Page 66 of The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge
All too soon, they said their goodbyes to Paris and headed south-east. The car wound its way through lush farmland, past fields of cows, then sunny vineyards. They stopped for meals in little villages, where they sat outside homely restaurants on squares with pollarded trees for shade, and stayed a night in a lonely wayside hotel. Soon after breakfast thenext morning the road began to climb through hill country towards snow-capped mountains wreathed with cloud. The air turned cool.
‘Switzerland,’she wrote to her parents,‘is the most delightful place I’ve ever visited.’
The air is so pure and the animals are beautiful. Frank’s cousin Hans has a pair of white-haired goats. The cows wear bells to stop them getting lost, and you can hear these in the distance from the other side of the valley. And the alpine flowers in the high pasture are so pretty and merry. It’s just like inHeidi– do you remember the pictures in my copy? And our wooden chalet is just like in the book. Hans’ wife Elsa hangs baskets of flowers from the eaves. There’s even a cuckoo clock!
The weather was clear and sunny, but cool enough for walking, and they were out hiking every day, taking sandwiches with them and flasks of tea. They were there for a fortnight and when it was time to go home Nancy didn’t want to leave.‘I feel like I shall be leaving a part of myself in the mountains,’she wrote on a postcard to Peggy.
She returned home to be told that her sister, now eight months pregnant, was struggling to cope and reluctantly agreed to go and stay with her for the remaining week of her holiday. It was hard trying to amuse a one-year-old who was only interested in gaining his mother’s attention, and the twin tub became her personal enemy. She flooded the kitchen twice. The return to Brandingfieldand a fresh tank of locusts couldn’t come quickly enough in her opinion.
When Nancy entered her lab, expecting all to be as she had left it, she stopped dead in the doorway with surprise. A leather briefcase and a sandwich tin lay on a previously unoccupied worktop, then her gaze was drawn to a black coat slung carelessly over the armed chair under the window. With a prickling feeling, she recognized that coat. It belonged to James.
At the sound of slow footsteps in the corridor, she snapped round to see him enter.
‘Hello!’ His lopsided smile was as arrogant as ever, as was his air of self-possession, but a walking stick was hooked over one arm and his gait was stiff as he crossed the room, the coffee he carried slopping into the saucer.
‘What on earth…?’ She stared at him, lost for words. There were other differences. His dark hair was cropped above his ears and his face looked even paler than usual, his eyes larger, with bruises under them. She found her voice. ‘Why are you here? Don’t tell me they threw you out for bad behaviour.’
He leaned his stick against the worktop, then stirred his coffee, took a sip and nodded with satisfaction. ‘Not bad after the stuff in the mess. Honourable discharge is the correct phrase.’ He grinned and rubbed his right leg. ‘That’s the end of my military career. I fouled up my cruciate ligaments on a training exercise. Jolly painful, but it got me a free ticket out.’
Her eyes widened in sympathy, then narrowed with puzzlement. ‘You didn’t say in your last letter, but that was ages ago. When did you do it?’
‘Three weeks back. I’ve been in hospital for most of that. Doped up after the op.’
‘And they just let you go?’
‘Nothing else for it. I’m supposed to be convalescing at home, but two days of my mother fussing about and I thought I’d come up here. Briggs is handling my application. Shouldn’t be any trouble, he said.’
‘Professor Briggs? I thought he was in South America somewhere.’
‘Did you? Well, he’s back now. He was here last week, in fact, but you were away.’
‘Was he? Someone might have let me know and I’d have come in,’ she muttered with a rush of annoyance. ‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with him for months.’
‘So I’m to join you in here,’ he said with a satisfied smile.
His stick fell. Nancy picked it up from the floor, then hung his coat up next to hers behind the door.
‘Thanks.’
‘What was it like, National Service?’ she asked, genuinely curious. ‘I loved your letters, but I couldn’t tell just how awful it was. Was it awful?’
He shook his head, drank his coffee down quickly and said, ‘Boring, mostly. If you’d been to boarding school, you’d feel quite at home.’
‘But you didn’t go to boarding school.’
‘No.’ He set down his cup and saucer and his eye wandered to the assortment of equipment at her corner of the room. She saw it through his eyes: the empty tank, soon to be home to the next consignment of insects, the odd-looking bitsof kit, the books and ring-binder files stacked on the shelves, flyers and photographs pinned to a cork noticeboard.
‘What’s that?’ He shuffled over to the worktop and reached up for the little carving she kept on a shelf.
‘What do you think it is? A dragonfly, silly. Edmund made it for me once!’
‘It’s not bad,’ he said, squinting at it.
She took it from him and set it back in its place, but his curiosity wasn’t satisfied.
‘May I?’ He took down one of the files without waiting for an answer, flicked through its contents briefly and muttered, ‘Interesting,’ before he put it back.
She was gripped by a sense of helplessness, wondering how she would work with him in the room, given his power both to beguile and annoy her, but if he noticed his effect on her he didn’t show it. Instead, he settled himself on the chair under the window. ‘Fill me in. What’s been going on and what’s everyone up to?’
