The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (40 page)

At first Nina had been too afraid to talk to Robert about what it might mean. She’d avoided him for twenty-four hours, letting him talk to the answerphone, and then she’d had an absolute turnaround. She’d run all the way there, across the field to his house, and demanded to know everything he knew, and he’d yielded to pressure. The day after that she’d gone to him again, invited to eat with him. The text message said,
Come round for supper. It’ll save on the shopping and washing up, and you’ll have been busy cleaning
.

It hadn’t occurred to her that there’d be cleaning, but it made sense. Her father had always attacked the family house top to bottom before they went away. Nina felt deeply resentful of having to do it, but on the other hand it wasn’t possible to leave the cottage in this state, strewn with newspapers, used teacups, and pizza boxes, because judgment was inevitable. Her dad had a key and he’d come in to water the plants, to close and open curtains so as to outwit burglars and to pick up the mail from the
doormat. Housework was unavoidable, but just as she was starting, dear God, no, there was someone at the door, at the window, tapping on it with an unconvincing smile: Gerald Medlar, asking if he could look at the garden. Feeling too ill to deal with him, she pleaded busyness and left him to do his survey alone. She could feel illness coming on, like something viral. She longed to be in a hotel room, all of her life and history shrunk into one suitcase.

Robert seemed to have forgotten that she was coming. This wasn’t unusual. There was no answer to the doorbell, nor to her shouted hello, opening the front door to the sweet zigzag drama of Mozart’s violin concerto. She found him in his study, surrounded by books; he was always happiest surrounded by books. In a life that had presented him, in some key areas, with failure, the things that he was better at than most people had become more and more vital; over and over he sought out the drug of intellectual excellence, and scored. Nina stood looking at her father working, his back to her, and remembered other days she’d waited to be noticed. Sometimes it was like he was brought up too fast from deep water, like he was at risk of the bends. Today there was a laptop on the desk, a new acquisition, although he still did most of the initial work longhand, on pads of narrow-ruled paper in a spiky, miniature script that made Nina think of an army of tiny beetles with sharp, small antennae. The laptop was sitting semi-alertly, functional enough to deliver the Mozart, while work continued by hand. Beside it a book in grimy brown cloth sat open, kept flat with a nineteenth-century gadget Anna had bought him, an iron bar with movable enclosing arms that had probably been intended for Bibles. The work in progress
attempted better to clarify the period from 1910 leading up to the outbreak of war. He’d been asked to send a sample, the first three chapters and a detailed synopsis, to a publisher, but wasn’t yet happy enough with the chapters to send them. He hadn’t been happy enough with them for years. The further he got down the road with the project, the more the opening chapters had to change, and the beginning was the last thing he was going to be able to write.

It had seemed obvious to Nina that when they met again, things would be tricky between them, but the awkwardness was entirely one-sided. Dr. Christos came in with coffee and with the mail and seemed more relaxed than earlier. Perhaps confessing having slept with Doris was a burden he’d unburdened. Whatever the case, it wasn’t referred to.

“So tell me, tell me,” he said, sitting down. “Tell me what happened next. Who was the Boy? Was it Paolo?”

“It wasn’t.”

“It wasn’t? It wasn’t Luca?”

“It wasn’t. It wasn’t Luca and it wasn’t Paolo. It was another boy entirely. Someone else.” She had to remind herself to be normal. She couldn’t take it out on him, her horrible confusion. That wasn’t going to work. She wasn’t going to be weak and needy. She had to keep things absolutely open and possible while she was digesting the situation, the Doris situation and her own. There were ups and downs, but that was normal, no doubt, in the case of second relationships, when both of you were divorced and weary and used up and compromised.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“I’m fine. I’m just tired.” How often it was used, this line, the
fine but tired
line, when transparency needed to be avoided.

“So how old was he, this boy?”

“Twenty. He was twenty.”

His eyes went to the diary on the bedside table. “Can I have a look at it?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Why not?” He looked quite put out.

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Just a second.” He answered a text message, and while he was doing so, Nina picked up the letter he’d brought and opened it.

He found this distracting. “Who’s the letter from?” He was still texting.

“From my dad. He’s had a breakthrough on the thing he’s writing.” She turned the page over, a single piece of paper. “And yes, that’s basically all. It’s all about work.” She looked again at the envelope. “Judging by the date, seems it’s been lost in the post.”

“You have something of your father, too,” Dr. Christos said. “As well as your mother. Your enjoyment of words and your thoroughness. You must have these qualities, I imagine, to be an editor.”

“I’m very like my father. The irony is that my mother and I weren’t really alike. She wasn’t a reader, barely read at all; even the self-improvement books were abandoned halfway through. She’d want to be doing things. She was a remorseless doer of things. My dad’s idea of bliss is a library and being left alone in it.”

For a long time, Nina had thought that she was a mixture of both parents, that it was a divide, two extremes that had blended together, that beneath Scandinavian cover of lightness and sun, her father’s darker Scottish soul, shaped by centuries of dour Hebridean ancestors, had worked its way in and made its pathways. People made assumptions and Nina had done it herself,
associating Anna’s blondeness, her easy-tanning skin, her energy, and her sky-blue eyes with summer. But of course it wasn’t anything like that simple.

Nina and Robert had sat in the garden, after their roast beef and potatoes, and at first the conversation was restricted to the holiday, the garden, the keys. Nina knew that she was going to have to bring up the subject that was on both of their minds, or they could discuss putting evening lamps onto timers for quite a while yet. She said, “I want to talk to you a bit more about Mum.” In response, her father said he’d like more coffee, and would she like one? She let him go to the kitchen and have his thinking time. When he returned he was ready.

“Your mother made you into her very best and closest friend,” he said, pushing down the plunger in the cafetière. “Which was wonderful in its way. Her focus on you. Her extreme focus.” He glanced at her to see how she was taking his use of
extreme
. “She was never more awake and never happier than when she was focused on you.” He poured the coffee. “But think for a minute how that made me feel. You see, from my standpoint it could sometimes look as if Anna was making a point. She was alive with you in a way she wasn’t any longer with me.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“Sometimes it seemed as if it was a way of keeping you to herself and keeping me away from you. The two of you developed that shorthand way of talking, those in-jokes.” He got up, rubbing at his lower back, and began to pull dandelion leaves out of the rockery. “Little blighters are inextinguishable,” he said, pulling and heaping.

“I always thought that’s how you wanted it. I would have loved to spend more time with you.”

“Really? Is that really true?”

“Of course. What do you mean? Of course it is.”

“You never got enough time to be bored. You never got enough thinking time.” In his own reckoning his detachment during Nina’s childhood had been not deprivation, but a gift. “Your mother was there day and night, wanting your attention.”

“She was the one giving me the attention.”

He took handfuls of dandelions to the wheelbarrow. “I didn’t see it that way, I’m afraid. You loved your mother, you still love your mother, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Of course not. But she was the neediest person I have ever met.”

Now he went into the house and began clearing plates and Nina saw that he would prefer to be alone. She said she had better get going.

“Have you lots still to do?”

“I haven’t packed yet.”

“You’d better get off then.” He began to run the hot water into the sink. “I’ll miss you when you’re away.”

“I’ll miss you, too, Dad.” She put her arms around him and her cheek against his back, while Robert stood helplessly with his arms raised, holding the washing-up brush. “I must go and get organized. But first I need a pee.”

As she went out into the hall she heard him saying, “For heaven’s sake, Nina, pee is so vulgar.”

“Sorry,” she called back. “I just need to micturate.” It was one of their old jokes. Instead of going to the downstairs bathroom, she headed up to what they both now referred to as her mother’s room. Sometimes, on the pretext of needing to find something, she went and looked through the boxes; she’d rearrange
things and weed out a few more things for throwing away. As the years passed, discarding some of the things and donating others became easier. There were always objects at the outer margins of sentimentality, that detached from posterity as time went on and the demands of posterity shrank smaller. Some items could be ditched, and some others — a very few things — were put into daily use again. Last time, she’d retrieved the recipe book, which for a long time had been too poignant a thing to take possession of. Its silk ribbon was still at the last recipe, the page for the pear and almond tart, its instructions neatly amended (one more egg yolk, fifty grams more of ground almonds), the page smeared in butter. Anna’s old Smith Corona was also there, on top of a jewelry box. The typewriter had always seemed too personal to give away, but now it was moving to the margin and beginning to detach itself. Its charity shop time was imminent.

When Nina emerged again, putting a summer dress of her mother’s into her bag, Robert was standing by the coat hooks, holding her jacket. He opened the front door and peered out. “Please go the road way. It’s getting dark.”

“I’ll be fine. I like the field. I have my phone. Don’t worry.”

“And you have your keys, I hope.”

“Of course.” She felt for them through her coat pocket. Keys weren’t just for door-opening. The summer before high school he’d coached her in what to do if grabbed by a man, and a key in the eye had been part of it. Anna hadn’t approved of the coaching. She wanted Nina to go out into the world trusting people and expecting the best of everyone, she said, and not anticipating danger from strangers.

Robert’s answer to this was always swift. “Remind us how many unlocked bicycles you’ve had stolen from outside the shop, because you prefer to trust people.”

Nina made her way across the field, following the line of horse chestnut trees. The last of the evening light was horizontal and intensely yellow. She noticed that she had cow shit on her boot; cows were grass eaters, so how was this substance so unpleasant? She and Luca had discussed this once and had concluded that it could only be a kind of weaponry … but she wasn’t going to think about Luca. She noticed how red her skirt was against the dark green of the evening grass, and how auburn her coat, as red-brown as a conker. This alertness might be ominous. She noticed that she was breathing quickly. She registered that the earth smelled of autumn, which had crashed in a month early. There was mist sitting over the stile at the far end, and the smell of new mushrooms.