The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  “It’s okay.”

  “Phone calls today, and an inspection, so I’ll be in the office.” The change of focus was abrupt. “You know the drill. I’ll see you later. Get some exercise.” He jabbed towards her with his index finger as he made the point about exercise. Nina looked at this hand, one that was never going to hold hers, never going to touch her. It was over. She went into the bathroom, shedding her clothes and fitting the plastic protector over the injured leg, and stood in the shower for a long time, in tepid water, holding on to the safety rail. What was she going to do now? She was stranded, and nowhere, and there was no obvious path. She’d been idiotic to think that the universe had provided. The universe couldn’t have cared less. The universe didn’t know what caring was; it didn’t even know about knowing. It was time to let go further. There had seemed only to be turnings, pauses, changes of direction, from one man to the other. It was depressingly familiar, this pattern, this context of two possible men. She’d been caught in a closed loop, and now it was time to step outside of the whole situation.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It was hard to know what the other diaries were like because they hadn’t survived. Why had Anna kept this one and not burned it with the others on the garden bonfire, the day Robert said he was no longer in love with her? It could only have been because she wanted him to find it. The fire had been small but its offerings wide-ranging. The notebooks and journals, plus paperbacks of an apparently random kind (no doubt not random in the least) and some clothes went onto the fire, cast onto it one by one, expressionlessly. Nina had watched from her window; it was astounding to see her mother burning books. This lapse from optimism had been Anna’s only period of accusation, counteraccusation. It was a silent one. Nothing further was said between them about the separation or its causes, and she’d moved out the next morning. Robert rang every Sunday to check she was well, and they’d chatted a few minutes about the week they’d each had, as if they were friends. Sometimes Nina had been with her mother during these phone calls, and had seen how civil and friendly Anna was to him, and how hard she was hit afterwards. It was difficult to know if Robert had any insight at all into the overlap between kindness and cruelty.

  Once she had possession, Nina carried the diary around with her, though she slotted it into the kitchen bookcase when she was packing, among her mother’s Norwegian-language novels, the ones she’d returned to when homesick. Taking it to Greece would be a haunted, compulsive thing to do: Nina knew this. Nonetheless, when the alarm woke her in the early morning she went straight to the shelf and picked the diary up and stuffed it down the side of clothes in her suitcase. By then she’d read it so many times that she had it virtually by heart. It was the diary from the year Anna and Robert separated, and it was the opening pages Nina kept returning to, the ones preceding the Easter disaster.

  It all started innocuously enough. After an ordinary New Year week of scribbled arrangements, planning last outings and last meals, the day arrived for Nina’s return to university, for her second spring term. The date of her departure, January 7, was marked by three words, Nina Goes Back, words written in large print and enclosed in a double rectangle. She’d shaded the space between the two so that it looked like a plaque.

  Took Nina to the train. It’s hard to know how to go on with this, Anna had written, returning from the railway station alone.

  January 8: Cathartic house clean, baking, thank-you cards, phone calls. Feel better.

  January 9: Looked at premises for my shop. The house is so quiet that all I can hear is my own mind talking. It’s absolutely intolerable. Sounds like exaggeration. Isn’t exaggeration.

  Nina traced her fingertip over her mother’s handwriting, following its upswings and downward flourishes, the neat, angular precision of the middle register.

  January 10: Cinema. Walk afterwards. Heavy heart. All my life has been about looking after people. As a daughter it was all about being pleasing. That’s how I cared for Mormor, in being pleasing. Then seamlessly I was passed on to Robert, and Robert was easy at first, until Nina arrived and he was so jealous. Underneath this it said, It is Nina who has been the great love of my life. This last line was added later in a different, darker ink. Had it been written during the separation? Was it a message from the grave?

  January 11: Missing Nina so much today that I can barely breathe. Need distraction. Tried Sheila’s recipe for apple crumble. Half and half, rolled oats as well as flour. That is the real Scottish way I’m told. There’s a real Scottish way for everything. And then, added in pencil, Sheila insists on custard and not cream, but custard is barbaric stuff. Egg sauce with apples. Disgusting.

  Later: Missing Nina so much. Crossing off the days. More than one instance of this. Multiple instances of others. Tried to call Nina but had to leave a message. Nina felt bad, remembering not wanting to return her mother’s calls. She’d been embarrassed by getting the daily evening call from home.

  The mood changed when Nina came back in February for a weekend for her father’s birthday.

  Such a good day today. Counting my blessings. Why do I forget to count my blessings? Nina looks more and more beautiful and has no idea at all. Anna had noted down the things they’d done, the funny moments. We misread “misled” as “my-zuld” in the crossword and couldn’t think what it meant. Shortcuts to things now lost. Joke about the sheepdog and the island. Hearts were drawn in the margin. And then Nina went back to Glasgow.

  I’m aware that sadness is making me ugly, her mother had written on March 17. I’m aware that this is noticed.

  And then the following day: I always had an inkling that it would matter. And lo, it matters. Has it mattered all along? It’s hard to say. At first, there was gratitude that overwhelmed everything else. He said so. He called me his angel. He said he was still amazed that I’d said yes. He watched me if I was in a room. That is all over now.

  There was also this: Out in the garden, a single tree is showing its colors. Spring seems counterintuitive this year. Something in me that was open has closed. In some ways it’s better to be closed. It’s what I want to say to Nina, but don’t know how to. Better only to be open in certain ways, but to know how to give all the signs of being open. Better to adopt the hard shell, but make it a beautiful one. An exotic beetle shell with enameled jewel colors. Something had been added afterwards in that second shade of blue. He thinks having a child was the end of us, but actually it was what made us survive. He has no idea. Why else would I have stayed? Among all this, in the pages leading up to April, there were eight instances in which a date was circled and the words The Boy were written next to the circled number. That was all. Nothing else was written or hinted at, until the eighth entry.

  At first Nina had been too afraid to talk to Robert about what it might mean. She’d avoided him for twenty-four hours, letting him talk to the answerphone, and then she’d had an absolute turnaround. She’d run all the way there, across the field to his house, and demanded to know everything he knew, and he’d yielded to pressure. The day after that she’d gone to him again, invited to eat with him. The text message said, Come round for supper. It’ll save on the shopping and washing up, and you’ll have been busy cleaning.

  It hadn’t occurred to her that there’d be cleaning, but it made sense. Her father had always attacked the family house top to bottom before they went away. Nina felt deeply resentful of having to do it, but on the other hand it wasn’t possible to leave the cottage in this state, strewn with newspapers, used teacups, and pizza boxes, because judgment was inevitable. Her dad had a key and he’d come in to water the plants, to close and open curtains so as to outwit burglars and to pick up the mail from the doormat. Housework was unavoidable, but just as she was starting, dear God, no, there was someone at the door, at the window, tapping on it with an unconvincing smile: Gerald Medlar, asking if he could look at the garden. Feeling too ill to deal with him, she pleaded busyness and left him to do his survey alone. She could feel illness coming on,
like something viral. She longed to be in a hotel room, all of her life and history shrunk into one suitcase.

  Robert seemed to have forgotten that she was coming. This wasn’t unusual. There was no answer to the doorbell, nor to her shouted hello, opening the front door to the sweet zigzag drama of Mozart’s violin concerto. She found him in his study, surrounded by books; he was always happiest surrounded by books. In a life that had presented him, in some key areas, with failure, the things that he was better at than most people had become more and more vital; over and over he sought out the drug of intellectual excellence, and scored. Nina stood looking at her father working, his back to her, and remembered other days she’d waited to be noticed. Sometimes it was like he was brought up too fast from deep water, like he was at risk of the bends. Today there was a laptop on the desk, a new acquisition, although he still did most of the initial work longhand, on pads of narrow-ruled paper in a spiky, miniature script that made Nina think of an army of tiny beetles with sharp, small antennae. The laptop was sitting semi-alertly, functional enough to deliver the Mozart, while work continued by hand. Beside it a book in grimy brown cloth sat open, kept flat with a nineteenth-century gadget Anna had bought him, an iron bar with movable enclosing arms that had probably been intended for Bibles. The work in progress attempted better to clarify the period from 1910 leading up to the outbreak of war. He’d been asked to send a sample, the first three chapters and a detailed synopsis, to a publisher, but wasn’t yet happy enough with the chapters to send them. He hadn’t been happy enough with them for years. The further he got down the road with the project, the more the opening chapters had to change, and the beginning was the last thing he was going to be able to write.

  It had seemed obvious to Nina that when they met again, things would be tricky between them, but the awkwardness was entirely one-sided. Dr. Christos came in with coffee and with the mail and seemed more relaxed than earlier. Perhaps confessing having slept with Doris was a burden he’d unburdened. Whatever the case, it wasn’t referred to.

  “So tell me, tell me,” he said, sitting down. “Tell me what happened next. Who was the Boy? Was it Paolo?”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “It wasn’t? It wasn’t Luca?”

  “It wasn’t. It wasn’t Luca and it wasn’t Paolo. It was another boy entirely. Someone else.” She had to remind herself to be normal. She couldn’t take it out on him, her horrible confusion. That wasn’t going to work. She wasn’t going to be weak and needy. She had to keep things absolutely open and possible while she was digesting the situation, the Doris situation and her own. There were ups and downs, but that was normal, no doubt, in the case of second relationships, when both of you were divorced and weary and used up and compromised.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  “I’m fine. I’m just tired.” How often it was used, this line, the fine but tired line, when transparency needed to be avoided.

  “So how old was he, this boy?”

  “Twenty. He was twenty.”

  His eyes went to the diary on the bedside table. “Can I have a look at it?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Why not?” He looked quite put out.

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “Just a second.” He answered a text message, and while he was doing so, Nina picked up the letter he’d brought and opened it.

  He found this distracting. “Who’s the letter from?” He was still texting.

  “From my dad. He’s had a breakthrough on the thing he’s writing.” She turned the page over, a single piece of paper. “And yes, that’s basically all. It’s all about work.” She looked again at the envelope. “Judging by the date, seems it’s been lost in the post.”

  “You have something of your father, too,” Dr. Christos said. “As well as your mother. Your enjoyment of words and your thoroughness. You must have these qualities, I imagine, to be an editor.”

  “I’m very like my father. The irony is that my mother and I weren’t really alike. She wasn’t a reader, barely read at all; even the self-improvement books were abandoned halfway through. She’d want to be doing things. She was a remorseless doer of things. My dad’s idea of bliss is a library and being left alone in it.”

  For a long time, Nina had thought that she was a mixture of both parents, that it was a divide, two extremes that had blended together, that beneath Scandinavian cover of lightness and sun, her father’s darker Scottish soul, shaped by centuries of dour Hebridean ancestors, had worked its way in and made its pathways. People made assumptions and Nina had done it herself, associating Anna’s blondeness, her easy-tanning skin, her energy, and her sky-blue eyes with summer. But of course it wasn’t anything like that simple.

  Nina and Robert had sat in the garden, after their roast beef and potatoes, and at first the conversation was restricted to the holiday, the garden, the keys. Nina knew that she was going to have to bring up the subject that was on both of their minds, or they could discuss putting evening lamps onto timers for quite a while yet. She said, “I want to talk to you a bit more about Mum.” In response, her father said he’d like more coffee, and would she like one? She let him go to the kitchen and have his thinking time. When he returned he was ready.

  “Your mother made you into her very best and closest friend,” he said, pushing down the plunger in the cafetière. “Which was wonderful in its way. Her focus on you. Her extreme focus.” He glanced at her to see how she was taking his use of extreme. “She was never more awake and never happier than when she was focused on you.” He poured the coffee. “But think for a minute how that made me feel. You see, from my standpoint it could sometimes look as if Anna was making a point. She was alive with you in a way she wasn’t any longer with me.”

  “Oh, Dad.”

  “Sometimes it seemed as if it was a way of keeping you to herself and keeping me away from you. The two of you developed that shorthand way of talking, those in-jokes.” He got up, rubbing at his lower back, and began to pull dandelion leaves out of the rockery. “Little blighters are inextinguishable,” he said, pulling and heaping.

  “I always thought that’s how you wanted it. I would have loved to spend more time with you.”

  “Really? Is that really true?”

  “Of course. What do you mean? Of course it is.”

  “You never got enough time to be bored. You never got enough thinking time.” In his own reckoning his detachment during Nina’s childhood had been not deprivation, but a gift. “Your mother was there day and night, wanting your attention.”

  “She was the one giving me the attention.”

  He took handfuls of dandelions to the wheelbarrow. “I didn’t see it that way, I’m afraid. You loved your mother, you still love your mother, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Of course not. But she was the neediest person I have ever met.”

  Now he went into the house and began clearing plates and Nina saw that he would prefer to be alone. She said she had better get going.

  “Have you lots still to do?”

  “I haven’t packed yet.”

  “You’d better get off then.” He began to run the hot water into the sink. “I’ll miss you when you’re away.”

  “I’ll miss you, too, Dad.” She put her arms around him and her cheek against his back, while Robert stood helplessly with his arms raised, holding the washing-up brush. “I must go and get organized. But first I need a pee.”

  As she went out into the hall she heard him saying, “For heaven’s sake, Nina, pee is so vulgar.”

  “Sorry,” she called back. “I just need to micturate.” It was one of their old jokes. Instead of going to the downstairs bathroom, she headed up to what they both now referred to as her mother’s room. Sometimes, on the pretext of needing to find something, she went and looked through the boxes; she’d rearrange things and weed out a few more things for throwing away. As the years passed, discarding some of the things and donating others became easier. There were a
lways objects at the outer margins of sentimentality, that detached from posterity as time went on and the demands of posterity shrank smaller. Some items could be ditched, and some others — a very few things — were put into daily use again. Last time, she’d retrieved the recipe book, which for a long time had been too poignant a thing to take possession of. Its silk ribbon was still at the last recipe, the page for the pear and almond tart, its instructions neatly amended (one more egg yolk, fifty grams more of ground almonds), the page smeared in butter. Anna’s old Smith Corona was also there, on top of a jewelry box. The typewriter had always seemed too personal to give away, but now it was moving to the margin and beginning to detach itself. Its charity shop time was imminent.

  When Nina emerged again, putting a summer dress of her mother’s into her bag, Robert was standing by the coat hooks, holding her jacket. He opened the front door and peered out. “Please go the road way. It’s getting dark.”

  “I’ll be fine. I like the field. I have my phone. Don’t worry.”

  “And you have your keys, I hope.”

  “Of course.” She felt for them through her coat pocket. Keys weren’t just for door-opening. The summer before high school he’d coached her in what to do if grabbed by a man, and a key in the eye had been part of it. Anna hadn’t approved of the coaching. She wanted Nina to go out into the world trusting people and expecting the best of everyone, she said, and not anticipating danger from strangers.

  Robert’s answer to this was always swift. “Remind us how many unlocked bicycles you’ve had stolen from outside the shop, because you prefer to trust people.”

  Nina made her way across the field, following the line of horse chestnut trees. The last of the evening light was horizontal and intensely yellow. She noticed that she had cow shit on her boot; cows were grass eaters, so how was this substance so unpleasant? She and Luca had discussed this once and had concluded that it could only be a kind of weaponry … but she wasn’t going to think about Luca. She noticed how red her skirt was against the dark green of the evening grass, and how auburn her coat, as red-brown as a conker. This alertness might be ominous. She noticed that she was breathing quickly. She registered that the earth smelled of autumn, which had crashed in a month early. There was mist sitting over the stile at the far end, and the smell of new mushrooms.