The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay Read online

  “You are, you’re very like him. It’s why she married you.”

  “She’d got it into her head that I was secretly miserable and masking it in being a workaholic, and that I was ripe for an affair and she couldn’t bear it to happen and was leaving before it could. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.”

  “You really have honed that nutshell.”

  “Why didn’t she turn to you, in this crisis? She’s always turned to you. Let’s be frank for once.”

  “What do you mean, ‘frank’? And what do you mean by ‘for once’?” Luca stood up and put his hands on the hips of his chalk-stripe jeans.

  Paolo looked down at Luca’s polished brown Chelsea boots, and up at his white shirt, silk jacket, gray and tan striped scarf. He thought, It isn’t any wonder that people think he’s gay. He glanced down at his usual dark-blue suit, the blue striped tie, and was aware of their dullness. A lack of imagination seemed to have become an issue. The two men were both beginning to show signs of their age; both had developed crow’s feet around their eyes, though neither had much gray to speak of, and their body shapes were just as ever — Luca slim and lithe and Paolo broad and strong. Luca was taller than average, and Paolo four inches taller than him. It had occurred to Paolo on several occasions over the years that if it came to it, he could take his brother easily and snap his neck.

  “Paolo?” Paolo had gone vague. Paolo was staring at Luca’s shoes.

  “She said she needed to be loved more, more than she loved me. What did she mean? I don’t get it.”

  “You and Nina have never really grasped this nettle.”

  “What’s the nettle?”

  Luca didn’t say, Drifting, the drifting. Instead he said, “She came to a decision, when Fran died. I don’t know why. It was just time, after a long time. That’s the best I can do for a summing-up.”

  “Do you think there’s somebody else?”

  “How could there be?”

  “It’s unimaginable.”

  “I’m sure there isn’t. And look. While we’re discussing things, there’s something I need to talk to you about. About the future. About mine.”

  At the airport, standing looking for her paperwork, Nina had been astonished to realize that Paolo was in the crowd, his familiar shape, his familiar face, intent on finding her. He’d said, “I had to come,” and they’d moved further aside so as to be out of people’s way. Paolo looked sad. “I talked to my brother again,” he said. “I know there’s something. He’s being evasive and he’s never evasive.”

  She’d blurted it. “We slept together. Luca. Me.”

  She said it looking into his eyes, because cowardice had always been an issue.

  Paolo was at first stunned and then unsurprised. He dropped the carrier bag he was holding (he’d bought magazines to give her for the flight) and having retrieved it adjusted his stance, moving his feet wider apart as if he was unsteady. He stared at her and there was a long exchange of eye contact, the seconds ticking by. Shock had already given way to an unbearable contempt.

  “When?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “When?”

  She wished that she hadn’t used the euphemism. Slept. They hadn’t slept. She should have used a far more brutal and appropriate word.

  “Nina? When was this?”

  She’d told the lie about the timing of it. There hadn’t seemed to be any choice. It didn’t feel like a choice. “It was after I moved out, and it wasn’t really anything. It was once.”

  “I knew it, I knew it.”

  “It was the wrong turn. I’m fine now and it’s all over, the whole illusion; I promise you. I promise you.” Why was she pleading?

  Paolo didn’t seem to have heard. “I knew it,” he said again.

  “You didn’t. Even I didn’t.” She’d never felt less coherent.

  “You’re in love with him; have always been.” He said it more to himself than to Nina.

  “It was more like … it was like an addiction.” She saw Paolo wincing; she was wincing herself.

  “That’s just a synonym, though, isn’t it, Nina.”

  “But it’s over now. Finished, all of it. I promise you.”

  They were standing in the zone where people queued to have their boarding cards scanned. People around them pretended they couldn’t see them, the couple who were standing aside; they pretended they couldn’t hear the conversation. But they smiled at each other as they talked, these strangers, speaking to one another in a way designed to mask their listening in. Such drama, going on in this cramped institutional space, couldn’t help but verge on the absurd.

  Nina said, “I need to go through.”

  Paolo said, “I wish you hadn’t told me.” She gathered her things together and he watched her. He said it again. “I wish you hadn’t told me.”

  “I’m sorry.” She began to walk away.

  “How are we going to do this, now?” he said, loud enough for everyone to stare, for people to begin to stifle laughter. “I didn’t think this was really over. But it’s over, isn’t it?”

  As she went through security, her face was hot with shame.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Triangles are stable things, mathematically stable but sometimes misleadingly so. We could do away with the triangle and place Nina and Luca and Paolo at points in a circle, each of them holding the hands of the other two, though the idea of a triangle, with its corners, its pauses and reversals, is better suited to the three of them. Perhaps it was always complicated, though very little of this embedded complexity showed up in the photographs that Anna took, hundreds of them, of Nina and the boys who lived next door. Anna took it for granted that Nina would marry one of the Romano boys. At night, stroking Nina’s hair until she slept, Anna told stories framed like an old folktale. There were once two brothers, tall, dark, and handsome brothers who loved each other with absolute love, and who as boys met a girl called Nina, as fair as they were dark, whose pale hair and pale-blue eyes marked her as a fairy creature. “Which of the brothers will win the fairy girl?” she’d ask. The outcomes weren’t always the same, but the versions in which she married the handsomer, more confident brother usually ended less than well.

  Because she had no children of her own, Nina carried pictures of her own childhood with her. Herself and Luca and Paolo as children: these were her children. In the photo that sat at the front of the picture slot in her wallet, a print in Kodacolor taken on a big, flat beach, she and Luca were eight and Paolo a taller, robust-looking ten-year-old, his eyes watchful and his smile guarded. He was physically distinct from the other two, with a soft belly, large thighs, the beginnings of a double chin, dimensions that didn’t much change in later life, other than to be firmed up by the hours he spent at a city swimming pool. Even as a child his expression was unlike those of the others; there was something about Paolo even at ten that was wearily human. Anna said he was an old soul. Luca and Nina, on the other hand, looked like immortals, like sprites. They had similar bodies, then, similar long, bony limbs, prominent knees and elbows, angular faces and wide smiles, eyes that shared and escalated mischief. The beach photograph at the front of the slot was the picture Nina showed Dr. Christos, one that illustrated the circle. The one she didn’t show him illustrated the triangle. It was hidden at the back of the compartment, one of her and Luca at fifteen and Paolo at seventeen, photographed in the garden. Nina was in the middle and had looped a skinny arm around each boy’s neck. Her white-blonde hair was in two thin plaits that wound around the crown of her head like some Nordic girl goddess.

  That was the day it started: the triangle’s official beginning. By then everything was in flux. Paolo was standing right next to Nina but looked as if he was already pulling away from her, even as the picture was being taken. This separateness had begun in the summer holidays: Paolo had been unavailable, having found other things to do and other people to do them with. Now, at the start of the October half-term, his not wanting to spend time with Nina an
d Luca was obvious. He’d begun to tire of the pranks and silliness of his brother, and Nina’s enthusiastic, uncritical aiding and abetting. He’d curl his lip a certain way, when Luca was being lunatic and Nina his devoted accomplice, and look into the middle distance, wishing himself elsewhere. That afternoon had been a case in point. After they’d had their picture taken, having been summoned into the garden and put into the old pose, Luca and Nina went to the Findlays’ sofa and listened to The Dark Side of the Moon, an album of Nina’s mother’s, one that her father had deemed barbaric; the barbarians, he said, were long past the gate and were trampling through the rose beds. Paolo had declined an invitation to join in. Instead he’d followed Anna into the kitchen, glad of a chance to talk about his dilemma (whether to go to university or not), but then she’d had to go out and so he’d wandered into the sitting room, still holding his coffee cup and with the stance of a spectator. Luca was lying with his head on Nina’s corduroy-clad thigh — it was a proper autumn day and they were all in cords and sweaters in mud and heather colors — playing a game of their own devising that was called Alternatives. One person declared a theme and then, after the others narrowed it down, had to come up with a funny alternative to the lyric they were listening to. Paolo wasn’t keen on playing; he wasn’t as quick-witted as the others and his brother could be scornful.

  It was Nina’s go. “Jobs. Professions.”

  “Weavers,” Luca said straightaway.

  Nina began to laugh. She was laughing even before she could spit it out. “Dark side of the loom!”

  She and Luca both found this hysterically funny. Paolo didn’t. It was a small thing, the kind of thing that could create alliances and also destroy them. Luca, laughing and bouncing the back of his skull uncomfortably on Nina’s leg, had been tipped off it and rolled forward. She’d tried to save him and the two of them had gone over the edge of the couch and onto a lambswool rug. Their limbs had become entangled. They took their time disentangling them.

  “For God’s sake,” Paolo said. “You’re so bloody childish.”

  “And what should we be, middle-aged like you?” Luca countered, looking up at him, his legs wrapped around Nina’s hips. Nina should have said something. Paolo was her friend. She was always the glue that bound them. “Personally, I plan to be childish for a long, long time.”

  “In which case, have a nice life,” Paolo told him, sounding more peevish than he meant to.

  “What, you think our parents are a good advert for growing up?” Luca said, sitting straighter. “They’re miserable and bored and that’s why they fight all the time.”

  “They don’t fight all the time,” Nina objected, though the truth was that they fought a lot. It was, as Anna explained to Robert, the reason the boys were at their house and on their sofa so often, and not at home.

  Paolo put his hands in his two front pockets. “Just grow up a bit, little brother,” he said. “It gets a little tedious, all this, and a bit embarrassing.”

  “What does?” Nina asked. She didn’t get it.

  “Fuck off,” Luca told him.

  “The cavorting, the flirting,” Paolo said. “And now I’m off to play tennis. Bye.”

  Thanks to the positioning and the screening of ancient trees, the two families occupied a private corner in the village, and so Giulio and Maria Romano’s screaming matches were muffled from most neighbors, while at the same time being broadcast right into the Findlays’ garden. The Findlay place, built on a plot that had been a scruffy car workshop in the ’60s, occupied a corner at the convergence of two quiet Victorian roads. Their wide, flat-faced two-story house, built in 1971, was the first modern building in an otherwise ubiquitously nineteenth-century locale, and was something of a talking point. When they first moved in, Anna would find locals at the door wondering if they could have a wee look; wasn’t this open-plan layout going to be awfully expensive to heat?

  Anna had been dismayed by the apparent disintegration of the threesome in the summer holidays, but was philosophical. It would just be a phase, she said to Nina. She’d acknowledged the change in front of the boys, that day, when she’d opened the door in the fence and asked them to come for a photograph. She must at least have her annual photograph, she said. The door, made out of a modified hinged panel with a bolt on both sides, was one that the two fathers had made together when the children were small and went back and forth. The parents had gone back and forth, too. There were frequent get-togethers on weekend summer evenings over wine, usually at Giulio’s invitation (he worked in wine; there was always wine). Maria joined in but she was unmistakably just a little less keen to socialize, trying to keep the visits to a fixed schedule and openly averse to their dragging on too long. She didn’t like the neighbors, and particularly not Anna, but their leaving early was also a kind of self-knowledge: when she and Giulio drank too much there’d inevitably be bickering that could tip into open warfare. She’d object to the length of Giulio’s anecdotes. He would call her a joyless nag. She might say that he’d had enough to drink. He’d say that it wasn’t any wonder that he drank. She’d say that she wasn’t going to be chastised in front of their friends. He’d say that was rich coming from her. Later, many years later, Nina would see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on television, sitting cuddled up with Luca on a night that Paolo was away, and she’d say, “Do Liz and Richard remind you of anyone?” and Luca, wincing, would say, “So much so that it feels almost like one of my own memories.”

  “So that’s your parents,” she’d said. “I wonder who’d play mine.”

  Luca had considered the question. “Max von Sydow and Daryl Hannah.” They’d laughed because it was true. They’d laughed some more imagining the four having dinner together, and this had spiraled into a routine that was added to intermittently for weeks.

  Having made his terse farewell, Paolo left the Findlays’ sitting room, stomping off through the front door and banging it behind him. Through the large glass window that dominated the front of the building, nine-paned like a tic-tac-toe board, they saw him stride past, his mouth set into irritation. Luca and Nina watched in silence, then caught each other’s eye and laughed again, Luca pressing his lips together and blowing a laughter raspberry through them, the kind done in the presence of pomposity.

  He stopped quite suddenly and looked pained. “Jesus, he’s turning into such a wanker.”

  He and Nina went outside, to the wooden seat behind the shed at the end of the garden. It was a south-facing corner and the day seemed almost warm there, out of the wind. No sooner had Nina sat down and put her hands on the edge of the bench, wrapping the ends of her fingers underneath, than she squawked in pain and withdrew. “Splinter. Fucking splinter.” Luca had taught her how to swear, though she exercised her new talent only in his presence. “Bollocks. Fucking hurts.” The fingertip looked instantly as if it were infected, puffing and pinking.

  Luca had taken a packet of Marlboros and a lighter out of his jacket pocket, having told Nina that he was going to teach her how to smoke. He put the cigarettes back and said, “Here, let me look.” They peered at the index finger together. “It’s gone right in. Hold it steady; I’m going to get it out.”

  “No, no, don’t; it’ll hurt.” She was flinching, screwing her face up. “I’ll go find Mum; she takes them out with a hot needle.”

  “A hot needle sounds a lot worse. Hold still.” He squeezed at the injury from both sides with the tips of his thumbs until the end of the splinter popped up, and then grasped it and pulled. “There’s a tiny bit left; let me suck at it.”

  Nina was already doing that, sucking at the wound and then peering at it, squinting. She felt a thrill of disquiet at Luca’s suggestion. “All gone I think. It’s bleeding, though.”

  Luca produced a clean tissue, winding it around the finger and tucking in the end. A blood spot seeped red from within, spreading and then ceasing. “That should do it,” he said. “Might need a Band-Aid later.”

  “Thank you.” She put ou
t her good hand. It was a thanking gesture, brushed against his ribs.

  What happened next happened in a rush. Luca took hold of the hand and pulled her towards him, adjusting his balance on the bench, and then he was kissing her. They kissed softly and then harder and moved closer to one another. He put his arms around her lower back and now his tongue found hers; she put her arms around him and pressed her breasts into his chest and he made a small noise, a soft grunt, something out of his throat like an admission of relief. Immediately after this there was a new noise, one they both recognized: the door from the kitchen opening and closing. Nina’s eyes widened as she realized that it was her mother approaching, her feet on the paved path; she moved back and Luca moved back further, pushing away from her and turning rapidly to face forward. They’d only just extricated themselves when Anna appeared, barefoot and wearing a red shirt dress with buttons that stopped short of the knee, revealing long, smooth legs that still bore traces of summer. She had wet laundry in a blue basket balanced against her hip. The washing line was attached to the shed at one end, and at the other to a rusting pole that Robert had planted in the hedge for the purpose.

  “What are you two up to?” She’d dropped the basket and was beginning to hang the clothes. She didn’t mean anything particular by it, but Luca had already sprung to his feet.

  “I’m going in now; see you,” he said. Anna turned to Nina while holding a shirt, offering an inquiring look, but said nothing, returning to the task, and Luca went through the door in the fence and disappeared.

  Disappeared was the apt word. He didn’t look Nina in the eye for almost three years. There were new friends, new faces in the garden that Nina realized were really old faces, boys she’d been at primary school with, like Andy Stevenson, who looked like a young farmer. Luca was busy with projects and mystifyingly cheerful. As for Nina, she was thought to be ill; her parents worried about her paleness and lack of sleep, her poor appetite, her inability to sit still. It affected her schoolwork. She’d study a little while or read, she’d listen to music or go to the hobby room to her mother’s sewing machine, but it was never long before she was back at the window. Sometimes she’d see Luca in his garden on his own, kicking leaves or hitting a tennis ball repetitively against the wall. He’d sit on the swing — Nina’s bedroom gave a grandstand view of it — with his feet in the dirt patch that had been worn beneath, moving himself back and forth with his shoes trailing. She’d see him reading in the hammock, one that Giulio had strung between two silver birches, with successive trilogy paperbacks of The Lord of the Rings. Sometimes he’d look up, a quick, disguised look upwards, and if he saw her he’d go inside. It was clear that he didn’t want to know her anymore. Unable to believe that their friendship was over, Nina persisted, for a few disheartening weeks, in behaving as if it wasn’t. “I’m busy,” he’d say, when she asked him if he’d like to do something, to go out, frowning at some fixed third point, as if she ought to have known, as if they’d already been over this. It was like the kissing was her fault somehow, as if she’d let him down.