Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind Read online

  She decides to explore the far reaches of the garden, follows a path through a stand of young green bamboo. She finds, to her complete bewilderment, the best thing ever to photograph. How unbelievable, she thinks, that she found it before her dad. She steps closer and inspects the bamboo. Chinese characters have been carved into the tall, woody stems. The characters are so clear—pale brown against the smooth, hard green. Absolutely bloody amazing. She takes out her phone and takes seven photographs. This is the most fabulous thing in the entire Master of the Nets Garden, and she found it.

  He likes her photographs of the bamboo graffiti.

  “What do you think the writing says?” asks Toni.

  “Peoples’ names? ‘Toni was here,’” he says.

  “It could be a line of poetry.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, this garden is special . . . and Chinese people are more respectful. They wouldn’t do gormless graffiti.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. Anyway, these might be political slogans.”

  “Or secret messages.”

  “Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If you exhibited this photograph in a gallery in London or New York,” he says, enlarging a section of bamboo on her smartphone screen, “people would ask exactly these kind of questions. Assuming they couldn’t read Mandarin. As the photographer”—he turns and raises his eyebrows at her—“you’d have to decide whether you wanted people to guess what the characters say, or whether you should translate the words and then use the translation as a title for the photograph.”

  Her dad says bizarre things like this all the time. It’s like he’s trying to make her brain think like his artist’s brain. She doesn’t know what he’s on about half the time, and she’s learned to just say hmm—without even rolling her eyes.

  “Hmm. Well, I’d like a painting of the bamboo graffiti. Make me one, hey?”

  “Why paint it? Make a big print from the photo.”

  “You copy other peoples’ paintings. Why not copy my photograph?”

  He pulls a face as though he’s smelling milk, suspecting it’s gone sour. There’s clearly some big artsy conflict going on in his head.

  “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  “Good. And I’ll tell everyone that the characters are coded messages.”

  He laughs and puts his arm around her. “Come on, they’ll be closing soon. We don’t want to get locked in.”

  Coded messages, Dominic muses as they leave the garden. The ways kids think . . . He recalls, momentarily, his own childhood excitement over a secret spy headquarters hidden at the back of a tailor’s shop, at a time when a coded message involved winding a strip of paper around a pencil.

  There’s a more adult interpretation of coded message, one that’s taken on a mutated meaning. He feels a shiver of recognition as he hears again the police officer who asked Dominic to formally identify the body. It’s not a child-friendly environment. He was home with Toni at the time—she’d stayed home from school—and although he knew the morgue was an inappropriate place to take a child, the police officer correctly intuited that Dominic needed everything spelled out. He was in shock. And down at the morgue—the memory is always at the edge of his consciousness—a white sheet covered Connie’s body; her neck and face were uncovered. He couldn’t believe there was anything wrong with her. The morgue assistant left him alone, and Dominic wishes now that he hadn’t lifted the sheet.

  Dominic takes a bottle of wine from the room’s minibar. It’s not surprising Toni has crashed, he thinks; she struggled to stay awake through their room-service dinner. They had an early start this morning, and everything here is different. That’s it, he says to himself; it’s the incessant lack of familiarity that’s so exhausting.

  Toni lies curled on her bed, and scattered around her on the bedcover are small paper and plastic bags that contain the small treasures she discovered in Shanghai’s South Bund Fabric Market. Hand-embroidered tapes, painted buttons, metallic thread.

  He wonders if the fabric market will be the highlight of Toni’s visit to China. It wasn’t what he expected; he’d thought they’d find themselves in an open-air market with semipermanent stalls, rather like Shepherds Bush or Borough Market back in London. In fact, the South Bund Fabric Market turned out to be a three-storey building with escalators—a down-market shopping mall, each floor packed with small shops selling fabrics, scarves, bags, belts. The tailors’ shops displayed sample suits, dresses, skirts, shirts and winter coats on hangers. Shoppers merely pointed at the design they liked, and then they were measured. Or they took a garment for copying. For Dominic, the charm of the fabric market lay solely in seeing Toni’s excitement. But a flash of panic did occur—when she ran back through the market to find the button shop, he thought he’d lost her.

  For him, the big eye-opener today was the rail system. China knows how to move people. Shanghai and Suzhou railway stations were the size of airport terminals. There were two departure lounges for every train—one for the front half and one for the back. And the platforms were as wide as airport runways. In their first-class carriage on the shiny white bullet train—he chuckles quietly as he relives the journey—the overhead TV monitors were showing Mr. Bean’s trip to the Launderette. All the passengers were laughing out loud. Occasionally, the show was interrupted, and the driver appeared on the screen with a view of the track ahead. He would turn to the camera and, wearing white cotton gloves, make a clenched-fist salute whenever the train reached maximum speed. Dominic had needed to remind himself more than once that he was in China, not Japan, because in his imagination, Japan had always offered the default vision of the future. He wonders how China will cope when all this new infrastructure needs replacing in a hundred years’ time, just as London is now struggling to replace Victorian water mains, sewers, bridges, tunnels.

  Mr. Lu bought the train tickets for them in advance and, fortunately, explained how to decipher the printed information. Dominic smiles when he recollects Toni’s rebuke: Jeez, Dad, I don’t know why you’re panicking so much. It’s all in the guidebook. There’s even a photo of a rail ticket with every bit of information explained. One sight had stopped them dead: a man in iron ankle shackles being escorted by two policemen through the Shanghai terminus.

  The door is wedged open to his adjoining bedroom, but instead of settling down next door with his glass of wine, he slumps in the armchair by Toni’s bed. He doesn’t dare close his eyes; he knows he’d sleep only until the small hours. He’d wake up confused, and he’s had enough of that. In those first months, he’d wake in the night and feel a surge of relief, believing he’d woken from a nightmare. Connie hadn’t died. One time, he dreamed he heard the clinking of a cup being stirred in the kitchen below, and he rushed down, believing that Connie couldn’t sleep and she’d decided to make a cup of tea—he was halfway down the stairs before the truth of the matter felled him.

  No more daytime or early-evening naps.

  It’s a godsend to have Toni’s company, but at the end of the day, he misses the lazy exchange of stories with Connie.

  He hopes this trip to China will draw some sort of line, that China will become a new landmark in Toni’s life. In his life, too. Not that any landmark could ever dwarf Connie’s accident. But at least they’ll have something else to refer to as a time marker—in their thoughts, that is. He wants Toni to think to herself: I did such and such after I went to China. Instead of: I did such and such after Mum died.

  He lies in a deep bath with his wine-soaked thoughts, imagining himself laid out on a slab. He takes another mouthful of wine and reaches up to place his glass on the marble sink. He’s afraid that if he closes his eyes he’ll see Connie’s trauma wound, the cleaned-up aftermath from being impaled on, what? A timber pole? He didn’t ask the mortuary assistant what exactly had skewered her. He’ll never tell Toni, or anyone else, about the injury. He doesn’t want anyone living with the mental image of her impalement, the blunt-force trauma, as stated wi
thout elaboration and printed in plain Helvetica in the autopsy report. He simply says that she died from internal injuries.

  He peers down at his own body—unscathed, unmarked by any past injuries. Connie once commented that men could exit this world with their bodies perfectly intact, pure as snow almost, having none of the damage that women routinely incur in childbirth. She didn’t say it with any edge of bitterness. Toni’s birth had been reasonably straightforward. He’d only said that once, though, in Connie’s company. She’d replied, “Not from where I was looking.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Florence, 1469

  Paolo sits at the plain, paper-strewn table in his study and assesses his previous day’s work—a half-finished pen drawing of a small garden urn. He placed the urn on a low wall in the courtyard so that when he sat down to start his sketch, his eye level was close to the centre point of the urn. In addition, he positioned the urn on the shaded side of the courtyard to avoid the visual distractions of flickering and static cast shadows. This allowed him to focus on a searingly complex mental task—namely, to imagine the walls of the urn as a series of hollow building blocks. His drawing thus comprises the penned outlines of all these tiny blocks; the blocks that form the back of the urn can be seen through the hollow blocks that form the front.

  By embarking on this some-would-say foolhardy project, he hopes to reveal how a symmetrical object manifests within a perspective drawing. How much distortion has to occur to make the urn look real? It’s a painstaking task, but if he doesn’t do it, he asks himself, who will?

  His patrons and admirers appreciate this eccentricity—his love of perspective—which everyone can see in his work. But he knows that for some people, his style is seen as intrusive, cold, too clever by half.

  There’s a second eccentricity that is not universally admired. It arises from his early training as a sculptor in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s workshop. He can’t help it—he sees the world with a sculptor’s eye. So when he applies paint to his panel or canvas, and imagines a strong light raking across his scene, he paints abrupt edges to the shadows. Most of his contemporaries would blend into shadow to suggest the subtle change of curvature in a horse’s neck or a man’s naked torso. Uccello paints badly chiselled sculptures rather than flesh-and-blood people. Paolo closes his eyes and grinds his teeth. That fool of a silk merchant—whose comment reached Paolo through a mutual friend.

  He does admit one professional regret. He wishes he’d made more work, more paintings, because he has experienced no better feeling in his life, no other comparable sense of euphoria, than the feeling at the start of a grand commission, when he conjured a vision, or at least some premonition, of the final outcome.

  He has never been daunted by the size of an undertaking. He methodically planned his preparatory sketches, dozens of them for each commission. Many were drawn from observation—the flaring nostrils of a startled and rearing horse, a soldier’s helmet lying on the ground, a hand gripping a sword, a woman shielding her face. Other sketches emerged from his imagination—a dragon’s head, a lashing, spiked tail. These were but a beginning, and though many were sketched by his assistants, it was his own skill, guided by God’s hand, that brought all these elements together in a composition that froze time at the moment of greatest drama. And all the while, as he journeyed from initial idea to final composition, he deftly balanced his expansive self-confidence with essential, flattening self-criticism.

  He turns to the pile of sketches for The Battle of San Romano triptych and sighs heavily. Several of the sketches were useful for all three paintings, so which painting should he assign them to? He’s now of a mind to archive all the drawings together, unsorted. What does it matter? They’re of no interest to anyone other than himself. He pulls out a drawing that’s larger than the others in the pile—it’s the final drawing for what he regards as the best work in the triptych.

  He smiles, pleased with himself. This will be Antonia’s lesson today.

  When Paolo enters the sala, he finds his wife cutting up some old, fine-quality curtains on the dining table. He’s proud of his wife’s care of the household, her diligence in making savings. She’s cutting away the worn areas of cloth, and no doubt she’ll find some new use for the salvaged material. Seeing her husband, Tomasa is quick to set aside her work. She takes a seat.

  “Don’t tire yourself,” says Paolo.

  “I’m tired already. I didn’t sleep last night, Paolo.” She shakes her head. “I believe I’ll meet my Maker sooner than he himself intends if you don’t start negotiations over Antonia. I can’t get this worry out of my head for two moments combined. This year, it must be decided. Her childhood has passed—”

  “You shouldn’t worry.”

  She leans towards him and whispers, “What will you say if you receive a proposal in the coming weeks?”

  “I’ll say, ‘Come back in twelve months.’ They’ll wait if they’re serious.”

  They fall silent. He understands her impatience, but she should trust him.

  She says, “I’m visiting the convent next week for the Feast of Saint Martha to see my aunt. I’d like to take Antonia. My aunt misses her—she was so happy when Antonia boarded there for her schooling. And Antonia hasn’t been back to the convent since you took over her studies.”

  “Yes, take Antonia with you. Take some extra treats for their celebrations.”

  “Thank you, Paolo. I—”

  “Make sure to tell your aunt that Antonia must visit the convent’s scriptorium. Tell her I want Antonia to see their current commissions—prayer books, tapestry designs. I want your aunt to be under no illusion. I’d pay a good dowry to the convent if Antonia were to take vows, but only if they offer more than a life of cold stone and early-morning prayer.”

  Tomasa takes his hand and speaks slowly. “What about Piero di Cosimo’s cousin? Don’t forget, he’s the eldest son.”

  “He’s the cousin of a painter, but that doesn’t mean he’d be sympathetic to Antonia’s talents. Once she’s inside her husband’s household, I’d have no say in the matter. Tomasa, listen to me. It would be far better, if she were to marry, for her to have a rich husband who would pay for an army of servants. With a rich husband, I could insist during negotiations that Antonia would always have her own private study, or at least a bedchamber that’s large enough for her painting studies.”

  “So do you want her to marry, Paolo?”

  He walks over to the window and gazes down into the street. He can choose whether or not to answer his wife’s question. “I’ve ordered a wooden chest from the cabinet-maker who supplied the workshop. I’ve specified the best quality. It will be Antonia’s dowry chest, and I’ll decorate the panels myself.”

  “At last.” She tips back her head and sighs heavily. “I have the linens for her wedding trousseau. I can half-fill the chest already. But you haven’t decorated any furniture in years. That’s work for an assistant.”

  “Ah! But a dowry chest painted by Paolo Uccello”—he turns and smiles to his wife—“will help any negotiation, don’t you think? Whether I’m haggling over a husband or negotiating with your aunt’s abbess.”

  Antonia sits by a niche in the wall of her small bedchamber, her prayer book open in her lap. There’s a small painting hanging inside the niche. It’s an image of the Madonna with her infant child, and in front of the painting there’s a scattering of pink petals, which Antonia collected from the courtyard. When she hears the servant girl’s footsteps on the stairs, she knows her father is ready to teach her again, and as the girl calls, “Your father—” Antonia is out of her chair and racing down to his study. As she hurries, two stairs at a time, she wonders how many girls on the long Via della Scala are allowed, as she is, to enter their fathers’ studies.

  She trips at the entrance to the room, rights herself. “What are we doing today, Father?”

  She finds him reaching up; he’s tacking a large line drawing to the shoulder-height wooden shelf that runs the length of th
e room. “It’s one of your battle paintings,” she says, excited.

  “It’s the final drawing for the painting. Now, I don’t want to talk about the story in this work. This test of observation is different from the lesson on Noah and the flood. In fact, for today, you must forget the subject. I particularly want you to see the arrangement of things.”

  Antonia’s jaw drops. “The arrangement . . . ?”

  With the drawing secured, he turns and stares at her, hard. “A painting is just an arrangement of things. Understand?”

  “But who did you paint this battle for, Father? And where is the painting now? Is it somewhere grand? In a palazzo?”

  “It belongs to the banker Lionardo Bartolini, and it hangs with its two sister paintings in his palazzo on Via Porta Rossa where it meets the Via Monaldo. Close to here. But I tell you, Antonia, wherever the painting hangs, now or in the future, I am in command of whosoever casts an eye towards The Battle of San Romano.”

  She presses her palm to her forehead. “How do you command someone when you’re not there in the Bartolini palazzo?”

  “Prepare to be enlightened. Pay attention, child. I want you to close your eyes, and open them only when I say so.” He takes a seat by the drawing and faces into the room. He wants to watch her eyes, to follow her gaze. “Now open your eyes and study the drawing.”

  After some moments, he forces a frown, because he doesn’t want Antonia to sense his delight. She’s under his spell. It’s not easy for an old man to control a young mind, but he has done so. The question is, can she slow down and work out how he is controlling her?