The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (39 page)

“What? No. It wasn’t Dr. Christos in the car with me.” She was trying and failing to see the face of the man in the ambulance.

“Yes. Christos in the car.”

If Nurse Yannis said it was Dr. Christos, then there wasn’t any doubt. Of course it was. Why wouldn’t it be the island doctor, sitting monitoring her in the back of the ambulance? Who else would it have been? She’d thought Dr. Christos was Paolo, a man with only the most basic physical similarity. She couldn’t remember what she’d said, but did remember wanting to say everything. She’d been sure she was going to die, and it had seemed vital that she set the record straight. That being the case, it was possible he already knew what she’d done.

Nurse Yannis said goodnight, giving her a parting stern look, and Nina turned out her light and was almost instantly asleep.
There below consciousness she found herself in an airplane crash, on a Greek hill in the dark. Dr. Christos was looking down at her and bending to kiss her on the mouth.

She heard him saying, “Nina, Nina, are you awake?” and opened her eyes and there he was, standing in her room.

“Dr. Christos. What is it?” The bedside clock’s illuminated hands reported that it was only 11:45 p.m.

“I’m just going home. I wanted to say goodnight.”

“Night night. I’m asleep.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow. We got interrupted in the talk about your mother. Was there something you were about to say? It seemed like you were going to tell me something.”

It was dark. She was only half awake. It was an ideal time. “I found out before I came here that she had an affair.” Her voice sounded thick and fuggy, as if she had a cold. “Just before my parents separated.”

“She was having an affair? Anna was having an affair. Who, who with?”

“My dad found a diary, one that maybe she’d left for him to read.”

“It’s the one you brought with you.”

“Yes.”

“She was having an affair. So, who was it?”

“Too tired,” Nina told him, her voice distorted. When he asked further questions she pretended to have gone back to sleep.

He was back just after breakfast, while Nina was writing to her father. She expected him to burst in looking eager for more details about Anna’s fling, but he was gray-faced and darker gray under the eyes. The death of Agatha had caused this, she
assumed. She asked him if he was okay and he closed the door and said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“Uh oh.” She thought it was a joke. “What’ve you done?”

“Behaved really badly. And stupidly. I was stupid.”

“What kind of stupid?” She put the pen down on the letter.

“I wasn’t going to tell you this.”

“What stupid thing have you recklessly done?” She was reckless herself. She was still confident.

“I slept with Doris last night. My ex.”

“Oh. Oh, God.” The shock was beyond concealment. “What happened? I mean, how did that come about?”

“We were both stressed. I was feeling down about not being able to save Agatha, and then Doris called, worried about her dad, so I went over to have a look at him.”

“What’s wrong with her dad?” Nina managed to say.

“He has dementia. He has bad days. He thinks that Doris and I are still married and that we have young children and he frets that he never sees them. He talks to little girls in the village thinking they’re his granddaughters. He tries to grab hold of them. It can be difficult. We had a drink, a few drinks; we got a bit drunk once we’d got him to bed, and one thing led to another.”

“These things happen.”

“You disapprove.”

“It’s not up to me,” she said. “I’m happy for you if you’re happy.”

“I’m not, that’s the point. What makes you think that I’m happy about it?” He was openly impatient. “But now, now I’m in trouble, because Doris might think we’re getting back together. We did it once before and got back together and it was a big mistake.”

“I see.”

“The point I’m not making very well — sorry — is that I don’t want Doris. But it’s risky, wanting someone new, wanting something new …” He looked at her and away again. “It’s so risky, so dangerous, and I admit, I don’t mind admitting this: I can feel the pull of returning to the past, being pulled back to safety. Everything I say to you that you mustn’t do.” Nina didn’t appear any longer to be listening. She stared at the letter. “The thing, a second thing, is that I’m worrying now. I worry that you think of me as the kind of man who has affairs.”

“You’re saying you’re not.”

“I’m just lonely, Nina.”

“I understand that.” She continued to look at the letter.

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to be.” She was as serious-faced as he was.

“No, I do, I need to apologize. I really am at a low ebb. I’m tired and Agatha trusted me to make her better and I couldn’t, and I’m just really tired. I shouldn’t have talked about sleeping with Doris. Certainly not in those terms.”

“It’s okay.”

“Phone calls today, and an inspection, so I’ll be in the office.” The change of focus was abrupt. “You know the drill. I’ll see you later. Get some exercise.” He jabbed towards her with his index finger as he made the point about exercise. Nina looked at this hand, one that was never going to hold hers, never going to touch her. It was over. She went into the bathroom, shedding her clothes and fitting the plastic protector over the injured leg, and stood in the shower for a long time, in tepid water, holding on to the safety rail. What was she going to do now? She was stranded, and nowhere, and there was no obvious path. She’d been idiotic
to think that the universe had provided. The universe couldn’t have cared less. The universe didn’t know what caring was; it didn’t even know about knowing. It was time to let go further. There had seemed only to be turnings, pauses, changes of direction, from one man to the other. It was depressingly familiar, this pattern, this context of two possible men. She’d been caught in a closed loop, and now it was time to step outside of the whole situation.

CHAPTER TWENTY

It was hard to know what the other diaries were like because they hadn’t survived. Why had Anna kept this one and not burned it with the others on the garden bonfire, the day Robert said he was no longer in love with her? It could only have been because she wanted him to find it. The fire had been small but its offerings wide-ranging. The notebooks and journals, plus paperbacks of an apparently random kind (no doubt not random in the least) and some clothes went onto the fire, cast onto it one by one, expressionlessly. Nina had watched from her window; it was astounding to see her mother burning books. This lapse from optimism had been Anna’s only period of accusation, counteraccusation. It was a silent one. Nothing further was said between them about the separation or its causes, and she’d moved out the next morning. Robert rang every Sunday to check she was well, and they’d chatted a few minutes about the week they’d each had, as if they were friends. Sometimes Nina had been with her mother during these phone calls, and had seen how civil and friendly Anna was to him, and how hard she was hit afterwards. It was difficult to know if Robert had any insight at all into the overlap between kindness and cruelty.

Once she had possession, Nina carried the diary around with her, though she slotted it into the kitchen bookcase when she was packing, among her mother’s Norwegian-language novels, the ones she’d returned to when homesick. Taking it to Greece would be a haunted, compulsive thing to do: Nina knew this. Nonetheless,
when the alarm woke her in the early morning she went straight to the shelf and picked the diary up and stuffed it down the side of clothes in her suitcase. By then she’d read it so many times that she had it virtually by heart. It was the diary from the year Anna and Robert separated, and it was the opening pages Nina kept returning to, the ones preceding the Easter disaster.

It all started innocuously enough. After an ordinary New Year week of scribbled arrangements, planning last outings and last meals, the day arrived for Nina’s return to university, for her second spring term. The date of her departure, January 7, was marked by three words,
Nina Goes Back
, words written in large print and enclosed in a double rectangle. She’d shaded the space between the two so that it looked like a plaque.

Took Nina to the train. It’s hard to know how to go on with this
, Anna had written, returning from the railway station alone.

January 8:
Cathartic house clean, baking, thank-you cards, phone calls. Feel better
.

January 9:
Looked at premises for my shop. The house is so quiet that all I can hear is my own mind talking. It’s absolutely intolerable. Sounds like exaggeration. Isn’t exaggeration
.

Nina traced her fingertip over her mother’s handwriting, following its upswings and downward flourishes, the neat, angular precision of the middle register.

January 10:
Cinema. Walk afterwards. Heavy heart. All my life has been about looking after people. As a daughter it was all about being pleasing. That’s how I cared for Mormor, in being pleasing. Then seamlessly I was passed on to Robert, and Robert was easy at first, until Nina arrived and he was so jealous
. Underneath this it said,
It is Nina who has been the great love of my life.
This last line was added later in a different, darker ink. Had it been written during the separation? Was it a message from the grave?

January 11:
Missing Nina so much today that I can barely breathe. Need distraction. Tried Sheila’s recipe for apple crumble. Half and half, rolled oats as well as flour. That is the real Scottish way I’m told. There’s a real Scottish way for everything
. And then, added in pencil,
Sheila insists on custard and not cream, but custard is barbaric stuff. Egg sauce with apples. Disgusting
.

Later:
Missing Nina so much. Crossing off the days
. More than one instance of this. Multiple instances of others.
Tried to call Nina but had to leave a message
. Nina felt bad, remembering not wanting to return her mother’s calls. She’d been embarrassed by getting the daily evening call from home.

The mood changed when Nina came back in February for a weekend for her father’s birthday.

Such a good day today. Counting my blessings. Why do I forget to count my blessings? Nina looks more and more beautiful and has no idea at all
. Anna had noted down the things they’d done, the funny moments.
We misread “misled” as “my-zuld” in the crossword and couldn’t think what it meant. Shortcuts to things now lost. Joke about the sheepdog and the island
. Hearts were drawn in the margin. And then Nina went back to Glasgow.

I’m aware that sadness is making me ugly
, her mother had written on March 17.
I’m aware that this is noticed
.

And then the following day:
I always had an inkling that it would matter. And lo, it matters. Has it mattered all along? It’s hard to say. At first, there was gratitude that overwhelmed everything else. He said so. He called me his angel. He said he was still amazed that I’d said yes. He watched me if I was in a room. That is all over now
.

There was also this:
Out in the garden, a single tree is showing its colors. Spring seems counterintuitive this year. Something in me that was open has closed. In some ways it’s better to be closed. It’s what I want to say to Nina, but don’t know how to. Better only to be open in certain ways, but to know how to give all the signs of being open. Better to adopt the hard shell, but make it a beautiful one. An exotic beetle shell with enameled jewel colors
. Something had been added afterwards in that second shade of blue.
He thinks having a child was the end of us, but actually it was what made us survive. He has no idea. Why else would I have stayed?
Among all this, in the pages leading up to April, there were eight instances in which a date was circled and the words
The Boy
were written next to the circled number. That was all. Nothing else was written or hinted at, until the eighth entry.