Free The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay by Andrea Gillies Page B

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.

    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 potenthormonal 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