“Don’t look like that,” Dr. Christos said when she’d gone. “I often eat early and it isn’t an issue. She is becoming absurd.”
The plates held two great mounds of moussaka, its thick slices of aubergine protruding from a brown-tinged bechamel sauce that was scattered with chopped herbs. “Hilariously, for a Greek, I don’t really like lamb.” He looked mournfully at his lunch. “I don’t really like sauces, either, if we’re going to entertain ourselves with a list. You mentioned that you and Luca used to make lists. I’m not keen on spice, spicy things, are you? Celery. I’m not keen on celery. Nor walnuts. Can’t stand sponge cake. Or marmalade. London was constant sponge cake and marmalade. Do you have any aversions?”
“Not really. Only liver. I don’t really like rice and especially not risotto, which has been tricky on occasion.”
They ate for a while in silence and then he said, “Changing the subject, have you thought any more about what you might do? I’ve been thinking about your bed and breakfast idea. I can see how it could work. We could work half the year and go south for the winter.”
“We?” She smiled, trying to make light of it.
“We what?” He seemed puzzled.
“Nothing.”
He hadn’t meant “we.” He hadn’t meant that. His phone rang and he sighed and answered it. “Okay,” he said into the receiver, once and then a further five times at intervals, before pressing the button to end the call. “And so I have to go. Again.”
Shortly after this she heard him talking to Nurse Yannis in Greek, their voices raised. It was clear there was vexation on both sides.
She didn’t see him again until after five. In the quiet of the hospital siesta Nina thought she heard somebody crying, a woman, and when Dr. Christos came back the weeping was explained.
“I’m just going home,” he said, coming into the room. “Heavy day. We lost one of the old ladies. Agatha. Upset us all. Upset poor Nurse Yannis very much.”
“Oh no. Agatha. I’m so sorry.”
Agatha was the old lady in the long pink dressing gown, who’d tried to talk to her in the garden. They hadn’t been able to communicate, but Agatha had smiled at her in a way few people did, with radiant sincerity, as if she recognized Nina and as if she loved her. Nina had returned the smiles in the same way, and it had felt like something real had passed between the two of them. Nina had looked forward to seeing Agatha and exchanging these reassurances.
“She died in her sleep this afternoon. It’s very sad. Life seems very sad today. I’m going home to cook. Cooking relaxes me.” He looked worn out.
“What are you going to cook? I’m sorry about Agatha.”
“She was old and ill and didn’t know it was coming. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, but anyway. Thank you. I’ll make an omelette with capsicum. Peppers. I grow peppers at the back of the house, and aubergines. I eat a lot of peppers and aubergines.” He seemed reluctant to leave her. “Would you like some tea? Let’s have a cup of tea before I go. I wish I could take you with me. In fact, do you want to come? You could, you know. I’ll bring you back again afterwards. I’m the one who authorizes the signing out.”
“I’d better not. But thank you. I’d love some tea.”
When he came back and had settled himself he said, “Do you mind if I make a sort of a speech?”
“What is it?”
He pushed the mint leaves further into his glass with a teaspoon. Nina waited. “I’ve been wondering if maybe it’s best to be direct. In the circumstances it might be best to be really direct. Despite how I look and sound, like shit no doubt, I am feeling, what’s the word … the only word for it is alive. Alive, like I’m coming alive again.”
“Dr. Christos —”
“I know. Timing. Timing is almost everything. I won’t say any more. I should go home. I’m sorry, I’m emotional and strung out today.” He put the tea down and slouched in the chair. “So we need to change the subject now. Tell me a story, would you. I’m frazzled.”
“What kind of a story?”
“Tell me more about the psychiatrist. What did she ask you? I’m interested. If you don’t mind, that is.”
“I don’t mind in the least.”
The hospital was enclosed by a high stone wall and tall gates, and was converted from a sinister Victorian house, one with ugly single-story prefab additions. The outpatients clinic was usually held in one of these, but the heavy rain of August had caused its flat roof to leak, and so the clinic had been moved temporarily into the main building. The receptionist directed Nina through double doors and to the empty waiting room, where she sat down opposite a print that was of two ducks with bow ties going down a country road with picnic baskets held in their wings. When the psychiatrist came in Nina was surprised to see a young woman — she was expecting someone of Alison’s age — brown-haired, faultlessly and sexlessly slender, wearing a brown dress, a brown cardigan, round-toed buckled shoes that were unscuffed, and one of those complicated braids that weave down the back of the head: a neat person and practitioner of order. Nina followed her down a corridor and through another set of doors.
At first this doctor had wanted to know about the separation, which seemed the obvious cause of the recent unraveling. Nina wasn’t able to tell her about what’d happened with Luca, or rather not willing, but something had to be offered up, so she chose childlessness and its griefs as her theme, painting it as a bottled-up conflict that had unbottled itself. Among the fibs and exaggerations there were truths. She explained about the miscarriage and the phobia of pregnancy that had followed, a situation Maria had been skeptical about.
“My husband’s free now to find someone fertile. I think he’ll remarry quickly. I think he’ll find someone quite a bit younger than him. Than me.”
“I see.”
“He wants five. He always wanted five. He had names for them, five girl names and five for boys.”
“It frightened me,” Nina told Dr. Christos. “Not the talk to the psychiatrist, but the hospital itself, the patients, the way they were. The way they’d changed. I kept trying to guide the conversation back to the people I’d seen in the corridors, lost-looking people, randomly dressed. I wanted to know what they’d been before and how they’d descended. It frightened me that the descent might be easy, that I might be at the beginning of it.”
“What did she say?”
“She couldn’t talk about the others. Of course she couldn’t. Patient confidentiality.”
“So what else did you talk about?”
“She wanted to know more about the marriage. I found myself telling her about Luca’s wedding; I found myself telling her what my dad said, the night my mum died, and why it was that I couldn’t marry Luca. I told her about seeing Paolo standing alone at the reception, and having the epiphany, and how I’d never regretted it. Which was true, though Paolo doesn’t think so.”
“What do you mean, after what your dad said? What did your dad say?”
“He didn’t like Luca. Doesn’t like him.” This was true, but it wasn’t the point. “And we talked about my mother. I said to her that I became my mother when my mother died, and she fixed on that.”
“You told me about the day after. The day after she died. Putting on her clothes.”
“The other thing is that I stopped talking. It was Anna who began to speak. My old way of talking … I said that it disappeared like the sea into itself at Corryvreckan. That’s a whirlpool, off the Scottish coast; it’s like the plug has been pulled in the sea. I’m not sure the psychiatrist was convinced that healthy minds can operate in metaphors.”
“It was Anna who began to speak?”
“I was just thinking earlier how different it would have been, if it had been Mum who was here with the broken leg.”
“How would it have been different?”
“She’d have befriended everyone, the whole island; they’d all have been here visiting. She’d have told stories and enchanted you, evaded all your
serious questions, turned your questions on their head and given silly answers. She’d have talked in parables and then made you divulge. She wouldn’t have let you anywhere near her.”
Dr. Christos frowned at her. “Nina, have you undergone — how can I put this — a disillusionment about your mother?”
“Not that. I see her differently now, I suppose. Now I’m older and I know more about her. But isn’t that true of all people once they’re at a distance?”
“Usually it’s the other way around and people idealize.”
“When Francesca got ill it began to be hard work, being like my mother. I realized how much I’d worked at it. There was a crisis and a letting go. I began to be more like Nina, the old Nina, and of course Paolo didn’t like her. He’d never really liked her. It was always Anna he wanted. Then, when I found out …” As she said this she realized that she could hear his feet, his shoes, his way of walking, and only had the chance to say, “He’s here,” before Paolo came into the room.
“Aha,” he said, and then, “More tea, is it. Always tea. Tea and sympathy.” Nina stared at him. “I’m interrupting; I’ll leave you to it.” He swept past them and out into the garden. “I’m having a cigarette with George.”
Dr. Christos went and stood inside the opened French window. “It’s lovely out here now,” he said to the two men. “I’m just going home. Rough day.”
She could hear Paolo’s voice saying, “Hope you have a good evening.”
When the doctor had gone she went out into the garden and found that George was no longer there. She said, sitting down, “Well, that was rude.”
“What was rude? I didn’t want to interrupt. And I just wished the man a good evening.”
“The man? Paolo, what’s got into you?”
“Do you want to come back to the hotel with me and have dinner?”
“I can’t walk that far.”
“Of course you can. Have you tried?”
“The crutches have bruised my underarms.”
“You’re going to have to leave the hospital eventually.”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I want to leave the hospital? I can’t wait to leave.”
“I’m beginning to understand the attraction.”
“What do you mean?”
“The bubble. The being waited on hand and foot by a devoted servant. The man who wants you to talk about yourself all day.”
She was hurt. “That’s really unkind of you.”
“Unkind but accurate.” He was looking at his phone again. “Sorry, there’s a call I have to make. I’ll see you tomorrow.” No sooner had he said this than he was off. Nina was irritated by the constant presence of the cell phone, its third mouth, its multiverse brain and all-seeing eye. She wanted to take it from him and throw it into the sea, but was simultaneously aware of the irony.
When dusk began to fall she went out into the garden. Standing by the steps to the beach, she saw Dr. Christos walking along the shore with his back to her. He came up onto the road and reached the harbor and walked along its wall, along its edge as if it were a dare, swinging his left leg out and over the water. He was concentrating on the way ahead, barely even glancing at the sea; he looked like a man with a lot on his mind. When he got to the other side he turned around and might have been able to see her watching, so she retreated to her room, unaware that Nurse Yannis was waiting for her there. She gave Nina a fright, sitting there so very still. Nina didn’t see her until she sank down onto the bed.
“Shit! Oh! You frightened me, sorry.”
“Why you watch Christos?” Nurse Yannis asked her.
“I wasn’t watching. I went out to look at the sunset.”
“He is in love,” Nurse Yannis said, beginning to correct a cuticle on her thumb.
“We’re just friends,” Nina told her.
Now Nurse Yannis bit at the nail as if it were urgent work. “So I tell him not to come anymore to sit here.”
“You are going to, or you have?”
“Tomorrow I tell him.” She put the lamp on and closed the French window, opened the smaller window and put the mosquito screen in place, observing the evening ritual. “He tells the same. Friends, only friends. But I know this. I see this another time.” She looked at Nina as if expecting her to speak. “He tells me what you say about God,” she added, sounding disapproving. “But it is God who saves you on the mountain.” Nina wasn’t going to get into this. The nurse made a dismissive clicking with her tongue. “You believe in God when you are in the accident. You ask God to help you, in the car.”
“What car?”
“Christos, he sits with you in the car when you go to the hospital.”
“What? No. It wasn’t Dr. Christos in the car with me.” She was trying and failing to see the face of the man in the ambulance.
“Yes. Christos in the car.”
If Nurse Yannis said it was Dr. Christos, then there wasn’t any doubt. Of course it was. Why wouldn’t it be the island doctor, sitting monitoring her in the back of the ambulance? Who else would it have been? She’d thought Dr. Christos was Paolo, a man with only the most basic physical similarity. She couldn’t remember what she’d said, but did remember wanting to say everything. She’d been sure she was going to die, and it had seemed vital that she set the record straight. That being the case, it was possible he already knew what she’d done.
Nurse Yannis said goodnight, giving her a parting stern look, and Nina turned out her light and was almost instantly asleep. There below consciousness she found herself in an airplane crash, on a Greek hill in the dark. Dr. Christos was looking down at her and bending to kiss her on the mouth.
She heard him saying, “Nina, Nina, are you awake?” and opened her eyes and there he was, standing in her room.
“Dr. Christos. What is it?” The bedside clock’s illuminated hands reported that it was only 11:45 p.m.
“I’m just going home. I wanted to say goodnight.”
“Night night. I’m asleep.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow. We got interrupted in the talk about your mother. Was there something you were about to say? It seemed like you were going to tell me something.”
It was dark. She was only half awake. It was an ideal time. “I found out before I came here that she had an affair.” Her voice sounded thick and fuggy, as if she had a cold. “Just before my parents separated.”
“She was having an affair? Anna was having an affair. Who, who with?”
“My dad found a diary, one that maybe she’d left for him to read.”
“It’s the one you brought with you.”
“Yes.”
“She was having an affair. So, who was it?”
“Too tired,” Nina told him, her voice distorted. When he asked further questions she pretended to have gone back to sleep.
He was back just after breakfast, while Nina was writing to her father. She expected him to burst in looking eager for more details about Anna’s fling, but he was gray-faced and darker gray under the eyes. The death of Agatha had caused this, she assumed. She asked him if he was okay and he closed the door and said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Uh oh.” She thought it was a joke. “What’ve you done?”
“Behaved really badly. And stupidly. I was stupid.”
“What kind of stupid?” She put the pen down on the letter.
“I wasn’t going to tell you this.”
“What stupid thing have you recklessly done?” She was reckless herself. She was still confident.
“I slept with Doris last night. My ex.”
“Oh. Oh, God.” The shock was beyond concealment. “What happened? I mean, how did that come about?”
“We were both stressed. I was feeling down about not being able to save Agatha, and then Doris called, worried about her dad, so I went over to have a look at him.”
“What’s wrong with her dad?” Nina managed to say.
“He has dementia. He has bad days. He thinks that
Doris and I are still married and that we have young children and he frets that he never sees them. He talks to little girls in the village thinking they’re his granddaughters. He tries to grab hold of them. It can be difficult. We had a drink, a few drinks; we got a bit drunk once we’d got him to bed, and one thing led to another.”
“These things happen.”
“You disapprove.”
“It’s not up to me,” she said. “I’m happy for you if you’re happy.”
“I’m not, that’s the point. What makes you think that I’m happy about it?” He was openly impatient. “But now, now I’m in trouble, because Doris might think we’re getting back together. We did it once before and got back together and it was a big mistake.”
“I see.”
“The point I’m not making very well — sorry — is that I don’t want Doris. But it’s risky, wanting someone new, wanting something new …” He looked at her and away again. “It’s so risky, so dangerous, and I admit, I don’t mind admitting this: I can feel the pull of returning to the past, being pulled back to safety. Everything I say to you that you mustn’t do.” Nina didn’t appear any longer to be listening. She stared at the letter. “The thing, a second thing, is that I’m worrying now. I worry that you think of me as the kind of man who has affairs.”
“You’re saying you’re not.”
“I’m just lonely, Nina.”
“I understand that.” She continued to look at the letter.
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be.” She was as serious-faced as he was.
“No, I do, I need to apologize. I really am at a low ebb. I’m tired and Agatha trusted me to make her better and I couldn’t, and I’m just really tired. I shouldn’t have talked about sleeping with Doris. Certainly not in those terms.”
The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay Page 25