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.
Kit, though, had still not settled in and followed Tally about lamenting from morning till night. Kit did not want to be a fork or pick worts to dye his sheep’s wool—and he did not want to go ping on the triangle when they played the Toy Symphony in music lessons.
Music was taught by an elderly professor of harmony who had hoped for a quiet life by returning to teach in the country. New children were usually persuaded to learn whatever instrument was needed for the orchestra, but when he met Kit the professor knew he was beaten.
“Oh Kit, surely you can just go ping,” said Tally wearily. “It doesn’t take a minute.”
But she was really very sorry for the little boy, who had just started at a small prep school down the road from his house and made friends with a boy called Horlicks Major and been picked for the cricket team, when a rich friend of his mother’s had come to stay with the family and said that Kit was repressed and should be sent to Delderton, and had offered to pay the fees.
“But I don’t mind being repressed,” Kit had told his new friends. “I don’t like it when people tell me I can do what I like. I want them to tell me what to do.”
Magda had stopped crying after lights-out and did her best to be a good housemother. Nothing could be done about her cocoa, and she got very confused about checking the laundry—it was a question of luck whose clean washing landed on one’s bed—but her German lessons were good, and she was particularly kind to Julia on the morning when the first letters came.
The post at Delderton came just after breakfast so that there was time before lessons began for the children to go to the pigeonholes outside the school office to see if there was any mail.
The aunts had kept their promise. There were three letters in Tally’s pigeonhole: one in green ink from Aunt Hester, one in violet ink from Aunt May, and one in ordinary ink from her father, which she pounced on and read first.
There was a letter for Barney and one for Tod and for Borro and for Kit.
Only Julia had no mail.
On Tally’s third day at Delderton the headmaster gathered the school together in the hall. He said that it was easy to forget, in the peace of the countryside, that Britain and France and so many of the free people of the world were in danger. Here in Devon we were unlikely to be bombed, he said, but we must be ready to do everything to help the war effort if the worst happened.
At this point the older children looked at each other hopefully, ready to man a nest of machine guns if one was set up in the courtyard, but what the headmaster said was different.
“Already two of the domestic staff have had their call-up papers. So I think it would be fair if every child did half an hour of housework before the start of lessons.”
Everyone agreed with this—except Verity, who said that she didn’t think her parents had sent her to school to scrub floors—but of course it was a disappointment. When one has hoped to man the barricades, it is difficult to get excited about doing the dusting or polishing the furniture.
Actually, it was not easy to forget that there might be a war, even at Delderton. Most of the staff had their own wirelesses and at six o’clock the children would make their way to the housemothers’ rooms and listen to the news.
Not only was Hitler braying and strutting and threatening, growing madder and wilder in his demands by the day, but Mussolini, the Italian dictator who copied him in everything he did, had invaded Albania, a defenseless country which had done him no harm whatsoever, and the Albanian ruler, King Zog, had fled his country and gone into exile.
On the following day as Tally was walking across the courtyard she saw a girl standing alone by the archway with a suitcase and a violin case beside her. She was tall and thin with frizzy black hair, and for some reason Tally knew at once who she was. She had the look of someone who had come far, like a camel across the desert.
“You’re Augusta Carrington,” she said.
Augusta nodded and said, “Yeth, I am.”
She had a ferocious metallic brace on her teeth, which made her lisp.
Clemmy now came out of the school office, holding a list and looking shaken.
“Are you sure, Augusta? ” she asked. “It says here that you can’t eat cheese or strawberries or wheat or eggs or nuts or rhubarb. You’re allergic to all of those.”
Augusta nodded.
“And fur and feathers,” she said, spitting a little through her brace.
Although Tally and her friends all took to Augusta, the allergy to fur and feathers made it difficult when they brought her to the pet hut, where they had their meetings. If she sat on the top step she sneezed all the time, and on the second step she sneezed often, but on the bottom step she was all right, and able to be sympathetic about their problems.
“You could call the axolotl Zog,” she suggested.
Actually she said “Thog” because of her brace, but they understood her.
“You shouldn’t call anything after a king,” said Tod. “Kings are evil.”
But Barney said it wasn’t Zog’s fault he had been born a king, and when they had looked carefully at the creature’s bandy legs and round black eyes he really did look quite like a Zog.
So that was one problem solved. The snails on the other hand were still lying about on other snails as though they were old sofas.
“I wish Matteo would come back,” said Borro restlessly.
But Matteo was still away, and biology had been postponed again.
Tally had heard a lot about Matteo as a biologist—but it was what he was like as a tutor that she wanted to know.
“He’s your tutor, too, isn’t he?” she asked Julia as they were getting ready for be
d. “What’s he like? ”
Julia had been replaiting her hair. She put down her hairbrush and didn’t answer straightaway.
“He’s not like anybody else,” she said.
“But do you like him? ”
“Yes, I like him very much, but that isn’t what it’s about. You’ll see . . .”
CHAPTER SIX
London Interlude
After they watched the Delderton train steam out of Paddington Station, the aunts felt completely wretched, and Tally’s father vowed that he would take her away at the end of the first term.
Then came Tally’s letters and everything changed.
“This is a very interesting school,” she wrote on her second day. “The first night I thought I would be homesick, but it was my housemother who was homesick . . . Being a fork is a bit odd but it can be quite peaceful because you can think your own thoughts . . .” and she described the cedar tree the headmaster loved so much, and the art classes, and Clemmy. By the time her second letter came it was clear that Tally was enjoying herself—and as it was a sunny morning the aunts, who always took such an interest in Tally’s life, set off for the Thameside Municipal Baths.
They were not going swimming. It was a long time since they had cared to plunge into chlorinated water in their bathing costumes, which no longer looked quite right. They were going to look at Tally’s art teacher.
“She’s in a mural in the Thameside baths,” Tally had written. “Barney says it’s easy to see her there because you can get quite close. She’s coming out of the water holding up a garland of sea-shells.”
So now the aunts paid their admission fee for Freestyle Swimming and took their rolled-up towels (which had no costumes inside them) into the entrance hall and there, sure enough, was a large mural of some girls coming out of a very blue pool surrounded by flowers.
“That’s her,” said Aunt Hester straightaway. “I remember her hair.”
Now that she wasn’t looking for Augusta Carrington, the woman who had been in charge of the school train was smiling very happily as she held up her necklace of shells. After that the aunts went on a proper Clemmy trail, searching her out in the London Gallery and the Battersea Arts Museum as instructed by their niece, but not tracking her down as she stood on one toe outside the post office in Frith Street where, as Tally had explained, she was cast in concrete and couldn’t really be seen.
In her second letter Tally also mentioned the problem of Gloria Grantley, with whom her friend Julia was so besotted.
“Could you ask Maybelle if she knows anything about her? ”
So the aunts went to the corner shop, where Maybelle was weighing caster sugar into blue bags, and she was very helpful and came around after the shop closed with a pile of film magazines in which she had marked a great many photographs of Gloria Grantley.
“She’s a big star all right,” said Maybelle. “She usually plays in those gloomy films where she’s on trial for murder or her lover tries to kill her and all that kind of thing. You know, melodrama.”
Maybelle herself preferred musicals—she was taking tap- and stage-dancing classes and definitely intended to break into films.
“She must earn millions,” said Maybelle. “And she’s beautiful all right, but . . .” She shrugged.
The aunts dutifully studied all the copies of The Picturegoer Maybelle had left.
There were photos of Gloria on a tiger-skin rug and in a hammock and coming down a flight of stairs.
“I think her throat is a little . . . excessive, don’t you? I mean . . . almost too swanlike? ” said May.
Hester agreed: “But it says here that she’s only twenty-five years old, so maybe she’ll settle down. People of twenty-five don’t always know how to behave sensibly.”
As Tally’s letters continued to come, the aunts became more and more involved with her life and that of her friends. They searched the hardware stores for a whisk that could be used to froth up Magda’s cocoa, and they went to the library to look up the philosophy of Schopenhauer and agreed that someone who was doing research on him could not be expected also to be good at housework. And when Tally added an excited postscript to her fourth letter to say that Augusta Carrington had turned up, they shared the relief of the staff, even though poor Augusta had serious problems.
“She’s allergic to absolutely everything,” wrote Tally. “Magda says she is used to allergies because Heribert, the professor she loved in Germany, was allergic to cheese and strawberries—they brought him out in lumps—but Augusta mostly lives on rice and bananas, though she can eat weird things like tripe and dark chocolates with gooey centers. It’s no wonder she got on the wrong train.”
And the aunts in their turn wrote almost daily to Tally to tell her what had happened in the street: about the new air-raid shelter at number 4, in which the dog across the road had had her puppies, and about old Mrs. Henderson, who had attacked the gardener in the park with his own shovel for digging up the wallflowers and planting cabbages, which would help us to win the war if it came, but did not smell nice.
When Tally had been at Delderton for a week, Dr. Hamilton’s brother, Thomas, came to see him to consult with him about a patient. Thomas was the richer and more fashionable doctor, but James had a special instinct for what was wrong with people. And with Thomas came his wife, Tally’s aunt Virginia, the mother of Roderick and Margaret. She said she had come to sympathize with Tally’s family, but actually she came to gloat.
“My dear, we were so horrified by what we saw at the station. Those dreadful children and everything so out of control and no uniforms! I suppose you’re going to take her away? ”
Tally’s father looked at her. “I don’t think so, Virginia. Not yet, at all events. We have had some very interesting letters from Tally.”
“Letters! But she hasn’t been away for a week. At Foxingham they’re not allowed to write at all the first week while they settle back into school.”
“Well, at Delderton they write when they like, and Tally has been very good. Her letters amuse us very much.”
Actually, thought Dr. Hamilton, Tally’s letters had done more than amuse him. They had interested him and consoled him and touched on some things that he cared about deeply.
“Really?” This was not at all what Aunt Virginia wanted to hear. “Margaret never has time for more than a few lines.”
“Of course, the letters at Foxingham are censored by the teachers,” said her husband. “Just as well, really. One doesn’t want to get oneself upset by any nonsense the boys can come up with.”
“We saw something about Foxingham in the newspaper, didn’t we, May? ” said Hester. “A boy who tried to run away because he was afraid of being punished.”
“Well, that’s the kind of nonsense I mean,” said Thomas. “There have to be punishments—they have pupils there from the royal houses of Europe, so the strictest discipline must be maintained. The Archduke of Hohenlohe has just sent his nephew there, and of course the Prince of Transjordania has been there for over a year. The boy who ran away was obviously a coward. He was supposed to go to the head for a caning and he just bolted like a scared rabbit. They found him the next day, hiding in some wood about twenty miles away. If Roderick did that I’d be ashamed, and I certainly wouldn’t want to hear about it in a letter.”
“Roderick would never get into that kind of trouble, dear,” said Aunt Virginia. She turned to her brother-in-law. “Well, I suppose you know what you’re doing, James, but I’d take Tally away at once if I were you.” She lowered her voice. “Mrs. Trent-Watson, who was at the train seeing Bernard off, says she’s seen that woman who was in charge of the children before. She says she’s an artists’ model—and you know what that might mean. Life classes and all sorts of dreadful things! Of course it may not be true . . .”
Hester and May smiled. “Ah, but it is true, Virginia. We’ve seen her on the walls of the swimming bath. Such a lovely girl. And Tally says she’s a wonderful cook!”
&nb
sp; Aunt Virginia sniffed. “Well, all I can say is I wouldn’t let Margaret associate with anyone like that, not in a million years.”
After they had left and Dr. Hamilton was alone in his study, he took out his daughter’s last letter again. Tally had described a strange, slightly mad but very beautiful world, a world in which the trees and the river and the hills at Delderton seemed to be as much a part of her life as the teachers and her friends.
And she wrote that she was waiting for her first biology lesson.
“The man who takes it is my tutor and he’s supposed to be terribly good. He’s been all over the world and done some important scientific work. I’m really looking forward to it.”
Dr. Hamilton missed his daughter more than he would ever admit, but he was very pleased about that last sentence. Biology, the science of life, how it had begun and where it was going . . . this was what had started him off on his studies as a doctor.
That his daughter should take the same journey made him very happy.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Matteo’s Moan
As it happened, Tally was late for the first biology class. She had cut her knee, tripping on a paving stone, and gone back for a bandage, and everyone was already settled when she slipped into a desk near the back.
The man standing at the blackboard wore a gray flannel suit. He had sparse ginger hair and a pointed ginger beard and he wore rimless spectacles.
“Today we are going to study the life cycle of the liver fluke,” he said in a high, slightly squeaky voice. “Look at page seventy-six of your textbook and keep it open.”
Tally fought down a wave of disappointment. The life cycle of the liver fluke might be necessary. It might be important. But it does not make the heart beat faster. The nuns had taught it also.