The Dragonfly Pool

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.

“I don’t want you to go away, Tally, believe me . . . We will all miss you very, very much.”

“Well then, why do I have to go? Why? Why? ”

“The nuns are very kind but I want you to have a broader education. Science, modern languages . . .”

“But I’m learning French. And you could teach me science.

You’ve always said, as soon as one can read one can teach oneself anything. Please, oh please, don’t make me go away.” She looked at him. Then: “It isn’t about the teaching, is it? It’s because there’s going to be a war.”

There was a long pause. Her father reached out for comforting words, but he had never lied to his daughter. “Yes,” he said heavily. “I think there’s going to be a war. There may not be but . . .”

But if there was, everybody expected that London, like all big towns, would be heavily bombarded. A man who did not protect his daughter from that horror must be the greatest criminal on earth. This chance to send her to safety in one of England’s loveliest counties had been a godsend.

But Tally was angry.