The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (12 page)

Until Nina went back to Glasgow, and when they weren’t working, Luca and Nina spent a lot of time together, through June, July, and August, and then half of September. On fine weekends they’d lounge in Nina’s garden, reading and dozing and listening to Anna’s battery-operated radio. The days were long and lazy and nothing much happened or was even said, though from time to time one of them shared bits from a book, or instigated idle chatter or a tease. Mostly they were verbal teases. “You’ve been immensely boring today; you’re the most boring person I’ve ever met.” “I’m not the one who mentioned photosynthesis twice over breakfast.” “You’re worse; you take books of logarithms on holiday.”

He kissed her sometimes, on the mouth, closed-lipped though sometimes for a long moment, with a constant firm pressure, what he called a Hollywood kiss, one from the golden age of film. He kissed her chastely, and held her hand, and put his arm around her often. Were they boyfriend and girlfriend, or not? She dreaded anybody asking. It seemed more like a regression than anything; they’d returned to the sibling patterns of childhood. That August at Giulio’s sixtieth, standing in the Romanos’ kitchen, Nina said the pâté was too salty and Luca pretended he’d made it and was offended and swooped, rugby-tackling her from the side so that both of them fell onto the linoleum. Other guests had moved swiftly out of range.

“Hey! Be careful there, you two. Glasses. Holding glasses here. Take it outside.”

“What are they like?” another guest asked rhetorically. “Like deranged giant kittens.”

“I foresee an announcement,” Giulio said, looking happy.

There were no question marks, nor irony, but there were question marks and irony afterwards for Nina, alone in her bedroom, turning to bury her face in the pillow so as to laugh. The need to make asses of themselves in public was mutual, circumventing
even the stern disapproval of her father. There was hope and fear and self-consciousness afterwards, but above all else, certainty, absolute certainty, that they were at the beginning of their story, their lifelong story.

The day after the party, finding they both had hangovers, Luca decided that they should play garden badminton. Paolo, who was catching the morning train, came to say goodbye as they were fixing the net. Luca had retrieved its moldering end from inside the hedge and was carrying it across to attach it to a hook on the wooden fence at the other side.

“I’m off, then,” Paolo said.

“Bye.” Luca wasn’t looking at him. He busied himself with knotting the ties.

“Great to talk to you, as ever.” Paolo left without saying anything further.

Nina said, “Why do you have to treat him like that?”

Luca looked confused. “He talks to me like that, too. All the time. Just not in front of you.”

Nina hit the shuttlecock hard, serving like gunfire. Luca smashed it back and she lobbed it, and he lobbed it higher and further in return, and Nina backed and backed and blundered into the rockery, twisting her foot and sinking to the grass with a shout. Luca was straight there, dropping his racquet and ducking under the net and running to her.

“Don’t move, don’t move, let me look at it first.” He removed her tennis shoe with tender care, Nina wincing and shrieking, and hoisted her foot onto his leg just above the knee. His hands stroked over her instep, over the ball of her foot, gently flexing her toes. “It isn’t anything much, I don’t think,” he said, “but we need to get it up and get some ice on it, pronto.”

It turned out that Paolo was still there. He was standing in the kitchen eating toast when Luca carried Nina back into the house, staggering under her weight and demanding she eat less chocolate. He followed the two of them into the sitting room and watched as Luca ministered to the foot. Luca got Nina settled, her leg propped on a cushion, and fetched frozen peas for the swelling.

Paolo hovered. “The swelling’s a good sign — it means it’s probably not broken.”

Luca’s expression was withering. “What do you know about broken ankles? Zero; less than zero. The swelling’s a good sign, indeed. I don’t think Nina thinks the swelling’s a good sign.”

Paolo went to an armchair and took another of the cushions and put it against his stomach and wrapped his arms tight around it. “I love your feet,” he said. Luca turned to stare at him. “No, really,” Paolo continued. “They’re elegant. My toes are like five fat prawns in a box, but yours are — look how thin the stems of your toes are, the little pads at the end.”

“It’s because she’s a girl, Paolo,” Luca said. “And you’re not, most of the time.”

Paolo blushed. He never had the answer until afterwards. He got up and left the room, and then a few minutes later left the house with his bag over his shoulder, following his dad out to the car for a lift to the railway station. There was a note for Nina on the kitchen counter.
Hope your foot’s okay. It’s been good to see you. Come and visit me in London one weekend
.

There was no doubt that Paolo was the nicer brother. Always kind. Even-tempered. Reliable. Loyal. But it hadn’t been any use.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“You mentioned that you’ve been here before,” Dr. Christos said as they sat having breakfast together. Olive oil had dripped onto the notes that sat beneath the plate, and Nina pointed it out, and he began blotting the paper with a napkin.

“Paolo and I came here on our honeymoon, twenty-five years ago this month.”

“Twenty-five years ago. Twenty-five years ago — I must have been a student then. I must have been here. I came home from the States for the summers. That’s right, I was here. I was working for Vasilios.”

“Really? You were here that September? Or had you gone back by then? We arrived on the eighth.”

“Ah no. I had to be back at the university at the end of August. We just missed each other. Wait — was that the wet summer? That’s what they call it here.”

“It rained almost all of the time.”

“The freak wet summer. You were here on honeymoon then? That was really bad luck.”

“It seemed like an omen.” He gathered the plates and put them on the table, and opened the French windows. “It hasn’t changed much, the island,” Nina added.

“It hasn’t. That’s its blessing and its curse. As they say.” He went to the corner and turned on the room fan. “Air con’s broken down today.” It spluttered into life and rotated its metal sunflower face, first this way and then that. “The people don’t
change, either. I don’t know in what year the people here stopped changing: we talk about it sometimes at home. With my sister and her family, I mean. I live alone now.”

He got the Scrabble board out and set it up. They played board games now, in the second week: Scrabble and backgammon, at odd intervals during the day, starting a round at breakfast and finishing by nightfall.

“Do you like it, living alone?”

“Not really. Look at that: it’s all consonants. But my wife didn’t want to live with me anymore. One day she said she’d had enough of my bad moods and irregular hours and my only doing the laundry every five years. She lives opposite her dad, in the houses up at the end of the no-through road, and I see her almost every day. So.”

Nina put the first word down. VARIANT.

“You used all your letters.” He sounded almost accusing.

“Sorry. It was what I had given to me.” She wrote down the score. “In my case it was me who did the leaving, but that was only technically, as he wanted me to go, and it was pretty much the same with my parents.”

“I feel as if we might need a bottle of whisky for this conversation. Whisky’s depressingly expensive here, though I can produce wine. My sister’s husband has the vineyard, the one you can see from the beach.”

“It’s the wine that Vasilios serves.”

He put down a word, and she followed with another, better one.

“It is. You’ll have tasted it. I can bring some in after hours, when I’m no longer your doctor, and we can sit on the patio and get toasted; toast your survival, I mean.”

“Is that allowed, the drinking?”

“I’m the one who does the allowing, though we hide the liquor when the humorless people come calling.” He inclined his head towards the window. “Quarterly inspections hoping to catch us out. And I have to say, it’s also how it felt in my marriage. Audits and reports and failure to meet standards.” He put down QUEST with the Q on the triple, and his face confirmed that honor had been saved. “The thing with relationships is that talking’s neither here nor there, and when it’s wrong it’s wrong. As soon as we know that, we should acknowledge it and move on. Surely.” She put I–O–N onto the end of QUEST. “Is that allowed?” he queried. “I don’t think you’ve changed the root of the word, but I’ll allow it this time.” He frowned at his board. “Women always want reasons; they want to go for a long walk, but sometimes it’s better if people don’t talk things over. Go with the instinct; the instinct’s usually right. And then, don’t look back — that’s absolutely the key thing.”

“My husband would agree with you,” Nina told him. “My ex-husband. I don’t know what to call him anymore. He drew the line in the sand and stepped over it, and on the other side there were lots of single women who’d formed a queue. My dad says he’s dating, out having dinner and looking a lot happier.”

Dr. Christos put down DRAB. “I know, but it’s all I have. This doesn’t always seem like a game of skill. Anyway. It’s just a game.” He got out fresh tiles. “I wish my ex would fall in love again. My life would be a hell of a lot easier.”

Nina had her word prepared and Dr. Christos followed immediately with EXIT, the X on a double.

“How can it be better not to talk things over?” she asked him. “The end of a marriage is a big thing in anybody’s life.”

“I don’t think it follows,” he told her. She laid down APHID below EXIT so that she also made EH, XI, and ID. She had to
show him the booklet with its list of acceptable two-letter words. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “You’re way too good at this. I diagnose too much Scrabble in your life. And no, I don’t think it follows. Few people can do justice to their decisions when asked about them. Language is an inadequate thing for feelings.”

“But you have to make an attempt at it, at least.”

“A decision comes at the end of a long sequence of thoughts. A person’s already talked it over a long time in his head.” He looked at his tiles glumly. “All these useless four-letter words. I can’t put CHAT down, not after ID, the ID incident.”

“It doesn’t matter. Put CHAT down if that’s what you have. As you say, it’s the luck of the draw.” She watched as he put CHAT on the board and garnered nine points. “But you have to give reasons, surely. You can’t not give reasons.”

“I don’t know if that helps. In our case it made things worse.” He looked at his phone. “I have to go; I’m late for a meeting. I’ll bring work back with me. You mustn’t distract me this afternoon.”

When he returned, after lunch, the aroma of coffee preceding him in the corridor and the sound of his flattened espadrilles flapping, he said, “I know what I said but please distract me: this is turning into a crap of a day.”

“Do you want to carry on with the game?”

“Let’s do that later. I may need to eat a dictionary first. I’m actually really tired. I’ll close my eyes for a bit and listen. Tell me something. Tell me something new.”

He sat himself down in the armchair, his red jeans and gaudy Hawaiian shirt super-real against the white of the wall, resting an elbow on the chair arm, his head in his open hand.

Nina said, “I had a sort of a breakdown, I think.”

Dr. Christos opened his eyes and closed them again. He didn’t look especially surprised. “Go on. If you want to say more.”

“What happened was fairly straightforward: my sister-in-law, Francesca, died in February, and for various complicated reasons I became depressed.”

“Various straightforward complicated reasons. What did she die of?”

“Breast cancer. She was forty-five.”

“What were the complicated reasons?”

“Francesca died and it was very distressing, and everybody fell apart. Even me, which surprised everyone because I’m a cold fish.” She grimaced.

“Surely not.”

“My mother-in-law’s phrase, because I’m reserved. Normally, yes, reserved, though I can see that might be hard to believe. And then Paolo wanted to talk to me about my being a misery. I was surprised because I thought that was him. We had a conversation about love. I didn’t think we were in it and he didn’t argue. So I moved out and went back to the village, really a suburb now, where I grew up, and then I went a bit nuts, and got pills, and felt better, and my doctor said I needed a proper holiday, so here I am.”

The doctor’s eyes were closed. It made confiding easy. It was comforting for Nina to be able to do this summarizing and hear it the way it ought to have been, its loose ends all tied.

“Was that the disgrace?” he asked.

“No, there was more. I’ll come to that.” She settled herself flatter on the bed. She could feel her heartbeat slowing.

“When you say breakdown — how did it start?”

“Are you going to take notes — have you gone into doctor mode on me?”

“Not at all. Sorry. Just very nosy.”