premises across the cobbled way. She could see a light gleaming, and now added to the sound of voices was the rippling music of a sailor’s melodeon. She could see a round window like a porthole, a lamp silhouetting figures inside. She reached out to knock on it, found it beyond her arm’s length, took one step forwards and fell thirty feet into the river below.
9
N INA WOKE THE next day with the recently christened Hester close to her cheek. And the name proved durable, if only because throughout that Saturday she found she was quite free to say it at will. Miss Shawcross made no appearance at breakfast, though as it was Saturday she was under no strict obligation to. So Mary Dagge, for one, was not surprised.
“Would Hester like egges?” she asked, pleased to have free reign in her kitchen once more.
“Hester would like egges,” said Nina, “and actually, Nina would too.”
“Sure we know Nina would,” chuckled Mary Dagge and spooned out two portions on Nina’s plate.
Hester proved even more durable because after breakfast that morning Janie and George returned to watch the fanciful girl with the doll of that name on the swing above the river. The river divided them, a large, brown, swirling fact of nature, a fact of metaphor too, for the divisions that must needs exist between two ragamuffins from a tin-roofed cottage and a girl from a large limestone house. Hester chatted with the unseen Emily and the all-too-visible Nina and had acquired definite character now, with her Puritan bib and smock, her intolerance of questions and her refusal to answer to any particular logic. Hester now, simply and definitely, was.
“Hester the Pester Hester the Pester,” George intoned tunelessly to himself, his large blue eyes on the dark girl swinging, legs crossed and kicking, over the river. He watched Janie dive in again and swim towards her, who had already come to signify all the resonance the word beauty would convey when he came to understand it. Was she Hester, he wondered, or was Hester the doll? The swing idled back and forwards on its own now and the doll sat crooked in the branches above it, as if willing it to maintain its motion. For Janie had reached the other side and they were both sitting with their bare feet in the lazy current. He could hear words like nursery rhymes and was trying not to cry. He could see them clapping hands together, a sailor came to sea-sea-sea to see what he could see-see-see. He walked into the river then to be less alone, he felt the tears would take over if he waited any longer. He felt the muddy current round his knees, his trousers, his waist, at which point he warmed the cold in his loins with his own urine, and the current took him and there was brown all around him, a thick, comforting swirling world of brown, no up no down, in which he.could have floated for ever had not four hands grabbed him and pulled him to the surface and he found himself on the muddy bank on the other side.
“Say thank you, George,” said the beauty with brown hair, wiping her muddy hands on her white dress.
“If it wasn’t for us you would have floated out to sea, you would have drowned,” said Janie matter-of-factly, “so you’d better say thank you.”
“Thank you Hester,” said George.
And the girl who was beautiful, although he didn’t know the word yet, giggled.
“Don’t thank Hester, thank me.”
“Are you not Hester?” George asked.
“No,” she said, “and I’m not Emily either. I’m Nina.”
“Thank you Nina,” said George.
“You’re welcome. Now let’s get you cleaned.”
George saw her stand and walk towards the house. Janie immediately followed. So George followed too. They had crossed the river, in fact as well as in spirit, and he was dimly aware that different rules now applied. To George, a mass of brown mud from head to toe, to Janie, with her wet dress clinging to her. Perhaps even to the immaculate Nina, clutching her doll, who alone knew the
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