The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (36 page)

Nina got to the track and found that there were children there in front of her, two girls and a boy, about twelve years old and in tracksuits. They could have been the young Nina and Becky and Andy — the three of them had been thrown together when the Romanos were away — though this girl was a darker blonde than she had been, her plaits half fallen out. All three turned to look at who was coming towards them. The boy wasn’t as tall and broad
as her old friend Andy Stevenson, who’d been square-faced and had rosy cheeks and a springy thatch of brown hair. Sometimes, thanks to brutal hairdressing, Becky Winter was mistaken for a boy; the Winter children all had the same haphazard kitchen-executed hacked-off style, but Becky also had the reddest mouth, a true red that was startling against her paleness, and the most beautiful gray eyes, silver gray outlined in slate. Nina dreamed about Becky from time to time, and wondered where she was now. She’d failed to find her anywhere online. Becky probably had a different name these days.

The threesome stood aside to let her pass, and after walking on a little way Nina went to the fence, and found that the boulder Luca had put there thirty-five years ago was still in place. She could see over the top and into the garden, which looked smaller but otherwise just as she remembered it, with its fruit trees, tidy rows of vegetables, greenhouses, bantam pens, and shed. Sheila had babysat Nina and had described herself as an aunt, and the Medlars’ bikes had often been parked at the Findlay house in the late afternoon. Sheila always brought home-baking, pitting native buns against Norwegian ones and finding the foreigners wanting.

Sheila, who had a symmetrical, snub-nosed face, with a long upper lip, always wore, as a kind of uniform, circle skirts that she’d made herself. They reached mid-calf and billowed as she cycled by, her long brown hair coiled up in a high bun. Gerald Medlar had been hugely tall with long, skinny legs and a full, dark beard; he’d worn jackets with many pockets, and always a hat, and looked like a Victorian naturalist.

The children were standing behind her. “This is a dead end,” the boy said. “And that’s private property.” He was grumpier, sourer-faced than Andy had been. Andy was apple-cheeked and
good-humored, though later on he’d had a fine line in cynicism. It’d been Andy whom Luca spent most time with as a teenager, once he and Paolo didn’t hang out anymore.

“I used to live here when I was your age,” Nina said. “I went to your school.” The children weren’t interested in that. “The Medlars, who own this garden, have lived here since then.” She looked at the grass for sign of hazards, getting down carefully from the rock.

“They’re old people,” the Becky look-alike said.

Nina moved towards her. “Are you a Winter, is your name Winter?” The girl shrank back.

“Don’t tell her anything,” the boy said. “Go home and tell your dad.”

Nina walked onwards. When had she last seen Sheila, other than in the street, waving and saying “How are you?” while dashing past? The last time they’d had a proper talk must have been after Anna’s funeral, at the wake that had progressed, as these things often did, from polite teatime chat over ham sandwiches to late-night booze and brutal tribal honesty. A lot of whisky had been drunk, and a lot of maudlin platitudes had been exchanged, and then Sheila had made her anti-papal remark, and Maria had taken offense. Not that these spats were anything new. Maria had been resentful of Sheila’s taking on the role of spare parent to Nina, when Maria was right there, next door, and yet was seldom asked to step in. She wasn’t asked by Anna because she was … Maria. Other people’s children didn’t like her. Nina hadn’t. Perhaps it was because it was clear to them that Maria was incapable of childishness, her default setting an unbending authority; it was Giulio whom their sons went to in times of trouble. If the boys were noisy or irritating she’d withdraw to the adults-only sitting room and smoke and listen to old
Italian records. Sheila, on the other hand, would get down on her knees and have big conversations with children about their small worlds, and had done so often with the young Romano boys. It wasn’t an experience they remembered fondly. Maria had told Anna once that everybody — far from being complicated — could be described in three words and that Sheila was wet, manipulative, and a fanatic.

At just before 7:00 a.m. Dr. Christos came back into the room. “Still awake? What is it that’s keeping you awake?”

“I don’t know.” The more accurate answer would’ve been,
There’s a long, long list
.

“We can talk about it over breakfast.” From across the hospital grounds came the sounds of the kitchen being opened, the electric metal shutters going up. The sun was rising at the same time. “I’ll go get us something.” He kissed her on the cheek on leaving and said he always looked forward to getting back to her, and Nina had a momentary sense of rightness. The past was gone and over, and she had to be forward-looking now. People said you should trust your feelings, but sometimes that was bad advice. Feelings are conservative things, and reactionary, and bogged down in the past. Allowing this interesting-looking, complicated man to woo her might be the right decision, despite her doubts. The new feelings would come, they would follow, coming in like a new tide as the old tide receded. As her mother had said, it was important to think about the life she’d have, the decades to come and the hour-to-hour. Nina was confident that the day-to-day would be entertaining, and that she’d be loved. What better basis was there?

Dr. Christos prepared a plate of food for her, spooning on a little of everything. He passed it over and poured the orange juice. “Headache all gone?”

“I’m fine. It was thinking about Becky Winter that brought it on. An old school friend. I’d never felt guilty about her before, but then suddenly I did.”

“What did you have to be guilty about?” He took a peach from the tray and sat on the end of her bed.

“We dropped her. The rest of us went to a private high school and we dropped her. We had new friends who looked down on the Winters, and we lost touch. That’s how it goes.”

“I wish we lost touch here. The same assholes at every wedding that were assholes when they were seven and are still assholes.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “No, I know,” he said. “I’m not sure that sort of language is becoming from my mouth, either.” He aimed the stone at the bin and threw and scored. “Listen, don’t go wasting any energy on feeling guilty. Life is seriously way, way too short. I’m not going to get pretentious about a doctor’s perspective, but you know — we see things. In any case I’m sure nothing you’ve ever done has been a cause for real guilt, not outside the normal parameters of human error.” He seemed to want to convince her and she loved that he spoke like this. He opened the French window and let the morning air in. “Seriously. Don’t feel guilty about anything. It’s over. It’s done. You’re a good person and always meant well and that’s basically all that counts.”

As she approached over the cattle grid, seeing the house in front of her, Nina was nervous about seeing Sheila, though social
encounters had all proved manageable thus far. When Nina had to, she upped her game. It was one of the problems. It made telling anyone how she was feeling impossible. But as Anna had remarked once, when Nina was upset about Luca, a fiction of coping facilitated coping.

Nina hadn’t been to the house for three decades, but nothing seemed to have changed. The door and window frames were still painted grass green; the bicycle stand was still there, and so were the bicycles, apparently the same. They were the kind you don’t see anymore: butcher’s bikes, her father had called them, upright and skinny with bells and baskets, their metal bits solid and black. Nina walked past them and into a porch framed in honeysuckle, the door left ajar. Before she could press the bell the door opened further and Gerald Medlar was in front of her, as lanky as ever, youthful-bodied and upright, though the beard was now white and his eyebrows pale and wild. He was holding a tray of seedlings, and almost dropped it when he saw who was standing there.

“Nina Findlay,” he said, retreating a step and smiling at her as if it were somehow ironic that she stood in front of him.

“Hello.”

“We heard you were back, that you’d bought Miss Plowman’s cottage. How very good to see you. Sheila will be delighted.” He half turned and bellowed his wife’s name into the hallway. A voice from upstairs said, “Gerald? What is it?”

He angled his head away to answer. “Come here! There’s a nice surprise at the door!” When he turned back to Nina she could see that he was afraid. He was going to have to talk to her until Sheila got there. Anna had said once that she thought embarrassment was the reason Gerald bought a house with such a huge garden and tended it so obsessively, that gardening was his refuge from
other people, and sure enough as soon as Sheila appeared he made his excuses, striding off across the grass towards the greenhouses. “Back in a tick,” he said over his shoulder. “I just need to deal with these or they’ll dry out. Put the kettle on, Sheila.”

“Let me look at you.” Sheila hugged Nina lightly and stepped back to scrutinize. “Well, just look at you, same as ever,” she said. Sheila, too, looked only marginally different. She’d been Nina’s teacher in her last year at the primary school and must have been at least sixty-five, but although she’d filled out a little, around the belly and the throat, and her hair, still worn the same, was now more salt and pepper than brown, the effect was rather as if a woman of thirty had been aged for a role; there was something unconvincing about it. She was wearing a blue skirt and matching blouse that were almost certainly homemade, that looked just the same as the clothes of decades earlier, that probably were the clothes of decades earlier. She took Nina into the kitchen and told her please to make herself absolutely comfortable, providing a William Morris cushion for one of the sturdy pine chairs. Nina sat as instructed, at a table covered with an oilcloth printed with apples and blossom, looking around the room, which was unchanged, still lined in its original yellow-painted tongue and groove. Sheila sat opposite and reached over and took her hand, and Nina had to concentrate hard so as not to cry. Pity was the worst. Sometimes pity seemed like a low trick.

“You’ll have heard all about it, then.” Nina was aware that her eyes were filling and was furious with herself.

“There are never any secrets in villages. Or rather there are, of course, but everybody knows them.” Sheila laughed, a short, pealing laugh. She’d always believed that laughter was the best medicine. It’s what she’d said to Robert when Anna moved out.
Now she put her hand to her forehead. “Tea. I was meant to put the kettle on.” Nina was aware she’d been given time to master herself. “But you’re all right and that’s the main thing,” Sheila’s back said as she lit the old stove.

“I’m all right and that’s the main thing,” Nina said. Was this it? Was this all? She was filled with gratitude. “Tell me all your news.”

“Nothing much to tell. We’re both retired now. Gerald lives in his garden, and I read a lot, and paint and do this and that, and we go away four times a year. Quarterly. Religiously, as it were. Not usually overseas. We’re about to go to Norfolk, in fact.”

“Lovely.” Nina managed to say the word but was awash with melancholy. This was the parallel marriage to that of her parents, the one that had survived, and it was hard to face up to their differing fates. They’d not had children (Gerald hadn’t wanted them, being concerned about population control) and so there was no child who would have escaped being devastated by a separation; there was no child who could have reveled in this, their amiable togetherness in early old age, safe in this farmhouse kitchen, with parents who looked to be immortal. She felt the unfairness of it. She looked across the table and saw her parents sitting there. She aged her mother to keep pace with the softness and elegance of Sheila’s own aging.

“I still see your dad,” Sheila was saying. “As you know he comes over once a week for a cup of something, a glass of something if it’s the evening.”

“I didn’t know. He doesn’t tell me these things.”

“He’ll never change. He was here last night. He’s so happy you’re back in the village. He was talking about your mother and I told him that I still miss her, every day. He said he felt the same.”
It’s easy to miss her now she’s dead
, Nina thought. Sheila had
begun to miss Anna even before she was dead. She said, her back to Nina, at the sink, “I tell him that your mother is with God, but you can imagine how he feels about that.”