The Dragonfly Pool

Old Mrs. Dawson, whose chest was bad again, stared at the notices pinned to the wall and thought about her dog. Tally took the dog out for her and said she didn’t want to be paid, because she liked dogs. She even liked Horace, who was a dachshund and that was not a popular breed just now. Tally had punched a boy who’d sneered at him for being a German sausage dog. There wasn’t anyone else who’d take him out for free, and Mrs. Dawson’s budget was tight. Surely the rumors couldn’t be true? Everyone knew that the doctor thought the world of his daughter. Why, it would break his heart to part with her.

“Next patient, please,” said the receptionist, Miss Hoy, and Mrs. Dawson made her way into the doctor’s room. She’d ask him whether it was true—after all, she had a right to know.

“Have you heard?” said Mr. Cooper as his son Kenny came in from the park. Kenny was the same age as Tally; they’d played together all their lives.

“Yes,” said Kenny and went past the cabbages and the sacks of Brussels sprouts and out of the back of the greengrocer’s shop into the mews. He’d be going to the stables, thought his father. When things were rough with him, Kenny often went to talk to Primrose. She was only an old Welsh cob who pulled the vegetable cart, but she was one of those horses that understood things.

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.