Page 2 of The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge
‘You need a rest, love.’ Her mother’s tone was wheedling. ‘Given all you’ve gone through. You shouldn’t work all the time.’
‘I have to, Mum. That’s the freelance life.’ She paused. ‘Look, I’ll think about it, I promise, but I really have to go now. Love you.’
After they’d said goodbye, Stef pulled on some cleanish jeans, grabbed her jacket from the chair, then rummaged in the cupboard for shoes. All the time she was thinking about her mother with the usual mixture of fondness, guilt and irritation. It was true that she’d not been to visit her since helping her move into her country cottage, but it was typical of her mum to imagine that Stef could drop everything and race over at a moment’s notice. Or was it Stef who was beingselfish? Mum was living on her own in an unfamiliar village, and although Stef’s sister Pippa lived nearby she ought to go and see for herself how Mum was getting on. Back and forth her mind darted.
She went to the bathroom mirror to put on the silver pendant and matching earrings that Pippa had given her for her thirtieth, and her attention moved to the evening ahead. Her literary agent wanted an update on Stef’s next book.
Sarah was always so glamorous, Stef thought, as she frowned at the reflection of her round face in the mirror, still pink from the shower. She wished she’d washed her thick, shoulder-length blonde hair after her run, for it had developed a life of its own. Too late now. A few strokes of the hairbrush, a touch of concealer, a slick of lip gloss and she’d have to do.
She searched for her bag, eventually locating it under the duvet, then scooped up her phone from the desk and her door keys from beneath a scrumpled tax demand. There were few advantages to a studio flat, but one was that things in it couldn’t get lost for long. The flat was rented from Jasmin, an ex-colleague who’d moved in with her new partner at the same time that Stef had moved out of Sam’s place. Jasmin sensibly hadn’t wanted to sell the flat in case her relationship didn’t work out. Stef hadn’t had that luxury. Now that she was single again and freelance, buying her own place looked impossible. She kept a car, despite the expense, as it gave her a sense of freedom, however illusory.
As she waited on the busy platform for a train to take her into Central London, her mother’s suggestion preyed on hermind. She could, she supposed, do the four-hour drive to North Norfolk on Saturday and stay for a couple of nights. As long as her mother understood she had to work. On Stef’s last visit, everything had been a mess. Stef’s parents were long divorced and her father had finally forced the sale of the family home. Despite a huge clear-out, Stef’s mum still had too much stuff. Since then, however, she had told Stef at least twice that she’d got rid of a lot more and the spare bedrooms were now ready for guests.
She hardly registered the train arriving and the carriage doors opening, for she was remembering the chaos of her mother’s move. A particular memory, unbidden, made her shudder with embarrassment. She sank onto a free seat, replaying it in her mind.
It had been a stressful morning. The vendors had been late dropping off the keys at the estate agents, and Pippa rang to say she was unable to help after all because her kids had temperatures. Stef and their mother had reached Springfield Cottage to find to their dismay that several cars were parked outside and there would be no space for the furniture van to unload. Her mother knocked on the door of the house opposite and learned that the vehicles belonged to a visiting film unit who were using a characterful Georgian house nearby as a set. Stef was dispatched to seek them out and found only a grumpy girl sitting on the wall outside the house. She was the unit’s runner, she said, and had been left to guard the equipment. Aaron, who was in charge, had taken everyone else to the Ilex Tree for a sandwich.
Seeing the furniture van roar past on its way to SpringfieldCottage, Stef shouted her thanks and rushed off to the village’s only pub. She arrived out of breath and thoroughly out of temper.
Still, the ensuing confrontation needn’t have happened in the way that it did, she reflected as the tube train stopped briefly between stations, and she wasn’t proud of herself. She squeezed her eyes shut in embarrassment.
She’d found four young men seated at a wooden table in the pub’s window, with glasses of beer and plates of sandwiches before them.
‘Are you lot blocking my mum’s cottage?’ Self-conscious under their gaze, Stef’s voice came out more sharply than she’d intended.
‘Possibly.’ The dark-haired man, presumably Aaron, for he appeared to be in charge, regarded her with a wary expression. ‘We’re sorry if it is us. Where is your mum’s cottage?’
‘Down there.’ She waved in the general direction. ‘Past the village shop, then it’s one of the red-brick ones on the right with the “Sold” sign outside. There’s a bloody great furniture lorry waiting to park, so can you move your cars, like, now?’
She and Aaron locked eyes and his flashed with annoyance. ‘If you ask nicely,’ he said, ‘then I’m sure we will.’
‘Just get on and move them,’ she said; then, her courage running out, ‘Please.’
‘All right.’ He pulled a key from his pocket. ‘George? Sajit? We’d better do as theladysays right away.’
Stef followed their striding figures up the street and stood wanly aside as they manoeuvred their cars past the waiting furniture van. George and Sajit smiled at her as they left, butAaron’s expression was furious and he drove so close she had to jump back. She swore and raised a finger as his car passed.
She recalled his angry face now as the tube train roared through the tunnels. The clean lines of his profile, his narrow face with its cropped beard, the springiness of his dark hair. And felt her face grow hot with shame at her behaviour.
When the signs for Embankment came into view, she was glad to disembark and shake off the memory.
Two
Delizioso, where Stef was meeting her agent, turned out to be a stylish Italian bistro with a scarlet, green and white striped canopy. Sarah, striking in an emerald shirt-dress that set off her cropped auburn hair, green eyes and pale skin, was already seated at a table outside. She was frowning as she tapped at her phone with quick fingers, but when she spotted Stef she laid it aside and rose with a welcoming smile. Of a similar age to Stef, agenting was a recent change for Sarah after years as an editor in a publishing house. They were both establishing new careers and, although Stef was in awe of Sarah, who could be fierce when roused, it felt like a close partnership.
A waiter brought them misted flutes of fizzing prosecco. Sipping the chilled bubbles gave Stef a thrill of pleasure and she felt herself finally relax.
Stef’s first book was a biography of the wife of a mid-twentieth-century English novelist, whom she hadstudied at university. From a newly discovered collection of letters, she revealed that the woman had been more than a helpmeet to her famous husband; indeed she was more a collaborator on some of his best-known work. Rumours of this had been circulating for years since their deaths, but Stef had been surprised by the storm of controversy that her book stirred up, relatives and friends of the couple lining up on one side or the other. That had mostly quietened down now, the paperback was shortly to be published and Stef’s editor Catherine was pressing for something new.
It hadn’t taken Stef long to find a subject that interested her. A London university conference in January, shortly before she was made redundant from theGlobe, had given her the idea. Stef had been sent to report on the conference instead of the newspaper’s science correspondent. A middle-aged male, set in his ways, he had joked that he would surely be ‘eaten alive’ if he went.
Stef had been surprised by what she’d heard in the sessions and chatting to delegates in between. She hadn’t appreciated the myriad small ways in which the lives of female scientists continued, even now, to be harder than men’s. Overt discrimination wasn’t always the greatest problem – progress had been made. It was the sheer number of persistent microaggressions that wore down female geneticists, engineers, zoologists and astrophysicists across the world. Stef’s article impressed theGlobe’s editor so much that he published it as news in the paper’s opening pages and commissioned a noted female scientist to write an editorial piece about it, underlining its importance.‘The days might be over when Lise Meitnerwas passed over for a Nobel Prize in favour of her male co-physicist,’this woman thundered,‘and biochemist Rosalind Franklin’s discoveries about the structure of DNA were sidelined by caballing male colleagues, but humanity is losing out on cutting-edge discoveries because scientific research is still a man’s world.’Women who originated groundbreaking projects were still being hampered by matters such as smaller research budgets, less laboratory space and the continuing power of male networks.
Stef’s report and the related editorial attracted a great deal of interest. Letters on the subject appeared in the paper for several days. She was interviewed on a BBC news programme and a shadow higher education spokeswoman asked a question about it in Parliament. And then it all died down. The issue continued to haunt Stef. She’d been interested in science herself at school in the 1990s, but remembered picking up on a subconscious message that ‘hard’ sciences like physics or chemistry ‘weren’t for girls’. Where this had come from she wasn’t sure, but it was certainly linked to another circulating assumption, that ‘girls weren’t good at maths’. Both of these, Stef knew, were myths, yet they persisted. And when disaster struck several months ago and she became one of the casualties in the round of editorial redundancies, Sarah encouraged her to research a serious book about the topic.
‘I’m still proposing to structure the book as a series of linked biographies,’ Stef said as they sipped their prosecco. ‘There’ll be plenty of reflective commentary, but the idea is that the powerful individual experiences will create a strong overall pattern.’
‘I agree. Especially if you have a good range of specialisms.Your editor is expecting to see one or two big names – it’ll help sales.’
