The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  UK PRAISE FOR

  THE ENLIGHTENMENT OF NINA FINDLAY

  “Romance is everywhere in this novel: filial, parental, platonic, amorous—and flirting and coupling and unraveling. But The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay is not chick lit. There’s a provocative intelligence in Gillies’ tale that challenges perceptions and beliefs about love, honesty, and betrayal. At its heart lies a mystery in the diary of Nina’s mother that holds the key to her own self-knowledge.” —Bookanista.com

  A Bookanista Summer Reading Pick, 2014

  “The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay traces the loops and fissures of memory … it moves backwards and forwards over several decades, uncovering intergenerational secrets and the holes in the stories people tell themselves.” —The Guardian

  “Gillies’ second novel is an intelligent, thoughtful, grown-up romance about second chances and the complications of relationships.” —Sunday Herald (Scotland)

  “A delicate depiction of life, love, and possible madness … Moving and surprising.” —Daily Express

  “If you like a book that makes you think as well as lose yourself, this is the one. Gillies portrays the complexities of relationships, and draws her characters so clearly, you think you really know them in real life. And then you’re sad because you don’t. I can’t recommend it highly enough.” —Katie Fforde

  “Funny and wise … Not to be missed.” —Good Housekeeping

  “A real page-turner.” —My Weekly

  ALSO BY ANDREA GILLIES

  Keeper: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey into Alzheimer’s

  The White Lie: A Novel

  Copyright © Andrea Gillies 2014

  Originally published in the UK by Short Books in March 2014.

  “Cucurrucucú paloma” lyrics on this page

  translated by Rachel McCormack.

  Original Spanish lyrics by Tomás Méndez.

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Gillies, Andrea.

  The enlightenment of Nina Findlay / Andrea Gillies.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-59051-729-1 (print) — ISBN 978-1-59051-730-7 (e-book)

  1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations) — Fiction. 2. Greece — Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PR6107.I4665E64 2015

  823′.92 — dc23 2014036711

  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  TO FRIENDS MET ALONG THE ROAD

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  When the minibus came round the sharpest bend of the descent, trundling along in poor light on the stony dirt road, its driver failed, at first, to see the woman standing taking photographs. He didn’t see her until just before he ran into her.

  Afterwards, Nina surprised people by insisting on taking all the blame for the accident. She was the fool who’d stood in the middle of the hill road at dusk, pale-haired in gray clothes and very nearly invisible. Later she’d hear that Andros was given a hard time; poor Andros was bombarded with questions. Why hadn’t he turned on his lights? Why wasn’t he wearing his glasses? Why did he react the way he reacted and put seven people’s lives at risk? It wasn’t just the facts that mattered, but the sequence. This was something Nina would think about a lot, during her recuperation: chains of events and how they could take people in unexpected directions.

  For the first forty-eight hours in hospital, she revisited the collision every time she gave in to sleep. Over and over she turned to see the boxy white vehicle, its shocking suddenness. She’d been singing a song, “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” one she’d listened to so often that she found she could sing it herself, even though she had no Spanish. She was enjoying that aspect, in fact: how the words had become music, like an incantation, like art in her mouth that she was making and delivering to the valley. She’d looked up the English translation before coming to Greece and had written it out in the back of her notebook.

  They say that at night,

  He spent the whole time crying;

  They say he didn’t eat;

  He spent the whole time drinking;

  They swear that heaven itself

  Shuddered on hearing his cries;

  How he suffered for her;

  Even in death he called for her.

  It was a song that was meaningful to her and to her situation. It wasn’t about her husband, who’d reacted stoically to the news that she wanted a divorce, but about her husband’s brother, a man who had loved her and whom she had loved.

  She didn’t see the minibus because she was looking in the other direction. Her camera was up at her eye, so as to capture the outlines of the houses below, the dark ribbon of road and the metal glow of the sea. The sun went down fast on the island, and its setting was brief and fatal. Brief and fatal: that’s what she’d written. She was ill by then and, in a way, no longer herself. Magic might become manifest here, if a person could only be alert to it, she’d said, in the postcard that she’d written a few minutes before. An island is a world, she wrote, though this is an untypically perfect one; this world is a family and even its housing’s democratic. She’d wanted to read The Tempest; earlier that day she’d rummaged through the books on the English stall at the market on the neighboring island, wondering if the universe might provide, but nobody takes Shakespeare on holiday. “The isle is full of noises,” she’d said aloud to herself, on first arriving at the viewpoint, having walked the long, slow incline from the harborside. There were swallows, bats, the occasional flying insect blundering about; human voices rising up and magnified; a tiny scooter making its bee hum on the coast road. The teenage boys liked to circumnavigate at this time of day, a journey that took less than an hour, their white lights tracking and overtaking one another. She’d taken out her camera. She’d begun to sing the song.

  So, Nina wasn’t paying attention to the possibility of the bus, but nor was Andros paying attention to the possibility of Ni
na. He was looking for goats, which could be hard to see on this, the final journey of the day from the upper village, especially if he was running half an hour late (as he was today for trivial reasons), and he’d tried in the past to abolish this last run, but the women who tended the hill gardens — most assertively, his wife, Olympia — had protested. Olympia, elegant as a goddess, fierce and beady-eyed as an eagle, wasn’t the kind of woman you contradicted lightly.

  Andros was almost on top of the goat when he realized it was there, a big brown billy goat with a defiant goat expression. An immediate decision needed to be made: there wasn’t quite enough room to pass on the left — if he went that way he’d scrape along the hillside wall — but there was plenty of space at the other side, without having to venture too near to the edge and its sheer drop. He veered to the right, and that’s when he saw Nina.

  Unaware of the goat’s role, Nina had trouble making sense of what was happening. The minibus was coming right at her; she saw Andros realize someone was standing there, his eyes widening and mouth mutely cursing. Luckily they had compatible instincts. She threw herself backwards to his left as he veered farther to the right, though it wasn’t quite enough for them to avoid each other, and so as Nina’s legs rose into the air the bus clipped her hard between knee and ankle. She felt it break, the right leg, its impact traveling through her cells, passing the bad news through her nervous system. Her back bounced against the road, and then her head, and her vision pulsed and darkened, narrowing rapidly inside a dark borderline. There was a rumble that she heard through her spine, a series of thumps, a bang, and then far-off-sounding shouts. Puzzled goat faces peered down as blackness eliminated the sky, and she was unconscious until, unquantifiable minutes later, she opened her eyes and saw Andros looking down at her, and ambulance personnel preparing to move her, saying her name, and there was pain that returned like a whip.

  Because the island’s own facility had no surgical wing, Nina was taken across the bay on the boat, to Main Island, to the ugly concrete hospital in the town. By the time the long, hearse-like vehicle got her over the water and round winding roads to the ER, she’d begun to hallucinate. She imagined that Paolo, her husband, was there in the back of the car with her, and felt urgently that she had to explain things to him, recent events and their autobiographical origins. He didn’t respond, adopting an apparent deafness and blindness, and then administered drugs began to kick in, loosening her grip on the facts, and so by the time she was lifted onto the examination couch she’d forgotten about the encounter with a man who shouldn’t have been there.

  “I don’t want Paolo to know,” she said. “You won’t tell him, will you? He’s already so disappointed in me.”

  A second shot of morphine was offered, but Nina needed to remain aware and exert control. She wanted information but recoiled from some of it. The leg was snapped jaggedly between ankle and knee like an object; she couldn’t look at it and was advised not to. She’d always thought of her bones as enmeshed, wrapped, integrated things. What had happened to her muscles, her veins? Was she at risk of bleeding to death? She vomited with fear that the surgeon would amputate, her voice full of pleading. An English-speaking doctor, worryingly young-looking, said, “If they offer you more anesthetic in there, take it, because it can get quite …” He paused, looking for the word: “… quite noisy.”

  “Noisy?” she queried. “Noisy?”

  Another face appeared, a tired, thin-faced nurse, and a form was presented and Nina signed it, her signature unlike anything it had ever been before, big and looping and going off the edge of the page. “Please take the morphine,” the doctor said. “She will get into trouble if you don’t.” Nina consented and, just as the senior man appeared, an emperor surrounded by courtiers, felt the warm rush of it flooding her and the pain subside. After this, things became not just manageable, but amusing. She was able to laugh at the serious things the consultant had to say about pins and screws and stitches. He took her flippancy in his stride.

  Two days after the operation Nina was returned to Small Island, a place that the guidebook referred to as the calf to Main Island’s cow but, in terms of scale, was more like the rabbit to Main Island’s elephant. The hospital there was a place she would never forget, not least for its beauty. Designed by an architect with a taste for the cleanly modern, it was a one-story arrangement of ten white rooms that formed three sides of a square. Its wide internal corridor looked out through floor-to-ceiling windows over a courtyard garden of rocks and herbs, from which a short flight of wooden steps led down to a pebble beach. She’d wondered, as a tourist, what the building was for. She’d walked past it along the shore and had mistaken it for an art gallery.

  By now she had crutches and was expected to begin to move about. It was disconcerting not to have a plaster cast.

  “A cast is to keep things in place,” Dr. Christos told her. “You don’t need that, because they’ve put pins inside the bone.”

  “Inside, inside the bone? I thought they were alongside.”

  “They’re inside, and they keep things straight. But I can see why people would prefer a cast. It feels like a protective shell.”

  “Exactly. It feels wrong just to have bandages, when what’s underneath …” Nina couldn’t finish the thought. It was disturbing, the idea of inner scaffolding. Someone had been inside her shinbone, while she lay with her self in dormancy, gaping and absent, and they’d pushed metal into the meat. She looked down at her leg, laid on the top sheet of the bed — it was too hot to stay under it, with this stiflingly hot limb swaddled tightly in crepe — and saw faint watery bloodstains. Dr. Christos looked, too.

  “We’ll need to change the dressing,” he said.

  “Can I have more morphine for that?” She was only half joking. She was beset by imaginings. But the unwrapping ritual didn’t reveal the scene of carnage that she’d feared. Instead there was a long, neat cut and vaguely Frankenstein’s-monster stitches.

  Dr. Christos had been there the first morning, sitting beside her bed. When she’d opened her eyes in the white cube of her room (its whiteness relieved only by pale-blue stripes on the window blind, the palest possible green of the metal bed, the dark blue of the bedside chair), she saw with a start that the chair was occupied. There was a man sitting in it, busy writing with a fountain pen, a man who hadn’t yet noticed that she was awake. He’d coughed — that’s what had woken her — and she’d stepped out of the past, scooped from a conversation with Luca, her husband’s brother. They’d sat side by side in an armchair that was upholstered in pink velvet, one only just big enough for two skinny children. On his lap there’d been a vast book with a dusty green cover and gold lettering, a world atlas, and he’d had the page open at Italy, showing her where his grandfather came from. She was ten years old and felt dizzy with happiness.

  It was bewildering to be bounced from the dream, one that felt nothing like a dream but like life lived over again, and into this alternative and dream-like reality: the white room, the blue chair, and the stranger. He was about her own age, this stranger, mid-forties at a guess, with shoulder-length black hair, some of it twisted almost into ringlets, and, when he looked towards the wall, tapping the pen against his upper lip, the kind of face that seems immediately trustworthy, though not handsome as such: his nose had broken once, his chin was small, and his eyebrows were outlandish. His wide mouth pressed wider into concentration as he returned to writing on a piece of paper at the top of others in a file, one that he’d balanced against the thigh of his raised leg, its ankle resting over his knee. On the sturdy side of averagely built, he was wearing a faded red collarless shirt, frayed jeans, and black cotton shoes that were rope-soled and flattened at the back.

  He’d introduced himself as Dr. Christos — his English had North American inflections — and she’d asked him how long he thought she’d be in hospital.

  “Depends,” he said. “Once you’re whizzing about confidently and we’re happy with the general state of
your health, you can go home.”

  “Right.” Her spirits dipped at the prospect of returning to face the music, the explanations.

  “How’s the head today?”

  “I’m still a bit nauseous, still tired, but it’s better than it was.” She sank deeper into the pillow and closed her eyes.

  “Then you should sleep. Your biggest fan is coming to see you later: the island priest. Brace yourself. There’s been a lot of church-going and candle-lighting. You know they’ve put up a shrine at the scene of the drama?” He showed her a picture on his phone, of a stone niche about eighteen inches high, inscribed inside with the date of the accident and fitted with a painted plaster crucifix. “This has been a big event for the island,” he added. He’d gone to get coffee. “It’s no trouble,” he said; “I have a machine in my office. They’re painting my office, but I prefer to sit with patients during the day, anyway. If I’m at my desk inevitably the phone rings or I’m interrupted. I look less available here.” The coffee was dense and oily and she’d made an appreciative noise. “You like it?” He looked pleased, settling himself again in the blue chair, apparently leaving the conversation at that.

  After a short while Nina said, “It looks as if you have a lot of — what are they, patient notes?”

  “Those, and pretty much all the paper that passes through the hospital. We’re having a financial crisis here; you’ve probably heard. We no longer have a manager, so all of this joy has devolved to me.”

  “You speak very good English.”

  The compliment might have been patronizing but he didn’t seem to mind. “Thank you; in fact, most of my life has been spent in the States. I left here as a student and haven’t been back very long.”