Clemmy gave an art class in which she told them about a Spanish painter called Goya, who fell ill and became deaf and rather mad and shut himself up in a gloomy house away from everybody and people thought the poor old man was finished — but afterward they found that he had covered all the walls of his house with strange, dark pictures. Then she drew the blinds in the art room and told the children to select their paints without turning on the light, and they grumbled and fussed — and found that they had made paintings in colors they hardly knew existed. The next day she retired to the kitchen and made pancakes for the whole school.
Magda allowed Tally to froth up her cocoa with the whisk sent by the aunts, but she lost page thirty-two of her book on Schopenhauer and became troubled again. As spring turned to early summer and some of the other children began to go barefoot, Verity took to wearing shoes.
And Matteo solved the problem of Borro’s snails in two minutes.
“They’re the wrong kind. Edible snails are Helix pomatia—these are Cepaea hortensis.”
And he suggested that Borro should tip them out and let them go, which Borro did.
Tally’s first tutorial with Matteo took place in his room, which was not in the main building but above the row of workshops behind the gym. It was reached by an outside staircase and had the look of a mountain hut: very plain, with wooden walls, a scrubbed table, a narrow bed, and a case full of books in various languages. The sackbut lay on a chair; it looked like a battered trombone and far too harmless to make such a howling and melancholy sound.
“Come and sit down,” he said.
He had come straight from taking a fencing class; his foils and mask were propped up in a corner and Tally looked at them wistfully.
“Could anyone take fencing?” she asked. “Could I?”
“Next year would be better,” said Matteo. “You’re still rather young.”
Tally nodded, accepting this. “I really liked your biology lesson. I liked it so much. I always thought science would be different — sort of cold and impersonal — but it isn’t, is it? It’s all part of the same thing. My father tried to make me see that, but I didn’t listen properly.”
“Listening is one of the most difficult things.”
He talked to her for a while about the river and what else might be seen in it later that year. Then he said, “But what about you personally? Your problems.” He smiled. “Tutors are for problems, you know.”
“Yes. Well, I do have problems. There’s Magda, you see. I found her crying on the first day about Germany and Heribert and I can’t do anything about that, but now she’s worrying again and it’s about the blackout curtains and Magda can’t sew. Of course, there may not be a war, but if there is we’re going to need an awful lot of them. So I think we should find some way of helping her so that she can get on with her book and stop the pages flying about so much, but I haven’t been here very long and I’m not sure how to do it. Could it be part of the domestic work we do before school?”
“I don’t see why not. That would be a way of doing it which would not upset her, and I’m sure you could manage it.”
“And there’s Kit,” Tally went on. “Of course, he can be very annoying, but he does so very much want to play cricket. I don’t know anything about it — we didn’t play it at my convent — but I thought… there’s the high school at St. Agnes and they do play cricket — I asked Daisy who I do housework with, and she says they do; her brother goes there. So couldn’t Kit go there one afternoon a week, maybe?”
“One could certainly ask,” said Matteo. “It seems a perfectly sensible suggestion to me. Any other problems?”
“Well, there’s Verity’s snake. It looks really ill and I can’t say anything because—”
Matteo’s face darkened. “You can forget the snake. It’s being collected this afternoon and returned to the shop.”
“Oh, good.”
Matteo waited. “Anything else?” he asked, for he had the feeling that Tally’s biggest worry was still to come.
“Well, yes. It’s about Julia. When I got on the train to come here I was so homesick you can’t imagine — I just wanted to cry and cry — but Julia was so welcoming and so kind, and I like her so much, but I could see she was worried about something. It was as though she had a great weight on her mind, and she was so odd sometimes — Barney says she’s a marvelous actress, but whenever O’Hanrahan tries to get her to do anything she just curls up… and no one could be kinder than him. And then last week she asked me to go to the cinema with her and it was Gloria Grantley, and Julia broke down completely and told me she was her mother. I promised not to tell the others, and of course I haven’t, but really I can’t bear it.”
“What is it that you can’t bear?”
“That ghastly woman — how can she think it’s more important to be famous and earn lots of money? Julia’s so sad, having to be kept secret, and she won’t do anything that makes her stand out, and she can’t get ordinary letters like the rest of us — her mother just sends awful boxes of chocolate with liqueur centers that nobody can eat except Augusta Carringon — but Julia doesn’t want chocolates; she wants a letter. And I think there has to be something one could do. I thought maybe I’d write to her and tell her how miserable she’s making Julia. She may just be stupid and not realize.”
Matteo looked at her gravely.
“I’m afraid you’d only make trouble for Julia. I know it’s hard, but sometimes there are situations where one can help only indirectly. And you do help Julia enormously just by being her friend.”
“Yes… but I do so hate not being able to make things better.
And she’s so awful — Gloria Grantley, I mean. The way she looked up to heaven and said, ‘Lionel!’ and fluttered her eyelashes. You wouldn’t believe what a bad actress she is!”
“I would actually,” said Matteo. “I saw the film.”
Tally looked at him in amazement. “You went to the cinema in St. Agnes? To see I’ll Always Be Yours? Did you really?”
Matteo was looking past her at the open window, and he did not speak at once.
“I had my reasons,” he said.
Tally waited, but whatever his reasons were he obviously did not want to share them.
She thought it was time to go, but as she was getting up Matteo turned to her.
“But what about you, Tally? Don’t you have any problems of your own?”
Tally thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. I do miss my father very much, but that’s not a problem, is it? It’s just part of life.”
“Yes, you’re right.” Matteo’s face was somber. “Missing people is definitely part of life.”
An unusual child, he thought when she had gone. I wonder where that comes from in someone so young — that concern for other people.
But almost at once he forgot her, lost again in a vision of his own.
In O’Hanrahan’s English classes the discussions about doing the legend of Persephone as a play became serious. The story seemed to have everything: all kinds of devils and demons and monsters, not to mention the three-headed dog, Cerberus, whom everybody liked; a beautiful and innocent heroine carried off by the King of Darkness and forced to live as his wife in the Underworld; a distraught mother, the goddess Demeter, who mourned her daughter so dreadfully that she could not attend to her duties and so let the corn wither and die. And it was a story about the earth being renewed in the spring, when Persephone returns from Hades, which seemed to be a good idea at a time when the world appeared to be doing anything rather than renewing itself.