The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  She’d be able to build a new house: Dr. Christos didn’t know, yet, about the money her mother had left her. She began to make sketches in her notebook. What she wanted had a lot in common with the island hospital: a courtyard house, single story with large, airy rooms, French windows leading into a central garden, and a veranda all around the inner three sides of the building, its stout pillars made of a hard Asian wood. Indoors there’d be simple furniture, nice pictures, a lot of books, a lot of music, perhaps a piano by the window. Nina saw herself out watering her pots in the evening, wearing a white linen tunic and trousers, her hair tousled and full of salt, her bare brown feet encrusted with sand. She looked absolutely content, this woman, and young for her age. Her new husband was sitting on the veranda with the newspaper and with wine. He was saying, “Let me cook tonight; I was given some fish today.” He was saying, “Did you bring artichokes down from the garden, my love?”

  Everything had gone disastrously wrong by the sixth morning of the holiday. On the sixth day, there didn’t seem anything to do but the same things she’d done the day before. She began to be frightened; there ought to be other things to do, other things to imagine, so why couldn’t she imagine them? She went along to Blue Bay, stopping to take photographs that were identical to ones she had already, of the morning sea, the boats arriving back in the harbor, the fishermen’s blue trousers and bent backs. At the beach she made camp in a shady patch under a pine, swam for a few minutes and tried to read while drying off, and swam a second time and returned to the tree and lay with one eye open, watching the other tourists. This was the best part of the day, but it was over by noon. By then she didn’t any longer want to be on holiday or here or alone; by noon she felt stunted by misery, her heart wrapped tight and all her responses and thoughts blunted. She ate warm white beans and tomatoes at the café, drank a small carafe of wine and went back to her room for a siesta, but sleep wouldn’t come, so she lay looking at the square of bright blue sky, and at the small, agile lizard on her bedroom wall, which was darting and then standing as if in a trance. She watched her alarm clock, longing for it to be time for a swim at Octopus Beach, but was bored by her visit there and didn’t stay long. After a shower, clad in fresh evening clothes, she went to the shop and bought leather belts, jewelry made of polished blue and green pebbles, and a series of boxes covered in tiny glued shells. Then, having deposited her finds in the room, she went down for dinner and ate squid rings and fries and salad, and tried to look absorbed in her book.

  “Nina, didn’t you hear me?” She looked up and saw Cathy’s face. “Will you come on a boat trip with us tomorrow? We’re sailing off to see a ruin and taking a packed lunch.” Cathy could see that Nina didn’t want to. “Please come,” she urged. “Kurt is coming with us and he’s going to feel like a big German gooseberry otherwise. Aren’t you, Kurt?” Kurt turned down his mouth and nodded. It wasn’t possible to refuse.

  So, on the morning of day seven, Nina went on a boat trip. Kurt seemed to think they were on a date, moving closer so that their thighs touched, putting his arm along the back of her neck and resting it on the metal rail. He said, “How is such a beautiful woman single?” He kept turning to look at her profile as if something additional wasn’t being said that needed to be said, but which he continued all morning not to say. After ninety minutes of sailing time they arrived at a tiny uninhabited island which had the remains of a villa on it, roofless, its windswept columns snapped and eroded. Only remnants of walls marked out lost rooms; a weatherproofed display board offered drawings that illustrated how grand it had all once been. The archaeologists had only recently left, and so as a tourist attraction the place was brand-new, so new that it wasn’t yet listed in guidebooks. The most exciting thing there, the thing that would draw people, was the surviving patch of a mosaic floor. It was the mosaic Andros would recognize her in, the one of the Nereid with the long, fair hair and turquoise eyes, armored and riding a dolphin. It wasn’t Nina as she was now, but as she’d been in her twenties and stupidly sure of everything. Nina stood in front of the explanatory board but couldn’t seem to take in the English written on it. She felt obscurely angry, couldn’t eat the picnic, and paced about on the shore until the boat was ready to return, with Kurt trailing after her. Cathy, sitting opposite on the journey back, held Gareth’s hand throughout, and whenever Nina caught her eye Cathy winked at her. When they disembarked Kurt put his arm around Nina’s waist and Cathy said, “Ooh, what’s this, a holiday romance?” Nina pulled herself free and ran all the way back to her room, and stayed there till she heard everyone else going down to dinner, then went elsewhere to eat. On the eighth day, the day of the accident, she said no to Cathy’s offer of a bicycle ride, and went to Main Island alone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After Nina left the doctor’s office and her father had driven her home, and she’d insisted she was fine and that he should go, taking the sweeping brush from him and cleaning up the cauliflower fragments, Nina went into her sitting room and was engulfed in darkness. It was still early, a summer evening and bright outside; no lamps were lit indoors, so it wasn’t the electricity playing up, doing that odd swooping, though it was exactly as if the daylight had been dimmed with a switch and then undimmed. It wasn’t a subtle thing, but a dramatic darkening, pausing like a held breath before letting go and allowing the light to return. Nina’s reaction was immediate: she picked up her bag and her coat and locked up the house and went and spent the night at her father’s.

  “Have you ever seen a ghost?” she asked Dr. Christos as he handed over a dense, sticky rectangle of baklava. Nurse Yannis had turned fifty and there was cake for everyone. His fingers brushed against hers.

  “No such thing as ghosts. Oddities of light, of perception, absolutely. Hallucinations, sometimes. What did you think you saw?”

  “When I moved into the cottage there were peculiar things. Sudden cold spots. Shadows that seemed to be moving. Noises.”

  “How old was this house?”

  “Seventeenth century, the oldest bit.”

  “Buildings of that age shift and creak.”

  “Believe me, I’m as skeptical as you are.”

  “I doubt that very much,” he said, straight-faced.

  “Funny,” she said, acknowledging the joke. “Paolo agrees with you that it was the old house settling. There had never been central heating, for instance. I got heating installed and he thought that was enough to explain the noises. But there were other things. Objects not where I’d left them.”

  “Stress plays tricks with the memory.” He went out of the room and wheeled in the shredder and dispensed with a pile of unwanted paperwork, making paper tagliatelle of shreds, pink and yellow and green. It was briefly noisy in the stillness. “Sorry for this. If you would prefer I will return to my office.” He looked at her. “Do you like having me here?”

  “I do,” she said, allowing her smile to be intimate and finding, in his own smile, his own eyes, that the intimacy was returned. They’d swapped, in some small way, a confession of mutual attraction for one another.

  The nurse came into the room, and Nina wished her a happy birthday and said the baklava was the best she’d ever eaten, and Nurse Yannis thanked her, before saying something in Greek that was evidently pointed, raising her eyebrows at the doctor. He sounded contrite, but when she’d gone he said, “It’s not like we’re understaffed. We’re ridiculously overstaffed, in fact.” He went out into the corridor. “And it’s not as if I’m not working in here!” he yelled after her in English, before reappearing looking rattled. “She refuses to accept that I’m working when I’m with a patient. It’s obvious that I’m working. I’m working as hard as I need to. Why work harder? This is something we really have trouble with. She goes around inventing tasks so as not to have a moment of relaxation. Makes no sense to me. But she’s always been that way. Stubborn as hell.”

  “You’ve known each other a long time, then.”

  “We were at school toget
her. Friend of my sister’s.”

  “Old friends, then.”

  “Pain in the ass. So, have you done your exercises?”

  “Not as such. No.”

  “Do them, while I make a call. I’ll bring lunch back, and we’ll go and sit outside. We need to get you out of this room and into the good sea air. While we’re eating you can tell me more about your ghost.”

  When Nina bought the cottage she’d agreed to the asking price and paid in cash, using the money her mother left her, though her father winced at the news that she’d not bothered to haggle, saying it was a mistake to start a battle with a white flag. It was her father she’d taken to see the cottage. Robert had said, “Nina, isn’t this the place Luca was talking about buying?” and she’d said she didn’t know, although she did know. Luca had been to see it and had decided against. For years he’d talked, in the way of people at no risk ever of having to put their words into practice, about having a country life, a kitchen garden and hens, and when Francesca died he’d said he thought that a chicken house was the way forward, though it was a certainty that had lasted only two days. He continued to live in the marital home, in the middle of an immaculate residential district at the heart of the city, and had soily ingredients delivered in a weekly box. A vegetable plot was one of Nina’s few fixed plans, but her father had dismissed the idea as impractical. “It’s a lot more work than you think,” he said, casting an experienced eye over the mossy lawn, the thickets of rhododendron and thistle that had taken their chance while the house lay empty, but he’d liked the paved front patch, with its alpines and its cottage borders. When she took him round to the back he’d taken out a notebook and had begun to make lists of all the work that was needed. Everything was overgrown, feral, rampant; diseased crab apple trees sagged with parasite climbers and lichen, and the walls of old stone were cracked and bulging, their pointing reduced to dust. Nina couldn’t bring herself to tell him that she didn’t intend to change anything. They went inside, where several centuries had made their presence felt and rubbed alongside each other in peaceful disharmony. There were seventeenth-century proportions, eighteenth-century shutters, Victorian cupboards, 1920s plumbing, 1950s improvements, and 1970s Formica. Her father tapped and stamped, looked under carpets and sucked through his teeth.

  “You’ve already agreed to buy — legally sewn up?” he said eventually.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I think it’s fine.”

  It had started the first morning. Nina said goodbye to the man with the van who’d delivered her boxes, her few bits of furniture, and was standing at the sitting room window looking out into the back garden. The glass was dirty, the view blurred by cobwebs, and it was so quiet that she could hear her own breathing. Into this steady rhythm of air taken in and expelled there came another noise, a soft click from upstairs as if someone had shut a door very carefully, a click and a creak of floorboards. The carefulness of it, as if not wanting to be heard, was what made the hairs stand up on her arms. She’d gone up there and, just as she got a clear view down the corridor, thought she saw a white cat cross the hall into her bedroom. She checked everywhere, behind curtains and in cupboards and under beds, just in case a cat had got in during the move. There was no cat. She went downstairs and sat in one of the armchairs by the fire, and began to feel unwell.

  “Unwell how?” Dr. Christos was fiddling with the patio awning to create a deeper shade.

  “It was like a bad hangover but I hadn’t been drinking.”

  “Probably a virus, or just old dust.”

  “I lay on the sofa and slept for a while. Then something woke me up. It was a shout. My name was shouted. Nina! Like a warning.”

  “Perhaps you were warning yourself.”

  “Myself?”

  “Ghosts don’t exist, so why are you seeing a ghost? That’s the interesting question. I used to see my dog sometimes, last year after he died, but it wasn’t really my dog.”

  “It wasn’t just seeing; I could smell smoke.”

  Dr. Christos looked as if he’d expected this. “Hallucinations can be multi-sensory. What happened next?”

  “I put my coat on and went out into the garden and walked around it for a while. And I remember thinking that Miss Plowman spent a lot of time out there, this tiny figure, swamped by her tweed trousers and big ugly cardigans and a man’s fishing hat. She was out there in all weathers; maybe she didn’t like the atmosphere, either.”

  “Who’s Miss Plowman?”

  “She was the previous owner. She lived there for a hundred years.”

  “A hundred years! Seriously?”

  “She was born there and lived there all her life, and died two days before her hundred and first birthday. Then the cottage was empty for eighteen months. Nobody wanted it. I had the chance to buy lots of her old possessions, her furniture, and most of it was very nice so I agreed. But I began to associate her tables, her chairs, with the bad feeling in the house. I slept on the sofa sometimes and then I’d get annoyed with myself, and spend time upstairs and crash about and sing, trying to dominate the space. But I was spooked. Once I got frightened while I was having a bath.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s a nice bathroom. It has alternating black and white tiles and there are tropical fish on the black ones — it’s unchanged since the twenties. There’s a really big, deep bath with long-stemmed silver taps. So, I ran the hot water, got in and washed my hair, and as I was doing it, my eyes half open, I thought I saw someone.”

  “Someone who?” His face was openly doubtful.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m sorry. Go on. I’m interested.”

  “There was masses of steam and it was like it was gathering, into a shape, like a person.” She stopped there in describing it, but it had become denser in the corner by the door, spinning the fog into muscle and bone. Limbs became more distinct, a neck, an elongated head, a deep gray crevice where eyes might be. “I got out of the bath and opened the window and it dispersed. It wasn’t anything.”

  Nina had been prey to specific, private fears, to do with the more recent past, and the vengeful, restless dead, though others in the vicinity would have said immediately that it was Miss Plowman’s ghost. Miss Plowman was still notorious in the neighborhood. When Nina was young the children of the village had referred to her as the witch, a name picked up from their parents, in some cases even their grandparents. She’d long had a reputation for being fierce and humorless. There had been an ongoing feud one summer with children who sat on her low front wall on warm evenings — Nina among them — and things had escalated, with parents getting involved, banging on her door. Apparently her language could be pretty spectacular. Perhaps angry Miss Plowman had left her indelible trace, all that misdirected bad energy. It would have been a relief to catch a proper glimpse of the entity, and to see that it had a human form, and to see that it was only Miss Plowman.

  “Did you see it again, your steam ghost?”

  “No. But I saw my mother. When I cleared the condensation. In the mirror, in my own face.” It was a relief to change the subject.

  “Only because you look alike.”

  Nina had seen Anna looking back at her, as she had been during the last year of her life, separated from Nina’s father and living alone. It was the expression in her eyes that startled her; Anna’s soul had shone out through her eyes, like some people’s do. But where was that soul now? Not gone, surely; not ended. Nina liked to think of it blown like a dandelion clock, seeding across the world in new and unexpected places. Anna had asked that her ashes be scattered on the roses at the house, roses she’d planted and had tended for fifteen years. “Next year you’ll find me there, redder than red,” she’d written, and Robert had cried when he read that in her will. Perhaps that was the point, the intended reaction; sentimentality is a powerful toxin, after all, a fine biological weapon. It wasn’t possible to deny the request and nor was it possible to avoid the metaphor, whic
h would grow in his garden ever after. Nina had visited the rose beds on the first anniversary of her death, but it had rained hard the previous day and the blooms were sodden, flattened, browning and becoming mush. She remembered words of her mother’s when her own mother had died. Surely so much love as that could only feed the world of spirit in which it was laid to rest. Love that was so absolute: surely that couldn’t be extinguished? Apparently it could. Apparently love was entirely extinguishable.

  “Also there were clunkings, like shoes being dropped on the wood floor in my bedroom, that I heard from downstairs. And then I was pushed when I was sleeping. I woke up early one morning feeling like I’d been pushed hard in my back. I was sleeping on my side. I surged forward. I could feel her hand on my back.”

  “Her? You thought it was Miss Plowman?” Now he looked perturbed.

  “No. Its hand. But of course it wasn’t a hand.” At the time she’d known it was a hand, and whose hand it was. Nina was haunted; she knew this. She’d been afraid that it was a personal haunting and would always be with her, and wasn’t just confined to the house. It was Francesca, she knew, who had shadowed her there.

  “When I sat up in bed the closet doors were both open, and I always closed them at bedtime.”

  “Old houses move and doors move with them.”