The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  Standing there with him, only yards from the shore, Nina could see the whole panorama of the life she was turning down. The shuttle ferry was in its dock and the great whale’s-back shape of Main Island lay ahead; seabirds decorated the undisturbed blue and the sun was deliciously warm on her face.

  She said, “You’re so lucky to have all this.”

  He unlocked the door. “Snowing at home,” he said, going in. “Snowing in October.” A few moments later his face reappeared. “Sit yourself down. I don’t recommend the one with the cushion. It’s unstable and might have teeth. The rocker is probably too rocky. I’d go for the basket chair if I were you.”

  Nina sat down, keeping her sore leg extended and lowering herself as she’d learned to. A tabby cat blinked at her from the cushion, its front paws tucked under its chest, sphinx-like in pose and ecstatically relaxed. How would it be, for this to be home and for this to be an ordinary afternoon in her life? She knew that all she needed to do was follow him into the house and close the door and kiss him, and she’d leave Greece with her future assured. It would have been impossible to exaggerate, even to herself, how deep and persuasive the enticement was, the internal monologue in support of making that wrong decision. She also knew she wasn’t going to do it, though this knowledge arrived with its sense of loss already in place. This could have been her life. There was Dr. Christos, making mint tea after a day at the hospital, coming to sit with her on the veranda, and there he was picking vegetables in the backyard for dinner; she’d pour the wine and he’d barbecue the fish, threaded in chunks onto skewers. On warm evenings they could cross the deserted road and go and swim. They could do it naked and in the middle of the night.

  “Would you like cake?” a disembodied voice called out. “I have some that Doris gave me, but it may be a little stale.”

  After they got back to the hospital and were about to get out of the car, he said, “Just one more question. Three, you said. Who was the third?”

  “The third?”

  “The third lover. You mentioned there’ve been three.”

  “Haven’t you guessed?”

  “No. Was I supposed to guess?”

  “Andy. Andy Stevenson.” She opened the door and had to wait.

  Dr. Christos got out of his side in a rush and pulled the crutches from the backseat. “Andy Stevenson. My God. Was this before he made love with your mother?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “I don’t believe that, though — do you?”

  “ ’Course. He said so.”

  “Nah,” Dr. Christos said. “But even assuming not … was this before he had that famously chaste kiss on the sofa with your mother?” His voice was different now, when he spoke to her. Perhaps she’d liberated him from the burdens of a constant and wearying kindness.

  “No, it was after she’d died.”

  The doctor slapped the car roof as if vindicated. “He was the boy who wasn’t a Romano, with the wrong kind of hands! The one you were supposed to take to the wedding and who sent you scurrying to Paolo!”

  She waved at him. “I’m going in now, so bye.”

  “You slept with him on the first date,” Dr. Christos said disdainfully. “Andy. On your only date, even though you didn’t like him.”

  What could she say? She hadn’t known how to stop it, once it started. It had been awkward, embarrassing, and Andy had been insistent. She said, “These things happen.”

  “You slut,” he said, as if it was a joke.

  When Nina went into her room she found Paolo sitting there. “You’re early,” he said, “And our outing has been delayed.”

  She sank onto the bed with a grateful, long sigh.

  “So how was it?” he said, looking up from yesterday’s Times.

  “Lovely, it’s really lovely.”

  “So you’re going for it? Deal done?”

  “I’m not sure. Not because it isn’t lovely, and not because I wouldn’t be welcome, I hasten to add.” She heard Paolo laugh, a short laugh, and raised her head briefly at the neck to look at him. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know anybody else who’d say I hasten to add. I’ve missed I hasten to add.”

  “Ha.”

  “I go to the art gallery now and look at the pictures you used to go and look at, and I go to the museum.”

  “When do you get time?”

  “I’ve been reading books that you gave me for Christmas but that I’ve never read, and some of the books that you’ve worked on, that you left behind.”

  What was this, and what was she supposed to make of it, and how was she supposed to answer? “You’ve been reading books I’ve worked on?”

  “I see you in them sometimes, especially in that one you more or less rewrote. The sentence structure of it.”

  “That terrible murder thing set in the hotel?”

  He was still looking at his paper. “It’s not terrible. You made it less so.” He shuffled down further in the chair and raised the pages higher, so now she couldn’t see his eyes. “I like the idea of walking in your footsteps and seeing things with you, even though you’re not there. It feels like togetherness in a way.”

  Not a phrase came to her. Her vocabulary, her articulacy, her ability to think on her feet: all of it had vanished.

  Nurse Yannis came into the room and took the clipboard from the end of the bed. “It is the end of the chart for you. No more chart.”

  Paolo put his newspaper down. “Thank you so much for all you’ve done.”

  Nurse Yannis turned to the patient. “You are not here for the winter, I hope. I say because it is cold here. People are surprised. It is cold and it is closed.”

  “Not as cold as at home.”

  “And also it is windy, at the top, and the heating is not good there. Also, nobody has English.”

  “Except for Olympia’s sister.”

  “That is true. And now I must attend.” She left them alone.

  Paolo went and shut the door after her, and when he’d returned to his seat, said, “There’s something I need to tell you.” Nina was still looking at the ceiling, and so when he went on, “Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I’m not sure you’re aware that Nurse Yannis’s Christian name is Doris,” she was able to be shocked and embarrassed without looking him in the face. The effects on her system were immediate, surging in. It was like standing in the shallows and being hit from behind by a wave. She was having some kind of physical crisis, perhaps a cardiac one: blood swept into the top of her head and back out of her fingers and she began to feel cold, her hands tingling and feet numbing.

  “I knew that,” she said, rubbing laboriously at her eyes with icy finger ends.

  “You did?”

  “Of course.” She pressed her lips together, sucking them into her mouth, and rubbed at her chin and then at her nose.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Just itchy.” Her heart was pounding, beating hard at her chest wall, and pains were shooting across the side of her head. She looked critically at her hands, at her fingernails, noting the tremor there. Paolo must be able to see it. She wanted to run. She began radically to slow everything down that was herself and that was still within reach. She said, “I must go to the loo before we go out,” and began to rise into a sitting position, still facing away from him. Matters were delayed while she rubbed at her lower back. She said, “I’m stiff today.” The bed seemed to be rising, as if inching upwards in a lift.

  Paolo’s voice sounded far off. “You knew that it was Christos’s wife looking after you?”

  “ ’Course. Why don’t you go and have a smoke with George?” How had she said these ordinary words?

  She couldn’t look at him openly, but turned her head enough to see that he was patting at his pockets for his cigarettes. She waited until he’d gone into the garden, and then she got to her feet, and made it to the bathroom by holding on to things, and sat there for a few minutes, and then after flushing the unused loo she went to the French window
and said, “I’ll be back in a tick,” already turning away as Paolo opened his mouth to respond. She went along the corridor to Dr. Christos’s office, and found it empty, and went straight to the cabinet and found her file.

  ROMANO. Nina.

  It was all in Greek. Of course it was; why wouldn’t it be? She took the top sheet and put the other pages back, pushing the cabinet door noisily closed again, and went out into the corridor just in time to see George going into Nurse Yannis’s office, Doris’s office. She knocked on the glass upper section of the door and was invited in, their two faces looking up at her expectantly.

  “What does it say?” She gave the sheet to George. “The bit at the top in red ink, with the asterisks around it.”

  George looked at it and said, “You’ll need Christos’s permission for this.”

  Nurse Yannis leaned forward and took it off him, turning it the right way round, and said something to George that made him raise both hands in surrender. “Okay, okay.” He turned to Nina. “Suicide risk. It says suicide risk.”

  “What?” Nina cried. “That’s just ridiculous. That’s ridiculous.”

  She heard someone sounding a car horn outside. She heard Paolo shouting, “Nina, where are you? Come on — it’s time to go.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  It wasn’t about being unhappy. This was something Nina knew she would struggle to make anyone understand. It wasn’t that. It was about feeling nothing, and no longer being able to think, and realizing that things had come to a close. The holiday had shown her that. There wasn’t any meaning to the repetition of the days. Waking at the taverna on the eighth morning, she knew that something had changed in the system of herself. New things were spawning and multiplying; it had started in her brain, like a package that appeared in a locked room, and was unwrapping itself and activating. It was colonizing her, imposing itself on her, this new and alien Nina. Thoughts that weren’t hers flooded into her mind, preoccupations that she tried to put aside, to master with her usual thinking, but it wasn’t any good; they kept coming. Unaccountably, she developed a yearning to do maths. At breakfast she tried to devise equations, bent over her notebook, trying to remember how they went and how they were solved, longing for a dog-eared school maths book. She couldn’t seem to stop; part of her mind was like a stray dog that wouldn’t stop following her.

  She became convinced that an underwater swim would help, that water in her ears was going to be the remedy, and set off towards the beach. A tune came into her head and she began to beat out its syllables against her thigh as she walked along, using three fingers to tap it out and finding it fitted exactly; it was three-divisible. She sat down on the harbor wall, ignoring the fishermen, and began to count out the beats of more songs, listing them under three columns; some were fours and some others were fives. It was difficult because her eyesight was going blurry. She was tired, so tired, slipping beneath a creeping exhaustion. She looked back in the direction she’d come in. She needed to go back to bed and sleep, and it was urgent that she get there as soon as possible. She began to make her way back to the taverna, the heat thick as soup. She was slow and everything else was speeded up: the traffic, the way people spoke, the birds overhead — all of it was going at a rush and flashing by. She went in through the taverna’s main door and into the bar, to the foot of the stairs, and paused, wondering if she might need an injection, or a pill: she could see herself in a curtained booth in Accident and Emergency — another three — and her smiling face saying, “It’s such a relief to find there are all sorts of numbers.” That, of course, was a twelve, which was really a three in disguise. She’d been intending to go up to her room but stood on the bottom step and looked up and couldn’t hear anything. It was dangerous up there. Francesca was there with a white cat.

  “Nina?” Vasilios was there; he said, “Are you okay?”

  She scanned his face and couldn’t think of his name. In any case it didn’t matter now. All she could do was retrieve what she could, in armfuls, and retreat and wait it out. What would happen next? She needed help. It could all get worse. Her towns and villages would be overrun, her institutions closed down; the vast, dark forest was already full of little fires. Panic began its ascending, a whole host of miniature panics, starting in her knees and climbing up her sinews with sharp claws like bats. She had to get help.

  “Nina? What’s the matter? Can I do anything?”

  She looked at Vasilios blankly, aware that she was standing very still. She couldn’t answer; everything in her was seizing up and deadening. She had to get medical help. She dropped her swimming bag and went out of the taverna and onto the road, aware that he was following her.

  “Nina, are you all right?” Hearing his voice, she turned to look at him — he was standing on the top outer step of the hotel — and raised her hands, her fingers splayed, pushing him with air.

  There was a boat about to go and so she ran towards the ferry dock, shouting for it to wait, and boarded it just as it was untying. During the journey she marshaled old pieces of memory and remembered bits of verse, the words stanching the unraveling like a tourniquet; it would do until she got to the hospital. She’d meant to go to the hospital on the bus, but instead when it stopped at the market she got off with everyone else and wandered round the stalls, pretending to look at bunches of herbs and bottles of oil, handling things as if she was going to buy them and putting them down again. She felt physically unwell, her knees weak, and decided that what she needed was something to read and a glass of white wine, and to sit watching market day from somewhere close by. There was a secondhand English bookstall, the front of its two trestle tables hung with Union Jack bunting, and so she bought an old hardback and took it to the terrace of a nearby bar, and read until the invading thoughts receded. In their place there came a decision, one that was sweet and obvious. Traveling back on the afternoon boat, she felt almost elated.

  Walking up the hill, Nina was focused only on picking the right location. There were no sentimental thoughts, no doubts, no pangs about last walks or last anythings; sensible decisions needed to be made. She couldn’t, for example, go up too far and risk being seen by the women in their allotments. The hill ascended in stages, rising and then flattening out, and for most of the way it was the same off the side of the road, following the same undulating pattern into the valley. Climbing further, she saw that the village was like a model beneath her, something scoopable in two cupped palms as if from a basin. When she stopped to look at the view she realized that she’d arrived. There was a short descent to a flattened-out area, a wide, brief apron of land that jutted out, where she could be alone and write a letter, and beyond that a sheer drop, which was free fall and joy and an ending. It was a marker of how unwell she was that she didn’t imagine how it might feel, this ending, or what the experience would be like for those who found her. It was all more abstract than that in her mind, like a switch about to be switched off. She knew that she could take this power and use it. She would walk off the edge of the world and then there would be nothing, and no other days would have to be endured.

  First, though, the letter had to be written, a short one — it could only be a short one — that was lucid and unambiguous. Above all it was important to ensure that Paolo knew that none of this was anything to do with him. That at least was what she intended. Cautiously she descended from the road and onto the ledge, holding the gray dress closer and guiding herself against the wall of the slope with the other hand. It was a soft and easy scramble down. Now there was need of somewhere to write, but there was nowhere good to sit, no boulders, and having inspected the sandy, loose surface she saw that there were ants, hundreds of teeming, busy ants; the ledge was alive with them. She climbed back up onto the road and went and sat on a squared-off rock in the shade of the hill. How was she to begin? Onto the old postcard, one bought twenty-five years earlier, she wrote, I should have loved you, Paolo. I wish I’d loved you. I wish I’d let myself. We could have had a wonderful lif
e. Then she wrote, If I could do it all again I’d do it all differently. The message had to be brief because otherwise, given a pad of writing paper, there might have been twenty pages and still not an obvious end to it. Who, given unlimited pages, would have felt that twenty were enough?

  She’d meant to write about the couple at the market, the English couple who ran the bookstall, but it wasn’t possible to do them justice and in any case nobody else would have seen why they were important. She’d watched them, transfixed, from the bar as the argument escalated. He’d said something to her that had shocked her, his wife, so that she stood staring at him, and then she’d fled him, threading through the marketplace in tears, crying noisily so that everyone else who was there paused what they were doing to watch. He’d shouted after her, “You’ve always been a toxic bitch!” Not just toxic, but always. Nina had watched the man to see what he’d do next. He’d packed the piles of stock into his car, boxing some and then throwing the rest in after, one by one, so that pages creased and snapped and covers twisted and exploded, and he’d slammed the boot lid down and driven away. Nina had gone forward to the last section of the book, a published edition of a writer’s diary. She already knew what happened at the end. The writer had seen the dark wood ahead of her. She’d known what it meant and where it led. She’d chosen to make her own exit, wading into a river with stones in her pockets. Nina threw the book into one of the market bins, on the way back to the boat.

  When the postcard was written, she left her bag sitting by the rock and went back down the slope, slipping her way down for the last bit, and walked along the ledge, which stretched for thirty feet or so if you included its tapering off. She stood looking out over the village, the tavernas, the shore and the sea, as the dusk grew deep, dun to sepia and sepia to pink; the sun was ripening and rosy, illuminating wisps of cloud with golden auras. She’d said to Paolo on the postcard that she wasn’t sad, that it was all completed. Her last thoughts, she said, were of how beautiful the world was. She realized that she wanted to illustrate this idea by leaving photographs for him of the view from the hill, the village below her so nestled and safe, the loveliness of the sky and the sea so tranquil and silvery. It was a perfect little world and she couldn’t make herself belong in it. She looked around for her camera and realized it was in the handbag, which had been left beside the rock as a marker. There was nothing for it but to scramble back up the slope, and so she did so, and stood on the deserted road with her camera to her eye. The song had come to her, the one in Spanish that was about Luca and Francesca, his love for her. She’d been taking photographs and singing the song when, having turned the viewfinder from landscape to portrait and back again, she became aware that something huge and white had appeared at her right side.