The first time Paolo rang Nina at the hospital she was astounded that he’d called at all. His final words to her at the airport had seemed definitively final, so she’d been surprised to get his text, saying that when it was time he’d come to Greece and get her, and even more so when he’d telephoned. Her phone had rung out and she’d seen his name come up on the screen, and had answered with a comical braced expression, her teeth set together.
There wasn’t any kind of a greeting; no hi, no hello. He launched in. “So how’s the leg?” If this was how it was to be, if he was opting for a chummy kind of amnesia, then so be it. It made a kind of sense.
“The leg’s still there, but I keep dreaming that it’s gone,” she told him. “I dream that I wake up and all that’s left is a stump.” She was aware that she sounded nervous.
“It takes a while to get over these things.” He cleared his throat. “I had coffee with your dad today. He’d just been to the cottage and said to tell you all’s well there. Your herb garden’s growing fast. He hoped it was okay to take some trimmings. I said I was sure it was.”
“Of course. Have you had much rain?” Yes, the weather.
“It’s been monsooning. Your dad also said to tell you that he’s had a breakthrough on the book. He’s writing to you.”
“That’s good to hear, about the book. He seemed like he’d got stuck, when I was living with him. Though maybe it was because I was living with him.” She felt weak. Surely they couldn’t keep going like this without mentioning it?
“I bet it isn’t raining in Greece,” Paolo said.
“Too warm, some days. I’m longing for a swim. I can hear people on the beach.”
“But it’s pebbly there, isn’t it, by the hospital?”
“How’d you know that? It wasn’t here when we were here.”
“Google.”
“Google, of course.” The anxiety was building, tight in her rib cage and soft in her stomach. Was she making a fool of herself in not seeing that this bland chatter was supposed to be her cue to sweep through it and apologize?
“It’s been quite warm between the showers,” Paolo said. “Good for your garden. Your dad might be struggling to keep on top of things.”
“I told him to hire someone and that I’d pay.” She sounded to herself as if she might be about to have a seizure. Her tongue felt enormous.
“Listen, I have to sign off, I’m late for a conference call. Good to hear you’re okay, Nina.”
“Thanks. Bye.”
“I told your dad that I’d ring. He’s anxious for news. Bye then.” In the tone of this voice, inside this farewell, was palpably the sound of obligation.
When Nina left Paolo she’d lived with her dad while the legalities were completed for the buying of a house in the same village, barely a mile from her childhood home. The day she got the keys and moved in, a chilly day at the end of June, Paolo had sent flowers and Nina rang her friend Susie in tears.
“What on earth’s the matter?” Susie asked. “So Paolo sent flowers. What’s wrong with that?”
“He wished me a happy life ahead. A happy life, like we’re not going to see one another.”
“He is trying to be dignified, Nina. That’s all.”
“Why doesn’t he feel things? He doesn’t seem to feel anything about this disaster.”
“Nina. I say this to you as a friend.”
“What?”
“You left him. It was you who left Paolo, and without much of an explanation.”
“There was an explanation. We talked it over.”
“You talked incomprehensibly by all accounts. Even by your account.”
“You’ve heard his account?”
“He thinks it’s about Luca. He thought having Luca staying with the two of you would make you happy.”
“He was wrong.”
“He said he thought it was what you always wanted.”
“He was wrong about that, too.”
“Can I ask you a question? Was it because you and Luca had sex? I wouldn’t blame you, I should add. I would’ve, like a shot.”
“No.”
“Was it so you could be with Luca, finally — did you leave so you and Luca could get together?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Twenty-five years after marrying the wrong brother.”
“He wasn’t the wrong brother.”
“Of course he was. You’ve always been completely smitten with one another.”
“He wasn’t the wrong brother. That wasn’t the tragedy.”
“Tragedy? What tragedy?” Nina didn’t answer. “Luca’s moved out now, Paolo says.”
“It wasn’t about Luca,” Nina told her. “Luca was irrelevant.” Though that wasn’t entirely true.
“Poor Luca, being irrelevant. His wife had just died. Paolo says you made it obvious you didn’t want him there, staying with you. That’s outstandingly odd. It’s not like you to be unkind and especially not to Luca; Luca of all people. What gives?” There was no response. “Darling. Noble silence is all very noble, but on the other hand it’s a license for gossips. The story going around is that you expected them to swap, when Francesca died: Paolo was to step aside, so that after a decent interval …”
“People can think what they like but they’ve got it all wrong. When I left Paolo, I didn’t want to see Luca ever again. It was why I left.”
“What?”
“I can’t be in the same room as Luca anymore.”
“To be honest I’m kind of offended. I’m offended you won’t share this with me.”
“I will tell you. Just not yet; right now what I need is distraction, and not to get messages from Paolo wishing me a happy life.”
“He means well.”
“But it’s all part of the plan, isn’t it? Kindness is part of the plan.”
“What do you mean, love?”
“It’s all part of the hatred.”
“You worry me when you start to talk like that. I think you should see someone, your doctor. Let me make you an appointment.”
“I’m absolutely fine. I’m clearer about everything now. I’ve never been clearer.”
Meanwhile, across town, Paolo had asked Luca if they could have a talk.
They were in Paolo’s office, a room unchanged in fifty years but which looked far older even than that, because their father, a lover of all things British and antique, had instructed its fitting-out in a Victorian style. It was wood-paneled, decorated with rare maps, and smelled of beeswax and dust and slightly of damp. An eighteenth-century window looked out over a narrow street to other eighteenth-century windows.
Luca had brought coffee, and put both cups down on the big desk, a partner’s desk inlaid with emerald-green hide. He sat on its corner and looked attentive. “Go on.”
“Nina isn’t talking to you,” Paolo began. “Why isn’t she talking to you?”
“Why isn’t she living with you? Same reason, I suspect.”
“Which is?”
“It’s a mystery.”
“I didn’t recognize her, Luca. When she started talking about it, her unhappiness. It came out of nowhere. I was caught off guard.”
“I told you. She’s seemed different to me, too.”
“Why was she so weird about your staying with us? She’s always wanted you around. But then suddenly she couldn’t tolerate you being in the apartment. She said she couldn’t eat any more bread that you’d made us. It was actually bizarre.”
Luca came over to where Paolo was sitting, in their father’s old chair, and put his hand on his brother’s shoulder, but was aware of Paolo’s struggling to keep composure, and withdrew. He sat down again on the edge of the desk and folded his arms and looked at the floor as if it interested him. “Have you spoken to her?”
“Yesterday. I rang to see if she needed help with the move. She seemed offended.”
“Well, I can sort of see her point. I can hear Francesca saying that help with moving in sounded like help with moving out.”
“Is she still talking?”
“No. And I don’t see her as much now. The last time, she was on the sofa when I came in after work. Doing the sudoku in the Times, the pen in her mouth and her face all frowny. Her little hands. There and then gone. She was perfect, you know. Not just beautiful, though that counts for a lot. She was so tolerant of all my terrible shit.”
“Indeed.” Paolo looked thoughtful. “Here’s the thing that floored me. When I pressed her for reasons, she told me I was like her father, too much like him.”
“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.