The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  “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.

  “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 fact
ory 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.

  Nurse Yannis came back into Nina’s room and asked if she’d like a cup of coffee. Nina said eagerly that she’d love one, thank you, and the nurse went out into the corridor and pushed the trolley in. She handed her a plate with a cake on it, a slab cake dotted with berries, dark-red berries that had leaked their juices into the sponge.

  “My sister, she makes this cake and sends it,” she said.

  “Your sister!” Nina exclaimed. “How is your sister?”

  “She is well.”

  They ate cake and drank coffee.

  “You speak very good English,” Nina said, looking for a topic.

  “I learn at school,” Nurse Yannis told her. “And I speak it here. It is not fantastic. I talk in now all the time.”

  “The present tense.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I have no Greek at all so the present tense is great for me. I’m the same in Italian. I can’t do the past and future and stick to the present all the time.”

  The nurse’s response to this surprised her. “Nina, I need to say to you … about Christos. He is a little bit in love with you.”

  Nina kept it together. “He’s just friendly. Have you known him a long time?” She asked, though she already knew the answer.

  “We are at school. His sister is my friend. You know he is married?”

  “I thought he was divorced.”

  “They live different, in different houses. But married.”

  “He is just a friend,” Nina said.

  “I am glad.” Nurse Yannis looked down at her feet. “Because he is not safe.”

  “Safe?” The nurse put Nina’s cup and plate onto the trolley and made as if to push it back out of the room. “Wait. Please say more. What do you mean, not safe?”

  Nurse Yannis paused at the door. “He loves his wife.”

  Panicking slightly, she said, “But you used the word safe. Is it safe that you mean?”

  The nurse came back in and leaned over the back of the chair. “I don’t talk more about Christos. But safe is not the word. I mean only, he loves his wife.”

  Nina had to get off this line of inquiry. “You knew him when he was a boy.”

  “Yes. His sister I like very much.” The emphasis on sister was intended.

  “What was it like, the island when you were children?”

  Nurse Yannis shrugged. “It is just the same. We have no electricity but just the same. No cars but just the same. Not many tourists. But the same.”

  “Was it a happy island? It seems like a happy place to me. People seem happy here.” She felt the dull inner thud of fatuousness.

  “They are the same like everywhere.” Nurse Yannis was plainly bored.

  “But it was a happy childhood? Lots of swimming and freedom?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  Nina had run out of questions. She looked stupidly at the nurse’s face. Finally Nurse Yannis took up the conversational baton. “And you, you are a happy child?”

  “I was. I was a happy child.”

  “Lots of swimming and freedom?”

  “Lots of freedom. Not a lot of swimming, other than at the city pool, which had too much chlorine in it. It’s not usually warm enough to swim outside in Scotland, though we tried on our holidays, at the seaside house we used to go to every year. Do I speak too fast?”

  “I understand.”

  “My village has changed a lot since I was young. I’ve moved there again and it is very different. When I was a child we played tennis in the street, and skipped in a big skipping rope, a jump rope. We spent a lot of time on bicycles. You know the word bicycle?”

  “Of course.”

  “Sorry.” There didn’t seem to be any way of talking to Nurse Yannis without looking and sounding like an idiot.

  On the long summer evenings preceding the holiday, Nina had walked around the village each evening at dusk and had seen children go by on their bikes, in single file and in safety helmets, exuding anxiety about the traffic, shouting to each other what was safe to attempt and what wasn’t. In the 1970s they’d spread out across the streets as they cycled, and cars had kept their distance, unexcited by the raggedness of their road manners. They had been five, a tight unit: Nina, Paolo, and Luca, plus Becky and Andy, a group that was known as the Old Village Gang, a gang intermittently at playful war with anothe
r group of five who lived on the other side of the high street, in the new houses. It wasn’t ever a Montagues and Capulets level of conflict, although hard fallen apples were thrown, on one heated occasion, illicitly in somebody’s orchard, and Andy had suffered a bruised cheekbone and a bloodshot eye. Nina had taken him home and Anna had ministered to his injuries, clucking and applying a poultice. She’d poured and offered a glass of apple juice, keeping a straight face, watching to see if he got the joke. Mostly it was all harmless fun, and considered perfectly normal. Children hung around on street corners and conspired, then, without being challenged by adults, and set things alight that didn’t really burn, and swung from municipal trees and played tennis in the road, and played on other people’s fields and built dens in hedges. Children were expected to play in the street, to be seen and to be noisy, to congregate and to share ownership of public spaces, which weren’t yet sealed off and designated, issuing their conditional welcome.

  When Nurse Yannis had gone Nina wrote this paragraph down, about how childhood had changed, and felt the pang she felt sometimes, the one that heralded the lack of a daughter to hand her world on to. She wrote another paragraph. It isn’t just love that’s handed down, and the genetic inheritance, and tics and habits of mind. There are other necessary things. Regret. Melancholy. An understanding of loss. It’s begun to mean something to me, not to have anyone to pass these things on to.

  Nurse Yannis came back into the room, interrupting her. “Letter for you,” she said.

  The handwriting was Luca’s. Nina hauled herself up into a more upright position on the bed, swiftly with both arms, pulling uncomfortably at her leg, her shoulder muscles, and tore at the envelope. A single large piece of paper, a good paper, thick and textured, had been folded into three. She opened it out and gulped its contents down, skimming to the end and the signing-off. Then, her heart pounding, she read it again, paying attention to each line.