The Dragonfly Pool (11 page)

“One could certainly ask,” said Matteo. “It seems a perfectly sensible suggestion to me. Any other problems?”

“Well, there's Verity's snake. It looks really ill and I can't say anything because—”

Matteo's face darkened. “You can forget the snake. It's being collected this afternoon and returned to the shop.”

“Oh, good.”

Matteo waited. “Anything else?” he asked, for he had the feeling that Tally's biggest worry was still to come.

“Well, yes. It's about Julia. When I got on the train to come here I was so homesick you can't imagine—I just wanted to cry and cry—but Julia was so welcoming and so kind, and I like her so
much
, but I could see she was worried about something. It was as though she had a great weight on her mind, and she was so odd sometimes—Barney says she's a marvelous actress, but whenever O'Hanrahan tries to get her to do anything she just curls up . . . and no one could be kinder than him. And then last week she asked me to go to the cinema with her and it was Gloria Grantley, and Julia broke down completely and told me she was her mother. I promised not to tell the others, and of course I haven't, but really I can't bear it.”

“What is it that you can't bear?”

“That ghastly woman—how can she think it's more important to be famous and earn lots of money? Julia's so sad, having to be kept secret, and she won't do anything that makes her stand out, and she can't get ordinary letters like the rest of us—her mother just sends awful boxes of chocolate with liqueur centers that nobody can eat except Augusta Carringon—but Julia doesn't want chocolates; she wants a letter. And I think there has to be something one could do. I thought maybe I'd write to her and tell her how miserable she's making Julia. She may just be stupid and not realize.”

Matteo looked at her gravely.

“I'm afraid you'd only make trouble for Julia. I know it's hard, but sometimes there are situations where one can help only indirectly. And you do help Julia enormously just by being her friend.”

“Yes . . . but I do so hate not being able to make things better.

And she's so awful—Gloria Grantley, I mean. The way she looked up to heaven and said, ‘Lionel!' and fluttered her eyelashes. You wouldn't believe what a bad actress she is!”

“I would actually,” said Matteo. “I saw the film.”

Tally looked at him in amazement. “You went to the cinema in St. Agnes? To see
I'll Always Be Yours
? Did you really?”

Matteo was looking past her at the open window, and he did not speak at once.

“I had my reasons,” he said.

Tally waited, but whatever his reasons were he obviously did not want to share them.

She thought it was time to go, but as she was getting up Matteo turned to her.

“But what about you, Tally? Don't you have any problems of your own?”

Tally thought for a moment. “No, I don't think so. I do miss my father very much, but that's not a problem, is it? It's just part of life.”

“Yes, you're right.” Matteo's face was somber. “Missing people is definitely part of life.”

An unusual child, he thought when she had gone. I wonder where that comes from in someone so young—that concern for other people.

But almost at once he forgot her, lost again in a vision of his own.

In O'Hanrahan's English classes the discussions about doing the legend of Persephone as a play became serious. The story seemed to have everything: all kinds of devils and demons and monsters, not to mention the three-headed dog, Cerberus, whom everybody liked; a beautiful and innocent heroine carried off by the King of Darkness and forced to live as his wife in the Underworld; a distraught mother, the goddess Demeter, who mourned her daughter so dreadfully that she could not attend to her duties and so let the corn wither and die. And it was a story about the earth being renewed in the spring, when Persephone returns from Hades, which seemed to be a good idea at a time when the world appeared to be doing anything rather than renewing itself.

In one lesson Barney, who had helped to produce the play they had done the previous year, attacked Julia directly.

“You ought to be the heroine—you'd be good. You know you would.”

But Julia only shook her head. “I wouldn't mind being one of the heads of Cerberus if they wear masks,” she said, “but that's all.”

When they were alone, Tally tackled her friend.

“Julia,
why
won't you do any acting? Everyone says you're good, and we don't want beastly Verity being the heroine and tossing her hair about. Perhaps you've inherited your talent from your mother,” said Tally, trying to forget Gloria Grantley raising her eyes to heaven and saying, “Lionel!”

“No, I haven't. I
haven't
!” Julia, who was usually so gentle, was getting angry. “It's my mother who acts. If she thought I was trying to compete she'd be terribly upset. Once when I was small she was making a film in Spain and I was able to be with her and I started to make up a funny dance—well, it wasn't really funny but I thought it was—and the people who were watching laughed, and she told me not to be silly, and that I was embarrassing her. She said it would be very wrong if I thought I had any talent—I would only be miserable. She was thinking of me, she said—and she must know because it's her profession.”

“Unless she's jealous,” said Tally.

“Jealous!” Julia rounded on her. “Jealous of a freckled beanpole like me? You must be mad!”

So that was the end of that conversation.

The school-council meeting on the following Monday took place in the hall. It was open to staff and pupils alike, and Daley usually swallowed a couple of aspirins before it began because the meetings were apt to go on for a long time. The agenda lay in front of him. It read:

Daley was declaring the meeting open when, to his surprise, the door opened and Matteo slipped into the hall. Matteo never came to meetings if he could help it, and even now he took a chair at the very back and leaned back as though he might be about to drop off to sleep.

The first item did not take long. The waste ground behind the gym had been dug up and plant covers were going to be put down for vegetables. Children could submit a list to Clemmy of plants they would like to see growing, and she would discuss it with the gardeners.

“Why is that with the vegetables we will win the war?” asked the small French girl with the large white rabbit, and Daley explained that by growing vegetables instead of importing them, Great Britain would save space on ships, which could bring over ammunition and armaments instead.

Then came cricket, which Tally had put on the agenda, and now she stepped forward and launched bravely into her speech.

“I know we don't play team games at Delderton, but there are people here—well, there's Kit, and there may be others—who would like to play cricket. And I thought . . . there's the high school in St. Agnes, and they do play cricket. So might Kit go there one afternoon a week, maybe? Could one ask?”

“Who would do the asking?” said Daley. The headmaster of St. Agnes did not approve of Delderton.

“Well, Kit could . . .” and as the little boy squeaked agitatedly, “and I could go with him. If you'd give me a letter?”

No one saw anything wrong with this, and the visit of the Spanish schoolchildren to give a concert came next. Everyone wanted to hear the children sing; they had been made homeless when their country was split by civil war and they were going to spend the night camping on the playing field.

“Couldn't they stay longer?” suggested Tally. “One day isn't very long. Maybe we could have one child each in our rooms.”

Everyone agreed with this, and Daley said he would suggest it to the person who was in charge of the Spanish children, but Tally realized that she must now be quiet and not have any more ideas, so she put a peppermint in her mouth, the kind with a hole in it, and put her tongue through it so as to stop herself from speaking.

Daley now read out the complaint from the manager of Great Western Railway, who said that passengers on the 11:15 from Paddington had been shocked to see Delderton pupils bathing in the river with nothing on when they went past. This happened every year, like hearing the first cuckoo in spring, and the older children sighed.

“That's just silly,” said Ronald Peabody, the boy who had broken the topmost branch of the cedar tree. “There's nothing to be ashamed of in the human body.” And he flexed his skinny biceps as though he was a weightlifter.

“Perhaps not,” said O'Hanrahan in his quiet voice. “But it seems a good idea to live in harmony with our neighbors.”

“Well, I think we're being bullied. It's like the trash cans,” said Ronald—and the children were off!

The trash cans at Delderton had large metal lids which made excellent shields, and the kitchen staff had taken to locking them up in a compound so that the children couldn't get at them.

“Locking things up isn't in the Delderton tradition,” said a boy with large spectacles. “We're supposed to be a free school.”

“Freedom doesn't mean causing distress and inconvenience to others,” said Magda, and told them what Schopenhauer had said about this, which was a lot.

Arguments about the trash cans took nearly a quarter of an hour and after that Verity said she had thought they were going to discuss the free period on Wednesday afternoons. She had tried to bring it up last time and Daley had promised to put it on the agenda, she said, and why wasn't it there? They had a free period in her cousin's school, and Wednesday was early-closing day in the village, so they had a right to have one here. A proper one, not the kind you got by cutting classes.

After this came “Domestic Work,” which seemed to be getting on all right on the whole, and Daley then decided to bring the meeting to an end with something that would unite everybody because it was so obvious that it couldn't be done. He picked up the letter about the Folk Dance Festival.

“I have had a request from the Ministry of Culture. It's rather a strange request and I shall of course turn it down, but I thought you might like to know that we have been invited.”

And he read out the letter from the ministry in London, which ran as follows: