The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (27 page)

“What a mess.”

“You say that, but the truth was that I was cheered up. He needed me the same way I needed him. It was something that passed between us. I was also his someone to run to. We had something that would never fail us. We thought so, anyway. It didn’t work out that way.”

“You and Paolo: you were happy? At your happiest — were you happy?”

“I thought so. I thought I did a really good job of being married. But Paolo says not.”

“I’m sorry. That’s hard.”

“I find it difficult to judge now, but I thought we were fine. I thought the way we were together, how we lived together, how we talked to each other, what we did, how we were when — well, anyway, I thought it was all how it was for everyone. But Paolo
surprised me, when we broke up. He said that Luca had always been in the way.”

“How could that have surprised you?”

“It did. It surprised me very much. Because Paolo was in on it. They were all in on it. Luca and me: we were the basis to two happy marriages. Don’t you see? We weren’t the hindrance. We were the basis.”

“How did you and Paolo get together? You said it was at Luca’s wedding. Were you making a point?”

“It wasn’t Luca; it was another date a few days before that did it. I wanted to take someone to the wedding and that’s the only reason I said yes when this boy asked me out.”

“Who was he?”

“An old school friend. But I didn’t take him to the wedding in the end. We had one date. He was good company, talkative, into politics, actually incredibly boring about the politics, but we knew each other well and it should have been easy. We went to the pub and I began to feel panicky. I didn’t know how to behave, how to talk. He held my hand and I stared at it because it was so odd. It wasn’t a Romano hand. When he kissed me his tongue was cold and slimy and tasted of tobacco. When I saw Paolo at the wedding, the way he looked at me: I knew.”

The door was open. All she needed was to push it a little. All it took was to go up close to him and to look up at him, into his eyes, until he bent and kissed her.

“He was waiting for a sign.”

“He was. And in fact, I’d been giving him signs for months. When Mum died, I changed, you see. I became a different person.”

“In what way different?”

“In almost every way. It was time to change.”

When Anna died Nina had begun to dress as her mother had done, in fact, for a while had worn her mother’s old clothes, her 1970s dresses, and that transformation had made all the difference. It had turned Luca off and Paolo on. Luca had been openly appalled, at the engagement party, to see how like Anna Nina looked, her hair up the same way and wearing one of the old frocks. It was good to give up the faded black jeans and the walking boots and repel him: she needed to assert her independence from his approval. Like so many things in life, it was all about timing. Timing, and femininity and smiling and legs.

“If you dress like a boy Paolo will treat you like a boy,” her mother had said, when Nina got back from the cinema that time, the day of the yellow sundress.

“I don’t mind that; I’m not interested in Paolo,” Nina told her.

“You should be. He would make a good husband. He’s a lovely boy, and much more suitable than Luca.”

“More suitable?” she’d said, aghast.

“You laugh at me but marriage is a contract. That’s something you children overlook. It’s important to think about what your life will be like, what it will be like over decades and also day to day.”

“Mum. I’m not going to marry for ten years at the least and probably never.”

“It’s your life,” her mother said. She’d say it in a singsong voice, giving the word
life
two syllables.

“And anyway, what makes you say that Luca is unsuitable? Not that I’m interested in Luca.”

“Luca is only exciting because — well, basically because he’s mean. He’s mean, Nina, and a bully.”

“You don’t know him at all,” Nina said.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The day that Anna died was the first time Nina and Luca slept together.

Nobody else knew or would ever know: so Luca said, though that turned out not to be true. Nina had never told anyone. She woke alone in her mother’s apartment with two kinds of grief: one that had become part of her, that ran in her blood and was ineradicable, and one that was really an anger, to which it seemed there might be a solution and an end. She lived in this now, inside the loss of her mother; she’d remain unborn inside her death for the rest of her life. The problem of Luca was of a different kind. Luca was, in a way, the more immediate problem. She’d offended him, and he’d left at 2:00 a.m. without saying goodbye.

They’d lain together in Anna’s spare bed, in the room Anna had furnished and prepared but which Nina had never used. This was something else to feel guilty about. It was a sleigh bed decked out with cornflower-blue linens, still smelling newly unpacketed and faintly of dye, their creases still evident. Anna had added touches that made it look as if Nina had been there already, as if she lived there: framed posters from recent exhibitions, a white bathrobe, nineteenth-century novels stacked in the bookcase, and beads and scarves hung across the mirror. Nina dozed and had bad dreams, and so when it began to get grayly light, a cool, chill dawn, she rose and put on the bathrobe and looked out of the window at the city roofscape, which was becoming steadily more three-dimensional. She went through to the kitchen and
boiled her mother’s kettle, and then emptied the boiled water out and refilled it and boiled it again. She opened the wrapping of the rye bread her mother ate, and looked at the cut end of it, and rewrapped it and boiled two eggs instead, and ate them with salt, and drank tea, opening the new carton of milk and disposing of the opened one, and all the time crying noiselessly in a way that was more inconvenient than anything, because it was ceaseless and itchy and dripping. She took the next tissue from the box and found she couldn’t use it, and had to use the one beneath.

The apartment, a Victorian top-floor with low attic ceilings, was a rental that Anna had taken unfurnished, and though she hadn’t been able to paint the magnolia walls, she’d bought vividly colored furniture, pea green and sky blue and Indian pink. She’d hung pictures of Nina that she’d had enlarged, some of which featured Luca and Paolo, on beaches and in gardens. She’d installed Australian art and African masks and artifacts that were stand-in souvenirs of all the places she’d never been; Robert hated to travel and had been enthusiastic only about desolate Highland scenery and the conquering of hills.

After breakfast and after dressing again in yesterday’s clothes, Nina returned to her mother’s bedroom and got into the bed and drew the top blanket, one of mole-gray velvet, up over her ears. She put one hand questingly under first one pillow and then the other and found Anna’s nightdress and held it to her face, feeling its silkiness and inhaling its motherly scent. On the top of the chest of drawers there were purple silk pajamas; she felt herself caught in a disappeared human event, suspended inside one of her mother’s last anticipated actions, changing the nightwear for
an evening that wouldn’t come. It was too sad. It was too much to bear. Now she wanted urgently to leave, and went rapidly down the three gloomy flights of hard stairs, each with its ironwork banister, through the green halls, past the maroon-painted doors, each with its brass nameplate, its faint remnant cooking aroma. She wondered if she was still a bit drunk: she and Luca had finished a bottle of prosecco, and then most of two Romano & Sons reds they’d found in Anna’s kitchen. There’d been a note from Paolo sitting at the bottom of the box.
Hope you enjoy
, it said, and underneath that,
with love from Paolo
. Paolo, it turned out, had kept her mother supplied with wine. That’s how she saw it at the time, though of course it was Giulio who sent the boxes, and Giulio who asked Paolo to add the note.

Luca’s arrival the previous evening had begun with a phone call. He’d heard from his mother, when he got home from the office, that Anna had died that afternoon, and was straight on the phone. Robert had answered and Luca had expressed his sorrow, in a rather ungainly, unprepared way, and then Robert had volunteered the information that Nina had insisted on staying over at Anna’s place. Luca rang her there and told her he was coming over with a cheesecake and a bottle of fizz. Nina had protested: she couldn’t eat cheesecake, she couldn’t drink. Her mother had died. Her mother had been taken from the apartment, like an object, like garbage, in a black bin bag disguised as a coffin. Luca said that no, on the contrary, prosecco was just the thing. They were going to celebrate her life, in just the way that Anna had when Mormor died. It had made a big impression on the Romano family, Anna’s insistence on a death being a celebration
of love. So he’d arrived, and they’d hugged, and they’d drunk a lot of wine. They’d got drunk and then he’d kissed her. He’d said, “I know what it is that both of us needs.”

Neither had any real idea what they were doing. This made Nina self-conscious and clumsy, but Luca became very grave, as if following unseen instructions. It was unfortunate that this in turn made Nina giggly. Luca had told her to shush.

“Shhh,” he said. “Don’t think, don’t talk; concentrate on touch and sensation.” He climbed naked off the bed and got down on both knees and said he just wanted to look at her, and she became aware of the look that had taken charge of her face, the skeptical, embarrassed look. He ran one hand over her near thigh and hip and onto her stomach and crossed over a nervous frontier of some kind, and Nina went into spasm as if she’d been tickled, and laughed and drew away.

He’d said, “You need to relax.”

“You’re telling me to relax?” She sat up and drew her knees to her chest, raising the sheet and resting her forearms on it. Nothing now could be seen of her other than from the shoulder up. “Luca, my mother died today. She died. Here in this building. In the next room.”

“Let me take you somewhere else than that.”

“Somewhere else?” Nina’s voice was stridently practical.

Luca stopped the stroking abruptly. He looked disappointed in her. “Nina. Don’t you want this?”

“I’m really hungry.” She didn’t want her first sexual experience to be here, and not on this night, but there wasn’t any way of telling him that, not now. What she wanted was another kind of physical attention: to have her back stroked and her hair played with. What she wanted was toast. She wanted him to put his clothes on and go and make her some. She hadn’t been able to face the cheesecake.

“We’ll eat afterwards,” Luca said, moving in and pushing her gently back onto the bed and setting the sheet aside.

The thing she’d imagined would be momentous was brief and unarousing, a quick exertion in her passive body, Luca not meeting her eyes as he moved, his face fascinatingly vacant. Nina kept it to herself, the brevity of it and how impersonal it had been. In any case it had been fine: Luca held her tightly afterwards, saying he was sorry about Anna and that he’d miss her. He said, “It hasn’t sunk in yet that she’s gone.”

“Gone,” Nina said, as if it were a word new to her. “Oh no, no. I’m not going to see her again. I’m not going to see her face again. This is goodbye. Not even goodbye. I couldn’t even say goodbye to her.” She’d cried and cried.