Eva Ibbotson - The Dragonfly Pool

Tally’s friend Maybelle, at the corner shop, was angry when she heard the news. She became angry easily, and now she picked up the trowel with which she’d been spooning lentils from a sack and threw it across the room. Tally wouldn’t fight, Maybelle knew that. She wouldn’t bite and kick and lie down on the floor till she got her own way. Not where her father was concerned. It was going to be a nuisance, doing without her friend. And she’d miss Maybelle’s debut as a powder puff in the Summer Show at the Hippodrome.

“Come on, girl,” said her grandmother. “We’ve got all those bags to tie up before tomorrow.”

“Shan’t,” said Maybelle, and she marched out of the shop and past the butcher’s and the cobbler’s till she came to the greengrocer’s. She’d see if Kenny knew.

Why can’t children be left alone? thought Maybelle angrily.

The nuns were used to children being taken away.

“But I shall be sorry to lose her,” said Mother Superior.

Sister Felicia, who produced the end-of-term plays in the convent, was feeling guilty. I should have let her be the Virgin Mary, she thought. She was always a sheep or a cow coming to the manger. I know how much she wanted the star part but she was so good at controlling the little ones.

Tally, coming down the hill like a lamb to the slaughter, was the last person to know. She was carrying a rolled-up sheet of paper with a one-side painting of St. Sebastian stuck with arrows, and a diagram of the life cycle of the liver fluke on the other. The nuns were poor, and one sheet of paper had to go a long way.

Dr. Hamilton came in from the surgery and made his way into the house. A thin, dark-haired man with a high forehead and concerned brown eyes, he was looking very tired. Friday was always a long day: the surgery stayed open till eight o’clock so that patients who came from the factories and the dockyards could come without missing work.

He was a man who told his patients exactly what to do — to eat regularly, take exercise, get plenty of fresh air, and go to bed early — and he himself did none of those things. He snatched meals between the surgery and his sessions at the hospital where he went two days a week, he went out on night calls that often turned out to be unnecessary, and stayed up till the small hours catching up with the new medical research.

The hallway was dark — his sisters, so much older than him, were good about saving electricity. Supper would be left for him in the dining room, but he wasn’t hungry. He’d come in late like this so often, looking forward to an hour with his daughter before she went to bed. He could hear her upstairs, talking to the aunts. Well, he’d better get it over.

“Ask Tally to come and see me in my study,” he said to the cook general.

Five minutes later the door opened and his daughter came in.

Oh Lord, I can’t do it, thought Dr. Hamilton. What will there be left when she is gone?

Already as she stood there in the lamplight he was memorizing her face. The pointed chin, the straight fawn hair lapping her ears, the inquiring hazel eyes. Her fringe had a nibbled look — Aunt Hester insisted on cutting it herself.

When his wife had died of puerperal fever a week after their daughter’s birth, Dr. Hamilton had been completely overwhelmed by guilt and grief. How could it be that he, a doctor, could not save the woman that he loved so much? For several weeks he scarcely noticed the baby, fussed over by his sisters and a nurse. Then one day, coming in late, he passed the nursery and heard a sound coming from his daughter’s room. It was not a cry, nor was it a whimper. It was the sound of… conversation. His five-week-old daughter was talking to the world.

He walked over to the cot. The baby’s eyes, properly focused now, were wide open. She did not smile at him; she looked .

What an idiot I’ve been, he thought. This is a person .

Things had happened to this person in the weeks he had ignored her that he might not have permitted if he’d been aware of what was going on. For example, her name… His sisters had had the child christened Talitha, after their grandmother.

“She was a saint,” they reminded their brother. “She used to wash the socks of the tramps she met on the London Underground. Wash them and dry them and give them back.”

Dr. Hamilton would have preferred to call his daughter something simpler: Ann, perhaps, or Jane. Yet as she grew, her name seemed entirely suitable, for in order to wash the socks of tramps you have to get them to take their socks off , and it was the kind of determination this would need that Tally showed from a very early age.

Tally meanwhile had crossed the room and come over to his chair to give him a hug. She could see that he’d had a bad day — he looked like that when a patient at the hospital died who should have lived, or when the pile of bills on his desk became unmanageable, or, lately, when he had been listening to Hitler raving on the wireless, and she was already thinking of ways to cheer him up. Sometimes they played chess, and sometimes she told him about something funny that had happened at school, but today she had a feeling that neither of these things would work.

“I’ve got something to tell you, Tally,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulders.

“Is it important?” she said apprehensively. She had learned early in life that important things were usually not nearly as nice as unimportant ones.

“Yes… I suppose it is. At any rate, it’s good news,” said the doctor resolutely.

Tally looked at him suspiciously. She knew his face better than she knew her own, and the lines around his mouth and the furrows on his forehead did not seem to indicate good news.

“Perhaps I’d better explain. I have a patient at the hospital — I won’t tell you his name but he is someone important in education — a professor and a very nice man. He thinks I saved his life, which is rubbish, but it’s true we were able to help him. Afterward, while he was waiting to be discharged, we talked about you, and…” Dr. Hamilton paused, looking at the window, which was just a square of darkness now, “he told me about a school he knows — he’s on the governing board, and he thinks very highly of the staff and the ideals of the school. It’s in the country, in South Devon, not far from the sea.”

Tally waited. Her heart was beating fast, but surely it was all right? A school in south Devon must be a boarding school, and one of the advantages of being poor was that she could never be sent away to those places that cost the earth.

“Apparently they give scholarships from time to time. Not for schoolwork but to children who they think might benefit from being there. Complete scholarships, where everything is taken care of. He says he thinks he could get you a place there.”

“I don’t want to go away.” She tried to speak in a sensible, grown-up way, but already her voice was letting her down. “I’m all right here. I’m fine.”

Her father was silent, jabbing his pencil on to his blotter. The blotter was a present from one of his patients: four sheets of pink paper pasted on to a piece of lumpy leather. His study was full of presents his patients had made for him: knitted sausages to keep out drafts, lopsided letter racks… Among all the strange objects was a plaster head of Hippocrates, the patron saint of medicine, who, two thousand years ago, had laid down the rules for treating patients with dignity and respect.