Only of course there was. Right at the base of the tussock was a round ball of chopped grass like a tennis ball and inside were three tiny squirming babies as pink and bald as sugar mice. We had to look at them very very quickly so that they wouldn’t get disturbed, but I think I’ll always remember them—they were so small but so alive.
The river is about twenty minutes’ walk from the school, and we have to ask permission to go there without an adult because the current is quite fast in places. It’s a really beautiful river, with banks full of balsam and bluebells everywhere, and there are sandy coves. We went to a place where there is an island which you can reach because a beech tree has fallen across from the bank. When we got to the island we had to lie down in the grass and be absolutely silent, and being absolutely silent didn’t just mean not talking; it meant more than that.
We lay there for a while and nothing happened and then there was a silver flash and a fish jumped out of the water and made a great arc . . . and behind the fish—we could see it quite clearly now—were two otters.
I’ve never seen otters before. They are amazing—so swift and so . . . graceful but funny, too. It was a mother and a nearly full-grown cub and they started rolling over and over in the water, trying to grab the fish, and at first they lost it and there was a lot of splashing, but then they caught it and swam with it to a big flat rock in the water and settled down to their meal.
But it was what came next that I liked so much.
When they’d finished eating the fish they swam back to the shore and started grooming themselves. They licked their fur and they polished their heads on each other and they went on rolling and polishing, till they were quite dry and fluffy, and only then did they dive back into the water and swim away.
We were there a long time because the otters were like people one was visiting and one didn’t want to leave them.
There was more we saw on the way back: a woodpecker, very close to, and a buzzard. It was as though Matteo knew where everything was—he would just go there and wait and there it was—and he said that we had to remember that everywhere was somebody’s home and tread respectfully and reverently.
You might think it wasn’t proper science, it was just a nature walk, but it wasn’t like that. When we got back we wrote down the date and the temperature of the water in the river and the exact location of the field-vole nest and I don’t feel that I will ever forget what I saw. Not ever.
When he had read Tally’s letter through twice and taken it upstairs to the aunts, Dr. Hamilton made his way to the surgery. He walked with a light step, ready for the question his patients always asked about his daughter.
“Tally is well,” he would tell them. “Tally is very well indeed.”
CHAPTER NINE
Trash Cans and a Festival
The term, which had begun slowly, suddenly seemed to gather speed. Armelle stopped asking the children to be forks and told them to become victims of the bubonic plague. Josie sent them out to collect bunches of motherwort, which they had to boil up in a vat.
Clemmy gave an art class in which she told them about a Spanish painter called Goya, who fell ill and became deaf and rather mad and shut himself up in a gloomy house away from everybody and people thought the poor old man was finished—but afterward they found that he had covered all the walls of his house with strange, dark pictures. Then she drew the blinds in the art room and told the children to select their paints without turning on the light, and they grumbled and fussed—and found that they had made paintings in colors they hardly knew existed. The next day she retired to the kitchen and made pancakes for the whole school.
Magda allowed Tally to froth up her cocoa with the whisk sent by the aunts, but she lost page thirty-two of her book on Schopenhauer and became troubled again. As spring turned to early summer and some of the other children began to go barefoot, Verity took to wearing shoes.
And Matteo solved the problem of Borro’s snails in two minutes.
“They’re the wrong kind. Edible snails are Helix pomatia—these are Cepaea hortensis.”
And he suggested that Borro should tip them out and let them go, which Borro did.
Tally’s first tutorial with Matteo took place in his room, which was not in the main building but above the row of workshops behind the gym. It was reached by an outside staircase and had the look of a mountain hut: very plain, with wooden walls, a scrubbed table, a narrow bed, and a case full of books in various languages. The sackbut lay on a chair; it looked like a battered trombone and far too harmless to make such a howling and melancholy sound.
“Come and sit down,” he said.
He had come straight from taking a fencing class; his foils and mask were propped up in a corner and Tally looked at them wistfully.
“Could anyone take fencing?” she asked. “Could I?”
“Next year would be better,” said Matteo. “You’re still rather young.”
Tally nodded, accepting this. “I really liked your biology lesson. I liked it so much. I always thought science would be different—sort of cold and impersonal—but it isn’t, is it? It’s all part of the same thing. My father tried to make me see that, but I didn’t listen properly.”
“Listening is one of the most difficult things.”
He talked to her for a while about the river and what else might be seen in it later that year. Then he said, “But what about you personally? Your problems.” He smiled. “Tutors are for problems, you know.”
“Yes. Well, I do have problems. There’s Magda, you see. I found her crying on the first day about Germany and Heribert and I can’t do anything about that, but now she’s worrying again and it’s about the blackout curtains and Magda can’t sew. Of course, there may not be a war, but if there is we’re going to need an awful lot of them. So I think we should find some way of helping her so that she can get on with her book and stop the pages flying about so much, but I haven’t been here very long and I’m not sure how to do it. Could it be part of the domestic work we do before school?”
“I don’t see why not. That would be a way of doing it which would not upset her, and I’m sure you could manage it.”
“And there’s Kit,” Tally went on. “Of course, he can be very annoying, but he does so very much want to play cricket. I don’t know anything about it—we didn’t play it at my convent—but I thought . . . there’s the high school at St. Agnes and they do play cricket—I asked Daisy who I do housework with, and she says they do; her brother goes there. So couldn’t Kit go there one afternoon a week, maybe?”
“One could certainly ask,” said Matteo. “It seems a perfectly sensible suggestion to me. Any other problems?”
“Well, there’s Verity’s snake. It looks really ill and I can’t say anything because—”
Matteo’s face darkened. “You can forget the snake. It’s being collected this afternoon and returned to the shop.”
“Oh, good.”
Matteo waited. “Anything else?” he asked, for he had the feeling that Tally’s biggest worry was still to come.
“Well, yes. It’s about Julia. When I got on the train to come here I was so homesick you can’t imagine—I just wanted to cry and cry—but Julia was so welcoming and so kind, and I like her so much, but I could see she was worried about something. It was as though she had a great weight on her mind, and she was so odd sometimes—Barney says she’s a marvelous actress, but whenever O’Hanrahan tries to get her to do anything she just curls up . . . and no one could be kinder than him. And then last week she asked me to go to the cinema with her and it was Gloria Grantley, and Julia broke down completely and told me she was her mother. I promised not to tell the others, and of course I haven’t, but really I can’t bear it.”
“What is it that you can’t bear?”
“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.
The first item did not take long. The waste ground behind the gym had been dug up and plant covers were going to be put down for vegetables. Children could submit a list to Clemmy of plants they would like to see growing, and she would discuss it with the gardeners.
“Why is that with the vegetables we will win the war?” asked the small French girl with the large white rabbit, and Daley explained that by growing vegetables instead of importing them, Great Britain would save space on ships, which could bring over ammunition and armaments instead.
Then came cricket, which Tally had put on the agenda, and now she stepped forward and launched bravely into her speech.
“I know we don’t play team games at Delderton, but there are people here—well, there’s Kit, and there may be others—who would like to play cricket. And I thought . . . there’s the high school in St. Agnes, and they do play cricket. So might Kit go there one afternoon a week, maybe? Could one ask?”
“Who would do the asking?” said Daley. The headmaster of St. Agnes did not approve of Delderton.
“Well, Kit could . . .” and as the little boy squeaked agitatedly, “and I could go with him. If you’d give me a letter?”
No one saw anything wrong with this, and the visit of the Spanish schoolchildren to give a concert came next. Everyone wanted to hear the children sing; they had been made homeless when their country was split by civil war and they were going to spend the night camping on the playing field.
“Couldn’t they stay longer?” suggested Tally. “One day isn’t very long. Maybe we could have one child each in our rooms.”
Everyone agreed with this, and Daley said he would suggest it to the person who was in charge of the Spanish children, but Tally realized that she must now be quiet and not have any more ideas, so she put a peppermint in her mouth, the kind with a hole in it, and put her tongue through it so as to stop herself from speaking.
Daley now read out the complaint from the manager of Great Western Railway, who said that passengers on the 11:15 from Paddington had been shocked to see Delderton pupils bathing in the river with nothing on when they went past. This happened every year, like hearing the first cuckoo in spring, and the older children sighed.
“That’s just silly,” said Ronald Peabody, the boy who had broken the topmost branch of the cedar tree. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of in the human body.” And he flexed his skinny biceps as though he was a weightlifter.
“Perhaps not,” said O’Hanrahan in his quiet voice. “But it seems a good idea to live in harmony with our neighbors.”
“Well, I think we’re being bullied. It’s like the trash cans,” said Ronald—and the children were off!
The trash cans at Delderton had large metal lids which made excellent shields, and the kitchen staff had taken to locking them up in a compound so that the children couldn’t get at them.
“Locking things up isn’t in the Delderton tradition,” said a boy with large spectacles. “We’re supposed to be a free school.”
“Freedom doesn’t mean causing distress and inconvenience to others,” said Magda, and told them what Schopenhauer had said about this, which was a lot.
Arguments about the tr
ash cans took nearly a quarter of an hour and after that Verity said she had thought they were going to discuss the free period on Wednesday afternoons. She had tried to bring it up last time and Daley had promised to put it on the agenda, she said, and why wasn’t it there? They had a free period in her cousin’s school, and Wednesday was early-closing day in the village, so they had a right to have one here. A proper one, not the kind you got by cutting classes.
After this came “Domestic Work,” which seemed to be getting on all right on the whole, and Daley then decided to bring the meeting to an end with something that would unite everybody because it was so obvious that it couldn’t be done. He picked up the letter about the Folk Dance Festival.
“I have had a request from the Ministry of Culture. It’s rather a strange request and I shall of course turn it down, but I thought you might like to know that we have been invited.”
And he read out the letter from the ministry in London, which ran as follows:
Dear Mr. Daley:
As your school is well known for its enterprise and initiative I am writing to ask whether you would consider sending a group of children to a Folk Dance Festival to be held in Bergania in the second week of June.
The Berganian authorities are very anxious to make stronger links with other European democracies and to foster friendship between the children of different nations as one of the most effective ways of securing world peace.
Quite a small group would suffice, and we would offer you assistance in the matters of group passports, visas, and travel assistance generally.