The Sweet Girl by Annabel Lyon

heavily on me. I could smell the old-man smell of him, the must, and hear the effort of his breathing. At the beach I simply told him to undress, and he did. I told him to go in. He looked at me, then dropped his stick and limped into the surf. At knee-depth he put his hands over his head and dived. It took him a long time to come up. I made the decision not to go in after him. Instead, I dug at the sand with my toes, working my feet in and in and in until I found wet.
    “Pytho!”
    A long way out, one arm in the air. Holding something up. I walked down to the shore, lifting up my skirts, and he swam in to meet me and hand me his find: an anemone. Immediately he turned back, and dived down again.
    I gave the anemone to Tycho and lay back on the rock, eyes closed.
    “He remembers,” I say to Herpyllis.
    That night he calls me to his study and we dissect his specimens. He lets me slit the underbelly of an orange starfish he kept damp, and therefore alive, so I can see the contractionof the muscles, the death-wince. He shows me the anemone’s mouth, a star-shaped, petalled orifice, and explains its digestion. He shucks a clam and sets me the exercise of describing it, both in words and drawings. When I bid him goodnight and gather the papers up to take to my room, he asks if he might keep them with his own notes. I go to sleep thinking about my drawings on his desk. This is the first time he’s asked to keep any work of mine.
    We start going to the beach every afternoon. Nico whines when we try to get him to come; he’s befriended a local boy and they’re off together most days, whooping through the trees with the puppy and annoying the neighbours. Herpyllis too refuses to come, though not angrily; she stands in the doorway, waving fondly, and is there to greet us with a big dry towel when we return. She bustles busily around us, ignoring the servants. Pyrrhaios is nowhere to be seen. Well. Mentally I superimpose my drawings of our specimens—the labial moistness of the clam, the petalled orifice of the anemone’s throat, the spasms of the dying starfish—on Herpyllis’s hole.
    Daddy, basking in his new mobility, swims a little longer each day even as the weather cools. Fall is coming, singeing the trees red and prettying Daddy, who rises from the waves all steaming in the cold, holding the cloth around his parts with one hand and clutching shellfish to his breast with the other, my very own Aphrodite of the Specimens. His eyes are clearer, and he smiles sometimes. Occasionally he makes a little joke. He has a permanent limp now, but no longer complains of it; it’s become a part of him. Once I watched him wade through the shallows, looking for limpets, quietly singing. Each dayI ask him how he’s feeling. “Quiet,” he’ll say, or “Steady.” Once, a day like any other, he told me he thought he felt joy.
    “You think?” I said.
    He shrugged. After a moment’s carefully considered silence, we looked at each other and laughed.
    That evening, after supper, he says he wants to swim the channel where it’s narrowest. “The soldiers do it just as the tide’s turning,” he says. “I’ve watched them. Pushed one way by the current, then the other. Good fun.”
    “Nonsense,” Herpyllis says.
    “Fun and science,” Daddy says. “It’s a unique phenomenon. Awfully famous.”
    “You’re already awfully famous,” Herpyllis says. “What on earth are you going to learn from being pushed around in the current like a fig in a custard?”
    “Ah,” Daddy says. “But you see, I intend to dive. To observe the behaviour of the marine life during the phenomenon. I shall gather—”
    “—specimens—” Nico, Herpyllis, and I say with one voice.
    “—and study them,” Daddy says serenely. “For my book.”
    Herpyllis rolls her eyes. Nico runs off to find the puppy.
    “A new one?” I ask.
    “A collaboration,” Daddy says.
    I can’t imagine who with; Theophrastos is still in Athens. Then he smiles and I