The Dragonfly Pool (33 page)

There was also an urgent letter from the founders, once again urging Daley to evacuate the school to America. It was a generous offer, and the pictures of the bombing of Warsaw should have made the decision easy—but it was not easy. Outside, the peaceful Devon countryside slumbered in the sunshine; the idea that airplanes would come and drop bombs over Delderton was hard to believe—indeed Delderton village was full of evacuee children from London who had been sent here just because it was safe. But if Hitler invaded Britain, that might be a different matter.

Half an hour later, Tally knocked on the door of his room. Daley had sent for her because he had been worried about her at the end of the summer term. The adventure in Bergania and the rescue of the prince had been kept from the newspapers, and the children seemed to have settled down well—but he had an idea that Tally was still troubled about something.

“Well, how has it been? Is your father well?”

“Yes, he is. Terribly busy with evacuating the hospital and everything, but he is well.”

“And have you had any news from the prince? From Karil?”

“No, nothing. The others haven't heard anything either. We've all written and written.”

“And you think he has forgotten you, and is ungrateful?”

“What else can we think?”

“There are other things that occur to one,” said the headmaster.

But he left it at that.

“I'm going to put him out of my mind,” said Tally—and while it was a lie, it was a brave one. She changed the subject. “Is Matteo still my tutor?”

“Yes, for now.” Everything was so unsettled and uncertain in this first fortnight of the war.

All the same, it was good not being new, thought Tally, knowing one's way about. Magda was still Tally's housemother and she was still worrying about Schopenhauer. She had got to the part in Schopenhauer's life where he was supposed to have thrown a washerwoman down the stairs because she was talking on the landing and disturbing him, and she didn't know whether to leave it in or not.

“It seems so unlike him to do that,” she told the children.

She also had a new anxiety—Heribert would almost certainly be called up to fight in the German army and she was very much afraid for him.

“I don't think he will make a good soldier; he was very absent-minded,” she said.

In the village, groups of children evacuated from London wandered about looking for fish and chips and cinemas and crying for their mothers. A fire-watching roster was pinned up—members of staff would take it in turn to watch for incendiary bombs from the flat roof of the gym.

To everyone's amazement, David Prosser volunteered for the army. No one especially liked him, but that didn't mean they wanted him to be killed. Before he went he asked Clemmy to marry him and she refused him, but so nicely that he was hardly hurt at all. The man who replaced him was as old as the hills, but he knew his subject.

The children who had shared the Berganian adventure still met on the steps of the pet hut to talk about their lives. When they first came back, expecting Karil to join them, they had been full of plans. Barney had bought a tree frog in a pet shop in St. Agnes as a present for the prince; it was an attractive animal with its shining pop eyes and glossy skin, but they did not try to name it—Karil would want to do that himself, they thought, but as the weeks passed the frog remained nameless.

“Amphibians don't really need to be called anything,” Borro had said. “They're all right as they are, so there's no hurry.”

But as they met for the new term they stopped trying to make plans for Karil.

The axolotl was in good health, and Tally now had charge of the white rabbit that had belonged to the little French girl who had not returned to school. Her parents didn't want to risk sending her across the Channel and being attacked by the U-boats that now patrolled the waters. She had written to say that Tally could have her rabbit, but though Tally cleaned it out and fed it and took it on her knee, she found it difficult to love it.

“Rabbits are not really very interesting,” she complained—but Julia said that rabbits weren't meant to be interesting; they were meant to be nice, and this one was.

Barney was very indignant about what had happened in the London Zoo. On the very day that war was declared all the black widow spiders and poisonous snakes had been killed in case their cages were bombed and they escaped and bit people.

“And the boa constrictors, too,” he said angrily. “Just killed outright, which is ridiculous—people would have seen them coming. Or they could have sent them to Whipsnade like the elephants. But cold-blooded murder like that!”

It was really strange, realizing the difference these last weeks had made to their friends overseas. Borro could write to the French girl whose mother bred Charolais cows, because France and Britain were allies, on the same side in the war, but the German and Italian children had become “the enemy” and were as unreachable as the moon.

“It seems so silly,” said Tally. “Only a month ago we were just people.”

As for Karil, it seemed clear now that they were not going to hear from him.

“He's obviously decided to be a prince after all,” Barney said. “I mean, he was brought up to all that since he was a baby, and now he doesn't want to have anything to do with us. It's quite natural really.”

Only Augusta, sitting on the bottom step so that the animal fur would not set off her allergy, said: “All the same, I think it's funny that you can save someone's life and they just forget all about you.”

Her brace had been removed in the holidays and her words were very clear.

Hearing their own thoughts spoken aloud upset the others badly—and from then on they did not speak of the prince again.

It was a beautiful autumn, that first autumn of the war, and Clemmy was busy pitting herself against the coming shortages—food rationing was expected the following month and she was determined to garner every berry, every rose hip, every mushroom before the coming frosts.

So every minute that the children were not in class she herded them through the lanes, armed with jam jars and saucepans and pots. The blackberries were more succulent that year than ever; the rose hips hung like crimson jewels from the briars, and on the moors the blueberries clustered between tufts of heather. There were sloes, so dark that their blueness was almost black, and chanterelles growing between the roots of trees. Clemmy was in her element as she led her troop of helpers, her hair streaming in the late sunshine, her cloak blowing in the wind. It is very different picking berries because you feel like a mouthful of something juicy and picking them because you are helping your country and can lay by stores against hardship. Even the detestable Ronald Peabody, who had broken the topmost branch of the cedar tree, picked with the best of them.

In her art classes Clemmy had let the children paint what they wanted, thinking that they might need to depict what they were going through in the changing world. When they came back after the journey to Bergania they had painted the mountains and the palace and the folk dancers, but that was before the outbreak of war. Now they painted orange and scarlet explosions and tanks and toppling houses as they saw them on the newsreels of the invasion of Poland.

But not Tally. Tally, as the term progressed, painted the things she saw on her walks with Clemmy: rowan berries on laden boughs; late foxgloves; fallen leaves, veined and crimson on the grass—and Clemmy realized that Tally was seeking comfort in nature as people have always done when their lives have run into difficulties.

“Nothing matters really when the world is so beautiful,” said Tally—and Julia, who did not agree, who knew that for someone like Tally it is people that matter, just nodded and smiled.

All the time they were in Bergania Julia had not mentioned her mother, and Tally hoped that she was no longer so unhappy about her. But when they had been back at school for nearly three weeks she called Tally into her room and held out a copy of
The Picturegoer
.

“Look!” she said.

On the center page was a picture of Gloria Grantley in her most pouting pose. The caption read: “Is Glorious Gloria running out of steam?”

The blurb underneath said that the plans for her new film,
The Devil in Velvet
, had been shelved. The studio refused to comment on the reasons for this decision, and her agent was not available.

“What do you think it means?” said Julia.

“Haven't you heard anything from Mr. Harvenberg?” asked Tally, who knew that Gloria's agent was a very important figure in her life.

Julia shook her head. “Not since the holidays. My grandmother wrote when war was declared because she wanted me to go out to America and spend the war there—well, I told you—but my mother didn't want me to come. She said it was too dangerous traveling by sea because of the U-boats, but of course I knew it was because . . . she didn't want me. But do you think she's in trouble?”

“No, of course not.” Tally was very firm. “This kind of thing happens all the time in the film business, you know it does. I expect her agent wanted more money and the studio is being difficult. You'll see, it will all resolve itself.”

“It will be awful if it doesn't. She absolutely lives for her work.”

Tally looked at the picture again. Ridiculous Gloria was lying on her stomach on some sort of animal skin with one foot in very high heels cocked up behind her. Yet it was only because she had gone to see Gloria at the cinema in St. Agnes that they had seen the newsreel which had set the whole Bergania adventure off. But for this horrible woman who treated her daughter so abominably, Karil would now be in the clutches of the Nazis.

That evening Tally wrote one last letter to the prince, calling up everything she could think of to amuse and interest him: Matteo's last biology lesson, when they had camped for a night on the moor and watched the stags preparing for their annual rut . . . the visit of the Spanish children, who had given a marvelous moonlit concert in the courtyard . . . and that the cow Borro was looking after was expecting a calf.

But once again, there was no reply.

W
hen you are unhappy, time goes very slowly. Karil had been at Rottingdene House for only a few weeks, but he felt as though he had been buried at the bottom of a well for years.

When he woke in the morning, he thought for a moment that he was still at home, because the first thing he saw was a tray with two rusks on it and a glass of fruit juice. But it was not an equerry who brought them; the duke's servants were so hard-pressed, looking after a household packed with people who could do nothing for themselves, that they could take on nothing extra and it was the Countess Frederica who handed him the tray. The countess had seen to it ever since they had arrived in London that Karil's life went on exactly as before, and now she told him his lessons for the day and his engagements for the afternoon.

Karil never thought he would be homesick for Monsieur Dalrose's history lessons, nor that he would miss riding in a procession to open a railway station or welcome a foreign deputation, but it was so. For his lessons now were given by his uncles and they taught him the very few things that they knew. Uncle Dmitri showed him how to design crests and mottoes; Uncle Franz Heinrich taught him how to write national anthems and music for royal occasions, and Uncle Alfonso was a specialist in the design of state uniforms.

No one taught him anything he might have wanted to know, or needed, and there had been no talk of sending him to school. For while no one spoke of money, it was clear to Karil that however grand and pompous the duke was, and however formal the household, there was not much spare cash. Even Carlotta, who could usually get blood out of a stone, found it hard to wheedle money out of her grandfather, and when his relatives needed anything they had to scrabble about among the few jewels that still remained to them and take something to be pawned or sold.