The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  She didn’t see Dr. Christos again until she went out onto the terrace, slowly on her crutches to look at the sunset over the sea, and saw him standing on the beach, his back to her, looking out across the bowl of blackening water and towards the other shore, where a hundred tiny white lights were clustered and twinkling. She was afraid he’d turn and see her, and so she returned to her room and settled herself in bed with a Jeeves and Wooster, one of only two books in English in the hospital library, but it proved impossible to concentrate. She swapped it for the novel she’d started on the plane, but found she couldn’t remember who anybody was or what’d happened to them, and so it, too, was abandoned, tossed onto the end of the bed. The restlessness was building. Perhaps dinner wasn’t just dinner at all. He’d said, “We’ll make a plan.” Not just a plan, but we who’d make it. It was rain on arid ground. In some ways hope is the worst thing; whenever there’s fresh hope there’s also something new to lose.

  Nurse Yannis came into the room, adjusted the netted window for maximum breeze, filled Nina’s water jug with more ice, emptied the wastepaper bin, taking sly glances at her all the while, and seemed to be looking for something else to do. Finally she settled into the blue chair, and folded her hands in her lap. They looked at one another. The nurse was probably about her own age, Nina thought. She was of average height and wiry build, discreet muscles showing in her upper arms. Her nose was bony and her mouth narrow and full, and her short brown hair, which suited her heart-shaped face, was red with henna in the artificial light.

  “My sister is on the bus,” she said. “She goes to the gardens on the bus.”

  “She was on the bus that day? I’m so sorry. Is she all right?”

  “It is fine. It is good for her.” She looked into Nina’s face for the first time. “My mother wants to thank you.”

  “To thank me?”

  “She wants to come, to hold your hands. She has no English.” She rose from the seat and sandwiched Nina’s hands between her own with a steady pressure, before releasing them again and returning to sit. “That is what she wants. She will kiss your hands also. She has no English but I have taught her ‘thank you.’ Can I tell her you permit it?”

  “Of course, if that’s what she wants. But I don’t understand.”

  “My sister is been sad. My mother is despaired. Is that the right word? It isn’t right.”

  They were interrupted by Dr. Christos, who put his head round the door and muttered something to the nurse. Sighing, she hurried out.

  “Sorry,” he said. “You were having a good chat. I hope you weren’t getting ahead in your story.”

  “Not at all. She was telling me about her sister. Apparently she was one of the passengers.”

  He came further into the room. “She’s always been a little bit lost. The sister. But there’s good news: she’s going to work for Michael. He wanted to know if he could do anything for anybody who was in the crash. He enjoys that, being the benefactor. Anyway, she’s taken a job at his company on the mainland; not working for him directly, I’m glad to say.”

  “Does this mean there will only be five women now, the women gardeners?”

  “They’ve already recruited a replacement.” He was looking at the novel on the bed. “Did you buy that at the English stall at the market?”

  “No, I bought it at the airport. What made you ask that?”

  “Somebody saw you, the day you were hurt, over at the market, buying a book. She said she saw you throwing a book away, in a bin. You seemed upset, she said. She was on the same boat back with you.”

  Nina searched in her handbag as if looking for something, a phantom lost thing.

  “Was there something in the book?” he added.

  “Nothing like that.”

  He picked the discarded novel up and looked at the back. “Perhaps I could borrow this, when you’re done. All I seem to read lately are thrillers. I only get to read in short bursts, and when I’m tired I find it hard to concentrate, unless a story’s very visual. What kinds of books do you work on?”

  “General fiction. Usually there’s a romance element somewhere.”

  “It sounds like a dream job, but I suppose it might be annoying if you didn’t like the book.”

  “I don’t usually much like the books. I’m more of a nineteenth-century girl.”

  “Do you like Tolstoy?” He sounded hopeful.

  “I love Tolstoy.”

  “It’s going to be great when you move here. Someone who reads, who likes films. It’s been lonely since my only real friend moved to the mainland last year. Did Vasilios tell you about his movie evenings in the winter in the bar? There’s a projector and he shows them on the big wall.”

  “The wall with no pictures on it. He told me about the film nights.”

  “He gets uptight if people even lean on it. The key thing on islands is to have a good home life. A good home life’s the saving grace.”

  It was too much, talking as if it was decided. “It’s not decided yet,” she reminded him, and then, because he looked disappointed, “What’s Christmas like here?”

  “Quiet, devout, not at all Anglo. Though Michael comes at Christmas with his famous friends, pursued by photographers. The weather’s not bad, sometimes windy and rainy but often bright, and only rarely really cold.”

  “What’s the downside?”

  “The downside. Well, I suppose it can seem like a long wait until the tourists come back. We go into a kind of hibernation. I get around it by spending the holidays with my other daughter in the States.” His phone was ringing. “But you know, it’s a very different life on an island if you have someone.”

  He answered his phone, and she watched him, patiently dealing with a query, sorting out someone else’s problem in his slow, beautifully articulated Greek, his kind and authoritative intonations. She’d had almost six months of being alone, of feeling starkly alone, but perhaps there was hope. People had second relationships; they did, and sometimes they were happier the second time. Perhaps there was going to be one more opportunity for tenderness, one more offer of a hand held in life, a warm hand held tightly in the street in the brutally disinterested world, and this was it, its genesis. It was possible. She’d classified herself as fundamentally unlovable, after everything that’d happened, but what if someone else just didn’t see it? It was like an old novel, the way her mind was working now, its firm response to an opportunity, and she was taken by surprise. It was odd that being surprised by your own ideas was even possible, but there it was, the unsolicited thought, that if he offered himself, a share in his life, she might not hesitate. Being alone was too hard; it was that simple and difficult.

  Nina picked up the newsletter again and flicked blindly through the pages, pausing to scrutinize stories as if she could read them. She had to tell herself to slow down. It was only dinner. Only dinner and no more; a new restaurant he wanted to visit. She looked at her phone, at the most recent text from Paolo, the one about the divorce settlement, and sighed. She turned away from his questions and allowed herself to imagine, knowing it was foolish but allowing it anyway. She saw herself in glimpses in a new incarnation: the incomer who’d been the doctor’s patient and who stayed on and married him, the dark-haired doctor’s blonde and blue-eyed wife, exotically semi-Scandinavian and long of limb, her Greek a little rusty but a woman anyone could depend on. She could throw herself into winning the love of everyone, this whole society, a help and friend to all and giver of the island’s best parties.

  But it was only dinner.

  “What’s funny?” Dr. Christos, a man she didn’t know, sat in front of her, closing and repocketing his phone.

  “Just a funny thought.” Crashing into the scenario had come the probable reality. “Nina? Who’s that?” “You know — the foreigner. The one with the limp.” “The odd one, looks like a mermaid, hides in the house and doesn’t talk?” “Yeah, that one.”

  Her smile vanished. She saw that it wasn’t her own face — in
troverted, socially inept Nina, awkward with everyone other than Luca — in the bits of film unspooling in her mind, but that of her mother. In a different context it could easily have been her mother’s story. In any case it was all highly improbable. Dr. Christos had a paler indentation around his ring finger where a wedding band had been removed, and he might be available, but so what? They’d have dinner and she’d fly home. He was busy on his laptop now, and she looked at him working and felt the first stirring of attraction. This available man might be someone she could lust after. The right kind of intimacy, the right kind of eye contact, the right kind of conversations when they were alone: perhaps that could grow into — she couldn’t use the word, the L word, but perhaps something permanent and comforting. She looked at his capable hands, his forearms, and then at his mouth. Now that there wasn’t any choice other than to be self-determining, there was a lot to be said for bypassing the whole love question and choosing, in a cool-headed way, someone who’d be good to grow old with. Her mind went to things that her mother had written, in the diary that Nina had brought with her. Perhaps romantic love is always a kind of undiagnosed madness.

  Even as she thought this, a corrective was at hand. Her phone buzzed and another text message had arrived from Paolo. Am now coming five days earlier. All booked up. Need a holiday. Can stay out of your way if that’s what you want.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The first time Paolo rang Nina at the hospital she was astounded that he’d called at all. His final words to her at the airport had seemed definitively final, so she’d been surprised to get his text, saying that when it was time he’d come to Greece and get her, and even more so when he’d telephoned. Her phone had rung out and she’d seen his name come up on the screen, and had answered with a comical braced expression, her teeth set together.

  There wasn’t any kind of a greeting; no hi, no hello. He launched in. “So how’s the leg?” If this was how it was to be, if he was opting for a chummy kind of amnesia, then so be it. It made a kind of sense.

  “The leg’s still there, but I keep dreaming that it’s gone,” she told him. “I dream that I wake up and all that’s left is a stump.” She was aware that she sounded nervous.

  “It takes a while to get over these things.” He cleared his throat. “I had coffee with your dad today. He’d just been to the cottage and said to tell you all’s well there. Your herb garden’s growing fast. He hoped it was okay to take some trimmings. I said I was sure it was.”

  “Of course. Have you had much rain?” Yes, the weather.

  “It’s been monsooning. Your dad also said to tell you that he’s had a breakthrough on the book. He’s writing to you.”

  “That’s good to hear, about the book. He seemed like he’d got stuck, when I was living with him. Though maybe it was because I was living with him.” She felt weak. Surely they couldn’t keep going like this without mentioning it?

  “I bet it isn’t raining in Greece,” Paolo said.

  “Too warm, some days. I’m longing for a swim. I can hear people on the beach.”

  “But it’s pebbly there, isn’t it, by the hospital?”

  “How’d you know that? It wasn’t here when we were here.”

  “Google.”

  “Google, of course.” The anxiety was building, tight in her rib cage and soft in her stomach. Was she making a fool of herself in not seeing that this bland chatter was supposed to be her cue to sweep through it and apologize?

  “It’s been quite warm between the showers,” Paolo said. “Good for your garden. Your dad might be struggling to keep on top of things.”

  “I told him to hire someone and that I’d pay.” She sounded to herself as if she might be about to have a seizure. Her tongue felt enormous.

  “Listen, I have to sign off, I’m late for a conference call. Good to hear you’re okay, Nina.”

  “Thanks. Bye.”

  “I told your dad that I’d ring. He’s anxious for news. Bye then.” In the tone of this voice, inside this farewell, was palpably the sound of obligation.

  When Nina left Paolo she’d lived with her dad while the legalities were completed for the buying of a house in the same village, barely a mile from her childhood home. The day she got the keys and moved in, a chilly day at the end of June, Paolo had sent flowers and Nina rang her friend Susie in tears.

  “What on earth’s the matter?” Susie asked. “So Paolo sent flowers. What’s wrong with that?”

  “He wished me a happy life ahead. A happy life, like we’re not going to see one another.”

  “He is trying to be dignified, Nina. That’s all.”

  “Why doesn’t he feel things? He doesn’t seem to feel anything about this disaster.”

  “Nina. I say this to you as a friend.”

  “What?”

  “You left him. It was you who left Paolo, and without much of an explanation.”

  “There was an explanation. We talked it over.”

  “You talked incomprehensibly by all accounts. Even by your account.”

  “You’ve heard his account?”

  “He thinks it’s about Luca. He thought having Luca staying with the two of you would make you happy.”

  “He was wrong.”

  “He said he thought it was what you always wanted.”

  “He was wrong about that, too.”

  “Can I ask you a question? Was it because you and Luca had sex? I wouldn’t blame you, I should add. I would’ve, like a shot.”

  “No.”

  “Was it so you could be with Luca, finally — did you leave so you and Luca could get together?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Twenty-five years after marrying the wrong brother.”

  “He wasn’t the wrong brother.”

  “Of course he was. You’ve always been completely smitten with one another.”

  “He wasn’t the wrong brother. That wasn’t the tragedy.”

  “Tragedy? What tragedy?” Nina didn’t answer. “Luca’s moved out now, Paolo says.”

  “It wasn’t about Luca,” Nina told her. “Luca was irrelevant.” Though that wasn’t entirely true.

  “Poor Luca, being irrelevant. His wife had just died. Paolo says you made it obvious you didn’t want him there, staying with you. That’s outstandingly odd. It’s not like you to be unkind and especially not to Luca; Luca of all people. What gives?” There was no response. “Darling. Noble silence is all very noble, but on the other hand it’s a license for gossips. The story going around is that you expected them to swap, when Francesca died: Paolo was to step aside, so that after a decent interval …”

  “People can think what they like but they’ve got it all wrong. When I left Paolo, I didn’t want to see Luca ever again. It was why I left.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t be in the same room as Luca anymore.”

  “To be honest I’m kind of offended. I’m offended you won’t share this with me.”

  “I will tell you. Just not yet; right now what I need is distraction, and not to get messages from Paolo wishing me a happy life.”

  “He means well.”

  “But it’s all part of the plan, isn’t it? Kindness is part of the plan.”

  “What do you mean, love?”

  “It’s all part of the hatred.”

  “You worry me when you start to talk like that. I think you should see someone, your doctor. Let me make you an appointment.”

  “I’m absolutely fine. I’m clearer about everything now. I’ve never been clearer.”

  Meanwhile, across town, Paolo had asked Luca if they could have a talk.

  They were in Paolo’s office, a room unchanged in fifty years but which looked far older even than that, because their father, a lover of all things British and antique, had instructed its fitting-out in a Victorian style. It was wood-paneled, decorated with rare maps, and smelled of beeswax and dust and slightly of damp. An eighteenth-century window looked out over a narrow street to other e
ighteenth-century windows.

  Luca had brought coffee, and put both cups down on the big desk, a partner’s desk inlaid with emerald-green hide. He sat on its corner and looked attentive. “Go on.”

  “Nina isn’t talking to you,” Paolo began. “Why isn’t she talking to you?”

  “Why isn’t she living with you? Same reason, I suspect.”

  “Which is?”

  “It’s a mystery.”

  “I didn’t recognize her, Luca. When she started talking about it, her unhappiness. It came out of nowhere. I was caught off guard.”

  “I told you. She’s seemed different to me, too.”

  “Why was she so weird about your staying with us? She’s always wanted you around. But then suddenly she couldn’t tolerate you being in the apartment. She said she couldn’t eat any more bread that you’d made us. It was actually bizarre.”

  Luca came over to where Paolo was sitting, in their father’s old chair, and put his hand on his brother’s shoulder, but was aware of Paolo’s struggling to keep composure, and withdrew. He sat down again on the edge of the desk and folded his arms and looked at the floor as if it interested him. “Have you spoken to her?”

  “Yesterday. I rang to see if she needed help with the move. She seemed offended.”

  “Well, I can sort of see her point. I can hear Francesca saying that help with moving in sounded like help with moving out.”

  “Is she still talking?”

  “No. And I don’t see her as much now. The last time, she was on the sofa when I came in after work. Doing the sudoku in the Times, the pen in her mouth and her face all frowny. Her little hands. There and then gone. She was perfect, you know. Not just beautiful, though that counts for a lot. She was so tolerant of all my terrible shit.”

  “Indeed.” Paolo looked thoughtful. “Here’s the thing that floored me. When I pressed her for reasons, she told me I was like her father, too much like him.”