The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (6 page)

Nina didn’t tell him that she was meeting his brother the following day for a drink. They met and drank wine and caught up with one another, and then, as they parted out on the street, she gave Luca the heart Francesca had returned. She said, “The one you gave me is in there, too, inside the envelope.”

“What? Why?”

“I realized I didn’t want it anymore.” The meaning of the whole exercise had been contradicted by Francesca’s intervention, and turned into an embarrassment.

Francesca, who’d been told about the drink, went and searched through Luca’s jacket pockets after dinner, and then his coat pockets, and found nothing. She looked in his bag while he was in the bath, the big leather bag she’d bought him in Italy, and found the envelope there, in a zip compartment. It had been sealed and opened and imperfectly resealed. She opened it and saw two hearts, settled together into a corner. Nina, it seemed,
had answered the return of the heart with a second gift to add to the first. Nina had redoubled. Nina was emphatic. Francesca put the envelope back where she’d found it, and never brought the subject up again.

After this, Luca began to telephone, and it became a ritual, their daily conversation. He’d argue later that this was his process of withdrawal, a kind of tapering-off from the patterns of the old days. He rang from the office at his dad’s wine distribution business, to Nina the junior copy editor, at that time working in-house for an Edinburgh publisher. He did it when Paolo went out, which he did routinely at lunchtime, eating a sandwich at the café across the road and dipping into the secondhand music shop. When winter came and Paolo went out less often, Luca rang from home, though he didn’t like shutting the door against Francesca.

Things became a lot easier after e-mail and texting became a normality. The friendship could continue, and increase and develop and deepen, without actual speaking being necessary, and without being defensive about being caught behind a closed door on the landline. Once there was e-mail there was regular e-mail, and the inadvertent privacy of the inbox meant that the conversation could and did drift into the strictly confidential. It was easy for the pen pals to be unguarded there, about issues in their respective marriages; it wasn’t so easy when they were reminded, by seeing each other at family occasions, that the supposedly safe distance of the written word was really something else entirely.

In addition they met sometimes for lunch, at the same small bistro, one secreted in a Georgian back street, a ten-minute walk from each of their apartments.

“Don’t you have male friends to moan to?” Nina asked him as they sat looking at the menu on their first visit.

“I’m the only twenty-three-year-old I know who’s married. Why did we marry so young?”

“You know why.”

“And so, what about Paolo?”

“Paolo’s perfect. No complaints at all.”

“Oh, come on. Bet he’s a bit of a Svengali. He’s always had a Svengali aspect. Bet he makes you watch history documentaries and David Attenborough. Bet he makes you go to museums, and puts important biographies at the side of your bed, and tries to talk about politics over breakfast, reading bits out from the newspaper. He’s so like your father.”

“No, he isn’t. Not remotely. And I love museums.”

“Please. We have not come here to praise Caesar, I trust. I was hoping for scandalous frankness.”

“You first, then.”

“Francesca hogs the duvet.”

“Nicely done. Paolo finishes crosswords that I started.”

“Francesca can’t cook to save her life.”

“Paolo eats toast in bed. In fact, he’s constantly eating.”

“Francesca spends hours on the phone to her girlfriends when I’m sitting in the TV room alone.”

She was getting into the swing now. “Paolo’s too quiet. And he refuses to argue with me, even if I provoke him.”

“Not even for fun?”

“Not even for fun.”

“Francesca is passive-aggressive. It’s all more in sorrow than in anger. Drives me nuts.”

“Paolo never buys me flowers.”

“Francesca makes me go to the theater.”

“Paolo tidies up my desk.”

“Francesca tidies up my desk.”

“They should have married one another.”

“I’d give them six months.”

It was at one of these lunches, in the week before Nina’s twenty-fourth birthday, that Nina happened to ask, “Do you still carry my heart?”

“Yes I do, E. E. Cummings,” Luca said. “I carry it in my heart.”

“Do you carry your own heart, also?”

“Yes. They’re in the pockets of this jacket, right now.” He glanced down, and patted them.

“Not in one pocket together?”

“No, because they jiggle together and clank and people ask what’s making the noise, and then I have to lie. I’m not great at lying, though I think I might have to work at getting better.”

She didn’t ask what he meant by that, because that would’ve been in breach of the rules. Flirting was allowable as long as it wasn’t allowed to become concrete. They could play at being on the brink of adultery. Both of them knew it was only a game.

“Can I have your one back?” she asked him. “The one you gave me?”

“Here you go.” He put the glass heart on the table.

“What’s this? You’ve had this fitting added.” A twisted gold coil was clamped into one end, in the space at the top where it divided.

“It’s in case you wanted to use it as jewelry,” he said, producing a small velvet box. “There’s a fine gold chain in there. An early birthday present.”

Nina threaded it through and put it on, but couldn’t get the fastening to work, so Luca leaned across and did it for her, his face close to her ear. She could feel his breath on her neck.

On Nina’s birthday she and Paolo had people over for dinner. Francesca spotted immediately, as Nina took the flowers and the waxed-paper packet of cheese, that she was wearing the glass heart as a pendant. Her eye went to it and it kept returning. She noted how much of the evening was taken up by Luca and Nina talking exclusively to one another, how often their eyes met, how Nina’s eyes went straight to Luca’s if anything was funny or extraordinary, or if someone was wrong or dull, sharing their recognition of wrongness and dullness. She saw that Nina and Luca came into physical contact a lot; the rough play of their childhood friendship continued, and there was poking in the ribs and shoving. When Nina complained that the cheese he’d brought was so overripe that it had achieved consciousness, Luca picked her up and put her into the larder and leaned against the door until she apologized. It had been like this always. At Luca’s wedding he’d taken joking exception to her tease about the cut of his suit, its big lapels, and what she called his mafia shoes, gleeful about her own daring. He’d lifted her up and put her over his shoulder; he’d taken her out of the tent, long and skinny in her honey-colored bridesmaid dress, and dumped her on the already dewy lawn. She’d come back into the gathering
bearing wet patches across her back, her pale hair falling out of its complicated bun, and she’d stood with her hands on her hips and said, “Right, Luca Romano.” Everyone around had seen the potential of the thing to descend into pranks, and how inappropriate that would be.

“Only kidding,” Nina assured the friends who had gathered to urge calm. She’d been taken off to a table, led by two hands holding hers, the hands of two kind friends, and she’d been put into a chair and plied with booze.

“No more, no more,” Luca had said at the same time, putting his hands up as his father approached. He’d gone to his new wife, and had waltzed her around the room, and then they’d toured it together hand in hand, making sure to have proper conversations with people, and all had been well.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dr. Christos came into the room to show Nina a copy of the island newsletter, a stapled booklet that featured the accident as front-page news.

“Oh my God,” she said. “They have my picture. My passport photograph.”

“I didn’t think you’d mind. It’s funny. You don’t think it’s funny?”

“Hilarious. I’m sure it’ll all seem hilarious eventually. So what does the headline say — is it about my being stupid?”

“It says, ‘the woman who almost killed seven islanders.’ Look at your face. I’m kidding.”

“Kidding but not really kidding.”

He began to translate the report into English for her, and it turned out it was purely factual, merely a blow-by-blow account of what had occurred. When he’d finished he handed the newsletter over. “Keep it. Souvenir.”

Two other photographs showed the scene of the accident and the damage to the minibus. “What does it really say, the headline?”

“ ‘The English Tourist Whose Leg Was Broken.’ That’s good, isn’t it? That’s passive; you were a victim of circumstance as much as anyone.”

“Not really. I was the one standing in the middle of the road.”

“Nobody sees it that way. Well — maybe one or two zealots. Maybe just the seven people on the bus, and their families and
friends. Wait, that’s the whole island. Maybe we need to organize an armed guard.”

He smiled to himself at the wit of his own remark, and settled to work, getting his laptop out and his spectacle case and consulting his notes over the top of reading glasses, their frames as dark as his eyebrows. Nina needed something to do, so she pulled the wheeled table into position across the bed and wrote to her father. She’d made light of the accident — and of her depression — on the phone, and he’d chastised her for that, so now she began to write a slightly less jokey account. Dr. Christos went out and came back with a breakfast tray — it was still only 8:30 a.m. — one that featured a flesh-pink ceramic bowl of hard-boiled white eggs. Nina took one and cracked it against the table edge, and began a slow peel, imprinting in memory the impact of her browned hands on the eggshell, the tiny suction noises of its loosening. When she’d cut it lengthways in half she picked up her camera, always beside her, and took a photograph.

Dr. Christos was watching. “You’re still getting it, the survivor’s euphoria,” he said. “I’ve had people photographing their breakfast before. The boy last year, for instance; the boy whose back wasn’t broken after all.”

“Christ, what happened to him?”

“Tombstoning, he said they call it. Jumping off high rocks into shallow water. The most stupid idea of fun imaginable.”

“A peeled egg. I know it sounds mad, but there are things I want to remember, to associate.”

“You were never in any danger, though, not really; not once we knew it was just your leg, just a little concussion.”

“It didn’t feel so straightforward at the time. Have you ever thought you were going to die?”

“No. I haven’t even been in hospital, not as a patient. Probably it’ll all happen at once. I’m sure my appendix, gallbladder, and prostate are just getting their ducks in a row.”

She smiled at him. She liked his company. “Well, not to overdramatize, but it felt like it was the end. Everything happening in extreme slow motion. The bus tilting and going over, and goats looking down at me from the slope. My vision going black at the edges — the window was getting smaller as if I was going blind. But I wasn’t afraid. It was bizarrely ordinary. I thought, ‘Oh well, it’s goodbye to the world, and it’s a pity because I really want to live.’ ”

“That’s a good thought to have.”

“When I woke up the ambulanceman was lifting me at the shoulder, the driver was at my feet, and another man was looking down at me. Andros. His big, fearful bear face.”

“He’s a good man. He went in the ambulance with you.”

“I grabbed hold of his wrist, did he tell you?”

“He told me.”

“In the ambulance — I thought I was dying so I drank it all up. I wanted to take it all in, everything I could still see, all the last things.”

“What last things?”

“Just things we saw on the way. The beauty was overwhelming, the colors, the soft summer dark. There was a blue door with an angel’s head knocker, pots of flowers, red and orange, lit windows, people walking along who had all the time in the world. Big teenage boys on small bikes. The lights of the car flashing off a big white house, one with columns and wide steps. A cat was stretched out on one of the steps, a black and white cat, and it raised its head to look at us as we went by. Apparently I was talking to Paolo. I thought my husband was in the ambulance.”