The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  The writing of happy postcards was easy enough. This is paradise and I may never leave: that was all that needed to be said on some of them, the words stretched across the open white field. Others got a fuller account. My day starts with warm bread and homemade apricot jam, eaten while sitting looking at the sea, in the shade of a day that’s going to be hot and blue, and ends with resiny white wine and wonderfully cool linen sheets that somebody else ironed. Swimming, eating, taking pictures, relaxing properly into a stack of novels, socializing when I feel like it and no dishwasher in sight: can life be bettered?

  The question of what to write to Luca, however: that took some thinking about. She couldn’t not send him a card. There was an option much better than silence, she decided, which was to be chummy with him and very clearly over things, post-obsessive and well, as she’d insisted at the airport that she was. But how to talk to him, to Luca, a man she no longer wanted to talk to, a man she felt almost violent about never seeing again, whose name made her fingernails press involuntarily into her palms? Sticking to food and drink was the answer. The quality of food and drink was a constant Luca preoccupation.

  Dear Luca, I’m sitting here eating yogurt with amazing island honey, which tastes faintly of herbs and also of brine. The wine is much better than it used to be, fruitier and fatter. You might even approve. You would have liked the swordfish that was barbecued last night. It turns out there IS a point to peppers stuffed with rice. Figs and peaches: that’s the trick. Like everything good, the sweet and the savory. But perhaps sunshine and fresh air make all the difference. See you soon, Nina.

  She was satisfied, reading over this before mailing it, that nothing was revealed or betrayed in its writing or reading; it wasn’t friendly or unfriendly. That’s what’s needed now, she reflected, ordering a second bottle of wine, smiling at Vasilios as he came to light the anti-mosquito candles: a position of perfect neutrality. Neutrality and sanity. She hadn’t added the line she was going to, about swimming out to the yacht that was anchored in the bay and how she’d swum right under it, as they had done together once when they were children, the two of them, while Paolo watched from the shore.

  Three days would have been fine. If she’d stayed for three days she could have regarded the visit as a triumph, but by the fourth morning the possibility of performance ripening into authenticity was gone, vanished in the night, and Nina woke with the old dread. She was afraid of the overscheduled empty day and longed for the comfort of work. She wished that she’d brought a manuscript. She worked as an editor of books, and craved her editorial language of secret symbols, for the absorption and certainties of a project-led life, and for the way that it could be allowed to take over the waking hours, running on seamlessly into the evening and obliterating doubt. That was always at least half what work had signified.

  She woke late, on the fourth morning, and when she came down to breakfast found that everybody else was already there.

  “Ah, here she is,” June and Iris said together, with open relief, as if she’d been missing and was found.

  “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” Cathy said, “but are you all right on your own? What I mean is, if you want to join in with Gareth and me, we’re off on the ferry to the caves today. Come with us.”

  “That’s nice of you,” Nina said. “Actually, I’m enjoying being alone. I’ve had a busy year, and my mother died” — she heard herself saying this as if it was something recent; it continued to feel recent — “and my sister-in-law died — well, strictly speaking she was my brother-in-law’s wife …” She had to pause. The thoughts crowded in. “Anyway. She died, and then my husband and I separated.”

  Dr. Christos came into the room, looking in his bag. “I brought you …” He rummaged further. “In fact, I forgot to bring it. It doesn’t matter. Tomorrow.”

  “What was it you forgot?”

  “Andros is into our local mythology …”

  “Andros who ran over me?” Nina was smiling, he was relieved to see.

  “Yes, that Andros.” He smiled wryly back. “He showed me a photograph of a mosaic floor, one they’ve found on another island. It’s from the second century, and there you were, riding a dolphin.”

  “There I was?”

  “Long fair hair, blue eyes, a long nose, and a certain very determined expression. It was definitely you. You had armor, too. You looked like you meant business.” As it happened, Nina had been there, to the island of the mosaic, but she didn’t tell the doctor this. He said, “Do you know about the Nereids?”

  “Not really. Were they mermaids?”

  “Mermaids, yes. Sea nymphs. People confuse them with sirens but they were the opposite of sirens. Sirens meant harm to men, but these sea nymphs were more like guardian angels. They lived deep in a silvery sea cavern, fifty of them with their father, Nereus. They came to the aid of sailors in distress. Andros is very superstitious.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Luca had always been Nina’s closest friend. When he married Francesca, when they were all ridiculously young, Nina gave him something in addition to the official gift that was really from her dad, the pair of Victorian wineglasses. This second gift was wrapped in tissue paper, a tiny thing pressed into his hand in a coffee shop. It was a soapstone heart, about an inch across, and had belonged to her mother.

  “In that case I’m doubly privileged,” he said. “I loved your mother.” Nina’s mother had only recently died.

  A few days later a padded bag arrived bearing Luca’s handwriting. It wasn’t unusual to get letters — he wrote fairly often, long, rambling messages that covered subjects big and small, the somethings and nothings that had occurred to him — but this was the first object to arrive in the post. Inside the bag there was another heart, of about the same size, one of Venetian glass, so dark blue it looked black, but with other colors suspended within it, ones visible only when you held it up to the light. There was a note, but it was only ten words long. I thought we should exchange hearts. It seemed only fair.

  She rang him to say thank you. In those days, phoning demanded predictability about where a person was going to be on any given day at any given hour, and Nina was inhibited about leaving messages on Luca’s answerphone, which sat on the new table in his newly acquired hall like a sleek black brick. Nobody was at home when she called. All Nina could say, her low voice amplifying into the high-ceilinged space, Francesca standing listening, was that it was nothing, and perhaps he could ring her tomorrow. Francesca scribbled Nina’s wish on the memo pad, and Luca called from the office the following morning.

  “I have something to tell you,” Nina said. “Paolo and I are going to be married.”

  “Have you slept with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “When did you first sleep with Francesca?”

  “Mind your own business!” His outrage was faked. If Nina had wanted details he’d have supplied them.

  “It’s possible it was the same night I first slept with Paolo.”

  “Oh, I see. That night.” He still thought it was a joke. “When can we meet?”

  “Sunday lunch at your mother’s.”

  “You’re coming?”

  “I’ll be there and the engagement will be announced.”

  “No, I meant when can we meet privately?”

  “You’re married now, Luca. Privately might be frowned upon.”

  “But I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “No, I mean I really, really miss you.”

  Luca kept the soapstone heart in the pockets of jackets, and felt it between his fingers sometimes, its familiar smoothness, its curves and indentations. Then one day he put a suit into the dry-cleaning pile and Francesca found it on a routine check. When he came home that night and into the kitchen, she was standing holding the thing in her outstretched palm.

  “A present from Nina, wishing me love in my life, wishing us love in our lives,” he said, answering the unasked
question.

  His wife looked skeptical. “I’m surprised you didn’t show it to me, then, if it was about us.”

  “You don’t need to be worried.” He dropped his bag and put his arms around her, drawing her closer so that her face pressed into his chest, so tightly that she could hardly breathe. “It’s you I want to be with,” he said into her hair, which was copious, long, wavy, tinted auburn from its almost-black.

  “You danced with her more than with me, at our wedding reception,” Francesca said. “Did you know that?”

  He pulled himself away. “You counted?”

  “It mattered to me.” Her dark eyes were filling.

  He went into the hall and divested himself of coat and shoes, and Francesca followed. “But she’s my sister,” he told her. “She’s like my sister. She’s been my unofficial sister since we were five years old. I’ve always treated her house like my house and vice versa. At our wedding — you have to understand — our wedding was also a big occasion for Nina and me. It was goodbye to that life.”

  “Luca, can you hear yourself?”

  “We’ve always been incredibly close, twin-like, finishing each other’s sentences, reading each other’s minds …”

  “I know. I know.”

  “… and now things will be different. Someone has supplanted her. You don’t see how important that is to the two of us?” He went back into the kitchen and Francesca followed.

  “You’re in love with her; you just don’t realize it.” She had begun to hear it in herself: her resignation to the facts.

  “Wrong, so wrong.” He took a bottle of wine from the rack.

  “So this heart doesn’t mean much to you.” She held it up between her fingers.

  “It does mean a lot to me” — as he spoke he was using the corkscrew — “insofar as it’s about my friendship with Nina. Nina’s my sister and that’s her sisterly love.”

  “You carry it around with you.” She put it onto the countertop, which was a large slab of polished stone, glossy in their bleached-oak kitchen.

  “I’d forgotten all about it. It was hidden in a pocket.” His voice remained unexcited.

  “Hidden. That’s an interesting word.”

  “Forgotten about in a pocket. Very nearly dry-cleaned.” He took glasses down from the shelf and filled them. “I’ll give it back to her if that’s what you want.”

  “That isn’t what I want. What I want is for her not to give you secret signals.”

  “This isn’t a secret signal.”

  “Secret reassurances.”

  Now Luca began to gesture with the glass. “She’s my sister! She’s been my sister without being my biological sister my whole life!”

  “She is in love with you.”

  “I’m giving it back. Look, I’m finding an envelope.” He put his wine down and rummaged in a cupboard. “Here’s an envelope. Look, I’m putting it inside and sealing it.”

  “Luca, calm down. Calm. You don’t need to do that: you just need to sound more convincing about what it means.”

  “I’m calling Nina. I’m calling her. I’m going to put her on the phone to you.” He picked up the phone receiver and dialed.

  “Please don’t. You’re just trying to humiliate me now.”

  He put the phone down. “Well, I’m sorry. I don’t know what else I can do.”

  Francesca didn’t mention the gift again until some months later. It happened to be when Paolo and Nina were on their honeymoon in Greece.

  “The weather’s terrible over there, for September,” Luca said as they watched the evening news. The map of Europe was uniformly gray, and there were flash floods in Athens.

  Francesca’s reply was unexpected. “Did you give that trinket back to Nina?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you?”

  “Ages ago.”

  “So that’s another one at the back of your socks.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” He got up off the sofa and spoke from the door. “I forgot about it. All right?” He went out of the room and returned with it. “Here.” He put it on the table. “Throw it away, return it, whatever you want. Your choice.”

  The next morning, Francesca went to Nina and Paolo’s apartment, and was about to put the envelope through the door when she realized that it wasn’t marked with Nina’s name. She didn’t want Paolo opening it and wondering, so she took a pen out of her bag and wrote Nina on the front.

  When Nina got back from the honeymoon, she found the heart waiting for her. She saw that it was Francesca who had sent it back. At least she assumed so; it wasn’t Luca’s writing on the envelope.

  Luca rang within an hour of their return.

  “Francesca dropped off the heart while we were gone,” she told him.

  “We should have lunch,” he said. “Tomorrow. I want to hear all about it. The honeymoon, I mean. Complete with sex bits.”

  “Did you hear me? Francesca put the heart through my letterbox.”

  “I know. It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “Not really, no. Not in itself, no.”

  When she got off the phone, Paolo said, “What heart was that? I couldn’t help overhearing.” She had to produce both hearts, so as to make it clear it was mutual and token and nothing.

  “It was just about good wishes for married life, wishing each other love,” she said.

  “Commendable of you both,” Paolo said, using the voice he always used when talking about the two of them.

  Nina didn’t tell him that she was meeting his brother the following day for a drink. They met and drank wine and caught up with one another, and then, as they parted out on the street, she gave Luca the heart Francesca had returned. She said, “The one you gave me is in there, too, inside the envelope.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I realized I didn’t want it anymore.” The meaning of the whole exercise had been contradicted by Francesca’s intervention, and turned into an embarrassment.

  Francesca, who’d been told about the drink, went and searched through Luca’s jacket pockets after dinner, and then his coat pockets, and found nothing. She looked in his bag while he was in the bath, the big leather bag she’d bought him in Italy, and found the envelope there, in a zip compartment. It had been sealed and opened and imperfectly resealed. She opened it and saw two hearts, settled together into a corner. Nina, it seemed, had answered the return of the heart with a second gift to add to the first. Nina had redoubled. Nina was emphatic. Francesca put the envelope back where she’d found it, and never brought the subject up again.

  After this, Luca began to telephone, and it became a ritual, their daily conversation. He’d argue later that this was his process of withdrawal, a kind of tapering-off from the patterns of the old days. He rang from the office at his dad’s wine distribution business, to Nina the junior copy editor, at that time working in-house for an Edinburgh publisher. He did it when Paolo went out, which he did routinely at lunchtime, eating a sandwich at the café across the road and dipping into the secondhand music shop. When winter came and Paolo went out less often, Luca rang from home, though he didn’t like shutting the door against Francesca.

  Things became a lot easier after e-mail and texting became a normality. The friendship could continue, and increase and develop and deepen, without actual speaking being necessary, and without being defensive about being caught behind a closed door on the landline. Once there was e-mail there was regular e-mail, and the inadvertent privacy of the inbox meant that the conversation could and did drift into the strictly confidential. It was easy for the pen pals to be unguarded there, about issues in their respective marriages; it wasn’t so easy when they were reminded, by seeing each other at family occasions, that the supposedly safe distance of the written word was really something else entirely.

  In addition they met sometimes for lunch, at the same small bistro, one secreted in a Georgian back street, a ten-minute walk from each of their apartments.

  “Don’t you hav
e male friends to moan to?” Nina asked him as they sat looking at the menu on their first visit.

  “I’m the only twenty-three-year-old I know who’s married. Why did we marry so young?”

  “You know why.”

  “And so, what about Paolo?”

  “Paolo’s perfect. No complaints at all.”

  “Oh, come on. Bet he’s a bit of a Svengali. He’s always had a Svengali aspect. Bet he makes you watch history documentaries and David Attenborough. Bet he makes you go to museums, and puts important biographies at the side of your bed, and tries to talk about politics over breakfast, reading bits out from the newspaper. He’s so like your father.”

  “No, he isn’t. Not remotely. And I love museums.”

  “Please. We have not come here to praise Caesar, I trust. I was hoping for scandalous frankness.”

  “You first, then.”

  “Francesca hogs the duvet.”

  “Nicely done. Paolo finishes crosswords that I started.”

  “Francesca can’t cook to save her life.”

  “Paolo eats toast in bed. In fact, he’s constantly eating.”

  “Francesca spends hours on the phone to her girlfriends when I’m sitting in the TV room alone.”

  She was getting into the swing now. “Paolo’s too quiet. And he refuses to argue with me, even if I provoke him.”

  “Not even for fun?”

  “Not even for fun.”

  “Francesca is passive-aggressive. It’s all more in sorrow than in anger. Drives me nuts.”

  “Paolo never buys me flowers.”

  “Francesca makes me go to the theater.”

  “Paolo tidies up my desk.”

  “Francesca tidies up my desk.”

  “They should have married one another.”

  “I’d give them six months.”

  It was at one of these lunches, in the week before Nina’s twenty-fourth birthday, that Nina happened to ask, “Do you still carry my heart?”

  “Yes I do, E. E. Cummings,” Luca said. “I carry it in my heart.”