The Dragonfly Pool

“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.”

“Yes . . . but I do so hate not being able to make things better.

And she’s so awful—Gloria Grantley, I mean. The way she looked up to heaven and said, ‘Lionel!’ and fluttered her eyelashes. You wouldn’t believe what a bad actress she is!”

“I would actually,” said Matteo. “I saw the film.”

Tally looked at him in amazement. “You went to the cinema in St. Agnes? To see I’ll Always Be Yours? Did you really?”

Matteo was looking past her at the open window, and he did not speak at once.

“I had my reasons,” he said.

Tally waited, but whatever his reasons were he obviously did not want to share them.

She thought it was time to go, but as she was getting up Matteo turned to her.

“But what about you, Tally? Don’t you have any problems of your own?”

Tally thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. I do miss my father very much, but that’s not a problem, is it? It’s just part of life.”

“Yes, you’re right.” Matteo’s face was somber. “Missing people is definitely part of life.”

An unusual child, he thought when she had gone. I wonder where that comes from in someone so young—that concern for other people.

But almost at once he forgot her, lost again in a vision of his own.

In O’Hanrahan’s English classes the discussions about doing the legend of Persephone as a play became serious. The story seemed to have everything: all kinds of devils and demons and monsters, not to mention the three-headed dog, Cerberus, whom everybody liked; a beautiful and innocent heroine carried off by the King of Darkness and forced to live as his wife in the Underworld; a distraught mother, the goddess Demeter, who mourned her daughter so dreadfully that she could not attend to her duties and so let the corn wither and die. And it was a story about the earth being renewed in the spring, when Persephone returns from Hades, which seemed to be a good idea at a time when the world appeared to be doing anything rather than renewing itself.

In one lesson Barney, who had helped to produce the play they had done the previous year, attacked Julia directly.

“You ought to be the heroine—you’d be good. You know you would.”

But Julia only shook her head. “I wouldn’t mind being one of the heads of Cerberus if they wear masks,” she said, “but that’s all.”

When they were alone, Tally tackled her friend.

“Julia, why won’t you do any acting? Everyone says you’re good, and we don’t want beastly Verity being the heroine and tossing her hair about. Perhaps you’ve inherited your talent from your mother,” said Tally, trying to forget Gloria Grantley raising her eyes to heaven and saying, “Lionel!”

“No, I haven’t. I haven’t!” Julia, who was usually so gentle, was getting angry. “It’s my mother who acts. If she thought I was trying to compete she’d be terribly upset. Once when I was small she was making a film in Spain and I was able to be with her and I started to make up a funny dance—well, it wasn’t really funny but I thought it was—and the people who were watching laughed, and she told me not to be silly, and that I was embarrassing her. She said it would be very wrong if I thought I had any talent—I would only be miserable. She was thinking of me, she said—and she must know because it’s her profession.”

“Unless she’s jealous,” said Tally.

“Jealous!” Julia rounded on her. “Jealous of a freckled beanpole like me? You must be mad!”

So that was the end of that conversation.

The school-council meeting on the following Monday took place in the hall. It was open to staff and pupils alike, and Daley usually swallowed a couple of aspirins before it began because the meetings were apt to go on for a long time. The agenda lay in front of him. It read:

• Vegetables • Cricket • Visit of Spanish Children • • Complaint from Great Western Railway • Domestic Work • Letter from Ministry of Culture

Daley was declaring the meeting open when, to his surprise, the door opened and Matteo slipped into the hall. Matteo never came to meetings if he could help it, and even now he took a chair at the very back and leaned back as though he might be about to drop off to sleep.