The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay Read online

  What is it that makes us fall in love with someone? A list of attributes is a useless thing in answering. Plenty of people have those same attributes and we don’t love them. There are people we dislike who have those same attributes. Tick the boxes, retrospectively, that mark the qualities of the person who was loved, and there may even be things we’d never tolerate again. The intangibles at work are things as unreliable as weather, forces that go beyond thinking and deciding, all of them convincingly permanent but proven by other examples of love to be as transitory as fog, as sunshine. On what basis had she done her choosing? In the hospital Nina wrote pages and pages on the whole slippery idea of the basis. Was it really something as embarrassingly superficial as the look of somebody, the way they spoke, their absolute faith in themselves? Luca and Paolo were both solidly good-looking, though Paolo was a lot more solid than his brother. There wasn’t any doubt that Luca was the more conventionally handsome; Paolo’s nose was longer, his mouth narrower, his eyes deeper set. But it couldn’t be that. If Luca and Paolo had swapped bodies it would still have been Luca. It could only have been down to a shared wit, a way of thinking; recognition of a companion mind. Perhaps it was simply instinctive, one of those rapid sub-verbal assessments that stick; attraction is happy to betray all rationality. As someone once said — possibly a prose stylist at Hallmark Cards — the heart wants what the heart wants. We can stage all the neurological interventions we like: it wants what it wants. There are things that take place in closed session, deep in the interfaces between mind and will, deep under the crust of the known self, where the playing out of heart goes blindly on. Sometimes the whole thing is utterly baffling afterwards. Was his cruelty, his inconstancy, a part of it? Did his being in a way dangerous, his approval hard to win, make his love worth more than Paolo’s — or is it all just more evidence of my own lack, lack piled upon lack, in being dazzled by unpredictability and disdaining constancy? She paused, pen poised, and added It’s such a dismal fucking cliché among womankind.

  If Nina had a tendency to drift into prose that was Jane Austen–ish (lack upon lack, dazzled, disdaining, constancy, it all seemed fairly Austen to her, reading back, though admittedly the final line was firmly modern), then this was in keeping with Anna’s preoccupation with Nina’s making a good marriage. When Nina was seventeen, in the second year of Luca’s great silence, and Paolo seemed interested in her, Anna was unsentimental about what Nina should do: in short, bag Paolo — who at that time was all set to be sole heir to the wine business — and step away from Luca, who was determined at that point to be a poet. Associating Anna’s advice with dull materialism, Nina found it easier to dismiss. The deed was already done. Her and Luca’s souls had exchanged, silently and invisibly, their potent hormonal business cards. Not that you’d have known it, looking in from the outside. From the outside there was scant evidence of anything other than indifference, though because of the timing of it his abandonment looked ordinary, even inevitable, to others. To the surrounding adults it looked more like a sudden growing up, a sudden leap forward of maturity. Almost simultaneously with Anna’s advice to Nina, Luca decided that he was giving up on being a writer and would try for law, and started to study harder. He began to take sports more seriously, joined the athletics club at school, and played competitive tennis. He became quite suddenly taller and filled out across the shoulders, and began to attract female attention. Throughout all of this Nina was ignored.

  That’s how things stood when she went to university, to Glasgow to study literature. Luca stayed home — having given up first on poetry and then on law — to join his brother at his father’s wine distribution business, where he embarked on an immediate overhaul, accusing Paolo of conservatism, wanting radical shake-ups even in the staff kitchen. Nina saw Luca that Christmas at her mother’s annual party, watching from across the room as he busied himself being lively in the presence of others. She watched how other girls talked to him. There was a lot of fluidity in her character that she could direct in ways Luca would approve of, if she could only be sure what those things were. She began to read her mother’s self-help books, looking for answers.

  “It’s a mistake to accept that the person you think you are is the person you are forever,” Anna had told her. “A person is a work of art and can be remade in different ways.”

  Her dad scoffed at this. He was disdainful of the idea of self-improvement, dismissive of what he called the inward-looking gaze, calling it the unhelpful offspring of the cult of individualism (this was how he talked), something that enforced a tendency to self-absorption. “What people who think they’re depressed need is to do community work, to help other people,” he’d say lugubriously. “Let them visit the poor, and help the elderly, and put other people first.” He encouraged Anna to be a local volunteer, and she said that she found it uplifting. Robert had rarely been irritable with her — theirs was a marriage almost entirely without arguments — but he was openly intolerant of her self-help phase, and openly relieved when it was over and she gave the books away to a church hall sale.

  Nina hung on to one of the books and kept it with her sports equipment in a long zipped bag. The chapter on love was especially well thumbed. It talked about identifying a mate, and Nina recognized that she’d identified Luca early. Although, was identification the right word? It didn’t seem so during the long days on the island, as her shinbone knitted slowly back together. All her hidden self had offered up was notification that something irrevocable had taken place, something that manifested itself as possessiveness. Even at fifteen, she’d owned Luca. She owned the way his shirt sat on his shoulders, the bulge of shoulder blades at the back and then concave between them, the way that he turned up his sleeves, unbuttoning the cuffs and folding them to the elbows. There was something about his forearms that drew her; when the two families ate together she’d look discreetly at them and at his hands as he broke bread. She knew the curves of his throat and spine and the backs of his legs, the shape of his feet, their bones and planes, the scattering of dark hair on his toes, the way his toenails flared upwards and how very short he cut them, so that the end of the toe bulged out afterwards; she knew the particular, individual system of muscles around his knees. She noticed small changes made to his hairline, and to his smell; his skin had a smell like but unlike his brother’s. She mapped and knew his physical self like a learned and recited poem.

  The facts were the facts. Luca had decided two things in the same year, the year of the beginnings of ownership: firstly that he would kiss her and secondly that the kiss was a mistake. There wasn’t any other interpretation possible. He couldn’t any longer even acknowledge her. So it was beyond surprising, when Nina came back for the long vacation at the end of her first university year, to find that Luca was there in the garden with her parents, waiting with them for her arrival. He’d brought samples of the new wines he’d been credited with sourcing in Italy, and was doing a little showing off. That was okay. It was allowable; Nina’s parents showed it in their faces, their finding it endearing that he should want to impress them, though some of the things he said were things they already knew, talking them through wine regions and varieties as if they were beginners. Nina had arrived quietly, letting herself into the house, and watched unseen from the kitchen window for a minute or two before opening the door to the outside, breaking the spell of Luca’s monologue. She was grabbed and hugged and kissed by her mother.

  “It’s so good to have you home, I can’t tell you,” Anna said, inhaling deeply at her daughter’s neck.

  “Wine, Nina?” Luca asked, as if things between them were normal.

  “No, thanks; travel headache.” She went back into the kitchen for water, watching them as she ran the tap colder. They were sitting at the metal patio set, the bistro set, so-called, on the uncomfortable white metal chairs. She saw Luca drape one arm over the back of the fourth chair — the vacant one that awaited her. When she returned she insisted on standing, leaning against the fence and
saying that she’d been sitting too long.

  “So, how are you?” Luca was smiling at her as if they were friends, as if none of it had happened. “How’s university life? Do you like living in Glasgow? And how long are you back for? For the whole summer, I hope. Do you have a summer job?”

  “It’s good, thanks. I do. I’m here till September. And yes, wait-ressing in town.”

  “Well, that’s systematic. And are you well?”

  “I’m very well.” The briskness was sufficient to earn a raised eyebrow from Anna, and Nina adjusted her tone. “How’s Paolo doing — how’s he liking London? He wrote to me and I meant to reply but then I didn’t get round to it.” Paolo had gone to London to work for a wine shop chain.

  “Paolo’s fine,” his brother said. “Fine, fine, dull as ever, fine.”

  “Luca, that’s mean,” Anna protested.

  Luca just laughed. He topped up the glasses, Nina’s included, ignoring her protests about the headache.

  He came into the Findlays’ house the following day without knocking, just like he used to. Nina went into the sitting room and found him on the couch. He’d taken a pile of books from the shelves; he’d helped himself to snacks and he’d put a record on. Nina had assumed she was alone at home, so cried out in surprise when she found him there: Luca, a Genesis LP, a Martin Amis, a sandwich.

  “This is bloody good ham,” he said. “Can I make you one?” He didn’t look up from reading.

  “Why are you here?” She was in the right, so why did she have to sound as if she wasn’t?

  Now he looked up, perplexed. “What do you mean?” It was as if he genuinely didn’t know. “Your mother said I could come whenever I need to get away. I needed to get away. Am I bothering you?”

  “Not at all.” The insincerity was blistering. She sat beside him and picked up a magazine. Her hands were shaking. Her stomach churned. She needed to be offhand, but her chilliness with him was doomed. He paid no attention to her attempted coolness, refusing to acknowledge her coolness until her coolness was defeated; this was crucially the thing that Luca always did and Paolo didn’t.

  He said, “So how are you really? Are you seeing anyone? I’ve been going out with Susie; you’ve probably heard.”

  “I heard that you dumped her.”

  “She’s going to be a success as a lawyer. That’s all I’m prepared to say. It isn’t a compliment. I’m getting another sandwich; can I get you one?” He went into the kitchen.

  “No, thanks. I’ve got one last essay to finish; I’d better go finish it.” She went to her room and sat on her bed and wondered what to do next. There was no essay. She was trapped in her room. What was she going to do?

  “Nina.” He’d come up the stairs behind her. His head had appeared round the door.

  She reached for the book by the bed, the dilapidated Byron, and he saw her do so and knew everything. He took the book off her and put it down and took off his shoes and lay on her bed on his back, and opened his arm and said, “Snuggle time,” and was absolutely unemotive about it, as if addressing the ceiling, and she complied, going and lying beside him and resting her head on his shoulder. He turned and kissed her softly and said, “That’s better.” After a while he said, “What shall we do with the summer? The summer: that’s too big a concept. What shall we do tomorrow? Let’s get on a train and go visit somewhere we’ve never been.”

  “I’m starting work tomorrow afternoon,” she told him.

  Luca just pulled her in closer. The tightness of the hug was a way of saying the unsayable. It was an apology. It couldn’t be anything else. Nina didn’t bring up the hiatus or her own confusion about it. She was too relieved to say anything. She wasn’t impressed with herself about this, but on the other hand the relief of it was above every other feeling.

  The following Saturday, Maria and Giulio came round for a drink for Anna’s birthday, and sat at the outdoor table and drank more of Luca’s new wine. Luca and Nina lay on the grass together on a tartan rug, looking private and conspiratorial, and Giulio began to talk about the two of them as if they were a couple, though he did so under his breath so that they couldn’t hear, whispering that he foresaw an announcement. None of the other three had anything to say to this, but each of their faces had its own reaction. Anna’s was cheerful skepticism, her eyebrows raised, smiling. Robert’s was openly aghast. Maria’s was directed at her husband, and could have killed a smaller mammal.

  Until Nina went back to Glasgow, and when they weren’t working, Luca and Nina spent a lot of time together, through June, July, and August, and then half of September. On fine weekends they’d lounge in Nina’s garden, reading and dozing and listening to Anna’s battery-operated radio. The days were long and lazy and nothing much happened or was even said, though from time to time one of them shared bits from a book, or instigated idle chatter or a tease. Mostly they were verbal teases. “You’ve been immensely boring today; you’re the most boring person I’ve ever met.” “I’m not the one who mentioned photosynthesis twice over breakfast.” “You’re worse; you take books of logarithms on holiday.”

  He kissed her sometimes, on the mouth, closed-lipped though sometimes for a long moment, with a constant firm pressure, what he called a Hollywood kiss, one from the golden age of film. He kissed her chastely, and held her hand, and put his arm around her often. Were they boyfriend and girlfriend, or not? She dreaded anybody asking. It seemed more like a regression than anything; they’d returned to the sibling patterns of childhood. That August at Giulio’s sixtieth, standing in the Romanos’ kitchen, Nina said the pâté was too salty and Luca pretended he’d made it and was offended and swooped, rugby-tackling her from the side so that both of them fell onto the linoleum. Other guests had moved swiftly out of range.

  “Hey! Be careful there, you two. Glasses. Holding glasses here. Take it outside.”

  “What are they like?” another guest asked rhetorically. “Like deranged giant kittens.”

  “I foresee an announcement,” Giulio said, looking happy.

  There were no question marks, nor irony, but there were question marks and irony afterwards for Nina, alone in her bedroom, turning to bury her face in the pillow so as to laugh. The need to make asses of themselves in public was mutual, circumventing even the stern disapproval of her father. There was hope and fear and self-consciousness afterwards, but above all else, certainty, absolute certainty, that they were at the beginning of their story, their lifelong story.

  The day after the party, finding they both had hangovers, Luca decided that they should play garden badminton. Paolo, who was catching the morning train, came to say goodbye as they were fixing the net. Luca had retrieved its moldering end from inside the hedge and was carrying it across to attach it to a hook on the wooden fence at the other side.

  “I’m off, then,” Paolo said.

  “Bye.” Luca wasn’t looking at him. He busied himself with knotting the ties.

  “Great to talk to you, as ever.” Paolo left without saying anything further.

  Nina said, “Why do you have to treat him like that?”

  Luca looked confused. “He talks to me like that, too. All the time. Just not in front of you.”

  Nina hit the shuttlecock hard, serving like gunfire. Luca smashed it back and she lobbed it, and he lobbed it higher and further in return, and Nina backed and backed and blundered into the rockery, twisting her foot and sinking to the grass with a shout. Luca was straight there, dropping his racquet and ducking under the net and running to her.

  “Don’t move, don’t move, let me look at it first.” He removed her tennis shoe with tender care, Nina wincing and shrieking, and hoisted her foot onto his leg just above the knee. His hands stroked over her instep, over the ball of her foot, gently flexing her toes. “It isn’t anything much, I don’t think,” he said, “but we need to get it up and get some ice on it, pronto.”

  It turned out that Paolo was still there. He was standing in the kitchen eating toast when Luca
carried Nina back into the house, staggering under her weight and demanding she eat less chocolate. He followed the two of them into the sitting room and watched as Luca ministered to the foot. Luca got Nina settled, her leg propped on a cushion, and fetched frozen peas for the swelling.

  Paolo hovered. “The swelling’s a good sign — it means it’s probably not broken.”

  Luca’s expression was withering. “What do you know about broken ankles? Zero; less than zero. The swelling’s a good sign, indeed. I don’t think Nina thinks the swelling’s a good sign.”

  Paolo went to an armchair and took another of the cushions and put it against his stomach and wrapped his arms tight around it. “I love your feet,” he said. Luca turned to stare at him. “No, really,” Paolo continued. “They’re elegant. My toes are like five fat prawns in a box, but yours are — look how thin the stems of your toes are, the little pads at the end.”