The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (52 page)

“Nina?” Vasilios was there; he said, “Are you okay?”

She scanned his face and couldn’t think of his name. In any case it didn’t matter now. All she could do was retrieve what she could, in armfuls, and retreat and wait it out. What would happen next? She needed help. It could all get worse. Her towns and villages would be overrun, her institutions closed down; the vast, dark forest was already full of little fires. Panic began its ascending, a whole host of miniature panics, starting in her knees and climbing up her sinews with sharp claws like bats. She had to get help.

“Nina? What’s the matter? Can I do anything?”

She looked at Vasilios blankly, aware that she was standing very still. She couldn’t answer; everything in her was seizing up and deadening. She had to get medical help. She dropped her swimming bag and went out of the taverna and onto the road, aware that he was following her.

“Nina, are you all right?” Hearing his voice, she turned to look at him — he was standing on the top outer step of the hotel — and raised her hands, her fingers splayed, pushing him with air.

There was a boat about to go and so she ran towards the ferry dock, shouting for it to wait, and boarded it just as it was untying. During the journey she marshaled old pieces of memory and remembered bits of verse, the words stanching the unraveling like a tourniquet; it would do until she got to the hospital. She’d meant to go to the hospital on the bus, but instead when it stopped at the market she got off with everyone else and wandered round the stalls, pretending to look at bunches of herbs and bottles of oil, handling things as if she was going to buy them and putting them down again. She felt physically unwell, her knees weak, and decided that what she needed was something to read and a glass of white wine, and to sit watching market day from somewhere close by. There was a secondhand English bookstall, the front of its two trestle tables hung with Union Jack bunting, and so she bought an old hardback and took it to the terrace of a nearby bar, and read until the invading thoughts receded. In their place there came a decision, one that was sweet and obvious. Traveling back on the afternoon boat, she felt almost elated.

Walking up the hill, Nina was focused only on picking the right location. There were no sentimental thoughts, no doubts, no pangs about last walks or last anythings; sensible decisions needed to be made. She couldn’t, for example, go up too far and risk being seen by the women in their allotments. The hill ascended in stages, rising and then flattening out, and for most of the way it was the same off the side of the road, following the same undulating pattern into the valley. Climbing further, she saw that the village was like a model beneath her, something scoopable in two cupped palms as if from a basin. When she stopped to look at the view she realized that she’d arrived. There was a short descent to a flattened-out area, a wide, brief apron of land that jutted out, where she could be alone and write a letter, and beyond that a sheer drop, which was free fall and joy and an ending. It was a marker of how unwell she was that she didn’t imagine how it might feel, this ending, or what the experience would be like for those who found her. It was all more abstract than that in her mind, like a switch about to be switched off. She knew that she could take this power and use it. She would walk off the edge of the world and then there would be nothing, and no other days would have to be endured.

First, though, the letter had to be written, a short one — it could only be a short one — that was lucid and unambiguous. Above all it was important to ensure that Paolo knew that none of this was anything to do with him. That at least was what she intended. Cautiously she descended from the road and onto the ledge, holding the gray dress closer and guiding herself against the wall of the slope with the other hand. It was a soft and easy scramble down. Now there was need of somewhere to write, but there was nowhere good to sit, no boulders, and
having inspected the sandy, loose surface she saw that there were ants, hundreds of teeming, busy ants; the ledge was alive with them. She climbed back up onto the road and went and sat on a squared-off rock in the shade of the hill. How was she to begin? Onto the old postcard, one bought twenty-five years earlier, she wrote,
I should have loved you, Paolo. I wish I’d loved you. I wish I’d let myself. We could have had a wonderful life
. Then she wrote,
If I could do it all again I’d do it all differently
. The message had to be brief because otherwise, given a pad of writing paper, there might have been twenty pages and still not an obvious end to it. Who, given unlimited pages, would have felt that twenty were enough?

She’d meant to write about the couple at the market, the English couple who ran the bookstall, but it wasn’t possible to do them justice and in any case nobody else would have seen why they were important. She’d watched them, transfixed, from the bar as the argument escalated. He’d said something to her that had shocked her, his wife, so that she stood staring at him, and then she’d fled him, threading through the marketplace in tears, crying noisily so that everyone else who was there paused what they were doing to watch. He’d shouted after her, “You’ve always been a toxic bitch!” Not just toxic, but always. Nina had watched the man to see what he’d do next. He’d packed the piles of stock into his car, boxing some and then throwing the rest in after, one by one, so that pages creased and snapped and covers twisted and exploded, and he’d slammed the boot lid down and driven away. Nina had gone forward to the last section of the book, a published edition of a writer’s diary. She already knew what happened at the end. The writer had seen the dark wood ahead of her. She’d known what it meant and where it led. She’d chosen to make her own exit, wading into a river with stones in
her pockets. Nina threw the book into one of the market bins, on the way back to the boat.

When the postcard was written, she left her bag sitting by the rock and went back down the slope, slipping her way down for the last bit, and walked along the ledge, which stretched for thirty feet or so if you included its tapering off. She stood looking out over the village, the tavernas, the shore and the sea, as the dusk grew deep, dun to sepia and sepia to pink; the sun was ripening and rosy, illuminating wisps of cloud with golden auras. She’d said to Paolo on the postcard that she wasn’t sad, that it was all completed. Her last thoughts, she said, were of how beautiful the world was. She realized that she wanted to illustrate this idea by leaving photographs for him of the view from the hill, the village below her so nestled and safe, the loveliness of the sky and the sea so tranquil and silvery. It was a perfect little world and she couldn’t make herself belong in it. She looked around for her camera and realized it was in the handbag, which had been left beside the rock as a marker. There was nothing for it but to scramble back up the slope, and so she did so, and stood on the deserted road with her camera to her eye. The song had come to her, the one in Spanish that was about Luca and Francesca, his love for her. She’d been taking photographs and singing the song when, having turned the viewfinder from landscape to portrait and back again, she became aware that something huge and white had appeared at her right side.

On the morning of the day that Paolo arrived from Athens, Nina had wanted to talk about the accident again. Dr. Christos knew that it was a way of preparing for Paolo coming, rehearsing what
she’d say to him. She needed to have her story straight. He understood why. He’d been the first at the scene, driven there by Dr. Argyros, who’d stayed to attend to the bus passengers while Dr. Christos and Andros took Nina over the water. It was Dr. Christos who’d found the postcard, when he looked in her bag for ID. It had been convoluted but her intentions had been clear, and he’d taken her intentions seriously; he’d had to; this wasn’t something he was able to keep to himself. He’d shared his knowledge, his fears, with the hospital on Main Island and, once he’d done that, had to fight to get them to release Nina into his care. He’d had to share his anxieties with Doris, who’d be looking after her; he’d had no choice about that, either. He said to the staff and to George that he didn’t feel he could leave Nina alone in her room for long, that everyone was as covertly as possible to keep watch. He’d been anxious about her mental state, so he was relieved to find her talkative and coherent. It was more than relief. He’d found her articulate, immensely attractive, vulnerable, appreciative of him. The attraction was almost overwhelming. He’d assumed, that night on the hill, that it was transitory, his being so drawn to her, that it was just about beauty, but after many hours of conversation the uninvited thing was stronger than ever, the unfathomable, inexplicable sense of belonging. Unsuspected by all who knew him, Dr. Christos was a deeply romantic soul.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Nina went out into the corridor and saw that Paolo was standing outside her room. The horn beeped a second time. He said, “Here we go. That’s our car.”

“I’ll just be a minute,” she told him. “Two minutes. I’ll see you out there.”

“I’ll get your bag.” He disappeared inside, and after taking a steadying breath she went back into the office, closing the door behind her. Nurse Yannis and George looked as if they expected her return.

“Nina,” the nurse said tolerantly.

There wasn’t time for pussyfooting. “I’m so sorry, Nurse Yannis,” Nina said. “I didn’t know; you should’ve told me.”

George thought she meant the diagnosis. He said, “She couldn’t tell you what it said in the file.”

“Not that. About being Mrs. Christos. I didn’t know and I need to apologize.” She stopped herself from repeating that Nurse Yannis should have told her, because it was supposed to be an apology. She could see through the glass upper of the door that Paolo was waiting with the bag over his shoulder, and said, “I have to go but I’m sorry.” She thought,
I am constantly apologizing; I have to find different words
.

Mercifully, Paolo gave no hint of having overheard anything of what had taken place. She asked him where they were going.

“Andros has organized a boat trip,” he told her.

“Oh no. What? I can’t.”

“I knew you’d say that, which is why I didn’t tell you before.”

“But I can’t. My leg. I can’t get onto and out of a boat.”

“He’s thought of that. Come on. You can’t let them all down.”

“All? Who’s all? Oh God, do I have to?”

“It’s just a few people who wanted to give you a send-off. We’re going round to the back of the island. A few drinks and a send-off. People have been making cakes. You have to come.”

“Are Dr. Christos and Doris coming?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

“They’re on duty, but we’re invited to dinner with them later. Here in the courtyard. Christos asked if we’d like that and I said yes. Are you all right? You don’t look well. Perhaps I should cancel.”

“Please don’t,” she said, beginning to go towards the foyer. “I can’t let everybody down.”

The boat was decorated with strings of Greek flags, and another string of squares of white card, each one marked with a letter in blue paint that spelled out
GOODBY NINA
, a banner that’d been hung across the outside of the cabin. Paolo saw that Nina had noticed the missing
E
and forestalled her, saying “Don’t you dare.” Andros had put out a pair of sturdy boards that were used for the elderly, leaning them against the boat and using the main rope to keep the boat tight against the dock, but the angle was difficult on crutches, so he and Paolo took an elbow each and lifted Nina from the harborside. Beneath the banner, a chair awaited her and an upturned crate for resting her leg. When everything was set and she’d given the thumbs-up to say she was comfortable, Andros cast off the lines and
fired the engine into a low rumble. They chugged off at a stately pace towards Blue Bay, hugging the shore and slicing through the inertness of the afternoon sea, and Nina was attentive to it all: the way the water moved, the rise and sturdiness of the hill and its colors, the shape of the village and its human bustle, the low autumn sun that cast strong shadows. Slowly they made their way round towards the rockier side of the island. Paolo was quiet, but his face suggested enjoyment, a quiet pleasure in things without need of talking, so Nina pulled her hat down closer and stood and leaned over the side, peering into the deeps. She needed time to think about Nurse Yannis, to remember talks they’d had and consider them in the light of the new reality. She searched her memory for pieces of film about Dr. Christos, finding quotations from him about his marriage, the things he’d said about Doris, the things he’d said quite separately about the nurse. Did it all fit together? She’d become afraid of things that didn’t fit.