The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay Read Online Free

ankle-height Wellingtons; all were small and sturdy, with soft, lined faces of a similar shape, wide at the brow but with pointedchins, deep-set eyes, and teeth that looked older than they did. When Nina got closer, on the first morning, the conversation loosened just enough to allow for a good look at her, and her call of “ kalimera ” had been tonelessly returned. She’d taken a photograph and was seen doing so and was scowled at, a finger wagged in her direction. Strolling on past the harbor, Nina sat on the wall to watch the boats, which were already pulling in and tying up. The men offered her something from the catch, and she got her phrase book out and made a hash of explaining that she had no kitchen.
    “Give to Vasilios,” one of them said, trying to push a pink fish, one that looked like a child’s drawing of a fish, into her hands. “Vasilios cook it.”
    She shook her head shyly, though Vasilios would have done so happily, there was no question; he’d think nothing of it. Favors were nothings here. One of the other men dangled a tiny live squid in front of her. “Here: pet for you.” As she walked onwards she saw him beating the thing in swift reprisal against the harbor wall.
    Now the road began to bend gently to the right, until soon (aside from the tarmac) Nina was in an ancient landscape, a biblical one of shepherds and sheep. She walked at a faster pace, trying not to have city instincts, and then there it was, Blue Bay, shaped like a mouth turned up at the corners, and high above it the cluster of white-painted houses that marked the edge of the upper village. The beach was backed by Mediterranean pines, and the aromas released here in the evening were sumptuous: it was worth the walk to experience the scent, though when she and Paolo had been here together, the weather had been too chilly for the effect to be dramatic. When they’d stayed here they’d been the only Britons at the hotel. Most of the visitors, even now, wereday-trippers who came from Main Island to swim, to stroll the quaint streets, buying shell necklaces and postcards, and venturing up the hill to buy honey from a smallholding, stopping to marvel at the view, before heading back on the late-afternoon boat, quietly across the sound in failing light.

    Taverna Vasilios had much better accommodation at twice the cost of the other, more basic hotel, and at the time Nina was staying there, half of the six rooms were taken by British people. Vasilios had put them together on the first floor, for company: to one side of her there were elderly sisters, Iris and June, who wore shin-length dresses and long strings of beads, their gray hair gathered identically at the napes of long necks, and to the other, Cathy and Gareth, a professional bodybuilder and his athletic wife, their muscles a deeper shade of walnut every day. Up on the top floor, along with a morose Belgian family and a retired couple from the mainland, was a solitary German man called Kurt, who’d come for the scuba diving. It was Kurt who’d joined Nina in the afternoons at the island’s best bathing spot, a small, deep swimming hole, greenish turquoise, accessed from an incomplete circle of flat rocks. On her first day Kurt had nodded his greeting to Nina before lighting a driftwood fire, stripping off unself-consciously, and disappearing into the sea clad only in mask and flippers. Nina watched him surreptitiously over the top of her novel. He floated facedown for a few minutes, scrutinizing the seabed, before going into a sudden dive, his large pink buttocks rising abruptly upwards. A muffled thud followed and then Kurt reappeared, rising up like Titan, his sturdy thighs glistening, before emerging out of the water with a small octopusattached to a speargun. He dismembered and cooked it, crouching by the fire, and, seeing Nina watching, offered her a flame-curled tentacle on the end of a skewer.

    Nina had hoped that the holiday would put an end to her over-thinking.