The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  “Paolo said the same.”

  “The reason the cottage feels cold and damp,” Paolo said on his second visit, “is because it is cold and damp.” He was comfortable talking about the house; they’d talked of little else. “It was built on a gradient and there’s soil banked up against the back wall. Hence dampness and armies of woodlice.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “But you can make it better. You could get the earth dug out and drainage put in at the back; that would make a huge difference.” Her father had said the same. They pressed in on her from both sides, these men and their pronouncements. In any case there wouldn’t be visits from Paolo anymore.

  After he’d left and she’d put the books away and hung the picture — things of hers he’d brought round that she’d left behind — it came to Nina that she was setting up in anticipation of a solitary life. Like Miss Plowman, she might never come up with a good reason to live anywhere else but here for the rest of her days; she’d die alone at one hundred and one years old and be found by the postman. Miss Plowman had been reclusive, friendless, near sociopathic, and Nina had a foretaste of a possible old age. All she’d seemed able to do lately was push people away. She craved people and then couldn’t tolerate them. Was that how it had started, the extreme loneliness of poor Miss Plowman? Her kitchen drawers had been left unemptied after the sale and the dresser had yielded its treasures: yellowing piles of recipes cut from newspapers, tobacco tins of buttons, scrapbooks of gardening records, and four cards from when she’d turned one hundred, one of them from Robert and none of their messages convincingly warm. Nina’s father confirmed that Miss Plowman had never been married, had never had a boyfriend as far as anyone knew, and was not well liked. Miss Plowman was not well liked — what a terrible legacy; what words for a tombstone.

  She’d suffered a stroke and was found on the kitchen floor, having already been dead for forty-eight hours. What must it be like to have nobody, no one at all? It didn’t bear thinking about. If Nina were to be Miss Plowman, at forty-six she wasn’t even halfway through her life; there’d be fifty-five years of living alone. She was standing in the bathroom cleaning her face with cotton wool as this occurred to her. She’d developed, she thought, a disappointed look. A grid of creases had appeared under her eyes, marionette lines led down from her cheeks to her chin, and gray strands were obvious, now, in the blonde. There wasn’t any doubt that in terms of — what was that hideous phrase? sexual capital — in terms of sexual capital she was already over the hill, prompting desire in no one ever again. The thought provoked a slow stir-up of fear, like the bottom of a pond agitated by a stick, clogging her mind with its silt. Couldn’t she go back? Too late, too late, the summit was passed and she was on the road down, all opportunities wasted. It began to be difficult to breathe: she took hold of the sink with both hands and felt violently sick and leaned forward. She was going to die, not in fifty-five years but right now. Her phone was in her bathrobe pocket; she leaned against the wall and slid down to sit on the floor and rang Dr. Macfarlane at home. Alison had soothed her fears. No, it didn’t sound anything like a stroke. Could she make that appointment now, with the friend at the clinic? Nina agreed that she could.

  “And after that, what I prescribe is the holiday you talked about.”

  “I was sure that I was dying,” Nina said.

  “Of course you’re dying, we’re all dying,” Alison consoled her. “But not now. This is just anxiety. Take the holiday.”

  Dr. Christos said, “Your phone’s flashing.”

  “I had it set to silent. It’s Paolo.” Nina picked it up and said hello. She smiled at the doctor as she did so.

  Paolo’s voice said, “Just tell me one thing absolutely honestly — are you in love with Luca?”

  “Hold on a second.”

  “Absolutely honestly: is it Luca that you want?” He wasn’t ever going to stop this. “There’s nothing to lose now, in being honest,” he said. “Do me the honor of being honest with me.”

  Nina said, “I can’t talk now; my doctor’s here,” but Dr. Christos was already leaving, saying he’d be back, and Paolo overheard. He said, “So now he’s gone, answer the question.”

  “It’s like I said at the airport. I was trying to tell the truth. It was something else. Like an addiction.”

  “Addiction is an odd word to use.”

  “Is it?”

  “So you’re distinguishing between love and infatuation, and felt neither for me.”

  “I didn’t say that. Where did that come from? Have you just called me to be angry with me?”

  “I want to know if I should be talking to my brother, or if I’m a gullible fool.”

  She said, unguardedly, “I’m pissed off with him, too.”

  “Pissed off why?”

  Why had she said that? “Just because of all this mess.” The tight control was exhausting her.

  “I know it was Luca who initiated it. He told me.”

  “You’ve had the conversation, then.”

  “I get it. I see how it happened. You’d moved out and were mildly deranged. He was grieving and withdrawn and nobody knew what to do for him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But why did your sleeping together make him worse? Why did you become so ill afterwards? Just tell me. Tell me again. You’re not with Luca. You’re not with him in some hidden way that’ll come to light when you come back?”

  “I don’t even want to run into him again. Run over him, maybe.”

  “Why do you say that? Did he behave badly? He didn’t … I mean, I hope he wasn’t …”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, it doesn’t matter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His account is pretty anodyne. You were both depressed, you comforted each other. And then … then decided it must never happen again and it was all fine, but — hang on, how does this bit fit into the story — never spoke to one another again, either.” Nina didn’t have an answer and Paolo continued. “Things are squared here. If that’s really how it was. I do need to know where I stand with him and I’m counting on you to be frank.”

  “There’s nothing else to tell.”

  “To be honest I’ve wanted you to have an affair for a long time.”

  “You haven’t. Don’t do that.”

  “Just to get it over with, the inevitable. So I could hate him officially and we could move away, after however many bloody decades it’s been with the two of you and your mating dance. I had nights when I went out in the car and shouted and punched the steering wheel.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop! Stop saying how sorry you are. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. You know what the worst of it is, Nina? Luca and I are strangers now; I don’t trust him and I can’t talk to him. What do you have to say to that? Sorry. Sorry.” He’d mimicked her low voice. “Sorry — that’s all you have for me, isn’t it? Why am I even calling you? This isn’t helping. I’ll see you when I get to Greece.” He hung up the phone.

  Dr. Christos came into the room looking cheerful, and stopped in his tracks. “What’s the matter?”

  “Bad call. Bad phone call.”

  “You look so anxious.”

  This, she could risk being frank about. “I’m always anxious. I’m becoming bored with my anxiety.”

  He dropped a stack of paperwork onto the table and settled himself in the chair. “Always? Why always?”

  “It started when my parents separated. If you want to know the real beginnings of it.”

  “Your parents divorced? I’m sorry. It’s very hard for children.”

  “They didn’t divorce. They separated when I was nineteen and then my mother died a year later. Heart failure.”

  “You’ve been anxious since you were nineteen years old? That’s a long time.”

  “Not continually anxious, but predisposed to it, I suppose. Luca, my brother-in-law, was my boyfriend, sort of my boyfriend, at the time. He proposed
to me the night my mother died, and I said no. I thought we were too young and that was the end of that. We were too young, of course. I was twenty. I was only in my third year at college. He married someone else six months later. He married Francesca, and I married Paolo the following year, and we were all happy, I thought, the four of us.”

  “The four of you?”

  “Happy and good friends.”

  “But. I feel there is a but.”

  “My husband always thought that really I was in love with his brother, and when Francesca died it made him afraid. Luca came to live with us, and I went quiet and withdrew, and that made Paolo more afraid. He couldn’t explain it, you see.”

  “And were you? In love with Luca?”

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love. I used to think I had. I knew what it meant. But now I really don’t.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “What’s it mean if it comes to an end in the course of one conversation? What if someone says to you that they don’t think you were ever in love?”

  “People use the word to punish other people as well as seduce them. They don’t always mean it. It doesn’t matter, though, not really, whether you can use the word or not. It’s not the word that matters. It’s how you behave.”

  “You don’t think the word matters, the use of the word? The other person using it? Really?”

  “Listen, whether people use the word or don’t, it’s very simple: they’ll stay with you or they won’t. In the meantime it’s a peace-keeping word. That’s why people are constantly asking for it. My wife used to. She needed me to look into her eyes at the same time. It said to her, ‘It isn’t going to be today, the day I leave you.’ That’s all that it could mean.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  When Nina and Paolo were together Sundays were often difficult, not only because they were committed, by long years of precedent, to go to lunch at Maria’s, but because of what always happened afterwards. Invariably Nina was restless at home on a Sunday evening. She’d flit between books, start and abandon work, go out for head-clearing walks, put on a film and then stare out of the window, her hands moving against each other, fingers finding skin and stroking there. She said it was the classic Sunday blues.

  Sometimes Paolo made the mistake of remarking that his Mondays were more to be dreaded than hers. What could she say to him? She loved her job. All she dreaded about the working week was Paolo’s being brought low by it. “I know you work harder than me,” she’d concede. It seemed important to be emphatic and to keep conceding this. It was incontestable that Paolo worked very long hours. He had to: once Giulio died, the year Paolo turned thirty, the business was basically down to him, and as the years rolled on it operated on tighter and tighter margins. Its engine was constant maintenance, constant vigilance, which was something Luca never really seemed to get. At least, he acted as if he didn’t get it. Luca worked a principled seven-hour day on the basis of work-life balance, leaving his brother to pick up the slack, and if he was challenged about it he’d maintain that Paolo’s approach was inefficient, even obsessive. Francesca talked as if she and Luca were the royal line, and Paolo the king’s brother. “Things are always hectic at work,” she’d say. “Luca manages to take time off. You need to learn to delegate.” But Paolo had tried and failed to delegate. He’d be tired at the weekend and then he’d go back to the office at 8:00 a.m. on Monday and wouldn’t much be seen for the following five days, other than to come home late and fall asleep in front of Newsnight. He’d generally be found in his home office on a Saturday morning, and also on a Sunday night, and it was a situation that couldn’t be helped. They’d had that argument once and it wasn’t repeated. Saturday afternoons, though, were designated as couple time. He and Nina would go out into the city together; they’d do the shopping and come home to read the papers, with music playing (über-gloomy German lieder, as Luca put it); they’d cook and eat and watch films. In retrospect it was all highly and repetitively scheduled, with little oxygen let into its habitualness. There wasn’t much in the way of lingering eye contact, little in the way of daring to be purposeless and alone.

  The usual pattern on a Sunday was that they’d sleep in, do chores, and be at Maria’s by midday. They wouldn’t often be home again till 4:00 p.m. or even later. Everybody knew the reason that lunch was prolonged: it was because Luca and Nina found it hard to say goodbye to one another. Their weekly reunion had a quality to it that was like something long delayed. Paolo and Francesca would hear about things neither had mentioned, that had been saved up, and also things they’d heard about in brief, that were extended and reframed into comedy.

  Once, in the tenth year of the marriage, Paolo was startled to discover that Nina and Luca were holding hands at the lunch table. This wasn’t something he could pretend not to know. He hadn’t ever had cause to drum up a hierarchy of betrayal, but just for that minute, right then, hand-holding at a family occasion seemed far worse than meeting in secret. Something had to be done; he knew he couldn’t go home with nothing said, festering and menaced by fear, so as they left their mother’s house he took hold of his brother’s arm to signal that he wanted a word. It was a private moment and safe to speak up: Maria was putting dishes away noisily in her kitchen; Nina and Francesca had gone ahead and were standing talking in the garden. Paolo paused his brother in Maria’s porch, among the pink pelargoniums that grew there on shelves.

  “Can I ask you please, not to,” he said. He had to be formal. He didn’t trust himself to be calm.

  “Not to what?” Luca didn’t seem to know.

  Paolo turned so that his back was to the women. “Nina’s hand.” It was hard to say it in a whole sentence.

  “It was Nina.”

  “Doesn’t matter who it was. Don’t.” Luca was surprised by the forcefulness. Paolo was always unfailingly polite.

  “She was the one who held mine,” Luca said quietly, glancing at his wife. Francesca was telling Nina about her Italian relatives, who lived in a village without gardens; who worked in the fields and hated even the idea of gardening.

  “Don’t.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. But no. Not again.”

  “There are other people here who’d misinterpret it.” That was the gallant approach to issuing a warning. Paolo was always conscious of the gallantry in things, or lack of it.

  “I know,” Luca conceded. He didn’t acknowledge that he’d been warned.

  Paolo could feel his reasonableness, his famed reasonableness, beginning to fray. “Don’t do this.”

  “There isn’t a this,” Luca told him.

  Paolo managed to lower his voice. “Don’t treat me like an idiot.”

  “I’m serious. Let me tell you what it is. You’re never demonstrative. You’re more like Robert than she realized you’d be.”

  Francesca turned to them. “Enough conspiring, boys,” she said. “It’s time to go home.”

  When Luca arrived at the office the following morning, Paolo asked if he could have a word, and a few minutes later Luca came into his room holding his pen in one hand and an order book in the other. Luca’s not really having the time for idle chat was indicated. “Paolo.”

  “What did you mean, more like Robert than she realized I’d be?”

  Luca closed the door. “Brother, I love you, more than I could ever love a woman, but you are not a demonstrative person.”

  “Demonstrative.” He seemed to weigh the word.

  “You were never the one who was physical with Nina. Can you remember ever touching her — and no, Anna’s photographs don’t count — before you kissed her at my wedding? I think not.” He tapped the pen against the book. “Had you ever had so much to drink in your life? No. Don’t look like that; it isn’t a criticism. Some people are not tactile, and you are one of the not-tactile people. Nina and I have always been physical with one another.”

  “So what you’re saying is that sex wouldn’t mean anything, either.”

  The bitterness
of this took Luca by surprise. “Paolo. What on earth.”

  “I’m just seeking clarification.”

  Luca put down the things he was holding. “Listen to me, listen. I am not in love with Nina. I am never going to be in love with Nina. Nina is my sister.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “My unofficial sister that I never had. A loved person, loved to bits in every other way than romantically.”

  Paolo knew this. He knew that Luca wasn’t going to use his power to take Nina from him. He didn’t allow himself to add a second thought, following on, which was that to Luca it was only possession of the power that mattered. He didn’t allow himself to dwell on that, because thoughts go on the record, even there in the deeps, and might rise to the surface and be real. Things we don’t allow ourselves even to think come out of our mouths in arguments.

  He’d made a decision early in life, about how best to deal with the triangle. He could have confronted them both — Luca, Nina — and made their love guilty, furtive; he could have brought the subject of others’ suffering into it, spelling out the ramifications, and made it impossible; he could have married someone else, his own Francesca, and didn’t feel as if he ever got the credit for not doing any of these things. He’d always loved Nina unconditionally and that was enough for him. Despite the things he found himself saying, out of hurt and bewilderment, once she’d moved out, there wasn’t anything she could have done to diminish his love, and so she had a power over him which he sometimes resented. For most of their marriage he was confident that he was liked, respected, approved of, adored, and in the context of adult sexual bonding, in the context of a long-term and loyal mating, wasn’t adored the same as loved? The trouble was that it wasn’t.

  After Nina left, Paolo came up with his own timetable of the inevitability of what happened, of its countdown, finding significance in things that weren’t important before. Afterwards, he pinpointed the beginning of the end as a moment during the previous summer, during the Romano clan’s annual family holiday by the sea. Late one night, Francesca went into the kitchen for a glass of water and discovered Nina kissing Luca. Francesca had gone to Paolo in tears, and had begged him not to make something of it. Luca had been acting weirdly ever since Francesca’s cancer diagnosis; he’d been odd at the office, he’d been odd with clients, he’d been odd at the Sunday lunches. He’d been badly affected by it and by things being uncertain, and allowances needed to be made.