The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (16 page)

Sometimes Paolo made the mistake of remarking that his Mondays were more to be dreaded than hers. What could she say to him? She loved her job. All she dreaded about the working week was Paolo’s being brought low by it. “I know you work harder than me,” she’d concede. It seemed important to be emphatic and to keep conceding this. It was incontestable that Paolo worked very long hours. He had to: once Giulio died, the year Paolo turned thirty, the business was basically down to him, and as the years rolled on it operated on tighter and tighter margins. Its engine was constant maintenance, constant vigilance, which was something Luca never really seemed to get. At least, he acted as if he didn’t get it. Luca worked a principled seven-hour day on the basis of work-life balance, leaving his brother to pick up the slack, and if he was challenged about it he’d maintain that Paolo’s approach was inefficient, even obsessive. Francesca talked as if she and Luca were the royal line, and Paolo the king’s
brother. “Things are always hectic at work,” she’d say. “Luca manages to take time off. You need to learn to delegate.” But Paolo had tried and failed to delegate. He’d be tired at the weekend and then he’d go back to the office at 8:00 a.m. on Monday and wouldn’t much be seen for the following five days, other than to come home late and fall asleep in front of
Newsnight
. He’d generally be found in his home office on a Saturday morning, and also on a Sunday night, and it was a situation that couldn’t be helped. They’d had that argument once and it wasn’t repeated. Saturday afternoons, though, were designated as couple time. He and Nina would go out into the city together; they’d do the shopping and come home to read the papers, with music playing (über-gloomy German lieder, as Luca put it); they’d cook and eat and watch films. In retrospect it was all highly and repetitively scheduled, with little oxygen let into its habitualness. There wasn’t much in the way of lingering eye contact, little in the way of daring to be purposeless and alone.

The usual pattern on a Sunday was that they’d sleep in, do chores, and be at Maria’s by midday. They wouldn’t often be home again till 4:00 p.m. or even later. Everybody knew the reason that lunch was prolonged: it was because Luca and Nina found it hard to say goodbye to one another. Their weekly reunion had a quality to it that was like something long delayed. Paolo and Francesca would hear about things neither had mentioned, that had been saved up, and also things they’d heard about in brief, that were extended and reframed into comedy.

Once, in the tenth year of the marriage, Paolo was startled to discover that Nina and Luca were holding hands at the lunch table. This wasn’t something he could pretend not to know. He hadn’t ever had cause to drum up a hierarchy of betrayal, but just for that minute, right then, hand-holding at a family occasion
seemed far worse than meeting in secret. Something had to be done; he knew he couldn’t go home with nothing said, festering and menaced by fear, so as they left their mother’s house he took hold of his brother’s arm to signal that he wanted a word. It was a private moment and safe to speak up: Maria was putting dishes away noisily in her kitchen; Nina and Francesca had gone ahead and were standing talking in the garden. Paolo paused his brother in Maria’s porch, among the pink pelargoniums that grew there on shelves.

“Can I ask you please, not to,” he said. He had to be formal. He didn’t trust himself to be calm.

“Not to what?” Luca didn’t seem to know.

Paolo turned so that his back was to the women. “Nina’s hand.” It was hard to say it in a whole sentence.

“It was Nina.”

“Doesn’t matter who it was. Don’t.” Luca was surprised by the forcefulness. Paolo was always unfailingly polite.

“She was the one who held mine,” Luca said quietly, glancing at his wife. Francesca was telling Nina about her Italian relatives, who lived in a village without gardens; who worked in the fields and hated even the idea of gardening.

“Don’t.”

“It doesn’t mean anything. But no. Not again.”

“There are other people here who’d misinterpret it.” That was the gallant approach to issuing a warning. Paolo was always conscious of the gallantry in things, or lack of it.

“I know,” Luca conceded. He didn’t acknowledge that he’d been warned.

Paolo could feel his reasonableness, his famed reasonableness, beginning to fray. “Don’t do this.”

“There isn’t a
this
,” Luca told him.

Paolo managed to lower his voice. “Don’t treat me like an idiot.”

“I’m serious. Let me tell you what it is. You’re never demonstrative. You’re more like Robert than she realized you’d be.”

Francesca turned to them. “Enough conspiring, boys,” she said. “It’s time to go home.”

When Luca arrived at the office the following morning, Paolo asked if he could have a word, and a few minutes later Luca came into his room holding his pen in one hand and an order book in the other. Luca’s not really having the time for idle chat was indicated. “Paolo.”

“What did you mean, more like Robert than she realized I’d be?”

Luca closed the door. “Brother, I love you, more than I could ever love a woman, but you are not a demonstrative person.”

“Demonstrative.” He seemed to weigh the word.

“You were never the one who was physical with Nina. Can you remember ever touching her — and no, Anna’s photographs don’t count — before you kissed her at my wedding? I think not.” He tapped the pen against the book. “Had you ever had so much to drink in your life? No. Don’t look like that; it isn’t a criticism. Some people are not tactile, and you are one of the not-tactile people. Nina and I have always been physical with one another.”

“So what you’re saying is that sex wouldn’t mean anything, either.”

The bitterness of this took Luca by surprise. “Paolo. What on earth.”

“I’m just seeking clarification.”

Luca put down the things he was holding. “Listen to me, listen. I am not in love with Nina. I am never going to be in love with Nina. Nina is my sister.”

“I know, I know.”

“My unofficial sister that I never had. A loved person, loved to bits in every other way than romantically.”

Paolo knew this. He knew that Luca wasn’t going to use his power to take Nina from him. He didn’t allow himself to add a second thought, following on, which was that to Luca it was only possession of the power that mattered. He didn’t allow himself to dwell on that, because thoughts go on the record, even there in the deeps, and might rise to the surface and be real. Things we don’t allow ourselves even to think come out of our mouths in arguments.

He’d made a decision early in life, about how best to deal with the triangle. He could have confronted them both — Luca, Nina — and made their love guilty, furtive; he could have brought the subject of others’ suffering into it, spelling out the ramifications, and made it impossible; he could have married someone else, his own Francesca, and didn’t feel as if he ever got the credit for not doing any of these things. He’d always loved Nina unconditionally and that was enough for him. Despite the things he found himself saying, out of hurt and bewilderment, once she’d moved out, there wasn’t anything she could have done to diminish his love, and so she had a power over him which he sometimes resented. For most of their marriage he was confident that he was liked, respected, approved of, adored, and in the context of adult sexual bonding, in the context of a long-term and loyal mating, wasn’t adored the same as loved? The trouble was that it wasn’t.

After Nina left, Paolo came up with his own timetable of the inevitability of what happened, of its countdown, finding significance in things that weren’t important before. Afterwards, he pinpointed the beginning of the end as a moment during the previous summer, during the Romano clan’s annual family holiday by the sea. Late one night, Francesca went into the kitchen for a glass of water and discovered Nina kissing Luca. Francesca had gone to Paolo in tears, and had begged him not to make something of it. Luca had been acting weirdly ever since Francesca’s cancer diagnosis; he’d been odd at the office, he’d been odd with clients, he’d been odd at the Sunday lunches. He’d been badly affected by it and by things being uncertain, and allowances needed to be made.

On the first evening after this holiday, having spent a day at the office without Luca around (Luca and the rest were still away, though Nina had also come home), having brooded all day about the kiss, what it might have looked like and how it had driven Francesca to confiding in him — which wasn’t usual at all — Paolo went home earlier than usual and with an armful of roses. As Nina took them from him he put his arm rather awkwardly around her neck to pull her face close to his. His displays of affection were always awkward.

“I missed you today,” he said.

“I missed you, too, but I got lots of work done.” She smiled at him. It was what he used to say to her when they were first married.

“Do you want to do something?” he asked, as if it had just occurred to him. “Go out somewhere? Why don’t we eat out? Be wild and eat out on a Wednesday night?”

She held his hand as they walked along the streets to the restaurant, and he returned her pressure equally, his fingers clasped
round hers. She asked him about his day and he described it and she reciprocated, and then they got to the place and were seated and talked about the menu.

“I think we should push the boat out and have the forbidden dishes with the big supplements,” he said, waggling his eyebrows.

“What, the steak with the four-pound supplement? That’s an outrageous idea.”

“We’re not the kinds of idiots who order the fourteen-pound set menu and then spend fifteen pounds on supplements,” he agreed, though she knew that he was going to do just that. It was as if Luca were there in his chair, a kind of possession. “So let’s see. The scallops starter, the posher steak, the fancier sauce, the extras. Though I’ve never seen the point of scallops and black pudding. Black pudding is crazy with scallops and kills them dead.”

“Hopefully they’re dead already.” The pig that wants to be eaten came to mind, from
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, but that was a conversational detour she could only have made with his brother.

“We’ll order only according to price,” Paolo said. “The most expensive wine on the menu. I’ve always wondered why it’s so great, that white burgundy.”

“Let’s find out what’s beyond the label.”

“If anything.”

“If anything.” She reached out her hand and put it over his, but he needed it to turn the page.

“It’s my sad duty to report that there isn’t a dessert with a supplement.” His voice was comically somber.

She turned her own page. “What, no custard tax?”

“No custard at all, in fact. This place is going to the dogs.”

“Well, at least it’s not going to the birds.” She looked at him hopefully. Luca would have been right on it. Bird’s Custard.

Paolo said, “I think the panna cotta is bought in. Certainly the sauce, from what I remember.”

Nina said, equally factually, “It was way too red to be actual strawberries.”

“It tasted like cheesecake topping, the deep-frozen kind. It undermines one’s faith in the rest of it. I’d have more respect for them if they did cheese and a baked apple. That’s what I’d do if I owned the place.”

“I know.” She gave him the fond look that reassured him his repetitions were endearing, but at the same time she knew that Paolo brought up this subject when his confidence was running aground. “You and Luca have been talking about opening a restaurant for I don’t know how many years. Do you think it will ever happen?”

“Didn’t take you long to bring Luca into the conversation.”

“I’m not allowed to mention Luca?”

Paolo’s smile morphed into doubt. “ ’Course you are. Any time. But that’s the point. It’d be nice if you chose not to.”

They ate the bread and oil. Paolo continued to look at the menu, making comments on the wine list; the Italian section was woefully out of date. When the scallops came, and they’d eaten some, Nina said, “You were right about the black pudding. I wonder why it’s a thing.” She did something that ordinarily Paolo did, and instituted a topic: they talked about great meals they’d had on holiday, and not-so-great meals. Afterwards they walked home separately, together on the sidewalk and side by side, and each with their hands in their pockets.

In bed, wanting to make amends in the dark, Nina got slowly and silently on top of Paolo, who always went to sleep facing downwards, his head to the side. Sometimes he slept right at the edge of the bed with his nose clear of the mattress, and it was
difficult not to see a correlation between days when he made that choice and episodes that had made him feel undermined. Nina always felt bad about his being undermined. She took off her pajama T-shirt and then, naked, raised his as high as it would go, edging it up until it strained against his shoulders and armpits. She lowered herself onto the small of his back and forced her hands under his chest. She was expecting him to say he was tired but instead he said, “That’s lovely.”

Encouraged, she wriggled down the bed a little and put her hands between his thighs, which were full and firm and warm and delicately hairy, and stroked inwards and upwards. Paolo turned over and took off his own T-shirt, and she removed his shorts — he consented, lifting himself — and then, positioning herself astride, she leaned down and kissed him.