“I wish I had a brother like Serge.”
“I’ve never seen Serge, so, you see, it doesn’t really make much difference.”
“You’ve never been only begotten, so you don’t know, Miss Folyat.”
Annette left it at that. She never knew what Deedy was thinking. She hardly knew what she thought herself, and her notions of other people were axiomatic, based on uncritical acceptance of her mother’s assumptions. She regarded herself as a very ordinary person—(at school she had thought herself neither above nor below the general run of girls, and had done the things they did, and talked of the things they talked of, very largely because they did them and talked of them). She felt a little resentfully that Deedy was an extraordinary person, but put it down to her deformity and pitied her. Being very active herself she could imagine no greater misfortune, except perhaps being deaf, like Beethoven, than to be unable to run and jump and swim. She loved swimming, and every morning would go up the beck to Deedy’s pool and plunge into the cold water or sit under the little waterfall. And then she would lie in the soft grass and rub her body over with crushed flowers, and laugh for the joy and freedom of it all. And she would come back with her hair lank and wet—there was very little of it, and that thin in texture—and wake Deedy and tell her how the morning was full of song. . . . Often when they sat by the pool in the evening the child would make her talk about the water and how it felt when it kissed her body, and one day Deedy said:
“Swim now.”
It was a very hot August day, and Annette had been narrating an adventure of Serge, based on the works of Edward S. Ellis, how he had swum two hundred yards Under water in an American river and surprised and captured an Indian spy. The description of under-water had been singularly vivid, and the beck was in mid-flood and very clamorous. Annette slipped out of her clothes and dived into the pool and lay there floating, her eyes closed and her hair floating out and her white body shimmering mysteriously through the water. Deedy crawled to the edge of the pool and looked down.
“Don’t lie still. Swim!”
Annette kicked up a white spume of water and Deedy clapped her hands.