Page 15 of The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge
A box was revealed with a picture on it. ‘A puzzle, I bet it’s a puzzle,’ Roger drawled.
Nancy read the words above the coloured drawing: ‘A Magic Chemistry Set!’ she gasped with delight. She swept the paper aside and lifted the lid off the box. ‘Oh!’ She ran her fingers over two neat rows of cardboard tubs inside. Glass phials and tubes clinked in their compartments when she touched them.
‘Isn’t it for boys?’ Helen asked, uncertain.
Roger snatched up the lid, studied the picture on it and laughed. ‘Of course it is. Look.’
Nancy studied the picture and her lower lip wobbled. Itfeatured a father and a son sitting together at a table, setting up an experiment. Floating in the background was a roundel containing the disembodied face of a sinister-looking man with a pointed black beard. ‘He’s a scientist,’ Roger said, pointing. ‘Only men are scientists.’
‘Don’t take any notice of the wretched boy,’ Rhoda said gravely. ‘Though you might need him to help you set up.’
‘Say thank you to your aunt,’ Nancy’s mother said. ‘It’s very generous of her, I’m sure.’
‘Very generous,’ her father echoed. ‘But not to be used without proper supervision. I don’t want you setting fire to the house.’
Nancy stood up, cradling the box, and fixed her aunt with a steady gaze. ‘I don’t care what Roger thinks and I don’t need his help. It’s my best present. Thank you, Auntie Rhoda.’
A dark shadow flickered across the kitchen table where the elderly Nancy sat over her lunch, pulling her out of her reverie. She glanced up. A bird, perhaps, flying across the window. It had gone. She took another bite of soft bread roll, her mind still caught in the past. That chemistry set. She smiled. She’d taken such care of it. Her mother wouldn’t have anything to do with it, even though her father had pointed out to his wife that she was using chemistry every time she cooked something. ‘That’s different,’ her mother had snapped. ‘Food is food. And it doesn’t have difficult names.’
‘Bicarbonate of soda?’ Mr Foster had said. ‘And what about cleaning fluids – ammonia? Bromide. That’s all chemistry.’
‘But it wasn’t how we were taught at school, Arthur. We didn’t have chemistry, it was domestic science. And Nancy would be better off learning how to cook and clean than messing about with these dangerous things. Then she could make herself useful like Helen.’
‘Helen is Helen and Nancy is Nancy,’ was her father’s gnomic response, but Nancy knew what he meant and loved him for it.
Her father had always spoken up for her. Her heart still ached at the memory of him, dead and gone when she was only twenty-nine. Her mother had not understood her, had been bemused by her. It was Rhoda, her father’s glamorous elder sister, fabric designer and businesswoman, who had paid for her from the age of eight to attend a reputable girls’ day school in North London, near where they lived. A school whose mission was to offer girls a proper academic education. Mr Foster worked for the Home Office. As a child, Nancy hadn’t known what he did exactly and wasn’t much interested. He left home at eight o’clock sharp every morning in a dark suit and a bowler hat, then reappeared in time for tea at six with the evening paper and a harassed expression.
Nancy smiled at these memories as she carried her plate to the sink. She stood for a while, leaning against it, lost in thought. Those were times of such happiness. She’d felt loved and secure with her family in that comfortable suburban house. There must have been snowy winters, but in her mind it was usually summer and she was in the garden. They’d used the straight lines mown by her father for races. The border beds, colourful with roses and dahlias, had beenout of bounds to balls, but the old apple tree with the tree house was theirs, as was the field beyond the garden gate. It had been idyllic, a paradise. But in this Eden there lurked a serpent. Three doors down from Nancy’s family lived the Hunters, whose two sons were older than the Foster children. The parents were friendly with Nancy’s parents but not close. Mrs Foster played bridge occasionally with Mrs Hunter. Nancy’s father and Mr Hunter were both members of the local Conservatives. For two consecutive Christmases before the war, the Fosters invited the Hunter family over for lunchtime drinks. The Foster children had felt too shy to address the boys, Brian and Lawrence, lanky lummoxes who wolfed all the sausage rolls, then hung about whispering together and obviously wanting to go home. Nancy was fascinated by Brian’s huge feet that he’d clearly inherited from his father but had not yet learned to manage. He was always treading on people’s toes.
By 1941, when Nancy was twelve, much had changed. A stray bomb the previous November had put out everyone’s front windows and left a crater in the street, now filled with rubble from the remains of a house further down. An Anderson shelter dominated the Fosters’ back lawn and the flower borders had been planted with potatoes and carrots. One of Nancy’s jobs was to feed the chickens in their run at the bottom of the garden, where she was overlooked by a silver barrage balloon bobbing above the field like an alien craft. It was out on the field that she liked to escape with a book when it was sunny in the hope that no one would bother her.
Sadly, one day, someone did.
It was the pair of large male feet she saw first, quite close, too close. She was sitting cross-legged in the long grass at the edge of the field, readingThe Thirty-Nine Steps, which she’d borrowed from the library. She’d been so caught up in the story that she hadn’t heard him approach. Her first thought was that it was Brian and she was surprised because the elder Hunter boy, at nineteen, was away somewhere with his unit, fighting the Germans.
‘Hello, Nancy.’ At the teasing deep voice, her gaze travelled upwards. A pair of pale cotton twill trousers – why was the belt undone? Now he squatted down and she found herself looking into Mr Hunter’s smiling face. Despite his affable expression, she felt a deep, incomprehensible sense of unease. ‘All alone?’ She nodded dumbly and pressed her open book to her stomach, wanting to edge away, but not daring to in case he complained that she was being rude. He was an adult and she’d been brought up to be polite to adults, especially when they were friends of your parents.
‘You were reading. Let me see.’ He reached out his hand and when it brushed hers she felt her skin crawl with disgust. She loosened her grip on the book and allowed him to take it from her.
‘Ah, an old favourite,’ he said and sat down to study it. He had surprisingly long lashes for a man, but when he stroked his chin it made a bristly sound. He looked up. ‘A funny choice for a girl.’
‘It is quite an exciting story,’ she managed to say. She hated that his eyes were on her bare legs and instinctively pulledher skirt down. She felt self-conscious these days, aware with dismay of her body changing and having no control of it. It had already happened to her sister Helen, but no one said anything about that in Nancy’s hearing, not even their mother. Helen had her own bedroom now and wouldn’t let Nancy into it. Though Nancy crept in from time to time when Helen was out and marvelled at its tidiness, a sewing pattern open on the desk next to a half-written letter to her American penfriend the only items out of place, a magazine photograph of Jimmy Stewart pinned to the wall next to her childhood picture of a golden-haired Jesus. In the top drawer of the chest she found a box of Kotex napkins. She’d already suspected that Helen had ‘started’.
‘I’m glad I found you here,’ Mr Hunter said, closing the book and returning it to her. He took off his hat and began to fan himself. ‘Rather warm, don’t you think? No, don’t go, you little minx.’ His hand gripped her knee so tightly it hurt and she froze. Then, with his eyes on hers and a cruel smile twisting his lips, he allowed his other hand to slide under her skirt and feel its way upwards. She gasped in shock.
‘Does it tickle?’ he murmured and edged closer.
‘Don’t,’ she almost sobbed, trying to inch away, but the hand on her knee was clamped too firmly. Then he was pushing her backwards, pinning her shoulders to the ground and fumbling with his trousers.
A movement beside her, then a dog’s cold nose brushed her cheek, its breath warm in her ear. Mr Hunter cursed and Nancy felt the weight of him lift. ‘Get off!’ He pushed the dog away and it growled. She rolled aside and sat up. He flailedat the animal, then stood up, reached for his hat and hurried away down the row of gardens to his own. She watched him go, shaking with dry sobs. The dog, a neighbour’s collie she recognized, sank down in the grass a few yards off, panting. Then, at the sound of a distant whistle and a boy’s call, it cocked its ears, leapt up and tore away across the field. She clambered to her feet, her knee throbbing where Mr Hunter had hurt it, grabbed the book and stumbled back through the garden gate.
The French doors stood open before her and as she approached the house she could hear high-pitched female tones from within. Mrs Hunter’s. She paused and listened. She was saying something about her husband having a day’s holiday and that she’d sent him out to dig a vegetable plot in the field.
Nancy could not face her. Instead, she turned and ducked back to the apple tree and managed to climb up to the plywood house. There she lay curled up, crying softly. She only emerged once she was sure her mother’s visitor had gone.
She never told anybody about what had happened. After all, she reasoned, nothing had, not really. But for a long time she dared not go out in the field alone. Her perfect place had been ruined.
Nine
