The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  “What is it you want to talk about?” Robert’s voice was softer than usual. He didn’t like it when Nina was upset. She’d arrived at the house weeping and in a state, alarming the taxi driver.

  “About you and Mum … It was good, wasn’t it, when I was young? It was good for most of my childhood. It wasn’t all a lie.”

  “It wasn’t all a lie.” Her father swirled the amber liquid, attempting the slowest possible swirling round the crystal tumbler.

  “I remember your nights out, on Saturdays when I was little. You seemed happy then.”

  His concentration intensified as he sent the whisky into reverse, counterclockwise, before answering. “We were. We were very happy then.”

  Nina and the babysitter had watched television, though the sitter had turned it off when the car came into the drive with its warning white lights. Robert was vocal on the subject of there being a hundred better things to do than sit in front of the tellybox, though when he was away Anna and Nina had TV binges and laughed at the badness of the bad. On those evenings that Robert wasn’t in his study working, Nina would find her parents sitting together in their usual way, at right angles on the big L-shaped sofa that occupied a corner. Inevitably there’d be music playing, Robert immersed in his reading, though Anna would interrupt him from time to time, and they’d pull themselves upright to sip at the wine; there was always wine, sent from next door in limitless supply. Nina could hear the audio of their evening from her bedroom, if her door was left ajar: her room was off the galleried landing that looked over the double-height sitting room, and their voices rose and dispersed like smoke, a drowsy nocturnal hum that was love and home and sanctuary.

  Sometimes she’d go onto the landing, unseen behind the wooden balustrade, and watch them for a while, hearing her father’s pessimistic remarks about the world, its dark future, listening to Anna trying to contradict them. Robert had a tendency to be gloomy and withdrawn, but Anna, never; she was the reliable antidote, and she’d be as inventive with him as she was with her child. Nina had come into the sitting room once and found her mother washing her father’s feet in a basin. These acts of grooming were mutual, which seemed at odds with her dad’s usual daytime austerity. He’d volunteer to wash Anna’s hair when she went to have a bath, and he’d brush it out for her at bedtime. She kept it long because he liked it that way.

  If Robert was in one of his intense work cycles he’d come out of his study for dinner and then return. There wasn’t any arguing with work: work is the basis of life, he’d remind them; there’d be no house nor food on the table without his job, and there wouldn’t be a job without the right kind of atmosphere to work in at home. That was hard to argue with, but it also meant that Anna spent a lot of time alone. Nina remembered coming out of her bedroom once, still only a small child, sleepless at midnight, and seeing her mother sitting upright on the sofa with her toes braced against the edge of the coffee table, staring into space. Robert must have been in the study, but nonetheless it was his music on the record player — Schubert, Dvořák, or Richard Strauss; Anna had won the battle to keep Wagner out of the evening rotation. Nina had gone and got on her lap. She’d had intuitions then, which had passed out of her at puberty, her old alertness to nuance replaced by the inward-looking gaze.

  “So what was it, Dad?” Nina asked him, the night she arrived on his doorstep. “You seemed happy. There were no signs whatever of unhappiness.”

  “Well, the same could be said of you and Paolo,” he’d said, looking almost triumphant.

  She didn’t rise. “Explain it to me.”

  “It’s hard to explain it to you.”

  “Try.”

  “It’s not about reasons, Nina. It was never about reasons. It was about feelings. It was what I felt.”

  Nina stared at him, at his profile, unable to see a way forward in what she’d hoped would be a final and frank heart-to-heart. How could he continue to wear that sweater, the dark blue Guernsey sweater that had gone at the elbows and that Anna had patched for him; she could still see the tiny, neat stitches around the suede. How could he continue to associate himself with those stitches, all that painstakingly stitched love?

  When Dr. Christos was called away, leaving her in the garden and insisting she get some exercise, Nina took up her crutches and went to a lounger in the shade. One of the old ladies, an IV needle fixed into the back of her hand with tape, her hair set in soft silver curls, came and sat in the adjoining chair and smiled at her, the warmest possible wide smile, before turning her attention to her book. She had scaly legs and yellowed thickened toenails, but beautifully manicured fingernails, the same glossy pink as her bathrobe.

  Nina was just getting back into the novel when Dr. Christos appeared. “Lazy, lazy Nina,” he said. “Get up. Come on. We need to get your blood moving. We’re going to walk around the grounds, one circuit only. You need someone with you, so I’ll come.” He helped her get into position on the crutches, making swift passes of his palm across her upper back, his hands settling briefly on her shoulders, and followed closely behind down the side path, into a world of enveloping heat and glare. When they got to the main entrance, the electronic glass door, Nina felt utterly drained and had to sit down at the hospital bus stop, on the yellow bench. Dr. Christos sat beside her looking at his phone. Across the road the hill rose steeply, and goats could be seen clustered halfway up. Nina put her hand to her forehead, shading her eyes, the better to see them. “I’m too hot; I’m going back indoors,” she said, and then, having got to her feet, “I’m feeling a bit woozy.”

  “Let me help you. It’s very hot today.” He took charge of the left crutch. “Give me this and put your arm around my shoulder. We mustn’t have you falling.”

  Back they went in slow progress around the hospital building. Once she was settled, Dr. Christos made her drink the tepid water from the jug, and took her blood pressure and pulse, his fingertips soft on her wrist. He said, on leaving the room, “I’ll be back again soon to check up on you.”

  Nina was just drifting off to sleep when her phone rang and it was Paolo. “Right,” he said without preamble. “Is there anything you want me to bring from the cottage?”

  “To bring?”

  “Nothing you need? I’m going over to see your dad and I’ll be driving right past. He’s fine, before you ask. He’s invited me for dinner.”

  “Because you’re flying tomorrow and it will save on cooking and cleaning time.”

  “Exactly so.”

  “If you have room in your bag, could you bring me the stuff that I left behind on my bedroom chair? A pink and white dress, dark-pink cardigan, blue trousers, and shirt.”

  “Consider it done. Let me just write that down.” After a pause he said, “Also, I need to tell you something. I’m seeing someone. Karen. Outside of the office, I mean.”

  “Karen, your assistant?” Karen was an attractive thirty-year-old Australian with short red hair.

  “Your dad wrote to you about it but I gather it got posted late.”

  “Karen, really.” Her heart palpitated, but it was just the surprise. It was, as Dr. Christos had said, entirely to be expected, a continuing possessiveness that didn’t really mean anything. It was just possessiveness, and having to come to terms with being replaceable. She said, “Are we getting all the hard stuff out of the way on the phone before you arrive?”

  “It doesn’t seem like there’s much privacy there.”

  “I’m sure Dr. Christos will keep his distance while you’re around. He’s already said as much. Look, you have to understand this: he’s been great and he’s given me lots of his time. I arrived with four books and there are two other English-language books in the hospital. The television is all Greek to me. The days are very long.”

  “You should have said; I could have sent books. You could have been working.”

  “I haven’t felt well enough to concentrate, not until the last few days.”

  “You could have been writing your me
moirs. Have you been telling the doctor your life story?”

  “Not really. A bit. Highlights.”

  “He knows all about it, then.”

  “Some. The bare bones of it, the thing that happened in the spring. The disgrace: he calls it the disgrace. He’s moral, a moral person. A churchgoer.” What was she saying now? It seemed like this was already spooling out of control.

  Perhaps Paolo saw this. He’d always changed the subject if he thought she was lying. He said, “So I’ll see you the day after tomorrow. You can go back to chatting to your handsome doctor now.”

  “How do you know that he’s handsome?”

  “Google, obviously. Google has the answer to all questions.”

  When Paolo rang off, Nina had a nap, and then when she woke Dr. Christos was there in the blue chair, with paperwork and the calculator. He said, “Balancing our budget would take a miracle of some kind.”

  “You need someone like Paolo,” she told him.

  “Paolo’s an accountant?”

  “Among other things. He’s good with money. He can persuade it to bend to his will.”

  “That indeed is a gift I do not have,” Dr. Christos said. “Perhaps I should employ him.”

  “I don’t think you could afford him.”

  “You sound proud of him when you talk about money.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Just an observation. I apologize. So when did you and Paolo get together?”

  “At Luca’s wedding.”

  He gave her a wide-eyed look. “Wow. Really. And what did Luca think of that?”

  “He seemed to approve. But it had already become a huge tangle: what Luca felt, what I felt, what both of us really felt, how that corresponded or didn’t to how we behaved. It’s continued to be a huge tangle.”

  “Will you tell me, who it was that you thought Paolo was really in love with when he married you?”

  “My mother. Paolo was in love with my mother.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It wasn’t even as if the evidence amounted to much. It’s a peculiarly human failing, the leap to conclusions; it must have an evolutionary purpose. Perhaps the point is to hurry things along and to introduce into every human life a frolicsome element of carnage. There wasn’t anything like carnage, in this case, but there was yearning. For him, perhaps first love. For her — who knew for sure? — perhaps not the last.

  Paolo and Anna had always known each other, but when Nina was seventeen, just months before the conversation over Christmas stencils, she’d seen Paolo begin to look at her mother in a different way. She told Dr. Christos that she could remember the day she first noticed it. It was an afternoon in early summer, and also, in a way, Paolo and Nina’s first date. (There wouldn’t be another one for over three years.) Paolo came to tell Nina that he was going to the cinema and to ask if she’d like to tag along. It was a film she’d told him that she wanted to see, just trying to make conversation. More and more, Nina found herself devising lists of things to talk about before seeing him: where he’d been, his tennis, what he was reading, how work was going. It was always very different with Luca. Nina and Luca, if put together in a room, would talk nineteen to the dozen — “Turn their keys and set them down and watch them go,” as Anna said once — though that wasn’t true in this particular year. Two years on from the kiss in the garden, Luca’s silence had built and built, as if silence could intensify its nothingness, and Nina was at the apex of misery. A key part of her unhappiness was that Luca didn’t appear to be suffering any ill effects at all. He’d swiveled away and was seen to be paying enthusiastic attention elsewhere. So Luca was in his silent phase, and Paolo, in his socially awkward way, had become attentive.

  The doorbell rang, on that warm afternoon, and Nina, who was lying on her bed with a book, crawled out onto the gallery, crouching at one of the gaps between the planks of the balustrade so as to observe unseen. She always hoped that it’d be Luca, though it never was. The doorbell rang a second time and she heard her mother, busy making a casserole, shout that she was coming. Anna opened the door to find Paolo there, standing on the step of the porch, tall and dark and broad-shouldered in a red plaid shirt and putty-colored chinos, his hands in his pockets. He had grown to six foot four. He was experimenting with a stubbly beard. He was nineteen and looked twenty-five. Nina didn’t go down immediately. Sometimes she’d keep very still so as not to make a sound, when Paolo was on the doorstep asking if she was in. Anna knew not to push it if Nina didn’t answer when she called her. She’d say Nina must have gone out; she knew what Nina’s silence meant. Though Nina didn’t always hide: sometimes she’d invite him in and make a pot of tea and put on music of her father’s, earning Paolo’s polite thanks, and watch him do a crossword and chip in a bit. She could hand him a newspaper and pick up a magazine; she’d done it before and he didn’t seem to mind. She might do that today. She was feeling low and that had made her bored; she was bored almost beyond endurance. Sitting with Paolo listening to sad German songs would be better than lying on her bed feeling sorry for herself.

  She was going to stand up and make herself known, but when Anna opened the door Nina saw it in Paolo’s face, his infatuation. He wouldn’t even have noticed her. His infatuation was absolutely obvious.

  “Mrs. Findlay, hello, how are you?” Christ. He was blushing.

  “I’m very well, thank you for asking, but I’m afraid Nina isn’t here. I think she’s gone to play tennis, Paolo, but she won’t be long. She’s never late for dinner.” Paolo smiled. It was a two-families joke, Nina’s appetite. “Do you want to come in and wait awhile?”

  Paolo said something that Nina couldn’t catch, and then the conversation continued at a whisper. Anna was looking down at her feet and Paolo was doing the same. They were lightly tanned, her toenails painted the usual shell pink; Anna never wore shoes or slippers or even socks indoors, and not always out in the village, either. Her bare and blackened soles were locally scandalous. Paolo said something, evidently something funny, and Anna laughed and it seemed like a private moment, a slow laugh that bore a trace of its private beginnings. They continued to talk as if what they said had to be concealed from eavesdroppers. Why else would he dip his head so conspiratorially, his hands on his hips? Why else would she echo the posture so she could reply? There were, suddenly, no innocent reasons. Nina was finding it harder to breathe quietly.

  Anna was wearing the yellow dress with the halter neck. She was still using her clothes from ten years before, and still had that old era’s habits, persisting into the 1980s. She was braless in the dress — in fact, rarely wore a bra at all; Maria had been heard to snipe that she had no use for nor need of one. She’d used the word bony about her neighbor, and also the word boyish.

  Giulio had taken issue with this description once. “Hardly boyish,” he’d said. “She has a tiny waist.”

  “Skinny legs,” Maria countered.

  “Skinny maybe, but shapely,” Giulio had said, absolutely unaware of the thin ice where he was walking.

  Anna had been doing some gardening. Her shoulders and arms were golden and she’d rubbed in a jasmine-scented cream. Her white-blonde hair was up in a hastily gathered knot, bits of it falling at her ears. She was forty-two years old and looked far younger, though not quite young enough to be Nina. She was Nina down the road, in years to come, an experienced and worldly Nina, a more obviously feminine Nina, a possible Nina, a version of Nina that men were going to like: one who wore dresses and showed skin and looked men in the eye and was quick to laugh, and facilitated conversations that made men feel good about themselves.

  Paolo followed her into the kitchen, which led off from the sitting room down a double step to Nina’s left. Nina went down the stairs, stealthily in stocking feet. The voices were audible now.

  She heard her mother say, “Well, that’s the thing about Luca, isn’t it?”

  She heard Paolo say, “I have to agree, even though he’s my brother.” His formal way of talking
grated. Luca made fun of it and aped him.

  Nina went down the steps into the kitchen, startling them both. Her mother’s hand held on to the waist of Paolo’s jeans at the back, and she let go and stepped away, a swift, balletic sidestep. A small hair clip had fallen out and she replaced it by one ear. “Darling!” The way she said the word it was possible she was horrified. “I thought you were off playing tennis. I thought you had court time until” — she looked at her watch — “until ten minutes ago. Paolo wants to take you to the cinema, the early showing.”

  Nina said, “Is Luca going?”

  Paolo looked at Anna when he answered. “He saw it yesterday. He says it’s good.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve just got going with something. I’d better finish.”

  “Okay then. Never mind.”

  “What a shame,” Anna said. “But you could do it tomorrow, surely.”

  Paolo looked hopefully at her. “Why don’t you come with me, in that case? Seeing as Nina doesn’t want to.”

  “I could come, I suppose,” Nina said. “I do want to see it.”

  “You should come with us,” Paolo told her mother.

  “Thanks, but I don’t think that would be the thing. Robert’s home soon in any case.”

  Nina looked at her watch. “Are we going for the six-thirty?”

  “Yes. Plenty of time.”

  Anna couldn’t help but cast a maternal eye over Nina’s clothes, swiftly top to bottom. She said, “Perhaps you’d better change.”