Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind by Anne Charnock Page B

Cione, in the Strozzi Chapel—with all the saints huddled together, row upon row, with their haloes nearly touching. The saints look so pleased to see one another; many look around aghast—wide-eyed in holy rapture.
    Even if she had seen paradise, Antonia believes, God couldn’t have allowed her to return home with her memories. How could God test mankind if revelations were handed down so freely? Men and women must earn their place in paradise through faith.
    Antonia wishes she had stepped through the gates, but she can’t convince herself it happened. No, she didn’t see the saints. Nor any thrones, nor angels. She didn’t see her earthly family mourning by her bedside. She didn’t gaze down from great heights.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    London, 2113
    “Please, Auntie Toniah. Let me go up with you,” says Eva, pleading.
    Toniah pulls the extending attic ladder down to the landing. “Okay. You can stand at the top of the ladder and take a peek. Put some shoes on.” Eva rushes to her bedroom. Toniah calls after her, “I don’t want you crawling around in the attic. I haven’t been up in years—it may not be safe.”
    It’s midmorning on Saturday, and classical music permeates the entire house from downstairs. Toniah would prefer something a tad more current, but Carmen likes to start the weekend with piano or clarinet. Today, it’s a concerto that Toniah has heard several times since returning home—Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio.
    She’s content to go along with Carmen’s music ritual; it generates a genial current. A few bars of Clara Schumann transport Toniah towards sunny beach breezes, undermining any intention of tidying her bedroom or sorting her laundry. But this morning, she has a task that’s not a chore; she wants to hunt out her student sketchbooks.
    Eva reappears wearing black school shoes below blue polka-dot pyjamas. She steps onto the first rung of the ladder and twists around. “What’s up there? Any of your old toys?”
    “It’s mostly junk. I need to go through it all.”
    Clearing the attic was one of many jobs Toniah’s mother had repeatedly postponed. She eventually gave up any pretence that the clear-out was imminent. She’d simply say, “I’ll do that when I’m retired.” Toniah can sympathize. For her mother, a teacher, retirement must have beckoned like a walk across open, rolling countryside. That’s how Toniah regarded summer vacations during her undergraduate days, but somehow, summers soon became cluttered. From a distance, the future always seems serene.
    The smell of dust and neglect seeps down onto the landing, and Toniah sneezes.
    Her mother died before reaching her retirement, so the contents of the attic were never sorted. Toniah made one attempt, three summers ago; she lifted down a plastic container filled with framed pictures, hoping to discover photographs of Nana Stone—they had only a handful. All she found were cross-stitch samplers and a set of washed-out watercolours. Her mother had grown tired of them, presumably, but why did she hold on to them? Toniah dismantled all the frames and thought about saving the watercolours, but in the end everything went into the recycling bins. She felt disrespectful, as though she were labelling a part of her mother’s life as inadequate.
    It has become clear to Toniah in the years since her mother’s death that household organization was low on her mother’s agenda, perhaps because the requisite talents were sapped by her schoolwork. She had other priorities. It seems to Toniah that her mother dedicated herself to keeping in contact with everyone she had ever met—school and college friends, work colleagues who had long since retired. She kept conversations alive with local friends who had moved overseas, and even kept track of Nana Stone’s ageing friends.
    As Eva steps up the ladder, Poppy appears from the bathroom. “Hurry up, Eva. It’s your swimming lesson, and I don’t want to be rushing for the bus