The Dragonfly Pool

Tally nodded. “Yes, it would. The spirits trapped in the Underworld would be interesting to do. Writhing and shrieking and begging to be let out.”

“Oh, not a play,” said Julia nervously. “Not proper acting.”

O’Hanrahan looked at her quietly for a moment before he said, “No one has to act if they don’t want to, Julia. You know that.”

When they were back in Julia’s room getting ready for lunch Tally asked, “Don’t you like acting? ”

“No. I mean, I don’t do it. Not ever.”

She had on her worried look and Tally did not ask any more. She knew already that she and Julia would be friends, but there was something puzzling about her. It was as though she would do anything not to be noticed, as though she needed to be younger and less important than she was.

Later, as Tally walked over to the dining room with Barney, he said, “She’s silly. Julia, I mean. O’Hanrahan got her to do a bit in Much Ado About Nothing. It was just in the classroom, but Julia was amazing. Only when we told her how good she was, she clammed up completely and went off in a state and she’s never done anything since. Whereas Verity always wants to be the star. You’ll see—if we do Persephone, she’ll try to be the heroine.”

“I was wondering about her feet. Verity’s, I mean. I can see it’s fine to go barefoot in the grass, but in Paddington Station . . . Doesn’t she get splinters? ”

Barney shrugged. “Someone told her she had beautiful feet and that was that. She’s the vainest person I know—she’ll spend an hour tearing her skirt in exactly the right place or untidying her hair.”

In the afternoon they had games and Kit’s hopes of playing cricket were finally dashed. The only team game they played at Delderton was softball, and people who didn’t want to play that went for cross-country runs, used the apparatus in the gym, or worked on the school farm.

Tally went down to help Borro clean out the goats. Borro’s father had been a chieftain in Bechuanaland before he was deposed by a rival and now had a job lecturing in the University of London, but Borro was determined to go back to Africa and reclaim his father’s land and farm it. The walls of his room were covered in pictures of cattle: Friesians and Aberdeen Angus and Longhorns, whose mild eyes gazed down at him as he slept. Not only that, but he was going to breed a new kind of cow, which would grow fat even on the parched soil of his native land.

Meanwhile, since cattle breeding was not really practical at school, he and Tod had decided to breed edible snails and sell them to restaurants. Tod wanted the money for the revolution and Borro wanted it for his fare back to Africa. Unfortunately the few snails they had managed to collect so far did not seem to be remotely interested in mating.

Tally’s friends discussed this, sitting on the steps of the pet hut after tea, watching the snails crawl over each other in a bored sort of way.

“I suppose it’s because each snail is both a male and a female,” said Tally, “so they get muddled.”

“Matteo would know what to do,” said Barney.

But Matteo was not yet back at school, and his first biology lesson had been postponed.

It was surprising how quickly one could get used to a completely new life. Some of the lessons were quite ordinary: chemistry, say, when a man called David Prosser did the experiments for them on a bench and then told them what to write up, but mostly going into a classroom was an adventure that might turn out in any sort of way.

Art, for example . . . Clemmy took a double period of art on Tally’s second day at school except that she didn’t “take” it—she just seemed to wander around the art room, which looked out over fields and the distant trees that lined the river. Paper and paints were laid out and Clemmy murmured something.

“Most people don’t believe in guardian angels, but what exactly is a guardian angel? ” she said. “Could it be something quite different to what people think . . .? ” And almost at once everyone had started working, completely absorbed. Tally found that she was painting her street: the rows of houses, her father’s surgery and above them, flying over the roofs, London’s own guardian angels, the barrage balloons—and it felt as though she was joining her life in London with her new life at Delderton.

But the lessons everyone spoke about were Matteo’s biology classes. “They’re special,” they said, and when Tally asked in what way, they said it was no use explaining; she’d see.

Making friends was the most important thing, but what Tally loved was the way Delderton grew out of the countryside. Going over to the gym she would meet a red squirrel or pass a great bank of primroses as scented and rich as if they had been planted there. And each morning, as she woke, she heard a thrush singing in the cedar tree.