With their possessions spread around the house – paperback books on the tables in the drawing-room, groceries in the kitchen, coats in the hall – its strong personality began to seem a little diluted. It became slightly more docile, as though it belonged to them instead of being entirely independent. They ate their lunch in the kitchen: somehow the dining-room seemed too forbidding, at least for cold pork pies and salad. The cat came in and fawned for a while against Mrs Foster’s legs, until fed some scraps. Toady, said Maria to it silently, sucker-up… It gave her a baleful stare and settled down to sleep beside the cooker.
The last tenants of the house had left evidence of themselves in the form of half-emptied packets of cereals on the kitchen shelf (Rice Krispie people they had been, Maria noted, with one family rebel who favoured Frosties), a plastic duck under the bath, a shredded burst balloon and some comics in the waste-paper basket in her room, some bits of Lego down the side of the drawing-room sofa and a battered fork-lift truck behind the cooker. Mrs Foster swept all these objects up and threw them into the dustbin. Maria regretted this: she had been trying to imagine from them what this invisible family might have been like. They seemed to have been of mixed ages and sexes. The house, she thought, must have been noisy last week. It was very quiet now, after lunch, as her mother washed up, her father read the newspaper, and she stood looking out into the garden.
“Shall we go and see what the beach is like?”
“Yes, please,” said Maria.
The beach that they went to was a couple of miles or so from the town. Maria, with several years’ experience of beaches behind her, found herself instantly awarding it a high mark. It was unassuming, to begin with – a row of beach huts being about the only facilities it offered. And the clutches of people spread fairly thickly over the area near the car park and beach huts soon thinned out so that to either side the beach stretched away more and more uncluttered, with just a dog or child scampering at the water’s edge, or family group encamped against the cliff.
It was the cliffs that instantly attracted her attention. Again, they made no large claims: not for them the craggy grandeurs of Cornwall or Wales. And they looked, in some indefinable way, soft rather than hard. It was the colour, chiefly, the slaty grey-blue that matched so nearly the now clouded sky, so that the sea, which had changed from milky green to a pale turquoise, lay as a belt of colour between the grey cliffs, the bright shingle of the beach, and the grey sky. And yet they were not, she saw, the same colour all the way up. They were capped at the top with a layer of golden-brown, which in turn was finished off with a green skin of vegetation. And here and there the three levels of colour became confused and inter-mixed, where grass and trees and bushes apparently tumbled in a green tongue down the face of the cliff. She stood staring, entranced, at this agreeable place where Dorset ends, and England, and both slide gracefully away into the sea.
“Here, I think,” said Mrs Foster. They spread their rug and sat.
They were sitting, as Maria soon found, upon more than just a slab of this grey-blue stone. In the first place it was not stone at all, but a hard, dry clay. A piece of it flaked off under her fingers, as she scratched idly at it. And then, looking closer, lying on her stomach with her face a few inches above the rock, it came to life suddenly under her very eyes. For it was inhabited. There, like delicate scribblings upon the clay, were the whirls and spirals of shell-like creatures – the same, she recognised, as those in the miniature chest of drawers in her room back at that house. But smaller, these were, barely an inch or so across, some of them, but perfect in each ridge and twist. And as she prised one out with the edge of a shell, it crumbled between her fingers into blue dust, but there, below and beneath, was another, and another, and another. The whole rock streamed with a petrified ghost-life.
“Look,” said Maria.
“Fossils,” said her mother. “Ammonites. This coast is famous for fossils. You could collect them.” She settled herself on her back, a hump of jerseys under her head, and turned the page of her book.
But I don’t want to spoil these any more, Maria thought. They’re so pretty. And they’ve been there for millions and millions of years so it’s stupid to spend a Friday afternoon now picking them out and breaking them. If I was good at drawing I would draw a picture of them.
Instead, she examined the rock carefully, to remember it, and then wandered off among the neighbouring rocks to see if there were any more the same. Most were smooth and empty but one or two glinted with this remote life, though less lavishly. And then she found that by exploring carefully among the pebbles and chunks of rock with which this part of the beach was littered, she could collect fossil fragments, like sections of small grey wheels, and occasionally a small, complete, flat one. Once she found a slab of the blue-grey stone, nine or ten inches across, in which two of the fossils hung one above another – ghostly creatures suspended in the small chunk of a solidified ancient sea that she held between her hands. She wrapped it in her anorak to take back with her.
Late in the afternoon they walked back to the car park along a beach from which the sea had retreated, leaving huge expanses of glistening sand on which children ran and shouted. At the edge of the distant water sea birds scurried to and fro before the waves. People were gathering themselves together, picking up buckets, spades, picnic baskets, folding chairs. What are beaches like at night, Maria wondered, all empty…
“I expect you’ll soon make some friends down here,” said her mother.
“Yes, I expect so,” said Maria, without conviction.
Back at the house, in the privacy of her room, she laid the fossils out on the chest. It did not seem her room yet. Last week, after all, someone else had called it their room, and a week or two before that, someone else. It felt impersonal – not quite rejecting her, but not welcoming either. The fossils, she felt, might establish her in some way. I will get a book about fossils, she thought, and see what kind they are, and put labels on them like that other person did once, who found the ones in the miniature chest of drawers. Had that person, she wondered, collected them from that same stretch of beach? They were much superior to her broken fragments. Taking them out of the drawers to examine more carefully, one by one, she heard the squeak of that swing again, and went to the window to see if she could see it in the next-door garden. Trees, though, blocked the view.
Her father came along the passage and stopped at the open door of the room.
“Well, then… All settled in?”
“Yes,” said Maria. Her father was older than most people’s fathers; he was beginning to go bald, his hair forming a neat horse-shoe around his scalp. He had changed from his holiday shirt into a special holiday sweater, she noticed. They looked at each other, as they often did, both wondering what to say next.
“Explored everything by now, I expect,” said Mr Foster.
“I haven’t seen all of the garden yet.”
Mr Foster looked out into the garden with faint alarm, as though it might make demands of him. In London they had no garden.
“Yes,” he said. “Well, I daresay it could come in useful.”
There was silence. “Well,” said Mr Foster, “I suppose it’s about time for supper.” He went downstairs.
They spent a quiet evening, going early to bed. Maria, feeling drugged by wind and sea, slept soundly, woken only once by some small dog that barked shrilly from somewhere outside.
Chapter Two
AN ILEX TREE AND A BOY
THE GARDEN, SHE discovered the next day, had possibilities. Without flower-beds, and furnished entirely with trees and shrubs that were clearly more or less indestructible, it was not at all the kind of garden in which you are being forever told not to step on the flowers or climb the trees. The huge, dank shrubbery that separated it from the next-door garden was a rabbit-warren of leafy tunnels and tents, inviting games of one kind or another. The trouble was that there was no one to play them with. Maria crawled aimlessly through and around. T
hen she turned to tree-climbing. One tree in particular attracted attention. It was the big dark tree she had noticed from the window, thickly leaved with shiny dark green leaves, and with massive trunk and branches that led on enticingly one from another, and met the trunk in ample curves that made natural sitting places. One, she found, was a perfect armchair vantage-point, not too alarmingly far above the ground, but commanding a view through the leaves into the next-door garden.
She sat there, watching unobserved the comings and goings from within the next-door house – a sprawling and ornate building that was now a private hotel. Ironwork chairs and tables, with sun-umbrellas, adorned the neatly mown lawn. There did not seem to be a swing there either, though there was a small bowling green and a badminton net.
The cat appeared, and sharpened its claws against the trunk of the tree with a rasping noise.
“What did you say your name was?” it said.
“Maria.”
“Mary, you mean.”
“No. Maria.”
“That’s a bit fancy, isn’t it?” said the cat scornfully.
“My mother thinks old-fashioned names are nice.”
“Pretentious, I call it,” said the cat. It watched a clump of grass intently, its tail twitching.
“Does the dog live next door?” said Maria. “The one that barks in the night?”
The cat shuddered. “Do you mind? One has some feelings.”
“I just wondered.”
Some children had come out into the hotel garden and were playing an energetic game of badminton, with much shrieking and shouting.
“Jolly lot,” said the cat. “Why don’t you ask if you can play with them?”
“I might.”
“Go on then.”
“In a minute.”
“You’re scared they wouldn’t want you,” said the cat.
Maria slid down the tree and walked slowly towards the ragged hedge that separated the two gardens at this point. The cat watched her through half-closed eyes. She stood looking at the children for a minute or so and then said, “Actually, I’ve got to go in and help my mother.”
“Sez you,” said the cat.
In the kitchen, her mother was energetically filling shelves and cupboards with their kind of food, and sorting out the crockery.
“Why were you chasing that cat away?”
“It’s an unfriendly cat,” said Maria.
“Nonsense. It’s been purring round my legs all morning.”
Hasn’t she ever noticed, Maria wondered to herself, that people can be quite different depending on whom they’re with? Animals too, presumably. Like Mrs Hayward at school smiles and smiles when there are parents there so you see her teeth all the way round and then when there’s only children again, her face goes all long and thin and you don’t see her teeth any more and her voice goes different too, kind of quicker and crosser…
The front doorbell rang.
“A caller!” said Mrs Foster. “But we don’t know anyone.”
She went through to the hall. Beyond the open door Maria could hear the mixture of voices – a strange one and her mother’s (that’s her talking-to-people-she-doesn’t-know voice, she thought). The voices ebbed and flowed; the kitchen clock ticked; the sun came out and made a neat golden square across half the table, down its legs and on to the floor. Maria became aware that she was being called, and went reluctantly into the hall.
“This is Maria,” said her mother. “Mrs Shand is our landlady. She lives over the road.”
Mrs Shand was very old. Her clothes were old-fashioned but lady-like, Maria recognised; silk dress and brooches and necklaces, and stockings that ended oddly in a pair of white plimsolls. She stared at Maria and said, “The last tenants had four. Just the one will be quite a change. Not that I mind children.”
I have never met a landlady before, thought Maria, so I don’t know if I mind them or not. I expect I shall find out.
“Well,” said Mrs Shand, “there’s plenty of space for the three of you, that’s for sure.”
“Plenty,” said Mrs Foster. “We hadn’t realised quite how large the house was.”
“Tenants are often surprised. The furnishings arouse comment also, from time to time.”
“We like Victorian things,” said Mrs Foster. “Aren’t you afraid of damage, though? With children about, and people being careless…”
“The house has been subjected to children all its life,” said Mrs Shand, a little tartly. “I grew up in it myself, with six brothers and sisters. And my mother before me. It is too old to change, like me. I had the kitchen modernised, as they call it. People seemed to object to the old arrangements.”
Maria, who had been studying the face on a cameo brooch pinned to the neck of Mrs Shand’s dress, and only half listening to the conversation, began suddenly to pay attention. How very strange to be staying in a house in which a great many children had grown up. In her own home, there had only been her: it was built eight years ago, and was younger, in fact, than she was. She thought of Mrs Shand, standing in this same doorway years ago as a girl her own age. She stared at the landlady’s face – hatched over with tiny, thread-like lines – for the shadow of this other person she must once have been, and could not find it. Had she, and others, leapt down those stairs three steps at a time, and sat in the tree in the garden?
“Maria,” said her mother, “Mrs Shand was speaking to you.”
Maria jumped, and paid attention again.
“I asked,” said Mrs Shand, “which room you chose for yourself.”
“The one at the back,” said Maria. “The little one.”
“Ah. The old nursery. That was always the children’s room. You can hear the sea at night.”
And the swing, thought Maria, and was going to ask about this swing when her mother began to speak. The conversation moved away to matters of newspaper deliveries and the electricity meter.
“Well,” said Mrs Shand, in a concluding tone of voice, “I think that is about all I need to tell you. The piano was tuned last month. Please feel free to use it.” She looked reflectively at Maria. “Quiet little thing, isn’t she? You are welcome to call in if there is anything you wish to ask about.” And then her grey and white patterned silk back view vanished between the green hedges of the drive.
“She matches the house nicely,” said Mrs Foster.
“Why doesn’t she live in it any more?”
“She finds it too big. She lives in a flat in the guest-house over the road.”
“I wish she’d taken her cat with her,” said Maria. And I wish I’d asked her about the swing, she thought. Never mind. Another time.
In the afternoon it rained. Excused the beach, Mrs Foster settled herself in the drawing-room to read, with barely concealed relief. Mr Foster went to sleep. Maria stared at the rain from her bedroom window for a while: it coursed down the glass in oily rivers, making the outline of the dark tree in the garden (her tree, as she now thought of it, the one that she had climbed that morning) swim and tremble like seaweed in a rock-pool. The thought of seaweed reminded her of the fossils from the beach and it occurred to her that she had meant to find out what they were called, and label them. She began to arrange them, comparing them with the ones in the miniature chest of drawers. Some were just the same, which made identification easy enough. She wrote their names in her best writing on small pieces of paper – Promicroceras… Asteroceras… – and arranged them in nests of cotton wool from the bathroom. It looked professional and scientific. One fossil, though, refused to be identified. It was a very ghostly thing, in the first place, just a hint of patterning on a lump of the blue rock that seemed at first glance to be nothing in particular. Only after a while did its lines and patterning become deliberate, the stony shadow of some ancient creature.
What I need, she thought, is a book. And downstairs in that room there are lots of books.
The books, though, when she stood among them in that library between the drawing-room and the
dining-room, were quick remarkably unenticing. They reached from floor to ceiling in tiers of brown, maroon and navy blue. There was nothing gay in sight – not a coloured jacket or illustration – and when she pulled a book or two out at random they each had the same queer smell. It was the smell, she decided, of books that no one has got around to reading for a long time. And the gold-lettered titles on their spines were far from inviting… The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, The Testament of the Rocks, The Principles of Geology. It was as she stared at them with distaste, though, that it occurred to her that words like “rock” and “geology” were to do with fossils. She took one of the books down and there, sure enough, was a page of neat drawings of rock sections, and, a few pages later, of shells. The text, though, was as unintelligible, almost, as though it were in a foreign language, laden with cumbersome words that she could not understand and sentences so long that it was quite impossible to find out what they meant. The drawings, on the other hand, were nice, and one book at least looked as though it might be helpful. She selected an armful and took them upstairs to her bedroom.
Arranged in a row on the table they looked important, if daunting. She sat down at the table – an old, battered one it was, with inky grooves and at one side some deeply inked initials, H.J.P. – and opened The Origin of Species, not very hopefully. It was an extremely solemn book, though one page through which she skipped did talk quite interestingly about striped horses. Most of it she could not understand at all. She scowled at the book, scrubbing the heels of her sandals on the rung of the chair, while outside in the garden that small dog was barking again. This book isn’t going to be any good, she thought, I don’t really understand a word of it. She flipped through the pages, and as she did so the book fell open at the end, and there, on the blank last page, somebody had made drawings with a fine-nibbed pen, with writing beside each one.
A Stitch in Time Page 2
