The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (19 page)

Nurse Yannis came back into Nina’s room and asked if she’d like a cup of coffee. Nina said eagerly that she’d love one, thank you, and the nurse went out into the corridor and pushed the trolley in. She handed her a plate with a cake on it, a slab cake dotted with berries, dark-red berries that had leaked their juices into the sponge.

“My sister, she makes this cake and sends it,” she said.

“Your sister!” Nina exclaimed. “How is your sister?”

“She is well.”

They ate cake and drank coffee.

“You speak very good English,” Nina said, looking for a topic.

“I learn at school,” Nurse Yannis told her. “And I speak it here. It is not fantastic. I talk in now all the time.”

“The present tense.”

“I suppose.”

“I have no Greek at all so the present tense is great for me. I’m the same in Italian. I can’t do the past and future and stick to the present all the time.”

The nurse’s response to this surprised her. “Nina, I need to say to you … about Christos. He is a little bit in love with you.”

Nina kept it together. “He’s just friendly. Have you known him a long time?” She asked, though she already knew the answer.

“We are at school. His sister is my friend. You know he is married?”

“I thought he was divorced.”

“They live different, in different houses. But married.”

“He is just a friend,” Nina said.

“I am glad.” Nurse Yannis looked down at her feet. “Because he is not safe.”

“Safe?” The nurse put Nina’s cup and plate onto the trolley and made as if to push it back out of the room. “Wait. Please say more. What do you mean, not safe?”

Nurse Yannis paused at the door. “He loves his wife.”

Panicking slightly, she said, “But you used the word
safe
. Is it safe that you mean?”

The nurse came back in and leaned over the back of the chair. “I don’t talk more about Christos. But
safe
is not the word. I mean only, he loves his wife.”

Nina had to get off this line of inquiry. “You knew him when he was a boy.”

“Yes. His sister I like very much.” The emphasis on
sister
was intended.

“What was it like, the island when you were children?”

Nurse Yannis shrugged. “It is just the same. We have no electricity but just the same. No cars but just the same. Not many tourists. But the same.”

“Was it a happy island? It seems like a happy place to me. People seem happy here.” She felt the dull inner thud of fatuousness.

“They are the same like everywhere.” Nurse Yannis was plainly bored.

“But it was a happy childhood? Lots of swimming and freedom?”

“Yes, yes.”

Nina had run out of questions. She looked stupidly at the nurse’s face. Finally Nurse Yannis took up the conversational baton. “And you, you are a happy child?”

“I was. I was a happy child.”

“Lots of swimming and freedom?”

“Lots of freedom. Not a lot of swimming, other than at the city pool, which had too much chlorine in it. It’s not usually warm enough to swim outside in Scotland, though we tried on our holidays, at the seaside house we used to go to every year. Do I speak too fast?”

“I understand.”

“My village has changed a lot since I was young. I’ve moved there again and it is very different. When I was a child we played tennis in the street, and skipped in a big skipping rope, a jump rope. We spent a lot of time on bicycles. You know the word
bicycle
?”

“Of course.”

“Sorry.” There didn’t seem to be any way of talking to Nurse Yannis without looking and sounding like an idiot.

On the long summer evenings preceding the holiday, Nina had walked around the village each evening at dusk and had seen children go by on their bikes, in single file and in safety helmets, exuding anxiety about the traffic, shouting to each other what was safe to attempt and what wasn’t. In the 1970s they’d spread out across the streets as they cycled, and cars had kept their distance, unexcited by the raggedness of their road manners. They had been five, a tight unit: Nina, Paolo, and Luca, plus Becky and Andy, a group that was known as the Old Village Gang, a gang intermittently at playful war with another group of five who lived on the other side of the high street, in the new houses. It wasn’t ever a Montagues and Capulets level of conflict, although hard fallen apples were thrown, on one heated occasion, illicitly in somebody’s orchard, and Andy had suffered a bruised cheekbone and a bloodshot eye. Nina had taken him home and Anna had ministered to his injuries, clucking and applying a poultice. She’d poured and offered a glass of apple juice, keeping a straight face, watching to see if he got the joke. Mostly it was all harmless fun, and considered perfectly normal. Children hung around on street corners and conspired, then, without being challenged by adults, and set things alight that didn’t really burn, and swung from municipal trees and played tennis in the road, and played on other people’s fields and built dens in hedges. Children were expected to play in the street, to be seen and to be noisy, to congregate and to share ownership of public
spaces, which weren’t yet sealed off and designated, issuing their conditional welcome.

When Nurse Yannis had gone Nina wrote this paragraph down, about how childhood had changed, and felt the pang she felt sometimes, the one that heralded the lack of a daughter to hand her world on to. She wrote another paragraph.
It isn’t just love that’s handed down, and the genetic inheritance, and tics and habits of mind. There are other necessary things. Regret. Melancholy. An understanding of loss. It’s begun to mean something to me, not to have anyone to pass these things on to
.

Nurse Yannis came back into the room, interrupting her. “Letter for you,” she said.

The handwriting was Luca’s. Nina hauled herself up into a more upright position on the bed, swiftly with both arms, pulling uncomfortably at her leg, her shoulder muscles, and tore at the envelope. A single large piece of paper, a good paper, thick and textured, had been folded into three. She opened it out and gulped its contents down, skimming to the end and the signing-off. Then, her heart pounding, she read it again, paying attention to each line.

Dear Nina
. The handwriting was terrible. Luca lived permanently at one keyboard or another. Having to decipher ambiguous words to make sense of some of it made the adrenaline course around her system all the harder.

Paolo wanted me to write to you to say some of the things I said to him, but they are things you and I have said to one another already and don’t need repeating here. Please destroy this after reading. Neither of us wants this on the record. I know that Paolo is coming for you, so when you tell him that you received this, you can also tell him that it was an apology to you for how things got so out of hand after Francesca’s death
.

I agree that it was April, that it happened, and after you moved out. That was the basis of the conversation Paolo and I have already had. I’m never going to tell him about February. I think we should spare him that. He is dogged, dogg-éd, in many ways, good and bad, and he’d worry that February led to March. I told him sincerely how it was: that it was once and a mistake, and that it was all about my own grief and your comforting me. They were kindness and comfort that went wrong and can’t be put right. So here it is, the big decision. I’m moving to Italy. Probably not for good, but for now and until it feels like time to come back. There’s a job there to do and I can do it well and have a sort of a new life, and I’m in need of that. I’ll be in Rome when you return. Perhaps we can e-mail, but can I ask you not to contact me until you know that you’re in love with Paolo. If that doesn’t happen, please don’t e-mail. It won’t work between us, the three of us, until the two of you are together again. But you knew that already. This much we have learned
.

I’m not sure whether to add this or not, but I’m tired and so I’m going to risk it. If our conversation resumes it must never return to the things we said and wrote to each other at around the time that you moved out. Nothing could be distilled out of that other than things neither of us wants to revisit. I hope I’m making sense. I’m not absolutely confident of that. Castigate me about it, when you write. If you write, tell me the trivial things that have always been the most important
.

I hope the leg’s making steady progress and that you’ll be pole-vaulting again before too long. Paolo has kept me informed of the basics, the updates, and I hope that will continue. I miss you. I miss our old friendship. You have always been my sister, which is why so much of this has been so weird
.

Luca

There was no mention of it, the unforgivable thing. No apology. Instead there was an ink dot beneath his name, where perhaps he was going to write a postscript and then didn’t. Or where, perhaps, he was going to add a kiss before changing his mind.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Nina didn’t meet Francesca until the night of the engagement party. This wasn’t neglect on Nina’s part: it would be the first time anyone in the family had met her, since she’d only arrived from Rome that afternoon.

Years later, at one of their lunches, when Luca complained that Francesca didn’t read and wasn’t interested in painting or history or ideas, Nina had asked him, taking care to pick a convivial moment, why he’d proposed to someone he’d known only a month.

“What’s the time got to do with it?” He seemed to be serious. “These things are instinctive. You know straightaway.”

She laughed, inviting him to join her, but he looked if anything more solemn. “She was prepared to take a risk,” he said, solemnly.

“So you said in the letter. She stepped out of the plane trusting you’d given her a parachute.”

“I asked the question and she said yes, even though it might have been a joke. It was a joke, until she answered. She passed the test.”

“It was a test? One I’d failed, then.”

“I knew I needed daring and spontaneity in my life,” he said, not looking at Nina but aware that he’d criticized her, nonetheless.