The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (42 page)

When she came out of physio and back into the sun, Dr. Christos was there, with a tray of coffee and three cups. He paused at George’s table and asked if he’d like one, and George said, “No, thank you,” in English without looking up from his paper.

“Getting back to ‘the Boy’ …” Dr Christos said, sitting down and looking expectant.

Nina sat opposite him. “It was Andy. My childhood friend Andy Stevenson.”

“Your childhood friend?”

“Andy from the village gang.”

“Andy! Really? Andy with the rosy cheeks and thatch of hair. Luca’s friend.”

“Though the thatch of hair is gray now. He’s still got the rosy cheeks. He still looks like a farmer.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“I have.”

“So he was twenty and your mother was, what, forty-five?”

George made a disgusted noise, stubbing out his cigarette with energy. He got up from the table and walked away as quickly as he could, which wasn’t fast. He had a bad hip, a stick, and took his time to leave the garden. Nina watched him go. “George is English. You didn’t mention that.”

“I’m sure I did. How else were you going to tell him you needed to phone me?”

“What’s he doing here?”

“Oh — George is a local now. He’s lived here a long time. He comes for his treatment and then he goes home.”

“But he smokes.”

“We can only advise. So how did Sheila know what the diary entries meant, when the boy wasn’t identified?”

“She’d seen them, the two of them, together. She already knew.”

“What happened?”

“She walked in on them.”

“Oh no.”

“She didn’t knock on our door anymore. She just went in, calling my mother’s name.”

“And there they were.”

“There they were. She went rushing in to tell Mum something, and the sofa is straight ahead of the door. All Mum wrote in the diary was
Sheila came over at a bad time
. That was it: one corroborating line. Sheila told Dad that she saw Andy lying on top of my mother, and that they were kissing. He had his legs together and hers were around him. They had their clothes on, but his shirt was out of his trousers and my mother’s hands were inside it, on his back. She was clear about that particular detail.”

“Have you spoken to Sheila?”

“No. It’s all been relayed through Dad. I’ve avoided Sheila. I’ll continue to avoid her.”

“And she’d seen the diary, before it was found?”

“No. She saw the year embossed on the front, when they found it in the box, and knew what must be in there, and made sure she got to look at it first. She tried to put it in a rubbish bag. She’d kept what she knew from my dad for all those years. Decades.”

“He didn’t know. And you didn’t know?”

“I was at university when all this happened. I had no idea at all.”

“So what did Sheila do, when she saw them together?”

“Apparently she ran out of the house, and didn’t talk to my mother again for almost a week, and then she arrived at the house one afternoon, saying they had to clear the air. That was their last conversation.”

“Do we know what was said?”

This time, Sheila rang the doorbell and waited, which was significant in itself. That was an unsubtle adjustment.

“She told Mum she didn’t feel she could be her friend anymore. Which shocks me. And after that there was mutual avoidance. They wouldn’t tell their husbands what they’d fought about. Sheila shunned Mum, afterwards. She didn’t visit her at the apartment, not once. I can’t forgive her that; that’s the unforgivable thing, to me. Anyway. It occurred to me that she might have been misrepresenting what she saw — for whatever reason — and I had to know, so I spoke to Andy. He said Sheila’s story was accurate.”

“You tracked Andy down?”

“He didn’t need tracking; he still lives in the village. He works at the garden center with his father. I’ve seen him twice, the first time when I was buying plants. He helped me choose. The second time the conversation was a bit different. I marched in there. I was very straightforward.”

“So, do you know if they …” Dr. Christos trailed off.

“Andy says not. Kissing only, he says. Not that it makes any difference. It doesn’t make any difference to Sheila or my father. It’s immaterial to them, whether it was just kissing or not.”

“I understand that point of view.”

“The thing is, Sheila had always disliked my mother.”

“Surely not. She was just easily shocked and worried about associating with a scarlet woman.”

“Sheila and Gerald had convinced themselves they were my parents’ best friends. They were always there, always there, and then Mum moved out and they dropped her like a rock. Off the end of a pier.”

“Well there you go. It was about their own respectability, no doubt.”

Nina knew that the roots went deeper than this one occasion. Sheila had always disliked her mother: Nina spent her whole childhood aware of it. Sheila was frequently to be heard having a go at Anna, in the presence of their husbands, though always in a laughing way, insisting it was done affectionately. Anna not having to work was a prime subject for satire, though actually she would’ve loved a job. Her quoting from the self-help books was another key reason for Sheila’s teasing, and of course Robert joined in with that. He was glad to have an ally. Nina watched and learned: she saw that Sheila picked up on things Robert disagreed with Anna about, and began to have the same opinions, about music, politics, food, culture: anything and everything.

“She’d ridicule Gerald, too, in front of my parents, about his low status. Dad had done some television, a history program, and Gerald was a science teacher at an unruly school and smelled of chemicals.”

“That lab smell. I have such a strong memory, now, of the labs at the school in Athens.”

“You went to school in Athens?”

“High school, yes, a boarder. I got a scholarship and off I went. My father saw it as some kind of class betrayal. But let’s not dwell on that. Sheila would have thought your dad very respectable, being a professor and having come from a church background. Presumably a Protestant church.”

“It was clear she thought Dad had married beneath him. I remember one day over tea she asked about Mum’s past, and Mum told her that she had been raised by her grandparents because her mother was a drug addict and died young; I hadn’t known that, so I was as surprised as anyone. She told Sheila that her grandfather worked in a factory, and that they lived in a rented apartment, and Sheila drew her own conclusions.”

“It sounds almost like she was teasing Sheila.”

“I’m sure she was.”

Even when she was young, it was obvious to Nina that it was her father Sheila really came to see. Weekend and evening visits were timed so that Robert was also at home, on the pretext of Gerald’s having another man to talk to. Sheila had a thing for Robert. How else to explain the Medlars’ constant appearances, two, three times a week? There every Saturday teatime with cake in the bicycle basket, drinking cup after cup of Lapsang and being sniffy about offers of Romano wine, which wasn’t as wholesome as their elderflower.

“Was there something going on there, between the two of them, Sheila and your dad, an affair?”

“He says not and I believe him. Dad’s so conventional and Sheila even more so. But I remember seeing them once, at our summer party, when I was about fourteen. Everybody else was in the garden and the two of them were in the sitting room, unaware that I was lying up on the landing, reading. She was standing right in front of him holding a glass of wine, too close
for a friend of his wife. She said, ‘She doesn’t deserve you, Robert,’ and put her hand onto one of his jacket lapels, and got hold of its edge and ran along the length of it slowly with her fingers. It was like she was staking her claim.”

“Maybe it was one-sided. You can hardly blame your father for that.”

“Later, when people had gone home, he said that Sheila Medlar was well named, as she was a meddler, and that she’d been unkind about Maria. Then he added that he wished that Sheila would stop fussing over him. He overdid it, the protesting.” She smiled, despite herself.

“What’s funny?”

“Luca always said that he thought Gerald and Sheila were secretly swingers.”

“Maybe they were.”

“She referred to Mum as a hippie; once I overheard her saying there’d been too much drug use, but Mum never took drugs. Unless … it’s just occurred to me that she might have been talking about the antidepressants.”

“There were antidepressants?”

“Sheila waged a long-standing and low-key campaign over years and years. I think it was Sheila who sowed the seeds of my father’s decision. He says not. He calls it support. Sheila supports him. Sheila has always supported him, he says. It’s a useful personal verb, isn’t it? I’ve always wondered if Sheila was the reason they separated, whether she talked my father out of being in love.”

“Nina, Anna was having an affair with a twenty-year-old boy.”

“But he didn’t know that! She was only having the stupid fling because Dad lost interest in her. She said there had been signs, in retrospect. His not wanting to talk to her. His loss of
interest in how she’d spent the day. His lack of curiosity about the shop plan. Things she didn’t seem to be able to do anything about.”

“So, you still think it was all your father’s fault.”

“I don’t. I used to. But no. Not anymore.”

“So, what are you saying?”

“Whatever the rights and wrongs, it destroyed her. She needed so much to be admired and my father had stopped admiring her. It made her ill. It made her make odd decisions.”

“I have to tell him how ill you’re feeling,” Nina had told her mother, sitting with her in the window seat, looking out over the botanical gardens. Her hair was taken out of its plaits, combed through by Anna’s fingers and replaited.

“I’m fine,” she protested.

“Dad asks how you are and I can’t lie to him and say you’re fine.”

“I’m just tired,” Anna insisted. “It will pass.”

“You shouldn’t lie to him, either, on the phone.”

“He’d feel like it was his fault, and it isn’t his fault that I’m ill,” Anna said. “It must be my fault. We each carry with us the power to be well and whole, and it’s a choice, whether to keep that power or to give it away. It’s a fault in me somehow. I have failed to be well.”

“You’re not making sense. Sometimes it’s just bad luck.”

“Please don’t tell your father. I hate to think of his suffering.”

“Of his suffering! Of his suffering? Come on!” Nina was finding it difficult not to hate her dad.

“I love him. Just because he doesn’t love me, that doesn’t stop me loving him as I always have. That’s never going to change.” Anna began to stroke Nina’s head. “I want him to be happy. That’s all I ever wanted. And if this makes him happier, this living separately — then I’m glad. I’m perfectly fine on my own. I have good friends, lots to do. I love living in town. I have plenty of money. And you. I have so many blessings.”