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  “No,” said Miss Shawcross, “a shamrock can only have three.”

  “It’s got four and it’s a clover,” said Nina.

  “Clover,” shouted the boy. “Clover, clover.”

  “Shut up, Georgie,” said the girl.

  “Well, if it’s got four it must be clover, but shamrock has three. We’re going back to the house now, since it’s teatime. And don’t look.”

  And Nina walked back to the house, one hand in Miss Shawcross’s mottled one, walking with Emily’s gait but stealing a glance backwards with Nina’s eyes. And Nina’s free hand waved.

  At tea that evening Nina wished, not for the first time, that Miss Shawcross was gone. An image crossed her mind as she ate her salted herring, placing it neatly on the downward curve of the fork and raising it delicately towards her mouth, of the governess lying placidly among the seaweed that rippled beneath her father’s shellfish plant, like the maiden of the river, hair undulating with the water. The image vanished as soon as it came, like a ripple on the same water, obscuring the desired picture beneath, and Nina felt immediately guilty and asked Emily to take over. Emily did, and finished her meal without any untoward displays.

  Afterwards Miss Shawcross wished, since it was Friday and her evening off, to visit the town of Drogheda. Dan Turnbull took her in the horse and trap. And Nina watched the bonneted head diminish as the trap passed through the gates, banished all thoughts of Emily and ran through the low archway, past the glasshouse, down the long field towards the chestnut tree. There she swung and let her skirts fly. She swung high, till she could see the sun shimmering over the sea, over the metal-roofed cottage that she noticed, for the first time, adjacent to the beach. Four or five children were tumbling down a sand-dune, running up it and tumbling down again. She felt a longing like a physical pain beneath her ribcage, she felt wet smudges trickling down her cheeks and realised she was crying.

  “Why are you crying?” Dolly asked her, Dolly, who she had placed face down in the branches immediately, above.

  “Because,” said Nina, “because because because.”

  “Because you’re lonely,” said Dolly.

  “How do you spell lonely?” asked Nina, mindful of her ABC’s.

  “L-o-n-l-y,” said Dolly.

  “Maybe,” said Nina. She swung high again, and Dolly disappeared momentarily from view. She saw two children detach themselves from the fury of sand round the dune, running forwards. The girl with sunbleached hair and the boy.

  “You want a brother,” Dolly intoned, as she came back into view.

  “Why not a sister?” asked Nina.

  “Because,” said Dolly, “because because because . . .”

  “How do you spell because?” asked Nina, anxious to change the subject.

  B-e-c-a-u-s-e “Because if I had a sister,” said Nina, “I wouldn’t need to talk to you.”

  “That’s not fair,” said Dolly.

  “Fair enough,” said Nina. “And when I have a sister, I definitely won’t talk to you. And no, that moany look won’t help you. In fact moaning will only make things worse.”

  “Who’s moaning?”

  Across the runnel of water, on the muddy bank now, the girl with bare feet in a thin yellow dress. The boy beside her, half her size, looking again at the mud oozing between his toes.

  Nina let herself swing for a moment and decided Dolly could no longer be simple Dolly any more, she needed a name. And the name came newly minted, fresh from Miss Shawcross’s Bible stories.

  “Hester, who do you think?”

  “Hester the doll?”

  “Hester the whine, Hester the moan, Hester the pester.”

  “Hester the pester,” the boy repeated. He shifted his position on the bank, to observe new emissions of mud whorl between his toes.

  “So why is she moaning?”

  “Oh questions, questions. You’re worse than Emily.”

  “Where’s Emily?”

  “Not telling.”

  And Nina diverted her gaze and swung higher, concentrating on the blue line of the horizon and the small red-roofed house. Until she was surprised by a splash. She looked down and saw the equally surprised waters rippling with a brown body swimming through them, like a thin frog in a yellow dress. The feet found solid ground and the head splashed upwards and Nina’s dress, as she swung, for she had determined now to continue swinging, brushed gently off the wet forehead with the plastered blonde hair.

  “No, tell me, where’s Emily?”

  “All right, you’re standing on her.”

  The girl jumped to one side. And Nina, who seemed to appreciate this affirmation of her imagination, allowed the force of gravity to slow her pendulum.

  “Sorry.”

  “And Emily doesn’t like to be trod on.”

  “I said I’m sorry.” The girl shifted her feet. Looked down at the empty grass. “What did I stand on?”

  “Her shoe.”

  “What’s her shoe like?”

  “Just like mine, actually.” Nina liked the sound of that word “actually,” and felt Miss Shawcross would have been proud. Then another word struck her, a word that put “actually” quite in the shade. “She’s my twin, actually.”

  “Sorry, twin.”

  “Her name’s Emily.”

  “Sorry, Emily.”

  Nina twisted clockwise in the swing, tangling the ropes above her, let Hester by the chestnut trunk come into view, let the whole world turn, and stopped by the thin girl in the yellow dress. She could see her ribs showing through the wet fabric.

  “She’ll accept your apology,” Nina said, “but only if she knows your name.”

  “Janie.”

  “Janie, this is Hester.” Nina raised her eyes, looked into Janie’s. Brown freckles around them, but the eyes were browner. “I’m Nina.”

  On the other riverbank, the boy began to howl.

  “And who might he be?”

  “That’s George. Shut up, George.”

  8

  ATRANSFORMATION CAME over Miss Isobel Shawcross during the course of her first Friday evening off governess duties. It began in the lounge of the Old Court Hotel, with the consumption of a glass of Guinness and a gin chaser. The prim, stiff back gradually became a curved one, the decorous thin mouth acquired a downward turn and the pencil of lipstick began to spread towards the chin. After a fifth Guinness and yet another gin she made her exit from the Old Court Hotel, an exit most unlike her entrance ninety-five minutes earlier. The laced bootees didn’t walk so much as clump down the wooden stairs, one hand steadying itself on the brass rail, her stomach seemed to precede her progress, the curve of her back following it like an inelegant version of the letter S, which she had so diligently drummed into Nina two days earlier. S is for saint, S is servant, S is for sofa, Miss Shawcross had intoned, neglecting to mention S is also for slither, for Shawcross, not to mention stomach. Her own began to burble as she turned an unsteady left out of the fine stained-glass doors of the Old Court Hotel and made her way down Shop Street, and a barely-suppressed belch announced her entrance on to the North Quay.

  She was drawn by the sound of distant music then, and following it found the source was quite proximate to her unsteady presence, the illusion of distance provided by the yellow peeling facade of the quaintly named Star of the Sea Music Emporium. She walked up steps, through a doorway, down an arched hall and found herself in a wooden rotunda where a small orchestra was playing a Viennese waltz and off-duty sailors were dancing with Drogheda ladies. She sat by an empty table and ordered another gin, and as she watched the swirl of giggling bodies around her a brown mood of melancholy settled over her. This mood was somewhat tempered by the taste of the gin she had ordered and by the presence, hot on its heels, of one Randal Noyce, Merchant Seaman. He complimented her on her presence in the same establishment, remarked on how it raised the tone of the place which was, between the two of them, hardly a step above your run-of-the-mill house of ill-repute, and congratulated h
imself, indeed, on his fortune in finding a like-minded soul in such a cesspit. He enquired of her profession and, on her reply, displayed an absorbing interest in all matters pertaining to the education of young ladies. He ordered a succession of further gins for Miss Isobel Shawcross of, as he was pleased to discover, the Kildare Shawcrosses, and noted with pleasure how the colloquialism of her speech increased in direct proportion to the number of gins she imbibed.

  He asked her to dance and again was pleased to observe a definite shift in her centre of gravity as she accompanied him to the floor. This shift became if anything more pronounced as the band exercised themselves in yet another version of the “Blue Danube” and Merchant Seaman Noyce and Miss Shawcross exercised themselves in their version of a waltz. Mr. Noyce being small, and a dapper waltzer, it was all he could do to negotiate the increasingly gravitationless bulk of Miss Shawcross round the floor. There was, to be sure, the fleeting pleasure of her ample bosom, now felt on the crook of his left arm, now on the right and occasionally even brushing off the tip of his chin. And this pleasure, Mr. Noyce eventually felt, needed an environment more intimate than that of the Star of the Sea Music Emporium. So he invited her for, in his own phrase, “a walk along the river,” an invitation which she readily accepted, looking forward to hearing, in her own phrase, “the waters rowl.”

  Once out on the North Quay, Miss Isobel Shawcross, of the Kildare Shawcrosses, revealed herself to have an education and a repertoire that ranged far beyond the confines of MagnalVs Questions and the King James Bible. She began a scandalous recitative version of “Captain Kelly’s Kitchen” which ran to seventeen verses, to the accompaniment of the slapping of river water and the creaking of steel hawsers. This lasted till Steampacket Quay where, in a disused shed behind Hope Mill, Miss Shawcross displayed a gymnastic agility most unsuited to ladies of the Kildare Shawcrosses, to any ladies whatsoever, indeed to all but Merchant Seaman Noyce, whom it suited fine. What suited him even finer was her rapid descent afterwards into the arms of Morpheus, a phrase of which the Kildare Shawcrosses surely would have approved as much as they would have disapproved the sight of her, legs akimbo, arms spread-eagled on a wooden palette. He left her there, snoring gently, among the broken barrels and damp wood shavings and an odour of old hops and excrement.

  She awoke, forty minutes later. Befuddled by gin and sensuality, she instantly wanted more of both. She staggered out of the warehouse and made her way towards the sound of voices, which seemed to be coming from a licensed 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

  NINA 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 way.

  “I’ve got just the job for you, George,” she said, “just the job for you.”

  The phrase was Dan Turnbull’s, which seemed apt enough for the business at hand. Apt enough too was Dan Turnbull’s hose, threading its way through the limp tomato plants that seemed to exhale in rows in the greenhouse. Nina dragged out the hose, turned on the spigot and watched the India-rubber respond as if an invisible snake was coursing through it.

  “Stand to attention, George,” she ordered. “Like a soldier,” she added when she saw his mudcaked face puzzled by the concept of attention.

  So George stood upright, his right hand frozen to his eyebrow the way he’d seen the soldiers do it in South Quay Barracks. And Nina circled round him with her cleansing spray which became a punishing jet when she pressed her finger to the nozzle. Which transferred the river’s mud from George to the cracked panes of the glasshouse behind him.

  “Do you know what Hester thinks,” said Nina dreamily, watching George’s hair part under pressure from the hosepipe.

  “Hester the Pester,” said George, his mouth hardly moving, military style.

  “What does Hester think?” asked Janie, who was lying face down with the doll by Nina’s feet.

  “Hester thinks we might be friends . . .”

  Dan Turnbull thought they must be friends. So after he had lifted Nina into the cart he had hitched on to Garibaldi, the grey mare, he lifted Janie and George too. He neglected to lift Hester, who Nina had left beside the India-rubber hose and the mud-splattered glasshouse. George surmised that she belonged to the house, the river and the chestnut tree and so couldn’t come along for the ride. It was not, he decided,
that she wasn’t wanted on this journey through the fuchsia and honeysuckle hedges, with the low hum of bees drowned by the rattle of the cart’s metal wheels, it was just that she wasn’t thought of. There were indeed other things to think of, like the dark soft hair of the girl beside him, darker than the shadows of the brown cows standing in the fields, melting in the heat of the midday sun. Like the appeals of the children that ran from every cottage, begging to clamber on for the ride. But Dan wouldn’t take them, would he. All Dan would carry was Nina, George and Janie, because he was collecting seaweed for the flowerbeds in Baltray House and hadn’t room for more than three. “So get off that trailer, Buttsy Flanagan, and crying won’t help you, will it, Nina?” And Nina said no, crying wouldn’t help one bit.

  But the truth was Nina didn’t take Hester because for once, on that Saturday morning, she had no need of Hester. She would have exchanged the company of Hester, Emily and whatever incorporeal friend she could ever imagine for the company of those two beside her on Dan Turnbull’s cart.

  Dan guided the mare towards the estuary mouth, where the large granite boulders broke away into scraps of fossilised stone, where the Lady’s Finger pointed towards an invisible spot in the hot sky above, at the apex of the triangle of river and sea. Across the warm, lazy river was the random straggle of huts around Nina’s father’s fish factory.

  Dan forked the seaweed that clung to the rocks by the water’s edge, wet clumps of brine-smelling tendrils the colour of dried blood.

  “That’s hair,” said Nina.

  “What’s hair?” asked Janie.

  “A woman’s hair,” said Nina.

  “Hester’s hair,” said Georgie.

  And Nina told them what her father had told her, the story of the spring and the foaming water and the girl who ran from it until she was caught by the waters here, at the mouth of what would become the Boyne river. And if the limestone tower was her finger, the seaweed must surely be her hair.

  “Her hair,” said George, sitting on a rock at the water’s edge.