Page 94 of The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge
Stef looked round with interest. The room reminded her very much of Nancy’s sitting room at Dragonfly Lodge. It wasn’t the room itself, which was much larger than Nancy’s, with high ceilings and long windows looking out onto the street, but the contents of it. The walls of books were similar, as was the desk with a microscope on it next to boxes of glass slides and haphazard piles of papers. A fire had been lit in the grate against the chill of the morning, and next to the mirror above the mantelpiece hung the shell of a giant horseshoe crab. One of the pair of fireside chairs had recently been occupied, for a foldedNew York Timeshad been left on the table next to it and a pair of spectacles lay on top.
She turned at the sound of the door opening. The elderly man framed by the doorway was tweedy in dress, with ruined good looks. His tall, lean figure was a little stooped, but Professor James West possessed the air of someone effortlessly important. ‘Miss Lansdown,’ he pronounced in clipped English tones, ‘you’re early.’
She wasn’t, but decided not to argue the point. ‘I thought I’d have more trouble than I did finding the house. It’s kind of you to see me, Professor.’
‘Not at all. I like to have visitors. Don’t get many these days.’ He came forward to greet her, his dark, hooded eyes glaring at her intensely out of his lined, cleanshaven face as he shook her hand. His iron-grey hair was neatly trimmed and combed back and he smelled pleasantly of something citrusy.
‘Cynthia’s bringing us coffee,’ he said. ‘She’s marvellous. Does everything for me. Let’s sit down, shall we?’
So this was Nancy’s James West, Stef mused as she watched him settle himself. She’d Googled him thoroughly in preparation for this interview, but even the photographs hadn’t prepared her for the discovery that he had been a very attractive man – was still attractive, if she was honest. He seemed engagingly unaware of the effect he had on people. No wonder Nancy had fallen for him.
They were chatting about Stef’s journey by the time Cynthia arrived with a tinkling tray and set about pouring coffee from a silver pot into fragile porcelain cups. There were tea plates, too, with napkins, and a dish of homemade cookies. Professor West had done very well for himself, but then Stef had expected this. You didn’t get to be the Head of Entomology at a prestigious Ivy League university and win so many prizes without becoming quite well-to-do. He’d married and had a family, she’d discovered from the internet, but his French wife, Sylvie, had died ten years ago and his two boys were grown and gone. It must be lonely rattling about in this big house, and he would be glad of the cheerful Cynthia’s company.
Stef sipped her coffee, nibbled at a cookie and waited until Cynthia had left before she reached into her tote bag for her tape recorder. Once the door had closed, she switched it on with his grudging permission and started confidently taking charge of the interview.
‘Professor, as I explained in my letter, I have questions only you can answer about Nancy Foster.’
‘Dear Nancy,’ he murmured, then shot her a genial look. ‘I think of her sometimes. How is she?’
‘She’s very well,’ Stef replied cautiously, suspicious of his charm. ‘Well, actually, she went through a bit of an ordeal recently.’ She described the flood and its aftermath, and West looked suitably concerned. ‘But she’s now living in the village not far from the Broad.’
Dragonfly Lodge had swiftly been declared uninhabitable by the landlord and those of Nancy’s belongings that survived the flood, including most of her books, had been dried out professionally and placed in storage. Then Stef’s mother learned that a small bungalow was coming up for rent on a leafy lane leading out of the village. Aaron had acted quickly and Nancy had moved in a couple of weeks afterwards. Stef had gone down to help. It was an attractive little house, with rooms that received plenty of daylight. There was a stubby front garden full of flowers and a sunny terrace at the back.
There was something less pleasant that she didn’t tell James. Soon after the flood, Aaron had reported Stef’s suspicions about Jackie, and a policewoman had gone to interview her in the back room at the visitors’ centre. Jackie was flustered and broke down in tears. She was indeed responsible for the threatening letters and had a pitiable story to tell. Her husband, it appeared, was Nancy’s landlord’s brother, who, having a financial share in the property, had taken it upon himself, without the landlord’s knowledge, to try to remove Nancy. He was either hoping that his brother would do the place up and let it more profitably to holidaymakers, or that he would agree to sell it. He was, it appeared, an overbearingsort of man and Jackie had reluctantly agreed to type up the letters and deliver them.
She had also, at his suggestion, stolen Tabitha, but had felt wretched about it and returned her. The police reported all this to Nancy and Aaron, but Nancy had felt so sorry for Jackie that she asked them not to prosecute. Aaron felt less sympathetic, but didn’t try to argue with his grandmother, who would find any conflict stressful. Jackie resigned as a volunteer and Jackie’s husband was incurring some of the expense of renovating Dragonfly Lodge, so a sort of justice was working itself out. Nancy was simply glad that the problem had gone away. She missed Dragonfly Lodge, but loved her new bungalow.
‘I’m glad to hear that she’s living somewhere more comfortable.’ James cleared his throat and changed tack. ‘As you know, it was a bit of a surprise to receive your letter and I admit that my initial response may not have been gracious.’
‘I think I can agree with that.’ It had, in fact, bordered on the rude.
‘But then I read the typed article you sent me.’
‘It wasn’t an article. It was the chapter about Nancy for my book on women scientists.’
‘Yes, of course. Women scientists indeed!’ he said as though such a thing was exotic. ‘And I saw that perhaps I needed to speak to you, after all, to put you straight on one or two matters.’
Stef had been, as she’d promised Nancy and Aaron, very circumspect in her writing about James’ involvement in the events that ended Nancy’s research career. She hadn’tactually accused James of colluding with Dr Staunton in the suppression of Nancy’s research, or of lying to Nancy about what he’d done – after all, there was no definitive proof. But she had stated that James had put Nancy under considerable pressure to prioritize his career at the expense of hers, and to accompany him to the States in the role of supportive wife – and had spelled out various ways in which he had acted nefariously. In doing so, she had deliberately taken a risk. No doubt her publisher would insist on cutting out some of these implications for fear of being sued for libel, but the draft had enabled her to achieve her aim with West. He’d finally granted her this interview.
And she’d come fully armed.
The last three months had been some of the busiest of her career. The week after her return to London, Sarah, her agent, had telephoned in high excitement to report that Catherine had offered a large advance to publish Stef’s book. Shortly afterwards, her American publisher had done likewise. Once the contracts were signed and the first tranches of the advances paid, Stef’s financial problems were over for the time being. For a whole week, when she woke up in her London flat she reminded herself of this fact and felt a rush of relief. This would be followed by a moment of panic, though, and she’d jump out of bed, ready to do a hard day’s work. The research stage was the thing she loved best, conducting interviews and transcribing them afterwards, visiting libraries and archives and surfing the internet for new lines of enquiry.
Stef had collected the stories of a range of women scientists from the previous hundred years. There were famous namesfrom the past, such as Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin and biochemist Chi Che Wang. Contemporary examples included the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield. But it was critical to her vision of the book to include half a dozen women that no one had heard of, some because their men had taken the credit or their careers had been held back. Nancy Foster was a prime example of one of these.
The chapter about her was the first that Stef drafted, even though it was to be placed halfway through the book. It was the one she felt most personally committed to and she wanted to do her best for Nancy. Catherine, her editor, had also made clear that while all Stef’s subjects would offer important revelations, Nancy’s was possibly the most poignant. The actual suppression of a woman’s scientific research was an invidious injustice only trumped, in Catherine’s view, by the experience of Rosalind Franklin in the early 1950s. Franklin’s X-ray photographs of DNA, the result of long hours of skilled and careful work, had been borrowed without her permission and employed without sufficient acknowledgement by a trio of men who, after her early death, went on to win the Nobel Prize for determining the structure of DNA. Not only had their findings depended on her work, but one of the men, James Watson, subsequently published a bestselling book that boasted of his success and disparaged Franklin and her work.
One by one, Stef went through her questions, testing West’s memories of every aspect of the traumatic episode that, ended Nancy’s career as a researcher. His weakness, she quickly discovered, was that he responded well to being buttered up.She asked about his own meticulous work with grasshoppers, the impressive doctoral thesis that had underpinned his subsequent move to Boston.
‘Nancy remembers the brilliance of your work,’ she said, ‘how privileged she felt when you explained it to her. It must have been amazing, the two of you working in the same lab at that time on your individual projects.’ She could see him puffing up his chest at the compliments. ‘And I believe Nancy was very helpful to you.’
‘She was indeed a marvellous sounding board for my ideas and made one or two very pertinent suggestions.’ While he was too cunning to admit the full extent of Nancy’s support and advice, he was generous enough in his replies. After all, given the great heights he’d reached in his career, what had he to lose?
He corroborated Nancy’s memories of being bullied in the ICP lab, had himself heard her colleagues’ derogatory comments about her in the chauvinist atmosphere of the scientists’ common room: that she was ‘stuck up’, ‘too brisk and mannish’.
‘And what did you do when you heard these insults?’ Stef murmured and watched his gaze slide away.
‘These men were confounded cads and naturally I… I asked them to pipe down.’
