The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (24 page)

When the grandparents visited Edinburgh — which they managed only once, already well into their eighties — Mormor (the Norwegian name specifically for a maternal grandmother) had tutted her disapproval of the size of the new house, the heat loss that was inevitable through such great, showy windows, though she approved of all the wood inside and the tall stove. She liked the many old things bought at low cost from sales and junk shops, the recycling of old quilts, all the secondhand kitchenware. Anna had taken pleasure in touring the house and showing her what she called the finds: the colander that cost a pound, the antique linens bought for two pounds a bundle, though she’d spared her the sums spent on other things — the astronomical amounts (Mormor would have thought) for light furnishings, sofas and mattresses. Mormor would have keeled over.

When Dr. Christos came out to join her, with his laptop, with his work, and their conversation resumed, she told him about the Norwegian visitors and about the finds. “Your mother would have fitted in well here,” he said. He began typing again and Nina looked at him, imagining his face if Anna were to walk into the room, his reaction to her. He’d be taken up and swept along. Anna had been a man magnet, and Nina, though she looked near
identical, just hadn’t been, not really; not in the same way. There had been some quality about Anna when she talked to a man, an absolute focus on him, inviting eye contact; it had also been about the use of her mouth, her own obvious awareness of her body, fiddling with her hair as she spoke, and that way she had of rubbing her shins, her kneecaps, when seated. The radiant smile, everything in her alive, alive; even in her forties everything about her radiating youth. Nina imagined Dr. Christos after a half hour of chat with Anna Olsen Findlay, his eyes glassy, his face obedient, his whole demeanor lost and craven.

She said, “It’s fashionable now in the UK to have what they call vintage — you know the word
vintage
? — but it was considered a bit weird then, to have secondhand things. Paolo’s mother was snide about it, though never to my mother’s face.” Then she added, “Mum knew, though, that she was privately snide, and referred to it once. She could be a bit tactless, sometimes. She didn’t get on that well with other women.” She thought,
And here I go, trying to talk a man out of being a little bit in love with someone who’s dead
. It wasn’t the first time she’d done it.

Dr. Christos, oblivious, replied, “We can’t buy clothes or furniture without crossing the water, and so if someone gets bored with a chair or a coat, they swap it. Sometimes they get the original thing back after a dozen swaps. It’s the kind of thing we do to cheer ourselves up in the winter. Andros takes the seats out of the minibus and we move things around.”

She’d been dying to ask and now she did. “What does your house look like? I must have walked past it every day on the way to the beach.”

“It’s small, painted white, with a blue door and red flowers on the window ledge. Like every other house, in fact.”

“What’s it like inside?”

He looked up from working. “Very simple. There’s a tiled floor, four chairs and a table. Also, highly controversially, white sofas from the mainland. That caused some excitement — my white sofas arriving on a lorry from Athens. But I also have cupboards that were my family’s, ones that came from the farm and that nobody wanted. There’s not much else to tell. It’s one big room with two bedrooms above. I have a good kitchen, plus a summer kitchen at the back, one with a roof but no walls, and a small garden. We grow a lot of our own food; the local shopping’s limited, as you know.”

“You’re right, my mother would have fitted in well. She was a housewife in a very 1970s style, a practitioner of crafts. It was all about the furnishing and bettering of the home, in low-cost, labor-intensive ways, at least once she met her friend Sheila, who was even more into it. The house tracked my mother’s life. That’s why it was so hard to leave; it was part of her and she was part of it. When she left, she was bleeding and it was bleeding.”

“Nina. Are you all right?”

“I’m melancholy today. I’m never sure if sharing a problem, a bad memory, is a good idea or not. My mother always said that a problem shared is a problem doubled.”

In April, the day she’d left Paolo, Nina had intended to go to a hotel, but when she got into the back of the cab it came to her that what she really wanted was to be in her childhood bedroom and in her childhood bed. She had two suitcases and a laptop and an envelope of old photographs: these had been the priorities. Coincidentally, aside from the laptop, this was just how Anna had left Robert, in a cab with two small suitcases and a bag of
photograph albums. Robert was thrown by his daughter’s arrival on his doorstep, but he acclimatized quickly, convinced the separation wouldn’t stick, that it was just a row that would be resolved in the morning. He and Nina sat in the dark, nursing glasses of whisky, the only light in the room emanating from the lit stove in the corner, steadily emitting its sweet chestnut wood smell. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened with Paolo, Nina said. She asked if they could talk about her mother.

“What is it you want to talk about?” Robert’s voice was softer than usual. He didn’t like it when Nina was upset. She’d arrived at the house weeping and in a state, alarming the taxi driver.

“About you and Mum … It was good, wasn’t it, when I was young? It was good for most of my childhood. It wasn’t all a lie.”

“It wasn’t all a lie.” Her father swirled the amber liquid, attempting the slowest possible swirling round the crystal tumbler.

“I remember your nights out, on Saturdays when I was little. You seemed happy then.”

His concentration intensified as he sent the whisky into reverse, counterclockwise, before answering. “We were. We were very happy then.”

Nina and the babysitter had watched television, though the sitter had turned it off when the car came into the drive with its warning white lights. Robert was vocal on the subject of there being a hundred better things to do than sit in front of the tellybox, though when he was away Anna and Nina had TV binges and laughed at the badness of the bad. On those evenings that Robert wasn’t in his study working, Nina would find her parents sitting together in their usual way, at right angles on the big L-shaped
sofa that occupied a corner. Inevitably there’d be music playing, Robert immersed in his reading, though Anna would interrupt him from time to time, and they’d pull themselves upright to sip at the wine; there was always wine, sent from next door in limitless supply. Nina could hear the audio of their evening from her bedroom, if her door was left ajar: her room was off the galleried landing that looked over the double-height sitting room, and their voices rose and dispersed like smoke, a drowsy nocturnal hum that was love and home and sanctuary.

Sometimes she’d go onto the landing, unseen behind the wooden balustrade, and watch them for a while, hearing her father’s pessimistic remarks about the world, its dark future, listening to Anna trying to contradict them. Robert had a tendency to be gloomy and withdrawn, but Anna, never; she was the reliable antidote, and she’d be as inventive with him as she was with her child. Nina had come into the sitting room once and found her mother washing her father’s feet in a basin. These acts of grooming were mutual, which seemed at odds with her dad’s usual daytime austerity. He’d volunteer to wash Anna’s hair when she went to have a bath, and he’d brush it out for her at bedtime. She kept it long because he liked it that way.

If Robert was in one of his intense work cycles he’d come out of his study for dinner and then return. There wasn’t any arguing with work: work is the basis of life, he’d remind them; there’d be no house nor food on the table without his job, and there wouldn’t be a job without the right kind of atmosphere to work in at home. That was hard to argue with, but it also meant that Anna spent a lot of time alone. Nina remembered coming out of her bedroom once, still only a small child, sleepless at midnight, and seeing her mother sitting upright on the sofa with her toes braced against the edge of the coffee table, staring
into space. Robert must have been in the study, but nonetheless it was his music on the record player — Schubert, Dvořák, or Richard Strauss; Anna had won the battle to keep Wagner out of the evening rotation. Nina had gone and got on her lap. She’d had intuitions then, which had passed out of her at puberty, her old alertness to nuance replaced by the inward-looking gaze.

“So what was it, Dad?” Nina asked him, the night she arrived on his doorstep. “You seemed happy. There were no signs whatever of unhappiness.”

“Well, the same could be said of you and Paolo,” he’d said, looking almost triumphant.

She didn’t rise. “Explain it to me.”

“It’s hard to explain it to you.”

“Try.”

“It’s not about reasons, Nina. It was never about reasons. It was about feelings. It was what I felt.”

Nina stared at him, at his profile, unable to see a way forward in what she’d hoped would be a final and frank heart-to-heart. How could he continue to wear that sweater, the dark blue Guernsey sweater that had gone at the elbows and that Anna had patched for him; she could still see the tiny, neat stitches around the suede. How could he continue to associate himself with those stitches, all that painstakingly stitched love?