After a pause he said, “It was always difficult.”
“It was me — I was the one she poured all the love into, and when I’d gone to Glasgow, you thought it’d be the start of something better, that you’d be closer. Didn’t you?”
“I hoped. And feared.”
“But it was all a hundred times worse.”
“Nina, I should say —”
“We had our own triangle, didn’t we — I never saw that. I was blind to it.”
“I admit I was lonely.”
“It was what you were trying to say, when you told her you didn’t love her anymore.”
“I loved her very much.”
She heard him blowing his nose.
“I’m so sorry, Dad. I’m so sorry.” She had to spare him any more of this. “And now I’m needed here for exercises; I’m keeping someone waiting. I’m looking forward to seeing you when I get home.”
She rang off before he could reply, aware that it had been a close shave. There were things she’d never be able to say to him. She’d never be able to tell him that her mother had counseled her to avoid love, to avoid risk, to marry wisely, and find romance elsewhere. The implications for her parents’ marriage were all too obvious.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
When he came looking for her the next morning, Dr. Christos found that Nina had gone out onto the terrace and was standing by the steps to the beach.
“About the house-hunting,” he said. “I’m sorry it kept getting postponed; it’s been one thing after another, but I’ve fenced off tomorrow after lunch. Is that okay?” He was already seating himself at the table beside her, the one furthest away from eavesdroppers, letting a heap of files fall onto the table and pulling his chair into the shade of the rectangular umbrella. Nina sat down opposite him. “So, your last day tomorrow,” he said, sadly. “How are you feeling about going home?”
“Nervous.”
He began to look at paperwork. “It’ll be all right. You’ll be back here before you know it. A Greek spring to look forward to.”
Nina turned her head to check no one else was in the garden. “You haven’t told Paolo anything, have you? Things I’ve told you.”
“Things you’ve confided to me? Absolutely not. I am as the tomb when it comes to secrets.” He tapped at his breastbone.
“There’s something else. Something else I wanted to tell you. Something I need to tell someone.”
“Of course.” He put his pen down, and took off his glasses. Now she had his full attention.
“You know I said I lied about the date of the thing with Luca.” She couldn’t call it anything but the thing. “Wait. Isn’t it your day off?”
“It is. Theoretically.”
“So what are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see you.” He said it like it ought to be obvious. “The truth is, it happened before Francesca died, and not afterwards. While Francesca was very ill.” The shock that she’d anticipated wasn’t forthcoming. She had to say it again. “It was before Francesca died, and not afterwards.”
“So, you made love while Francesca was ill.” He wasn’t shocked in the least. “It doesn’t change anything, you know.”
“And then she died. Did you know this already?”
“I didn’t.”
“I was sure you knew this already. I thought I’d told you in the ambulance.” Now at last he looked surprised. “I know you were with me. Nurse Yannis told me.”
“I’m sorry — I waited for you to recognize me, but then you didn’t and it seemed too late to tell you.”
“I didn’t tell you about Francesca?”
“No. Well, you may have done. It wasn’t that you didn’t talk; you talked all the way there. You called me Paolo. You thought I was Paolo — but you see, that also meant you assumed I knew what you were talking about, and I hadn’t a clue. None of the names and dates meant much, and it’s common for people with concussion to free associate. I’m afraid that mostly we tune out. We let people talk.”
“I didn’t even ask myself how Paolo could have got there.”
“You were talking to another man and you thought I was him. We stopped at traffic lights outside the town hall, and there was a cat on the steps. You started to talk about a cat you’d seen at home, and then you got hold of my hand and told me you were more sorry than it was possible to say.”
“I remember that.”
“We drove up to the hospital. You were still talking about time and forgiveness. It moved me very much. You started to tell Andros the same things, repeating yourself as we were getting you out of the car. You were injured and dusty, covered head to toe in pale dust, and making this earnest, urgent speech about love. That’s when you got hold of his wrist. You made a big impression on him. He thought you’d fallen from the sky or came from the sea and had become human. He doesn’t believe in any of that stuff, obviously, but he was actually slightly freaked out.”
The doctor’s phone rang and he answered it, dealing with queries, his profile serious and intent, and Nina watched him talking. He had to be told the worst. He had to be made to see that it wasn’t possible to love her.
When he’d finished the call she said, “Francesca was two weeks from the end of her life. Two weeks.”
He took it well. His reply wasn’t hesitant. “Which has made you very guilty.”
Guilty wasn’t enough of a word. Its black hole wasn’t deep and dark enough. “Beyond guilty. Beyond all other guilt.”
“But it’s retrospective, this guilt,” he told her. “You weren’t to know that’s what would happen.”
“We didn’t. We didn’t know. She was fine until the holiday. She thought she saw us kissing, Luca and me, and after that she thought everything Luca had told her about me was a lie.”
“There wasn’t kissing?”
“Not really. I mean, technically almost a kiss … she saw me leaning forward to kiss him, in the kitchen at the holiday house, but I was only doing it because … It’s hard to explain. There’d been — it amounted to a campaign. By Luca. A whole litany of days, of events. He bullied me. I felt bullied. Two months of it, between the lunch and the holiday.”
“The lunch?”
“The lunch I told you about, the one in which he seemed to be saying he wanted a divorce and expected me to sympathize.”
“He didn’t mean it?”
“After that I tried to cut him off. I mean it. I’d had enough. The way he spoke about Francesca. I had … it was a dark night of the soul. I wanted more than anything not to be around him anymore. I developed a strong aversion to him. But of course we saw each other all the time.”
Being in the same room was inescapable, but Nina tried to avoid having to talk to Luca or meet his eyes, and adopted a new abruptness in her texted and e-mailed replies. She’d tried ignoring him completely, a total cold turkey, and that backfired; he showered her with attention, with Internet links and references to shared interests, with compliments and questions, and he did it publicly as well as digitally, so that she had no option but to respond. Open hostility wasn’t possible. She knew better than to make an enemy of Luca; she’d seen, over the years, that the opponent always came off badly, and there’s no worse enemy than an ex-confidant. What she needed, Nina realized, was to treat him as she’d always treated his wife, civilly but as if his being in the same room didn’t matter, as if it didn’t reorientate her mind.
“Then we got to the family holiday. We always went to the same house, all of us together, three generations to a village by the sea; a lovely big stone house with a beach outside the gate. It was perfect, and unbearable.”
“What happened?”
“The campaign continued. Even from day one. He’d put his arm round me when we sat together. He’d whisper in my ear. He looked miserable and I asked him if he was okay and he said, ‘Things a bit tricky at home.’ What could I say to that? He’d told me he was leaving her. I didn’t have anything to say to him. He’d come and sit wit
h his back against mine, when we were sitting on the sand, and ask me to lean against him. Francesca and Paolo watching! And it wasn’t just in public that he was overbearing. He’d follow me into my room and shut the door. He’d lie on the bed, putting his arm out for me to join him. It was constant avoidance.”
One afternoon, during a siesta, when Paolo was out sailing with his cousins’ boys, Nina became aware that Luca was in the room: she was lying on her front, still asleep, and he got on top of her, putting his face into the crook of her neck and shoulder. Waking, Nina realized she was chilled — it was a windy, fresh day and she had the window open — but no sooner had she realized it than Luca was warming her.
“You look half frozen,” he said, kissing her neck. “White as a sheet.” He forced his arms under her stomach.
She elbowed him, trying to tip him to one side, saying, “Luca, no, get off.”
“All we need now is Pink Floyd.” He got to his feet, apparently unoffended. “I miss those days. Why did we let those days end?”
“It was a long time ago.”
He closed the window, and looked out of it at the lawn. “I keep thinking about our summers,” he said. “Lazy days in the garden with you. Books, the radio, making daisy chains. Lovely sleepy aimless chat. That was the last time I got to relax on holiday.”
Dr. Christos was growing restive. “But what about the kiss, this kiss you were supposed to have?”
“It happened at the end of the second week. I couldn’t sleep, and went into the kitchen for water. It was one a.m., and Luca was there.”
He’d looked up from his laptop and grinned. “Come here,” he’d said.
She went across, thinking he was going to show her something on the screen. He swiveled out of the kitchen chair and looked up at her, in the dimness of a room lit by a solitary nighttime bulb, and put his hands onto her waist, and ran them down onto her thighs. “No knickers,” he said. “Jesus, that’s so exciting. And no bra, either. Come here.” She pulled away and folded her arms over her breasts, looking down on him chidingly. “You seem really alive to me,” he said. “You’ve always been the only other person who was as alive as I was.”
“Thank you.”
“I love you, Nina Olsen Findlay Romano,” he said. “Give me a kiss.”
Dr. Christos had become impatient. “But why did you agree, when you’d come to dislike him so much?”
“The truth is, I didn’t have the courage to refuse. The explanations would have been long and he wouldn’t have stopped; he would have kept at it; he would have found a way to get the whole family involved. That was my instinct. I was — it sounds weird but I was becoming genuinely slightly afraid of him. So I leaned forward to give him the kiss on the mouth; a peck, it was intended to be, merely complying — you understand that? — and Francesca walked in. He saw her before I did; his eyes widened and he pushed back, scraping the chair along the stone floor. The timing was unfortunate and so was his guiltiness. Francesca said, ‘Here you both are,’ with a disastrous kind of tone to her voice. I didn’t look at Luca, nor her. I went past her and up the stairs.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“Like what? Like whining, ‘It wasn’t me; it was Luca; he started it’? It was best to say nothing. In any case I relied on Luca. I’d always relied on Luca to cast me in the best light.”
“But he didn’t?”
“I don’t know what was said. But Paolo had a visit from Francesca, to tell him about the kiss, and about my initiating it. Paolo has come to use the word initiate a lot. So you see, when she died and I was so unhappy and withdrawn, Paolo was sure of what was coming. He thought Luca and I were having an affair. He didn’t believe me, when I said that we weren’t. That’s how I came to say to him that I didn’t think we were any longer in love.”
“Right. But, Nina. Nina. This man who intimidated you, who was a bully — you had sex with him while his wife was dying.”
“I need to tell you how that happened. There was a series of events. There’s more.”
“Go on.”
“After the kiss, we all started to see the effects on Francesca. It started that autumn with depression, with fatigue, and then they found another lump, and it had spread, and nothing could be done.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“In February, when she died, she was supposed to have another six months at least. At least six; six months to a year, they said. But you see, after Luca and I had sex … there was a very sudden deterioration after that. She only lived for two weeks after that.”
“Coincidence. She would have deteriorated anyway.”
“Luca told her.” Nina covered her face with her hands. “He told her what we’d done, and of course then she was sure about the kiss, and what it meant.”
Now he looked surprised. “Why did Luca tell her?”
“Luca can’t bear to look at me anymore.”
“Because of the guilt.” He looked saddened. He shared a little in her desolation.
“He moved in with us so he could torture me.”
“You asked for forgiveness in the ambulance. I didn’t know what I was forgiving you for, but I gave it to you anyway, for what it’s worth. Perhaps not much.” He showed no sign of liking her any the less. “We don’t have to believe in God to absolve one another.”
She said, “You’re a good man.” It was true: a good man, and interesting, and wasn’t everybody flawed in some way or other?
“So tell me. Tell me how you ended up having sex with a man you no longer even liked.”
The night Luca came to Nina was one of a fierce, dry cold, so cold that it hurt even to breathe. It was an evening that he knew Paolo would be out: Paolo was at the company’s annual meeting and was staying on for the drinks afterwards; a man who’d worked closely with Giulio was about to retire. Luca had been excused both events, because Francesca was ill, but then Maria turned up, and was sitting with her chatting and knitting. “You’re going to be fine,” she kept saying, a mantra that interrupted whatever they were talking about, at intervals; a punctuating chorus. Maria was still sure that Francesca would recover, and was knitting her a sweater. Maria’s health, however, belied this confidence. It was striking, how much she’d been physically diminished by Francesca’s disease. Paolo said that he was reminded of a wooden coat hanger deprived of a heavy wool coat, and it was true that Maria’s cheekbones had become prominent for the first time, though her hair, always raven black, petrol black, was still more black than gray. She’d been wearing a new dress, as if cancer was something that demanded dressing up, one which was royal blue and cut like one of the Queen’s, and was finished with a spray of amethysts. Her boys had bought the brooch for her seventieth birthday, and she’d worn it every day since.
Knowing that his mother would prefer to have Francesca to herself, Luca had been busy with e-mail, until at just after nine he closed the lid and got up and stretched and said that if Fran didn’t mind he’d pop in on Bob Gillespie’s leaving do. Francesca said that of course he must go. She lay on her dark-brown sofa, propped up by silk cushions, wearing one of the beautiful dresses that she’d bought when the cancer returned. This one was green silk with billowing sleeves and a wide sash; she wore it with white stockings and white kid slippers, her hair up and fixed with diamanté-headed pins, her face serious but not unsmiling, her eye contact soft and direct. She looked like a painting by Sargent or Whistler.
Nina had visited that afternoon, when the winter light had been dim and silvery, and a log fire had crackled in the grate and all had been calm. Francesca had been into town that morning and had exhausted herself: she’d had to call Luca from the middle of the John Lewis store, in the middle of shopping, unable to walk further. It was entirely her own fault, she said. She’d been warned not to overdo things after the second bout of chemotherapy, and lo and behold had overdone things. She rolled her own eyes at herself, but she was also observably weak, having trouble getting to the bathroom. Seeing this,
Nina had failed to know how to act or what to say; they’d never been friends and being natural was proving impossible. She’d taken refuge in being of practical use. She’d gone for groceries and made tea. She’d taken the crockery to the kitchen afterwards and busied herself there, and then she’d said that she had to go to a dental appointment, an invented one, hugging Francesca’s face to hers in leaving. Francesca had returned the embrace and Nina had burst into tears. It risked being offensive, Nina’s own irrelevant upset, but it had counted for something, that hug; she’d cherish that hug later, when the self-examination began in detail, spooling out of her unstoppably. It was the last time she’d see Francesca.
When Nina got home she found that Luca had texted her. Thanks for coming. Know it’s just chemo that’s made her ill, but it’s frightening. Grateful that you’re always there.
She texted back. I’m here for you. You know that. Always and at any time.
What had she meant by it? She hadn’t really meant anything. She’d heard from Paolo, more than once, in the last few days, that Luca was a broken man, and it had brought on a bout of bad conscience. She had to take the circumstances into account, when thinking badly of Luca. She had to be kinder. What could she do for him other than offer her support?
When Luca turned up at her door, Nina had been drinking wine and watching a recorded episode of CSI. Detective shows had become a habit, amassing on her television on series-record. It had been a drab winter and she went for the ones that had sunshine — CSI’s Miami, The Mentalist’s California. The day had troubled her and she’d had too much to drink; she was opening the second bottle when the bell rang. She went to the intercom bad-temperedly and asked who it was and buzzed Luca into the building, watching from the banister as he began to come up the stairs at a run. Something had to be the matter. She called down the stairwell. “Is everything all right?”
“Just visiting,” he called back, running up two, three stairs at a time.
The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay Page 30