The Dragonfly Pool (8 page)

On the following day as Tally was walking across the courtyard she saw a girl standing alone by the archway with a suitcase and a violin case beside her. She was tall and thin with frizzy black hair, and for some reason Tally knew at once who she was. She had the look of someone who had come far, like a camel across the desert.

“You're Augusta Carrington,” she said.

Augusta nodded and said, “Yeth, I am.”

She had a ferocious metallic brace on her teeth, which made her lisp.

Clemmy now came out of the school office, holding a list and looking shaken.

“Are you sure, Augusta? ” she asked. “It says here that you can't eat cheese or strawberries or wheat or eggs or nuts or rhubarb. You're allergic to all of those.”

Augusta nodded.

“And fur and feathers,” she said, spitting a little through her brace.

Although Tally and her friends all took to Augusta, the allergy to fur and feathers made it difficult when they brought her to the pet hut, where they had their meetings. If she sat on the top step she sneezed all the time, and on the second step she sneezed often, but on the bottom step she was all right, and able to be sympathetic about their problems.

“You could call the axolotl Zog,” she suggested.

Actually she said “Thog” because of her brace, but they understood her.

“You shouldn't call anything after a king,” said Tod. “Kings are evil.”

But Barney said it wasn't Zog's fault he had been born a king, and when they had looked carefully at the creature's bandy legs and round black eyes he really did look quite like a Zog.

So that was one problem solved. The snails on the other hand were still lying about on other snails as though they were old sofas.

“I wish Matteo would come back,” said Borro restlessly.

But Matteo was still away, and biology had been postponed again.

Tally had heard a lot about Matteo as a biologist—but it was what he was like as a tutor that she wanted to know.

“He's your tutor, too, isn't he?” she asked Julia as they were getting ready for bed. “What's he like? ”

Julia had been replaiting her hair. She put down her hairbrush and didn't answer straightaway.

“He's not like anybody else,” she said.

“But do you like him? ”

“Yes, I like him very much, but that isn't what it's about. You'll see . . .”

A
fter they watched the Delderton train steam out of Paddington Station, the aunts felt completely wretched, and Tally's father vowed that he would take her away at the end of the first term.

Then came Tally's letters and everything changed.

“This is a very interesting school,” she wrote on her second day. “The first night I thought I would be homesick, but it was my housemother who was homesick . . . Being a fork is a bit odd but it can be quite peaceful because you can think your own thoughts . . .” and she described the cedar tree the headmaster loved so much, and the art classes, and Clemmy. By the time her second letter came it was clear that Tally was enjoying herself—and as it was a sunny morning the aunts, who always took such an interest in Tally's life, set off for the Thameside Municipal Baths.

They were not going swimming. It was a long time since they had cared to plunge into chlorinated water in their bathing costumes, which no longer looked quite right. They were going to look at Tally's art teacher.

“She's in a mural in the Thameside baths,” Tally had written. “Barney says it's easy to see her there because you can get quite close. She's coming out of the water holding up a garland of sea-shells.”

So now the aunts paid their admission fee for Freestyle Swimming and took their rolled-up towels (which had no costumes inside them) into the entrance hall and there, sure enough, was a large mural of some girls coming out of a very blue pool surrounded by flowers.

“That's her,” said Aunt Hester straightaway. “I remember her hair.”

Now that she wasn't looking for Augusta Carrington, the woman who had been in charge of the school train was smiling very happily as she held up her necklace of shells. After that the aunts went on a proper Clemmy trail, searching her out in the London Gallery and the Battersea Arts Museum as instructed by their niece, but not tracking her down as she stood on one toe outside the post office in Frith Street where, as Tally had explained, she was cast in concrete and couldn't really be seen.

In her second letter Tally also mentioned the problem of Gloria Grantley, with whom her friend Julia was so besotted.

“Could you ask Maybelle if she knows anything about her? ”

So the aunts went to the corner shop, where Maybelle was weighing caster sugar into blue bags, and she was very helpful and came around after the shop closed with a pile of film magazines in which she had marked a great many photographs of Gloria Grantley.

“She's a big star all right,” said Maybelle. “She usually plays in those gloomy films where she's on trial for murder or her lover tries to kill her and all that kind of thing. You know, melodrama.”

Maybelle herself preferred musicals—she was taking tap- and stage-dancing classes and definitely intended to break into films.

“She must earn millions,” said Maybelle. “And she's beautiful all right, but . . .” She shrugged.

The aunts dutifully studied all the copies of
The Picturegoer
Maybelle had left.

There were photos of Gloria on a tiger-skin rug and in a hammock and coming down a flight of stairs.

“I think her throat is a little . . . excessive, don't you? I mean . . . almost too swanlike? ” said May.

Hester agreed: “But it says here that she's only twenty-five years old, so maybe she'll settle down. People of twenty-five don't always know how to behave sensibly.”

As Tally's letters continued to come, the aunts became more and more involved with her life and that of her friends. They searched the hardware stores for a whisk that could be used to froth up Magda's cocoa, and they went to the library to look up the philosophy of Schopenhauer and agreed that someone who was doing research on him could not be expected also to be good at housework. And when Tally added an excited postscript to her fourth letter to say that Augusta Carrington had turned up, they shared the relief of the staff, even though poor Augusta had serious problems.

“She's allergic to absolutely everything,” wrote Tally. “Magda says she is used to allergies because Heribert, the professor she loved in Germany, was allergic to cheese and strawberries—they brought him out in lumps—but Augusta mostly lives on rice and bananas, though she can eat weird things like tripe and dark chocolates with gooey centers. It's no wonder she got on the wrong train.”

And the aunts in their turn wrote almost daily to Tally to tell her what had happened in the street: about the new air-raid shelter at number 4, in which the dog across the road had had her puppies, and about old Mrs. Henderson, who had attacked the gardener in the park with his own shovel for digging up the wallflowers and planting cabbages, which would help us to win the war if it came, but did not smell nice.

When Tally had been at Delderton for a week, Dr. Hamilton's brother, Thomas, came to see him to consult with him about a patient. Thomas was the richer and more fashionable doctor, but James had a special instinct for what was wrong with people. And with Thomas came his wife, Tally's aunt Virginia, the mother of Roderick and Margaret. She said she had come to sympathize with Tally's family, but actually she came to gloat.

“My dear, we were so horrified by what we saw at the station. Those dreadful children and everything so out of control and no uniforms! I suppose you're going to take her away? ”

Tally's father looked at her. “I don't think so, Virginia. Not yet, at all events. We have had some very interesting letters from Tally.”

“Letters! But she hasn't been away for a week. At Foxingham they're not allowed to write at all the first week while they settle back into school.”

“Well, at Delderton they write when they like, and Tally has been very good. Her letters amuse us very much.”

Actually, thought Dr. Hamilton, Tally's letters had done more than amuse him. They had interested him and consoled him and touched on some things that he cared about deeply.

“Really?” This was not at all what Aunt Virginia wanted to hear. “Margaret never has time for more than a few lines.”

“Of course, the letters at Foxingham are censored by the teachers,” said her husband. “Just as well, really. One doesn't want to get oneself upset by any nonsense the boys can come up with.”

“We saw something about Foxingham in the newspaper, didn't we, May? ” said Hester. “A boy who tried to run away because he was afraid of being punished.”

“Well, that's the kind of nonsense I mean,” said Thomas. “There have to be punishments—they have pupils there from the royal houses of Europe, so the strictest discipline must be maintained. The Archduke of Hohenlohe has just sent his nephew there, and of course the Prince of Transjordania has been there for over a year. The boy who ran away was obviously a coward. He was supposed to go to the head for a caning and he just bolted like a scared rabbit. They found him the next day, hiding in some wood about twenty miles away. If Roderick did that I'd be ashamed, and I certainly wouldn't want to hear about it in a letter.”

“Roderick would never get into that kind of trouble, dear,” said Aunt Virginia. She turned to her brother-in-law. “Well, I suppose you know what you're doing, James, but I'd take Tally away at once if I were you.” She lowered her voice. “Mrs. Trent-Watson, who was at the train seeing Bernard off, says she's seen that woman who was in charge of the children before. She says she's an artists' model—and you know what that might mean. Life classes and all sorts of dreadful things! Of course it may not be true . . .”

Hester and May smiled. “Ah, but it is true, Virginia. We've seen her on the walls of the swimming bath. Such a lovely girl. And Tally says she's a wonderful cook!”

Aunt Virginia sniffed. “Well, all I can say is I wouldn't let Margaret associate with anyone like that, not in a million years.”

After they had left and Dr. Hamilton was alone in his study, he took out his daughter's last letter again. Tally had described a strange, slightly mad but very beautiful world, a world in which the trees and the river and the hills at Delderton seemed to be as much a part of her life as the teachers and her friends.

And she wrote that she was waiting for her first biology lesson.

“The man who takes it is my tutor and he's supposed to be terribly good. He's been all over the world and done some important scientific work. I'm really looking forward to it.”

Dr. Hamilton missed his daughter more than he would ever admit, but he was very pleased about that last sentence. Biology, the science of life, how it had begun and where it was going . . . this was what had started him off on his studies as a doctor.

That his daughter should take the same journey made him very happy.

A
s it happened, Tally was late for the first biology class. She had cut her knee, tripping on a paving stone, and gone back for a bandage, and everyone was already settled when she slipped into a desk near the back.

The man standing at the blackboard wore a gray flannel suit. He had sparse ginger hair and a pointed ginger beard and he wore rimless spectacles.

“Today we are going to study the life cycle of the liver fluke,” he said in a high, slightly squeaky voice. “Look at page seventy-six of your textbook and keep it open.”

Tally fought down a wave of disappointment. The life cycle of the liver fluke might be necessary. It might be important. But it does not make the heart beat faster. The nuns had taught it also.

“The history of this organism begins in vegetation in slow-moving streams, where it exists in the form of slime-encrusted eggs. You can see a picture of these in your textbook, labeled diagram A. Please copy it carefully into a blank page of your exercise books.”

He waited, the chalk in his hand, till everyone had finished.

“The eggs are then eaten by a sheep and make their way through the animal's bile duct into the liver, where they become adult flukes.”

He drew a liver (but not a sheep) and put in the adult flukes, explaining their effect on the animal, which was bad. “I will allow five minutes for you to copy from the blackboard,” he said.

Tally, filling her liver with the flattened parasites, felt increasingly miserable, and angry, too. Why did everyone tell her how wonderful biology was? The nuns had taught it better.

“There now follows hermaphrodite fertilization, and the resulting eggs pass out through the alimentary canal and on to the grass, where they turn into conical organisms which are known as miracidia,” he droned. “You will find these on the next page, page seventy-seven . . .”

When the lesson was over Tally hurried out past Julia and her friends. She wanted to be on her own, for it seemed clear that they had been playing a joke on her, pretending that the biology teacher was special. She didn't mind being teased usually, but she had written to her father about him because she knew how much he wanted her to enjoy science.

But they caught her up.

“I'm sorry—that was a shame,” said Julia. “We should have warned you—but everyone was sure that Matteo would be back today.”

“What do you mean? Wasn't that Matteo? ”