The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (29 page)

Nurse Yannis came in to see Nina, scowling. “Your light is still on,” she said. “You must turn it off and sleep.” The nurse’s
initial friendliness seemed to have petered out, and nor had her mother come to the hospital to kiss Nina’s hands; it hadn’t been mentioned again. Had Nina annoyed or offended the nurse in some way? She turned off her light and lay blinking in the dark. Though she was aware that the repertoire of quotable days was small and repetitive, there remained many things to be nostalgic about. Though Luca wasn’t one of them. Not anymore.

When Nina arrived to take Anna out to lunch the last time — though she hadn’t known it would be the last — her mother had been making a quilt by hand, out of old cut-up dresses. The radio was on and she hadn’t heard the door; Nina, who’d let herself in, surprised her by appearing in front of her, and Anna had knocked her sewing box onto the rug. They’d searched thoroughly and were confident they’d found all of the pins, but one had been missed. It had stuck in Luca’s foot, at 2:00 a.m. on the night after she died, when he was looking for his shoes. It had gone in deep and it had hurt him. Remembering this, lying sleepless in the island hospital, it was hard not to see it as a warning.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Nina looked at her watch for the fifth time.

“When are you expecting him?” Dr. Christos asked, as if he didn’t already know.

“About three. The boat gets in just before three.”

“It’s going to be fine.”

“Of course.” Nina found she was patting the sheet. She was sitting on top of the bed, dressed in white trousers and a thigh-length white smock, and long stone necklaces in sea blues and greens that she’d bought at the gift shop. Her arms were brown against the white.

“It’s bound to be tricky.” He took her hand in a doctorly way. “The last time you saw him, you told him you’d slept with his brother. That’s bound to be a little bit awkward.”

“It’ll be fine,” she said dully. “It’s not like we haven’t talked about it. He needs a holiday; he’ll pop in every day to see how I am and it won’t even be mentioned, because it isn’t appropriate here.”

“That’s possible.”

“But the other possibility is that he’s come to thrash it out, that it’s all he’ll want to talk about. Maybe that’s why he came five days early. Oh God.”

Dr. Christos went and looked out into the garden, and then returned. “Have you given any more thought to my suggestion?”

“I can’t think about that now.”

“This is the best time to decide. Looking forward is your best defense.”

“When are the rentals available from?”

“November the first.”

“Okay. At least, I’ll give it some serious thought.” Nina took a deep breath. “Also, there’s something I want to tell you before Paolo gets here. Something Paolo doesn’t know. Something Paolo mustn’t know.” If she was going to live here, she had to tell him the rest.

Dr. Christos looked at his phone. “My meeting’s been delayed. We have time.”

“I have to tell someone. I haven’t been able to tell anybody.”

“Go on.”

“Where to start. When I came here, to Greece, I mean, it was clear that everything terrible that’d happened was my fault.”

“You’re too hard on yourself,” he interjected.

“I haven’t been hard on myself though, that’s the trouble. I thought I was right about everything. I thought I understood everything. And then when I nearly died —”

“You didn’t really, you know. Nearly die. But go on.”

“There are things I decided never to tell. Self-protective, I thought. I’m getting better; I’m so much better, but a lot of that has been about getting it back in place, the self-protection. Do you understand?”

“Of course. It’s what happens when people get better.” He smiled at her. “They reacquire their old inhibitions.”

They looked at one another.

“I’ve been talking to you for — how long has it been? I’ve lost track. Weeks. But there are things I haven’t dared tell you.” Her voice became uneven, and he looped his arm around her neck and pulled her closer to him.

He said, “This will pass.” His face remained close to hers. “I’m going to get you a brandy from the crisis cupboard. The bottle we keep for accidental deaths.”

When he’d returned with it, Nina said, “The thing is, I’ve always kept Paolo at a distance, and then when Francesca died, even more at a distance.”

“Why was her passing so important?”

She didn’t address this. “When I pushed Paolo away he consented, and then he waited. There were other people I pushed away who stayed away, people who proved to be easily deterred. Close friends, people I’d always thought were friends. I told myself I was happier not having to deal with people, but I wasn’t happier.”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, I have so been there, as my American child would say.”

Nina wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “Where does your American child live?”

“In Baltimore, where she was born. One of the girls identifies as American and the other’s Greek and they never see each other.”

“That’s a shame. They Skype, though, I imagine.”

“They don’t. They don’t really e-mail, either. They manage to misunderstand each other even by e-mail. You know, you could have borrowed a laptop and had e-mail and the Internet. It would have been a lot less boring. Nurse Yannis said she’d offered and you didn’t want it.”

“Thank you. She’s right, I don’t want it, not yet. It’s hard to explain, but inside a computer … that feels like somewhere Luca is, where Luca lives, that’s still about Luca and me. That’s how it feels right now. I’m just telling you how it feels.”

“It’s addictive. I’ve had whole weekends that have disappeared, not even getting out of bed.”

“I’m afraid of it at the moment, like I won’t be able to stop myself from reconnecting with him if I return to the old haunts. That it won’t even be something I choose.”

“I understand that.”

“I want to want different things.”

Dr. Christos looked down at the suitcase, which lay spread open on the floor. Some shoes were in it and some clothes; three of the four books and some of the souvenirs, stowed away in their floral paper bags. “Are you packing?”

“Not yet. Just having a sort-out and making sure everything fits. Nurse Yannis has been helping, as it’s difficult to reach down.”

“Has she … has she said anything more to you?”

“About what?”

“Just about anything.”

“Not a word. Why?”

“No reason. You could always leave things with me, for when you come back.”

“I’m counting on Paolo to have room in his bag. He’ll come with six shirts and a razor.”

“Just say, won’t you, if you want to stay a few more days. There isn’t any rush.”

“Don’t you need the bed?”

“Quite the opposite. We’ve kept inventing reasons for you not to be discharged. We’ve massively exaggerated your concussion.”

“You’re joking.”

“Not really, no.”

“Don’t you feel bad about lying?”

“Not remotely. I have no issue with it. It’s just another tool.”

“Just another tool?”

“Of course. Don’t look like that. I bet you lie just as much and as often. About Luca, for instance, and about the timing. It was before you moved out but you said it was after. I lied to my wife for years. She knows that. She knew at the time, but she didn’t want to spoil things and it would have spoiled things.”

“What sort of lying?”

“Other women. Where I really was when I worked late.”

“Ah. Ah, I see, I see.”

He saw the look on her face. “My wife and I — we should never have got married. But when I find her, the woman I need … I’m looking for the person I’ll be with when I’m very old, whose hand I’ll be holding when I die.”

Nina said, “Can I ask you a really straight, blunt question?”

“Fire away.”

“Did you have a fling with Nurse Yannis? Was she one of the women you had an affair with?”

“Nurse Yannis?” It was his turn to look appalled. “Nurse Yannis. No.”

“I’m sorry for asking.”

“You don’t need to be. Ask away.”

“Your wife knew, and she didn’t say anything.”

“She left it to me to feel bad on my own, and eventually I did feel bad, and it was only when I felt bad that she left me. Life’s a funny old game.”

“Isn’t it.”

“Once the secret was out in the open, a whole load of secrets, they had to be dealt with and we couldn’t go on as we had been. We were happy when I was a liar, and unhappy when we told the truth … Are you all right?”

“Could I have another small Metaxa?”

“Of course. I wish I could have one.”

While he was gone Nina had cause to ask herself why she was going to tell him what she was about to tell him. Was it because she was saying goodbye and so it no longer mattered? Or was it because she wasn’t saying goodbye, and needed to know how he’d react to hearing the worst?

When he came back, twenty minutes later and apologetic, Nurse Yannis had delivered the mail and Nina was reading a letter from her father. Now she was overseas he talked to her more than he’d done in years; the letters kept coming. This one was all about her garden and included a list of things he thought she should plant that would suit the conditions. He was going to weed out and clear most of the borders, he said, but had attached a sheet detailing the shrubs and perennials she might want to keep. He’d divided the page into a grid and filled each box with a drawing, captioned with both the common and the Latin names.

“That looks interesting,” Dr. Christos said. “Have you told me yet — the thing you wanted to tell me? Not knowing what it is, it’s hard to know.”

“I’ll get to it.”

He could read her anxiety. “So what’s come in the post?”

She showed him the beautiful sketches. “This is what my dad’s like,” she said. “He’s relishing this. It’s a project and he’s good at projects. Better at projects than people.”

“Was he a distant sort of father?”

“Not distant exactly. He took an interest in me and we had conversations, though his approach was usually quite purposeful. ‘Let’s talk about weather patterns, Nina. What do you know about how the weather works?’ We didn’t interrupt him in the study unless it was for a good reason. Dad’s a euphoric workaholic, and lately I’ve seen that I could be the same. I’ve found myself wanting to disappear into it.”

“What’s his subject?”

“Modern British history. Right now, the First World War. He loves it, the work, everything about it. Mum explained it to me like that, that it was love.”

“It wasn’t love between your parents?”

“Absolutely it was. Until the bad year, the separation. They were devoted to one another. I thought that, at least. Everybody thought that.”

“Were they wrong?”

“Who knows. People are revisionist about their feelings. They lose sight of how they felt, when they no longer feel whatever it is. Feelings are the hardest thing of all to remember, to put yourself back inside of. Don’t you think?”

“What happened in the bad year?”

“There was a conversation they hadn’t had before. They had a disagreement about what they’d do when I left home. And then my mother moved out. They separated, she moved into an apartment in town, and then a year later she died. She was only my age.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I was the one who found her. She’d sent me out to get shopping. I came back with it and she was dead.”

“That must have been a terrible shock.” He looked shocked himself. “Poor Anna; poor, poor Anna.”