A Stitch in Time

by Penelope Lively

  “’Bye.”

  “I’ll come and look at that book sometime, I expect.”

  The rest of the afternoon seemed a little flat. Maria and her mother ate their sandwich tea. They read their books. Bravely, they bathed in a sea whose chill matched its stony colour. And as the sun began to sink in the sky Mrs Foster said, as Maria had known she would, “Well, I think we’ve had the best of the day.”

  Back at the house they found a note on the door-mat. Mrs Foster picked it up and they read, in large, loopy handwriting, “It occurred to me that you might care to borrow a small handbook to places of interest to visit in the neighbourhood, which I happen to have. Perhaps the little girl would kindly call over this evening and I will give it to her.” It was signed, “Hester Shand”.

  “Our landlady,” said Mrs Foster. “Would you mind, darling?”

  Maria did mind, privately. She had not taken an instant liking to Mrs Shand; rather the opposite, indeed. But there was no good reason to refuse without making her mother cross, and she preferred not to have people cross with her. “All right,” she said.

  Mrs Shand lived in a large, much-turreted house called The Victoria Private Hotel over on the other side of the road. A notice at the entrance to the drive said ‘No Turning’. A further one, halfway up, said ‘Residents’ Cars Only’. Small green signs warned you off the grass. There seemed to be much that was forbidden. A further notice beside the door of the hotel said flatly ‘No Children or Dogs’. Maria stared at it, thinking it pointless. There are, after all, both children and dogs – lots of them, all over the place. So there’s nothing to be done about it. You might as well say No Rain or Earthquakes. But what the notice meant, of course, was There Are To Be No Children Or Dogs Here. Which, Maria thought with a sudden rush of indignation, was rude. Nobody can help being a child or a dog, and indeed they’re not bad things to be, one way and another. She was just about to ring the large brass bell beside the door when a small nameplate caught her eye, with another bell below it: Shand, Flat I. Please Ring.

  She rang. After about a minute, a tube beside the bell, which she had not noticed, crackled and said, “Yes?” making her jump.

  “My mother sent me to get the book.”

  “Push the door,” said the tube breathily, “and go up the stairs. The door at the far end of the landing. It is unlocked.”

  The Victoria Private Hotel, within, was sunk in a deep (childless and dogless) silence. Maria climbed two flights of stairs, thickly carpeted, and found herself on a wide landing, confronted by many closed doors. The one at the far end did indeed have a further nameplate beside it saying Shand. She opened the door and went in.

  Her first impression was that there was some kind of machinery at work. A small room, furnished only with a mirror and a marble-topped table, opened into another, larger one, and from the large one came a confusion of rhythmical noises, and, almost at once, Mrs Shand’s voice saying, “Please come through here.”

  It was not machinery, but clocks. Mrs Shand sat on a large padded sofa (reminiscent of the ones in the drawing-room over the road) in the middle of a room otherwise furnished largely with clocks. There were other padded chairs, and small wobbly tables, and glass-fronted bookcases, and a very large fern in a pot, and many pictures, but the clocks dominated. They were mostly grandfather clocks, half a dozen of them at least, standing around the walls like so many tall, insistent presences, ticking like an ill-assorted orchestra, all at odds with one another, some slow, some fast, some urgent, some with a halting note as though they would stop if only they could. She stared round at them in wonder, and they ticked at her in their different voices and at their different speeds, turning upon her their various faces. For they were all different. There were faces sternly simple and faces painted with flowers, a face ornately patterned in brass, a face above which a galleon rocked ceaselessly against a painted sea. Ten to two, said one, five to six, another – half past seven, twelve o’clock… The hands were all at odds. A muted argument about the time raged from one side of the room to another.

  “The book is on the table,” said Mrs Shand. “Please be careful. There are some valuable ornaments about.” She was working on a piece of embroidery. Gingerly, Maria approached a small, unsteady table (which lurched as she came near it) and took the book. Mrs Shand, over a needle she was threading, gave her a critical look.

  “Of course,” she said, “in my day a little girl would wear a frock. Nowadays all children wear trousers, so that for the life of me I cannot tell the difference. Not that it seems to matter any more. Enjoying your holidays?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Maria.

  “There’s nothing like the seaside, is there?”

  Maria could think of no answer to this that would not lead the conversation into another dead end, so she said nothing. In any case it was clearly not a real question, for Mrs Shand had turned away to hunt for something in the sewing-basket beside her. Maria wondered if she might go now, but Mrs Shand suddenly said, re-emerging from the sewing-basket, “I daresay you would like a chocolate.”

  Maria was not, as it happened, particularly fond of chocolate, but could think of no way to refuse, so she said, “Yes, please.”

  “The silver box on the desk,” said Mrs Shand. “The soft centres are on the right-hand side.”

  There was a silence, invaded only by the ticking of the clocks, while Maria ate her chocolate (it tasted rather unpleasantly of violets) and Mrs Shand threaded her needle with a long length of pink silk.

  “The clocks were my grandfather’s collection. They will go to a museum when I die.”

  This remark, also, was not one that could be followed up with any success. Maria finished her chocolate (with some relief) and said, “How do you know what the right time is?”

  “There is always the wireless.”

  And there, indeed, it was, an up-to-date Japanese transistor, on a table beside the sofa.

  “The clocks have not been altered since my grandfather’s death. As a gesture of respect. He was a distinguished scientist.”

  And in the time since then, presumably, they had run fast, or slow, or stopped and been re-wound, and thus ended in this state of fretful disagreement.

  “The one beside the fireplace was the schoolroom clock, in the house you are staying in. It is not so valuable as some of the others, but attractive.”

  It was indeed. The face was wreathed in painted flowers, which twined around the brass figures, and behind the brass hands, which said ten to four (it was in fact about six o’clock). Violets, clover, daisies, vetch: the flowers, in fact, of field and hedgerow. And beside each painted flower in tiny, sloping letters, was its name: Common Forget-me-not, Myosotis arvensis; Creeping St John’s Wort, Hypericum humifusum; Woody Nightshade, Solanum dulcamara…

  “Unfortunately it no longer works,” said Mrs Shand. “The only one that is beyond repair, I am told. It broke down when my own mother was a child.”

  At ten to four one day. Morning or afternoon? Maria wondered. Her attention shifted from the clock to a picture above the mantelpiece beside it. That too was interesting. It was an embroidered picture, not painted at all – a stitched house, with stitched writing above and below (she was too far away to read what it said), and small stitched objects, trees or animals or something, and a patterned border enclosing the whole.

  “That is a Victorian sampler,” said Mrs Shand. “Have a look at it. It is rather an unusual one. The little girl who made it would have been about your age, I imagine.”

  Maria stepped closer. The letters of the alphabet ran across the top of the sampler, and then the numbers one to ten. Below them was a row of creatures – a jolly prancing black dog, very small, and some things that might have been deer, and a couple of birds. Then there were some verses, which she read through.

  Think O my soul the solemn day

  Is sure and soon will come

  When I must quit this house of clay

  And hear my final doom

/>   Before the wise all-knowing god

  I quickly must be brought

  Who knows my evry way and word

  My evry secret thought

  His nature is all holiness

  Almighty is his powr

  How shall I stand before his face

  In that most solemn hour

  Below that was a squarish red brick house, neatly sewn in cross-stitch. On one side of it were a pair of garden urns, the kind that you grow flowers in, and on the other a swing. It was a large and handsome swing, stitched in black, presumably to represent black ironwork. Underneath the house was a row of objects that Maria took at first to be flowers, since they were not unlike the formal flowers in the curly pattern that bordered the whole picture. Or they might have been snails. It was only after staring at them for a moment that she realised they were in fact fossils. Ammonites – small, spiral stitched ammonites. And below them, finishing off the picture, as it were, was a handsome and elaborately embroidered tree. There was lettering underneath the tree, more small black-stitched lettering: Quercus ilex, the holm oak. Finally, at the bottom, there was more lettering: Harriet Polstead aged 10 yrs her sampler. And then, below that: Susan Polstead completed this work for her sister 30 Sept 1865. Maria looked at it for a few moments in silence, and then said, “She was younger than me, actually.”

  “Possibly,” said Mrs Shand.

  There was a further silence, while Maria studied the sampler and thought about this girl called Harriet, and then Mrs Shand said, “Well, I daresay your mother will be wondering where you are.”

  She looked expectantly at Maria and Maria said, “I think I’d better be going now. Thank you very much for the book.”

  “Not at all,” said Mrs Shand. And then, as Maria was almost out of the door, she added, almost sharply, “I trust you’re making good use of the piano.”

  “Yes,” said Maria untruthfully.

  “Quite right,” said Mrs Shand. “Goodbye, then.”

  Going back down the stairs of the hotel, so smugly shrouded in its child- and dog-rejecting silence (from somewhere on the ground floor came a discreet tinkle of tea-cups), Maria decided that she did not altogether care for Mrs Shand. Which was a pity because in fact there was a great deal that she would have liked to ask her about the clocks, and even more, about the sampler. It was still in her head as she crossed over the road – its stiffly stitched flowers and that leaping black cross-stitch dog, and the swing and the urns and the plump cushiony shape of the tree at the bottom. Quercus ilex, the hold oak.

  Because, she thought with a sudden gush of interest, that’s my tree, I’m sure it is… It’s the same shape, and the same very dark green, and the same fat trunk and branches. And the house is the same house.

  But there are no urns now, and no swing, and for some reason the house is a different colour. White, not brown.

  She crossed the road and stood staring at the house. Behind and beyond it the sea made a grey backcloth flecked with white just as it must have done when it was built. That would always have been the same, that and the shape of the coast reaching away to right and left. And here was she, Maria, standing looking at it on an August evening just as the girl who made the sampler – what was her name, Harriet? – must have done once, a long time ago. Harriet is like the ammonites in the rock, she thought, not here any more but here in a ghostly way, because of the things she left behind. The sampler, and the drawings in the book. And it came to her, as she turned to go into the house, that places are like clocks. They’ve got all the time in them there’s ever been, everything that’s happened. They go on and on, with things that have happened hidden in them, if you can find them, like you find the fossils if you break the rock.

  Before supper Mr Foster examined Mrs Shand’s guidebook and made a neat list of Places of Interest to be visited during the course of the holiday, with map-references and a note about mileages. This filled Maria with a certain gloomy apprehension: she did not like this kind of arrangement, unavoidable as it was in a family like hers. Both her parents thought that it did you good to go and see interesting places. So Maria sat in silence while plans were made, and a discussion held about how many Dorset towns were Roman in origin.

  “Well,” said Mr Foster, “and what has Maria been doing?” He often referred to her as Maria when he was in fact speaking to her.

  “I sat in the ilex tree,” said Maria.

  “The what tree?” said Mrs Foster.

  “The ilex tree. The one at the end of the garden.”

  “Who told you it’s called an ilex tree?” said Mr Foster.

  Mr and Mrs Foster were town people: they tended to know a great deal about things that are discussed in the papers and on television, and to be good at finding the quickest way from one part of London to another, but not to know the names of things. Plants and trees and stars and that kind of thing. Maria had long observed that one of the many ways in which people are divided up into different kinds is the division between people who know the names of things, who usually live in the country, and people who do not, who usually live in town, but thought that she was probably, secretly, inside, the other kind.

  “Nobody, really,” said Maria. For some reason that she could not pin down, she found that she did not want to talk about the sampler. Probably they would not be interested, in any case. “It’s a kind of oak tree,” she added.

  “No, it isn’t,” said her father. “Oak trees have acorns. And an entirely different leaf.” He spoke firmly and confidently: he was used to being right about things. It was always assumed, within the family, that he was right.

  Maria said nothing. She looked at her father over the table and said nothing. He smiled affectionately at her as though to say that no one expected a person of eleven to be well-informed, and began to talk to his wife about matters arising from an article he had read in the newspaper, and presently Maria finished her supper and left the kitchen without either of them noticing. She was good at not being noticed. It was, she sometimes thought, the only thing she was good at.

  She went out into the garden and lay on her stomach on the grass for a bit in the last warming rays of the sun. (The cat, purring with unctuous charm, came and lay beside her to begin with – “Oh, no you don’t,” said Maria, “I’m not talking to you this evening. You’ll just spoil a nice day.” It stalked off in a huff, to roll destructively on the only flowers.) Presently, though, the sunlight ebbed away from the lawn and she wandered back into the house through the open French windows of the drawing-room.

  It could never be a comfortable room, somehow, but it did now feel familiar. Even the huge dark pictures seemed to have been part of her life for much longer than two days. Though there were still things she had never noticed, like, for instance, the other glass dome on the table in that corner by the window, in which were two more stuffed birds (so faded that it was impossible to tell what their original colouring might have been). My friend, Maria told them, my friend Martin wouldn’t approve of you being stuffed and put under a glass dome like that. And I quite agree. He knows all about birds and plants and what their names are and things like that but he didn’t know the name of the fossil he’d found and I told him and he may be coming to look at the book about fossils. He said he would. I expect he will.

  And like the silver-framed photographs on the mantelpiece, one of a whiskery man with a nice, benign face, the other of a group of people, grown-ups and several children, sitting under a tree in a garden. The ladies wore long dresses, and the children were much encumbered with bulky clothes and straw hats or bonnets. Everything was in shades of yellowish-brown. She examined them for a moment before moving over to the piano, with the thought – somewhat unenthusiastic – that she might play it.

  Maria was only moderately good at playing the piano. She had had lessons since she was six and in fact quite enjoyed them. But she was not, she knew, good at it. Not like Julia next door at home, who was Grade VI and had won a competition. But it was a very splendid
piano – a proper grand piano, not like the unobtrusive upright that fitted into the corner of the living-room at home. Sitting down at it, with the brown cover removed, she felt both swamped by it and somehow uplifted, as though one might indeed suddenly be able to place one’s hands upon the keys and bring forth a fluent and silvery stream of music.

  Which was not, of course, at all the case. She played through as much as she could remember of the piece she was learning at the moment, and it sounded much as it always did, jumpy with hesitations and wrong notes. She got off the piano stool and, lifting its lid, discovered within a pile of tattered and yellowing sheet-music. Most of the pieces were far too difficult. At the bottom, though, there was a thin leather-bound album, a collection of songs and tunes all bound together in a gold-tooled binding on which was stamped in gold lettering, S.C.P. 1860. One or two of these seemed more approachable to someone of her modest abilities, and she played them through, not worrying too much at her mistakes and enjoying the large, competent sound of the piano.

  A movement, in the shadowy evening gloom of the room, distracted her and made her produce an ugly discord. The cat was squatting on the arm of a chair observing her.

  “We aren’t concentrating, are we? Not giving the matter our full attention. There’s a certain basic lack of talent too, I’d say.” It stared squint-eyed into the garden, its tail twitching slightly.

  “You again,” said Maria. “Thinking about eating the birds, I suppose.”

  “That’s always an interesting possibility,” said the cat.

  “Beast.”

  “Perfectly true. Of the species ‘cat’, to be precise. Felix felix. So what’s wrong with behaving like one?”

  “Just because it’s your instinct doesn’t make it a nice way to behave. Sometimes I feel like hitting people and I suppose that’s instinct but it’s still a nasty thing to do,” said Maria.

  The cat curled up like a bun and closed its eyes. “My, we are feeling argumentative this evening, aren’t we?”