The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (30 page)

Anna had been too tired to go out, but wanted to do something and decided she’d make a pear tart. Nina returned from her mission that drizzly, ordinary Tuesday with the ingredients it turned out Anna didn’t have — the ground almonds, the vanilla extract — and found her mother stretched out on the sofa on her back, hands folded over her stomach, in perfect peace and symmetry. There was something disturbing about this implied acceptance. Nina couldn’t think what to do: should she call the doctor, an ambulance, the police? What did you do first when someone
died? She picked up the phone and dialed emergency services, and called her father and he came straight over. They stood looking at her together, Nina crying into her father’s shoulder.

“That’s not Anna any longer,” he said. “Anna’s gone; your mother’s gone, Nina. She’s passed over.”

He’d used the language of his childhood, trying to comfort her, but neither of them really believed that Anna had passed anywhere. That
was
Anna. Anna was finished. Anna had come to an end.

“Mum had been ill for months with this mysterious constant tiredness,” Nina said. “She kept saying that she was on the mend but it was obvious that she wasn’t. It transpired that one of her friends — Sheila Medlar — was saying privately to the others that her optimism was a big act and that really she was severely depressed. I hated her for that. Hated her.”

Dr. Christos looked dismayed by her hatred. “You don’t think it was a kindness? Sheila telling the other friends that Anna was low?”

“That’s how my dad sees it. He’s unshakable that Sheila was devoted to her.”

“You don’t think so, though.”

“It was vital to Mum that people didn’t know how low she was. Even me. I was also protected. It was only afterwards when I saw things she’d written that I knew how it had really been. She saw lying to me as protecting me, and her lying was a kind of love. She was determined to be thought to be coping and making the best of things, but Sheila insisted on seeing through it. I can’t see that as a kindness.” Nina looked again at her watch. “Mum never
showed the truth to me, not once. That’s the thing that upsets me now. She was always sunny, positive, a rock, but there’s a cost when you’re somebody’s rock, isn’t there? I thought that she was different from other people, that she had a knack for happiness. I still say so, when people ask about her, and ask how she was on her own, after the separation. I continue to be loyal. It’s a kind of a loyalty to the view of her that she wanted me to have.”

Anna hadn’t known how ill she was. She lost faith in life and then in God, and thought that this double sense of letdown was enough to explain the trouble she was having climbing stairs. She returned to the village to see her doctor, and at first Alison was content to latch on to the obvious — recent depressing events — to explain her problems, and gave her drugs she didn’t take. Anna made a dramatic exit from the church Bible group shortly after this, traveling back to the village again so as to end her membership face-to-face. She told them, the assembled company, that she couldn’t any longer believe in the goodness of a god who contemplated suffering as part of any kind of plan; when you stopped believing in God’s goodness you seemed to have disproved the whole idea of God. They were convinced that this dissent was really to do with the breakdown of the marriage. Two women from the group visited her at the apartment, to appeal to her to stay and to find love through fellowship, and then they went to see Robert when she died.

“Anna lost her faith, and I have never had any, and so you’re wasting your time,” Robert said to the women, both of them short-haired and in long, loose dresses. “Worse, you are wasting my time.” One had made the mistake of putting her hand on his
shoulder, as if faith were a transferable thing being transmitted through his collarbone, and he’d been very direct about his feelings after that. The women had fought back. Maria had come out of her house to see what all the commotion was about.

“Let me share something with you,” this same woman had said, when visiting Anna and attempting the same maneuver. “Sometimes God makes our lives hard because that’s what we need. Sometimes we need to have a harder life.”

“You think my life with Robert was too easy?” Anna asked her. “What do you know about my life with Robert?”

Nina had tried to explain all this to Paolo, and why it was that she couldn’t — why she physically wasn’t able to — get married in a church. He’d countered with an undeniable fact, that she’d gone with Anna to the midnight service every year on Christmas Eve. She’d found the experience infinitely depressing, all the mystery and beauty of the season reduced to a tedious travelogue of shepherds and inns. She wanted to hear about other things than that, about magic and paradox: how a virgin could be a mother, what or who the Holy Spirit was, and if God really did manipulate the movements of stars. What if the Big Bang that brewed up all our little accidental intelligences also made one freakishly vast one, a chemically induced god who found Himself alone, and also, to His own surprise, mortal? What if His person was physically contained in the expanding universe and had expanded too much, His lights dimming steadily over time? These interesting questions were never addressed.

Dr. Christos said that his meeting had been postponed and that they should get some fresh air: Nina didn’t look well, and there
was time before Paolo arrived. Nina looked again at her watch; it was still only 2:45. When they got to the steps to the beach, the doctor took the crutches from her and balanced them against a table. “Lean on me,” he said. “To give yourself a rest from those damn things. Put your arm around my neck.”

“I’m okay resting against the barrier.” Even as she said this, she was already doing so. This was interesting. Her mind wanted to go forward into a relationship with him but her body didn’t seem to agree. He might know this; he might want to discuss it as if it were a knot that could be unknotted.

“What was it that you wanted to tell me?” he asked.

“I’m too tired.” She regretted raising it now. She shouldn’t even have flagged the existence of the thing Paolo mustn’t know. It was one of those things that must never be told, that grow in scope and danger when they’re shared. Off in the distance, on the beach beyond the harbor, the heat haze had rendered two figures insubstantial, even flimsy, as if they were only a trick of the light. Nina watched them under a sun-shading hand. “I know you don’t believe in ghosts,” she said, “but I used to see my mother when I was out shopping, ahead of me in the crowd and then gone.”

“You don’t see her anymore?”

“I don’t. But I did. I used to see her. That’s what changed my mind about the spirits of the dead. I think they’re real. I know they are. Where does that lead us?”

“You are wonderful,” Dr. Christos said, still facing the sea.

“I like you, too.” It was true, but what else did it mean? Perhaps only that they were in the same predicament. What was going on? She’d lost all faith in judging her feelings. Anna had given lots of good advice about keeping control, but she’d had her heart broken, nonetheless.

One day, out of the blue she’d asked Robert, in what was really only a conversational gambit at dinner — and in Nina’s presence — what he thought they should do when Nina left home. It was a lighthearted comment, whimsical, but he didn’t seem to want to answer. He looked uncomfortable; he started to prevaricate, and so she began to press him — what did he mean, what was the matter? He said he thought that their life together was coming to an end. It had been wonderful, he said, but life was short and it should be about growth and change, when the appropriate time came. Growth and change: Nina had never heard him use this sort of language, and it’d turn out that he’d dipped into the self-help books, despite his disdain for them, looking for ways of having a conversation he didn’t know how to have. Anna couldn’t react at first, to what he’d told her; she sat open-mouthed, having been absolutely wrong-footed. It had been a wonderful twenty-one years, he said, but now that Nina was at college he thought it would be better for both of them to pursue their lives in different ways. He was sure that if Anna thought about it she’d become as excited as he was about the possibility of a new life, of travel, of pursuing new interests.

“Of pursuing new women,” Anna interjected.

“It’s not about that,” he said, in his practiced tutorial fashion. “Why must you be so reductive?”

“You don’t love me anymore,” Anna said, her voice breaking.

“No, I don’t think that I do,” Robert told her, looking pained. “I don’t know why. I’ve felt this way for a while. I can’t explain it. It’s just something that’s happened. I’m sorry this is happening now. I’m sorry, Nina, that you had to be here for this.”

Nina had fled to her room, and Anna had gone after her, to comfort her.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Everything had been fine, or at least in some kind of balance, or at least in abeyance, until Francesca became ill. The illness was a shock to everybody, but wasn’t at first regarded as a crisis, because it was thought that the cancer had been detected early. By mid-May in the year before she died she’d had surgery and chemo and seemed to be on the mend, and she and Luca went away to a swanky hotel to celebrate. The day they got back was also the day that Nina and Paolo went off to Rome for their annual visit; Nina accompanied him there on business every spring. Thanks to this overlap of away dates there hadn’t been any contact with Luca for over a week, and so when she got into the car at the airport and turned her phone back on, Nina was surprised to find no messages waiting. Ordinarily there’d be a backlog of them in all formats: texts and e-mails and things written to her via social networks. Ordinarily the most recent would say,
Are you here yet? Talk to me. Tell me everything
. Whenever she answered, even if it was hours later, Luca replied immediately, and if she didn’t respond fast enough for him there’d be increasingly dramatic accusations it was impossible not to laugh at. He was always predictably direct. If she said,
Talk later
, he’d reply,
Talk now. Can’t wait. Medically urgent
. Even though Nina was absolutely staunch in her belief that it was harmless behavior and harmlessly life-enhancing, this state of affairs could be tricky, domestically.

Paolo was tolerant, but tolerance had its limits. She had to limit the text exchanges while they were watching a film, for
instance, even though (as she always argued) most television was more entertaining if you were also bantering with someone else at the time. (The net result was more happiness, so what was the issue?) If she replied at the dinner table to the question
What are you eating?
Paolo might pretend not to notice. Or he might say, “Nina, enough. He can wait. Turn it off.”

Sometimes Nina was irritated by this. “It’s just fun, Paolo,” she’d say. “It’s just Luca.”

He’d wave at her from across the table. “Hello. Hello, Nina. I am here. Perhaps you’d be more interested in me if I texted or tweeted you.” Nina had to bite her lip because there was something in what he said. She and Luca had discussed this very thing: people did become more incisive, sharper, more lateral, when they were trained to be so by interacting online and by having to condense their thoughts; it was good synaptic exercise. Privately, she thought that Paolo could do with a bit of that intense verbal jousting and wordplay. But Paolo was disdainful about socializing on the Internet; it had become a sore point and she’d learned not to challenge him on it.