just a lump of grey rock. Small lights are inset into the tanks, and they shine downwards so that the cragginess of each rock is obvious. Is it art? She has no idea. She must ask her dad.

  He said he wouldn’t be gone for long. He’s in a pre-meeting at his client’s office before they visit the client’s home town, Suzhou. That’s when they’ll get down to the details of exactly which painting he wants her dad to copy, at what size. Her dad refuses to paint actual size; that way, he avoids any dodgy business. He’s a professional copyist painter, with the emphasis on professional; that’s what he always tells people.

  The hotel reception is on the second floor, and as Toni wanders past, all three reception staff look up and smile. She takes the elevator down to the ground floor,
to a windowless mini-reception where another receptionist stands in semi-darkness at a high counter. He’s stationed there so that when people walk in off the street, he can say, “Please take the elevator to reception.” Toni reckons he has the most boring job on the planet. Does he think it’s a good job? She has no idea. He says, “Have a good afternoon. Do you need a taxi?” She shakes her head. “No, thanks.”

  Toni texts her dad: Gone out. On the bund. He replies: On way back, meet you opp hotel. Don’t wander off. She replies: As if!

  She knows he’ll be in a panic now. Out on the Bund, on her own; anything could happen. That’s the problem now; he thinks anything can happen, as though once one bad thing happens to you, it’s easier for another bad thing to smack you. As if when you’re vulnerable, God decides to kick you while you’re still down. But she doesn’t believe in God, not since she woke up on her last birthday, her first day as a teenager. That’s when she decided.

  Anyway, she doesn’t mind her dad’s fussing, because she’s just the same—only she doesn’t say anything. It’s like she expects a disaster with every ping. During the past two hours, she has imagined her dad falling down the stairs at the metro station and being trampled by the crowds. She has imagined him walking from the metro and glancing instead of looking at a busy junction and getting flattened by a motorcycle rickshaw driving on the wrong side of the road. It wouldn’t actually kill him, but he’d definitely end up in hospital. And now he’s rushing back. The roads are so dangerous here.

  Toni comes to a conclusion as she waits patiently at the road junction outside the hotel. She should worry about bigger things instead of stressing about traffic accidents. She should upscale to the apocalypse.

  So she crosses to the promenade, leans over the railing and imagines in the distance a tsunami sweeping up the Huangpu. Would it come from her left or her right? She can only imagine it coming from the left. But that’s correct. It would come from the sea, from the left. In front of her, there’s a procession of three open barges laden with pyramids of coal. Boxy Chinese characters are spray-painted in yellow across the coal. The delivery address? Or a Chinese proverb? Or “Happy Birthday, Mai Ling”? That’s the name of her best friend in the denim-jacket-pimping embroidery group. The tsunami roars towards the Bund. She grips the steel railing, and the leading edge of the wave lifts the coal barges so they’re half as high as the buildings of Pudong on the opposite bank. Yellow-coated coal pours as easily as cornflakes from a box.

  Toni feels much better for that. The world looks super normal now.

  Daylight is fading, and the digital advertising on the Pudong skyscrapers starts to pulsate: “Dunlop” to “Range Rover” to “I ♥ SHANGHAI.” She wheels around, too quickly, for she now attracts attention. It’s not as though she looks foreign; her hair is dark. But when anyone sees her ice-grey eyes, they seem to freak out; she must look like a ghost. Two girls with that Harajuku look—white net tutus, white lace-up high tops and preppy, tight sweaters—smile at her, take out their smartphones and snap her photo. She snaps them back. They’re delighted. Toni could get used to this place with all the smiley faces.

  With her back to pullulating Pudong, she takes in the sedate granite buildings ranged along the Bund—the near-uninterrupted vista of 1920s solidity—and she picks out the Waldorf Astoria where her dad took her this morning for a white-chocolate mocha in the Long Bar. So swanky, but in a dark-wood way, with huge, lazy ceiling fans.

  Toni turns back to the Pudong skyscrapers, a cityscape built in the last thirty years on swampy farmland on the east bank of the Huangpu. Small passenger ferries ply across the river, miraculously avoiding the heavy traffic of barges and container ships. The biggest ships are guided around the tight loop of the Huangpu by tugs pulling on their sterns. Between the commercial traffic and the passenger ferries, a golden galleon twinkles its carefree way, seemingly indifferent to the possibilities of waterborne calamity. “300 Tourists Drown in Huangpu as Megaton Ship Rams Golden Galleon.” Toni wants to be a reporter when she grows up.

  She isn’t the only person twisting back and forth trying to reconcile the two banks of the river. “Colonial Past Meets Confident Chinese Future.” Toni wonders whether, if she travelled at light speed back and forth across the river, she would travel back in time. She read about an astronaut going into space and back at high speed. He lost a second, or something.

  If she could go back in time and fix things, then she wouldn’t be here now on a business trip with her dad. He’d said she could stay home with a friend, but she knew he wanted some company. In fact, he follows her around the house now, always sitting nearby. Even if he’s doing some admin, he’ll sit close with his laptop. She doesn’t mind; it’s good, really, but she knows there’s something she can’t ever say, and it hangs there. And she’s never, ever, going to say it aloud to him, or anyone. She’s sticking with his version. So she says the words in her head once more, hoping this will be the last time. She hopes she can throw the words in the river and lose them in, where, the Chinese Sea? Here goes, one last time: He should have collected the parcel. It was his parcel.

  He would have driven a different route, or maybe set off a few seconds sooner, because her mum always opened the back passenger door to hang up her jacket on the hook, and she always checked the rear-view mirror before setting off, which he didn’t. So even if her dad had stepped out of the house at the exact same time as her mum did, he’d have driven past the timber depot half a minute before the wrong-place, wrong-time accident—as her dad describes it. He never mentions the parcel; he just says she was driving into town.

  A few texts are exchanged, and as Toni makes her way along the Bund, she spots her dad. It isn’t difficult, because he’s taller than most people around him, and he’s wearing an unnecessarily bright, red, flat cap. He had wanted Toni to buy a colourful hat at Heathrow airport, but she refused point-blank. “I’ll find you,” she said, “with that nuclear button on your head.”

  He hugs her. “It’s getting dark already.”

  “I’m fine. Everyone’s friendly.”

  “Don’t accept any invitations for coffee or anything. You just don’t know. We’re new to all this.”

  “How did it go with Mr. Lu?”

  “Great. Let’s celebrate. I’ve found a restaurant.” He points to a road leading away from the Bund. “Down there.”

  “Has he chosen a painting?”

  “We’ve narrowed it to three, and he’ll decide at the weekend. So . . . we’re going to Suzhou tomorrow, and he’s booked another hotel for us.”

  “It won’t be as amazing as this hotel.”

  “I thanked him. I said you love it.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Urbane, polite, knowledgeable.”

  “Urbane?”

  “A sophisticated man about town. He’s done piles of homework, too, which was a bit embarrassing. I had to pretend I knew as much as he did.”

  “And did you ask him my question? Why didn’t he ask a Chinese artist to do the job?”

  “No point. He wanted the Dominic Munroe signature on the painting.” And in a deep, self-mocking tone, “Copyist to the English aristocracy.”

  “Do I have to meet Mr. Lu?”

  “You should say hello if he drops by the hotel in Suzhou.”

  “Okay. If you think so.”

  “You’ll like him. He smiles a lot.”

  They walk away from the Bund along East Jinling Road, which is lined by tall stone buildings. Electric scooters speed past them, and Toni points one out to her dad. A young man, an office worker in a grey suit and white shirt, sits forward on his scooter with two male passengers tucked behind him, riding pillion, wearing the exact same colour of suit and shirt. All three men are laughing, heads back. Toni and her dad twist around and watch them as they swing out into the traffic on Zhongshan East Second Road.

  “Thank God the bikes are all electric here,” says her dad. “Can you imagine, back in Florence, with this number
of bikes?”

  “At least you could hear them coming.” She stops. “Dad, look at these shops.” Haberdashery businesses occupy the street-level shops, all selling more or less the same textile accessories—reels of ribbons, decorative edging, fabric tape.

  “Dad, I want to buy some embroidered tape. Will they sell just a few centimetres?”

  “I doubt it. Looks like wholesale. Hey, I reckon we’ve time to go to the fabric market tomorrow before we catch the train. I’ve got the address. How about that?”

  “Brilliant. I want to pimp another denim jacket, better than this one.”

  As they walk farther from the Bund, the pavement becomes more uneven, and the small textile businesses give way to bakers, tobacconists, silk-duvet fabricators, barbers. There’s a rotten smell from a stinky-tofu stall, so they rush past, cut off right and pass through a forest of concrete pillars that carry the Yan’an Elevated Road.

  “Here it is.” The Shanghai Laolao Grandmother Restaurant.

  Toni throws a worried glance at her dad.

  “Don’t worry. I checked online. They’ll have a picture menu.”

  “And with your brilliant Mandarin . . .”

  “Yeah, we’ll be fine.”

  Her dad has learned how to say in Mandarin—which isn’t a huge amount of use as people here speak Shanghainese—One bottle of beer and one Coca-Cola, please. They join a melee inside the restaurant entrance, and within moments they’re pulled away by the manager, who seats them in a cubicle close by the entrance. A waitress immediately deposits a large, ring-bound, plasticized menu on the plain laminate table.

  “Did you see her shirt?” Her dad tries to catch sight of the waitress. “Can you see? It’s totally creased. Looks like it’s been stuffed in a bag for two years.”