The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (17 page)

He said, “I’m sorry I was such an arse about Luca.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He didn’t have the slightest sign of an erection and so she was talking about both not mattering. She wanted him to know that neither mattered, that nothing did. She ran her hands over his belly and he supported, with a cupped palm, the knee that was about to slip off the side. She said, “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s just that we find the same things funny. That’s all it’s ever been.”

“I don’t think Francesca likes it. I think she minds more than me.”

“What makes you say that?” Nina shifted her weight so that she sat further back, resting her hands on her own thighs.

“Are you saying that you’re surprised?” His tone was unfortunate, unintended.

Nina got off the bed. “I’m thirsty,” she said, beginning to walk towards the door in the half dark. “I found that red dehydrating. Do you want some water?”

“No thanks, I’m fine.” Paolo turned over, putting his hands beneath his head, and when she got back he was asleep.

The next morning he’d already gone to the office when she woke and it was after eight when he got home again, looking washed out. He hadn’t slept well, he said. The white burgundy followed by a Côtes du Rhône with the beef: that was a mistake, he said, broadcasting the remark over his shoulder as he hung up his jacket. He put his shoes in the rack under the hall table and went to the bathroom, and when he came out his disembodied voice said, “Actually I thought I might go for a swim; want to join me?”

She spoke to the door. “I won’t if you don’t mind. I feel like I have a cold coming on.”

“Okay — well, I’ll see you later.” She heard him putting his shoes back on, the scrape as they were taken once more from the rack. “Oh! Dinner! I forgot to ask.”

“It’s a ham salad,” she said, calling back blindly from the sofa, where she had a manuscript propped on cushions. “It’ll keep.”

“You go ahead and eat,” he said. “No point waiting for me.”

She ate in front of a film she’d seen before, barely noticing it. Something was wrong, but what? Paolo came back just as the end credits were rolling and went straight into the bathroom and showered. Nina waited and when he emerged went to him and kissed him and put her hand on the edge of the towel by his navel, but Paolo hung firmly on to it at both sides. “You’re not going to get your way with me that easily, you hussy,” he said.

She left him to dress and then she heard him in the kitchen, whistling as he got the salad plate out of the fridge and removed the foil from it, admiring the coleslaw she’d made, his favorite potato salad, the scent of a home-boiled ham. She heard him opening wine and the radio going on, and her anxiety tightened
its lacing.
This is stupid
, she said to herself.
Since when did a trip to a swimming pool come loaded with such threat? It was a swim. He’s home and he’s whistling
.

After he’d eaten Paolo came into the room in his pajamas and a red sweater. He was holding his briefcase.

“Do you have to work?”

“Yup. But then when do I not? It’s like that for some of us.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing at all. I’d better get on with it. Big meeting tomorrow and there’s something wrong with the figures.” He settled himself cross-legged at the other end of the sofa. “Music would be nice,” he said, without looking up. Nina complied, putting on the Bach Cello Sonatas, the Pablo Casals recording that he loved. “Any chance of a coffee?”

“Too late, isn’t it?”

“Too late?” His eyes betrayed a moment of alarm.

“For coffee. It’s not going to help with the insomnia.”

“Tea would be good in that case.” And then, as Nina went out of the room, “I saw Francesca at the pool.”

Nina came in again. “Francesca?”

“She was there for a swim.” He flicked through the papers. “We swam together.”

“I’m glad she’s feeling well enough to swim again,” Nina said feebly.

“It’s okay, I hope, our swimming together.”

“ ’Course it’s okay. I was just surprised.”

Paolo went up to bed before her, saying unnecessarily that he was over-tired, and was gone when she woke.

The next day, Nina rang Luca at the office.

“Luca. Me. Is it safe?”

“Nobody here but us chickens.”

“Did you know that Francesca went swimming last night and met Paolo at the pool?”

“Francesca? No. She didn’t go swimming. We had people over.”

When Paolo got home, Nina said, “Why did you say you’d seen Francesca at the pool?”

Paolo looked as if she’d walked right into his trap. “How do you know that I didn’t?”

“Luca mentioned that they’d had people over.”

“When did you see Luca?”

“He rang earlier, worried about you working so hard.”

“Well, that’s ironic. You wouldn’t mind, though, if Francesca and I had something we did together? Like going swimming. Or learning salsa? She’s keen and I’m keen and you’re not keen.”

“Salsa? But — but, Paolo, you never dance. Not even at your own wedding, despite my pleading with you to dance.”

“I think it might be time to learn. Do you object?”

“No.”
No-but, no-but
. Surely he must hear the
but
.

“Excellent. I’ll go and call her.”

Later, when Nina was quiet, Paolo asked her what was wrong. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just thinking.”

“You’re not completely happy about the dancing plan.”

“She jumped at it. She sounded … I could hear her from right over here.”

“Luca doesn’t want to learn, either. What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. It’s just that we don’t do that much together.”

“It’s held on a Thursday night. Why don’t you and Luca do something?”

“Paolo. What are you doing?”

“I’m not doing anything. You and Luca like to do things I don’t like. Why don’t you two go to the cinema and see something French?”

“I might have a few people over and play cards,” she told him. “Poker nights. Cigars. Pizzas. Beer.”

“Well, that sounds marvelous.”

“It will be.”

Paolo jabbed one finger in her ribs. “Poker,” he said. “I might be good at that.”

“You might.”

“Do I have to go dancing? I hate dancing.”

“You have arranged it, I think you’ll find.”

He put his hand to his forehead. “Oh God. I’m going to have to call Francesca back. She’ll think we’re both mad.”

“She thinks that already,” Nina said, feeling safe again.

CHAPTER TEN

Autumn was coming and day on day the light seemed to be yellower, saturating the garden with richer-looking colors. The sea shimmered so brightly that it was hard to look at.

“It’s so beautiful here,” Nina said, as she did every day, going tentatively on her crutches to the chair that Dr. Christos was holding in place. He’d already been there for some time, sitting at a table with a desktop calculator.

He looked at the view as if it didn’t often occur to him to look. “It is. It’s very fine.” He stood up and gathered his things together. “I’m supposed to be somewhere, but George here is the person to tell if you have a problem, a pain, or need something.” He gestured to a man sitting at a table further along, a man of about seventy, bald but for a gray monk’s tonsure and stiff gray mustache, who was dressed in striped blue pajamas and a blue robe edged in red.

“What’s George going to do?” she whispered. He looked far frailer than she did. He was bent over a newspaper, his nose wrinkled up so as to keep his glasses in place.

“He has a mobile phone in his pocket, always, don’t you, George?” When he didn’t respond Dr. Christos said something to him in Greek and in answer he raised his thumb without looking up. “George has my number and he will call if you need me. He calls me a lot. We talk more on the phone than in person.” George put his thumb up again and turned it decisively down. “Hah!” Dr. Christos said.

When he’d gone, Nina attempted to catch George’s eye. “Thanks!” she called across the garden.
“Efharisto!”
George looked up at her and furrowed his brow. He took his phone out of his pocket and appeared to offer to dial. “No, no — it’s okay. No need for Dr. Christos.” She shook her head and waved her hands at the same time, and he put his phone back and gave her one last look, as if identifying a time waster. Nina moved to one of the shaded sunloungers and got her book out, the other English remnant left at the hospital by a previous patient. It was a Swedish thriller and full of twilight and blizzards and menace, the perfect antidote to an Aegean idyll.

When Dr. Christos returned he pointed out that Nina’s phone was blinking receipt of a text message. It wasn’t Luca. Every day she hoped it was Luca with a proper explanation, an apology. She felt the sourness of repeated disappointment. “My dad,” she said, pressing the button. Why was she announcing the names of people who contacted her, as if she needed to account for herself? “Apparently it’s snowing at home. That’s decided it. I’ll move here and do bed and breakfast.”

He’d opened a folder and was distracted by it, lifting out the top sheet so as to reread what was written there. “It’s not good news for one of our guests. Crap. I don’t know. Some people just can’t get a break. But why tell her today? Why tell her at all, come to that? She’s so old. It’s not going to make her happier.”

“But she has a right to know her own bad news,” Nina said. “Surely.”

“I don’t agree.” He took his laptop out of his bag. “Happiness is way more important than the notional truth.”

“The notional truth?” She expected him to laugh at himself but he didn’t. Was that one of the things? She was trying not to list them, but there had to be things. When you took such a big step forward, there were bound to be small steps back. But how many?

“I’m very glad about the decision.” She looked confused and so he clarified. “The decision about moving here.” Did he know that she was testing the waters?

“I wasn’t completely serious. When I told Paolo about the possibility, he said living abroad would be good for me. It makes me deeply miserable when he talks like that.”

“Why so?”

“Because he talks to me as if I’m just an old friend, like someone he doesn’t need to see very often and can keep up with on Facebook. Not that Paolo uses Facebook. I can’t even imagine Paolo using Facebook.”

“Why not?”

“Because … Why not … because I suppose there’s something about him, like my dad, that’s old-world. Paolo’s a reluctant user of technology. He’s pen and ink. He’s stayed pen and ink while the whole rest of the office, the rest of the world, has become computer-operated. Luca more or less lives on his phone and his iPad. Paolo has e-mail but that’s about all, and his assistant does most of that. Not because he’s incompetent with it, but he just doesn’t want to live there, in that culture, I suppose. He holds on to the old culture. He writes letters and sends them through the post. He buys old books and won’t have a Kindle. He doesn’t really use the Internet. He’s like a one-man campaign. Paolo, alone in his fort, surrounded by progress he doesn’t want and completely outnumbered.”

“You sound fond of him.”

“I am. I’m very fond of him. But we’re not going to be reconciled.”

Dr. Christos clicked his Biro on and off, and on and off and on again. “So let’s get this straight. You don’t want him, but you want him to want you.”

“It’s not that. It’s just that he’s got used to not being married to me too quickly, like it never really amounted to anything much. Are you all right?”

“Too much wine last night. I need aspirin.” He rummaged in his bag and found some. She wanted to know who it was he’d got drunk with, but decided against asking.

Nina took a breath. “I need to think very hard about it, moving away, moving overseas. It has to be the best decision I ever made.”

“What, bigger than marriage?”

“I’m forty-six years old. I might only be halfway through my life. Generally people in my family live to be very old, well into their nineties.”

“So, if you moved here, you’d do bed and breakfast and give up editing.”

“I wouldn’t give up editing. I need to work and I love to work. Why wouldn’t I work?”

“There’s no need to be defensive.” Dr. Christos looked at his phone messages and clicked through them.

“Francesca never had a job, not after she married, and Luca took pride in that. They assumed they’d have lots of children and then they couldn’t. It didn’t seem to occur to him that he was blithely signing a woman up to a lifetime without achievement, like it was purely a matter of prestige for himself.”

“Achievement outside her domestic achievements,” Dr. Christos interjected. He began to make notes on the second sheet.

Somewhere at the back of her mind Nina found that the list had begun, and was writing itself, the list of negatives. She said, “I suppose it’s different if you have children. I gave up work when I was pregnant. I had eclampsia. Toxemia, they used to call it; a better, more descriptive word.”

“I’m sorry, Nina.” Look at his face, his kind face. It didn’t matter if he could be pompous, a bit of a dinosaur. He was open, openhearted. They didn’t have to agree about everything. She and Paolo hadn’t.