A Stitch in Time

by Penelope Lively

  “In fact,” Maria went on, “when I come to think about it I suppose that’s the difference between us. That I try not to do things that might be nasty even if they are my instinct and you just don’t bother. In fact you don’t know what nasty is.”

  “Oh, clever clever,” said the cat irritably.

  “And the other thing, of course, that’s different is that you can’t remember things like I can. What did we have for lunch yesterday?”

  “Don’t pester me with details,” said the cat.

  “There you are! And of course the most important thing is that you can’t talk. Unless I let you.”

  “Oh, shut up,” said the cat. It slid off the arm of the chair and made a sinuous exit into the garden, without looking at her.

  And the other thing, of course, Maria thought, is that it can’t expect things either. Like wondering what we’re going to do tomorrow and if it’ll be good or bad, and thinking how funny that I don’t know now – anything might happen, there might be the end of the world, or an earthquake, and I simply don’t know but by this time tomorrow I will. She put the music away and closed the lid of the piano.

  Lingering over this odd thought, and with it other confused but not really unpleasant thoughts – of that sampler, of fossils, of Martin – she went upstairs to her room, undressed, washed, and was lying tidily in bed when her parents called in, singly, to say goodnight. Mrs Foster adjusted the bedclothes, removed some dirty socks and a shirt, and said, looking out of the window, that there was a lovely sunset and she thought that meant good weather.

  “Not an earthquake, then,” said Maria, from deep within the bed, mostly to herself.

  “What, dear?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, goodnight, then.”

  “Goodnight.”

  Her father came in and gave her one kiss with exactly the same careful deliberation that he gave her twenty pence pocket money every Saturday morning. This did not, Maria had worked out, mean that he did not love her but just that he believed money to be important. He always knew exactly how much money he had, or should have, in his pocket, in just the same way that he always cleaned his shoes at the same time every evening and always folded the newspaper right side out before throwing it in the dustbin. He was a very tidy person. I am tidy too, thought Maria, I suppose I have inherited tidiness like I have inherited my mother’s straight hair, but I am untidy in my head, in the things I think about… And, thinking this, and wondering if, were it possible – and oh, how amazing and interesting it would be if it were – to somehow arrive within someone else’s head and listen to thoughts as though to the radio, other people’s would be as perplexed and as peculiar as her own, she sank gradually into sleep.

  And heard, she thought, though by the morning she hardly remembered having done so, the distant sound of the piano being played. The very song she had tried to play herself, but more competently managed.

  Chapter Four

  THE COBB AND SOME DINOSAURS

  “WHAT WOULD YOU like to do?” said Mrs Foster. “Beach? Or something different?”

  “Something different.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” said Maria. They looked at each other, a little disagreeably, across the breakfast table. Mrs Foster thought that Maria was being unhelpful; Maria thought that her mother should have some interesting alternative already worked out.

  “In that case,” said Mrs Foster, “you can come down into the town with me, to the library. And then we could go for a walk along the Cobb.”

  “The what?”

  “The Cobb is the harbour wall. You can walk along it. It’s very old. I daresay,” Mrs Foster added without enthusiasm, “you could buy an ice cream or something at the end of it.”

  Maria stared at her mother coldly. She was not in fact thinking of either ice cream or the prospect of walking along the harbour wall, and she did not mean to look cold. It had occurred to her that she had a reason for wanting to go to a library herself: the cool expression was simply what happened to her small, rather pale face when she was deep in thought. It frequently gave rise to misunderstandings.

  “And there’s no need to look so cross about it,” said Mrs Foster.

  Coming out of the drive Maria noticed for the first time that the house had a name. It was a well-concealed name, the letters being simply cut into the white plaster of the two columns at either side of the drive gates but not picked out in any way, so that they were white against a white background: Ilex House.

  They descended the steep streets that led down into the town. When places are clothed in tarmac, houses, walls, shops and lamp-posts, it is difficult to remember that beneath lies earth, rock and the natural shape of the land. In the heart of London, in Oxford Street, Maria had been startled once to see workmen lift a slab of paving to reveal, beneath, brown earth. It was as though the new, shrill street of concrete and plate-glass windows had shown its secret roots. But here, she noticed, in this small seaside town, the roots came boldly out on to the surface, for walls and the occasional house were made of the same grey-blue stone as the cliffs. It seemed, somehow, satisfactory, as though the houses had grown out of the soil just like the trees and grass and bushes, settling down to match the pewter sky and the pale green sea below it. And as they passed a terrace of cottages she saw suddenly the coiled glint of an ammonite, enshrined there for ever in the wall beside a net-curtained window in which stood a vase of plastic flowers.

  They arrived at the library, and Mrs Foster became involved in the complicated process of acquiring temporary tickets. Maria left her and began to search for what she wanted. It did not take very long: libraries are obliging places once you have got the hang of them. ‘Trees’, she soon discovered, came under ‘Botany’, and here was a fat book, lavishly illustrated with trees in all sizes and shapes. She found what she wanted and sat reading with quiet satisfaction; “Quercus ilex, the holm oak – common in gardens and parks, this handsome tree with dark, evergreen foliage and brownish-black, deeply fissured bark was introduced from Southern Europe during the sixteenth century…”

  Her mother’s face appeared at her shoulder. “What are you reading?”

  Maria indicated, in silence.

  “Oh,” said Mrs Foster. “That tree you were talking about…” Then, after a moment she added, “Actually you were right. It does seem to be a kind of oak tree.”

  Maria said nothing. She closed the book and put it carefully back on the shelf, patting it into line with its neighbours.

  “Yes,” said Mrs Foster, after a brief silence during which she looked rather oddly at her daughter. “Well, I suppose he was wrong, as it happens.” She seemed about to say something else, and then stopped.

  They walked out of the library in silence, books tucked neatly under their arms, and down the steps into the street. As they turned towards the harbour Mrs Foster said, “Of course, living in a town all the time that’s the kind of thing you never really know much about. One tree seems much like another.”

  “Not really,” said Maria.

  Her mother looked mildly surprised. “Well, I suppose not, when you look.”

  After a moment she went on, “Do you do about plants and things at school?” She sounded quite respectful, as though, Maria thought, she were talking to someone important, not me at all.

  “Not very much,” said Maria. She thought of plants at school – beans in jam-jars with blotting-paper that got all smelly and enormous white roots twining round and round inside the jar. And mustard and cress on bits of flannel. But what I like, she thought, is not all that but the names of things. And every single kind of thing having a different name. Holm oak and turkey oak and the sessile and pedunculate oak. Sessile and pedunculate…

  “What?” said Mrs Foster.

  “Nothing.”

  They had now reached the little harbour. The boats there were of a scale to match it – dinghies and rowing boats dapper in new coats of white paint, their names brisk in
black or blue; My Lady, Chopper II, Jester. There was a smell of tar, petrol and fish. The boats rocked gently on sheltered water that glinted here and there with rainbows of oil: beyond, on the seaward side of the Cobb the waves sucked and lashed at the stone, and the green water was marbled with foam. The curving stone barrier along which they now walked seemed to divide two worlds. In the cosy, ordered world of the harbour each boat had its circle of admirers, grooming, coiling ropes; white seagulls screamed over pickings of orange peel, crusts, tea-leaves. Beyond the protection of the Cobb, the sea behaved as it liked, and there the gulls seemed both wilder and more competent, rocking with folded wings from one wave to another, or sailing effortlessly on the wind, their hard and staring eyes sometimes level with Maria’s as they swooped low in passing. She wondered if one kind of gull settled for the squabbling life of the harbour, while others chose to rough it on the open sea, or if all gulls did both, or what. And then there seemed to be a third, inland way of life, for looking up at the patchwork of fields running back beyond the town, she could see more gulls scattered behind a ploughing tractor. Presumably, in fact, the cleverest gulls tried everything and then continued with whichever place provided most food, and so became the fattest and strongest gulls also…

  But I’d choose the sea, she thought, if I were them. Not apple cores or muddy worms. Real fish, even if you hardly ever caught one.

  They reached the end of the Cobb. “I’m sorry,” said Mrs Foster, “there don’t seem to be any ice creams.”

  “I don’t want one,” said Maria. And she didn’t. It was quite enough to sit on the edge of the stone, with her legs hanging down over the water, looking across the harbour at the town. She could see their house, half hidden among trees, to the left, and then to the right the main part of the town spilling down between hillsides to a seafront of ice-cream-coloured cottages, green and pink, and a pale edging of sand before the sea began. It was a lovely day. Not, Maria thought, a straightforward lovely day with a boring blue sky and nothing in it but the sun, but better than that because the sky was pleasantly busy with clouds, huge shining heaps of cloud that roamed across the horizon, ebbed and flowed, formed and reformed as you watched them. And every now and then they blotted out the sun for a few minutes, so that bands of sunshine fled along the coastline, spread out before her here in a huge receding curve. Everything would go grey and muted, as the sun went in, and there would be this band of golden colour sweeping along the cliffs to Weymouth, lighting up now a bright slice of rock, now a green field, now the white sparkle of a house, now the turquoise of the sea itself.

  “What are you looking at, Maria?”

  “Nothing,” said Maria. Then she added, “Just the sun,” because that sounded rude, as well as being untrue.

  “Nice day,” said her mother.

  Mrs Foster took some postcards out of her handbag and began to write on them. First she addressed them (to Aunt Ruth, the neighbours, grandfather, and her friend Elizabeth), and then she wrote the messages. The messages, Maria could see, were all nearly the same. They said they were having good weather, Lyme was pleasantly unspoilt and the rented house very nice.

  When I’m grown-up, thought Maria – if I ever do grow up, which isn’t something you can ever imagine happening – when I’m grown-up I shall come back here and think of myself sitting here now, today. And having thought this, in an off-hand sort of way, the thought suddenly took shape, most startlingly, so that a grown-up Maria (wearing spectacles, for some reason, with a handbag tucked under her arm, and dressed in a tweed suit like Aunt Ruth’s) stood before her, smiling quite benevolently, and so real that it seemed almost possible that other people might see her also.

  “Please let me introduce you to my mother,” said Maria, “I mean to your mother.”

  “Maria, you’re muttering again,” said Mrs Foster, looking up from the postcards. “It’s getting to be a habit. You really must stop.” Maria said guiltily, “Sorry,” and the grown-up Maria smiled once more and dissolved most gracefully into the sea. Which, Maria felt, was the best place for her, because harmless as she appeared the thought of her was somehow entirely unwelcome. I don’t want to be like that, thought Maria comfortably, I want to be me as I am now for ever and ever.

  A boat was arriving at the end of the Cobb – a very nautical-looking boat sprucely painted in pale blue and white, with much rope and sail displayed, but that nevertheless ran on a noisily chugging engine that now spluttered to a stop as it reached the steps. A party of people got off, children and adults. They were on the Cobb before Maria realised that it was Martin and his family.

  They approached, an untidy and vociferous party, the grown-ups talking loudly, the younger children clamouring and arguing. Martin trailed behind, looking, she thought, bad-tempered. He wore jeans with holes in both knees, and a jersey tied around his waist.

  He saw her. “Hello.”

  “Hello.” Maria shot a wary glance at her mother, who looked up from the postcards.

  “They’re a rotten cheat, those boats,” said Martin. “Fifty pence and all you get is ten minutes pottering about round the harbour. I think they’re frightened of the real sea.”

  The rest of his family had sat down a few yards away, locked in argument about which beach they should go to. Mrs Foster, looking uneasy, said, “Oh, are they?” Children often had this effect on her parents, Maria had noticed – strange children. Boys especially.

  “Have you been?” said Martin to Maria. “I shouldn’t bother.”

  It now dawned on Mrs Foster that Maria and Martin knew one another. “You’re in the guest-house next door to us?” she said.

  Martin nodded. There was a silence, awkward only for Mrs Foster, who clearly could think of nothing else to say, and Maria, who yearned to, but was as usual throttled into silence by her feelings. Martin was absorbedly picking at a limpet exposed by the ebbing tide. “Can I come over and have a look at that book tonight?” he said suddenly.

  They were now all three engulfed by the rest of Martin’s family, younger children, older children, and two women – one, it became apparent in a confusion of explanations and remarks, being his mother and the other his aunt. The children divided fairly evenly into two families of cousins. It seemed, to Maria, like being suddenly in the middle of a flock of starlings. She saw her mother furtively gather her possessions around her, as though they might be trodden on or removed. Martin’s mother had launched straight into an impassioned account, much punctuated with laughter, of a visit to Weymouth they had made the day before. Impressively, she was able to talk uninterrupted while at the same time preventing one small child from falling into the sea and re-dressing another. Mrs Foster listened with a rather fixed smile: they were not, Maria could see, at all the same kind of person.

  “…So we decided you can keep your classy resort,” concluded Martin’s mother. “In future we’re stopping here.” Her attention strayed to Maria as she finished buttoning someone’s trousers. “Are you on your own? You must come over and play with the girls.”

  “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” said Mrs Foster doubtfully.

  “Any old time. Well, come along then, all. Martin?”

  “I’ll stay here for a bit.”

  “All right. Get back in time for lunch, though. And don’t be a nuisance to Mrs… er…?”

  “Foster,” said Maria’s mother.

  “We’re Lucases. Both lots. Well, ’bye for now, then.” They trailed off along the Cobb, audible long after they were out of sight behind a building.

  Mrs Foster looked apprehensively at Martin. She did not much like boys. Maria always felt that one of the few things she had done right in her life was to be a girl.

  “I thought I’d go to the museum,” said Martin.

  Mrs Foster brightened. She had obviously expected something much more destructive or energetic.

  “What a good idea. Maria hasn’t been there either.”

  They walked slowly back to the town. Martin explained to
Mrs Foster, lengthily and patiently, how an outboard motor works. Mrs Foster said, “Yes,” and, “I see,” at intervals. Maria, happy, trotted two steps behind. It seemed to be quite all right for her to say nothing. At the entrance to the museum Martin said to her, “Actually, your mum didn’t follow all that,” and she said wisely, “No, I don’t think she did.”

  Inside the museum, Mrs Foster said, “I’m afraid it looks a bit dull.” She began to move dutifully from glass case to glass case, spending the same length of time at each. Maria had seen her use the same system on picture exhibitions.

  The cases were full of fossils. Fossils of a much greater variety and perfection than any one could imagine finding for oneself. Ammonites as big as door-knockers; chunks of rock through which swam the bony tracery of complete fish; the vertebrae of dinosaurs; the imprint of reptilian feet on a slab of clay… And the labels describing each item battered the reader with immensities of time – forty million years ago, a hundred and eighty million, four hundred million. Here were creatures younger by hundreds of millions of years than others. And here were charts that explained, with helpful drawings of rampant dinosaurs, fish of the most weird and impractical design, and all the smaller fry by way of shells and starfish and things that creep or crawl, which creatures had lasted for how long. Ammonites, Maria noted with surprise, were a relatively late invention, sharing a swampy and tropical universe with diplodocus and pterodactyl.

  And all these creatures, she saw, studying charts and pictures, have stepped out of the rock of which the place is made, the bones of it, those blue cliffs with which England ends.

  “Blue lias,” said Maria.

  “What?”

  “It’s called blue lias, the rock here.” And she said it again, to herself, because she liked the sound of it. Blue lias… And the brown rock on top of it is called upper greensand, and all these different kinds of rock are different ages, like the fossils, old and older and very old indeed. They lie, sleeping, as it were, under fields and towns, full of the shells and bones of creatures that once were here.