The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (33 page)

As far as it was possible to rush, Nina rushed into the garden, to the steps to the beach, and looked towards the harbor, shielding her eyes with her hand from the sun. The ferry was there.
Why hadn’t it occurred to her before that the ferry wasn’t there? She saw the captain of the boat — was that his name? It was a two-man operation. The skipper, perhaps. He was delivering grocery boxes and sacks of something unidentifiable, blue sacks onto the gray harbor wall. No passengers were any longer evident. She went back slowly to her bed and looked at her face, and put on mascara and a coral-colored lipstick, and blotted most of the lipstick off again. She avoided her reflection because it asked her to confront something she didn’t want to feel, but it was already too late: it was coming at her now, in waves, powerful, physical, like the coming of an illness, like something viral that Paolo had sent ahead of himself. Dr. Christos was right when he said that it was just nostalgia, nostalgia mixing itself potently with fear of the unknown; she knew he must be right. To reinforce her resolve she flicked through text messages that’d come recently from her soon-to-be ex-husband, and found the one she wanted.
Need to move on to practical discussion about sale of apartment and division of assets, so give it some thought
.

One of the few compliments Maria had ever paid her was to say that she liked what Nina had done with the apartment. Nina had furnished it in a warm and comfortable way, Maria said, leaving an implied criticism of Luca’s decorating style unspoken. The two homes were starkly different, one traditional, full of fireplaces, and the other a treetop duplex that had been mercilessly eviscerated and modernized. Nina liked velvets, cushions, thick rugs, shelves cluttered with old ceramics. She liked light against the dark: set against the slate-colored walls there were white-framed pictures, white candlesticks and chairs, the mantelpieces
adorned with strings of tiny pea lights, hung above fires that were crackly with logs each winter. It was, in short, a terrific place to be at Christmas. Luca and Francesca’s home, on the other hand, was thoroughly fashionably austere, its heating running invisibly under the floors. Sleek lines were the key thing; they had dark-colored modular seating, hard-edged carpentry, and open space: they’d taken out pieces of walls in the pursuit of flow, and all the walls were white, so that it was like living in an art space. The kitchen, renovated a third time, was glossy red and bare, the lights enormous and architectural. Display cases constructed of white cubes housed commissioned pieces of Italian glass. The untidiness of books was confined to upstairs.

Nurse Yannis came back into the room and said, “Christos is with your husband.”

Nina, who was lying down, had a physical reaction to the news, pushing off her hands and trying to sit up too suddenly, so that pain flooded into her limbs. The nurse came to her aid, rubbing the small of her back, while Nina asked for more details: where were they exactly, the two men, and why, and what were they saying? Nurse Yannis didn’t know. All she knew was that Dr. Christos’s mission to the village was to meet Paolo off the ferry.

“It is a medical meeting only,” she said, sensing Nina’s distress. That was worrying. That was even worse, if anything.

“It didn’t occur to me that he would do this,” Nina said. Mistakenly she’d seen the hospital as a closed system, something hygienic into which Paolo would be admitted under laboratory conditions. She’d assumed that she’d be present at each Paolo–Christos interaction. The small world of island certainties, one
she could hold in the palm of her hand, began to disintegrate and leak through her fingers.

At this moment, all the things said and given were regretted. Dr. Christos didn’t know the worst, the shameful truth about Francesca’s death, nor what’d really happened on the day of the accident, but there were other things she should have kept to herself, and she was a fool: she knew this. Not that self-knowledge helped.

“Do not worry,” Nurse Yannis said. “It is well. They have coffee and then they come.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Nina heard them now, two pairs of shoes on the hard tiles of the hospital corridor.

The footsteps paused, and now she could hear them making their polite farewells.

At the center of her anxiety, beyond the surface worry about shouting and slammed doors and becoming a laughingstock, was the possibility that the man who was about to come into the room would turn out to be a stranger. Paolo wasn’t the same man she had lived with and had left six months earlier — she wasn’t the same, so how could he be? So much that was unknowable had washed through the situation since they’d parted, and she couldn’t guess at the sort of structures he’d built around himself, his defenses and his certainties; the way he imagined his life; the way he narrated the past. Quite apart from the way a sexual and possibly also loving relationship with Karen might have affected him, there could also be new friends, new advisors, new interests, new thoughts: he was becoming the person he had begun to be without her. She knew there had been a series of conversations with Luca. Perhaps, in talking to his brother, Paolo had revealed something of himself that had always gone unsaid. His secret heart: the question had begun to preoccupy Nina very much. Paolo’s secret heart wasn’t something she felt she’d ever known. They’d lived together, for the most part perfectly contentedly, but Paolo had never really been revealed, and to that there was now added a further layer
of mystery, in everything that had happened, that had been said and decided since she’d left.

He was here. He knocked twice and put his head around the door and now he was here. It was very, very strange that he was here. The island didn’t really feel as if it was fully in the world, not the old one of the old life. It felt more like somewhere that had been stepped aside into. To have someone from the past walk into it was like time travel, like past and present being bridged by science in a hitherto impossible manner.

“There you are,” he said, as if he’d been searching, coming into the room and smiling towards the window. “So how’s the invalid?”

“I’m okay, I think. Much better in many ways.” She was pleased with this response. It covered everything and gave nothing away.

“You look very well.” He’d only glanced briefly at her; he went straight to the vertical blind that covered the French window, and pulled it to one side. “Do you mind?”

“If you like, though my nurse might tell you off, as it’s theoretically still siesta time.”

“We need light, I think,” he said. She’d never seen him so self-conscious, and it was contagious.

He stood looking out at the garden.

“So how are you, how was the journey?” she asked his back, aware that she was beginning to fidget.

He turned from the window. “So let’s have a look at this troublesome leg,” he said, sounding for all the world like the consultant at Main Hospital. He stood over her shin with his unsteady hand extended. “May I?”

“Go ahead.”

He was already folding up her trouser hem. “No cast? I expected a cast.”

“They don’t do it for this kind of injury. I told you on the phone.”

He brushed the fabric down again, and pulled the blue chair across. “How’s the brain progressing? Cussed or concussed?”

“What did Dr. Christos think?”

“He says you’re more cussed every day.” He looked down at his hands, his thumbs rotating one another. The moment had come, the silence after the pleasantries. But what moment? Was she supposed to embark on explaining herself again? What about his parting words as she’d gone through security?

Nina wasn’t going to initiate. All she could do was retreat into formality. “You look tired,” she told him. “I’m sure we could rustle up some coffee, if you’d like some. The doctor has an Italian machine.”

“Coffee would be good.”

He looked weary, his clothes creased from traveling, their fabric wrinkled at the elbow and behind the knee. There was newsprint on his pale summer jacket and a dribble of coffee on his blue shirt. His hair stood up in a shock; he saw her notice it and smoothed it through. “I’d forgotten how difficult it is to get here. It was a voyage of many parts. Taxi to the airport, flight to Athens, overnight stay —”

“How was it, the overnighter?” She wanted more detail about unimportant things.

“Procedural. Then the connecting flight, the bus to the ferry port, the boat across here. Dr. Christos met me at the harbor and walked me over. He said I could stay with him if I wanted and save paying for a hotel. He has a spare room and the evenings are usually solitary, and what did I say.”

This was alarming. “What did you say?”

“I said thanks but no thanks. I’m already booked into the taverna. I couldn’t let Vasilios down.”

“Why did you change your flight and come early?” This had been bothering her.

“I needed a rest.”

Perhaps that was really all it was. “You’ll enjoy the weather,” she told him. “The weather’s been faultless.” There was nothing for it but to treat the momentous as trivial and vice versa. Wasn’t that how catastrophe was put in its place? The one-liners had always been reserved for the big things, the non-births, the deaths and betrayals. It was likely as not going to be the only way of managing their new status with one another, the postmarital world.

Perhaps Paolo saw that they had drifted too far into the banal. “Look,” he said. “I didn’t come here to yell at you. I’m hoping that now we have some distance we can be constructive, and make plans. We need to go through the boring details. I’ve been to a solicitor, as you asked me to. I found a new one so that you can use Graham.” Graham Pye, a friend of her father’s, had always done their legal work.

“Okay,” she said. He was clear of it all now. He was free. He was recovered. It was, in its own way, devastating. She tried to locate a teasing sort of tone in herself, something frivolous. “You’ve had a long chat with the doctor, I hear. Village spies have been keeping me informed.”

Paolo deflected in his usual oblique way. “I didn’t want to stay at his house, but I liked him. We had a cup of coffee, so you could sleep.”

“Although he knows I don’t keep the siesta.”

“He told me you have grown fond of one another.”

“What?” He was smiling. “You’re kidding. Tell me you’re joking.”

“That was the gist of it.”

She couldn’t help herself. “So what else did you talk about?”

“We talked about the leg, which I’m assured is going to be better than the other one. We talked about the accident, how you bashed your brain on the road and whether it’s safe for you to fly.”

“And is it?”

“It has been for a while, I gather.”

“I feel fine.”

“Before we say any more, I’ve something to tell you.”

“What — what is it?”

“Mum had a TIA — that’s a small stroke — sorry, I can see that you knew that’s what it means — and she’s been in hospital. She’s going to be fine, but she’s high maintenance and Luca’s not been finding trips into the ward easy. It’s only been six months, no, nearer eight. Christ. Eight months since he lost Francesca. And even though she died at home … you know. It’s still the hospital.”