The Dragonfly Pool

“Oh no, my darling, no no. Not at all; I may have said . . .” She extracted a mauve and scented handkerchief and dabbed her eyes. Daley had lent them his room, but there seemed to be nothing to drink on his desk, and she signaled to her agent, Mr. Harvenberg, who slipped out for a gin and tonic. “But I was wrong, I see that now. Only it’s such a terrible profession. There is such heartbreak.” She clutched Julia, digging her long fingernails into her daughter’s arm. “I wanted to do my best for you and that meant acting younger than my age so that I could make a lot of money for us. And I have made a lot—and I shall make more when I’ve sued the film company. I’m going to take them to the cleaners. You’ve no idea how they’ve treated me.”

“Aren’t you going back to Hollywood then?” asked Julia.

“Go back to that sewer? Never! I wouldn’t go back if they asked me on their bended knees. I’m going to stay and do my bit for my country. I’m going to join the WVS. The uniform is dreadful—that miserable bottle green—but I shan’t let it put me off. You’ll see, my darling; you’re going to be proud of me. Now come and give me a kiss.”

Afterward Mr. Harvenberg took Julia and Tally aside.

“They sacked her. Booted her out. Said she was all washed up, too old. Don’t take too much notice—she’ll find someone to protect her. There’s a boyfriend lined up already. Doubt if she’ll last in the WVS, whatever that is. You mustn’t take anything she says to heart. I’m off back to the States, but if you want anything let me know.” He extracted his card and handed it to Julia. “It’s much too early to say, but if you want to go in for the profession later, I might be able to help you. You’re not a looker like your mother, but you can act and that counts for something. Not much, but something.”

Everyone had gathered together in Magda’s room—the aunts, the minister of culture, those parents who were staying in the school . . . But Dr. Hamilton had taken Karil aside and was talking to him in the courtyard.

“Matteo came to see me before he went abroad,” he said. “He asked me if I was willing to have you stay for the holidays. Not just these holidays, but all of them.”

Karil waited.

“I said I was more than willing. That I would be delighted, if it suited you.”

“There’s nothing I’d like better,” said Karil. “But you don’t know me.”

For Tally’s father had been at a conference when Karil had come to stay after the funeral.

Dr. Hamilton smiled. “Tally knows you,” he said. “That’s enough for me.”

As they made their way upstairs and into Magda’s room, they heard Kit’s plaintive voice.

“I don’t like cocoa with skin on . . .” he began.

But there wasn’t any skin on it. The aunts had made the cocoa.

And the party began.

Epilogue

This time they were not sleeping in tents on the edge of the park; there were no toilet blocks, no large Yugoslav ladies rinsing their feet in the sinks for washing up. They were guests of the new Berganian government and had rooms in a wing of the palace.

Not all the children who had come to Bergania six years before were able to come. Verity was tossing her hair about in a modeling agency and Borro had returned to Africa where his father had been invited back, but the rest of them were there: Tally and Julia, Barney and Augusta, and Tod and Kit.

They were hardly children now. All of them had left school at the end of the summer term. Barney had got a scholarship to Cambridge to read Natural Sciences, Julia was to start at acting school in the autumn, and Tally, to everyone’s surprise, had been bitten by a thirst for the legends and teachings of the ancient world.

“There’s a degree at Oxford where you can do all that,” O’Hanrahan had told her, “but it’s no use for getting well-paid jobs.”

“Would I get in?” Tally had asked. “I’d have to get a scholarship.”

“If you work like a maniac I’ll get you in,” he’d said.

And he had kept his promise.

Their rooms in the palace were crowded, for everyone wanted to come and see the ceremony in which the Berganians finally shook off the dreadful years of Hitler’s occupation and took the government back into their own hands. Daley was there, and Magda, and Anneliese, the German girl with the auburn curls who had been at the festival. Even the two little girls who had started the rumpus on the hill that probably saved Karil’s life had managed to make it.

VE Day, when the end of the war in Europe was celebrated, had seen the Deldertonians spilling out of school onto any train or bus or car that was available to take them to London, along with what seemed the whole population of the free world. They had climbed the railings of Rottingdene House for a view of the dancing and the revelry and the bonfires—and no one shooed them away, for the duke’s old home was now a tax office, and people swore that the ghost of the old man stomped through the house at night cursing and swearing.