The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (13 page)

“It started with a cauliflower. Of all things. Paolo came to the cottage to see how I was settling in. He’d brought wine and a pair of small chickens that were ready to cook. I forget what they’re called; there’s a word for the little ones; they come in pairs and you eat one each. I’ve never liked them because it’s like eating babies. Anyway. He said he would roast them. I didn’t want that. It seemed like a big deal.” She focused hard on the window blind, which was bobbing in the room fan’s breeze. “I wasn’t well. But you see, why did I have to eat chicken with a man I’d recently told I didn’t love? It’s always been other people who decide what’s kind and what’s rude. I’ve never been one of the deciders.”

“Was it true about not loving him anymore?”

“I don’t know.”

“How could you not know?”

“You say that as if it’s always been clear to you, who you love and who you don’t.”

“Shouldn’t that be ‘whom’?”

“I tend to pretend I don’t know that, in conversation. It’s so doggedly formal. ’Course, if I were editing you it’d be different. Paolo didn’t like my editing him. He didn’t like the way I’d done the food shopping, either. Why was it any of his business?”

Before she could stop him he’d opened the fridge, saying, “Dear God, what’s all this?” The ready meals were stacked in two piles of three, and on the upper shelf smaller cartons, of rice, couscous, prepared side dishes, sat alongside tubs of hummus, salsa, prepared garlic and chili pepper.

“I haven’t felt like cooking.”

He pulled out one of the meal boxes so as to be able to read the label. “Cumberland sausage with parmesan mash.”

“I haven’t felt like cooking.”

Paolo found a roasting dish, washed his hands, salted the birds, and then — taking a knife from the rack on the wall and a board from behind the bread bin — chopped onions and garlic cloves and added them to the tin. He rummaged in the fruit bowl, and sliced a lemon up and added the pieces. “There. As easy as those terrible cook-chill things.”

“I know. Why are you treating me as if I don’t know?”

He’d turned up the radio, and steamed the potatoes and boiled some green beans and they’d eaten lunch and talked about nothing, about world events.

Then he’d said, “Does the chef get a cup of coffee?” and he’d hung around, sitting on her sofa with his feet on the table, reading her weekend newspapers with faked raptness as if he hadn’t already read them at home. He mentioned, on leaving, that he’d left her a cauliflower that he’d bought at the farmers’ market, and some good cheese for the sauce.

Her father had found her later that afternoon, sitting on the kitchen floor, a destroyed cauliflower around her, bits of floret clutched in balled fists. She’d smashed it over and over, its cauliflower brain. He’d driven her to the village clinic, 150 yards, as Nina felt too dizzy to walk it. The doctor was grave and kind and elderly, technically long past retirement age; she’d been the family GP for a long time. Nina thought of her as another mother. She was Dr. Macfarlane but Nina had long since been urged to call her Alison.

“So what happened today?” Alison asked.

“Paolo brought me a cauliflower. I’ve never liked cauliflower. He was the one who liked it.”

It seemed as if her thoughts and preferences would always be tangled up with his, conjoined like Siamese twins, and she wasn’t wholly confident that her own would survive if surgically
detached. Cooking was part of the problem, Nina told her; cooking was something too associated with the past and with domestic expectation. Chopping vegetables seemed too much like an act of faith in the future. Nina wondered if that’s how her father had seen things: he hadn’t cooked after Anna moved out, other than for the Sunday joint of beef, which sat under foil in the fridge for the rest of the week, awaiting slicing. Cooking, he said, was for people who didn’t have much else to do. Time was precious. He had ten thousand more books to read than years to read them in, and beans on toast and fruit from the bowl was a perfectly good dinner, thank you. He didn’t need to make a salad of the fruit and add elderflower cordial and mint and whatnot.

“It’s not going to be forever,” Nina said. “It’s just that I need to go through a period of food not mattering. Much more time is freed up for curling on the sofa in a ball.”

“Tell me more about the curling up,” Alison said, picking up her pen. It was an ordinary day in the despair business.

“It hasn’t settled yet, the swinging pendulum,” Nina told her. “Though sometimes I can feel it, the pendulum, striking hard at my inner walls.”

“I don’t understand what you mean. What’s the pendulum?”

“Sometimes it seems as if I caught a virus a long time ago.” She’d felt it there, waiting deep inside her cells, waiting to be tickled back into life. “That’s what I’ve come to you about. I think I have a virus.”

“What are the symptoms?”

“Overexcitement and then feeling dead. A virus in my brain, that’s what it might be.”

“It sounds rather like it might be a kind of depression.”

“I’m not depressed. I just have to change and I’m too tired.”

“I wonder if you should have a chat with a friend of mine. She’s a psychiatrist at the hospital.”

“You mean the mental hospital?”

“She’s a friend of mine, and it’s just where she works. She’s a good listener, and she will have more time.” She looked at Nina over the top of silver-framed glasses. “It’s entirely up to you. I think it might help and wouldn’t hurt, but you don’t have to go.”

“I think I’m ill; I don’t think it’s depression,” Nina said.

“Darling, it’s the same thing. Your mother said exactly the same words to me once, and I reacted in just the same way then.”

“My mother? My mother didn’t suffer from depression.”

“Everyone does from time to time. It’s completely routine human stuff. Shall I give my colleague a ring and get you an appointment?”

Nina went home and looked at mental health forums online. One person had described their illness as a dark wood. He was always aware of its presence, its dark edges, he said; it was important to keep your back to it and focus on the landscape in front of you. Nina thought about this on the plane, after the second lot of turbulence, when the aircraft swung side to side and it felt as if the wings would break off. She’d had ultimate clarity then and was full of resolutions. Better to go through the wood than to avoid it.
I’m going in there with matches in my pocket
, she thought,
and I’m going to make a fire
. A cleansing fire seemed easy then. It was only on the fifth day of the holiday, coming down again to the same breakfast, the prospect of the same day laid out before her on the blue checked tablecloth, that she realized her fire-starting abilities had left her.

When Dr. Christos brought the breakfast he’d also brought flowers, mauve and yellow flowers that grew on the hill, placing them on her bedside table in a jam jar, and when he went off to do the ward round (as he called it, though there weren’t really wards), Nina drew them, their delicate, small faces set among spiky leaves, a rough sketch in her notebook, noting the date underneath.

If something was going to begin, perhaps it had already begun; perhaps it began with the flowers. What would life with Dr. Christos be like? She saw the two of them as if from the ceiling, curled naked in white cotton in his big wooden bed. Now she saw the house from the sky, with chili peppers drying on the steps, and towels, two sandy pairs of shoes; over the little tarmac road the sea was dazzling and the shoreline skimmed by light. She smiled at the snippet of film she saw of their island wedding, the two of them standing under the tree in the square, the whole community gathered around them. It might all unexpectedly be in her reach. What had permanence been with Paolo? A deep, unthinking lassitude. What would permanence have been with Luca? It would have been volatile; it might not have lasted. There had to be something else, some third option, at once fixed and evolving, and perhaps this was the start of it.

She’d live in one of the little white houses that faced the sea, at least at first, while having something built, and she’d swim before starting work. She saw that her hair was wet as she took out the manuscript that had come in the post, its fat pile of paper densely peopled with words. Other people’s storylines and societies would keep her from feeling confined. Perhaps in addition she’d write a book about her life on the island; the accident and the way she met her second husband would both be gifts to an
opening chapter. The small blue flame of her self-regard sparked and caught, when she thought of this plausible life.

Nina picked up her notebook.
The thing I love about the plan is that its simplicity and luxury are both the opposite to how they are at home
. The simplicity would be in the material facts, their few possessions. The luxury would be in the backdrop, the sunshine, the seafront location, and most important in the stretching out of time. There’d be the opportunity to be properly alive. There would be four summer dresses; there’d only be a need for four. There’d be local leather sandals and a big plain hat and straw baskets for visiting the street market. She’d have an allotment up in the top village, and join the women gardeners on the minibus. The seven of them, six alike and one startlingly different, would stand together at the bus bench and scrutinize outsiders. Her Greek would be good by the second spring.

She’d be able to build a new house: Dr. Christos didn’t know, yet, about the money her mother had left her. She began to make sketches in her notebook. What she wanted had a lot in common with the island hospital: a courtyard house, single story with large, airy rooms, French windows leading into a central garden, and a veranda all around the inner three sides of the building, its stout pillars made of a hard Asian wood. Indoors there’d be simple furniture, nice pictures, a lot of books, a lot of music, perhaps a piano by the window. Nina saw herself out watering her pots in the evening, wearing a white linen tunic and trousers, her hair tousled and full of salt, her bare brown feet encrusted with sand. She looked absolutely content, this woman, and young for her age. Her new husband was sitting on the veranda with the newspaper and with wine. He was saying, “Let me cook tonight; I was given some fish today.” He was saying, “Did you bring artichokes down from the garden, my love?”

Everything had gone disastrously wrong by the sixth morning of the holiday. On the sixth day, there didn’t seem anything to do but the same things she’d done the day before. She began to be frightened; there ought to be other things to do, other things to imagine, so why couldn’t she imagine them? She went along to Blue Bay, stopping to take photographs that were identical to ones she had already, of the morning sea, the boats arriving back in the harbor, the fishermen’s blue trousers and bent backs. At the beach she made camp in a shady patch under a pine, swam for a few minutes and tried to read while drying off, and swam a second time and returned to the tree and lay with one eye open, watching the other tourists. This was the best part of the day, but it was over by noon. By then she didn’t any longer want to be on holiday or here or alone; by noon she felt stunted by misery, her heart wrapped tight and all her responses and thoughts blunted. She ate warm white beans and tomatoes at the café, drank a small carafe of wine and went back to her room for a siesta, but sleep wouldn’t come, so she lay looking at the square of bright blue sky, and at the small, agile lizard on her bedroom wall, which was darting and then standing as if in a trance. She watched her alarm clock, longing for it to be time for a swim at Octopus Beach, but was bored by her visit there and didn’t stay long. After a shower, clad in fresh evening clothes, she went to the shop and bought leather belts, jewelry made of polished blue and green pebbles, and a series of boxes covered in tiny glued shells. Then, having deposited her finds in the room, she went down for dinner and ate squid rings and fries and salad, and tried to look absorbed in her book.

“Nina, didn’t you hear me?” She looked up and saw Cathy’s face. “Will you come on a boat trip with us tomorrow? We’re
sailing off to see a ruin and taking a packed lunch.” Cathy could see that Nina didn’t want to. “Please come,” she urged. “Kurt is coming with us and he’s going to feel like a big German gooseberry otherwise. Aren’t you, Kurt?” Kurt turned down his mouth and nodded. It wasn’t possible to refuse.