“It’s bound to be tricky.” He took her hand in a doctorly way. “The last time you saw him, you told him you’d slept with his brother. That’s bound to be a little bit awkward.”
“It’ll be fine,” she said dully. “It’s not like we haven’t talked about it. He needs a holiday; he’ll pop in every day to see how I am and it won’t even be mentioned, because it isn’t appropriate here.”
“That’s possible.”
“But the other possibility is that he’s come to thrash it out, that it’s all he’ll want to talk about. Maybe that’s why he came five days early. Oh God.”
Dr. Christos went and looked out into the garden, and then returned. “Have you given any more thought to my suggestion?”
“I can’t think about that now.”
“This is the best time to decide. Looking forward is your best defense.”
“When are the rentals available from?”
“November the first.”
“Okay. At least, I’ll give it some serious thought.” Nina took a deep breath. “Also, there’s something I want to tell you before Paolo gets here. Something Paolo doesn’t know. Something Paolo mustn’t know.” If she was going to live here, she had to tell him the rest.
Dr. Christos looked at his phone. “My meeting’s been delayed. We have time.”
“I have to tell someone. I haven’t been able to tell anybody.”
“Go on.”
“Where to start. When I came here, to Greece, I mean, it was clear that everything terrible that’d happened was my fault.”
“You’re too hard on yourself,” he interjected.
“I haven’t been hard on myself though, that’s the trouble. I thought I was right about everything. I thought I understood everything. And then when I nearly died —”
“You didn’t really, you know. Nearly die. But go on.”
“There are things I decided never to tell. Self-protective, I thought. I’m getting better; I’m so much better, but a lot of that has been about getting it back in place, the self-protection. Do you understand?”
“Of course. It’s what happens when people get better.” He smiled at her. “They reacquire their old inhibitions.”
They looked at one another.
“I’ve been talking to you for — how long has it been? I’ve lost track. Weeks. But there are things I haven’t dared tell you.” Her voice became uneven, and he looped his arm around her neck and pulled her closer to him.
He said, “This will pass.” His face remained close to hers. “I’m going to get you a brandy from the crisis cupboard. The bottle we keep for accidental deaths.”
When he’d returned with it, Nina said, “The thing is, I’ve always kept Paolo at a distance, and then when Francesca died, even more at a distance.”
“Why was her passing so important?”
She didn’t address this. “When I pushed Paolo away he consented, and then he waited. There were other people I pushed away who stayed away, people who proved to be easily deterred. Close friends, people I’d always thought were friends. I told myself I was happier not having to deal with people, but I wasn’t happier.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, I have so been there, as my American child would say.”
Nina wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “Where does your American child live?”
“In Baltimore, where she was born. One of the girls identifies as American and the other’s Greek and they never see each other.”
“That’s a shame. They Skype, though, I imagine.”
“They don’t. They don’t really e-mail, either. They manage to misunderstand each other even by e-mail. You know, you could have borrowed a laptop and had e-mail and the Internet. It would have been a lot less boring. Nurse Yannis said she’d offered and you didn’t want it.”
“Thank you. She’s right, I don’t want it, not yet. It’s hard to explain, but inside a computer … that feels like somewhere Luca is, where Luca lives, that’s still about Luca and me. That’s how it feels right now. I’m just telling you how it feels.”
“It’s addictive. I’ve had whole weekends that have disappeared, not even getting out of bed.”
“I’m afraid of it at the moment, like I won’t be able to stop myself from reconnecting with him if I return to the old haunts. That it won’t even be something I choose.”
“I understand that.”
“I want to want different things.”
Dr. Christos looked down at the suitcase, which lay spread open on the floor. Some shoes were in it and some clothes; three of the four books and some of the souvenirs, stowed away in their floral paper bags. “Are you packing?”
“Not yet. Just having a sort-out and making sure everything fits. Nurse Yannis has been helping, as it’s difficult to reach down.”
“Has she … has she said anything more to you?”
“About what?”
“Just about anything.”
“Not a word. Why?”
“No reason. You could always leave things with me, for when you come back.”
“I’m counting on Paolo to have room in his bag. He’ll come with six shirts and a razor.”
“Just say, won’t you, if you want to stay a few more days. There isn’t any rush.”
“Don’t you need the bed?”
“Quite the opposite. We’ve kept inventing reasons for you not to be discharged. We’ve massively exaggerated your concussion.”
“You’re joking.”
“Not really, no.”
“Don’t you feel bad about lying?”
“Not remotely. I have no issue with it. It’s just another tool.”
“Just another tool?”
“Of course. Don’t look like that. I bet you lie just as much and as often. About Luca, for instance, and about the timing. It was before you moved out but you said it was after. I lied to my wife for years. She knows that. She knew at the time, but she didn’t want to spoil things and it would have spoiled things.”
“What sort of lying?”
“Other women. Where I really was when I worked late.”
“Ah. Ah, I see, I see.”
He saw the look on her face. “My wife and I — we should never have got married. But when I find her, the woman I need … I’m looking for the person I’ll be with when I’m very old, whose hand I’ll be holding when I die.”
Nina said, “Can I ask you a really straight, blunt question?”
“Fire away.”
“Did you have a fling with Nurse Yannis? Was she one of the women you had an affair with?”
“Nurse Yannis?” It was his turn to look appalled. “Nurse Yannis. No.”
“I’m sorry for asking.”
“You don’t need to be. Ask away.”
“Your wife knew, and she didn’t say anything.”
“She left it to me to feel bad on my own, and eventually I did feel bad, and it was only when I felt bad that she left me. Life’s a funny old game.”
“Isn’t it.”
“Once the secret was out in the open, a whole load of secrets, they had to be dealt with and we couldn’t go on as we had been. We were happy when I was a liar, and unhappy when we told the truth … Are you all right?”
“Could I have another small Metaxa?”
“Of course. I wish I could have one.”
While he was gone Nina had cause to ask herself why she was going to tell him what she was about to tell him. Was it because she was saying goodbye and so it no longer mattered? Or was it because she wasn’t saying goodbye, and needed to know how he’d react to hearing the worst?
When he came back, twenty minutes later and apologetic, Nurse Yannis had delivered the mail and Nina was reading a letter from her father. Now she was overseas he talked to her more than he’d done in years; the letters kept coming. This one was all about her garden and included a list of things he thought she should plant that would suit the conditions. He was going to weed out and clear most of the borders
, he said, but had attached a sheet detailing the shrubs and perennials she might want to keep. He’d divided the page into a grid and filled each box with a drawing, captioned with both the common and the Latin names.
“That looks interesting,” Dr. Christos said. “Have you told me yet — the thing you wanted to tell me? Not knowing what it is, it’s hard to know.”
“I’ll get to it.”
He could read her anxiety. “So what’s come in the post?”
She showed him the beautiful sketches. “This is what my dad’s like,” she said. “He’s relishing this. It’s a project and he’s good at projects. Better at projects than people.”
“Was he a distant sort of father?”
“Not distant exactly. He took an interest in me and we had conversations, though his approach was usually quite purposeful. ‘Let’s talk about weather patterns, Nina. What do you know about how the weather works?’ We didn’t interrupt him in the study unless it was for a good reason. Dad’s a euphoric workaholic, and lately I’ve seen that I could be the same. I’ve found myself wanting to disappear into it.”
“What’s his subject?”
“Modern British history. Right now, the First World War. He loves it, the work, everything about it. Mum explained it to me like that, that it was love.”
“It wasn’t love between your parents?”
“Absolutely it was. Until the bad year, the separation. They were devoted to one another. I thought that, at least. Everybody thought that.”
“Were they wrong?”
“Who knows. People are revisionist about their feelings. They lose sight of how they felt, when they no longer feel whatever it is. Feelings are the hardest thing of all to remember, to put yourself back inside of. Don’t you think?”
“What happened in the bad year?”
“There was a conversation they hadn’t had before. They had a disagreement about what they’d do when I left home. And then my mother moved out. They separated, she moved into an apartment in town, and then a year later she died. She was only my age.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I was the one who found her. She’d sent me out to get shopping. I came back with it and she was dead.”
“That must have been a terrible shock.” He looked shocked himself. “Poor Anna; poor, poor Anna.”
Anna had been too tired to go out, but wanted to do something and decided she’d make a pear tart. Nina returned from her mission that drizzly, ordinary Tuesday with the ingredients it turned out Anna didn’t have — the ground almonds, the vanilla extract — and found her mother stretched out on the sofa on her back, hands folded over her stomach, in perfect peace and symmetry. There was something disturbing about this implied acceptance. Nina couldn’t think what to do: should she call the doctor, an ambulance, the police? What did you do first when someone died? She picked up the phone and dialed emergency services, and called her father and he came straight over. They stood looking at her together, Nina crying into her father’s shoulder.
“That’s not Anna any longer,” he said. “Anna’s gone; your mother’s gone, Nina. She’s passed over.”
He’d used the language of his childhood, trying to comfort her, but neither of them really believed that Anna had passed anywhere. That was Anna. Anna was finished. Anna had come to an end.
“Mum had been ill for months with this mysterious constant tiredness,” Nina said. “She kept saying that she was on the mend but it was obvious that she wasn’t. It transpired that one of her friends — Sheila Medlar — was saying privately to the others that her optimism was a big act and that really she was severely depressed. I hated her for that. Hated her.”
Dr. Christos looked dismayed by her hatred. “You don’t think it was a kindness? Sheila telling the other friends that Anna was low?”
“That’s how my dad sees it. He’s unshakable that Sheila was devoted to her.”
“You don’t think so, though.”
“It was vital to Mum that people didn’t know how low she was. Even me. I was also protected. It was only afterwards when I saw things she’d written that I knew how it had really been. She saw lying to me as protecting me, and her lying was a kind of love. She was determined to be thought to be coping and making the best of things, but Sheila insisted on seeing through it. I can’t see that as a kindness.” Nina looked again at her watch. “Mum never showed the truth to me, not once. That’s the thing that upsets me now. She was always sunny, positive, a rock, but there’s a cost when you’re somebody’s rock, isn’t there? I thought that she was different from other people, that she had a knack for happiness. I still say so, when people ask about her, and ask how she was on her own, after the separation. I continue to be loyal. It’s a kind of a loyalty to the view of her that she wanted me to have.”
Anna hadn’t known how ill she was. She lost faith in life and then in God, and thought that this double sense of letdown was enough to explain the trouble she was having climbing stairs. She returned to the village to see her doctor, and at first Alison was content to latch on to the obvious — recent depressing events — to explain her problems, and gave her drugs she didn’t take. Anna made a dramatic exit from the church Bible group shortly after this, traveling back to the village again so as to end her membership face-to-face. She told them, the assembled company, that she couldn’t any longer believe in the goodness of a god who contemplated suffering as part of any kind of plan; when you stopped believing in God’s goodness you seemed to have disproved the whole idea of God. They were convinced that this dissent was really to do with the breakdown of the marriage. Two women from the group visited her at the apartment, to appeal to her to stay and to find love through fellowship, and then they went to see Robert when she died.
“Anna lost her faith, and I have never had any, and so you’re wasting your time,” Robert said to the women, both of them short-haired and in long, loose dresses. “Worse, you are wasting my time.” One had made the mistake of putting her hand on his shoulder, as if faith were a transferable thing being transmitted through his collarbone, and he’d been very direct about his feelings after that. The women had fought back. Maria had come out of her house to see what all the commotion was about.
“Let me share something with you,” this same woman had said, when visiting Anna and attempting the same maneuver. “Sometimes God makes our lives hard because that’s what we need. Sometimes we need to have a harder life.”
“You think my life with Robert was too easy?” Anna asked her. “What do you know about my life with Robert?”
Nina had tried to explain all this to Paolo, and why it was that she couldn’t — why she physically wasn’t able to — get married in a church. He’d countered with an undeniable fact, that she’d gone with Anna to the midnight service every year on Christmas Eve. She’d found the experience infinitely depressing, all the mystery and beauty of the season reduced to a tedious travelogue of shepherds and inns. She wanted to hear about other things than that, about magic and paradox: how a virgin could be a mother, what or who the Holy Spirit was, and if God really did manipulate the movements of stars. What if the Big Bang that brewed up all our little accidental intelligences also made one freakishly vast one, a chemically induced god who found Himself alone, and also, to His own surprise, mortal? What if His person was physically contained in the expanding universe and had expanded too much, His lights dimming steadily over time? These interesting questions were never addressed.
Dr. Christos said that his meeting had been postponed and that they should get some fresh air: Nina didn’t look well, and there was time before Paolo arrived. Nina looked again at her watch; it was still only 2:45. When they got to the steps to the beach, the doctor took the crutches from her and balanced them against a table. “Lean on me,” he said. “To give yourself a rest from those damn things. Put your arm around my neck.”
“I’m okay resting against the barrier.” Even as she said this, she was already doing so. This was interesting. H
er mind wanted to go forward into a relationship with him but her body didn’t seem to agree. He might know this; he might want to discuss it as if it were a knot that could be unknotted.
“What was it that you wanted to tell me?” he asked.
“I’m too tired.” She regretted raising it now. She shouldn’t even have flagged the existence of the thing Paolo mustn’t know. It was one of those things that must never be told, that grow in scope and danger when they’re shared. Off in the distance, on the beach beyond the harbor, the heat haze had rendered two figures insubstantial, even flimsy, as if they were only a trick of the light. Nina watched them under a sun-shading hand. “I know you don’t believe in ghosts,” she said, “but I used to see my mother when I was out shopping, ahead of me in the crowd and then gone.”
“You don’t see her anymore?”
“I don’t. But I did. I used to see her. That’s what changed my mind about the spirits of the dead. I think they’re real. I know they are. Where does that lead us?”
“You are wonderful,” Dr. Christos said, still facing the sea.
“I like you, too.” It was true, but what else did it mean? Perhaps only that they were in the same predicament. What was going on? She’d lost all faith in judging her feelings. Anna had given lots of good advice about keeping control, but she’d had her heart broken, nonetheless.
One day, out of the blue she’d asked Robert, in what was really only a conversational gambit at dinner — and in Nina’s presence — what he thought they should do when Nina left home. It was a lighthearted comment, whimsical, but he didn’t seem to want to answer. He looked uncomfortable; he started to prevaricate, and so she began to press him — what did he mean, what was the matter? He said he thought that their life together was coming to an end. It had been wonderful, he said, but life was short and it should be about growth and change, when the appropriate time came. Growth and change: Nina had never heard him use this sort of language, and it’d turn out that he’d dipped into the self-help books, despite his disdain for them, looking for ways of having a conversation he didn’t know how to have. Anna couldn’t react at first, to what he’d told her; she sat open-mouthed, having been absolutely wrong-footed. It had been a wonderful twenty-one years, he said, but now that Nina was at college he thought it would be better for both of them to pursue their lives in different ways. He was sure that if Anna thought about it she’d become as excited as he was about the possibility of a new life, of travel, of pursuing new interests.
The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay Page 19