The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (37 page)

Nina looked at her own hands, as if critically, and had to pay attention to her mouth, which was tensing up and gathering, her tongue hard against its roof. “Thank you,” she said eventually.

Sheila brought the tray to the table. “Have you spoken to your dad today?”

“I’m going there after this.” Nina looked at her watch. “So I can’t stay very long.”

“You haven’t spoken, then. Today. Look what I’ve done, I’ve poured without the strainer. Honestly sometimes I think I’m losing my marbles.” She returned the poured tea to the pot.

“Is there something — is Dad okay?” Nina was visited by something ominous.

“Your dad is fine. I made scones this morning so we should eat them; they don’t keep.” She found the strainer and returned with a tin that had once been for toffees. “Heaven knows where Gerald’s got to. He’s probably forgotten you’re here.”

“Dad — he isn’t ill?”

“Oh, darling, no, not ill at all. Hale and hearty.”

“I can’t stay very long I’m afraid.”

Sheila’s shoulders sagged, and her face. “Oh. Oh well. As ever, love goes with you.” She was prone to saying this sort of thing. “Your dad told me you’ve been low, and have seen a professional, a therapist, and I said I thought that was natural, and a good thing. The end of a marriage is a huge event in a person’s life, a person of heart and soul, I mean, and you have always been that.” She cleared spittle from the corners of her lips with her fingers. “Like your mother. Wonderful Anna.”

“Thank you. You’re very kind.”

Gerald came into the room and went straight to the sink, where he washed his hands thoroughly, rubbing between his fingers and over his knuckles, before picking up and using a nail brush with vigorous strokes until he was satisfied. He sat and sighed happily, downing his tea and pouring a second. “So. All well with you, Nina?” He was looking at the post, squinting at the fronts of envelopes and opening them with a paper knife. “Drink up,” he said. “Dying to show you what I’ve done with the garden. There’s some spectacular stuff coming in for the autumn show.”

Sheila said, “Gerald, I’m just going to give Nina the tour first.” She patted the table. “Come on. Quick tour. I’ll show you my work before you’re submerged in dahlias.”

Nina followed her out of the kitchen and back into the hall, over the nut-brown carpet, and saw, through doors left ajar into sitting and dining rooms, that it was all exactly as always. The look of the house had been fixed forty years earlier, and it was still furnished with the sort of flat-faced, wood-grainy sideboards and cupboards that spent a decade being disdained in junk shops but are now classified as period in sale rooms. They went up the stairs, where Sheila’s watercolors had been hung in a staggered row: daffodils and roses and snowdrops, things grown and brought in from the garden that had died on the page before wilting; irises flattened like a boned chicken. They went briskly around the three bedrooms, one stylized pretty wallpaper succeeding the next, a transition of dusky pinks and greens.

“But it’s a perfect mess in here,” Sheila said when they reached her and Gerald’s bedroom, picking up a pair of black socks and a towel, which were all that disturbed the pristine neatness. Nina had never been in there before. There was more of the same sort of furniture, and hatboxes that served as bedside tables, piled high with early Penguin editions, their front covers yellowing and
curled. There were more botanical watercolors: Sheila said that she’d begun to sell them at agricultural fairs. She asked Nina to say which she liked best, and Nina picked an unconvincing cherry tree, and Sheila took it from the wall, looking at the sticker on the back, and said she could do it for £35, which was chum rate, and Nina could pay her next time. She took a sheet of marbled paper out of a drawer, wrapped it up, and handed it over.

“Cake,” Gerald said, as they reappeared in the kitchen. He was ticking items off on a bank statement. “Cake, Nina. Come and sit down. Can you make a fresh pot, Sheila? This one’s stewed. Made by my own fair hands, Nina. Fruitcake. My special recipe. Just a small slice? Good girl.”

Sheila reboiled the kettle and the others watched her. “Miss Plowman’s house,” she said as she was spooning more leaves.

Gerald had been prompted. “That’s quite a project,” he said. “Would you mind if I came and had a look at the garden? I’ve been itching to see it properly for a long time.”

“Of course you can.” (No, no!)

“I hope you’re steeling yourself for a lot of man-hours. Woman-hours.”

“I don’t want to change much. I like it overgrown. It has a ‘garden of goodness and evil’ sort of look.” Sheila frowned at the description.

“You must put the health of the garden first, though,” Gerald said. “It would be absolutely immoral to let it decay past the point of saving.”

“I think Nina’s garden morality is probably her own affair,” Sheila said evenly.

“I think Nina knows that I’m only trying to help,” Gerald replied, equally flatly.

Sheila brought the tray to the table and Nina looked at her watch. “I’d love to stay but I must get going, I’m sorry. Dad was expecting me five minutes ago.”

“What, no time for the garden?” Gerald said, disappointed.

“Next time,” Sheila told him. “She can’t keep Robert waiting.”

“Well, I’ll say goodbye to you then, Nina,” Gerald said, with such unfriendliness that Nina blushed.

“Don’t sulk, Gerald,” Sheila said, guiding Nina back through the hall to the porch. She watched her putting on her boots. “Happiness, it isn’t difficult really, you know,” she said. “It’s just about being grateful for what you have. Truly grateful, every day, and showing your gratitude to one another.”

How dare you
, Nina said, though only to herself, as she rose from zipping and delivered her smiling farewell. “Lovely to see you.”

“Forgiveness is important, dear,” Sheila called after her. “Forgiveness may be the most important of all the virtues.”

Nina waved as she rounded the corner. She realized that she’d left the water color behind.

When she got to her father’s house Robert was standing inside his opened front door, one of his fingers marking the spot he’d got to in a bulky reference volume. He looked anxious. “Sheila’s just called me,” he said, before Nina could speak. “She was worried she’d said too much.”

“What’s going on?”

“It’s about your mother. Her diary.”

“Diary — what diary?”

He turned and walked towards the study and Nina followed, saying, “Dad, what about a diary? Dad, stop. What diary?”

When he came out again he was holding a small book, a fat journal dense with paper, gilt-edged, its once-pale cover much drawn on in blue. “When we were in the attic, clearing out some old boxes last week —”

“Who’s we?” Nina interrupted.

“We didn’t know it was there. A box of your mother’s things we hadn’t known about.”

“Who’s we?”

“Sheila came and helped me sift through it.”

“I bet she did.”

“Nina, Sheila has been kind to me. She said she’d deal with the box and I was to leave it to her. She put the diary in the rubbish bag, but then I checked to make sure nothing we wanted had found its way in there. Sheila didn’t want me to read it. She said she’d look at it first, so I knew there was something.”

Nina held out her hand. “Please, Dad.” Robert gave it to her, though he looked reluctant. “What is it that I should know?”

“Your mother. I think you should know your mother.”

“I knew my mother better than you did.” She felt it again, the old resentment. “You read Mum’s diary? Without telling me?”

“I’m telling you now.”

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

“I didn’t know what to do for the best.” He looked genuinely troubled. “You’ve been so unwell and I thought it was best not to tell you, but Sheila insisted. She’s usually right about these things and she thought you had a right to know the truth.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was Paolo who brought the midmorning coffee in. “I came in to say goodnight but you were fast asleep,” he said, vaguely accusingly. There were responses Nina could have made (
Are you saying that I use sleep as an avoidance of you? Because that’s pretty ironic
) but she confined herself to apologizing.

He asked if she had spare postcards, and she said she did, but it turned out that the paper bag was empty. Nina’s eyes went over to the window, to the shelf beneath it and the letter-writing case, one constructed from satisfyingly weathered brown leather. Paolo mustn’t open the folder and go foraging and find the card she’d written on the hill. She’d used one of the postcards she’d bought twenty-five years ago and hadn’t used, leftovers that’d sat undisturbed inside it ever since.

Paolo passed it across, and she unzipped it and took out the five cards that had remained unused. Paolo didn’t notice that they were old postcards, but there wasn’t any reason why he would have done. They’d been in the folder and out of the light and hadn’t really aged; the shop still sold the same ones now, the same old images, the same out-of-date typeface.

“I’ll go and write them at the café and send them off,” he said. “I’ll have a bit of sun and a swim and come back after lunch.”

“You’re not staying to come with me to see this villa? Sorry, I thought you wanted to.”

“Sorry, I should have said. I saw the doctor on my way in. He’s got meetings and has postponed. Not that I’m surprised.”

“Why aren’t you surprised?”

He was looking at his phone. “Bugger,” he said. “Bugger, bugger.”

“What’s the matter?”

He was already leaving the room. “Sorry, got to make a call.”

They said
sorry
a lot to one another now.

When he’d gone Nina took out the postcard that she’d written to him just before the accident. She’d taken it out of her handbag and put it back in the folder with the others, after her things were brought from the hotel. What she’d written there shocked her. Who was this woman, who’d written these mad things? The handwriting was tiny, and got tinier as she’d run out of space. She didn’t recognize herself there, although the simplicity of her opening words, what she had to say about regret, was undeniably moving; she was moved by her own directness. She folded the card in half, and folded again, then tore it into shreds and put the pieces into the inner zipped pocket of the bag, ready to dispose of elsewhere. She imagined herself swimming far out underwater, using only her hips and her legs together, the postcard held tight across her chest as she took it to its hidden cavern. She was going to have to take it home with her. She couldn’t put it in the bin. Dr. Christos wasn’t a bad person, of that she was sure, but he was the sovereign of this small world and might feel that everything was under his dominion.

Just as she was thinking this, the doctor came into the room and said it was time for a walk.

“I’m too tired,” she told him. “I’ll do it later.”

“They all say that. Come on; let’s take a turn around the grounds, as Jane Austen might say.”

“You read Jane Austen?”

“I do, I read her when I’m feeling low.
Persuasion
is my favorite.”

“
Persuasion
is my favorite, too. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who chooses
Persuasion
.” She thought,
this man has been granted to me
. She could hear her mother saying, “Wake up! Take this chance! Chances don’t come often!” She’d said once that Nina should be brutal about opportunity; it hadn’t meant much to Nina at the time.

They went around the hospital perimeter, along its smoothed-out paths. It was growing hot, and the doctor held a Chinese parasol over her head throughout, a lacquered red and white umbrella that was embellished with flowers and smelled of old glue. He said that he was having an early lunch because of a meeting, and had asked for Nina’s to be delivered at the same time so they could eat together. When they got back to the room Nurse Yannis was there with the tray, which she put on the table with a little more force than was needed. “It is not fair to the cook,” she said, looking at the doctor. “Think of other people.” Nina was embarrassed about this selfishness by association. The point had been made in her own language.

“Don’t look like that,” Dr. Christos said when she’d gone. “I often eat early and it isn’t an issue. She is becoming absurd.”

The plates held two great mounds of moussaka, its thick slices of aubergine protruding from a brown-tinged bechamel sauce that was scattered with chopped herbs. “Hilariously, for a Greek, I don’t really like lamb.” He looked mournfully at his lunch. “I don’t really like sauces, either, if we’re going to entertain ourselves with a list. You mentioned that you and Luca used to make lists. I’m not keen on spice, spicy things, are you? Celery. I’m not keen on celery. Nor walnuts. Can’t stand sponge cake. Or marmalade. London was constant sponge cake and marmalade. Do you have any aversions?”

“Not really. Only liver. I don’t really like rice and especially not risotto, which has been tricky on occasion.”

They ate for a while in silence and then he said, “Changing the subject, have you thought any more about what you might do? I’ve been thinking about your bed and breakfast idea. I can see how it could work. We could work half the year and go south for the winter.”