A Stitch in Time

by Penelope Lively

  To Joy, Max, Tim and Nick

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. A House, a Cat and Some Fossils

  2. An Ilex Tree and a Boy

  3. Clocks and a Sampler

  4. The Cobb and Some Dinosaurs

  5. The Day that was Almost Entirely Different

  6. Harriet

  7. An Afternoon Walk and a Calendar

  8. The Swing

  9. Rain, and a Game of Hide-and-Seek

  10. The Picnic

  11. A Small Black Dog and One Final Piece of Blue Lias

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  A HOUSE, A CAT AND SOME FOSSILS

  “ALL RIGHT, BACK there?” said Maria’s father.

  “Not much longer now,” said Maria’s mother.

  Neither of them turned round. The backs of their heads rode smoothly forward between the landscapes that unrolled at either side of the car; hedges, trees, fields, houses that came and went before there was time to examine them. Fields with corn. Fields with animals. From time to time, on the left, snatches of a milky green sea bordered with a ribbon of golden sand or shingle. That is the English Channel, said Maria, inside her head, to the ashtray on the back of the car seat, the sea. We have come to spend our summer holiday beside it, because that is what people do. You go down to the beach every day and run about and shout and build sandcastles and all that. You have blown-up rubber animals and iced lollies and there is sand in your bed at night. You do that in August. As far as I know everybody in the world does.

  The car slowed down and turned into the forecourt of a garage. “QUAD GREEN SHIELD STAMPS!” screamed the garage, “WINEGLASS OFFER! JIGSAWS! GREAT PAINTING OF THE WORLD!”

  “Just short of three hours,” said Mr Foster. “Not bad.”

  “Quite good traffic,” said Mrs Foster.

  They both turned round now to look at Maria, with kindly smiles.

  “You’re very quiet.”

  “Not feeling sick or anything?”

  Maria said she was quite all right and she wasn’t feeling sick. She watched her father get out of the car and start to fill it with petrol from the pump. He was wearing a special, new, holiday shirt. She could tell it was a holiday shirt because it had red and blue stripes. His shirts for ordinary life were never striped. On the far side of the petrol pump another car drew up. It was full of children, most of them small and several of them wailing. A boy of about Maria’s age looked at her for a moment through the window, his expression irritable and bored. A woman got out of the car, saying loudly, “Now just shut up for a moment, the lot of you.”

  Maria stared at the face of the petrol pump. It had a benevolent face, if you discounted a bright orange sticker across its forehead, which referred to the Wineglass Offer.

  “Noisy lot,” said the petrol pump. “You get all kinds, this time of year.”

  “I expect you do,” said Maria. “It’ll be your busy season, I should imagine.”

  “Too right,” said the petrol pump. “It’s all go. Rushed off my feet, I am, if you see what I mean.” In the other car, the two youngest children had struck up a piercing argument about who had kicked whom, and the petrol pump spluttered as it clocked up the next gallon. “Excuse me… It goes right through my head, that racket. Personally I prefer a nice quiet child. You’re just the one, are you?”

  “That’s right,” said Maria. “I’m an only.”

  “Very nice too,” said the petrol pump. “I daresay. Had a good journey down?”

  “Not bad,” said Maria. “We had quite good traffic.”

  “I’ll tell you where you get good traffic,” said the petrol pump with animation. “The coast road on a Saturday night. Nose to tail all the way. Spectacular. Now that’s what I call traffic.”

  “We get good rush-hours,” said Maria, “where we live. On the edge of London.”

  “Is that so? Jammed solid – that kind of thing?”

  There was no time for more. Maria’s father got into the car again and started the engine.

  “Cheerio,” said the petrol pump. “Nice meeting you. All the best. Take care. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.”

  “Right you are,” said Maria. “Thanks for the petrol.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Back behind her parents’ travelling heads, with Dorset unrolling tidily at each side of her, Maria hoped there would be something to talk to at this holiday house her parents had rented for the month. You can always talk to people, of course. It’s usual, indeed. The trouble with people is that they expect you to say particular things, and so you end up saying what they expect, or want. And they usually end up saying what you expected them to. Grown-ups, Maria had noticed, spent much time telling each other what the weather was like, or wondering aloud if one thing would happen, or another. She herself quite liked to talk to her mother, but somehow her mother was always about to go out, or into another room, and by the time Maria had got to the point of the conversation, she had gone. Her father when she talked to him would listen with distant kindliness, but not as though what she said were of any great importance. Which, of course, it might not be. Except, she thought, to me. And so for real conversations, Maria considered, things were infinitely preferable. Animals, frequently. Trees and plants, from time to time. Sometimes what they said was consoling, and sometimes it was uncomfortable, but at least you were having a conversation. For a real heart-to-heart you couldn’t do much better than a clock. For a casual chat almost anything would do.

  “A holiday house,” she said to the ashtray, “is presumably bright pink or something. Not normal at all. With balloons tied to the windows and a funny hat on the chimney. And jolly music coming out of the walls.”

  “Here we are,” said Mrs Foster, and as she spoke Maria saw this place announce itself with a road-sign. Lyme Regis. She had been studying road-signs throughout the journey. The places to which one was not going were always the most enticing, lying secretly to right and left out of sight beyond fields and hills, promised by signposts that lured you with their names – Sixpenny Handley, Winterborne Stickland, Piddletrenthide and Affpuddle. They seemed not quite real. Could they be like other places, with bungalows, primary schools and a Post Office? Like the green tracks that plunged off between hedges and fields, they invited you to find out. And I’ll never know now, she thought sadly. That’s one of the lots of things I’ll never know.

  She turned her attention to Lyme Regis, which she would have to know, like it or not. It did not seem too bad. It did not, for instance, have houses in rows. Maria had quite strong opinions about a fair number of things, though she seldom mentioned them to anyone, and she did not care for places in which houses were lined up in rows, staring blankly at you as you passed, though in fact she lived in this kind of house herself, and so did everyone she knew. The houses in this town, on the whole, were differently arranged. Their problem, if you could call it that, was that the town was built upon a hillside, or several hillsides, and seemed in grave danger of slithering down into the sea, so that each house had to dig its toes in, as it were, bracing itself against the slope with walls and ledges and gardens. The houses rose one above another, lifting roofs and chimneys and windows out of the green embrace of trees. She had never seen a place with so many trees, big ones and little ones, light and dark, all different. And between them you could see slices of a sparkling sea, tipped here and there with the white fleck of waves.

  “Delightful,” said Mrs Foster.

  “Nice Victorian atmosphere,” said Mr Foster. And then, “This must be it, I think.”

  They turned in
to a gravelled drive, tightly lined with bright green hedge. The drive made a little flourish between hedge and a somewhat unkempt shrubbery, and then ended up in front of a house. Maria and her parents got out of the car and stood in front of the house, considering it. At least Maria considered it. Her mother said, “How pretty. I like the white stucco,” and her father began to take the suitcases from the car. Maria went on considering.

  It was a tidy house. It did not sprawl, as some of its neighbours sprawled, into such follies as little towers and turrets, glassed-in verandas, porches and protrusions of one kind and another. It stood neat and square – or rather, rectangular, for it was longer than it was high – with a symmetrical number of green-shuttered windows upstairs and down, at either side of a black front door with a fan-light above it. Its only frivolity was a pale green iron canopy with a frilled edge that ran the length of the house just beneath the upstairs windows.

  “Well, Maria,” said Mr Foster. “Is it anything like you imagined?”

  “No,” said Maria.

  “About 1820, I should think,” said Mr Foster, in his instructing voice. “That kind of architecture is called Regency.”

  And Maria thought, never mind about that, because somewhere there’s a swing. It’s blowing in the wind – I can hear the squeaking noise it makes. Good, I shall like having my own swing. And someone’s got a little dog that keeps yapping. She walked round the corner of the house into the garden, to see where this swing might be, but there was nothing to be seen except a large square lawn, edged with more dense and shaggy shrubbery and a good many trees. At the end of the garden was a hedge, and beyond that the hillside dropped away steeply down towards the sea. The sun had gone in now, and the glitter was gone from the sea. Instead it reached away upwards to the sky, grey-green splashed here and there with white, to melt into a grey-blue sky so gently that it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. To right and left the coast stretched away in a haze of greens and golds and misty blues, and immediately in front of the town a stone wall curled out into the sea to put a protective arm round a little harbour filled with resting boats, their masts like rows of toothpicks. Gulls floated to and from across the harbour, and on the beach behind it people sat in clumps and dogs skittered in and out of the water. It was a view you could spend much time examining.

  The swing, she decided, must be in the adjoining garden, which was almost completely hidden by trees. The house next door, which was large, and of the towered and turreted kind, could just be seen between them. She went back to the front of the house again, where her father was just unlocking the door. They went inside.

  “Good grief!” said Mrs Foster. “It’s the real thing! Stopped dead in 1880.”

  Whereas outside all had been softly coloured – green and blue and gold – within the house all was solidly brown. The walls, in the hall at least, were panelled. A brown clock ticked upon a table over which was spread a brown velvet tablecloth (“Tassels and all,” said Mrs Foster, picking up one edge and letting it drop again. “My!”). A brownly patterned carpet was spread across part of the brown tiled floor. Thick brown curtains hung at either side of the French windows opening on to the garden, visible through the door of what was clearly the main room. (This, said Maria to herself, is what is called a drawing-room, like they have in books and I have never seen before.) They all three walked into this room, and stood for a moment in silence.

  “The drawing-room, I should imagine,” said Maria’s mother.

  Bulbous chairs and small, uncomfortable-looking sofas stood about, confronting one another. A vast piano was shrouded in a brown cover made to fit it. On the mantelpiece, stuffed birds sat dejectedly on twigs beneath a glass dome: they seemed, at first glance, to be sparrows but would be worth further investigation, Maria thought. I could look them up, she decided hopefully. She liked looking things up. Perhaps they would turn out to be rare warblers, or something extinct.

  They toured the room. On one wall was a huge brown oil painting of a man in Highland costume standing in front of a mountain, surrounded by a great many dead birds and animals. A glass-fronted cabinet stood against another wall, crammed with china ornaments. A bookcase was filled from top to bottom with books that tidily matched one another, all their spines lettered in gold. You could never, Maria thought, never never take a book like that to bed with you. Or read it in the lavatory. You would have to sit on one of those hard-looking chairs, wearing your best clothes, with clean hands.

  “Well,” said Mrs Foster, “what do you think of it?”

  “I hadn’t thought,” said Maria, “that a holiday house would be like this.”

  “To be frank,” said her father, “neither had I.”

  They inspected the rest of the house. Downstairs there was a dining-room, in which eight, leather-seated chairs were gathered round a very long table. Above the sideboard hung another brown oil painting in which dead hares, rabbits and pheasants were spread artistically across a chair. There was a further room, which Maria instantly identified (to herself) as a study, lined with bookcases from floor to ceiling and furnished with more brown chairs and sofas. The kitchen was relatively normal. Upstairs there were several bedrooms and a bathroom. The bath, Maria noted with delight, had feet shaped like an animal’s claws. She considered it for some time before following her parents down the stairs again.

  As they reached the hall once more there was a sudden disturbance. The fringed cloth upon the table twitched, and from under it emerged a large tabby cat, which strode into the middle of the carpet and sat staring at them for a moment. Then it set about washing its face.

  “Fully furnished seemed to include resident cat,” said Mr Foster. “Nobody said anything about that.”

  The cat yawned and wandered out of the open front door. It cast a speculative look at the car and stalked off into a shrubbery.

  Mr and Mrs Foster became active and business-like, unloading the car, carrying things into the house and investigating the cooker and the electrical appliances, which seemed to be firmly of the twentieth century. Maria followed them around, helping when asked.

  “Which room would you like, darling? This one, with the view of the sea?”

  Maria went to the window. It was the same view of the sea and harbour, horizon and cloud, that she had studied from the garden, with, this time, the garden itself in front. The window rattled in a gust of wind and again she thought she heard a swing squeak.

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  The room itself was small, and much filled with furniture – little round tables with frilled edges, a rather high large bed with brass rails at head and foot, many sombre pictures, and, on one of the tables, a miniature chest about eighteen inches high with many small drawers. Maria opened one, and was confronted with three rows of bluish-grey fossils, like little ridged wheels, neatly arranged on faded brown stuff like felt and labelled in small meticulous handwriting. Promicroceras planicosta, she read. Asteroceras obtusum.

  “Well,” said her mother. “We’d better get the cases up. Are you coming?”

  “In a minute,” said Maria.

  She closed the drawer of the chest, deciding to save the fossils until later. She got up on the bed and bounced. It was lumpy but somehow embracing. The big chest of drawers was empty and smelled of moth-balls. She turned to the window and looked out into the garden. There was a huge dark tree at one side of it that she had not noticed before, a very solid and ancient-looking tree, quite different from the more ordinary and recognisable ones that swayed and shook in the sea wind. The garden seemed to perch on the hillside, suspended above the sea, a bare, rather neglected garden, with hardly any flowers. The trees and shrubberies, though, were inviting. They would have to be explored.

  The cat brushed its way into the room, making her jump and stumble against one of the small tables. An ornament fell to the floor. She picked it up and saw guiltily that it was chipped. She put it back on the table.

  “Fool,” said the cat.
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br />   “What?”

  “Fool, I said. I suppose you think you’ll get away with that.”

  “I might,” said Maria.

  The cat yawned. “Possibly,” it said. “And again possibly not.” It licked one paw delicately, sitting in a patch of sunlight.

  “I must say you’ve got some very attractive Victorian atmosphere here,” said Maria.

  “We aim to please,” said the cat.

  “Where’s the swing?” Maria asked.

  “There isn’t one.”

  “Yes, there is. I heard it squeaking.”

  “Have it your own way,” said the cat. “You’ll soon find out.” It squinted at her through half-closed eyes and went on, “And don’t maul me about. I can’t stand it. The last lot were forever patting and stroking. ‘Nice pussy, dear pussy.’ Ugh!”

  “I don’t like cats,” said Maria.

  “And I’m not keen on children. How old are you? Nine?”

  “Eleven,” said Maria coldly.

  “Bit small, aren’t you?”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “Rather on the plain side too, I’d say. Mousy. Not like that Caroline next door to you at home. Her with the long fair hair. And the two sisters she’s always rushing about with. Laughing and pushing each other.”

  “You would know about Caroline,” said Maria.

  The cat inspected its paw, and stretched. “Is your mother a good cook?”

  “Very,” said Maria.

  “Lavish helpings? Plenty of scraps left – that kind of thing?”

  “I should think you’ll be all right.”

  “Good,” said the cat. “Last week was a bit thin. Big family. Everyone after the pickings. There’s a lot to be said for a small litter.” It eyed Maria thoughtfully, “Or don’t you agree?”

  “You can’t be sure,” said Maria, “when you are. You don’t know what it would be like otherwise. They nearly didn’t have me, you know. I heard my mother say so once to her friend. But they’re glad they did now.”

  “Is that so?” said the cat. “Fancy.” It sounded unconvinced. “Well, I’ll be seeing you, no doubt.” It sauntered out of the room and down the stairs, its tail waving elegantly from side to side.