A Stitch in Time

by Penelope Lively

  And don’t, she said to the tree with sudden passion, don’t tell me it was all my imagination. Because I don’t believe it. Like I don’t believe in her being grown-up, like Martin said she was. I think… I think something happened to her, but I don’t know what.

  The thought trailed away into a whisper, among the whispering leaves of the tree.

  Chapter Seven

  AN AFTERNOON WALK AND A CALENDAR

  ONCE, WHEN MARIA was younger, she had imagined a burglar. She had imagined him on to the ledge outside her window, and clothed him in dark furtive clothes, and given him a stocking over his head that horribly blunted his features as in a picture she had once seen in a newspaper. And then somehow he had got out of control, this burglar, and instead of staying where he was or dissolving like a nightmare as you wake, he had tampered with the catch of the window so that lying in bed she distinctly heard it click, and the window lift, and then there he was climbing into the darkness of the room, and she had huddled there first quaking and then finally screaming at full pitch till people came, lights snapped on… And then, of course, the burglar picked his moment to vanish, leaving Maria hysterical in an empty room.

  But I have grown out of that kind of thing now, she thought. I can deal with burglars, and the stairs creaking in the night, and thunderstorms. I can even go to the bathroom in the dark if I can’t find the electric light switch. I am on the way to being grown-up and not having problems of that kind at all.

  “That’s what you think,” said the cat. “What about the time you lost your head in the supermarket and rushed about weeping?”

  “That was different,” said Maria. “I couldn’t find my mother. I thought she’d gone without me.”

  “A pretty poor performance, all the same,” said the cat. “Grown-up, my foot…”

  It was sitting at the foot of the ilex tree, grooming its belly in a contorted attitude that involved sticking one leg vertically above its head.

  “You’ve missed a bit,” said Maria, “on your left side.”

  The cat began a vigorous lathering of its ears. “I take it you won’t be mentioning to that boy that you see faces in old samplers?”

  “He’s not all that interested in her, actually,” said Maria.

  “Got some sense. Unlike you.”

  “I don’t see why it’s not sensible to be interested in other people,” said Maria coldly.

  “Well, what could be more silly than spending your time chuntering on about a girl you’ve never known and never will. You could be reading a good book. Improving your mind. Learning something.”

  “Speak for yourself,” snapped Maria.

  “Ah,” said the cat, “but I can’t. Remember?” It flexed its claws, apparently admiring them. “What’s so fascinating about her, anyway? A perfectly ordinary child, no doubt, like yourself.”

  “I don’t think she ever grew up.”

  “Rubbish. Everyone does.”

  “They don’t have to,” said Maria stiffly. After a moment she went on, “There are no photographs of her any older than I am now. And her sister finished the sampler.”

  “Plenty of explanations for that.”

  “And funny things happen here, so that you can’t be quite sure what’s real and what isn’t. There’s a dog that barks but nobody seems to have a dog around here. And I hear this swing that squeaks.”

  “The gate needs oiling,” said the cat. “Old Mrs Thing said. Remember?” It prowled away into the undergrowth, ears flattened, and Maria said to its back view angrily, You don’t care, do you? You don’t care what happened to her. Nobody does, except me. Because I think something happened, and that’s why she didn’t grow up. And with this thought nagging at the back of her mind like a painful tooth, she slid down the last three feet of the tree and landed with a thump on the grass.

  Uncle David and Aunt Ruth had arrived. In consequence, there was more lunch than usual and it was eaten in the dining-room. Maria was kissed, and obligingly kissed people back. She was told that she had grown, and could find nothing to say in response: her uncle and aunt had not visibly changed in any way, so that there was no comment she could make of that kind, unless she was to point out that Aunt Ruth’s hair was untidy, or that Uncle David had cut himself shaving, which would have seemed rude. Only grown-ups, she had learned, are allowed to make remarks about what people look like: if children do so it is rude.

  That being done, she found herself forgotten. She was talked over and around, which she did not mind since it allowed her to get on with various things she wanted to think about. At the end of lunch Uncle David remembered her suddenly and said, “Time Maria and I had a private word,” which he had said on every visit as far back as she could remember and which meant he was about to give her fifty pence. He rummaged in his pocket and for a nasty moment she thought he was going to go on to say, “Dear me, now what can that be behind your right ear?”, which meant that he was going to conjure the fifty pence out of her hair, as he always used to do when she was younger. She stood there resignedly, waiting for this, and the resigned expression must have turned into her cold one, for Uncle David hastily handed over the fifty pence and began to talk to her father.

  After lunch they went for a walk. They started out over the fields to the west of the house, following the path that led to the cliff walk from Lyme to Axmouth. Aunt Ruth made exclaiming noises about how lovely it all was. Uncle David lit his pipe and left behind him an aromatic wake of pipe smoke. Maria’s father instructed the visitors upon the history and topography of the town. Her mother told Aunt Ruth about some material she was thinking of recovering the best chairs in when they went home.

  Maria fell behind. Presently she was some twenty paces from the others, which allowed her to get on with her own thoughts without having to be interrupted by what other people were saying. She felt quite alone in this sunlit airy place, suspended between the mysterious depths of the sky above and the restless shimmering of the sea. Stopping for a moment, and looking back, she could see the rooftops of the town spilling down to the shore between green flanks of hill, and, beyond it, a landscape neatly squared off into fields, with the town fingering out into it, spawning houses along the roads. And underneath it all, thought Maria, there’s rock, our blue lias, full of ammonites and belemnites and everything. People dump houses on it, and petrol stations, and churches, and branches of Tesco, and underneath it all the place stays what it was in the beginning, before everything, millions and millions of years ago…

  About a hundred and forty million years, for instance, like those pictures in the museum said. On a Saturday afternoon then (if they bothered with Saturdays, that is) there’d have been pterodactyls flying around instead of seagulls, and ichthyosauruses on the beach instead of people’s dogs. And ammonites everywhere, like we have flies now – no, like herrings because they were in the water, of course.

  “Maria…”

  “Coming,” said Maria, without having heard, dawdling along the path, which had left the fields now and wound among trees. How very peculiar, she thought. There are places, and they go on for ever and ever. And there are people (and dinosaurs and things) and they don’t. And there are days and months and years (and centuries, in millions). The fossils are here, and Harriet, and me, like beads on a necklace. One after another, and yet all at once.

  “Maria, will you hurry up!”

  They were standing waiting for her at a point where the path plunged off into deeper woodland.

  “Tired, dear?” said Aunt Ruth kindly, and Maria stared at her with a blank cold face, not because she felt either blank or cold but because a torrent of thoughts was still going through her head about places, pterodactyls and a girl who made a sampler.

  “Maria…” said her mother, and Maria jumped and said no thank you she wasn’t tired at all.

  “Onward?” said Mr Foster, and there was a break for discussion while everyone said what they thought about going onward or not. Mr Foster and Uncle David were in favour
of it. Mrs Foster wanted to be back not too late to get the supper on. Aunt Ruth thought the path looked a bit steep and wondered about her shoes. A notice said that you could walk to Axmouth and back, but it would take you three or four hours and be very strenuous, which was perhaps why Aunt Ruth gazed longingly back towards Lyme Regis.

  “Just part of the way,” said Mr Foster, “until we start to flag. The weak may fall by the wayside.” He set off briskly between the trees.

  Maria dropped behind once more and returned to this question of places. Can places, she wondered, like clocks, stop? So that a moment goes on, as it were, for ever – like the ammonites suspended in a piece of rock. I wish it was like that, she thought, how interesting that would be. As interesting as if you could see into other people’s heads, seeing backwards like that, as it were, into somebody else’s time. And she seemed to see again that reflected face in the glass of the sampler.

  “Careful, here,” called Mr Foster, “rather a steep bit…” and there was a little flurry of activity ahead as Aunt Ruth, in unsuitable shoes, slithered on the shaly surface of the path, nearly fell, and was set to rights again by Uncle David.

  It was another of those days when bands of sunlight fled along the coast and huge heaps of cloud roamed the sky. In the language of weather forecasting, of course, it would be a day of sunny periods, with perhaps the suggestion of a scattered shower. In any other language, it was a day of gold and palest blue and chestnut brown in which shadows chased across a chameleon sea that melted from turquoise to sombre grey and back to milky green. But the sea was hidden for the most part by the thick belt of trees and bushes through which they walked along a path that climbed and then suddenly dropped again. At each side of the path wild plants arranged themselves according to preference, tall things in clumps that swayed before the wind, creeping things that swarmed over low rocks and nestled down in the grass. Grass vetchling, thought Maria, I know that one now, and this green thing like a little pine tree is giant horsetail – we looked that up in the flower book – and that’s spurge and that’s lesser celandine. And, examining this tangle of growth, she was struck by the orderliness of it all, the way in which each plant knows its place and sticks to it. A pocket of rich damp earth for one; a sandy shelf for another. Which, for things that can’t think, seemed really rather clever. A shower of thistledown drifted away down to the sea. Waste, thought Maria sternly, not so clever.

  These ups and downs, she realised, these great bites out of the ground that were giving Aunt Ruth so much trouble (as the path got rougher and steeper her murmurings about how late she thought it might be getting grew louder and stronger) must be old landslides. But very old, years and years ago, because all was covered now in trees and bushes. And now they went steeply down and came to a place where the trees were yet taller and older, their reptilian roots lying exposed across the path (and proving yet another hazard to poor Aunt Ruth). And the things that grew were different also. Ferns and wild garlic and a strange primeval reed-like plant with drooping head.

  “Oh dear,” said Aunt Ruth breathlessly. “Up we go again…”

  It was very quiet. From time to time a pigeon lurched from one tree to another. Leaves rustled. A seagull sailed over somewhere out of sight, with a sad trailing cry. Otherwise there was nothing to be heard but the sound of their own footsteps and Uncle David talking to Maria’s father.

  And then, suddenly, a dog barking. No, thought Maria, yapping not barking. A bark is the loud important noise that big dogs make. This is the noise that a small dog makes, a rather silly small dog, the kind that runs round and round in circles and gets over-excited. And she looked round for the dog, which was quite clearly here, and yet nowhere to be seen, in this tipping, shelving place of trees and bushes. And as she realised this it came to her, slowly but somehow not all that surprisingly, that this was the dog she had heard barking from the garden back at the holiday house.

  She caught up with the others.

  “There’s a dog got lost somewhere. Yapping and yapping.”

  They stopped, and without footsteps the place was quite still, with only wind and sea and bird noises. And this dog.

  “Where, dear?”

  “Here,” said Maria, in an off-hand voice, “somewhere just near.” Poor little dog, it was really in a dreadful state, quite hysterical.

  They looked all round, and at each other, the four of them. Uncle David shook his head in a bewildered manner and set about relighting his pipe, a tricky process of putting himself between the wind and the lighted match.

  “Well,” said Mrs Foster, “I’m afraid I can’t hear anything.”

  Maria looked at them blankly, listening to the dog.

  “Of course,” said Aunt Ruth, “she may have much keener hearing. You’d expect it, at that age.”

  The dog was working itself up into a most dreadful frenzy. It’s not lost, thought Maria, that’s not what’s the matter. It’s that something’s happening that’s upsetting it. And even as she thought this the noise of the dog was swamped by another noise, a kind of rushing and tearing and slipping noise as though all of a sudden the whole world was on the move, and through it, just, came the anguish of that distraught dog, and someone shouting. Children shouting.

  “Oh…” said Maria, with this noise in her ears, and as it gathered and drowned everything she found herself clutching the thin trunk of a tree beside the path, for suddenly the very ground under her feet seemed no longer quite reliable.

  “Maria, whatever is the matter?” said her father crossly, and as he said it the noise stopped, and the dog too, and the path became quite steady again and Maria let go of the tree.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  And she bent down to do up the strap of her sandal, which was tiresomely flapping. For there was nothing any more. And with the world quite solid again, and the dog vanished and that other strange noise with it, the whole business seemed not quite real, just as yesterday the face of that girl in the glass of the sampler seemed an instant later as though it had perhaps not been there at all.

  “Well,” said Uncle David, “push on, shall we?”

  But Aunt Ruth had had enough. She didn’t want to be a drag and of course everyone else must carry on, she’d be quite happy to sit here for a bit (with an unenthusiastic glance at the undergrowth of bramble and nettles) but she did feel perhaps time was pressing rather.

  And so they all turned round and set off back again, with Aunt Ruth at the back, becoming noticeably silent on the uphill bits, and Maria in front this time, because the feelings she had just been having for some reason made her want to get back too.

  At the corner of their road she remembered the fifty pence in her pocket, and the calendar that she had already promised herself, and she went into the shop and bought it. Her father and Uncle David broke off their conversation as she came out to look down at her with kindly interest.

  “Well,” said her father, “and what’s Maria been squandering her pennies on?”

  “A nice drawing-book, I expect,” said Aunt Ruth.

  They gazed at the calendar in surprise. “Very nice,” said Uncle David. “Good old-fashioned pictures, eh? Reminds you of Dickens and that sort of thing. Very pretty.”

  “That’s what you really wanted?” said Mrs Foster.

  What she means, of course, thought Maria, is that she can’t imagine why. And turning over the pages of the calendar, from one greyish picture to another, she could quite see how it would appear to someone else, humbly competing with those handsome coloured views of selected bits of Dorset, immaculately photographed cottages and cliffs and downland scenes.

  “Turns the clock back a bit, eh?” said Uncle David, looking over her shoulder, and Maria gave him a startled glance.

  September, she now saw, offered a view of the town and the coastline to the left, as though someone had sat a half-mile or so offshore in a fishing-boat to draw it. The cliffs were covered with trees, thickly, as now.

  “Let’s see…”
said Uncle David. “We’d be about there, yes?” and his large finger came down at a point on the picture at the edge of Lyme. “Town’s spread a bit since then. Only two or three houses along there in those days.”

  “One of them’s ours,” said Maria.

  “Is that so?” said Uncle David doubtfully. He peered more closely at the picture. “Not really clear enough to be sure about that.”

  “It is,” said Maria.

  “And that’s where we’ve just been walking. Been a bit of cliff erosion since, by the look of it.”

  And about that he was perfectly right, for the picture showed a more regular coastline than the steeply shelving woods in which they had just been walking. So at least some of that happened since the picture was made, thought Maria. I wonder when? And looking at the bottom corner of the print she saw 1840 in small sloping letters.

  Since 1840, anyway, and Susan and Harriet weren’t even born then, because Susan finished the sampler in 1865. In September 1865. But those trees we walked through were quite old so it didn’t happen all that long after. I wonder, she thought, I wonder if… And a thought, a disturbing thought, came into her head and hung there like a grey cloud until Uncle David spoke again.

  “Interesting,” said Uncle David, “seeing how a place changes, that kind of thing…”

  “Yes,” said Maria warmly, and for an instant there passed between them a sympathy that quite blotted out the fact that Maria was eleven and Uncle David really quite old, and that usually they could not think of anything much to say to each other.