The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (10 page)

“For God’s sake,” Paolo said. “You’re so bloody childish.”

“And what should we be, middle-aged like you?” Luca countered, looking up at him, his legs wrapped around Nina’s hips. Nina should have said something. Paolo was her friend. She was always the glue that bound them. “Personally, I plan to be childish for a long, long time.”

“In which case, have a nice life,” Paolo told him, sounding more peevish than he meant to.

“What, you think our parents are a good advert for growing up?” Luca said, sitting straighter. “They’re miserable and bored and that’s why they fight all the time.”

“They don’t fight all the time,” Nina objected, though the truth was that they fought a lot. It was, as Anna explained to Robert, the reason the boys were at their house and on their sofa so often, and not at home.

Paolo put his hands in his two front pockets. “Just grow up a bit, little brother,” he said. “It gets a little tedious, all this, and a bit embarrassing.”

“What does?” Nina asked. She didn’t get it.

“Fuck off,” Luca told him.

“The cavorting, the flirting,” Paolo said. “And now I’m off to play tennis. Bye.”

Thanks to the positioning and the screening of ancient trees, the two families occupied a private corner in the village, and so Giulio and Maria Romano’s screaming matches were muffled from most neighbors, while at the same time being broadcast right into the Findlays’ garden. The Findlay place, built on a plot that had been a scruffy car workshop in the ’60s, occupied a corner at the convergence of two quiet Victorian roads. Their wide, flat-faced two-story house, built in 1971, was the first modern building in an otherwise ubiquitously nineteenth-century locale,
and was something of a talking point. When they first moved in, Anna would find locals at the door wondering if they could have a wee look; wasn’t this open-plan layout going to be awfully expensive to heat?

Anna had been dismayed by the apparent disintegration of the threesome in the summer holidays, but was philosophical. It would just be a phase, she said to Nina. She’d acknowledged the change in front of the boys, that day, when she’d opened the door in the fence and asked them to come for a photograph. She must at least have her annual photograph, she said. The door, made out of a modified hinged panel with a bolt on both sides, was one that the two fathers had made together when the children were small and went back and forth. The parents had gone back and forth, too. There were frequent get-togethers on weekend summer evenings over wine, usually at Giulio’s invitation (he worked in wine; there was always wine). Maria joined in but she was unmistakably just a little less keen to socialize, trying to keep the visits to a fixed schedule and openly averse to their dragging on too long. She didn’t like the neighbors, and particularly not Anna, but their leaving early was also a kind of self-knowledge: when she and Giulio drank too much there’d inevitably be bickering that could tip into open warfare. She’d object to the length of Giulio’s anecdotes. He would call her a joyless nag. She might say that he’d had enough to drink. He’d say that it wasn’t any wonder that he drank. She’d say that she wasn’t going to be chastised in front of their friends. He’d say that was rich coming from her. Later, many years later, Nina would see
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
on television, sitting cuddled up with Luca on a night that
Paolo was away, and she’d say, “Do Liz and Richard remind you of anyone?” and Luca, wincing, would say, “So much so that it feels almost like one of my own memories.”

“So that’s your parents,” she’d said. “I wonder who’d play mine.”

Luca had considered the question. “Max von Sydow and Daryl Hannah.” They’d laughed because it was true. They’d laughed some more imagining the four having dinner together, and this had spiraled into a routine that was added to intermittently for weeks.

Having made his terse farewell, Paolo left the Findlays’ sitting room, stomping off through the front door and banging it behind him. Through the large glass window that dominated the front of the building, nine-paned like a tic-tac-toe board, they saw him stride past, his mouth set into irritation. Luca and Nina watched in silence, then caught each other’s eye and laughed again, Luca pressing his lips together and blowing a laughter raspberry through them, the kind done in the presence of pomposity.

He stopped quite suddenly and looked pained. “Jesus, he’s turning into such a wanker.”

He and Nina went outside, to the wooden seat behind the shed at the end of the garden. It was a south-facing corner and the day seemed almost warm there, out of the wind. No sooner had Nina sat down and put her hands on the edge of the bench, wrapping the ends of her fingers underneath, than she squawked in pain and withdrew. “Splinter. Fucking splinter.” Luca had taught her how to swear, though she exercised her new talent only in his presence. “Bollocks. Fucking hurts.” The fingertip looked instantly as if it were infected, puffing and pinking.

Luca had taken a packet of Marlboros and a lighter out of his jacket pocket, having told Nina that he was going to teach her how to smoke. He put the cigarettes back and said, “Here, let me look.” They peered at the index finger together. “It’s gone right in. Hold it steady; I’m going to get it out.”

“No, no, don’t; it’ll hurt.” She was flinching, screwing her face up. “I’ll go find Mum; she takes them out with a hot needle.”

“A hot needle sounds a lot worse. Hold still.” He squeezed at the injury from both sides with the tips of his thumbs until the end of the splinter popped up, and then grasped it and pulled. “There’s a tiny bit left; let me suck at it.”

Nina was already doing that, sucking at the wound and then peering at it, squinting. She felt a thrill of disquiet at Luca’s suggestion. “All gone I think. It’s bleeding, though.”

Luca produced a clean tissue, winding it around the finger and tucking in the end. A blood spot seeped red from within, spreading and then ceasing. “That should do it,” he said. “Might need a Band-Aid later.”

“Thank you.” She put out her good hand. It was a thanking gesture, brushed against his ribs.

What happened next happened in a rush. Luca took hold of the hand and pulled her towards him, adjusting his balance on the bench, and then he was kissing her. They kissed softly and then harder and moved closer to one another. He put his arms around her lower back and now his tongue found hers; she put her arms around him and pressed her breasts into his chest and he made a small noise, a soft grunt, something out of his throat like an admission of relief. Immediately after this there was a new noise, one they both recognized: the door from the kitchen opening and closing. Nina’s eyes widened as she realized that it was her mother approaching, her feet on the paved path; she moved
back and Luca moved back further, pushing away from her and turning rapidly to face forward. They’d only just extricated themselves when Anna appeared, barefoot and wearing a red shirt dress with buttons that stopped short of the knee, revealing long, smooth legs that still bore traces of summer. She had wet laundry in a blue basket balanced against her hip. The washing line was attached to the shed at one end, and at the other to a rusting pole that Robert had planted in the hedge for the purpose.

“What are you two up to?” She’d dropped the basket and was beginning to hang the clothes. She didn’t mean anything particular by it, but Luca had already sprung to his feet.

“I’m going in now; see you,” he said. Anna turned to Nina while holding a shirt, offering an inquiring look, but said nothing, returning to the task, and Luca went through the door in the fence and disappeared.

Disappeared
was the apt word. He didn’t look Nina in the eye for almost three years. There were new friends, new faces in the garden that Nina realized were really old faces, boys she’d been at primary school with, like Andy Stevenson, who looked like a young farmer. Luca was busy with projects and mystifyingly cheerful. As for Nina, she was thought to be ill; her parents worried about her paleness and lack of sleep, her poor appetite, her inability to sit still. It affected her schoolwork. She’d study a little while or read, she’d listen to music or go to the hobby room to her mother’s sewing machine, but it was never long before she was back at the window. Sometimes she’d see Luca in his garden on his own, kicking leaves or hitting a tennis ball repetitively against the wall. He’d sit on the swing — Nina’s bedroom gave a grandstand view of it — with his feet in the dirt patch that had been worn beneath, moving himself back and forth with his shoes trailing. She’d see him reading in the hammock, one
that Giulio had strung between two silver birches, with successive trilogy paperbacks of
The Lord of the Rings
. Sometimes he’d look up, a quick, disguised look upwards, and if he saw her he’d go inside. It was clear that he didn’t want to know her anymore. Unable to believe that their friendship was over, Nina persisted, for a few disheartening weeks, in behaving as if it wasn’t. “I’m busy,” he’d say, when she asked him if he’d like to do something, to go out, frowning at some fixed third point, as if she ought to have known, as if they’d already been over this. It was like the kissing was her fault somehow, as if she’d let him down.

What is it that makes us fall in love with someone? A list of attributes is a useless thing in answering. Plenty of people have those same attributes and we don’t love them. There are people we dislike who have those same attributes. Tick the boxes, retrospectively, that mark the qualities of the person who was loved, and there may even be things we’d never tolerate again. The intangibles at work are things as unreliable as weather, forces that go beyond thinking and deciding, all of them convincingly permanent but proven by other examples of love to be as transitory as fog, as sunshine. On what basis had she done her choosing? In the hospital Nina wrote pages and pages on the whole slippery idea of the basis. Was it really something as embarrassingly superficial as the look of somebody, the way they spoke, their absolute faith in themselves? Luca and Paolo were both solidly good-looking, though Paolo was a lot more solid than his brother. There wasn’t any doubt that Luca was the more conventionally handsome; Paolo’s nose was longer, his mouth narrower, his eyes deeper set. But it couldn’t be that.
If Luca and Paolo had swapped bodies it would still have been Luca. It could only have been down to a shared wit, a way of thinking; recognition of a companion mind. Perhaps it was simply instinctive, one of those rapid sub-verbal assessments that stick; attraction is happy to betray all rationality. As someone once said — possibly a prose stylist at Hallmark Cards — the heart wants what the heart wants. We can stage all the neurological interventions we like: it wants what it wants. There are things that take place in closed session, deep in the interfaces between mind and will, deep under the crust of the known self, where the playing out of heart goes blindly on. Sometimes the whole thing is utterly baffling afterwards.
Was his cruelty, his inconstancy, a part of it? Did his being in a way dangerous, his approval hard to win, make his love worth more than Paolo’s — or is it all just more evidence of my own lack, lack piled upon lack, in being dazzled by unpredictability and disdaining constancy?
She paused, pen poised, and added
It’s such a dismal fucking cliché among womankind
.