A Stitch in Time

by Penelope Lively

  “Good, isn’t it?” said Martin. He pored over the cases, scowling in concentration.

  Everything changes. The earth’s surface heaves and boils: seas become land, continents are swallowed up by water, mountains are flung up. And through all this marches an endless procession of life-forms, from the unambitious shell-like creatures of this case, to the lumbering dinosaur of that picture. (Why, Maria wondered, reading the caption, should it matter so much that its brain was only the size of a kitten’s?… Kittens manage, after all.) One thing gives way to another, and eventually all ends up, as the chart indicated at the bottom, on a note of undisguised triumph, with naked but bearded man, standing arms akimbo on what appeared to be Dover cliffs.

  “Noah’s Ark isn’t true at all,” said Maria, with sudden illumination.

  “’Course not,” said Martin. “It’s a load of rubbish.”

  “Then people should say so,” said Maria crossly. She felt cheated. All your life you accepted blithely one account of things, and then you found yourself presented with something entirely different (and much more appealing). It needed thinking about.

  They were moving together from case to case now. Occasionally Martin would give her an amiable poke to attract her attention… “Look at that… Hey, come here…”

  “It’s as though,” said Maria, “somebody was messing about with it all. Trying to see what would work and throwing away the things that didn’t.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s evolution. We did it at school. Things change themselves – or bits of themselves – so that they fit in with where they’re living. They grow longer legs or stop having tails or learn to eat something different. And the things that don’t just die out.”

  “I see,” said Maria reflectively.

  Mrs Foster had reached the exit now, having completed her tour. They could see her, from the gallery on which they now were, sitting down to wait for them, opening her newspaper.

  A large chart entitled The Descent of Man demonstrated this in the form of a tree from whose branches burst forth one creature after another, flourishes of Alice-in-Wonderland invention whose basic wrongness became apparent as their particular branch came to an abrupt end with some bizarre and extinct animal. At the top of the tree, having scrambled triumphantly up through mammals and apes, stood naked and hairy man again.

  “It’s like snakes and ladders,” said Maria. “Throw a six and you stand on your hind legs.”

  Martin gave her a look of guarded approval. “Except that they didn’t know they were doing it. Each bit took millions of years.”

  “We must be too. Changing.”

  “I’ll grow two more arms. Better for climbing trees. And a tail.”

  “That’s going backwards again. I want eyes at the back as well as at the front.”

  “Two mouths. So you could eat first and second course both at once.”

  “Legs that expanded, like a music-stand. So you could run faster when you need to.”

  They began to giggle. Mrs Foster, down below, looked up in surprise.

  “We are, though,” said Maria. “Seriously, I mean, changing all the time. Growing up. Getting taller and growing new teeth.”

  “That’s different.”

  “More peculiar,” said Maria, “because you know it’s happening.”

  But Martin had lost interest. He was examining the postcards at the exit. They each bought two rather muted postcards of fossils (“Wouldn’t you rather have a nice view?” said Mrs Foster. “Or one of the beach?”), and then set off on the climb up through the town back to the house. It seemed a very much shorter walk than it had ever done before. Disconcertingly soon they were outside the drive gates and Martin was saying, “Well, ’bye then…” and, more politely, “thank you for having me.”

  Lying in bed that night, waiting for sleep, Maria floated back in her mind to the night before. Same bed, same window, same curtains. But between them twenty-four hours of time during which things had happened. Nothing in particular (except that I had a nice time with Martin at that museum) but time none the less, which changes everything. Even, she thought, me. I’m not the same as I was last night. Not absolutely exactly the same. I look the same – except that I suppose I’m just a very tiny bit bigger, because I must have grown – but I’m not the same, not quite the same, because I’ve seen things and done things and thought things I hadn’t this time yesterday.

  Downstairs, her mother’s voice came up in fragmented clips of a conversation with her father “…not at all a tiresome boy, really… fascinated by the museum, for some reason… positively chattering, she was…”

  And I might, Maria thought, falling away into sleep, I just might tell Martin sometime about that sampler, and the cocks, because he might think they’re interesting too. But I’m not sure yet. I’ll have to think about that.

  Chapter Five

  THE DAY THAT WAS ALMOST ENTIRELY DIFFERENT

  “GRYPHAEA,” SAID MARTIN. “It’s a Mesozoic oyster.”

  “I wonder what they were like to eat?”

  “OK for ichthyosauruses, presumably,” said Martin, “with a nice piece of toast.”

  Gryphaea was a kind of fossil that the beach provided in abundance, curled grey stones like snails. They had five of them now.

  “What we need,” said Martin, “is a brontosaurus vertebra. Some hope.”

  They were examining the books in the library. In the hall, Mrs Foster passed once or twice, looking into the room as she did so. Martin’s presence unnerved her: she expected him to break something.

  “Why don’t you go and play outside, you two?”

  “We’re just going to,” said Martin blandly. He was very good with grown-ups, Maria could see, in a way that she was not. It usually ended up with them doing what he wanted, rather than the other way around. Mrs Foster went into the kitchen and closed the door.

  “James nicked my Stomechinus yesterday. I found it, though. And I belted him – not hard – and he told Mum and I got sent to bed early.”

  James, Maria thought, was brother, not cousin. About four. It was hard to be sure, though – she never could sort them all out. She nodded sympathetically.

  “You can’t win,” said Martin with sudden gloom, “when you’re the eldest. Whatever you do, you shouldn’t have because you’re old enough to know better. And you spend your life fetching things from upstairs. Other people’s jerseys. Look – there’s a fantastic fossil! S’pose we found one of those!” They had come across a book with particularly clear and satisfactory illustrations.

  “We won’t.”

  “We might.”

  “We can’t. It comes out of the wrong kind of rock. It’s a trilobite, and you only get them in much older rock than the kind we’ve got here – blue lias. They were extinct by the time our kind of rock was made.”

  “Pity,” said Martin. “They could roll up like woodlice, it says here. Oh, well… You know something?” he went on, looking at Maria with a dissecting stare, as though he had her at the far end of a powerful microscope.

  “What?”

  “You’re the only girl I’ve ever come across who wasn’t like somebody’s sister. Mine, for instance. I daresay it’s because you aren’t. Anyone’s sister.”

  There are some supremely agreeable moments in life that are best savoured alone – the first barefoot step into a cold sea, the reading of certain books, the revelation that it has snowed in the night, waking on one’s birthday… And others the full wonder of which can only be achieved if someone else is there to observe. Such, Maria thought sadly, as this. For having said it, Martin had already turned away to explore the rest of the room. No one else would ever know.

  “It’s a pretty weird house, this.”

  “It’s all Victorian. The real thing, my mother says.”

  “Better than a rotten old hotel.”

  “The lady it belongs to lives over the road,” said Maria. “She’s got lots of clocks. And a queer picture – a sewn picture, not a paint
ed one. The girl who made it was about the same age as me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It says so. And when she made it. 1865. I keep thinking about her. I keep wondering what happened to her.”

  “She grew up, didn’t she?” said Martin briskly. “She grew up and got married and had children and all that stuff. I say, there’s a super atlas here.”

  There was a silence. Martin pulled the atlas out and flipped over the pages.

  “I don’t feel as if she did,” said Maria at last. “I feel as though she’s still here, somehow.” She added, in a voice which was meant to be defiant but which came out merely as quiet, “The same age as me.”

  “That’s daft,” said Martin. “She isn’t, is she? Unless you think she’s a ghost or something. And that would be even more daft.” He hoisted the atlas back on to the shelf. “Fact is, she’s dead. Ages ago.”

  “I s’pose so,” said Maria coldly.

  “Stands to reason. Come on, let’s go.”

  Later that evening she went and sat alone in the ilex tree, after Martin had gone back to his family. It was a very soothing tree. Not just a good, private place in which to be, but somehow enclosing and companionable with its warm rough bark and its whispering, shifting leaves, darker and more leathery than the leaves of ordinary trees. Sitting in it, back against the trunk, legs stretched out along a fat branch, everything swayed and moved around you and yet at the same time you seemed to feel the roots of the tree reaching down, down into the ground, tethering it so firmly that it must be solid as a house, immovable. It had been making acorns, the tree; there were green berries in their scaly cups all around her, pale against the dark shiny leaves, hundreds of them. They wouldn’t, of course, make hundreds of trees. None, probably. Waste, again. Sleepily, Maria watched the shadow of the tree get longer and thinner across the lawn, and told it about her day. We fossil-hunted, she said to it, down on the beach, my friend and I, my friend Martin, that is – but of course you know about him because he’s climbed you too – and we found another Gryphaea and a bit of a Stomechinus but not a very good one, and tomorrow I’m going out for the day with Martin’s family. I’m invited. Actually, she said to the tree, I’m not all that sure about that. There’s so many of them, and they all talk at once. It makes me nervous. But I think I want to go.

  “Remember to say thank you for having me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve got your comb in your pocket?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you feel sick in the car, tell Mrs Lucas.”

  No, thought Maria. In front of them all? Do you really think I would? Die, quietly, just like that, is what you’d have to do.

  “Have a lovely day.”

  Over at the hotel (having had to wait, alone and conspicuous, pink to the roots of the hair, in the hall until noticed) she found that the Lucas families were neither ready nor decided about what they were going to do. For the next half-hour there was a fever of dressing children, sending Martin to find other children who had strayed away somewhere, looking for things that had got lost, and arguing about where they should go. Two girls jumped up and down, without stopping for an instant, shouting, “We want to go to the fun-fair! We want to go to the fun-fair!” Above this Martin’s mother administrated.

  “What do you mean, you haven’t got a dry T-shirt? There must be one. Then wear one of Jane’s.”

  I’ve never worn somebody else’s clothes, thought Maria. That’s one of the lots of things I haven’t ever done in my life. A picture of her own clothes came before her eyes, laid out clean on the chair at the end of her bed every night ready for the next morning, the dirty ones taken away to be washed.

  “There’s stock-car racing at Beaminster,” said Martin. He had said it three times already, but without much conviction, as though aware that it was a hopeless case.

  “We want to go to the fun-fair!”

  “Then look under the bed for them. James – come here!”

  “Beach! Beach, beach, BEACH!”

  “Susie, do your hair.”

  “Fun-fair!”

  “BEACH!”

  “No, you can’t have a lolly now.”

  “I can’t find my shoes.”

  “Oh… SUGAR…” said Martin in sudden rage. He went and stood staring morosely into the garden.

  “I think,” said Martin’s aunt, “that the visitor should be allowed to choose. What would you like to do, Maria?”

  “BEACH!”

  “FUN-FAIR! FUN-FAIR!”

  “All right. That’s enough. Leave her alone,” said Mrs Lucas. “James, don’t keep pulling her jersey like that.” From under a heap of dirty nappies, toys and wet bathing things she pulled a local newspaper. “Blandford Forum Gymkhana – God, no! Flower Show at Child Okeford – not with this lot, thank you very much. Motor Cycle Scramble…” (“Yes, great, let’s get going then…” said Martin, but in the tones of one who knows there is no hope.) “…Horse Show, Pottery Exhibition… Here, what about this, then? ‘Medieval Fayre. Spend a day in the fifteenth century at lovely Kingston Peverell Manor… Jousting, Archery, Ox-roast, Medieval Banquet, Minstrels. And many other attractions, including Produce Stall and Teas. Entrance 25p. By kind permission of Sir John and Lady Hope-Peverell.’ How about that?”

  “Can we joust?”

  “I want an ox.”

  “Oh, no,” said Martin wearily, “not a stately home…”

  Maria knew what he meant. She was herself something of an expert on stately homes. Mr and Mrs Foster enjoyed a drive to such places on a Sunday afternoon: it got you out of London, you saw the countryside (conveniently displayed, neither muddy nor cold, on the other side of the car windows) and you were taking an interest in history. Such outings could do you nothing but good. Maria had trundled obediently, at one time or another, up the stairs and through the rooms of Knole, Woburn, Blenheim, Hampton Court, Longleat and many another. Sometimes there were lions or dolphins, and sometimes there were not. When there were such additions to what was already on offer, the history part seemed to have been put rather firmly in its place, as though the owners were faintly apologetic about it, being quite well aware that not everyone cares for that kind of thing and not wanting to press the point. Indeed you were obviously free to give it a miss altogether if you preferred. The Fosters, though, did not. They would join conducted tours of the stately home in question, and Mr Foster would occasionally ask questions of the guide about a picture, or suit of armour. Maria found this intensely embarrassing.

  “Not a bloody stately home,” said Martin.

  “Martin! Don’t be silly, anyway – it’s obviously a special do, this. Right, that’s settled then. Jerseys. Anoraks. Everybody have a pee before we go.”

  Hours later, it seemed, in the car, wedged between someone’s thigh and someone else’s elbow, Maria again watched Dorset unfurl at either side of her – fields, hills, villages. Everybody talked at once, and pointed things out. As a journey, it bore as little relation to journeys with her parents, in the hushed interior of their carefully cleaned car, as the Underground in rush-hour to a First Class train compartment. This car was, within, ankle-deep in sweet-wrappers and iced lolly sticks, and without, coated in dust on which Martin had written various rude comments about its condition. It came as something of a relief to reach their destination after twenty minutes or so. A small queue of cars was moving slowly into a field car park. A banner, slung across the entrance to the stately home, said ‘August Fayre’, in huge but distinctly amateurish red letters (it had once, Maria could see, been a bedspread). The house, as such things went, was not at all stately. Not, admittedly, the kind of place one lived in oneself, but certainly not in the Woburn/Blenheim/Longleat league. Old, evidently, and with all those external bits and pieces like stone mushrooms and stone balls on the tops of pillars, and wrought-iron gates, that imply grandeur, but with other, more homely touches such as a forgotten dustbin lid beside the entrance, and an abundance of weeds in the flower
-beds. There were large numbers of people about, and a distant, cheerful, jangle of music.

  They spilled out of the car. “You big ones can get lost,” said Mrs Lucas briskly. “Twenty pence each and see you at half past four, back here.”

  The big ones, it seemed, included also Martin’s sister and girl-cousin. Ten yards from the car park he did a quick deal with them which involved giving them two pence each out of his twenty in exchange for which they were to keep away.

  “I’m not being lumbered with them all day,” he explained. “Anyway they’re only nine.”

  “Most people think I’m nine,” said Maria, “because of being small.”

  “Well, you aren’t, are you? It’s what people are that matters, not what they look like. Come on.”

  Maria, weaving through the crowds behind him, wished that she was able to say exactly what she meant like that. Out loud, not just to cats and trees and petrol pumps. There seemed to be no difficulties about being Martin: he just was, like some kind of business-like, confident dog. Though, she now saw, he was not as good at managing his own mother as he was at managing other people’s. But it is, of course, nearly always the case that other people’s grown-ups are more persuadable than one’s own.

  It was extremely odd, this Fayre. All the people officially involved with it in one way or another, from the car park attendant to the ladies running the produce stalls or the tea tent, wore historical clothes. From which particular bit of history did not seem much to matter – there were assorted long dresses, some topped with vaguely medieval head-dresses, one or two hairy dressing-gowns, hitched round the middle with rope (“I’m a friar,” explained the car park attendant kindly, “in case you were wondering. Not what I’d choose as a get-up, myself, but we all got to do our bit.”), sundry shepherdesses and milkmaids, and a great many muscular legs stuffed into tights and bound around with ribbon to imitate doublet and hose. The lady of the house looked uncertain in purple velvet and a towering wimple. Her husband, the Sir Somebody, strode around beaming and talking to people, his spectacles contrasting oddly with his ruff and slashed knickerbockers. One had the feeling that everybody was sternly doing their duty. A large notice at the entrance had explained how ten thousand pounds must be raised for the repair of the village church.