Nina In Utopia

by Miranda Miller

  ‘You cannot have two sets of conscience,’ Henrietta sternly rebukes us. We all look guilty except Nina, who stares back at her sister with hard blue eyes. I used to compare her eyes to celestial pools, but now they remind me of broken shards of sapphire glass. Arrogantly, Henrietta drones on about submission and obedience. Why do we permit these spiritual insults? I suppose they are the wages of her virtue.

  ‘The self must be denounced and laid in dust.’ There would be more dust if she were not in the house. Henrietta’s long nose twitches as she prepares to sniff out our faults. Nina grows more pale and looks so beautiful I almost reach out to her across the red-and-green acres of carpet. Once, on this same carpet, we used to read poetry aloud to each other when the children were in bed. I would stand behind Nina while she sat at the piano singing Italian songs about love. Somewhere in our old pianoforte those songs lie curled and shrivelled, listening to the hymns that have supplanted them. Nina’s hair is very soft, and the curve of her neck at the back, where the fine black wisps curl, always reminds me of a … I was going to say, of an alabaster carving of a tree, but, no, it is the human flesh that is so touching.

  Henrietta does not care for flesh. She turns on Nina and demands that she unbosom herself, pronouncing the word ‘bosom’ with distaste. Her own are so very flat. I wonder if she uses a rolling-pin on them.

  Suddenly there is a flash in the glooming room. Nina’s temper illuminates the fog that has seeped in from the street or out from our brains.

  ‘Yes, Henrietta, I’ll open my heart to you. A bleeding heart, like the one Mama had on the wall of her bedroom. Shall I take my dress off so you can see it properly? Or serve it to you on a dish?’

  Henrietta blushes and looks away as Nina, to my horror, starts to undo her dress. Tommy cries drearily, the servants exchange glances and titter. I am supposed to do something, to preside over this prayer meeting that has turned into a bear garden, but I cannot bear to touch my wife. I indicate to Lucy that she should remove Nina.

  Henrietta sits down to punish the piano, and there is another hymn. I don’t know the words, but I open my mouth and look pious. Henrietta is the only person in the room who is actually singing, her husky contralto would be pleasant if it were not for her intonation of dreadful certainty.

  ‘Content to live but not afraid to die …’ Oh, but I am. And, when I do, a vast stone monument and at least four coffins will pin me down.

  Without Nina the ceremony comes smoothly to an end and we are at last allowed to eat. As I rush into the dining-room with undignified haste I overhear an argument between Tommy and Henrietta on the stairs.

  ‘I don’t want to say any more prayers. I should think God has heard enough from me today. He wants to listen to a new little boy.’

  ‘Now, Tommy, you cannot go to bed without saying your prayers. You must do all you can to make your little mind-house good and beautiful.’

  ‘Your aunt is quite right, Tommy,’ I call out, pouring a glass of Bordeaux to drink with my oxtail soup. ‘Your aunt is always right.’

  And, indeed, by the time Henrietta sits down at the table the good food - better since she sacked our old cook - has restored my cheerfulness. ‘Thank you so much for managing Tommy, my dear. For managing all of us. I never knew the household run so smooth.’

  ‘A man has no business to meddle in the management of his house. You are the nobler sex. You should return from your toil to a quiet, happy home.’

  I wipe my mouth with my napkin and try to look noble. ‘Nina was not always able to -’

  ‘Ah, Nina! I’m afraid there is another problem -’

  I groan. ‘Let me eat my pudding before I hear of it, please.’

  When I have eaten the last crumb of an excellent apple pie Henrietta hands me a green leather folder. ‘I did not want to bother you but felt you should see these very singular drawings your wife - my sister - has made.’

  After Lucy has removed our plates I lay out Nina’s sketches upon the dining-table.

  I see at once that they are the products of a diseased mind. Angular towers loom over a wide road where bizarre carriages move as if by magic. No horses are to be seen. The road is serpentine, winding in and out of the towers in a most improbable fashion. More disturbing is the population of Nina’s phantastic metropolis. Females - for I cannot call them ladies - are very scantily attired, like ragged beggar-maids, with brazen faces and hideous coiffure. Gentlemen, or at least the males of this degenerate species, are also semi-naked, exhibiting their limbs like navvies. It is as if the Resurrection men had dug up graves and flung out the still-warm bodies of benighted criminals. Shameless, vicious, godless, they leer and strut, not yet dead but clearly incapable of civilized life. There is in these savage faces a lack of refinement, a want of delicacy, that makes me wince and turn away. I shudder as I remember that these are the very people Nina admired and regarded as the prize at the finishing line of the March of Progress. I force myself to confront this painful evidence of my wife’s moral insanity.

  ‘Charles? Are you feeling faint?’

  Henrietta pours me a glass of brandy and stands over me anxiously. Close up, she exudes an aroma of camphor and sweat that is most unenticing. Nina used to smell of lavender and hope, and her skin was soft, so soft, perhaps because she had been kept in cotton wool. But for all her personal unattractiveness Henrietta has been a staunch friend in these last terrible weeks.

  I must stop being sentimental about Nina, for it does no good. She has murdered our marriage and has almost murdered me.

  JONATHAN

  AT THE WEEKEND, when I don’t have to go to work, it’s so hard to wake up. This morning my dreams flowed into the morning, leaving a tide-mark of fractured memory. Last night Nina stared at me through the wall with huge, sad eyes. When I walked over to reach out my arms to her the wall became opaque again, and she disappeared.

  I struggle out of bed, make coffee and stagger over to my desk. There is always work to be done, emails to be sent and answered, and I would rather do it than face the void of another lonely Saturday. I switch on my iMac, cheered by the optimistic chime it greets me with, press ‘connect’ and wish it would - connect me, I mean, with the world out there, with who I was when I was married to Kate and who I might become when I find someone new with whom I can share my life. I have a virtual social life, of course - twelve new emails, a white twelve dancing on a stamp, proclaim my virtual popularity.

  Most of them are about work. I sip my coffee and read about the progress of the shopping mall in Dubai and the right-to-light issues of the clinic in Grimsby. They aren’t great monuments, but they will function and stand up. I’m never going to build the romantic follies I once dreamed of, but neither is anyone else. These are commercial products for the global market, and I do at least have work at a time when many architects are unemployed. I earn enough to pay the mortgage on my garret (Nina!) and Ben’s school fees. I still don’t see why he can’t go to the local state primary school, but I don’t want to argue with Kate. We’ve argued enough. I’m just so glad that Ben is going to stay at home instead of being abandoned in a Gulag as I was at seven.

  Replying to my colleagues, I use the bland language of professional friendship: ‘Hi’; ‘Cheers’; ‘Best’. This used to be ‘best wishes’, but that was too specific, so now we just order each other to enjoy the best while having a nice day. We could even see each other on our computer screens, but I wouldn’t want anybody to see me this morning. The seediness of solitude is creeping over me like moss; I’m sitting here wearing an ancient blue jersey full of holes, and the purple-and-green striped silk trousers I rashly bought in Dubai last month when I went to inspect the site. I haven’t combed my hair or had a shower since yesterday, and when I glimpsed my eyes just now in the bathroom mirror they were bloodshot and disorientated.

  I have a message from Dreamgirlocean42. A few weeks ago I registered with an online dating agency, bliss.com. I was sitting here one morning, unlovely and unloved, when a spam
message drifted across my screen. Soft-focus images of a couple showering together and floating through a meadow hand in hand hid my plans for a waiting area with disability access.

  I despised myself for being seduced by this corn, but it turns out there are twenty million of us. The population of a small country: Desolationland. We are spread across the globe, we will pay ten quid a month and go a long way for that shared shower. The ghost of a village matchmaker falls on my bright white screen with advice for long-distance dates: book your own hotel; get a taxi to and from the airport; don’t leave your drink unattended. I’m not looking further afield than London. There are 237 other Jonathans also looking for love, so I have taken Optimistlondon as my nom d’amour or nom de guerre. I’m a cowardly warrior. I wait for women to contact me and then take pleasure in ignoring them. I have already been rebuked by cyberCupid: What are you waiting for, Optimistlondon?

  I open Dreamgirlocean42’s message. She is feisty (not another one!), funky, yet sensitive. A surprisingly lovely woman, she claims. I study her unsurprising photo. She suggests meeting for a drink, and I hesitate to reply. There is no scope for hesitation on bliss.com; you are not allowed to draft a reply but have to bang out an instant response. I’ll reply before I go to the gym this evening. Annabel might be there. She looks alarmingly rich and glamorous and probably wouldn’t be interested in slumming it with me, but she does keep smiling and chatting and doing sexy things with her arms on the adjoining treadmill.

  This is a rather long-winded way of reassuring myself that I’m not depressed or mad. I go through this most days now, while staring at Nina’s corset in the corner of the room. The cage she opened and stepped out of. It’s a formidable structure, metal ribs covered with strips of grubby, coarse linen and a dozen black tapes to squeeze and distort her lovely, slender young body. It smells of sweat and decay and coal dust. Nina’s white underwear - layers and layers of it, like a frilly onion - was threaded with black ribbons because she was in mourning for her little girl. I deleted the photos I took of Nina on my mobile phone by mistake, so that corset is the only tangible evidence that she was ever here. I stare at the wall where I saw her in my dream. I think it was a dream.

  Shall I tell you a joke, Jonathan? If you must. Why is an infant like a diamond? I don’t know, Nina. Because it is a dear little thing. I’ve tried squirting her corset with Artemis for Men, but it still pongs of her sweat. I shall have to get rid of it, of course, in case Annabel and I ever get it together and she thinks I’m into fetishism. As if we’re not both terrified enough of any kind of new commitment. I could probably flog it on eBay - an early Victorian corset, mint condition - but it is the only proof I have. I shall never be able to throw it away. I could hide it in the tiny loft where I have stored Kate’s old love letters and Ben’s toys and the album of photographs of my parents. A loft is the place where you put away your past.

  But Nina wouldn’t stay there. Her persistence is quite extraordinary. Her awful puns hover in the air. Why are young ladies like arrows? I don’t know, Nina. Because they are all in a quiver when the beaux come.

  I went to the Family Records Office at Kew and discovered that there really was a Dr Charles Sanderson living in that house from 1851 to 1865. But whatever was between me and Nina doesn’t grow on family trees. I thought of looking for her grave, but even that wouldn’t convince me. I don’t want to be convinced. There is little enough poetry or magic in my life, so why should I reason her away? That extraordinary laugh, at once childish, refined and depraved. She made everything seem fresh and exciting, even me.

  When I first saw her that evening, sitting on the doorstep, I thought of Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice. The long tangled hair, huge eyes and complicated clothes that struck my first erotic nerve when I was about six. Nina was a fantasy that had been waiting to happen to me all my life, far more potent than any porn I could download.

  A pretty girl complained she had a cold and was sadly plagued by chaps. You should never suffer the chaps to come near your lips. If we hadn’t both been very drunk I probably never would have got around to it. But she was so astonishingly passionate. I thought Victorian women were passive - lie back and think of England and all that. Alice was about seven, and Nina must have died years ago, so I suppose that makes me a necrophile and a paedophile. Well, nobody’s perfect.

  The first night (talking of perfection) I felt like Sir Galahad, which is quite pleasant after your ex-wife has been screaming at you down the phone, calling you a shit and a bastard. I mean Nina so obviously was a maiden in distress, not a homeless junkie or an escaped lunatic (although those possibilities did cross my mind). Her weird clothes somehow added to her mystery and charm. I only saw that she was exhausted and needed a meal, and I admit I was glad of her company.

  For the first year after Kate and I split up it was a novelty to eat alone, but that soon wore off, and I had begun to dread the click of my solitary key in the door. When you open the door of an empty room, silence wallops you. I had developed a habit of switching on the radio or television as soon as I got home to produce a numbing babble of voices or music; electronic companionship that left me feeling lonelier than ever.

  Nina was such good company. Everything surprised and delighted her, and she made me look at London through new eyes. My dreary little flat was her Wonderland, and she thought my Waitrose convenience meal a banquet.

  After supper that first night her tiredness caught up with her and she became weepy. I couldn’t throw her out, so I made up the sofabed for her and primly unfolded the screen I bought in Tokyo to divide my one large room into two tiny ones. It’s made of lacquer and paper, very expensive and rather beautiful. Waves and fishes and women in kimonos act out some scene from kabuki drama on translucent panels. I averted my gaze from even the shadow of her undressing.

  When I came out of the bathroom I saw she had fallen asleep fully clothed on top of the summer-weight duvet. She slept on her side, with her arms crossed and the dark mass of her hair spread out around her, looking as if it might have a separate dream life of its own. Her face was calm and trusting, as if she had wiped out the tears and dramas of the day as Ben does. I stood over her, wanting to cover her in case she woke up shivering in the middle of the night, but I was afraid she’d think I was … a dozen melodramatic phrases came into my mind. Would she know a word like rape, or would she say, ‘Unhand me, villain’? I was tempted to touch her just to see what she would say. I was tempted for other reasons, too, but in the end I just crept back to my side of the screen.

  In the morning I woke at seven. The sunlight threw ambiguity on to the screen so that the fishes and waves and women seemed to be dancing. There was no sound from the other side, and for a moment I thought she might have disappeared. I could see the lumpy shadow of the sofabed but couldn’t be sure that Nina was still lying on it. I got up and dressed, suddenly aware that my weekend would be ruined if she wasn’t there. Then I heard a long, quivering snore. Can ghosts snore?

  The sun warmed my face as I put coffee, fresh orange juice and pains au chocolat on a tray and carried it through. The thud of the tray on the wooden floor woke her. Nina opened her eyes and stared at me in horror, as if I were the phantom. Then she appeared to remember what had brought her here, and tears came into her eyes. I handed her a cup of coffee before she could start crying again. She lay in a tangle of dark hair, dark-green duvet and black dress, a personal forest that smelled none too sweet. Her washing habits were either of the streets or of another century. I sat back in my rocking-chair, out of olfactory range, and observed her as she twittered and gushed over our very simple breakfast.

  ‘And did you prepare all this by yourself?’

  ‘Yup. The butler’s still off duty.’

  ‘Your servants seem to have a great deal of leisure. Oh dear - you are laughing - do you really live here all alone?’

  ‘Except when mysterious women invade my flat.’

  ‘I do apologize. You have been so kind, my presence mu
st be a dreadful inconvenience -’

  ‘Nina, please don’t be so polite.’ She frowned, and I lost patience with the quagmire of mutual misunderstanding. ‘The bathroom’s free, if you want to use it before you go.’

  ‘Where am I going?’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s up to you?’

  Forty minutes later she was still in there. I wondered if she had fallen asleep or slit her wrists or disintegrated back into my imagination. As my bathroom has no window the air conditioning comes on with a roar when you shut the door, and I couldn’t hear any noise above it. I knocked on the door and asked if everything was all right, but there was no reply, only the sound of water running. Then water started to appear under the bathroom door, a trickle that rapidly became a large puddle. The very expensive antiqueoak floor I installed here isn’t waterproof, and I was beginning to think Nina was a suicidal maniac who had chosen my bathroom for some ghastly scene of self-sacrifice. Had she slit her throat? Drowned herself in the bath?

  I shouted and thumped on the door, which opened - she hadn’t even locked it - to reveal a wet, steaming heap of gigantic clothes, taps gushing wildly and Nina, about an inch away from me in the tiny space, very small and crestfallen, wrapped in my white bathrobe. I leaped to the overflowing bath, turned off the taps, slipped on the wet tiled floor and hit my head.

  Above me I could hear Nina wailing that she had killed me.

  ‘I’m not dead,’ I said irritably, climbing carefully to my feet, furious at the damage she had done to my immaculate flat. Then I caught sight of her face, terrified and apologetic under her wilderness of hair, and started to laugh. I’ve always liked Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy; I didn’t really mind finding myself in one of their films. The straight guy in his elegant flat overtaken by the forces of anarchy.