The Dragonfly Pool (10 page)

“No one knows except Daley and Matteo, so you mustn't tell.”

“I won't say anything. But if she's your mother . . . you mean you miss her during term time? I miss my father but—”

“No. I miss her all the time; I don't see her even on the holidays. Well, hardly ever—just in secret places for a very short time. I'm too old, you see. I'm nearly thirteen, and it wouldn't do for her to have a daughter my age. She's supposed to be twenty-five, so I have to be kept out of the way, but I just want to be able to be with her. I love her so much.”

Tally knew what she should have done next—sat quietly beside Julia and let her talk—but she couldn't. She got to her feet and collected the largest stones she could find and hurled them one by one into the river. Except that in her mind it wasn't stones she was throwing, it was Gloria Grantley she was sending into the swirling, icy water. Gloria with her pout and her bosom and her fluttering eyelashes, who was too busy being famous to acknowledge her daughter.

It was a while before she could come back to comfort her friend.

“I expect it's just as hard for her. She must long to be with you, but I expect it's her manager who told her she has to be careful.”

Julia looked at her with gratitude. “Yes—he says it's only while her contract lasts. Then when she's saved lots of money she can retire and we can be together.” She looked wistfully at Tally. “There's another performance at five o'clock. I'm going to stay for it—even if I get into trouble. Will you tell Magda? ”

Tally sighed. “I'll stay with you,” she said. “You shouldn't go home by yourself in the dark.”

The thought of another two hours of the swan-necked Gloria was appalling. But at least she'd get another look at the brave king of Bergania, not to mention the prince-under-plumes.

D
r. Hamilton was reading the latest letter from his daughter:

 

When he had read Tally's letter through twice and taken it upstairs to the aunts, Dr. Hamilton made his way to the surgery. He walked with a light step, ready for the question his patients always asked about his daughter.

“Tally is well,” he would tell them. “Tally is very well indeed.”

T
he term, which had begun slowly, suddenly seemed to gather speed. Armelle stopped asking the children to be forks and told them to become victims of the bubonic plague. Josie sent them out to collect bunches of motherwort, which they had to boil up in a vat.

Clemmy gave an art class in which she told them about a Spanish painter called Goya, who fell ill and became deaf and rather mad and shut himself up in a gloomy house away from everybody and people thought the poor old man was finished—but afterward they found that he had covered all the walls of his house with strange, dark pictures. Then she drew the blinds in the art room and told the children to select their paints without turning on the light, and they grumbled and fussed—and found that they had made paintings in colors they hardly knew existed. The next day she retired to the kitchen and made pancakes for the whole school.

Magda allowed Tally to froth up her cocoa with the whisk sent by the aunts, but she lost page thirty-two of her book on Schopenhauer and became troubled again. As spring turned to early summer and some of the other children began to go barefoot, Verity took to wearing shoes.

And Matteo solved the problem of Borro's snails in two minutes.

“They're the wrong kind. Edible snails are
Helix pomatia
—these are
Cepaea hortensis
.”

And he suggested that Borro should tip them out and let them go, which Borro did.

Tally's first tutorial with Matteo took place in his room, which was not in the main building but above the row of workshops behind the gym. It was reached by an outside staircase and had the look of a mountain hut: very plain, with wooden walls, a scrubbed table, a narrow bed, and a case full of books in various languages. The sackbut lay on a chair; it looked like a battered trombone and far too harmless to make such a howling and melancholy sound.

“Come and sit down,” he said.

He had come straight from taking a fencing class; his foils and mask were propped up in a corner and Tally looked at them wistfully.

“Could anyone take fencing?” she asked. “Could I?”

“Next year would be better,” said Matteo. “You're still rather young.”

Tally nodded, accepting this. “I really liked your biology lesson. I liked it so much. I always thought science would be different—sort of cold and impersonal—but it isn't, is it? It's all part of the same thing. My father tried to make me see that, but I didn't listen properly.”

“Listening is one of the most difficult things.”

He talked to her for a while about the river and what else might be seen in it later that year. Then he said, “But what about you personally? Your problems.” He smiled. “Tutors are for problems, you know.”

“Yes. Well, I do have problems. There's Magda, you see. I found her crying on the first day about Germany and Heribert and I can't do anything about that, but now she's worrying again and it's about the blackout curtains and Magda can't sew. Of course, there may not be a war, but if there is we're going to need an awful lot of them. So I think we should find some way of helping her so that she can get on with her book and stop the pages flying about so much, but I haven't been here very long and I'm not sure how to do it. Could it be part of the domestic work we do before school?”

“I don't see why not. That would be a way of doing it which would not upset her, and I'm sure you could manage it.”

“And there's Kit,” Tally went on. “Of course, he can be very annoying, but he does so very much want to play cricket. I don't know anything about it—we didn't play it at my convent—but I thought . . . there's the high school at St. Agnes and they do play cricket—I asked Daisy who I do housework with, and she says they do; her brother goes there. So couldn't Kit go there one afternoon a week, maybe?”