The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  Luca shook out his newspaper to its full broadsheet size and disappeared behind it, other than for his hands at its edges.

  “Here is my suggestion,” Francesca said. “A registry office wedding and then a blessing by the priest to please the Italian contingent.”

  “You say ‘Italian contingent’ like that doesn’t include you.”

  “I was born in Greenwich. That’s in London. And look, they’re coming a long way and some of them really can’t afford it.”

  Luca’s newspaper said, “I think Nina should do what she likes.”

  Francesca was vexed by this. “But what about Paolo? He’s not happy about it, either.”

  This was surprising news to Nina. “What? What makes you say that?”

  “He doesn’t seem happy about it to me. That’s all.”

  “But Paolo agrees! He doesn’t want a church wedding and a big fuss.”

  “Right on,” Luca said.

  “Francesca tells me that you don’t much like my mother,” Paolo said later, walking with Nina to the pub. “Not that I’d blame you.”

  “Your mother’s lovely,” Nina said carefully, “but she’s also used to having things her own way.”

  “And so are you.”

  “And so am I.” She agreed because agreement with a mild reproof is attractive in a person. It was what Anna said, that it’s undignified to disagree with criticism and shows a lack of confidence. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, Nina said to herself. But it did matter.

  “I have news,” Paolo said, “that possibly you’re not going to like. Francesca has interceded with Mum.”

  “What? Interceded how?”

  “She’s explained you to her.” Paolo seemed to be amused. “She promised her that they’d take her to Rome.”

  Nina stopped walking, an appalled look on her face. “I don’t want to go to the pub. I’m going back.” She turned in the street and began walking the other way. “We need to talk to your mother.”

  Giulio was at the office, and they’d missed Luca and Francesca by only ten minutes, Maria said, calling through the hatch from the sitting room. It made her twitchy to have other people in her kitchen; she’d do as instructed and stay put, but then she’d direct all the news, all the questions, through the hatch in a rush, so that by the time they sat down together she was all out of conversation. Nina could see her face looking through the tea-tray-sized hole and when she caught her eye Maria reminded her to rinse the pot with boiling water first. Maria wouldn’t drink tea that hadn’t been made in a warmed pot. She could detect an unwarmed pot.

  “She knows how to do it, Mama,” Paolo said irritably. He and Nina made the tea, sourced and plated up the biscuits, washed and assembled the china that was kept for company, dusty on the cupboard shelf, and took the tray through.

  Paolo set it carefully down on the ugly table that had been his granny’s once, and that was known among the family as the Heirloom. “So, what did Francesca say to you?”

  “They are taking me to Rome,” she said inconsequentially. She broke a biscuit in half. “I don’t wish to discuss the wedding.” She looked critically at the tray. “No tea plates, Paolo.” Paolo went obediently to the kitchen. When he’d gone through the door Maria said, “Please, you must stop flirting so much with Luca. It isn’t proper.”

  Nina could feel herself flushing. “I don’t flirt with Luca. Luca’s one of my oldest friends. We’re friends.”

  “He’s married now and he doesn’t have friends. Not female ones. It isn’t right.”

  “That really isn’t fair.”

  “And you shouldn’t have behaved the way you did at his wedding.”

  “That’s just ridiculous. You’re being ridiculous.” Nina was aware of sounding shrill.

  Nothing further was said until Paolo came back into the room. He’d heard some of it. “What on earth’s going on?”

  Nina was aware that it wasn’t how her mother would have handled things. Anna’s priority in dealing with anyone at all was that she was loved and admired at the end of the conversation. Maria reached into her handbag, the one that was beige patent leather, found a handkerchief, and clicked the bag shut. She dabbed at her eyes and Paolo put his arms around her and said, “Don’t be so dramatic about everything; everything’s fine.” He didn’t sound absolutely sure, though.

  “Maria likes to make situations,” Francesca said, on the Sunday after this at lunch. “But she has a good heart. Try to put up with us a little.”

  No matter how many times Nina rehearsed it in her mind afterwards, she couldn’t make Paolo see that “try to put up with us a little” was a put-down. She brought it up unhappily on the way home. “It says that I’m the outsider and she’s on the inside,” she argued.

  “She’s married to Luca, she’s close to Maria, she’s Italian — of course she’s on the inside,” he said placidly.

  “Paolo. Paolo.” Her heart beat wildly. The top of her head ached. “You did it, too. You just did it, too. You place me on the outside.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’d be on the outside, too, if I could.”

  The registry office skirt suit was made of a heavy raw silk and was cream with white trims. The buttoned fitted jacket had a big, soft collar, and the wide skirt, billowing over net petticoats, was tightly belted and ballerina length, so that the whole effect was very like an old Dior design, an outfit in an Audrey Hepburn photograph that was also a postcard Nina kept by her bed. Anna had made the suit, though Nina found it only after her mother had died, in her apartment on the top of the wardrobe, inside a suitcase labeled with her name. Under the layers of tissue there were also cream silk stockings, white shoes, and a little hat with white netting that she could lift so as to be kissed. It was strange and wonderful to wear the clothes, as if Anna were also there at the ceremony, there inside the fabric, the seams and hems. In the end the day passed well and Maria was brave, even stopping to admire the flower arrangements at the registry office, though she was also overheard saying that she didn’t find Nina very bridal.

  After they’d eaten three courses in the tent in her father’s garden, and had danced to the jazz trio and had cut cake, Nina found that the waistband had become a bit too tight for sitting down in comfort (she hadn’t provided herself with a going-away outfit, she realized too late), which was a pity because quite a bit of sitting had to be done, in the Daimler that Robert had booked to take the newlyweds to the airport, and then on the evening flight to London. They were to spend a night there in a swanky hotel booked by Giulio, ready for the early-morning journey to Greece. Nina was preoccupied on the London flight, uncomfortable in the skirt suit and casting sly sideways glances at Paolo, wondering if he, too, was thinking about why things had become awkward between the two of them. It was hard to account for, their formality with one another. She adored Paolo and he adored her and everything should have been rosy. They’d been friends all their lives, were deeply bonded, were all set for a comfortable life, and they’d already had successful, enjoyable sex. What else was there? What on earth was wrong? She struggled to make sense of it. She was nervous about the honeymoon, too, because of having to make sure that it was unequivocally happy — it felt as if this responsibility was hers — in a place where there was nothing to do but to be honeymooners, where everyone would know they were honeymooners. She was quiet, the following morning, as they soared out of the sunshine of London, into the cloud cover of mainland Europe and onwards into the unseasonal rainy weather of the Aegean. She’d slept badly — Paolo insisted on cuddling up in bed, had tracked her across the sheet in his sleep, and he was large and fleshy and made her overheat. Both of them were tired, because of the wedding and having risen very early, so they caught up with some rest as they flew, which meant that Nina was able to close her eyes and go over things. It was baffling to her, what it might be that was wrong. Didn’t she want to be married to Paolo? Yes. She did. She had meant it when she said yes. Did she really, privately, long to
be married to Luca? No. She didn’t. She had meant it when she said no. It was the right order of things, to be married to the friend, a man who loved her sincerely, and to have Luca there in the vicinity. Luca was never going to love her as Paolo did and the pattern of things felt right. Anna would have approved it. So what was the problem? Even the geography of the problem was unclear.

  Anna had said, “Put yourself into a situation in which you gain things that can never be lost.” Nina remembered the day vividly; they’d been stenciling in the downstairs bathroom, ready for Christmas, even though it was only October, in Nina’s last year at school. The subject of Paolo had started the conversation off; Anna didn’t miss an opportunity to speak up in favor of him. “He’s one of those people you’ll never lose,” Anna said. “Those people are rare. You only realize it when you get older. He’d be loyal to you your whole life.”

  “Maybe.” It was all Nina could offer. She never felt adequate during these discussions.

  “Love is dangerous.” It was said undramatically. “Unless you keep it safely aside from life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A successful marriage — that’s about the hour to hour. It’s about an unstriving contentment. Friendship. Safety. Loyalty.”

  “Are you talking about Paolo again?”

  “Passion, on the other hand … there are feelings best kept in our heads, out of harm’s way. There are feelings that could prove damaging, that make us vulnerable. Best to park those with the possible, with potential, and keep them there. The things that can never be lost: they’re confined to your head, and remain there throughout, and are untouchable.”

  “Untouchable?” Nina didn’t follow.

  “The point is, your head is your place of safety,” Anna said, “and you can be different there. You can continue to be yourself there in absolute freedom.” Nina hadn’t known how to respond. “You can love whomsoever you like,” Anna continued, “and think what you like, and these are your truths and no one can sabotage them.” These are your truths: they were words from one of the self-help books. “It’s why I think journal-keeping is vital. Write in it every day. It ensures that you keep track of yourself, and return to her.”

  You can love whomsoever you like? All Nina could do was resort to the facts. “Did you love someone else before you met Dad?” Or after; or after; she didn’t dare use the words, but even thinking them made her lose concentration on the task, letting the Mylar stencil slip and messing up the line. One of the mistletoe sprigs was wonky even now, on the ceiling above the bathroom window. She came down the stepladder.

  “I didn’t love your dad when I married him,” her mother said, standing back and looking as if she knew this would cause a sensation. “I really liked him, don’t get me wrong. Real love is something that grows over time. It’s not ‘falling in love,’ which is something altogether different.” Nina stopped what she was doing. “I’m just trying to protect you,” her mother continued. “It’s never straightforward. But you see, when you’re young and lovely, you can have just about anyone you want and it’s so easy to make the wrong decision. If you decide against Paolo, you’ll find that when you go out into the world after university, or even while at university, chances are that you’ll become infatuated, obsessive, over someone you barely even know. You’ll fall in love, whatever that means.”

  “Whatever that means?”

  “The trouble with falling in love is that it’s not a conscious thing, it’s not a decision. It’s a decision made for you, and isn’t always good for you.”

  “Who makes the decision? I don’t understand.”

  “Something inside you that’s out of your control. I don’t know if that’s even really you, not in any meaningful sense. It’s the one acceptable example of the subconscious taking absolute charge of us, and nobody questions it. Instead, it’s glorified.” Anna’s latest self-help book had been based in neurology; she’d begun looking for titles that Robert would have more respect for. She began to climb up the stepladder. “It’s a strange thing, falling in love, and to be honest not something I’d recommend.”

  “Was there somebody before Dad?” Or after; or after. She couldn’t say it, the name on her tongue.

  “Oh yes, of course.” Anna had smiled, remembering. She’d put her hand to her brow as if to regulate her thoughts. “I was twenty and he was dazzling. He made me ill with longing. But I didn’t want to be ill. I wanted to be in control. It was all too dangerous. I wasn’t going to hand over control of my happiness to someone else.” She started to put the masking tape around the holly stencil. “The point is that you think you’ll only love once, or one person at a time. Isn’t always so.”

  “You can’t be in love with more than one person at once.” Nina found that she’d got acrylic gold paint on her jeans and dabbed at it. Anna threw her a wet sponge.

  “That’s just a tradition. Oh no, now I’ve shocked you again. All I’m saying is, don’t make the mistake of thinking that there’s only one right person for everybody, the other half of a divided self, all that baloney.” When she said baloney it was with a Norwegian accent. “The truth is there are lots of men out there you could be happy with. All I’m saying is, don’t get hung up on one as the love of your life. It doesn’t really work that way. People meet second loves of their lives, and sometimes third. Sometimes the third turns out to be the first, the important one. Strictly in terms of your safety, if you want to have that intense feeling it’s best to have it for someone you will never marry.”

  “Courtly love; it’s courtly love,” Nina said.

  “But look, the paint dries really fast so come on, we need to get this finished.” They resumed work and then Anna said, “Talking of which, how are you getting on with The Faerie Queene? And the Wyatt?”

  “I like the Wyatt,” Nina told her. “I’ve only read bits of the Spenser, though. It’s absolutely huge.”

  “You could do English at the university.” Anna was wistful. “I longed to do that, when I was your age. Imagine it, reading novels and poems all day and sitting in lectures hearing what they mean, and writing your own ideas about them. Sounds heaven. Spenser is on the first-year syllabus here. I had a look. That’s why I bought it for you.”

  “At the university here?”

  “You’d be able to live at home,” Anna said. “Think of the money you’d save. You could have a car, some spare cash to go out. You could bring your friends back here anytime. Dad and I would make ourselves scarce.”

  Anna might have diagnosed Nina’s problems as springing from not doing honor to the present. That was the way she spoke sometimes, and if people noticed she’d explain that she learned a lot of her English idiom from nineteenth-century novels. She’d done a lot of reading before she was married, every summer in her teens, all summer long at the lake house, one after another.

  “I live in the present, too, I hope,” Dr. Christos said. “It’s something we should all aspire to. Don’t you think? You don’t think so?”

  “I can’t even imagine that,” Nina said. “When I’ve monitored myself, what I think about, where my mind roams and dwells —”

  “Really — where your mind roams and dwells?”

  “My mother. That’s how she used to speak.”

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  “I find myself in the past and in the future, going from one to the other and back. I use the past to speculate forward. I’m barely in the present at all.”

  “Isn’t that just another way of saying that you’re a worrier?”

  “I suppose. Even here. Especially here. The holiday was supposed to be all about living in the day, making the most of each minute of it; really savoring life. My mother could have pulled it off. She spent a lot of time reminding me to be present, in the room, as she’d say. ‘Be in the room, Nina.’ And I suppose when I was small I was really good at it. Less so later.”

  “It didn’t work, then. The plan. Coming to Greece and not being anxious?”

 
“I found it hard even to notice Greece. I took hundreds of photographs so that I could see it afterwards.”

  The first day of the honeymoon was okay, because everything was new. It was cloudy and puddly and only just warm, but they took advantage of the temperature to be active: they walked for miles along the beaches, and it was fine because it was all new. On the second day it was cooler, the clouds lower and grayer, and Paolo suggested that they take the boat to Main Island. He’d read in the guidebook that there were caves worth visiting. They could do that, do some shopping, look at the old church, have a nice lunch, visit the museum: what did she think? She said that it sounded like a very good plan, and it was; it was a good plan, but at the same time obscurely disappointing. Why must the day be so busy, so crammed?

  “We can get the early boat back if you don’t feel up to it. But come on, we need to get a move on if we’re to get the morning ferry.”

  What was I so afraid of? What do I continue to be afraid of? she asked herself later. It felt already like the marriage survived from minute to minute only because Nina was making a vast effort to keep it going, an exhausting constant feat of concentration that wasn’t dissimilar to the one that she’d enact twenty-five years later, on the plane when the turbulence hit. The day had gone well, though it had rained during the donkey ride up to the caves. Nina had been wary of the donkeys. She’d been bitten by one on a beach holiday when she was small, and she’d been thrown off a horse when she was ten. It had taken ages to muster the courage to get on the donkey, and Paolo had teased her.

  On the third and fourth days it rained constantly, and they ended up spending most of the time in the taverna, in the bar and in their room, going from one to the other and back. There wasn’t any heating, they didn’t have sweaters, and the rain had brought a chill along with it, so they ended up reading in bed for most of each afternoon. On the fifth day it was sunny in the morning, so they went to Blue Bay, but Paolo was bored by the beach and had run out of things to read. By the time they’d had lunch it had begun to rain again, so they played backgammon in the bar and drank Greek brandy. The following day the sky was blue, albeit with a procession of clouds, so they took a boat trip around uninhabited islands and swam, in a churned-up and gritty sea. It began to rain while they were swimming and rained all that night, and continued at intervals for the final two days. They spent their last afternoon in the town on Main Island, running between shops as rain pelted down.