As she approached over the cattle grid, seeing the house in front of her, Nina was nervous about seeing Sheila, though social encounters had all proved manageable thus far. When Nina had to, she upped her game. It was one of the problems. It made telling anyone how she was feeling impossible. But as Anna had remarked once, when Nina was upset about Luca, a fiction of coping facilitated coping.
Nina hadn’t been to the house for three decades, but nothing seemed to have changed. The door and window frames were still painted grass green; the bicycle stand was still there, and so were the bicycles, apparently the same. They were the kind you don’t see anymore: butcher’s bikes, her father had called them, upright and skinny with bells and baskets, their metal bits solid and black. Nina walked past them and into a porch framed in honeysuckle, the door left ajar. Before she could press the bell the door opened further and Gerald Medlar was in front of her, as lanky as ever, youthful-bodied and upright, though the beard was now white and his eyebrows pale and wild. He was holding a tray of seedlings, and almost dropped it when he saw who was standing there.
“Nina Findlay,” he said, retreating a step and smiling at her as if it were somehow ironic that she stood in front of him.
“Hello.”
“We heard you were back, that you’d bought Miss Plowman’s cottage. How very good to see you. Sheila will be delighted.” He half turned and bellowed his wife’s name into the hallway. A voice from upstairs said, “Gerald? What is it?”
He angled his head away to answer. “Come here! There’s a nice surprise at the door!” When he turned back to Nina she could see that he was afraid. He was going to have to talk to her until Sheila got there. Anna had said once that she thought embarrassment was the reason Gerald bought a house with such a huge garden and tended it so obsessively, that gardening was his refuge from other people, and sure enough as soon as Sheila appeared he made his excuses, striding off across the grass towards the greenhouses. “Back in a tick,” he said over his shoulder. “I just need to deal with these or they’ll dry out. Put the kettle on, Sheila.”
“Let me look at you.” Sheila hugged Nina lightly and stepped back to scrutinize. “Well, just look at you, same as ever,” she said. Sheila, too, looked only marginally different. She’d been Nina’s teacher in her last year at the primary school and must have been at least sixty-five, but although she’d filled out a little, around the belly and the throat, and her hair, still worn the same, was now more salt and pepper than brown, the effect was rather as if a woman of thirty had been aged for a role; there was something unconvincing about it. She was wearing a blue skirt and matching blouse that were almost certainly homemade, that looked just the same as the clothes of decades earlier, that probably were the clothes of decades earlier. She took Nina into the kitchen and told her please to make herself absolutely comfortable, providing a William Morris cushion for one of the sturdy pine chairs. Nina sat as instructed, at a table covered with an oilcloth printed with apples and blossom, looking around the room, which was unchanged, still lined in its original yellow-painted tongue and groove. Sheila sat opposite and reached over and took her hand, and Nina had to concentrate hard so as not to cry. Pity was the worst. Sometimes pity seemed like a low trick.
“You’ll have heard all about it, then.” Nina was aware that her eyes were filling and was furious with herself.
“There are never any secrets in villages. Or rather there are, of course, but everybody knows them.” Sheila laughed, a short, pealing laugh. She’d always believed that laughter was the best medicine. It’s what she’d said to Robert when Anna moved out. Now she put her hand to her forehead. “Tea. I was meant to put the kettle on.” Nina was aware she’d been given time to master herself. “But you’re all right and that’s the main thing,” Sheila’s back said as she lit the old stove.
“I’m all right and that’s the main thing,” Nina said. Was this it? Was this all? She was filled with gratitude. “Tell me all your news.”
“Nothing much to tell. We’re both retired now. Gerald lives in his garden, and I read a lot, and paint and do this and that, and we go away four times a year. Quarterly. Religiously, as it were. Not usually overseas. We’re about to go to Norfolk, in fact.”
“Lovely.” Nina managed to say the word but was awash with melancholy. This was the parallel marriage to that of her parents, the one that had survived, and it was hard to face up to their differing fates. They’d not had children (Gerald hadn’t wanted them, being concerned about population control) and so there was no child who would have escaped being devastated by a separation; there was no child who could have reveled in this, their amiable togetherness in early old age, safe in this farmhouse kitchen, with parents who looked to be immortal. She felt the unfairness of it. She looked across the table and saw her parents sitting there. She aged her mother to keep pace with the softness and elegance of Sheila’s own aging.
“I still see your dad,” Sheila was saying. “As you know he comes over once a week for a cup of something, a glass of something if it’s the evening.”
“I didn’t know. He doesn’t tell me these things.”
“He’ll never change. He was here last night. He’s so happy you’re back in the village. He was talking about your mother and I told him that I still miss her, every day. He said he felt the same.” It’s easy to miss her now she’s dead, Nina thought. Sheila had begun to miss Anna even before she was dead. She said, her back to Nina, at the sink, “I tell him that your mother is with God, but you can imagine how he feels about that.”
Nina looked at her own hands, as if critically, and had to pay attention to her mouth, which was tensing up and gathering, her tongue hard against its roof. “Thank you,” she said eventually.
Sheila brought the tray to the table. “Have you spoken to your dad today?”
“I’m going there after this.” Nina looked at her watch. “So I can’t stay very long.”
“You haven’t spoken, then. Today. Look what I’ve done, I’ve poured without the strainer. Honestly sometimes I think I’m losing my marbles.” She returned the poured tea to the pot.
“Is there something — is Dad okay?” Nina was visited by something ominous.
“Your dad is fine. I made scones this morning so we should eat them; they don’t keep.” She found the strainer and returned with a tin that had once been for toffees. “Heaven knows where Gerald’s got to. He’s probably forgotten you’re here.”
“Dad — he isn’t ill?”
“Oh, darling, no, not ill at all. Hale and hearty.”
“I can’t stay very long I’m afraid.”
Sheila’s shoulders sagged, and her face. “Oh. Oh well. As ever, love goes with you.” She was prone to saying this sort of thing. “Your dad told me you’ve been low, and have seen a professional, a therapist, and I said I thought that was natural, and a good thing. The end of a marriage is a huge event in a person’s life, a person of heart and soul, I mean, and you have always been that.” She cleared spittle from the corners of her lips with her fingers. “Like your mother. Wonderful Anna.”
“Thank you. You’re very kind.”
Gerald came into the room and went straight to the sink, where he washed his hands thoroughly, rubbing between his fingers and over his knuckles, before picking up and using a nail brush with vigorous strokes until he was satisfied. He sat and sighed happily, downing his tea and pouring a second. “So. All well with you, Nina?” He was looking at the post, squinting at the fronts of envelopes and opening them with a paper knife. “Drink up,” he said. “Dying to show you what I’ve done with the garden. There’s some spectacular stuff coming in for the autumn show.”
Sheila said, “Gerald, I’m just going to give Nina the tour first.” She patted the table. “Come on. Quick tour. I’ll show you my work before you’re submerged in dahlias.”
Nina followed her out of the kitchen and back into the hall, over the nut-brown carpet, and saw, through doors left ajar into sitting and dining roo
ms, that it was all exactly as always. The look of the house had been fixed forty years earlier, and it was still furnished with the sort of flat-faced, wood-grainy sideboards and cupboards that spent a decade being disdained in junk shops but are now classified as period in sale rooms. They went up the stairs, where Sheila’s watercolors had been hung in a staggered row: daffodils and roses and snowdrops, things grown and brought in from the garden that had died on the page before wilting; irises flattened like a boned chicken. They went briskly around the three bedrooms, one stylized pretty wallpaper succeeding the next, a transition of dusky pinks and greens.
“But it’s a perfect mess in here,” Sheila said when they reached her and Gerald’s bedroom, picking up a pair of black socks and a towel, which were all that disturbed the pristine neatness. Nina had never been in there before. There was more of the same sort of furniture, and hatboxes that served as bedside tables, piled high with early Penguin editions, their front covers yellowing and curled. There were more botanical watercolors: Sheila said that she’d begun to sell them at agricultural fairs. She asked Nina to say which she liked best, and Nina picked an unconvincing cherry tree, and Sheila took it from the wall, looking at the sticker on the back, and said she could do it for £35, which was chum rate, and Nina could pay her next time. She took a sheet of marbled paper out of a drawer, wrapped it up, and handed it over.
“Cake,” Gerald said, as they reappeared in the kitchen. He was ticking items off on a bank statement. “Cake, Nina. Come and sit down. Can you make a fresh pot, Sheila? This one’s stewed. Made by my own fair hands, Nina. Fruitcake. My special recipe. Just a small slice? Good girl.”
Sheila reboiled the kettle and the others watched her. “Miss Plowman’s house,” she said as she was spooning more leaves.
Gerald had been prompted. “That’s quite a project,” he said. “Would you mind if I came and had a look at the garden? I’ve been itching to see it properly for a long time.”
“Of course you can.” (No, no!)
“I hope you’re steeling yourself for a lot of man-hours. Woman-hours.”
“I don’t want to change much. I like it overgrown. It has a ‘garden of goodness and evil’ sort of look.” Sheila frowned at the description.
“You must put the health of the garden first, though,” Gerald said. “It would be absolutely immoral to let it decay past the point of saving.”
“I think Nina’s garden morality is probably her own affair,” Sheila said evenly.
“I think Nina knows that I’m only trying to help,” Gerald replied, equally flatly.
Sheila brought the tray to the table and Nina looked at her watch. “I’d love to stay but I must get going, I’m sorry. Dad was expecting me five minutes ago.”
“What, no time for the garden?” Gerald said, disappointed.
“Next time,” Sheila told him. “She can’t keep Robert waiting.”
“Well, I’ll say goodbye to you then, Nina,” Gerald said, with such unfriendliness that Nina blushed.
“Don’t sulk, Gerald,” Sheila said, guiding Nina back through the hall to the porch. She watched her putting on her boots. “Happiness, it isn’t difficult really, you know,” she said. “It’s just about being grateful for what you have. Truly grateful, every day, and showing your gratitude to one another.”
How dare you, Nina said, though only to herself, as she rose from zipping and delivered her smiling farewell. “Lovely to see you.”
“Forgiveness is important, dear,” Sheila called after her. “Forgiveness may be the most important of all the virtues.”
Nina waved as she rounded the corner. She realized that she’d left the water color behind.
When she got to her father’s house Robert was standing inside his opened front door, one of his fingers marking the spot he’d got to in a bulky reference volume. He looked anxious. “Sheila’s just called me,” he said, before Nina could speak. “She was worried she’d said too much.”
“What’s going on?”
“It’s about your mother. Her diary.”
“Diary — what diary?”
He turned and walked towards the study and Nina followed, saying, “Dad, what about a diary? Dad, stop. What diary?”
When he came out again he was holding a small book, a fat journal dense with paper, gilt-edged, its once-pale cover much drawn on in blue. “When we were in the attic, clearing out some old boxes last week —”
“Who’s we?” Nina interrupted.
“We didn’t know it was there. A box of your mother’s things we hadn’t known about.”
“Who’s we?”
“Sheila came and helped me sift through it.”
“I bet she did.”
“Nina, Sheila has been kind to me. She said she’d deal with the box and I was to leave it to her. She put the diary in the rubbish bag, but then I checked to make sure nothing we wanted had found its way in there. Sheila didn’t want me to read it. She said she’d look at it first, so I knew there was something.”
Nina held out her hand. “Please, Dad.” Robert gave it to her, though he looked reluctant. “What is it that I should know?”
“Your mother. I think you should know your mother.”
“I knew my mother better than you did.” She felt it again, the old resentment. “You read Mum’s diary? Without telling me?”
“I’m telling you now.”
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
“I didn’t know what to do for the best.” He looked genuinely troubled. “You’ve been so unwell and I thought it was best not to tell you, but Sheila insisted. She’s usually right about these things and she thought you had a right to know the truth.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was Paolo who brought the midmorning coffee in. “I came in to say goodnight but you were fast asleep,” he said, vaguely accusingly. There were responses Nina could have made (Are you saying that I use sleep as an avoidance of you? Because that’s pretty ironic) but she confined herself to apologizing.
He asked if she had spare postcards, and she said she did, but it turned out that the paper bag was empty. Nina’s eyes went over to the window, to the shelf beneath it and the letter-writing case, one constructed from satisfyingly weathered brown leather. Paolo mustn’t open the folder and go foraging and find the card she’d written on the hill. She’d used one of the postcards she’d bought twenty-five years ago and hadn’t used, leftovers that’d sat undisturbed inside it ever since.
Paolo passed it across, and she unzipped it and took out the five cards that had remained unused. Paolo didn’t notice that they were old postcards, but there wasn’t any reason why he would have done. They’d been in the folder and out of the light and hadn’t really aged; the shop still sold the same ones now, the same old images, the same out-of-date typeface.
“I’ll go and write them at the café and send them off,” he said. “I’ll have a bit of sun and a swim and come back after lunch.”
“You’re not staying to come with me to see this villa? Sorry, I thought you wanted to.”
“Sorry, I should have said. I saw the doctor on my way in. He’s got meetings and has postponed. Not that I’m surprised.”
“Why aren’t you surprised?”
He was looking at his phone. “Bugger,” he said. “Bugger, bugger.”
“What’s the matter?”
He was already leaving the room. “Sorry, got to make a call.”
They said sorry a lot to one another now.
When he’d gone Nina took out the postcard that she’d written to him just before the accident. She’d taken it out of her handbag and put it back in the folder with the others, after her things were brought from the hotel. What she’d written there shocked her. Who was this woman, who’d written these mad things? The handwriting was tiny, and got tinier as she’d run out of space. She didn’t recognize herself there, although the simplicity of her opening words, what she had to say about regret, was undeniably moving; she was moved by
her own directness. She folded the card in half, and folded again, then tore it into shreds and put the pieces into the inner zipped pocket of the bag, ready to dispose of elsewhere. She imagined herself swimming far out underwater, using only her hips and her legs together, the postcard held tight across her chest as she took it to its hidden cavern. She was going to have to take it home with her. She couldn’t put it in the bin. Dr. Christos wasn’t a bad person, of that she was sure, but he was the sovereign of this small world and might feel that everything was under his dominion.
Just as she was thinking this, the doctor came into the room and said it was time for a walk.
“I’m too tired,” she told him. “I’ll do it later.”
“They all say that. Come on; let’s take a turn around the grounds, as Jane Austen might say.”
“You read Jane Austen?”
“I do, I read her when I’m feeling low. Persuasion is my favorite.”
“Persuasion is my favorite, too. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who chooses Persuasion.” She thought, this man has been granted to me. She could hear her mother saying, “Wake up! Take this chance! Chances don’t come often!” She’d said once that Nina should be brutal about opportunity; it hadn’t meant much to Nina at the time.
They went around the hospital perimeter, along its smoothed-out paths. It was growing hot, and the doctor held a Chinese parasol over her head throughout, a lacquered red and white umbrella that was embellished with flowers and smelled of old glue. He said that he was having an early lunch because of a meeting, and had asked for Nina’s to be delivered at the same time so they could eat together. When they got back to the room Nurse Yannis was there with the tray, which she put on the table with a little more force than was needed. “It is not fair to the cook,” she said, looking at the doctor. “Think of other people.” Nina was embarrassed about this selfishness by association. The point had been made in her own language.
The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay Page 24