The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (22 page)

Anna had said, “Put yourself into a situation in which you gain things that can never be lost.” Nina remembered the day vividly; they’d been stenciling in the downstairs bathroom, ready for Christmas, even though it was only October, in Nina’s last year at school. The subject of Paolo had started the conversation off; Anna didn’t miss an opportunity to speak up in favor of him. “He’s one of those people you’ll never lose,” Anna said. “Those
people are rare. You only realize it when you get older. He’d be loyal to you your whole life.”

“Maybe.” It was all Nina could offer. She never felt adequate during these discussions.

“Love is dangerous.” It was said undramatically. “Unless you keep it safely aside from life.”

“What do you mean?”

“A successful marriage — that’s about the hour to hour. It’s about an unstriving contentment. Friendship. Safety. Loyalty.”

“Are you talking about Paolo again?”

“Passion, on the other hand … there are feelings best kept in our heads, out of harm’s way. There are feelings that could prove damaging, that make us vulnerable. Best to park those with the possible, with potential, and keep them there. The things that can never be lost: they’re confined to your head, and remain there throughout, and are untouchable.”

“Untouchable?” Nina didn’t follow.

“The point is, your head is your place of safety,” Anna said, “and you can be different there. You can continue to be yourself there in absolute freedom.” Nina hadn’t known how to respond. “You can love whomsoever you like,” Anna continued, “and think what you like, and these are your truths and no one can sabotage them.”
These are your truths
: they were words from one of the self-help books. “It’s why I think journal-keeping is vital. Write in it every day. It ensures that you keep track of yourself, and return to her.”

You can love whomsoever you like
? All Nina could do was resort to the facts. “Did you love someone else before you met Dad?” Or after; or after; she didn’t dare use the words, but even thinking them made her lose concentration on the task, letting
the Mylar stencil slip and messing up the line. One of the mistletoe sprigs was wonky even now, on the ceiling above the bathroom window. She came down the stepladder.

“I didn’t love your dad when I married him,” her mother said, standing back and looking as if she knew this would cause a sensation. “I really liked him, don’t get me wrong. Real love is something that grows over time. It’s not ‘falling in love,’ which is something altogether different.” Nina stopped what she was doing. “I’m just trying to protect you,” her mother continued. “It’s never straightforward. But you see, when you’re young and lovely, you can have just about anyone you want and it’s so easy to make the wrong decision. If you decide against Paolo, you’ll find that when you go out into the world after university, or even while at university, chances are that you’ll become infatuated, obsessive, over someone you barely even know. You’ll fall in love, whatever that means.”

“Whatever that means?”

“The trouble with falling in love is that it’s not a conscious thing, it’s not a decision. It’s a decision made for you, and isn’t always good for you.”

“Who makes the decision? I don’t understand.”

“Something inside you that’s out of your control. I don’t know if that’s even really you, not in any meaningful sense. It’s the one acceptable example of the subconscious taking absolute charge of us, and nobody questions it. Instead, it’s glorified.” Anna’s latest self-help book had been based in neurology; she’d begun looking for titles that Robert would have more respect for. She began to climb up the stepladder. “It’s a strange thing, falling in love, and to be honest not something I’d recommend.”

“Was there somebody before Dad?” Or after; or after. She couldn’t say it, the name on her tongue.

“Oh yes, of course.” Anna had smiled, remembering. She’d put her hand to her brow as if to regulate her thoughts. “I was twenty and he was dazzling. He made me ill with longing. But I didn’t want to be ill. I wanted to be in control. It was all too dangerous. I wasn’t going to hand over control of my happiness to someone else.” She started to put the masking tape around the holly stencil. “The point is that you think you’ll only love once, or one person at a time. Isn’t always so.”

“You can’t be in love with more than one person at once.” Nina found that she’d got acrylic gold paint on her jeans and dabbed at it. Anna threw her a wet sponge.

“That’s just a tradition. Oh no, now I’ve shocked you again. All I’m saying is, don’t make the mistake of thinking that there’s only one right person for everybody, the other half of a divided self, all that baloney.” When she said
baloney
it was with a Norwegian accent. “The truth is there are lots of men out there you could be happy with. All I’m saying is, don’t get hung up on one as the love of your life. It doesn’t really work that way. People meet second loves of their lives, and sometimes third. Sometimes the third turns out to be the first, the important one. Strictly in terms of your safety, if you want to have that intense feeling it’s best to have it for someone you will never marry.”

“Courtly love; it’s courtly love,” Nina said.

“But look, the paint dries really fast so come on, we need to get this finished.” They resumed work and then Anna said, “Talking of which, how are you getting on with
The Faerie Queene
? And the Wyatt?”

“I like the Wyatt,” Nina told her. “I’ve only read bits of the Spenser, though. It’s absolutely huge.”

“You could do English at the university.” Anna was wistful. “I longed to do that, when I was your age. Imagine it, reading
novels and poems all day and sitting in lectures hearing what they mean, and writing your own ideas about them. Sounds heaven. Spenser is on the first-year syllabus here. I had a look. That’s why I bought it for you.”

“At the university here?”

“You’d be able to live at home,” Anna said. “Think of the money you’d save. You could have a car, some spare cash to go out. You could bring your friends back here anytime. Dad and I would make ourselves scarce.”

Anna might have diagnosed Nina’s problems as springing from not doing honor to the present. That was the way she spoke sometimes, and if people noticed she’d explain that she learned a lot of her English idiom from nineteenth-century novels. She’d done a lot of reading before she was married, every summer in her teens, all summer long at the lake house, one after another.

“I live in the present, too, I hope,” Dr. Christos said. “It’s something we should all aspire to. Don’t you think? You don’t think so?”

“I can’t even imagine that,” Nina said. “When I’ve monitored myself, what I think about, where my mind roams and dwells —”

“Really — where your mind roams and dwells?”

“My mother. That’s how she used to speak.”

“Sorry. Go on.”

“I find myself in the past and in the future, going from one to the other and back. I use the past to speculate forward. I’m barely in the present at all.”

“Isn’t that just another way of saying that you’re a worrier?”

“I suppose. Even here. Especially here. The holiday was supposed to be all about living in the day, making the most of each minute of it; really savoring life. My mother could have pulled it off. She spent a lot of time reminding me to be present,
in the room
, as she’d say. ‘Be in the room, Nina.’ And I suppose when I was small I was really good at it. Less so later.”

“It didn’t work, then. The plan. Coming to Greece and not being anxious?”

“I found it hard even to notice Greece. I took hundreds of photographs so that I could see it afterwards.”

The first day of the honeymoon was okay, because everything was new. It was cloudy and puddly and only just warm, but they took advantage of the temperature to be active: they walked for miles along the beaches, and it was fine because it was all new. On the second day it was cooler, the clouds lower and grayer, and Paolo suggested that they take the boat to Main Island. He’d read in the guidebook that there were caves worth visiting. They could do that, do some shopping, look at the old church, have a nice lunch, visit the museum: what did she think? She said that it sounded like a very good plan, and it was; it was a good plan, but at the same time obscurely disappointing. Why must the day be so busy, so crammed?

“We can get the early boat back if you don’t feel up to it. But come on, we need to get a move on if we’re to get the morning ferry.”

What was I so afraid of? What do I continue to be afraid of?
she asked herself later. It felt already like the marriage survived from minute to minute only because Nina was making a vast effort to keep it going, an exhausting constant feat of
concentration that wasn’t dissimilar to the one that she’d enact twenty-five years later, on the plane when the turbulence hit. The day had gone well, though it had rained during the donkey ride up to the caves. Nina had been wary of the donkeys. She’d been bitten by one on a beach holiday when she was small, and she’d been thrown off a horse when she was ten. It had taken ages to muster the courage to get on the donkey, and Paolo had teased her.

On the third and fourth days it rained constantly, and they ended up spending most of the time in the taverna, in the bar and in their room, going from one to the other and back. There wasn’t any heating, they didn’t have sweaters, and the rain had brought a chill along with it, so they ended up reading in bed for most of each afternoon. On the fifth day it was sunny in the morning, so they went to Blue Bay, but Paolo was bored by the beach and had run out of things to read. By the time they’d had lunch it had begun to rain again, so they played backgammon in the bar and drank Greek brandy. The following day the sky was blue, albeit with a procession of clouds, so they took a boat trip around uninhabited islands and swam, in a churned-up and gritty sea. It began to rain while they were swimming and rained all that night, and continued at intervals for the final two days. They spent their last afternoon in the town on Main Island, running between shops as rain pelted down.

On the day Nina moved out, Paolo took the chance to say that she hadn’t really seemed present to him when they were on honeymoon. Other things, other disappointments were cited, as if he’d compiled a list of long-ago infractions, as if the list had silently accrued, ready for the possibility of this moment’s coming to
pass. This old view of an old episode, or perhaps new view of it, had shocked her, not just in its having lain in wait but in its being unanswerable. As she was packing a bag, he’d listed them one after another, the ways in which she’d failed him. He’d appeared unconcerned about her leaving. He stood aside and let her leave. He said, “Off you go, then, if that’s what you want.” He hadn’t looked her in the eye. He’d picked up a book and, still looking at it, asked if she needed a lift. He’d said, when she’d called the cab and put her luggage by the door, that he was relieved the day had come that had been so long in coming.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Nina paused in doing her exercises. “I’ve been trying to chat to Nurse Yannis; I asked what it was like here when she was a child but she wasn’t very forthcoming.”