Page 1 of The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge
One
London
June 2010
What a difference a year can make.
Late one Thursday afternoon, Stef Lansdown was taking a shower and didn’t see a sparrow alight on the sill of the open window of her studio flat and peck at some breadcrumbs she’d scattered there. It glanced about, its beady eyes alert. After a moment, it spread its wings and darted inside.
The empty room lay bathed in sunshine, the roar of traffic from the street almost drowned out by a loping hiphop beat shaking the floor. The bird didn’t seem frightened. It circled, perched briefly on a bedside lamp, then flitted back to the sill where it continued its meal.
Stef’s flat was situated on the first floor of a modern block in Balham, South London. Its single room, with galley kitchen and bathroom cubicle, was light and airy but marredby clutter. An unmade double bed dominated the space. Washing was drying on a rack. Newspapers and spiral-bound notebooks lay tumbled across a tiny sofa pushed up against a wall of bookshelves. On a coffee table under the window, a modest clutch of birthday cards shivered in the breeze.
Among the books were piled a dozen copies ofSecrets of an Author’s Wifeby Stephanie Lansdown. An anglepoise lamp stood sentry on a narrow pine desk over an open laptop next to a mobile phone and a mug of cooling tea. A light blue jacket hung on the back of the chair.
Suddenly, the room leapt into life. The rush of water cut out, loudening the throb of the music downstairs.
The startled sparrow flew away.
The shower room door swung open and Stef stepped out through a billowing cloud of vapour like a modern Venus, wrapped in a white towel. A birthday card caught in the draught and sailed to the floor. She picked it up and frowned at its message: ‘Life is short. Smile while you still have teeth. Happy Birthday!’Ha ha. As she returned it to the table, her phone began to ring. She sighed, then answered it.
Stef had embraced turning thirty. On her birthday, her lawyer boyfriend Sam had thrown a party for her at a trendy wine bar near their luxurious flat in Clapham. She had a promising career as a journalist on a national broadsheet newspaper and was about to publish her first book. Personal happiness and success seemed secure and a bright future beckoned.
By the time she was thirty-one, that future had darkened. She and Sam had split up acrimoniously and since it was his flat she’d had to find somewhere else to live. Soon afterwards,her job went in a round of redundancies, and despite a small severance payment and the slightly larger advance she’d been given for her book it was becoming a struggle to pay the bills. She’d picked herself up and was making a new life for herself but she still felt battered and bruised.
‘Mum. Hi.’ Stef tucked the phone between shoulder and ear, gathered the towel more tightly in one hand and continued drying herself with the other while her mother rambled on about Stef’s failure to call and the lack of rain for the garden. She listened with increasing impatience. Her mum had a habit of ringing on a whim and launching into a monologue without asking if it was convenient.
She took advantage of a pause for breath to ask, ‘Was there anything urgent, Mum? Only I’m about to go out.’
‘You should have said. With anyone nice?’ Her mum’s falsely casual tone could not disguise her real meaning:Is there a young man involved?Stef plucked a pair of socks from the airer and decided they were dry. She hated this constant interest in her love life. Her mother seemed more concerned by it than by Stef’s professional difficulties, and last year’s break-up with Sam, engendered by his stubborn refusal to discuss the possibility of ever having children, seemed to have upset her as much as it had Stef.
‘I’m meeting Sarah for a drink. You know, agent Sarah. At six,’ she emphasized, noticing with alarm that her bedside clock said five-thirty.
‘Well, you’d better go.’ Her mother sounded hurt. ‘You know, I was hoping you’d come and stay sometime. It’s months since I’ve seen you.’
‘Oh, Mum, not months. I helped you move in. How many weeks ago was that?’
‘Six weeks. That’s anawfullylong time. I’d come up to see you, but the hotels are so expensive.’
Stef looked round the cramped room and felt guilty. It wasn’t easy to ask her mum to stay here. She was considering what to suggest, when her mother rushed on. ‘Therewasa reason I rang, actually. I’ve found a woman who might interest you.’
‘Awoman?’ Stef smiled. ‘I thought it wasmenyou wanted me to meet.’
‘No, silly, a woman for that book you’re going to write. I met her at an art exhibition in the village. Her name’s – oh, Nancy something. Foster, that’s it. Dr Nancy Foster. She’s a naturist.’
Stef giggled. ‘A nudist? Really? In respectable Hickston?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, darling. She lives in a cottage on the wildlife reserve, she told me. Very remote, but she doesn’t mind that because of the wonderful birds.’
‘You mean she’s anaturalist.’ Stef’s eyes twinkled as she tapped the speaker icon, then laid down her phone while she fastened her bra.
‘Yes, I told you!’ Her mother’s voice sounded squawky in the room. ‘We were both puzzling over a drawing of a badger. Nancy said something about its spine being wrong. Anyway, we got talking. A very interesting person, Stef. She studied Zoology back in the late 1940s, then worked in a lab doing research.’
‘Really?’ Stef stilled briefly before opening a drawer. ‘Thatmust make her, what, in her eighties?’ She straightened, a pair of knickers in her hand, trying to think. Nancy Foster might indeed be worth meeting. The next book Stef was planning to write was about women scientists. A zoologist from that period could be useful.
‘Eighty-something, yes, but you wouldn’t think so to look at her. Very active and such an original dress sense. But listen, this is the important bit. She’s giving a talk about swallowtail butterflies on Saturday evening at the reserve. I wish you’d come, darling. We could go to it together and you could talk to her afterwards.’
‘Mum, I’d love to, honestly, but Saturday’s the day after tomorrow!’ Stef tried to remember what she was doing at the weekend. Nothing exciting. Working on an article for an ecology magazine. She had a deadline early next week.
