Eva Ibbotson - The Dragonfly Pool

But it was what came next that I liked so much.

When they’d finished eating the fish they swam back to the shore and started grooming themselves. They licked their fur and they polished their heads on each other and they went on rolling and polishing, till they were quite dry and fluffy, and only then did they dive back into the water and swim away.

We were there a long time because the otters were like people one was visiting and one didn’t want to leave them.

There was more we saw on the way back: a woodpecker, very close to, and a buzzard. It was as though Matteo knew where everything was — he would just go there and wait and there it was — and he said that we had to remember that everywhere was somebody’s home and tread respectfully and reverently.

You might think it wasn’t proper science, it was just a nature walk, but it wasn’t like that. When we got back we wrote down the date and the temperature of the water in the river and the exact location of the field-vole nest and I don’t feel that I will ever forget what I saw. Not ever.

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.”

The 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?”

“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.”