The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (18 page)

BOOK: The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay
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“Some people were confident that working was the reason for my getting ill, implying I’d put the baby at risk, that I’d killed the baby. My mother-in-law, for instance. I said to her that it was hard to imagine how lying on a sofa reading could be to blame. Paolo mis-sold the job to her as reading books, when we got engaged, and she never really saw it differently. She was in two minds. It was womanly and effete, the job, so that was a plus, but on the other hand, pointless and easy to sacrifice.”

“You love your work.”

“I like being good at it.”

“Perhaps more than being married.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It’s just a point of view.”

“You don’t approve of women having careers?” The list was adding to itself in a slow italic.

“Of course I do. Absolutely I do. I’m not my father. He didn’t even approve of my having one.”

“There was an assumption that I wouldn’t work after I had the baby, that I’d have better things to do than work.”

“But — you would have had better things to do. Maybe we should stay clear of this. Did you keep trying, to get pregnant, I mean?”

“I couldn’t go through it again.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Luca was wonderful to me. Luca was wonderful. Paolo was hurt and absent and Luca was there.”

Luca was the first of the Romanos to come to the house. He came gravely and kindly, bearing flowers, cake, art books. He said, “Let’s not speak about it,” and held her close, which was what she needed. Everybody else had wanted to talk, had wanted glib assurances that they’d “try again.” He made her tea and toast and put the radio on and sat holding her hand. He’d been to a talk about Caravaggio and leafed through a book of his paintings, telling her what he’d discovered. When she was tired and closed her eyes he read to her from
Sense and Sensibility
, which lay open on the coffee table. Nina had always found solace in Eleanor and Marianne.

The day after Luca’s visit, Maria and Francesca turned up, each of them carrying a heavy bag. They’d brought meals for the next four days, chicken and beef dishes they’d made together and had sealed in cartons they’d found at a kitchenware shop. Nina’s gratitude was waved away. It was nothing. Families looked after each other, Maria said, shrugging. Francesca had gone to the newsagent and bought a bagful of media distraction: the
Telegraph
and the
Guardian
,
Marie Claire
and
National Geographic
,
Private Eye
and
Good Housekeeping
.

“We really have no idea what kind of thing you like,” she said. “So I hope this covers it. You’re such a serious person. Intellectual, I mean. Not like me, who didn’t even finish school.”

Nina said, “Educated shouldn’t be confused with bright.” She’d meant to pay a compliment.

“I didn’t say I wasn’t bright,” Francesca said, slapping the magazines onto the table.

Anna had always maintained that it was best not to share your fears and weaknesses. She’d said exactly that when Nina was seventeen and Luca was distant. They’d been icing a chocolate cake together. “These things pass,” she’d said. “But the people you confide in will never forget it, what you said when you were low: they’ll fix it forever as a truth about you, when it’s only a truth about that moment.” It had been hard to contribute to these conversations. “People know their own complexity very well, but invariably they try to simplify other people. They can’t help it.”

So Nina had never confessed — other than to Luca, who could take it — just how unhappy she was after her miscarriage. Paolo didn’t know that she’d found herself following women with babies around the city. She’d always tried to keep her failings from him — though that also meant that there was a void, in which she couldn’t be positive and (unable to be negative) wasn’t anything, was apparently a blank. Paolo always took it badly if she was unhappy, thus proving Anna absolutely right. It was Luca who heard all about it. She’d told him how, pausing outside a department store changing room, she’d stroked the misshapen head of a tiny newborn still sleeping off his birth journey, passing a forefinger over his pulsing fontanelle. She knew he was a he, because he was color-coded in a variety of blue clothes and linens and had plastic cars strung on his pram toy. He’d looked very like her own lost boy, who’d died before he could live, delivered perfect and lifeless as if he’d changed his mind. Nina bent her own head close to the tiny face, taking in its scents and its
whispering rapid breaths, and had inhaled deeply. The woman had emerged from the changing cubicle and, seeing Nina, had shoved the clothes, the hangers, hurriedly onto a rack, wheeling the buggy vigorously away from danger.

Nina picked up another paperback she’d brought with her, one from which protruded a Sistine Chapel bookmark. Inside she was confronted by a page with a squashed mosquito close to the fold, and a blotch of sun oil that had blurred an irregular patch of words. It was the page she’d been at on the day she’d broken her leg and she closed it again, unable entirely to defuse the memory. This book would have to be disposed of.

She said, “I’ve been thinking I might go and spend some time in Norway. Even if I moved here.”

“If?” Dr. Christos jumped right in. “You’re still thinking about it? Quite right. These things take time. Actually no, to hell with that. Just do the mad thing and agree.”

“When, in all probability, I move here” — she paused to make a “there you go” face — “I could go to Norway for July and August, when it’s too hot for me in Greece. I find I’m impatient to go. It’s been thirty — no, thirty-two — years since I was there. Mum never went back after her parents died. I call them her parents but really they were her grandparents, and old even when I was small. Their weekday apartment was rented — which was usual for Oslo — but they owned a summer house by a lake, one we used to visit every year. It was a modest, ramshackle house. They had money, but they lived modestly on principle.”

It was an old wooden house and right on the shore, in a small community of other wooden houses; it was absolutely quiet, there, with the lake in front and the forest stretching behind. The house had been rented out since Anna died, but recently the tenants had given up the lease and Nina found she was keen to visit. Anna had also inherited a substantial amount of money, and when she died it was both house and windfall that passed to Nina. When Anna’s will was found, the size of the cash inheritance surprised them all; even Robert hadn’t known it was so much. Anna hadn’t told him the truth about it. He’d thought it was a little nest egg put aside for a home deposit, for Nina when she left university. It had been an accidental fortune, because without really meaning to, Grandpa had made a lot of money. He was given shares in the furniture company when he first joined, to make up for low wages, and it was a small concern then, just three of them, three carpenters hand-making lovely carved things, but then it was a huge success; it became a factory in the end, churning out machine-made tables for a chain of shops. He kept working there, even though he hated what it had become. Anna told Nina that it was a Norwegian thing, and hard to explain, but it was unacceptable among the family and neighbors not to work. They didn’t even move house, and if they hadn’t bought a new car you would never have seen any difference in their lives.

“They were embarrassed by the money,” Nina told Dr. Christos. “They had a freedom they never used, and in turn it was the same with Mum. She could have gone off and done something interesting, instead of moldering away in that horrible apartment. Someone else’s apartment. Interesting thing, masochism, isn’t it? She was punishing herself.”

“Punishing herself — why?”

“She felt she must have deserved to be rejected by my father, somehow. I can’t explain it to you because I don’t really understand it, either. Seems completely fucked up to me. Sorry for the language.”

“I don’t mind the language. I don’t think it suits you, though.”

“Doesn’t suit me how?” She thought she knew the answer, but wanted to hear it.

He looked at his watch. “I have to go do rounds and then I have meetings, over there.” He nodded towards Main Island. “I’ll come by again later.”

The afternoon went very slowly. She had a brief conversation with George about shipwrecks (there’d been two notable finds in the bay), a chat translated and chaired by Nurse Yannis, who afterwards ordered her to go in for a siesta and followed her into the room to darken the windows. They talked about the progress of the leg, and about shoes; Nurse Yannis wore shoes in pretty colors that she bought by mail order — tangerine-colored moccasins today — and she blushed sweetly when Nina admired them. After that there was an interminable three hours in which nothing happened but the rhythmical fluttering of the roller blind in an onshore breeze. Nina tired of reading, her mind wandering, and she couldn’t focus on anything else, on writing or planning. She lay and watched the blind moving. She longed for work, a working day at a table, with a coffeepot and an omelette, and logs crackling in the wood burner. She longed for a Scottish summer day.

Dinner arrived, a pink fish and a green salad, and shortly after that Dr. Christos, but he didn’t stay long. He reported, under questioning, that the crossing to the island had been ordinary, the bus to the town crowded and hot, and the town crowded and hot, too. The meeting had gone fine. He asked how she was
and looked at the chart, and then he left, saying only, “See you tomorrow.” It was as if they’d argued but had to work together. She reviewed their last conversation. It couldn’t have been
fucked up
that did it, could it? Surely not. He hadn’t been able to use the word
feminine
, if it was
feminine
he was thinking and not saying. Had
fucked up
been some kind of a letdown? It didn’t matter. But it did matter. Things mattered now that didn’t used to. Charm mattered more than ever, here in the onset of — what should she call it? — of diminished allure. A woman whose skin is beginning to line and sag, whose hair is beginning to thin and to gray, she needs self-confidence if she is still to be noticed by men, if she’s still to have romantic potential. She needs charisma; she needs unyielding self-belief, and it needs to show, in her eyes and in the way she speaks, and in her posture, an expectation of being loved. Nina wrote these thoughts down in her notebook, noting the echo from a speech of Caroline Bingley’s in
Pride and Prejudice
, but couldn’t think what to write next. She started doodling: first the lake house with the shore in front, before sketching in the woods that lay behind, and then she put the notebook down again, feeling deeply dissatisfied. There was some unidentifiable blockage. What was the blockage? She felt nervous, on edge.

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