“I’m sorry if I’m humorless.” She was aware that she didn’t sound sorry. “I haven’t had much to laugh about recently.”
“Oh Lord.” He put his hands one to each side of his forehead in mock horror. “The self-pity continues apace.”
“Self-pity? Self-pity?”
“Don’t shout. The whole hospital is listening.”
She quietened her voice. “Escalation. My point exactly.”
Paolo folded his arms. “While we’re having a heart-to-heart, can I say that it’s always pissed me off, how you and Luca treat me as if I’m not as intelligent as the two of you. Not so intellectually lithe. Luca’s lovely phrase. It was something he admitted to, when he was too unhappy to edit himself.”
Nina began to feel cold. What other unedited things had Luca told him? It was her turn to be affronted. “We have never done that.”
“As if my brain is less evolved. Which is my own phrase, and not one of Luca’s, as it happens. I can use language, too.”
“Who’s self-pitying now?”
“As if I’m unsubtle and blundering, and as if I’m a bit slow in contrast to you two titans of repartee.” He saw her shaking her head. “Oh yes you do. It’s something I don’t miss about having you around. The divorce is absolutely the right thing, isn’t it? It’s good to be reminded of that.”
“Well, that’s charming.”
“You and Luca, your self-congratulatory superiority … You think it was banter that was the problem? Escalation? Why do you think it was so easy for banter to escalate? What lay behind that?”
“Nothing lay behind it. You can’t keep blaming Luca for all of our problems, Paolo. It’s too easy to blame Luca.”
“You’re so critical, you know. You are the most critical, intolerant person. You say Francesca was, but really you were just as bad, only it was never in public, and never with Luca, but always with me behind closed doors.”
“Super charming. Well, I imagine it’s all a lot more soothing to your soul now, now you have Karen in your bed, who thinks everything you say might have been misattributed to Oscar Wilde.”
The argument had brought Nurse Yannis and Dr. Christos to the door. Separate doors. Nina could see part of Nurse Yannis’s leg in the corridor, and the doctor’s right hand at the edge of the French window.
“There we go. Zing. You never used to talk to me like that. Luca’s been a terrible influence, appalling.”
Nina wanted to cry and to be forgiven, but instead she said, “Maybe you should go.”
Paolo didn’t need telling twice. He gathered up his things and left, saying good morning as he skirted around the nurse. She heard the swish of the electronic glass door in the foyer, its double swish as Paolo left the hospital.
Dr. Christos came into the room shortly after. “May I come in? The auditors are in my office and it’s getting too hot out there.” He settled himself in the chair with his usual work bag, his glasses on and a pen behind his ear. Nina opened the novel she’d been reading and stared at the text, and a misspelled word leapt out at her. She folded the page corner down. She could e-mail them when she got home.
He said, “Well, that was a difficult one.”
Nina was still furious. “Forgive me if I’m not yet ready to make it into an anecdote.”
“That’s fine.” It seemed to be. He took a sheaf of paperwork out and assumed the note-making position, one leg balanced on the other, resting the folder on his raised thigh.
“I’m sorry,” Nina said. “That was rude. I’m nothing but rude today. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“It’s difficult having Paolo here.” It was a catch-all diagnosis, pronounced while reading an invoice. “I must admit, I have trouble not rushing to your aid when I hear him yelling at you.”
“We were yelling at each other. Necessary, probably.”
“Be wary — it can be dangerous, the postmortem.” He put the file down and opened his laptop. “It’s easy to think the big row has arrived, the one that clears the air. Big row, makeup sex, vow renewal on the beach. Believe me, I’ve been there.”
“You and Doris? You renewed your vows on the beach?”
“It’s all recriminations in the end. A clean slate is basically impossible.” He looked at her, diagnostically. “Do you want me to have a word with him, to say you want him to go home early?”
“No. But thanks.”
“My advice is, stop explaining yourself — why should you have to keep on explaining yourself? Draw a line in the sand, Nina, Cut the rope.”
“You’re right. I know you’re right.”
“Imagine being with someone new,” he said, squinting at the screen as if that’s where his concentration lay, as if what he was saying wasn’t something important. “Someone you have no bad memories with. No self-delusion. No past arguments. No awful days you have to pretend didn’t happen. No papering over cracks and hoping for the best and suspecting the paper won’t hold. None of that. Zero. No shadows.” He began to type vigorously.
Nina felt it, the upswing, and had to dismiss it. She wasn’t going to be carried along by the hypothetical future. She said, “I know, I know.” She picked the book up and Dr. Christos kept working.
After a while she said, “My mum said to me once, you think that your suffering is also someone else’s suffering, but the truth is that you’re the only person who’s suffering, so take a decision to stop suffering and let it go: just let it go and never think about it again. Not ever.”
“Was she talking about your father, the separation?”
“No, she was trying to get me out of brooding about Luca. I was young. He wasn’t talking to me and it seemed like the end of the world.”
“Your mother spoke a lot of sense.”
Nina turned onto her good side and away from the chair, and watched the open door, its narrow window into the hospital corridor. She saw the old man go by, the one who wore a smoking jacket and velvet monogrammed slippers, limping past very slowly on his walker. She needed to think. One thing at least was very clear: Dr. Christos thought there was going to be something between the two of them. He thought that the thing had already begun. Was there still possibility here? She’d decided there wasn’t, but there was a chance this was just her own intolerance at work. Susie had talked to her about this recently (she was online dating), about middle-aged people being too prescriptive and having far too limited a wish list. “Love can grow out of apparently rocky ground,” Susie said. “I know of examples.”
Nina knew Paolo was right; she was intolerant and critical; she was too hard on people. Too hard on some, too generous to others. How did you fix that in yourself? And how did you know if your doubts about pursuing a relationship were owing to over-stringent qualms, or whether they were down to good instincts, an awareness of a desperate hanging on to a once-lovely idea, as if tenaciousness might be enough? She’d told herself that it was over, the possibility of Dr. Christos and her island life, but it had been necessary to keep telling herself, because something stubborn in her held stubbornly on.
She heard Dr. Christos’s voice say, “You seem unhappy.”
“I’m fine. Just tired.”
“Yesterday you were happy about seeing Paolo, and today fighting with him has made you unhappy.” She didn’t answer. “He’s a powerful force in your life, isn’t he?”
She turned so she could see him. “In what way?”
“I think you’d have a lot more objectivity about things if Paolo hadn’t come here.”
“Objectivity: how does that apply to relationships?” She laughed, hoping they could laugh at the absurdity together, but instead he looked almost bitter. “You’re not going to do a stupid thing and renew your vows on the beach, I hope,” he said. “Like lots of other idiots have done.”
She began to rearrange her pillows, and as she was doing so her phone made its text-arrival noise. Tring. He waited while she looked at it. “Paolo,” she said. Paolo had written to apologize. Seems I
can be critical and intolerant, too. Am not titan, but maybe titanic. She couldn’t help smiling.
“I think you’re going to have to work harder at cutting that rope.” Dr. Christos closed the laptop lid decisively. “Facts need to be faced. You weren’t happy, which is why you slept with Luca. I wasn’t happy with Doris, or I wouldn’t have slept around, either.”
“I didn’t sleep around.”
“The numbers aren’t relevant.”
“I think they are, actually.”
“Kissing, sex, what’s the difference? It’s all adultery. Even this thing of ours is really adultery of a kind.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Men don’t have close friendships with women, not really. You and Luca — it was always foreplay, wasn’t it?”
“No. No, it wasn’t.” She wasn’t going to smile, not in that concessionary way that women did, that meant I might not really mean this, and I don’t have any opinions I hold more strongly than that I need you to adore me.
Nina’s phone rang out, interrupting them.
“Paolo. Where are you?” It was an odd question, but she hardly knew what she was saying.
“Stuck at the taverna waiting for a Skype call. How’s it going?” Evidently no mention was to be made of earlier, or of text messages.
Dr. Christos mouthed, “I’ll go,” and left the room.
“So,” Paolo said. “What have you and your doctor been talking about today?”
Nina sighed vocally. “I can’t. I can’t have any more big conversations. This is turning into a ridiculous day and I’m just not able to.”
“What’s going on?” She could hear him drawing on a cigarette. “I’ll pop up after the call. If you want to see me.”
“I do.” She needed to say more. “I do,” she said again. She had to close her eyes on her own ineptitude.
“Have things got ridiculous with the doctor?”
“No, no.” Yes, yes. “In fact we were talking about Sheila Medlar. Dad and Sheila Medlar.” Even now, she hated to bracket the two names together.
“The dreaded meddler,” Paolo said. She could hear him relaxing. “It was a bit of an error on Robert’s part, letting her mother him. I have a vivid memory of the shirt. The shirt day.”
“What was that?”
“Your dad let Sheila alter his shirt when he complained that it was too baggy for his suit jacket. Ignoring your mother chipping in saying she would do it.”
“I remember.”
“Sheila was a marvel, wasn’t she? That was his word. She’s one of those women who take pride in not having time to relax. She worked full-time and also managed to have a cleaner house. They bonded over time-saving gadgets, her and your dad; a particularly dismal mushroom cleaner comes to mind. All those newspaper advert wonders. Anna was more focused on playing and making a mess. I loved that about her.”
She needed to tell him. “I found stuff out about Mum and Dad, before I came here, that I didn’t tell you.”
“What kind of stuff?”
And yet, she wasn’t quite ready. “We found an old diary. She’d written about being unhappy when I left home.”
It had been sufficient, the generalizing. “I think we were all aware,” he said.
“It was a diary from my second year away. Makes me wonder what the year before was like for her.”
“I think it was very hard. My mother went round to comfort her, the day you moved to Glasgow. I think she struggled after that.” She could hear it in his voice, the tact, the understatement.
“It was my going to university that started it.” She said this and there was a powerful sense of release. Perhaps it would only ever have been possible in this peculiar way, on the phone and in the same Greek village.
“Don’t feel guilty.”
“I do. I always will.”
“She was unhappy even before you left school. We’ve never talked about this, but I think her flirting with me was another symptom. Even before you went to Glasgow.”
“Don’t.”
She heard him light another cigarette. Why was he smoking so much? “Don’t be guilty. It’s not your fault, Nina. It’s not your fault she wasn’t happy.”
This set Nina off; not only the words but the way that he said them. He heard it happening and let her cry. She had to dry her face with the back of her hand. She said, “I discovered just before I came away that she was on antidepressants.” He was quiet. “Paolo?”
“I knew about that.”
“Did you visit her, at the apartment?” Dread flickered deep in her stomach.
“Why do you say it like that?”
Nina cleared her throat. “How often did you visit?”
“I was the one who took round the wine. The box of pills was on the kitchen counter. The antidepressants. Jesus, maybe they were tranquilizers. What year was this again? Anyway, she saw me notice them and put them in a drawer, and thanked me and ushered me out. That’s what happened every time I made a delivery: hello and thank you and how-are-you that wasn’t a question, not listening to the reply. She’d lost interest in me by then.” He dragged deep on his cigarette. “We should be having this conversation face-to-face. I’ll come over.”
“First can I say something else? I’ve always wanted to tell you. The flirting bothered me. It’s always bothered me.”
“Whose?”
“Yours. With my mother. It really bothered me.”
“Her flirting with me, Nina. It wasn’t my flirting with her. Constant flirting with me, when I was, what, eighteen, nineteen? In front of my mother, in front of my dad? It was absolutely bloody mortifying.”
“No, no, no,” Nina said placidly. “You can’t rewrite that particular bit of history, Paolo Romano. You were flattered.” She felt almost drunk. Perhaps they could say anything, everything; maybe even standing in the same room.
“Flattered? You’re joking. My mother was upset by it, which really bothered me.”
“I have to tell you, you looked pretty happy at the time.”
“She chaperoned you so much. You were joined at the hip. Nobody could get anywhere near you. You were always with Luca and me or with your mother.”
“Er … this is a bit off point, isn’t it?”
“It was also about keeping the boys away, I think. Apart from me; she felt in control of things if it was me. It wasn’t just me that she flirted with, you know. Luca. Andy Stevenson. Boys at the tennis club.”
“Why do you mention Andy?”
“They played tennis together.”
“Did they? I didn’t know that.”
“And then if we sat in your garden she’d be in and out, trying to join in, eavesdropping.”
“She approved of you. She was the one who urged me to go out with you. You remember, when you came and took me to the cinema that night? My mum in her yellow dress?”
“When you came into the kitchen, she’d just put her hand against my lower back, actually almost onto my arse, when she was leaning on me to pick up a hair clip that had fallen out.”
Nina began to feel shivery. “You were the one who kept landing on her, accidentally on purpose, at the concert for Maria’s birthday.”
“Not on purpose at all. Not at all. She stroked my hand. She put her hands on top of my head and it didn’t feel as if she was going to let go again. On my mother’s birthday, Nina. My mother was upset, in the car on the way home. You must remember how your mum flirted with my dad at all those get-togethers.”
“She liked your dad.”
There was a pause, a muttered expletive. He seemed to be talking to someone else, away from the receiver.
“Is someone else there with you?”
“It’s Skype. It’s kicking in. Sorry to cut you off, but I’m going to have to go. I’m supposed to be in a conference call. I’ll be in later.”
“Work to do, even here? Can’t you leave it behind even for a few days?”
“You sound like Francesca. And no, sa
dly not. There’s a big deal going down, which I will tell you about when I see you. Plus I haven’t called Karen today. So I’m signing off. I’ll see you soon.”
Nina looked out of the window and saw Dr. Christos there, sitting at a table working. Perhaps he wasn’t really working. Perhaps he’d positioned himself so he could listen in. Perhaps he was on the Internet. Perhaps he was e-mailing a friend and discussing her, perhaps only her body. Perhaps he was having a conversation with Doris that belied everything. Nina realized that she’d become someone who was quick to lose trust in people. How did you start trusting people again, when your faith in someone vital had been betrayed?
It couldn’t wait any longer. She picked up her phone and rang her father.
“Nina! How lovely. How are you?”
“I’m so much better. I’m on the mend.”
“Very relieved to hear it.”
“There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you.”
He waited.
“What I wanted to say to you.” She paused. It was difficult to put it into words. “I don’t want to start something, a big emotional conversation. That’s not why I’m calling. It’s the opposite, in a way, the end of a conversation we’ve already had. The part that was missing.”
“And what’s that, darling?” His voice was unsteady. Perhaps he already knew.
“Can we agree not to talk about this again? Before I say it, the thing I want to say. I don’t want you to feel, when I come home, that I’m expecting that this is the start of some huge … conference, going over things. I don’t want it to be that.”
“Goodness me. What on earth is it?” He was trying to keep it light.
“I know. I’m getting into this huge preamble. And it’s a simple thing, really.”
“Go on.”
“I thought, for a long time, the longest time, that you didn’t love her, Mum, that you weren’t capable of giving the love she needed …”
Robert waited. She heard him breathing.
“But … I’ve started to see that perhaps it was the other way around.”
The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay Page 29