The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (4 page)

It’d been her doctor’s idea that Nina go on holiday. It was mid-September, and blustery and gray at home, definitively autumn, the Christmas puddings already stacked high in supermarkets, though it remained late summer on the island. Nina hadn’t visited for twenty-five years, but there hadn’t been much change in the interim, not in its look and layout, nor really in its culture, either. It was surprising that nothing had changed, and yet what could change? Motorways and superstores were irrelevant, and the mood too conservative for other, more optional sorts of progress. As they’d approached in the late afternoon on the little ferry, its small dominion had looked like an arid hill rising out of the sea. It was only when you grew closer that the softer, intermediate slopes became visible, the flatter sections thick with olive groves, the terracing cut for the growing of wine, and the modest houses among them. Those who weren’t involved in fishing or tourism made a subsistence living, in homes perched on contrary angles of the hill, on smallholdings that worked tiny parcels of land. Most of the shoreline was pebbly, though there were small stretches of sand at intervals, and a bigger one, a golden hundred-yard beach known as Blue Bay, a short walk from the main village, which ran alongside the harbor in a T-shaped arrangement. There, a single joined-together row of houses faced out to sea, along with a couple of shops, a café, and two tavernas, and then between those two hotels a road went back at a right angle, a no-through road lined on both sides with more simple houses. A narrow band of tarmac encircled the island, most of it adjoining the shore, and a dirt road, hard and pale and loose with grit, stretched up the hill to the top village, which was really only a hamlet and wasn’t quite at the top. This was the winding and precipitous route on which Nina had met the minibus and broken her leg.

She could see the shore road from the furthest corner of the hospital grounds, and saw, in the early mornings, the women waiting at the bus stop on their way up to the allotments. They were the people whose lives she’d imperiled, though they seemed to be fine; nobody was limping and they were in their usual high spirits. She’d walked past them often, these same six women, in the week before the accident; they were always together and always talking nineteen to the dozen. They were the first islanders she’d seen on day one, on leaving the hotel. It’d been a morning full of promise and she’d breakfasted early, alone on the terrace, under a roof made of wooden poles and the grapevine that bound them, the sunlight dappling and shifting through the leaves. Afterwards she’d packed a towel, sun cream, biscuits, a bottle of water, two books, and her journal into a bag, putting her swimsuit on under her dress. When she came out onto the street the women were standing at the bench, a rudimentary one that Andros had installed and painted yellow. Unofficially he was the transport convener, the owner not only of the minibus, but also of a car and bicycle hire shack, and the only available taxi. There were more yellow benches at Blue Bay, at intervals along the road, and round the back of the island on its wilder, rockier side. Nina had preferred to walk, to see things unfold at ambling speed; she’d wanted to slow everything down: her thoughts, her heart rate, her experience of hours passing. She’d used the bus only once, sitting on the otherwise empty seat that had its back to the driver, under the silent scrutiny of six pairs of very dark eyes. There was something almost tribal there, in the gardening group, something about blood and belonging that made Nina envious. All the women wore floral dresses with aprons over them, and ankle-height Wellingtons; all were small and sturdy, with soft, lined faces of a similar shape, wide at the brow but with pointed
chins, deep-set eyes, and teeth that looked older than they did. When Nina got closer, on the first morning, the conversation loosened just enough to allow for a good look at her, and her call of “
kalimera
” had been tonelessly returned. She’d taken a photograph and was seen doing so and was scowled at, a finger wagged in her direction. Strolling on past the harbor, Nina sat on the wall to watch the boats, which were already pulling in and tying up. The men offered her something from the catch, and she got her phrase book out and made a hash of explaining that she had no kitchen.

“Give to Vasilios,” one of them said, trying to push a pink fish, one that looked like a child’s drawing of a fish, into her hands. “Vasilios cook it.”

She shook her head shyly, though Vasilios would have done so happily, there was no question; he’d think nothing of it. Favors were nothings here. One of the other men dangled a tiny live squid in front of her. “Here: pet for you.” As she walked onwards she saw him beating the thing in swift reprisal against the harbor wall.

Now the road began to bend gently to the right, until soon (aside from the tarmac) Nina was in an ancient landscape, a biblical one of shepherds and sheep. She walked at a faster pace, trying not to have city instincts, and then there it was, Blue Bay, shaped like a mouth turned up at the corners, and high above it the cluster of white-painted houses that marked the edge of the upper village. The beach was backed by Mediterranean pines, and the aromas released here in the evening were sumptuous: it was worth the walk to experience the scent, though when she and Paolo had been here together, the weather had been too chilly for the effect to be dramatic. When they’d stayed here they’d been the only Britons at the hotel. Most of the visitors, even now, were
day-trippers who came from Main Island to swim, to stroll the quaint streets, buying shell necklaces and postcards, and venturing up the hill to buy honey from a smallholding, stopping to marvel at the view, before heading back on the late-afternoon boat, quietly across the sound in failing light.

Taverna Vasilios had much better accommodation at twice the cost of the other, more basic hotel, and at the time Nina was staying there, half of the six rooms were taken by British people. Vasilios had put them together on the first floor, for company: to one side of her there were elderly sisters, Iris and June, who wore shin-length dresses and long strings of beads, their gray hair gathered identically at the napes of long necks, and to the other, Cathy and Gareth, a professional bodybuilder and his athletic wife, their muscles a deeper shade of walnut every day. Up on the top floor, along with a morose Belgian family and a retired couple from the mainland, was a solitary German man called Kurt, who’d come for the scuba diving. It was Kurt who’d joined Nina in the afternoons at the island’s best bathing spot, a small, deep swimming hole, greenish turquoise, accessed from an incomplete circle of flat rocks. On her first day Kurt had nodded his greeting to Nina before lighting a driftwood fire, stripping off unself-consciously, and disappearing into the sea clad only in mask and flippers. Nina watched him surreptitiously over the top of her novel. He floated facedown for a few minutes, scrutinizing the seabed, before going into a sudden dive, his large pink buttocks rising abruptly upwards. A muffled thud followed and then Kurt reappeared, rising up like Titan, his sturdy thighs glistening, before emerging out of the water with a small octopus
attached to a speargun. He dismembered and cooked it, crouching by the fire, and, seeing Nina watching, offered her a flame-curled tentacle on the end of a skewer.

Nina had hoped that the holiday would put an end to her over-thinking. There wasn’t any doubt that she’d over-thought herself into a corner. She craved a meditative narrowing of her life, a shrunken world of small things, its smallness fully lived in and with joy. Who used the word
joy
anymore? She knew that joy was what she needed; joy would do what drugs couldn’t. In practice, though, the ideal of freedom and spontaneity proved illusory; she came up with an itinerary and stuck to it. Following breakfast there was a morning at Blue Bay, and lunch in the café on the harborside: tepid broad beans in tomato sauce, a couscous feta salad and a small carafe of rough wine that sent her groggily into siesta. After a nap, the air-conditioning roaring, she swam at Octopus Beach, keeping out of Kurt’s way, and then returned to the hotel, reading on her bed and clock-watching. At 5:00 p.m. she went out and strolled around in the coolness of the late afternoon, browsing at the gift shop, looking once again at the same few things. A book went with her to dinner on the terrace, though she chatted a bit to the other residents, romanticizing her life at home into something interesting and honorable, before retiring early and lying sleepless till the small hours. This went on for seven days.

The writing of happy postcards was easy enough.
This is paradise and I may never leave
: that was all that needed to be said on some of them, the words stretched across the open white field. Others got a fuller account.
My day starts with warm bread and homemade apricot jam, eaten while sitting looking at the sea, in
the shade of a day that’s going to be hot and blue, and ends with resiny white wine and wonderfully cool linen sheets that somebody else ironed. Swimming, eating, taking pictures, relaxing properly into a stack of novels, socializing when I feel like it and no dishwasher in sight: can life be bettered?

The question of what to write to Luca, however: that took some thinking about. She couldn’t not send him a card. There was an option much better than silence, she decided, which was to be chummy with him and very clearly over things, post-obsessive and well, as she’d insisted at the airport that she was. But how to talk to him, to Luca, a man she no longer wanted to talk to, a man she felt almost violent about never seeing again, whose name made her fingernails press involuntarily into her palms? Sticking to food and drink was the answer. The quality of food and drink was a constant Luca preoccupation.

Dear Luca, I’m sitting here eating yogurt with amazing island honey, which tastes faintly of herbs and also of brine. The wine is much better than it used to be, fruitier and fatter. You might even approve. You would have liked the swordfish that was barbecued last night. It turns out there IS a point to peppers stuffed with rice. Figs and peaches: that’s the trick. Like everything good, the sweet and the savory. But perhaps sunshine and fresh air make all the difference. See you soon, Nina
.

She was satisfied, reading over this before mailing it, that nothing was revealed or betrayed in its writing or reading; it wasn’t friendly or unfriendly. That’s what’s needed now, she reflected, ordering a second bottle of wine, smiling at Vasilios as he came to light the anti-mosquito candles: a position of perfect neutrality. Neutrality and sanity. She hadn’t added the line she was going to, about swimming out to the yacht that was anchored in the bay and how she’d swum right under it, as they had done
together once when they were children, the two of them, while Paolo watched from the shore.

Three days would have been fine. If she’d stayed for three days she could have regarded the visit as a triumph, but by the fourth morning the possibility of performance ripening into authenticity was gone, vanished in the night, and Nina woke with the old dread. She was afraid of the overscheduled empty day and longed for the comfort of work. She wished that she’d brought a manuscript. She worked as an editor of books, and craved her editorial language of secret symbols, for the absorption and certainties of a project-led life, and for the way that it could be allowed to take over the waking hours, running on seamlessly into the evening and obliterating doubt. That was always at least half what work had signified.