The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  “It’s because she’s a girl, Paolo,” Luca said. “And you’re not, most of the time.”

  Paolo blushed. He never had the answer until afterwards. He got up and left the room, and then a few minutes later left the house with his bag over his shoulder, following his dad out to the car for a lift to the railway station. There was a note for Nina on the kitchen counter. Hope your foot’s okay. It’s been good to see you. Come and visit me in London one weekend.

  There was no doubt that Paolo was the nicer brother. Always kind. Even-tempered. Reliable. Loyal. But it hadn’t been any use.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “You mentioned that you’ve been here before,” Dr. Christos said as they sat having breakfast together. Olive oil had dripped onto the notes that sat beneath the plate, and Nina pointed it out, and he began blotting the paper with a napkin.

  “Paolo and I came here on our honeymoon, twenty-five years ago this month.”

  “Twenty-five years ago. Twenty-five years ago — I must have been a student then. I must have been here. I came home from the States for the summers. That’s right, I was here. I was working for Vasilios.”

  “Really? You were here that September? Or had you gone back by then? We arrived on the eighth.”

  “Ah no. I had to be back at the university at the end of August. We just missed each other. Wait — was that the wet summer? That’s what they call it here.”

  “It rained almost all of the time.”

  “The freak wet summer. You were here on honeymoon then? That was really bad luck.”

  “It seemed like an omen.” He gathered the plates and put them on the table, and opened the French windows. “It hasn’t changed much, the island,” Nina added.

  “It hasn’t. That’s its blessing and its curse. As they say.” He went to the corner and turned on the room fan. “Air con’s broken down today.” It spluttered into life and rotated its metal sunflower face, first this way and then that. “The people don’t change, either. I don’t know in what year the people here stopped changing: we talk about it sometimes at home. With my sister and her family, I mean. I live alone now.”

  He got the Scrabble board out and set it up. They played board games now, in the second week: Scrabble and backgammon, at odd intervals during the day, starting a round at breakfast and finishing by nightfall.

  “Do you like it, living alone?”

  “Not really. Look at that: it’s all consonants. But my wife didn’t want to live with me anymore. One day she said she’d had enough of my bad moods and irregular hours and my only doing the laundry every five years. She lives opposite her dad, in the houses up at the end of the no-through road, and I see her almost every day. So.”

  Nina put the first word down. VARIANT.

  “You used all your letters.” He sounded almost accusing.

  “Sorry. It was what I had given to me.” She wrote down the score. “In my case it was me who did the leaving, but that was only technically, as he wanted me to go, and it was pretty much the same with my parents.”

  “I feel as if we might need a bottle of whisky for this conversation. Whisky’s depressingly expensive here, though I can produce wine. My sister’s husband has the vineyard, the one you can see from the beach.”

  “It’s the wine that Vasilios serves.”

  He put down a word, and she followed with another, better one.

  “It is. You’ll have tasted it. I can bring some in after hours, when I’m no longer your doctor, and we can sit on the patio and get toasted; toast your survival, I mean.”

  “Is that allowed, the drinking?”

  “I’m the one who does the allowing, though we hide the liquor when the humorless people come calling.” He inclined his head towards the window. “Quarterly inspections hoping to catch us out. And I have to say, it’s also how it felt in my marriage. Audits and reports and failure to meet standards.” He put down QUEST with the Q on the triple, and his face confirmed that honor had been saved. “The thing with relationships is that talking’s neither here nor there, and when it’s wrong it’s wrong. As soon as we know that, we should acknowledge it and move on. Surely.” She put I–O–N onto the end of QUEST. “Is that allowed?” he queried. “I don’t think you’ve changed the root of the word, but I’ll allow it this time.” He frowned at his board. “Women always want reasons; they want to go for a long walk, but sometimes it’s better if people don’t talk things over. Go with the instinct; the instinct’s usually right. And then, don’t look back — that’s absolutely the key thing.”

  “My husband would agree with you,” Nina told him. “My ex-husband. I don’t know what to call him anymore. He drew the line in the sand and stepped over it, and on the other side there were lots of single women who’d formed a queue. My dad says he’s dating, out having dinner and looking a lot happier.”

  Dr. Christos put down DRAB. “I know, but it’s all I have. This doesn’t always seem like a game of skill. Anyway. It’s just a game.” He got out fresh tiles. “I wish my ex would fall in love again. My life would be a hell of a lot easier.”

  Nina had her word prepared and Dr. Christos followed immediately with EXIT, the X on a double.

  “How can it be better not to talk things over?” she asked him. “The end of a marriage is a big thing in anybody’s life.”

  “I don’t think it follows,” he told her. She laid down APHID below EXIT so that she also made EH, XI, and ID. She had to show him the booklet with its list of acceptable two-letter words. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “You’re way too good at this. I diagnose too much Scrabble in your life. And no, I don’t think it follows. Few people can do justice to their decisions when asked about them. Language is an inadequate thing for feelings.”

  “But you have to make an attempt at it, at least.”

  “A decision comes at the end of a long sequence of thoughts. A person’s already talked it over a long time in his head.” He looked at his tiles glumly. “All these useless four-letter words. I can’t put CHAT down, not after ID, the ID incident.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Put CHAT down if that’s what you have. As you say, it’s the luck of the draw.” She watched as he put CHAT on the board and garnered nine points. “But you have to give reasons, surely. You can’t not give reasons.”

  “I don’t know if that helps. In our case it made things worse.” He looked at his phone. “I have to go; I’m late for a meeting. I’ll bring work back with me. You mustn’t distract me this afternoon.”

  When he returned, after lunch, the aroma of coffee preceding him in the corridor and the sound of his flattened espadrilles flapping, he said, “I know what I said but please distract me: this is turning into a crap of a day.”

  “Do you want to carry on with the game?”

  “Let’s do that later. I may need to eat a dictionary first. I’m actually really tired. I’ll close my eyes for a bit and listen. Tell me something. Tell me something new.”

  He sat himself down in the armchair, his red jeans and gaudy Hawaiian shirt super-real against the white of the wall, resting an elbow on the chair arm, his head in his open hand.

  Nina said, “I had a sort of a breakdown, I think.”

  Dr. Christos opened his eyes and closed them again. He didn’t look especially surprised. “Go on. If you want to say more.”

  “What happened was fairly straightforward: my sister-in-law, Francesca, died in February, and for various complicated reasons I became depressed.”

  “Various straightforward complicated reasons. What did she die of?”

  “Breast cancer. She was forty-five.”

  “What were the complicated reasons?”

  “Francesca died and it was very distressing, and everybody fell apart. Even me, which surprised everyone because I’m a cold fish.” She grimaced.

  “Surely not.”

  “My mother-in-law’s phrase, because I’m reserved. Normally, yes, reserved, though I can see that might be hard to believe. And then Paolo
wanted to talk to me about my being a misery. I was surprised because I thought that was him. We had a conversation about love. I didn’t think we were in it and he didn’t argue. So I moved out and went back to the village, really a suburb now, where I grew up, and then I went a bit nuts, and got pills, and felt better, and my doctor said I needed a proper holiday, so here I am.”

  The doctor’s eyes were closed. It made confiding easy. It was comforting for Nina to be able to do this summarizing and hear it the way it ought to have been, its loose ends all tied.

  “Was that the disgrace?” he asked.

  “No, there was more. I’ll come to that.” She settled herself flatter on the bed. She could feel her heartbeat slowing.

  “When you say breakdown — how did it start?”

  “Are you going to take notes — have you gone into doctor mode on me?”

  “Not at all. Sorry. Just very nosy.”

  “It started with a cauliflower. Of all things. Paolo came to the cottage to see how I was settling in. He’d brought wine and a pair of small chickens that were ready to cook. I forget what they’re called; there’s a word for the little ones; they come in pairs and you eat one each. I’ve never liked them because it’s like eating babies. Anyway. He said he would roast them. I didn’t want that. It seemed like a big deal.” She focused hard on the window blind, which was bobbing in the room fan’s breeze. “I wasn’t well. But you see, why did I have to eat chicken with a man I’d recently told I didn’t love? It’s always been other people who decide what’s kind and what’s rude. I’ve never been one of the deciders.”

  “Was it true about not loving him anymore?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How could you not know?”

  “You say that as if it’s always been clear to you, who you love and who you don’t.”

  “Shouldn’t that be ‘whom’?”

  “I tend to pretend I don’t know that, in conversation. It’s so doggedly formal. ’Course, if I were editing you it’d be different. Paolo didn’t like my editing him. He didn’t like the way I’d done the food shopping, either. Why was it any of his business?”

  Before she could stop him he’d opened the fridge, saying, “Dear God, what’s all this?” The ready meals were stacked in two piles of three, and on the upper shelf smaller cartons, of rice, couscous, prepared side dishes, sat alongside tubs of hummus, salsa, prepared garlic and chili pepper.

  “I haven’t felt like cooking.”

  He pulled out one of the meal boxes so as to be able to read the label. “Cumberland sausage with parmesan mash.”

  “I haven’t felt like cooking.”

  Paolo found a roasting dish, washed his hands, salted the birds, and then — taking a knife from the rack on the wall and a board from behind the bread bin — chopped onions and garlic cloves and added them to the tin. He rummaged in the fruit bowl, and sliced a lemon up and added the pieces. “There. As easy as those terrible cook-chill things.”

  “I know. Why are you treating me as if I don’t know?”

  He’d turned up the radio, and steamed the potatoes and boiled some green beans and they’d eaten lunch and talked about nothing, about world events.

  Then he’d said, “Does the chef get a cup of coffee?” and he’d hung around, sitting on her sofa with his feet on the table, reading her weekend newspapers with faked raptness as if he hadn’t already read them at home. He mentioned, on leaving, that he’d left her a cauliflower that he’d bought at the farmers’ market, and some good cheese for the sauce.

  Her father had found her later that afternoon, sitting on the kitchen floor, a destroyed cauliflower around her, bits of floret clutched in balled fists. She’d smashed it over and over, its cauliflower brain. He’d driven her to the village clinic, 150 yards, as Nina felt too dizzy to walk it. The doctor was grave and kind and elderly, technically long past retirement age; she’d been the family GP for a long time. Nina thought of her as another mother. She was Dr. Macfarlane but Nina had long since been urged to call her Alison.

  “So what happened today?” Alison asked.

  “Paolo brought me a cauliflower. I’ve never liked cauliflower. He was the one who liked it.”

  It seemed as if her thoughts and preferences would always be tangled up with his, conjoined like Siamese twins, and she wasn’t wholly confident that her own would survive if surgically detached. Cooking was part of the problem, Nina told her; cooking was something too associated with the past and with domestic expectation. Chopping vegetables seemed too much like an act of faith in the future. Nina wondered if that’s how her father had seen things: he hadn’t cooked after Anna moved out, other than for the Sunday joint of beef, which sat under foil in the fridge for the rest of the week, awaiting slicing. Cooking, he said, was for people who didn’t have much else to do. Time was precious. He had ten thousand more books to read than years to read them in, and beans on toast and fruit from the bowl was a perfectly good dinner, thank you. He didn’t need to make a salad of the fruit and add elderflower cordial and mint and whatnot.

  “It’s not going to be forever,” Nina said. “It’s just that I need to go through a period of food not mattering. Much more time is freed up for curling on the sofa in a ball.”

  “Tell me more about the curling up,” Alison said, picking up her pen. It was an ordinary day in the despair business.

  “It hasn’t settled yet, the swinging pendulum,” Nina told her. “Though sometimes I can feel it, the pendulum, striking hard at my inner walls.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean. What’s the pendulum?”

  “Sometimes it seems as if I caught a virus a long time ago.” She’d felt it there, waiting deep inside her cells, waiting to be tickled back into life. “That’s what I’ve come to you about. I think I have a virus.”

  “What are the symptoms?”

  “Overexcitement and then feeling dead. A virus in my brain, that’s what it might be.”

  “It sounds rather like it might be a kind of depression.”

  “I’m not depressed. I just have to change and I’m too tired.”

  “I wonder if you should have a chat with a friend of mine. She’s a psychiatrist at the hospital.”

  “You mean the mental hospital?”

  “She’s a friend of mine, and it’s just where she works. She’s a good listener, and she will have more time.” She looked at Nina over the top of silver-framed glasses. “It’s entirely up to you. I think it might help and wouldn’t hurt, but you don’t have to go.”

  “I think I’m ill; I don’t think it’s depression,” Nina said.

  “Darling, it’s the same thing. Your mother said exactly the same words to me once, and I reacted in just the same way then.”

  “My mother? My mother didn’t suffer from depression.”

  “Everyone does from time to time. It’s completely routine human stuff. Shall I give my colleague a ring and get you an appointment?”

  Nina went home and looked at mental health forums online. One person had described their illness as a dark wood. He was always aware of its presence, its dark edges, he said; it was important to keep your back to it and focus on the landscape in front of you. Nina thought about this on the plane, after the second lot of turbulence, when the aircraft swung side to side and it felt as if the wings would break off. She’d had ultimate clarity then and was full of resolutions. Better to go through the wood than to avoid it. I’m going in there with matches in my pocket, she thought, and I’m going to make a fire. A cleansing fire seemed easy then. It was only on the fifth day of the holiday, coming down again to the same breakfast, the prospect of the same day laid out before her on the blue checked tablecloth, that she realized her fire-starting abilities had left her.

  When Dr. Christos brought the breakfast he’d also brought flowers, mauve and yellow flowers that grew on the hill, placing them on her bedside table in a jam jar, and when he went off to do the ward round (as he called it, though there weren’t rea
lly wards), Nina drew them, their delicate, small faces set among spiky leaves, a rough sketch in her notebook, noting the date underneath.

  If something was going to begin, perhaps it had already begun; perhaps it began with the flowers. What would life with Dr. Christos be like? She saw the two of them as if from the ceiling, curled naked in white cotton in his big wooden bed. Now she saw the house from the sky, with chili peppers drying on the steps, and towels, two sandy pairs of shoes; over the little tarmac road the sea was dazzling and the shoreline skimmed by light. She smiled at the snippet of film she saw of their island wedding, the two of them standing under the tree in the square, the whole community gathered around them. It might all unexpectedly be in her reach. What had permanence been with Paolo? A deep, unthinking lassitude. What would permanence have been with Luca? It would have been volatile; it might not have lasted. There had to be something else, some third option, at once fixed and evolving, and perhaps this was the start of it.

  She’d live in one of the little white houses that faced the sea, at least at first, while having something built, and she’d swim before starting work. She saw that her hair was wet as she took out the manuscript that had come in the post, its fat pile of paper densely peopled with words. Other people’s storylines and societies would keep her from feeling confined. Perhaps in addition she’d write a book about her life on the island; the accident and the way she met her second husband would both be gifts to an opening chapter. The small blue flame of her self-regard sparked and caught, when she thought of this plausible life.

  Nina picked up her notebook. The thing I love about the plan is that its simplicity and luxury are both the opposite to how they are at home. The simplicity would be in the material facts, their few possessions. The luxury would be in the backdrop, the sunshine, the seafront location, and most important in the stretching out of time. There’d be the opportunity to be properly alive. There would be four summer dresses; there’d only be a need for four. There’d be local leather sandals and a big plain hat and straw baskets for visiting the street market. She’d have an allotment up in the top village, and join the women gardeners on the minibus. The seven of them, six alike and one startlingly different, would stand together at the bus bench and scrutinize outsiders. Her Greek would be good by the second spring.