Page 36 of The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge
‘If you weren’t such a—’ Nancy started, then sat back in her seat with a sigh.
She noticed how he treated Anne Durban differently, with gentle courtesy, but then Anne never got hot under the collar like Nancy. Instead, she merely stated her own opinions and listened to James or whoever express theirs before saying, ‘Well, I might not be right, but that’s what I think, anyway,’ and moving on to talk of something else. Nancy couldn’t stand by like that if she disagreed about an issue. She wanted to get to the truth. She knew that this was what made a good scientist, a refusal to let things go. And frankly she enjoyed a spirited argument. It made her feel alive.
James had once told her that she argued ‘like a man’ and said he intended it as a compliment, but it bothered her. Did Anne Durban argue ‘like a woman’, then? Would Nancy have to be ‘like a man’ in order to get on?I’m just being myself,she decided in the end,and so is Anne being herself,and she stopped worrying.
James irritated and fascinated her in equal measure. She resented how aware she was of him, always subconsciously looking for his tall figure in the eccentric long black coat he wore instead of a jacket, discarding it only on the warmest days. In the classroom, he sat at the back and she could sense his restless movement as he turned the pages of a book, the scratch of his shiny pen in his notebook.
And it became painful for her to notice how he looked at Anne Durban. He wasn’t getting anywhere with her, though. Peggy had teased her about James’ attentions and she had frowned, with an expression of distaste, though she’d said nothing, but nothing needed to be said. Anne was a popular girl with the boys, but said once that she was ‘keeping herself’and that ‘she’d know’ when she met ‘the one’. Clearly that wasn’t James.
James never looked at Nancy that way, though he often sought her company and clearly felt comfortable with her. They were good-humoured rivals and often compared marks, for the pair were invariably top of the class. Sometimes the laurel crown went to Nancy, at other times to James.
Nancy had her own admirers. She was friendly with Edmund, though he wasn’t around much outside class, which she thought a shame. The good-natured Theo was a more constant presence, and when he asked her at the beginning of second year to go to the theatre with him, she was flattered and spent time choosing the right dress for the occasion, a demure red and black plaid A-line style with a black velvet collar. She basked in Theo’s warm friendliness. He made her laugh with his impressions of their lecturers and she enjoyed his insightful comments on the play.
Afterwards, they walked the dark streets to the Underground station and before they parted he took her hand and asked bashfully if he could kiss her, but she felt a flash of fear and hesitated and the moment was lost. She berated herself on the train home for letting the memory of Mr Hunter’s unwanted attentions still stand in her way so many years later.
Theo did ask her out again and this time she did politely let him kiss her, but when she felt his tongue probe between her lips, she pulled away. ‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped, certain it was her fault. She’d overheard girls at school talk about kissing and how to manage noses and teeth, but now it hadactually happened to her she found she couldn’t relax. In the end, she got quite skilled at it, but her affection for Theo was lukewarm and he, too, seemed relieved when after several weeks she asked if they could go back to being friends. This physicality was almost something one had to get out of the way with men, she thought, after which you could feel comfortable together as pals. She rather envied Diana, who Anne Durban said prudishly was ‘getting a reputation’, but, seemed to enjoy herself very much while doing so.
Soon after Helen’s wedding, Nancy heard that she’d passed her second-year exams with flying colours, beating James by two marks, which gave her great satisfaction. She’d enjoyed the year on the whole and had learned so much, but several things left her uneasy. The lecturers and support staff, bar one, took little notice of the students. The one she thought most warmly of, Mrs Hall, the motherly technician, performed many small acts of kindness for the students. She smuggled into the lab replacements for forgotten scalpels or broken petri dishes. Her boss, Miss Pick, would never have allowed this if she’d known. Mrs Hall also helped Nancy when she had a bad period, taking her to a side room and giving her a bottle of hot water wrapped in a cloth to cuddle against the pain.
Another disappointment was the content of the degree course. Professor Briggs was an entomologist, renowned internationally for his work on bees, and it had been natural for him to recruit other entomologists to the department. So although the undergraduate curriculum adequately covered the basics of Zoology, it would be difficult forgraduate students at Prince’s College to specialize in anything but insects, for there was no one to knowledgeably supervise them. For the moment, this didn’t really bother Nancy. Time seems endless to the young and she had another year to go before decisions about the future needed to be made.
In the meantime, there were the summer holidays – eight weeks stretching out before her. One of these would be spent in the Welsh mountains near Porthmadog. There would be six of them: Anne Durban, Theo, Peggy, George, herself and James. The other Anne had been invited but had chosen to go to Italy with her parents instead. Aunt Rhoda had given Nancy some money for her birthday and, brushing aside her mother’s worries that she’d fall down a mountain or find herself in ‘a difficult situation’ with one of the boys, she declared that she would go.
The cottage lay at the edge of a village in a high valley. Some mornings, once the mist burned off the hills, they could see the tip of Mount Snowdon in the distance, but more often than not it was hidden by dense cloud. George had borrowed a large shooting brake from an uncle, and drove it like a maniac, glowering over the wheel at other road users as he rounded the bends of the narrow mountain roads. The evening they arrived, everyone felt quite weak-kneed with relief as they got out.
It was Anne who proclaimed it ‘a darling cottage’, which is what they subsequently called it until its real name was forgotten. It was built of grey Welsh stone, its slate roof yellow with lichen. Inside, it was cold and dark and smelledof ashes, but once Theo got a fire going and defenestrated a few of the larger spiders it became cosy. The girls set about cooking sausages and potatoes on the ancient kitchen range, after which everyone was too tired to do much and went to bed, three in each of the two bedrooms, lying top to toe on the huge Welsh bedsteads.
The holiday felt to Nancy like perfect freedom. There were no parents or lecturers to please. They got up when they felt like it, ignoring the early morning habits of a local cockerel, and fell into bed when they were too tired for anything else. Most days, they trekked for miles across hillsides and through dank woodland. One hot afternoon, they ate a picnic tea on the rocky shores of a lake and, since there was no one else around, stripped down to their underwear and one by one plunged squealing into the clear, chilly water. Nancy undulated like an otter as she darted beneath the surface, keeping a professional eye out for water nymphs or fish, though finding little evidence of either. They avoided looking at one another when they emerged shivering, grabbing their clothes and dressing quickly.
The plan was to take turns to cook, but after a couple of disasters the girls ended up doing it all. The payback was in the pub where the boys bought the beer. Here they played cribbage until closing time, then back at the Darling Cottage James brought out a bottle of whisky.
The holiday was memorable for two particular reasons. First, it marked the occasion when, after months of shyness, George and Peggy finally got together after becoming separated from the others on an evening walk. They cameback down the hill hand in hand, to the sound of the boys’ teasing cheers.
The other was more serious, for it could have ended in tragedy. One morning towards the end of their stay, James rose unusually early and came in for breakfast announcing that Snowdon was clear of cloud and he, for one, was going to climb it. Only Theo and Nancy were eager to join him. George dropped them at a village below the mountain and arranged to come back later.
At first, all went well. The climb was strenuous but not too much so, but there came a point where they were halfway along a narrow ridge with sheer drops on either side and a thick mist suddenly engulfed them. Nancy dropped to her hands and knees and followed James’ muffled voice calling instructions from ahead, but though she called behind her many times there was no answer from Theo. She and James reached the safety of a rocky outcrop, where they waited, freezing cold and anxious, but Theo did not appear. Eventually, the mist began to clear. James expressed a wish to go on and claim the summit, but Nancy talked him out of it. They both made their way down, Nancy in dread of what might have happened to their friend, only to find Theo waiting calmly at the bottom reading a book. He’d taken the decision without telling them to turn back rather than go on. Nancy was furious.
One way or another, though, the holiday had brought everybody closer. James was so annoying, Nancy felt, but she couldn’t help being drawn to him. He was a spark of light to her, the one most up to her intellectual weight, and she feltalive when she argued with him. And sometimes in bed, as she lay waiting for sleep to overtake her, she tried to imagine what it would be like to feel his arms around her and his lips on hers.
Twenty
Stef saw from the window that the rain had eased. Fingers of pale sunshine illuminated the sitting room of Dragonfly Lodge, playing on Nancy’s face, draining it of colour. The old lady seemed particularly tired this morning. Stef had had to ask more questions than she usually did to nudge her memories and establish how she’d felt about past events as they had happened. Everything Nancy described was so long ago, it was inevitable that she’d feel differently nearly sixty years later.
‘A couple more questions and then we’ll stop,’ Stef said and Nancy agreed. ‘Were you aware as a student of occasions when you were treated differently to the men? Did you ever experience a sense of injustice, for instance?’
Nancy thought for a moment, frowning, then said, ‘We took a great many things for granted then which you’d find unacceptable now. I don’t remember minding, for instance, about conventions of dress or not being allowed to buydrinks in the men’s bar.’ She chuckled. ‘That small lounge we girls had to ourselves, I didn’t like it. It had once been a laboratory, I think – it still had a horrid antiseptic smell – and we never spent much time there. But then there weren’t many girls overall studying science, and since it was a science college, the authorities probably thought that it was all we needed.’
She sighed and went on. ‘What I did object to was anything that constrained me intellectually. One of the lecturers used to joke that women were less intelligent than men because their brains were smaller. That made me angry. I put my hand up once and told him he was wrong. He had it in for me after that. He’d call me “the formidable Miss Foster” in a sneery voice. I didn’t like that at all.’
‘I should think not. Especially since you were often getting the best marks in the class.’
‘Yes. It was difficult at home, too. My mother couldn’t see the point of me continuing my studies after my undergraduate degree. I think she was proud of me in her own way, but she’d have been happier if I’d studied English Literature or Art History. She did say she was glad she could explain to people that it involved working with animals. Molecules or machines would have sounded far too masculine.’ Nancy smiled, then reached out an arm for her crutches. The interview was over.
‘The carer left some lunch for me in the fridge,’ Nancy said. ‘Perhaps you could heat it up – and find something for yourself.’
Stef assured her that she would have her own lunch at hermother’s but would be glad to prepare Nancy’s and bring it in for her on a tray.
While she was in the kitchen, waiting for the plate of chicken and vegetables to heat up in the microwave, her eye was drawn to a small pile of post left on the worktop and she couldn’t help noticing a letter left unfolded on the top. It was typed in an unusual italic font, which was strange, and because she felt protective towards the old lady she bent to look closer. Her eyes widened at the first line and she picked up the page and read it all with a growing feeling of concern. The letter was making a threat, there was no doubt about it. There was no envelope that she could see anywhere and the type was blotched as if by rain.
