A Stitch in Time

by Penelope Lively

  “Fifteen pence,” said the assistant. “Do you want the postcard, dear?”

  Or, Maria now saw, you could have a whole collection of such cards made up into a calendar. Forty-five pence. Which, at the moment, she had not got, but, she remembered, might well have after tomorrow, when Uncle David was to come down, who invariably gave her fifty pence as a present.

  “I think I’ll save up for the calendar,” she said. August was topped by a picture of fishermen with nets, oddly dressed. September you could not see.

  “Old prints,” said the assistant. “Nineteenth century. People like that kind of thing nowadays. They don’t appeal to me so much, personally. Enjoying your holidays?”

  “Super,” said Martin.

  “Time flies. The fifteenth already. September before we know where we are.”

  They came out into the street again, sucking pear-drops. It was lunch-time, and the population of the street’s hotels, boarding-houses and rented holiday houses converged upon them, laden with wet bathing-things, folding chairs and baskets. Amid these comings and goings, like a rock defying the fretful waters of a channel, stood the sombrely dressed figure of Mrs Shand, leaning slightly upon a stick, a shopping basket set upon the pavement beside her.

  “That’s our landlady,” said Maria apprehensively. Mrs Shand’s gaze was beamed down the road towards her, but without any sign of recognition. This did not entirely surprise Maria; people usually did forget her quite quickly, she had found. To remain in people’s heads you need to be noisy, or striking-looking, or memorable in some other way, and she was not. As they reached Mrs Shand she began to slide by between her and the garden hedge, at which point Mrs Shand’s head swung sharply round in her direction.

  “I know you, do I not?”

  Maria explained.

  Mrs Shand turned her head to Martin. “And who is this?”

  Maria explained further.

  “And what have you been doing with yourself, young man?” said Mrs Shand.

  This daunting question, which, Maria knew, would have reduced her to silence, had no such effect upon Martin. He proceeded to tell Mrs Shand, at considerable length, so that she was obliged twice to shift her weight from one leg to the other, and prevented several times from interrupting him either to ask a question or bring his account to an end.

  “If you are interested in fossils,” she said at last, “you may, if you would like, come to see me and I will show you some very interesting specimens of my grandfather’s.”

  “OK,” said Martin.

  “Yes, please,” said Mrs Shand reprovingly.

  “That’s quite all right,” said Martin. “This afternoon, if I’ve got time. We’ve got to go now, it’s lunch-time – ’bye.” He treated Mrs Shand to an amiable grin. Maria, turning furtively as she went in at her drive gates, saw the old lady standing where they had left her. She looked in some indefinable way slightly less rock-like.

  The Fosters spent what Mrs Foster called a “quiet” afternoon in the garden (but our afternoons are never noisy, thought Maria, never never, we just don’t have that kind of afternoon…). Maria read, her father alternately read the newspaper and slept beneath it, and her mother sewed. She was making a patchwork quilt. She had been making it for eight years now: it was very large, exquisitely designed and sewn, and would surely be very beautiful when finished. Maria, when she was younger, had sometimes felt jealous of the patchwork quilt and once she had taken some of the pieces of material that her mother was collecting for it and put them in the bottom of the dustbin under tea-leaves and potato peelings. No one had ever known. It was quite the worst thing she had ever done and she still went hot and cold at the thought of it. Nowadays she no longer had any emotions of any kind about the quilt but it did sometimes occur to her that it was taking her mother almost as long to make it as it had taken to make her, Maria, and that people often showed more interest in the quilt.

  From the other side of the hedge, from time to time, came the sounds of intermittent warfare between the Lucas children. There was some kind of long-term, all-afternoon quarrel going on which flared up periodically into shouted argument. Sometimes the argument would end in shrill and noisy weeping from one of the younger children. When this happened Mr Foster would frown and sigh, and Mrs Foster would look up from her sewing and stare with disapproval at the hedge separating the two gardens. Once she said, “Those are really very uncontrolled children.” On two or three occasions the tears and arguments were brought to an abrupt and unnatural close by brief but loud interruption from one or other of the mothers. On these occasions Mr and Mrs Foster exchanged glances, and Mrs Foster turned back sternly to the quilt. Maria had never, she realised, heard either of them shout, at each other, her, or anyone else. All this was quite interesting, and she lay alternately reading and thinking about it until it was time for tea.

  Martin appeared as they were sitting round the table.

  “Have you had tea, Martin?” said Mrs Foster.

  Martin had, it appeared, but was quite open to suggestions about a second one. He sat down with them and ate four sandwiches and a slice of cake. He had a second slice when pressed – not very hard – by Mrs Foster.

  “It’s funny she’s not fatter,” he said, nodding his head in Maria’s direction. “All this food just for her. Lucky thing.”

  “More cake?” said Mrs Foster doubtfully.

  “No, thank you,” said Martin, after a brief but apparently careful consideration. “Shall we go and see that old lady?”

  Maria was only moderately enthusiastic about this. Mrs Shand alarmed her, just a little. This time, though, she remembered, she would be fortified by Martin. One would not need to talk, just listen and look. And those clocks could do with looking at again.

  “All right,” she said.

  Outside the hotel, Martin expressed his deep contempt for that notice. “Who do they think they are? No Children or Dogs… They’ll be lucky.” He stumped loudly up the stairs.

  Mrs Shand, when they arrived in her room, was engaged upon the same piece of pink embroidery. The effect of the room, its atmosphere, and the sight and sound of the clocks on Martin was, for a few moments at least, to silence him. He stood staring round, rubbing one plimsoll up and down against the grubby leg of his jeans.

  Mrs Shand got up from the sofa and went over to a cabinet in one corner of the room, from which she took a shallow tray covered with a cloth.

  “You may sit down and look at this. Please be careful where you put your feet, young man.”

  Maria and Martin sat side by side upon a sofa blowsy with brown and yellow cotton roses, and examined the tray of fossils, while Mrs Shand observed, in silent irritation, the trickle of sand which marked Martin’s progress across the room, and then returned to her sewing.

  The fossils, they instantly recognised, were a cut above the ordinary. No Gryphaea or Stomechinus here, not even a solitary ammonite, but belemnites like huge bullets, sharks’ teeth so large that the picture they conjured up of their Jurassic owners made Maria vow silently that she would never again set foot in the English Channel, and the most delectable crumple lily-like plant etched upon a slab of rock.

  “Cor…” said Martin lovingly.

  “You may handle them,” said Mrs Shand (unnecessarily, for they already were).

  “Who found this?” demanded Martin.

  Mrs Shand lowered her spectacles and looked at him over the top of them. “My grandfather. He was a friend of Sir Charles Darwin and helped him with his researches by collecting fossils on the cliffs here. I will show you a photograph of him.”

  “Where did he find it?”

  But Mrs Shand was back at the cabinet now, burrowing in a drawer quite silted up, Maria could see, with papers and bundles of letters. She returned carrying a large, apparently very old (for the leather was faded and here and there quite worn away) photograph album. She set this upon Maria’s lap and turned the pages over until she came to one on which was a single photograph of an e
lderly man with a prolific white beard and kindly expression. The same person, Maria now saw, whose photograph stood upon the mantelpiece in the drawing-room of the house over the road. On the opposite page was another yellowed photograph of a lady in clothes both billowing and tightly buttoned, giving her the same densely upholstered effect as the Victorian chairs in the drawing-room of the holiday house. She wore a lace cap, and more frills of lace emerged at the neck and wrists of her dress. But her face, amid these oddities of dress, was an ordinary, comfortable, motherly face: you could see it today twenty times over in any high street or supermarket. And a strand of hair had escaped from beneath her cap and lay across her forehead, adding a homely touch to the otherwise formal picture. People aren’t different, on the outside, Maria thought, people from other times. But the inside of their heads must be, because of everything being different all round them. She stared at the photograph, seeing also that the brooch at the person’s neck, of clustered ivory roses, was the brooch worn now by Mrs Shand, seated in her chair on the opposite side of the fireplace, smoothing the embroidered panel upon her knee.

  “My grandmother,” said Mrs Shand. “If you turn the page you will see my mother as a small girl, and her younger sister Harriet.”

  They sat upon one of those chairs from the drawing-room. Or rather, the older girl sat and Harriet stood beside it and leaned upon the arm. You could see that she had been told to stand thus, to make a nice picture. They were dressed alike in dresses of some dark material that came to below the knee, black boots which vanished into the dresses, buttoned with a multitude of tiny buttons, and white pinafores with an abundance of ruffle and frill. Their long hair, held back by bands, had just been brushed, by the look of it. They were alike – you could have known they were sisters – but the older girl was thinner and darker, and her expression the more solemn (or bored?). Harriet’s face, on the other hand, which was fatter and, even in the brownish-yellow tones of the photograph, gave an impression of pink cheeks and blue eyes, had a clenched, stiff look about it which seemed somehow not at all natural. It came to Maria suddenly what this look suggested. She was going to start giggling, she thought. Something happened (the photographer, maybe – did he look funny, or make some funny remark?) and she giggled and they told her to stop it for the picture, or she was just going to giggle, and trying not to.

  Maria stared intently at the picture, and Harriet, a hundred years and more away, suppressed unseemly laughter. In black ink, under the photograph, someone had written, “H.J.P. and S.M.P., aged 10 years and 12 years, February 1865.”

  “There are some more family groups,” said Mrs Shand, “if you go on.”

  There were indeed. Mother and children groups, with the baby (like a chrysalis swathed in white muslin) upon its mother’s knee, and the other children ranged beside the chair in order of size; portraits of one person after another, head and shoulders emerging from a soft brown cloud; muzzy pictures of out-of-doors groups, playing croquet on some tree-fringed lawn, seated at tea round a table set beneath a tree, or, in one interesting case, sprawled on the beach amid a clutter of sunshades and tartan rugs. Behind them reared a most recognisable slice of cliff.

  “That’s here,” said Maria.

  “Naturally,” said Mrs Shand, “since they lived here. You may each have a chocolate, if you care for one.”

  “Thanks,” said Martin with alacrity.

  Individuals emerged now from the various photographs, as Maria turned the pages over. Here was the bearded father (holding a new baby, with an expression of kindly bewilderment upon his face), and here the plump mother again, festooned with small children. And here were Harriet and her sister. And here, a few pages on, was her sister, but taller, and alone this time. And here she was, again, with her hair piled upon her head and her skirt down to the ground, defined now by her dress as a grown-up person though her face looked much the same. She changed into something else, thought Maria, like butterflies. People don’t do that now, you don’t exactly know when they stop being children and are grown-up because everybody goes on wearing the same kind of things all the time. Martin’s mother’s jeans are just like mine. The old-fashioned arrangement seemed not at all a bad one. You’d know where you were, at least, she thought. And what you were.

  She searched the pages for a grown-up, evolved Harriet, but could not find her. This was worrying. Here was Susan, looking fat and discontented, aged sixteen, and here she was again, wreathed in smiles, quite grown-up, with a baby in her arms. But no Harriet. Maria stared up at the sampler.

  “She made the sampler, didn’t she?” she said. “Harriet.”

  “Not entirely,” said Mrs Shand. “Susan finished it. My mother.”

  Maria opened her mouth to ask why but was interrupted by Martin, who had ignored the album and was still poring covetously over the fossils.

  “Where did he find the fish?”

  Dapedius colei, it was called, glinting in its slab of lias, a perfectly orthodox and scaly fish, like some Jurassic bream.

  “I bet we’ll never find one of them…” said Martin, in envious gloom.

  “On the West Cliff, I believe,” said Mrs Shand, “after a cliff-fall had exposed some fresh strata. That happens, you know, from time to time.”

  Alluring as the fossils were, Maria found that her attention had somehow strayed entirely now to the album. She turned the pages back, learning from each group more of the family structure – the C.R.P. who must be an aunt, and the Miss D. who hung upon the fringes of a group, here and there (governess, nurse?), and the graded F.S.P.s and B.M.P.s and T.J.P.s who were all the other brothers and sisters. Susan and Harriet seemed to come around the middle of the family. She went back to that early picture and studied them both again: it was the only good one of Harriet. Elsewhere she was an indistinct member of a group and after the middle of the album did not seem to appear at all.

  “Would you like a chocolate, Mrs Shand?” said Martin with an air of sudden concern.

  “Not just now, thank you.” Martin’s hand hovered above the silver box, and there was a pause while Mrs Shand looked at him over her spectacles, saying nothing but apparently savouring the moment. Then she said, “Very well, young man. One more,” and Martin’s hand foraged among the chocolates and Mrs Shand returned to her sewing.

  Maria got up and went over to the sampler. She thought that it must have been very difficult to sew. The stitches were small and neat, with never a mistake, as far as you could see – it must have taken hours and hours. Hours and hours, perhaps, when the person sewing it would have much preferred to be doing something else. Because I wouldn’t like to have to do that, thought Maria, not one little bit. Though I’d have put the tree in too, and its name underneath – Quercus ilex – and the fossils. And the little black dog. And the swing (the swing? what swing?), and the urns. And the house. Because of course it is the house, only for some reason she made it brown and not white, but otherwise it’s much the same. Which, Maria thought, I find odd – it being there then and still here now but Harriet isn’t. And, thinking of Harriet with sudden intensity, she looked back to the sampler again.

  She was looking sideways at it, and the sampler itself had become suddenly invisible, for the glass behind which it was framed reflected the window at the other side of the room, and the view out of the window, so that from this angle she saw only a reflected square of garden with lawn and trees swaying softly in the wind. And, suddenly, like a portrait in a frame – a photograph even, but coloured this time, and quite real, she felt sure – a face, a pink and white face with fair hair held back by a band, above a frilled white pinafore, staring at her out of the sampler.

  But no, in at the window. Because it is back to front, she thought, a reflection… And she turned sharply round, to find herself looking at a window empty of anything save lawn, trees and sky…

  She swung round to look at the sampler again – and it had become nothing now but canvas and stitching once more. And a reflection, if you found the
right angle, but a reflection of nothing more surprising than window, trees…

  “What a very fidgety person,” said Mrs Shand. “Round and round… You are making me dizzy.”

  Maria sat down guiltily.

  “Perhaps you would kindly put the album back in the cabinet. And the fossils, if you have seen enough of them.”

  “Thank you for having us,” said Martin, when this was done.

  Mrs Shand waved her needle with a gesture of gracious dismissal. “Please see that the door closes properly behind you.”

  “Excuse me,” said Maria, “please, why did Susan…”

  But the rest of the question was lost. Mrs Shand, looking up as she spoke, interrupted before she had finished.

  “And perhaps you would kindly mention to your mother that the side gate into the garden is inclined to squeak. If the noise offends it should be oiled. Did you say something?”

  “No,” said Maria.

  “Super fossils,” said Martin, as they crossed the road back to their own side.

  “Mmn.”

  “That fish thing. Dapedius…”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to find one of those,” said Martin.

  “Oh,” said Maria, without conviction.

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Maria hastily.

  Martin went back to the hotel to watch television. Maria walked round the side of the house, across the lawn (the lawn upon which, possibly, in fact probably, a large noisy family had played croquet, and then lined up against the wall to have their photograph taken, smallest in front, mother and father and aunts and others in the middle). She climbed up to her favourite branch in the ilex, and for the next half-hour she sat in the tree and told it things (but silently, in her head). A very peculiar thing happened just now, she said to it, I thought I saw Harriet’s face looking out of the sampler she made, as though she was still here.