The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (20 page)

Now that Francesca was dead, after a battle with cancer that seemed for a while to have been won, Nina was deeply ashamed of herself for never having liked her. She’d not cut enough slack for a person who was going to die young. There could never be enough slack cut for a person who was going to die young. Not treating someone who was going to find themselves in that predicament with the reverence, the empathy that was warranted was always an issue after they were gone. All those last occasions, last interactions, that should have been loving and sincere, that should have meant something definite. It was a situation that mourned its own lack of clairvoyance.

Clairvoyance was topical. Dr. Christos imagined he was being clairvoyant right now, but like Susie he’d got it all the wrong way round. “You left Paolo because Francesca had died, to signal to Luca that you were ready to be with him. Yes?”

“No. The last time I spoke to Luca I told him I would never speak to him again. That was the day I left Paolo.”

“I thought you fell in love.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I thought there was a disgrace.”

“We slept together. Luca and me. That’s inaccurate, in fact. There wasn’t any sleeping.”

“When was this?”

“It was before I moved out. Though Paolo thinks it was after.”

“He knows. How does he know?”

“I told him at the airport. I lied about the timing.” She had a new thought. “I keep forgetting that you’re going to meet him.”

“You can trust me; don’t worry.”

“Paolo would be destroyed if he knew it was before we separated.”

“Understandably.”

“Luca was in a state after I left,” she added.

“Because he thought …”

“Luca assumed, like you did, that I was signaling that it was our chance to be together.”

“Oh, I see — I see now. Luca was horrified that it was just sex; he thought it was building up to something. Then you left Paolo because you realized that you didn’t love Paolo, either. You saw that you didn’t really love anyone.”

“I said to Paolo that he was ripe for an affair, but really it was me. It was obvious that it was me. This is starting to sound like a soap opera.”

“It’s because the soaps are accurate.”

“Paolo thought that I was in love with his brother, when we married, but Paolo was the one who was in love with someone else. Though he’d deny that if you asked him.”

“What? Paolo was in love with someone else? You haven’t said anything about this. Who was it?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Luca and Francesca’s engagement party took place in Maria’s house, in the sitting room that opened into the dining room through double doors that had been wedged open. The house was crammed with dark-wood furniture brought over long ago from home (Maria still referred to Italy as home), dark furniture and prints of Tuscan scenery in gilt frames. Everybody was there who should have been, other than Anna, who had died. There
were people who hadn’t seen Nina since her mother’s death, which had happened mere weeks earlier, and who took the chance to offer their condolences. Nina hadn’t wanted to come, not least because she knew she’d bring bereavement with her. She felt like the angel of death at the marriage feast, and so once she’d circulated, briefly and politely, she sat in a corner nursing a drink, watching as the engaged couple were taken round the relatives. Francesca’s unself-conscious laughter rang out again and again. She was elated, and why not — even Nina had agreed that this event should bring to a close the official period of mourning, although a little of its melancholy was revived, as one person after another came up to say how sorry they were about Anna. Francesca, meanwhile, had put lively Italian music into the cassette deck and was encouraging the whole gathering to dance. (She wasn’t to know why it was that the evening had a melancholy aspect. Luca hadn’t explained.) She’d taken on the role of hostess, because Maria was very clearly over-tired. Francesca didn’t mind: she said it was an ideal way to meet people, and took the job seriously, moving around the room attending to the needs of all, fetching drinks and finding lumbar-supporting cushions for Giulio’s elderly relatives, who were so frail and old as to be papery, like animations of bones. Over and over Nina heard the story being told of the whirlwind romance that had taken place. She heard it, and failed to have feelings about it. Deep in the possession of a near overwhelming grief, she’d barely even thought about Luca in the interim. She hadn’t allowed herself to. She hadn’t had the energy.

At just after 9:00 p.m., as she was about to make her excuses and go, Paolo arrived from the train station, walking into the room in a dark-blue suit, a pale-blue shirt open at the collar, smelling of fresh antiperspirant applied over sweat, and was
greeted with general acclaim. “Here he is, the London Romano!” his father cried out, clasping him around the neck. Paolo was used to Giulio’s emotional response to reunions and took being clasped and kissed in his stride. He left his rucksack by the door and went round and said hello to everyone, starting with his mother, who was sitting to Nina’s left and who introduced him at length to Francesca, before proceeding clockwise around the room so that he came to Nina last. Recently, someone had said to him, “Touch the woman you love, lightly and briefly, when you’re talking.” His hand glanced against Nina’s thigh as he came to rest in the vacant chair beside her. That same someone had said, “When you look into the face of the woman you love, think how you feel about her as you are speaking.” When he said he was glad to see her and she turned to meet his eyes, there was such an intensity to his expression, such soulfulness, that Nina was floored. She moved back in her chair as if she’d been physically pushed there. What had happened to Paolo? She’d never seen Paolo like this. He looked at her as if they shared a secret, as if they were secretly and illicitly in love.

Aware of her reaction, Paolo turned his attention to the wine. “This is drinking so well,” he said to the glass. He looked across the room to where his father was standing, and raised the glass of red up. “It’s drinking like twice the price, three times the price,” he said, shouting above the din of chatter. Giulio, gratified, raised his own glass in return. Now Paolo’s gaze returned to Nina’s profile. “I haven’t seen you in ages. I was hoping you’d come down and visit.” She couldn’t look at him. “I’m sorry,” she said, still looking at Giulio. “It’s been a tough few weeks. I wasn’t prepared for how delayed it would be, the grieving.”

“You must miss her every day. I miss her, too. And I must admit …”

“What must you admit?” The words escaped her before she could stop them.

He blushed. He must have known what she meant. “Just that it’s odd being back here, and having a social occasion without. You know. Without your mother. That presence. Things seem flat, don’t they.” He didn’t seem able to call her Anna anymore.

Francesca came across to them holding a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries, and offered Nina one. “I’m sorry I haven’t had the chance to talk to you properly,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you and all of it very good, obviously.”

Nina thanked her and welcomed her to the family. She said, “Luca’s obviously besotted,” and Paolo acknowledged the handsomeness of this gesture by brushing his hand against her leg again. Generosity was easy, in fact. She could only speak like that because she was too numbed to feel anything.

“Luca thinks of you as his sister,” Francesca continued. “So we’re going to be more than friends, I hope.”

“It’s true, you’re right; Nina is our sister,” Paolo told her. “At least, she’s Luca’s. I’m not sure I’d classify her as mine.”

“Ouch.” Francesca had misunderstood.

Nina had registered a strong and sour wine aroma coming from Paolo’s direction when he spoke, not the high-achieving new red but another that lay beneath it, an underachieving one.
He was drinking before he got here
, she thought.
He drank wine on the train
. It was true. He’d drunk a whole bottle of an astringent Bordeaux, for courage.

“You were positively joined at the hip when you were children, I hear, the three of you,” Francesca said. She had nice teeth, even and white, and terra-cotta-colored lips, full and soft. Much about her was soft, in fact: her black wavy hair, which fell in a silky S to her shoulder, the expression in her large and very dark
eyes, and the bloom of her skin, which was caramel-tinted, an olive skin that had seen some sun and glowed with a vanilla-scented lotion. Her face was confident and mobile, mapping her changing thoughts and feelings, and she fidgeted as she stood, moving her arms as she spoke, running her hands over her own lower back and hips. She wasn’t thin like Nina. She was ample, curvaceous, luscious. When she laughed her abundant bosom shook and rippled at the top of her dress.

“Look at the two of us,” she said, putting a butterscotch-colored arm next to Nina’s near-white one. “We really couldn’t be more different.”

There wasn’t any way back, only forward.

Paolo and Nina’s engagement party, held in that same room, was a more formal, less relaxing event. There wasn’t any mystery about that different atmosphere: Maria Romano didn’t like Nina. The word Maria used about her was
aloof
, and Nina was all too aware that she gave that impression. Being at Maria’s made her nervous; being around Francesca made her nervous, and nervousness had made her quiet, and quietness had been misinterpreted, in that way that was classic of a noisy, demonstrative family.

Maria would say afterwards, chastised by Paolo, that she hadn’t treated Nina any differently to Francesca, that she’d given Francesca just the same kind of advice about starting married life on the right footing.

“Not in public,” he’d reminded her. “Not in the middle of the room in the middle of the party.”

The trouble had all been kicked off by Nina’s admission that she didn’t want a church wedding. Maria was deeply upset by
this decision. Think of all the people coming from Italy! It was unfortunate that Paolo, in the interests of handling his mother, didn’t say straightaway that he agreed with Nina about the registry office. Instead, he expressed it as a desire to give Nina what she wanted. He thought that was reasonable, he said (
reasonable
was a very Paolo sort of a word). It was Nina’s day.

When Maria took Nina on, each of them standing holding a glass and a salmon pinwheel sandwich, Paolo was standing on the sidelines, pretending to listen to the people he was talking to but half watching the two of them, like a bodyguard who knows he might have to intervene. Afterwards, he insisted that his mother ring Nina to apologize, which she had done with good grace. All she wanted, she said, was for everybody to have the best possible, most memorable day, and for the photographs to be wonderful — but of course it was Nina’s affair, she added, as if that were self-evidently untrue. Francesca and Luca were there with Nina when Maria rang, and so when she came off the phone Nina was asked to recount the whole conversation.

“It’s such a shame.” Francesca rubbed consolingly at Nina’s upper arm. “It’s such a pity that the wedding’s becoming an ordeal.”

“Francesca,” Luca said neutrally.

Nina looked from him to his wife. “Who said it was an ordeal?”

“You’re becoming more and more stressed,” Francesca told her. “Fighting the family isn’t going to make you happier. Wouldn’t it be easier just to say yes? You are becoming a Catholic, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m an atheist.”

“But Maria thinks you are. She thinks you are having instruction.”

“Atheism is a bit of a stumbling block.”

“You lied to Maria. That’s terrible.”

“Paolo, not me. He wanted to keep her happy until after the ceremony. I agree, I think it was a mistake. But there isn’t much I can do about what Paolo says to her.”

Luca looked up from his newspaper. “He’s such a milksop.”

“You don’t want to have it in your mother’s church?” Francesca looked as if she might know why not. Most things had been explained to her, by this stage.

“I don’t want to have it in any church,” Nina told her.

“But a church wedding’s a real wedding. It’s so much nicer, the day you’ll have, the dress, the ceremonial. The registry office is pretty dire. Have you been inside it?”