The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (15 page)

“Did you see it again, your steam ghost?”

“No. But I saw my mother. When I cleared the condensation. In the mirror, in my own face.” It was a relief to change the subject.

“Only because you look alike.”

Nina had seen Anna looking back at her, as she had been during the last year of her life, separated from Nina’s father and living alone. It was the expression in her eyes that startled her; Anna’s soul had shone out through her eyes, like some people’s do. But where was that soul now? Not gone, surely; not ended. Nina liked to think of it blown like a dandelion clock, seeding across the world in new and unexpected places. Anna had asked that her ashes be scattered on the roses at the house, roses she’d planted and had tended for fifteen years. “Next year you’ll find me there, redder than red,” she’d written, and Robert had cried
when he read that in her will. Perhaps that was the point, the intended reaction; sentimentality is a powerful toxin, after all, a fine biological weapon. It wasn’t possible to deny the request and nor was it possible to avoid the metaphor, which would grow in his garden ever after. Nina had visited the rose beds on the first anniversary of her death, but it had rained hard the previous day and the blooms were sodden, flattened, browning and becoming mush. She remembered words of her mother’s when
her
own mother had died. Surely so much love as that could only feed the world of spirit in which it was laid to rest. Love that was so absolute: surely that couldn’t be extinguished? Apparently it could. Apparently love was entirely extinguishable.

“Also there were clunkings, like shoes being dropped on the wood floor in my bedroom, that I heard from downstairs. And then I was pushed when I was sleeping. I woke up early one morning feeling like I’d been pushed hard in my back. I was sleeping on my side. I surged forward. I could feel her hand on my back.”

“Her? You thought it was Miss Plowman?” Now he looked perturbed.

“No. Its hand. But of course it wasn’t a hand.” At the time she’d known it was a hand, and whose hand it was. Nina was haunted; she knew this. She’d been afraid that it was a personal haunting and would always be with her, and wasn’t just confined to the house. It was Francesca, she knew, who had shadowed her there.

“When I sat up in bed the closet doors were both open, and I always closed them at bedtime.”

“Old houses move and doors move with them.”

“Paolo said the same.”

“The reason the cottage feels cold and damp,” Paolo said on his second visit, “is because it is cold and damp.” He was comfortable talking about the house; they’d talked of little else. “It
was built on a gradient and there’s soil banked up against the back wall. Hence dampness and armies of woodlice.”

“I don’t mind.”

“But you can make it better. You could get the earth dug out and drainage put in at the back; that would make a huge difference.” Her father had said the same. They pressed in on her from both sides, these men and their pronouncements. In any case there wouldn’t be visits from Paolo anymore.

After he’d left and she’d put the books away and hung the picture — things of hers he’d brought round that she’d left behind — it came to Nina that she was setting up in anticipation of a solitary life. Like Miss Plowman, she might never come up with a good reason to live anywhere else but here for the rest of her days; she’d die alone at one hundred and one years old and be found by the postman. Miss Plowman had been reclusive, friendless, near sociopathic, and Nina had a foretaste of a possible old age. All she’d seemed able to do lately was push people away. She craved people and then couldn’t tolerate them. Was that how it had started, the extreme loneliness of poor Miss Plowman? Her kitchen drawers had been left unemptied after the sale and the dresser had yielded its treasures: yellowing piles of recipes cut from newspapers, tobacco tins of buttons, scrapbooks of gardening records, and four cards from when she’d turned one hundred, one of them from Robert and none of their messages convincingly warm. Nina’s father confirmed that Miss Plowman had never been married, had never had a boyfriend as far as anyone knew, and was not well liked.
Miss Plowman was not well liked
— what a terrible legacy; what words for a tombstone.

She’d suffered a stroke and was found on the kitchen floor, having already been dead for forty-eight hours. What must it be like to have nobody, no one at all? It didn’t bear thinking about.
If Nina were to be Miss Plowman, at forty-six she wasn’t even halfway through her life; there’d be fifty-five years of living alone. She was standing in the bathroom cleaning her face with cotton wool as this occurred to her. She’d developed, she thought, a disappointed look. A grid of creases had appeared under her eyes, marionette lines led down from her cheeks to her chin, and gray strands were obvious, now, in the blonde. There wasn’t any doubt that in terms of — what was that hideous phrase?
sexual capital
— in terms of sexual capital she was already over the hill, prompting desire in no one ever again. The thought provoked a slow stir-up of fear, like the bottom of a pond agitated by a stick, clogging her mind with its silt. Couldn’t she go back? Too late, too late, the summit was passed and she was on the road down, all opportunities wasted. It began to be difficult to breathe: she took hold of the sink with both hands and felt violently sick and leaned forward. She was going to die, not in fifty-five years but right now. Her phone was in her bathrobe pocket; she leaned against the wall and slid down to sit on the floor and rang Dr. Macfarlane at home. Alison had soothed her fears. No, it didn’t sound anything like a stroke. Could she make that appointment now, with the friend at the clinic? Nina agreed that she could.

“And after that, what I prescribe is the holiday you talked about.”

“I was sure that I was dying,” Nina said.

“Of course you’re dying, we’re all dying,” Alison consoled her. “But not now. This is just anxiety. Take the holiday.”

Dr. Christos said, “Your phone’s flashing.”

“I had it set to silent. It’s Paolo.” Nina picked it up and said hello. She smiled at the doctor as she did so.

Paolo’s voice said, “Just tell me one thing absolutely honestly — are you in love with Luca?”

“Hold on a second.”

“Absolutely honestly: is it Luca that you want?” He wasn’t ever going to stop this. “There’s nothing to lose now, in being honest,” he said. “Do me the honor of being honest with me.”

Nina said, “I can’t talk now; my doctor’s here,” but Dr. Christos was already leaving, saying he’d be back, and Paolo overheard. He said, “So now he’s gone, answer the question.”

“It’s like I said at the airport. I was trying to tell the truth. It was something else. Like an addiction.”

“
Addiction
is an odd word to use.”

“Is it?”

“So you’re distinguishing between love and infatuation, and felt neither for me.”

“I didn’t say that. Where did that come from? Have you just called me to be angry with me?”

“I want to know if I should be talking to my brother, or if I’m a gullible fool.”

She said, unguardedly, “I’m pissed off with him, too.”

“Pissed off why?”

Why had she said that? “Just because of all this mess.” The tight control was exhausting her.

“I know it was Luca who initiated it. He told me.”

“You’ve had the conversation, then.”

“I get it. I see how it happened. You’d moved out and were mildly deranged. He was grieving and withdrawn and nobody knew what to do for him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But why did your sleeping together make him worse? Why did you become so ill afterwards? Just tell me. Tell me again.
You’re not with Luca. You’re not with him in some hidden way that’ll come to light when you come back?”

“I don’t even want to run into him again. Run over him, maybe.”

“Why do you say that? Did he behave badly? He didn’t … I mean, I hope he wasn’t …”

“What?”

“Nothing, it doesn’t matter.”

“What do you mean?”

“His account is pretty anodyne. You were both depressed, you comforted each other. And then … then decided it must never happen again and it was all fine, but — hang on, how does this bit fit into the story — never spoke to one another again, either.” Nina didn’t have an answer and Paolo continued. “Things are squared here. If that’s really how it was. I do need to know where I stand with him and I’m counting on you to be frank.”

“There’s nothing else to tell.”

“To be honest I’ve wanted you to have an affair for a long time.”

“You haven’t. Don’t do that.”

“Just to get it over with, the inevitable. So I could hate him officially and we could move away, after however many bloody decades it’s been with the two of you and your mating dance. I had nights when I went out in the car and shouted and punched the steering wheel.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop! Stop saying how sorry you are. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. You know what the worst of it is, Nina? Luca and I are strangers now; I don’t trust him and I can’t talk to him. What do you have to say to that? Sorry. Sorry.” He’d mimicked her low voice. “Sorry — that’s all you have for me, isn’t it? Why
am I even calling you? This isn’t helping. I’ll see you when I get to Greece.” He hung up the phone.

Dr. Christos came into the room looking cheerful, and stopped in his tracks. “What’s the matter?”

“Bad call. Bad phone call.”

“You look so anxious.”

This, she could risk being frank about. “I’m always anxious. I’m becoming bored with my anxiety.”

He dropped a stack of paperwork onto the table and settled himself in the chair. “Always? Why always?”

“It started when my parents separated. If you want to know the real beginnings of it.”

“Your parents divorced? I’m sorry. It’s very hard for children.”

“They didn’t divorce. They separated when I was nineteen and then my mother died a year later. Heart failure.”

“You’ve been anxious since you were nineteen years old? That’s a long time.”

“Not continually anxious, but predisposed to it, I suppose. Luca, my brother-in-law, was my boyfriend, sort of my boyfriend, at the time. He proposed to me the night my mother died, and I said no. I thought we were too young and that was the end of that. We
were
too young, of course. I was twenty. I was only in my third year at college. He married someone else six months later. He married Francesca, and I married Paolo the following year, and we were all happy, I thought, the four of us.”

“The four of you?”

“Happy and good friends.”

“But. I feel there is a but.”

“My husband always thought that really I was in love with his brother, and when Francesca died it made him afraid. Luca came to live with us, and I went quiet and withdrew, and that made Paolo more afraid. He couldn’t explain it, you see.”

“And were you? In love with Luca?”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love. I used to think I had. I knew what it meant. But now I really don’t.”

“Oh, come on.”

“What’s it mean if it comes to an end in the course of one conversation? What if someone says to you that they don’t think you were ever in love?”

“People use the word to punish other people as well as seduce them. They don’t always mean it. It doesn’t matter, though, not really, whether you can use the word or not. It’s not the word that matters. It’s how you behave.”

“You don’t think the word matters, the use of the word? The other person using it? Really?”

“Listen, whether people use the word or don’t, it’s very simple: they’ll stay with you or they won’t. In the meantime it’s a peace-keeping word. That’s why people are constantly asking for it. My wife used to. She needed me to look into her eyes at the same time. It said to her, ‘It isn’t going to be today, the day I leave you.’ That’s all that it could mean.”

CHAPTER NINE

When Nina and Paolo were together Sundays were often difficult, not only because they were committed, by long years of precedent, to go to lunch at Maria’s, but because of what always happened afterwards. Invariably Nina was restless at home on a Sunday evening. She’d flit between books, start and abandon work, go out for head-clearing walks, put on a film and then stare out of the window, her hands moving against each other, fingers finding skin and stroking there. She said it was the classic Sunday blues.