Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind (23 page)

She sits back in her chair. She feels tired, ready at last to slip into sleep. In this muzzy state, she takes hold of the two paintings transformed by the black lines, and it strikes her that one of the paintings makes her feel sad, whereas another makes her feel joyful. She wonders if colours are like letters; they spell out a word, a feeling, if arranged in the right order. This thought creeps into bed with her, and as she drifts into sleep, she wonders if she’ll glean an answer to this question in her dreams, or if a revelation might come during lauds.

It seems only moments later that she hears the tapping at her door. She wakes in the morning gloom, reaches for her robe and whips it around to throw it over her head. But the action is too hasty, and the edge of the heavy material catches the water bowl on the edge of her desk. The bowl smashes against the wall; paint-stained water splatters across the white plaster and falls in long drips to the cold stone floor.

The cell door opens; it’s Jacopa. At the sight of a spectacularly drenched wall, she clamps her hands over her mouth to smother laughter.

Antonia, stupefied, slowly straightens her robe.

Jacopa says, “Leave the mess. I’ll clean it up after prayers. Come, let’s not be late.”

Antonia pushes her fingers through her close-cropped hair, ties her novice’s headscarf. She turns to her desk, gathers her small paintings, unscathed by the disaster, and takes them to her dowry chest. She lifts the lid an inch and slips the papers inside.

“Hurry, now,” says Jacopa.

Antonia takes three quick steps across her cell but falters as her hand touches the door. She looks over her shoulder and stares, transfixed by the glorious drips and splatters.

AUTHOR
’
S HISTORICAL NOTE

Antonia Uccello, the daughter of Tomasa di Benedetto Malifici and Paolo Uccello, was born in Florence in 1456. Her older brother was named Donato. Antonia entered the convent of San Donato in Polverosa outside the city walls of Florence, most likely before her thirteenth birthday. The painters’ guild recorded Antonia as a
pittoressa
—a painter—on her death certificate dated 9 February 1490. This is all we know about the life of Antonia Uccello. None of her work is known to have survived.

Paolo Uccello was an innovator in creating the illusion of three-dimensional space through the use of linear perspective, and he became well known for his depictions of storms, battles, dragons and wild animals. Antonia was born when Paolo was aged around fifty-nine. His last known painting is a night-time hunting scene,
The Hunt in the Forest
.

It was commonplace for wealthy Italian families to board their daughters at convents for their education. The high cost of marriage dowries in Renaissance Italy often resulted in fathers allowing only their eldest daughters to marry. Such was the fear of any gossip being attached to younger daughters that they were packed off at an early age to convents to become “brides of Christ.” I was fascinated to learn that convents were important civic institutions and took a decisive role in the commercial life of Florence. The abbess of a convent was a key player in a complex web of social and power-based relationships within the city. And families vied to place their daughters in convents with high status so that important family connections in the outside world were mirrored and enhanced within the cloisters.

It took me several years to work out how to combine my interests in art history, science and fiction writing with my experience of actually making art; this novel is my first published attempt. With hindsight, I realize that the exhibition
Maurice Denis, 1870–1943
at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery in 1995 sparked my enduring fascination with those painters at the end of the nineteenth century who rejected realism in art. Subsequently, I researched how some of those modernists (Émile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, André Derain) were influenced by the early Italian painters of the quattrocento. I visited Italy as often as possible, and naturally, it was no hardship when I felt obliged to return to Florence for this novel. I had to visit Antonia’s convent—the location of which I discovered in the tiniest of footnotes in Sharon T. Strocchia’s
Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence
.

Although the convent of San Donato in Polverosa has recently been converted to apartments—and a large H&M store now stands opposite—the public church attached to the convent is still a place of worship. Cenni di Francesco’s nativity fresco,
The Adoration of the Magi
, adorns the nave. It’s in a good state of preservation, considering it was painted almost 750 years ago—in 1383, to be precise. I like to imagine that Antonia Uccello herself spent many hours in quiet contemplation of this truly engaging fresco.

Few women painters are known from the early Italian Renaissance in Italy, and most were nuns, including Maria Ormani, Caterina dei Vigri, Barbara Ragnoni and, of course, Antonia Uccello. Plautilla Nelli is the best known of the nun painters of the Renaissance, and her astonishingly modern
Lamentation with Saints
—restored in 2006—is now on display in the great refectory of San Marco Museum in Florence.

I visited Bologna to see the remarkable saint’s chapel that displays the mummified remains of Caterina dei Vigri. Respected in her own lifetime as a writer and painter, she became the abbess of the convent of the Poor Clares in Bologna. Later in the Renaissance, a few Italian women artists did gain public recognition. In some cases, these painters were the daughters of male artists, and they worked within their fathers’ studios. Among the best known of these Italian artists are Fede Galizia, Sofanisba Anguissola and her sister Lucia, Marietta Tintoretto, Lavinia Fontana, Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabetta Sirani.

On a personal historical note, my great-aunt’s fiancé died during the final days of World War I, and he is buried at the Cross Roads Cemetery at Fontaine-au-Bois in France. It has always struck me that there is a missing side to our family, since my aunt did not marry until later in life, and she didn’t have children. I visited the cemetery for the first time while writing this novel, having just delved into the family archive. In the row of graves farthest from the cemetery entrance, there are headstones for two men of the Chinese Labour Corps. Miniature bamboo is planted between their headstones. Both men came from the modern-day Chinese province of Shandong.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I take great pleasure in thanking Alexandra Jungwirth and Robert Charnock for their kindness in helping me to plan my research trip to Shanghai and Suzhou, and for making my stay in China so enjoyable. My thanks also to Wang Yu Hong and Wang Xingyi for their generous hospitality and assistance. I am also grateful to friends and family who read my manuscript at various stages of completion. In particular I thank three members of the Charnock family—Garry, Robert and Adam—Andrew Fletcher, Neve Maslakovic and Jacqui Nevin.

During the development of this novel, I received invaluable guidance from my editor, Jason Kirk, at 47North. I am immensely grateful to Jason for his sustained support and enthusiasm for this writing project. My thanks also to Britt Rogers, Ben Smith and each member of the 47North publishing team; they are all delightful.

I always enjoy the research element of writing fiction, and I’m pleased to thank Aarathi Prasad for our fascinating conversation about the future of human-reproduction technologies. I heartily recommend Aarathi’s fascinating book
Like a Virgin—How Science Is Redesigning the Rules of Sex
.

This novel makes some sense of my meandering career, which has taken me from science journalism and photography to a fine art practice. I’m grateful to my former studio colleague Fiona Curran for encouraging me to start this novel at a time when I was hesitant.

Thanks to the many enthusiasts who write excellent websites and blogs on subjects as diverse as medieval writing, ghost advertisements and the customization of denim jackets. And thanks to Lise den Brok of Historypin.

The extract from Laura Cereta’s “A Letter to Bibulus Sempronius: A Defense of the Liberal Instruction of Women” (in
Her Immaculate Hand, Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy
, edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr.) is reproduced by kind permission of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies.

My thanks also to Cheng Jia Wen for her translation of the Chinese inscriptions on two headstones at Cross Roads Cemetery.

My special thanks are reserved for Garry—always my first reader and my travelling companion on every journey.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Painting and images referred to in this novel can be viewed on Anne Charnock’s Pinterest page:
www.pinterest.com/annecharnock
.

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2nd ed. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2011.

Burke, Peter.
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Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy
, edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr., 81–84. Asheville, NC: Pegasus, 2000.

Chadwick, Whitney.
Women, Art, and Society.
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Cogeval, Guy, Claire Denis, and Thérèse Barruel.
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Asheville, NC: Pegasus, 2000.

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Uccello: The Complete Work of the Great Florentine Painter.
London: Phaidon, 1950.

Prasad, Aarathi.
Like a Virgin—How Science Is Redesigning the Rules of Sex.
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. Lewes: East Sussex County Library, 1986.

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Strocchia, Sharon T.
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Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

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.

Vasari, Giorgio.
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Translated by George Bull. London: Penguin Books, 1987.

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Paolo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest.
Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2010.

AN EXCERPT FROM ANNE CHARNOCK’S

A Calculated Life

CHAPTER ONE

The second-smallest stick insect lay askew and lifeless on the trails of ivy. Jayna lifted the mesh cover, nudged the foliage with her middle finger, and the corpse dropped to the cage floor. It made no sense. The smallest of the brood, the outlier, should have died first. Why this one, the second smallest? She glanced at the temperature monitor. Surely, it wasn’t her fault? And it couldn’t be the food—she turned over a leaf—or they would all be ill by now. So what exactly . . . ? The surviving insects shuddered indifferently.

Jayna placed the cover back on its base. One thing was certain. An autopsy was out of the question; she had no scalpels. In any case, she thought, it was a fact: in the normal run of things, people had autopsies; insects did not. She pushed a hand through her hair. One dead stick insect and now she was running two minutes late for breakfast. That’s all the death amounted to—a slight delay in her morning routine. The death would remain a mystery. No ripple of concern, no cascade of grief. She peered into the cage at the still-smallest stick insect.

“Maybe you’re . . . just lucky,” she murmured.

Jayna left Rest Station C7 with her friend Julie and together they headed towards the tower blocks of downtown Manchester. They looked like schoolgirls, holding their packed lunches and wearing identical office garb.

“Why would the smallest, feeblest one survive longer?” said Jayna.

“Was it feeble? Perhaps it was just . . . small,” said Julie.

By the time they reached the Vimto sculpture on Granby Row, Jayna had scanned through the data she’d compiled over the past three months on the eating habits of her stick insects, their rates of growth, their response to stimuli—light, heat, and touch—morning and evening activity rates . . . thirteen variables in all. She plotted against time, overlaid the graphs, and compared. No help at all.

“I kept a close eye on them all but I only took measurements for two—the two closest to average size,” said Jayna.

“Hmm. Mistake.”

The morning street projections let rip with the usual inducements—half-price breakfast deals, lunchtime soup ’n’ sushi specials. Julie peeled off northwards. Jayna, still perplexed, pressed ahead and pulled up sixteen data sets culled over recent weeks from a slew of enthusiasts’ forums and from academic studies by the Bangalore Environmental Research Institute. Rates of growth, population size, mortality figures; it was all there. She plotted the longevity of stick insects against their size at death, and regressed the data. The correlation with size was . . . heck, weaker than she’d imagined. She tripped on a raised paving flag. And as for luck, she thought, the tiniest survivor in mind, that was without doubt a dumbed-down term referring to randomness.

On entering the high atrium of the Grace Hopper Building, she walked under the turquoise-leaved palms and bit her lip. She pushed the Bangalore data from her mind and considered her Monday schedule as she stepped to the back of the elevator. The doors closed with a whoosh-chang! and she tapped the back of her head against the elevator panel.

Time to think straight. How should she handle her entrance? Act as though nothing had happened on Friday? Walk straight past Eloise? Or should she apologize without any delay? It was just too awkward . . . and confusing. She hoped Eloise had calmed down over the weekend. According to Benjamin, it was a simple misjudgment. “A minor faux pas”—his exact words. The elevator doors opened and she stepped out. She was relieved Benjamin had said minor. A bit of a faux pas would be worse, definitely.

Pushing open the office door, she came to a decision. She would keep quiet, hope for the best.

Eloise jumped up, lifted a hand—not exactly a wave—and scuffled across the analysts’ floor at Mayhew McCline to intercept Jayna. “Tea!” she said, and pulled Jayna towards the kitchen galley. “Listen, I’m sorry about Friday.”

“No. I’m the one who’s sorry, Eloise. How was your father?”

“You were right. No real panic. He was comfortable and sedated when I got there.”

“You were worried. I wasn’t—”

“I overreacted. I didn’t mean it.”

“Is he still in hospital?”

“Yes, should be home tomorrow.” She cocked her head to one side. “It was a very nasty fall, you know . . . but nothing’s broken. They’re running tests, giving him a full check.”

“That’s—”

“I shouldn’t have barked at you.”

Jayna raised her eyebrows fractionally. She didn’t disagree. What had she said that was so bad? “Don’t forget the monthly figures before you go. Only take a minute.” It hadn’t exactly been a quarrel; too brief and one-sided. Jayna reassessed the incident: Eloise pushing things into her bag, one arm in her coat. She’d barged past and barked so the whole department heard, “You really are the bloody limit, Jayna.” The emphasis still caught her by surprise. And then Eloise had thrown open the office door. Her coat belt got caught on the handle. She’d yanked at the belt and shoved the door, which had slammed back against the wall.

“Darjeeling, black, isn’t it?” Eloise turned and hit the kettle switch. “Jayna, you have to understand. We can’t all be as calm as you.”

Jayna shook her head, “Nothing for me, thanks,” and turned to leave but Eloise touched her arm. “Listen, to be honest, I wanted to clear the air quickly. Something serious . . .” She hesitated. “You’d better see Benjamin, now. It’s about Tom Blenkinsop.” Eloise frowned at Jayna’s blankness and, as if spelling things out for a child, “It’s . . . not . . . good.”

A bugbear, that Tom. She should have told him; if he needed so much help he should have asked through proper channels, booked some extra training, some official mentoring time. Maybe Benjamin had found out about his off-loading. It had started two months back when Tom sent her a research report before submitting it to Benjamin, with a request: Cast an eye over this, will you, Jayna? An aberration; an extra step in the accredited process. On the first three occasions the amendments had taken less than ten minutes but, from that point on, Tom’s requests had landed every few days and the reports had become weightier. She hadn’t complained because once she’d corrected the first report she hadn’t liked the idea of Tom’s errors reaching Benjamin. He might have missed them. So Jayna had developed the habit of charging the time to her own jobs; five minutes here, ten minutes there. She finessed his arguments, improved his executive summaries—his weakest area—and, when essential, she hunted down additional data sources to “beef things up,” as Tom himself would say.

Benjamin usually worked in the middle of the analysts’ floor on the thirty-first but this morning he summoned staff to the thirty-second, to his so-called quiet room.

“About Tom?” she said, poking her head around his door. Benjamin, slumped in his sofa, looked up at Jayna and seemingly had no inclination to say anything. She felt hot. “I thought his last report—”

“It’s not about his work,” he said, and gestured to the armchair. “You know he’s . . . he was on holiday?”

She did. Tom had dropped another tome on her before he left, with a brief note:
Check and forward. Thx.

“Was on holiday?”

“Tragic accident,” he said. “I want to tell everyone individually.”

“Tragic?”

“Swimming in the sea . . .”

Benjamin, she realized, had already told the story several times. He didn’t continue. So she prompted: “Drowned?”

“His wife and kids were on the beach. Couldn’t do anything about it.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Swept out. His brother phoned me last night at home. He’s flying out today.”

Another silence. What was she supposed to say? She recalled a drowning incident reported in the news. What did the journalist ask . . . ?

“Have they found his body?” she said with precision.

“No. Not yet. Only happened yesterday.”

“That’s terrible.”

“And it’s going to be a long time before there’s a funeral. There’ll be an autopsy when they find the body . . .”

Stumped.

“Jayna, can you help me out?” Benjamin, gray-faced, pulled himself up to sit straight-backed. Was this one problem too many for Benjamin, she wondered, or was he upset? Tom had only joined seven months ago. “Can you go through his files? Finish anything that needs finishing. I think the others might find it too upsetting, so soon.”

“Okay. I’m familiar—”

“Thanks. Don’t tell the others. Just fit it around your own work. Let me know if I need to do any firefighting.”

A secondary post-mortem, she thought. “Fine.”

Jayna stepped along the corridor’s repeat-pattern squares and dipped into the washroom. Inside the end cubicle, she leaned back against the door.

Such bad timing! Rebuffing Tom . . . of all the opportunities I could have taken, Jayna reproached herself. He didn’t bother to explain . . . just assumed. She flushed the toilet unnecessarily as though eradicating her response to his request: Tom, I can’t possibly find time until the end of the month. Send it to Benjamin, as is. He’d retorted: FU2. Thanks for nothing, wonder woman.

I didn’t know he was in a rush, going on holiday. How stupid of him to drown!

What, she wondered, were the chances of Tom’s death? In the entire working population of the Grace Hopper Building she’d expect a premature fatality . . . once a year? But at Mayhew McCline, with only forty-five employees, the chance of anyone drowning was so small it was technically . . . She stopped herself and opened the door.

It was never negligible, it was always there. She turned the tap, too far, and water shot out from the basin. Accidents simply happened.

The kitchen became the unofficial, designated space for commiserations and the occasional sobbing over Tom as though the analysts were protecting their office space from permanent stains of association. Jayna observed Eloise zigzagging through the department with a condolence card. She averted her eyes as each person hesitated with pen poised. Eloise didn’t bring the card to Jayna. Hester, chief analyst, announced she was installing herself for the morning in Benjamin’s quiet room and they all knew what she’d be doing—she’d inform colleagues in London about Tom’s death and speak to his personal business contacts, get them reassigned to other analysts. Jayna imagined ripples of concern of varying magnitude spreading from all these subsidiary nodes. No such after-effects from her stick insect’s demise.