Saying sorry made things worse. This had always been the pattern.
“I’m going back to the hotel,” he said, picking up his jacket and bag. “I’ll be back after dinner.” Pausing at the door, he added, “I don’t think we should talk about this anymore, do you? We’re beginning to regress.”
Nina couldn’t think what to say to him.
A few minutes later Dr. Christos came into the room wearing a white coat and a stethoscope. She’d never seen him wearing a white coat, nor with a stethoscope around his neck, and it occurred to her that they might be for Paolo’s benefit. “Hello, hello,” he said. “Just on my evening rounds. How are things? How is the conversation going?”
She found she didn’t want to answer. “It’s fine,” she said. “We’re talking.”
“I’ll be back after dinner with a bottle of something and you can tell me everything. I want the play-by-play.”
“Actually, Paolo is coming back then.”
“Okay. Well. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He went out of the room, and then returned. “I just wanted to add something. Forgive me, please, for any apparent ebbing and flowing. I don’t want to confuse things, or get in the way while Paolo’s here, and as you can imagine I have certain professional obligations.” He looked towards the open door. “But I want you to know that you’ve become important to me in a short time.”
At 8:35 p.m. Paolo returned, with apricots, chocolate, and a paper bag of salted nuts. “There she is,” he said, coming into the room.
“Here I am. Still here in my monastic cell.”
“Not a bad view from your monastery.”
“The best.” It was hard to smile.
“It’s dark out there already. I’d forgotten how early it comes. It was pretty much dark by seven. And I’d forgotten how many mosquitoes there are.” He scratched at his wrist. “I should have eaten the Marmite.”
“What Marmite?”
“Karen says if you eat plenty of Marmite before coming over, they can smell it in your blood and stay away.”
“Karen seems to know these things.”
“She’s done a lot of traveling.”
“That’s nice. So how was your swim, your dinner?”
Paolo brought the chair closer to the bed, folded his arms onto the sheet, and rested his head on them. He said, “I’m so tired, Nina.” She had to stop herself from smoothing his hair with her hand. “You are still coming home with me, I assume. To your place, I mean. To your home. What’s the plan?”
“The plan is that I’ll stay with Dad and put the cottage on the market, and put most of my stuff in store, and then I’m coming back here for the winter.”
“You’re not going to live at the cottage while making these plans?” He lifted his head, the better to hear.
“I’m not going to spend another night there. Don’t give me a hard time about it.”
“It’s your call.” His head went back onto the bed.
She knew she must never engage with its consciousness again. She must be separate and brief, a visitor. She must pack up and disengage, and do all of this as quickly as possible, turning the key on it, never to return. “I don’t know what I’ll do after that. Once Easter comes.”
His eyes sleepily opened and closed. “You look anxious. Don’t be anxious. We’re going to get through this. It will — what’s that word — normalize. Things will normalize.”
“But in what way?”
“At the risk of sounding trite, I think that if you’ve really given Luca up, anything could be normal that we wanted it to be. We can be exceptionally civilized about this whole process.”
“The dismantling.”
“Indeed.”
“Why do you say ‘if’? You know I don’t want Luca.”
“You always did, though, didn’t you?”
“I just wanted to be near him. I just wanted to keep talking.”
“You were in love, Nina.” He’d closed his eyes.
“It wasn’t that.”
“You say that now.”
“But it’s only now that matters, surely.”
“I don’t think you think that’s true.”
“The chain is broken between Luca and me.”
He sat up again and rubbed his face. “So how do you feel about him going to Rome?”
“How do I feel about it? I’m fine. I hope it works out.”
“He was going to go earlier, but then Mum got ill. He’s going to live near Francesca’s brother. It’s all arranged. The brother arranged it.”
“Last wishes. She wanted him to move far away.”
“Mum’s moving there, too. He’s coming back for her once she’s well enough. Meanwhile we’ve got the carer on full-time hours.”
“Maria’s going, too. Wow. I wasn’t expecting that. Are you okay with all this?”
“Absolutely I am. It’s wonderful for her. I haven’t seen her so happy for a long time. All she talks about now is how much she is going to love living near the relatives that she’s forgotten she fights tooth and nail with.”
Paolo was fine. He was well on the way to being recovered. He could make jokes about his mother in the middle of the conversation.
Dr. Christos came in holding a bottle and three upside-down glasses, their stems between his fingers.
“Oh,” Nina said. “Hello again.”
Paolo stood up. “Good evening.”
It was Paolo he spoke to. “I thought you might like to try a glass of island wine.”
“That would be wonderful.”
“As you’re a wine expert.”
“I’d be very interested.”
“It’s not a marketing exercise; don’t worry. They don’t make enough to export it.” He gestured with the bottle hand. “We could go outside. I’ve had the anti-bug lamps lit for a while.”
“Sounds very good to me,” Paolo said. It wasn’t clear if Nina was invited, but she went anyway.
Once they were seated and extra candles had been found — there was a box of matches in the doctor’s pocket — and the wine was poured, and Paolo had declared it good and unusual, Dr. Christos asked him, “Did Nina tell you that she’s moving here?”
“Naturally,” Paolo said, as if it was a stupid question.
“I have good news on that subject, in fact.” He turned his attention from Paolo. “I’ll show it to you tomorrow, Nina. I’ll drive you up there. It’s a very nice house, up on the hill.”
“How long is it available for?” Paolo asked.
“Until the spring, when the holiday lets start again.”
“It’s available at a low cost?”
“Very low, if Nina wants it.”
“Then I think Nina does.”
“Hold on a minute,” Nina said.
“As long as it’s okay for other members of her family to come and stay.”
“Of course, of course,” the doctor said, looking miserable.
“I will come, too, to see the villa, if that’s all right.”
“Of course. The more the merrier.”
Paolo began to ask questions about the wine. Nina excused herself, saying her leg was aching and she needed to rest, and left the two men sitting at the outdoor table in the dark. She could hear what they were saying as she fought to stay awake. They were still talking about the old world and the new, although only in wine-making terms.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nina opened her eyes and Dr. Christos was there wishing her a good morning. He looked at her chart and she watched his face for signs.
“Pain all gone?”
“I feel fine again. Thank you.” She’d had a severe headache in the night and there had been a well-disguised concern. “What time is it?” It wasn’t yet light.
“Just after five.”
“Why are you here?”
“I’m your guardian angel; didn’t you know that?”
“Nice thought.”
“So what brought it on, the headache? It can�
��t have been the wine. You only had a sip.” Evidently he wasn’t going to mention other sources of stress.
“Bad dreams.” She realized, but only when her grip tightened involuntarily around it, that she was still holding her mother’s diary. When she let go of it and looked at her clammy palm, she saw that blue ink had transferred from its cover, and that the doodles around the spine were smudged.
“What is that?” His curiosity was undisguised.
“It’s not something I could bear to lose.” She put it on the bedside table and closed her eyes. “I’m going back to sleep now.” She wanted to tell him the worst about herself, to blurt it. She’d start with the ghost in the cottage, and how she’d known that it was Francesca; Francesca had craved her deeper commitment to self-condemnation. Or so it had seemed at the time.
Dr. Christos said, “Anyway, I must get home to my dog. I’m on duty at seven.”
She half opened her eyes. “You have a dog? I thought your dog died.”
“I have a new dog. An inherited dog.”
“You didn’t tell me; what’s the story?”
“No story. I don’t tell you everything.” And then, “There isn’t much to tell. It’s a mutt. Its owner died.”
When he’d gone, Nina found that she wasn’t sleeping, but merely telling herself to sleep, and so after a while she gave up and picked up Anna’s journal and read sections of it again. It had a smell, not a maternal one especially but of the house and of childhood: a scent with a hundred obscure unnameable strands. When she’d read it the first time the sorrow had been overwhelming, but now, now was different. She’d found a way of knowing and accepting its sadness. Memories could be retrieved and reinterpreted, like books that were quite different when you picked them up again, years later after life had taken its bite out of you, but having gone through that process Nina felt able to reinhabit the original version of the past. She’d never destroy it, the diary, but she was going to put it at the bottom of a box, just as Anna had done.
It was Sheila Medlar who’d ensured that Nina was given the diary. Robert had been nagging Nina to pay a call on the Medlars since the day she moved into the cottage, so three days before leaving for Greece she’d surrendered to the inevitable and gone to visit them. It didn’t need to be a big visit, he said, but they’d love to see her. It was amazing, he said, that Nina hadn’t run into Sheila and Gerald in the street (not knowing that Nina had gone to special effort so as not to).
Walking into the mini supermarket, Nina felt like her vision was divided into a split screen, half blandly modernized, kitted out with shelves and plastics, and half the hardware shop it had been when she was young. There had been dark mahogany fittings, a counter the length of the room, and Gus McInnes in his overalls, his square face set in concentration as he tried to solve somebody’s plumbing issue, offering gadgets and advice and wrapping both in brown paper. In 1971, when they’d moved there, the shops were already wartime survivals, and Anna had found the old-fashionedness disconcerting. Since she’d died there’d been rapid change. McInnes was long gone, and so was Rudolfo — real name Roger — at the hair salon, which was now the village deli, its sidewalk blackboard promising local cheeses and ice creams, its windows decorated with jars of fruits steeped in alcohol and oatcakes tied in cellophane like gifts. Haig the fishmonger and Rossiter the butcher were gone, too. The village had become huge, formless, part of the city, its once-green lanes lined with modern housing.
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 elect
ric 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.”
The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay Page 23