The Dragonfly Pool by Eva Ibbotson Page B

entrance hall and there, sure enough, was a large mural of some girls coming out of a very blue pool surrounded by flowers.
    â€œThat’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.
    â€œCould 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.
    â€œShe’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.
    â€œShe 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œShe’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