Eva Ibbotson - The Dragonfly Pool

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…”

After 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.