The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  “You tracked Andy down?”

  “He didn’t need tracking; he still lives in the village. He works at the garden center with his father. I’ve seen him twice, the first time when I was buying plants. He helped me choose. The second time the conversation was a bit different. I marched in there. I was very straightforward.”

  “So, do you know if they …” Dr. Christos trailed off.

  “Andy says not. Kissing only, he says. Not that it makes any difference. It doesn’t make any difference to Sheila or my father. It’s immaterial to them, whether it was just kissing or not.”

  “I understand that point of view.”

  “The thing is, Sheila had always disliked my mother.”

  “Surely not. She was just easily shocked and worried about associating with a scarlet woman.”

  “Sheila and Gerald had convinced themselves they were my parents’ best friends. They were always there, always there, and then Mum moved out and they dropped her like a rock. Off the end of a pier.”

  “Well there you go. It was about their own respectability, no doubt.”

  Nina knew that the roots went deeper than this one occasion. Sheila had always disliked her mother: Nina spent her whole childhood aware of it. Sheila was frequently to be heard having a go at Anna, in the presence of their husbands, though always in a laughing way, insisting it was done affectionately. Anna not having to work was a prime subject for satire, though actually she would’ve loved a job. Her quoting from the self-help books was another key reason for Sheila’s teasing, and of course Robert joined in with that. He was glad to have an ally. Nina watched and learned: she saw that Sheila picked up on things Robert disagreed with Anna about, and began to have the same opinions, about music, politics, food, culture: anything and everything.

  “She’d ridicule Gerald, too, in front of my parents, about his low status. Dad had done some television, a history program, and Gerald was a science teacher at an unruly school and smelled of chemicals.”

  “That lab smell. I have such a strong memory, now, of the labs at the school in Athens.”

  “You went to school in Athens?”

  “High school, yes, a boarder. I got a scholarship and off I went. My father saw it as some kind of class betrayal. But let’s not dwell on that. Sheila would have thought your dad very respectable, being a professor and having come from a church background. Presumably a Protestant church.”

  “It was clear she thought Dad had married beneath him. I remember one day over tea she asked about Mum’s past, and Mum told her that she had been raised by her grandparents because her mother was a drug addict and died young; I hadn’t known that, so I was as surprised as anyone. She told Sheila that her grandfather worked in a factory, and that they lived in a rented apartment, and Sheila drew her own conclusions.”

  “It sounds almost like she was teasing Sheila.”

  “I’m sure she was.”

  Even when she was young, it was obvious to Nina that it was her father Sheila really came to see. Weekend and evening visits were timed so that Robert was also at home, on the pretext of Gerald’s having another man to talk to. Sheila had a thing for Robert. How else to explain the Medlars’ constant appearances, two, three times a week? There every Saturday teatime with cake in the bicycle basket, drinking cup after cup of Lapsang and being sniffy about offers of Romano wine, which wasn’t as wholesome as their elderflower.

  “Was there something going on there, between the two of them, Sheila and your dad, an affair?”

  “He says not and I believe him. Dad’s so conventional and Sheila even more so. But I remember seeing them once, at our summer party, when I was about fourteen. Everybody else was in the garden and the two of them were in the sitting room, unaware that I was lying up on the landing, reading. She was standing right in front of him holding a glass of wine, too close for a friend of his wife. She said, ‘She doesn’t deserve you, Robert,’ and put her hand onto one of his jacket lapels, and got hold of its edge and ran along the length of it slowly with her fingers. It was like she was staking her claim.”

  “Maybe it was one-sided. You can hardly blame your father for that.”

  “Later, when people had gone home, he said that Sheila Medlar was well named, as she was a meddler, and that she’d been unkind about Maria. Then he added that he wished that Sheila would stop fussing over him. He overdid it, the protesting.” She smiled, despite herself.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Luca always said that he thought Gerald and Sheila were secretly swingers.”

  “Maybe they were.”

  “She referred to Mum as a hippie; once I overheard her saying there’d been too much drug use, but Mum never took drugs. Unless … it’s just occurred to me that she might have been talking about the antidepressants.”

  “There were antidepressants?”

  “Sheila waged a long-standing and low-key campaign over years and years. I think it was Sheila who sowed the seeds of my father’s decision. He says not. He calls it support. Sheila supports him. Sheila has always supported him, he says. It’s a useful personal verb, isn’t it? I’ve always wondered if Sheila was the reason they separated, whether she talked my father out of being in love.”

  “Nina, Anna was having an affair with a twenty-year-old boy.”

  “But he didn’t know that! She was only having the stupid fling because Dad lost interest in her. She said there had been signs, in retrospect. His not wanting to talk to her. His loss of interest in how she’d spent the day. His lack of curiosity about the shop plan. Things she didn’t seem to be able to do anything about.”

  “So, you still think it was all your father’s fault.”

  “I don’t. I used to. But no. Not anymore.”

  “So, what are you saying?”

  “Whatever the rights and wrongs, it destroyed her. She needed so much to be admired and my father had stopped admiring her. It made her ill. It made her make odd decisions.”

  “I have to tell him how ill you’re feeling,” Nina had told her mother, sitting with her in the window seat, looking out over the botanical gardens. Her hair was taken out of its plaits, combed through by Anna’s fingers and replaited.

  “I’m fine,” she protested.

  “Dad asks how you are and I can’t lie to him and say you’re fine.”

  “I’m just tired,” Anna insisted. “It will pass.”

  “You shouldn’t lie to him, either, on the phone.”

  “He’d feel like it was his fault, and it isn’t his fault that I’m ill,” Anna said. “It must be my fault. We each carry with us the power to be well and whole, and it’s a choice, whether to keep that power or to give it away. It’s a fault in me somehow. I have failed to be well.”

  “You’re not making sense. Sometimes it’s just bad luck.”

  “Please don’t tell your father. I hate to think of his suffering.”

  “Of his suffering! Of his suffering? Come on!” Nina was finding it difficult not to hate her dad.

  “I love him. Just because he doesn’t love me, that doesn’t stop me loving him as I always have. That’s never going to change.” Anna began to stroke Nina’s head. “I want him to be happy. That’s all I ever wanted. And if this makes him happier, this living separately — then I’m glad. I’m perfectly fine on my own. I have good friends, lots to do. I love living in town. I have plenty of money. And you. I have so many blessings.”

  “The shock of my father wanting a divorce was terrible,” Nina told Dr. Christos. “Utter, utter shock. She didn’t get over it. That’s the point, for me, what it did to her. The affair’s irrelevant; the rest is irrelevant.”

  “You’re still defending her absolutely, aren’t you, even though you know what the diary was trying to tell you.”

  “Whatever the reasons for it, she didn’t survive. That’s just a fact. And no, you’re right, it wasn’t simple. My dad was unhappy for a long time.”

  “He was unhappy?”

  “What I
learned, when it happened … what I learned at the time was that people can hurt other people so much that they cause them to die.”

  “But she was the one having an affair.”

  “She’d always been good at being happy, I thought. Too good. When she was desperate she gave me no clue. I look back on the phase in which I know she was desperate, and see no difference in her. She was just the same with me as she’d ever been. When I first saw the diary, and when I looked back, I began to feel …”

  “Unsure. I see. Unsure how real her happy self ever was.”

  “Being told by someone you love that they no longer love you — I was never going to let that happen to me.”

  “Nina —”

  “Never, never.” She began to get up. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  Until she went to the psychiatric hospital, Nina had never been able to confide in anyone about one specific way that her mother’s death had changed her life. She’d gone to the final appointment determined not to tell, and had told everything. It was ironic, she said, that she rejected Luca’s proposal on the night her mother died, because her mum had been vocal all along that Nina should keep clear of him, and none of her persuasion had done the trick. Despite all of Anna’s warnings, it was Robert who’d made marrying Luca impossible.

  When Nina rang her father to say that her mother had died, he seemed to know even by the way she said “Dad” that there was catastrophic news.

  “What is it, what’s happened?” he’d said immediately.

  After the funeral directors had been they’d driven back to the village in silence, and little was said over scrambled eggs on toast. Robert put the television on, which he did routinely now when Nina was there, because of all the things they couldn’t say to one another, all the unresolvables. Nina was willing to go along with this, but only on the assumption that he was working up to something, a statement of loss and sorrow. Even the merest hint of guilt and regret would have done; even if it had been bogus and artificial, he needed to do that, to honor Anna, to be kind to Nina. But Robert didn’t. Nina, eyeing the clock on the mantel, decided she would wait till 9:00 p.m., and then she was going to have to say something. When the clock reached 9:05 she put down her book and looked across at his chair. He was watching the news for a third time that evening, apparently engrossed.

  She said, “How can you love someone and then quite suddenly not love them?”

  Without looking away from the screen he said, “This isn’t the time.”

  “Yes. This is the only time. I need to know.” She reached for the remote and turned the TV off.

  Robert looked around the room as if the answer might lie there. “I don’t know. I can’t honestly tell you because I don’t know.” He looked at her, his brow furrowed with sincerity. “I’m sorry. That’s all I can say.”

  “There has to be more to say than that.”

  He took his glasses off and put them in their case, and put the case on the lamp table. “It crept up on me slowly. And then over a few weeks it became much more intense and certain. It began to feel as if it would overwhelm me if I didn’t speak up.”

  “That it would overwhelm you? But what was it? What was the it?”

  “Don’t raise your voice, please. I don’t know. They were feelings, not reasons. Feelings can change.”

  “But surely feelings about people are based on something?” She could hear her voice beginning to be unstable.

  “It’s a difficult thing to say, about romantic love. You’re very young. You have all this to come. It’s not like the love between parents and children. It shouldn’t even be the same word.”

  “But that’s the trouble. I’m as baffled by this, I’m as offended by this as if you’d stopped loving me.”

  “I’ll never stop loving you. That isn’t possible.”

  “You say that but how do you really know? Feelings change.”

  “Some feelings don’t.”

  “But you see, you see. That was the kind I thought you had for Mum, the kind that doesn’t.”

  “Don’t get angry with me, Nina.”

  “Who should I be angry with, then?”

  “With death. You’re angry with death.” He put his palms over his eyes, resting his chin on the heels of his hands. “There are things you don’t understand when you’re twenty, but you think you know everything, then. You think it’s all so simple.”

  “Some things are simple,” Nina told him. “They should be.”

  “Should is another matter entirely.”

  “I still can’t believe it,” Nina said. “That she didn’t tell me she was so ill. That she told you.”

  Anna had discovered that she had a heart problem, and had begun a course of medication.

  He smoothed over his eyebrows, once, twice, firmly with his fingertips. “She only told me on Sunday, and only because I asked.”

  “And why do you think it was her heart that failed?” The accusation was obvious.

  “How dare you,” Robert said quietly.

  Nina felt the blood rising in her face. She stood up. “I’m sorry.” She sat down again.

  “Your mother was coping fine. I spoke to her once a week. I still cared about her, Nina.”

  “Coping fine? Coping fine?”

  “Yes, coping fine. She was always doing something, going somewhere, rediscovering her old friends. She said it was lovely to be back in the city and to see the gardens from her window. She sounded happy.”

  “Jesus, Dad.”

  “Jesus Dad what?”

  “I just don’t think you knew her at all. I just don’t think you knew anything about her.” Nina stood up again. “I’m going to spend the night there, at Mum’s place.”

  “Nina. Please.”

  “It’s what I want to do tonight. I want to be there. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  When Luca rang to express his sorrow, Robert told him that Nina was alone at Anna’s, and that he’d appreciate it if Luca could go round and check on her. They’d lain together in the spare bed, and then, at 2:00 a.m. she’d offended him in a way that could never be put right. At 2:00 a.m. when he’d asked her to marry him, she’d said that he had to be joking.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Just after lunch, Paolo came into the room looking round-shouldered and exhausted.

  Nina was writing in her notebook, and the first thing he said was “What are you writing about?”

  She’d seen that look on his face before. He’d always seemed threatened by her journal-keeping, as if the things she said there must be critiques of her life, and as if inevitably he must be one of the things criticized.

  “It’s just about the day. It’s always about the day, and things I want to remember.” Paolo knew what a diary was. Why did she always feel as if he was trying to catch her out by asking?

  He sat down heavily in the chair and turned his shoes up and looked at them. “Don’t you think sometimes that maybe you should live life more, instead of endlessly scrutinizing it?”

  She was still writing. “Absolutely. I’m sure I do. Most people do.”

  “Most people.” He sounded fed up. “I couldn’t give a damn about most people.”

  She put her pen down. “What’s the matter, Paolo? You’ve been here two minutes and you’re already bored.”

  “I’m not bored, I’m just tired. But thanks for pointing that out.”

  “I wasn’t having a go at you.”

  “It sounded like you were.”

  “All I’m saying is, don’t feel an obligation to come and sit with me.”

  “You think I’m here because of obligation?”

  “I was perfectly fine for almost three weeks. I managed pretty well on my own.”

  “Perhaps I should go, then.”

  “Don’t go. Please stay.”

  “I have other things I ought to be doing. I came to bring you fruit and a magazine someone left at the taverna. Seeing as you’re lacking in things to read
.” He put a brown paper bag on the table, and a copy of Woman & Home that had a ripped cover.

  “Thank you.” She should have left it at that, but couldn’t. “You know, that was a perfect little example of a thing that we’ve always done, that’s always been an issue with us.”

  “What’s that?” He picked up the magazine and flicked through it.

  “The way we escalate something that’s really nothing, that’s really only banter.”

  “You do that. It’s something you do.”

  “We do it together. I say you look bored, and you say, ‘Well, I’m sorry if I bore you,’ and are offended, and then I’m offended that you thought I was saying that you bore me, and whoosh whoosh, up the whole thing goes in flames.”

  He put the magazine back on the table. “It was supposed to be a general topic. I’ve had a similar conversation with Luca, about over-thinking, his over-thinking.”

  “What does he over-think?” Instantly she was nervous.

  “In his case it’s more to do with his virtual life. He’s reading again now and doing more, but he disappeared into the Internet for a while. He stopped leaving home, pretty much, when he was on leave. He recognizes it’s an issue. I think it’s the main reason he’s going to Rome. He’s intending to be more of a physical being there, he says — to go out in the evenings, socialize, travel a bit.” He gave her a searching look. “Is it okay for me to talk like this?”

  “Of course.” She looked out of the window at the sunshine. “You’re oversensitive sometimes. As well. I need to add as well, because I mean as well as me. I can be oversensitive. But all I was asking, when I came into the room, was a friendly question about what you were writing about. I could see it was one of your notebooks. It was a conversational opener, not paranoia.”

  “But you can see that it’s my journal. It’s to do with private thoughts by definition.”

  “It was only banter, Nina. You could have made a joke of it and said it was about how I’m getting fat. You could’ve claimed that it was a love poem to a rugged Greek doctor with a stubbly chin. What’s a good rhyme for rugged, I wonder …”