Dear Nina. The handwriting was terrible. Luca lived permanently at one keyboard or another. Having to decipher ambiguous words to make sense of some of it made the adrenaline course around her system all the harder.
Paolo wanted me to write to you to say some of the things I said to him, but they are things you and I have said to one another already and don’t need repeating here. Please destroy this after reading. Neither of us wants this on the record. I know that Paolo is coming for you, so when you tell him that you received this, you can also tell him that it was an apology to you for how things got so out of hand after Francesca’s death.
I agree that it was April, that it happened, and after you moved out. That was the basis of the conversation Paolo and I have already had. I’m never going to tell him about February. I think we should spare him that. He is dogged, dogg-éd, in many ways, good and bad, and he’d worry that February led to March. I told him sincerely how it was: that it was once and a mistake, and that it was all about my own grief and your comforting me. They were kindness and comfort that went wrong and can’t be put right. So here it is, the big decision. I’m moving to Italy. Probably not for good, but for now and until it feels like time to come back. There’s a job there to do and I can do it well and have a sort of a new life, and I’m in need of that. I’ll be in Rome when you return. Perhaps we can e-mail, but can I ask you not to contact me until you know that you’re in love with Paolo. If that doesn’t happen, please don’t e-mail. It won’t work between us, the three of us, until the two of you are together again. But you knew that already. This much we have learned.
I’m not sure whether to add this or not, but I’m tired and so I’m going to risk it. If our conversation resumes it must never return to the things we said and wrote to each other at around the time that you moved out. Nothing could be distilled out of that other than things neither of us wants to revisit. I hope I’m making sense. I’m not absolutely confident of that. Castigate me about it, when you write. If you write, tell me the trivial things that have always been the most important.
I hope the leg’s making steady progress and that you’ll be pole-vaulting again before too long. Paolo has kept me informed of the basics, the updates, and I hope that will continue. I miss you. I miss our old friendship. You have always been my sister, which is why so much of this has been so weird.
Luca
There was no mention of it, the unforgivable thing. No apology. Instead there was an ink dot beneath his name, where perhaps he was going to write a postscript and then didn’t. Or where, perhaps, he was going to add a kiss before changing his mind.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nina didn’t meet Francesca until the night of the engagement party. This wasn’t neglect on Nina’s part: it would be the first time anyone in the family had met her, since she’d only arrived from Rome that afternoon.
Years later, at one of their lunches, when Luca complained that Francesca didn’t read and wasn’t interested in painting or history or ideas, Nina had asked him, taking care to pick a convivial moment, why he’d proposed to someone he’d known only a month.
“What’s the time got to do with it?” He seemed to be serious. “These things are instinctive. You know straightaway.”
She laughed, inviting him to join her, but he looked if anything more solemn. “She was prepared to take a risk,” he said, solemnly.
“So you said in the letter. She stepped out of the plane trusting you’d given her a parachute.”
“I asked the question and she said yes, even though it might have been a joke. It was a joke, until she answered. She passed the test.”
“It was a test? One I’d failed, then.”
“I knew I needed daring and spontaneity in my life,” he said, not looking at Nina but aware that he’d criticized her, nonetheless.
Now that Francesca was dead, after a battle with cancer that seemed for a while to have been won, Nina was deeply ashamed of herself for never having liked her. She’d not cut enough slack for a person who was going to die young. There could never be enough slack cut for a person who was going to die young. Not treating someone who was going to find themselves in that predicament with the reverence, the empathy that was warranted was always an issue after they were gone. All those last occasions, last interactions, that should have been loving and sincere, that should have meant something definite. It was a situation that mourned its own lack of clairvoyance.
Clairvoyance was topical. Dr. Christos imagined he was being clairvoyant right now, but like Susie he’d got it all the wrong way round. “You left Paolo because Francesca had died, to signal to Luca that you were ready to be with him. Yes?”
“No. The last time I spoke to Luca I told him I would never speak to him again. That was the day I left Paolo.”
“I thought you fell in love.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I thought there was a disgrace.”
“We slept together. Luca and me. That’s inaccurate, in fact. There wasn’t any sleeping.”
“When was this?”
“It was before I moved out. Though Paolo thinks it was after.”
“He knows. How does he know?”
“I told him at the airport. I lied about the timing.” She had a new thought. “I keep forgetting that you’re going to meet him.”
“You can trust me; don’t worry.”
“Paolo would be destroyed if he knew it was before we separated.”
“Understandably.”
“Luca was in a state after I left,” she added.
“Because he thought …”
“Luca assumed, like you did, that I was signaling that it was our chance to be together.”
“Oh, I see — I see now. Luca was horrified that it was just sex; he thought it was building up to something. Then you left Paolo because you realized that you didn’t love Paolo, either. You saw that you didn’t really love anyone.”
“I said to Paolo that he was ripe for an affair, but really it was me. It was obvious that it was me. This is starting to sound like a soap opera.”
“It’s because the soaps are accurate.”
“Paolo thought that I was in love with his brother, when we married, but Paolo was the one who was in love with someone else. Though he’d deny that if you asked him.”
“What? Paolo was in love with someone else? You haven’t said anything about this. Who was it?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Luca and Francesca’s engagement party took place in Maria’s house, in the sitting room that opened into the dining room through double doors that had been wedged open. The house was crammed with dark-wood furniture brought over long ago from home (Maria still referred to Italy as home), dark furniture and prints of Tuscan scenery in gilt frames. Everybody was there who should have been, other than Anna, who had died. There were people who hadn’t seen Nina since her mother’s death, which had happened mere weeks earlier, and who took the chance to offer their condolences. Nina hadn’t wanted to come, not least because she knew she’d bring bereavement with her. She felt like the angel of death at the marriage feast, and so once she’d circulated, briefly and politely, she sat in a corner nursing a drink, watching as the engaged couple were taken round the relatives. Francesca’s unself-conscious laughter rang out again and again. She was elated, and why not — even Nina had agreed that this event should bring to a close the official period of mourning, although a little of its melancholy was revived, as one person after another came up to say how sorry they were about Anna. Francesca, meanwhile, had put lively Italian music into the cassette deck and was encouraging the whole gathering to dance. (She wasn’t to know why it was that the evening had a melancholy aspect. Luca hadn’t explained.) She’d taken on the role of hostess, because Maria was very clearly over-tired. Francesca didn’t mind: she said it was an ideal way to meet people, and took the job seriously, moving around the room attending to the needs of all, fetching drinks and finding lumbar-su
pporting cushions for Giulio’s elderly relatives, who were so frail and old as to be papery, like animations of bones. Over and over Nina heard the story being told of the whirlwind romance that had taken place. She heard it, and failed to have feelings about it. Deep in the possession of a near overwhelming grief, she’d barely even thought about Luca in the interim. She hadn’t allowed herself to. She hadn’t had the energy.
At just after 9:00 p.m., as she was about to make her excuses and go, Paolo arrived from the train station, walking into the room in a dark-blue suit, a pale-blue shirt open at the collar, smelling of fresh antiperspirant applied over sweat, and was greeted with general acclaim. “Here he is, the London Romano!” his father cried out, clasping him around the neck. Paolo was used to Giulio’s emotional response to reunions and took being clasped and kissed in his stride. He left his rucksack by the door and went round and said hello to everyone, starting with his mother, who was sitting to Nina’s left and who introduced him at length to Francesca, before proceeding clockwise around the room so that he came to Nina last. Recently, someone had said to him, “Touch the woman you love, lightly and briefly, when you’re talking.” His hand glanced against Nina’s thigh as he came to rest in the vacant chair beside her. That same someone had said, “When you look into the face of the woman you love, think how you feel about her as you are speaking.” When he said he was glad to see her and she turned to meet his eyes, there was such an intensity to his expression, such soulfulness, that Nina was floored. She moved back in her chair as if she’d been physically pushed there. What had happened to Paolo? She’d never seen Paolo like this. He looked at her as if they shared a secret, as if they were secretly and illicitly in love.
Aware of her reaction, Paolo turned his attention to the wine. “This is drinking so well,” he said to the glass. He looked across the room to where his father was standing, and raised the glass of red up. “It’s drinking like twice the price, three times the price,” he said, shouting above the din of chatter. Giulio, gratified, raised his own glass in return. Now Paolo’s gaze returned to Nina’s profile. “I haven’t seen you in ages. I was hoping you’d come down and visit.” She couldn’t look at him. “I’m sorry,” she said, still looking at Giulio. “It’s been a tough few weeks. I wasn’t prepared for how delayed it would be, the grieving.”
“You must miss her every day. I miss her, too. And I must admit …”
“What must you admit?” The words escaped her before she could stop them.
He blushed. He must have known what she meant. “Just that it’s odd being back here, and having a social occasion without. You know. Without your mother. That presence. Things seem flat, don’t they.” He didn’t seem able to call her Anna anymore.
Francesca came across to them holding a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries, and offered Nina one. “I’m sorry I haven’t had the chance to talk to you properly,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you and all of it very good, obviously.”
Nina thanked her and welcomed her to the family. She said, “Luca’s obviously besotted,” and Paolo acknowledged the handsomeness of this gesture by brushing his hand against her leg again. Generosity was easy, in fact. She could only speak like that because she was too numbed to feel anything.
“Luca thinks of you as his sister,” Francesca continued. “So we’re going to be more than friends, I hope.”
“It’s true, you’re right; Nina is our sister,” Paolo told her. “At least, she’s Luca’s. I’m not sure I’d classify her as mine.”
“Ouch.” Francesca had misunderstood.
Nina had registered a strong and sour wine aroma coming from Paolo’s direction when he spoke, not the high-achieving new red but another that lay beneath it, an underachieving one. He was drinking before he got here, she thought. He drank wine on the train. It was true. He’d drunk a whole bottle of an astringent Bordeaux, for courage.
“You were positively joined at the hip when you were children, I hear, the three of you,” Francesca said. She had nice teeth, even and white, and terra-cotta-colored lips, full and soft. Much about her was soft, in fact: her black wavy hair, which fell in a silky S to her shoulder, the expression in her large and very dark eyes, and the bloom of her skin, which was caramel-tinted, an olive skin that had seen some sun and glowed with a vanilla-scented lotion. Her face was confident and mobile, mapping her changing thoughts and feelings, and she fidgeted as she stood, moving her arms as she spoke, running her hands over her own lower back and hips. She wasn’t thin like Nina. She was ample, curvaceous, luscious. When she laughed her abundant bosom shook and rippled at the top of her dress.
“Look at the two of us,” she said, putting a butterscotch-colored arm next to Nina’s near-white one. “We really couldn’t be more different.”
There wasn’t any way back, only forward.
Paolo and Nina’s engagement party, held in that same room, was a more formal, less relaxing event. There wasn’t any mystery about that different atmosphere: Maria Romano didn’t like Nina. The word Maria used about her was aloof, and Nina was all too aware that she gave that impression. Being at Maria’s made her nervous; being around Francesca made her nervous, and nervousness had made her quiet, and quietness had been misinterpreted, in that way that was classic of a noisy, demonstrative family.
Maria would say afterwards, chastised by Paolo, that she hadn’t treated Nina any differently to Francesca, that she’d given Francesca just the same kind of advice about starting married life on the right footing.
“Not in public,” he’d reminded her. “Not in the middle of the room in the middle of the party.”
The trouble had all been kicked off by Nina’s admission that she didn’t want a church wedding. Maria was deeply upset by this decision. Think of all the people coming from Italy! It was unfortunate that Paolo, in the interests of handling his mother, didn’t say straightaway that he agreed with Nina about the registry office. Instead, he expressed it as a desire to give Nina what she wanted. He thought that was reasonable, he said (reasonable was a very Paolo sort of a word). It was Nina’s day.
When Maria took Nina on, each of them standing holding a glass and a salmon pinwheel sandwich, Paolo was standing on the sidelines, pretending to listen to the people he was talking to but half watching the two of them, like a bodyguard who knows he might have to intervene. Afterwards, he insisted that his mother ring Nina to apologize, which she had done with good grace. All she wanted, she said, was for everybody to have the best possible, most memorable day, and for the photographs to be wonderful — but of course it was Nina’s affair, she added, as if that were self-evidently untrue. Francesca and Luca were there with Nina when Maria rang, and so when she came off the phone Nina was asked to recount the whole conversation.
“It’s such a shame.” Francesca rubbed consolingly at Nina’s upper arm. “It’s such a pity that the wedding’s becoming an ordeal.”
“Francesca,” Luca said neutrally.
Nina looked from him to his wife. “Who said it was an ordeal?”
“You’re becoming more and more stressed,” Francesca told her. “Fighting the family isn’t going to make you happier. Wouldn’t it be easier just to say yes? You are becoming a Catholic, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m an atheist.”
“But Maria thinks you are. She thinks you are having instruction.”
“Atheism is a bit of a stumbling block.”
“You lied to Maria. That’s terrible.”
“Paolo, not me. He wanted to keep her happy until after the ceremony. I agree, I think it was a mistake. But there isn’t much I can do about what Paolo says to her.”
Luca looked up from his newspaper. “He’s such a milksop.”
“You don’t want to have it in your mother’s church?” Francesca looked as if she might know why not. Most things had been explained to her, by this stage.
“I don’t want to have it in any church,” Nina told her.
“But a church weddi
ng’s a real wedding. It’s so much nicer, the day you’ll have, the dress, the ceremonial. The registry office is pretty dire. Have you been inside it?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Luca said, quartering his paper so he’d have a hand free for the coffee cup. “It’s all about the party afterwards.”
“I just think she’d be happier,” Francesca persisted.
“Happiness isn’t the issue,” Nina said.
“Happiness ought to be the issue.” Francesca turned to grimace at Luca.
“I’m perfectly happy, thanks.”
“A word of advice: Maria doesn’t understand reserve. She likes straight talking. She and I have had our moments.”
“And how,” Luca agreed.
“I like straight talking, too,” Nina protested.
“That’s true, actually,” Luca said. “That’s how she got into this mess.”
“I do know Maria, you know,” Nina reminded her. “I’ve known her all my life.”
“You’re saying that the fact I’ve known her for less time makes my insight less valuable?”
“She isn’t saying that.” Luca’s voice was sharper.
“I know that you’ve never got on.” Francesca looked sympathetic.
Nina heard herself gasp. “We’ve always got on fine. What did she say?” The humiliation was like a hot knife.
“Can you see yourself from the outside?” Francesca asked. “Can you look at the situation and wonder why Nina doesn’t just have it in the Catholic church and make everybody happy?”
“Francesca. I’m technically a Protestant, but actually an atheist. My Catholic future husband is also an atheist and would prefer not to have a Catholic wedding. You’re saying — what — that I should become a Catholic solely for my mother-in-law’s sake? Seriously, you think becoming a Catholic isn’t that big a deal?”
The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay Page 13