Читать книгу The Meadows of the Moon - James Hilton - Страница 6

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Miss Grimshaw, or Grimmy as they called her, looked after Fran and Michael with prim and occasionally irascible vigilance. She taught them, amongst other things, Deportment, the “Parts of Speech,” the list of the English Sovereigns (with dates), and how to “line in” drawings that had previously been smudgily traced. John, of course, had long before finished with his share of Grimmy; he was in the Fifth Remove at Wellborough, and only at home during vacations. And Mrs. Savage, his mother and Michael’s, was in Fran’s eyes a benign goddess who came occasionally into the schoolroom and smiled.

She far more often smiled than spoke, and she had a lovely smile. It was a loveliness that was half sad. Once when Fran, copying Michael, called her “mother,” she said, with this lovely sad smile: “You mustn’t call me that, Fran. You see, I’m not your mother.”

Fran wanted to be helpful. “Then what shall I call you? Doesn’t anybody call you anything?”

And the answer came, as sadly as the smile: “You can call me—Nan—if you like.”

“Nan?—Nan!” The name was sampled, considered, and approved. “Oh, Nan’s a lovely name.... Isn’t it, Micky?” (The appeal to him was inevitable.)

All he deigned to reply was a stout asseveration: “I’m going to call you ‘Nan,’ too, if Fran does.”

And so it happened that they called her Nan, both of them, and that they always spoke of her as Nan. When John came home he was inclined to be superior about it. “ ‘Nan’—and ‘Fran’—” he echoed, with faint disparagement. “Seems to me rather a muddle.... Anyway, I shall go on calling her ‘mother.’ ”

To which Michael rejoined: “Yes, you do, John. Then she’ll always know which of us it is. Wouldn’t it be nice if people didn’t have any real names at all, and you just had to call them what you liked?”

“Sort of idea you would have,” replied John.