A Stitch in Time

by Penelope Lively

  “Maps, now,” said Uncle David vaguely, “get a lot out of old maps, myself. Not your aunt’s cup of tea so much, of course. Must show you a book I’ve got sometime.”

  Maria nodded, meaning that she would like that very much. Aunt Ruth, who had been saying to Mrs Foster, as Maria had clearly heard on the edges of her own conversation with Uncle David, “Such funny taste for a little girl – old prints…” turned round suddenly and said, “Well, on our way, I think, dear…” Which meant that she wanted to bustle them both back off home to London. Aunt Ruth, Maria had noticed before, was a person who felt unsafe if detached too long from London. She plunged beyond it, briefly, rather as a nervous swimmer plunges into the sea with head turned always towards the shore. And after that there was a flurry of farewells, and more kissing and being kissed. And then the visitors were gone and the Foster family subsided once more into a private calm. Maria hung the calendar up in her room, with the other months folded behind the August page, and as she did so it occurred to her that it was, in a sense, something of a bad bargain since most of the year was already gone. There is nothing so lifeless as an old calendar, unless it be last year’s diary. Which, Maria thought, is a bit silly, because time isn’t uninteresting just because it’s time that has been had, rather than time that is still to come. And she looked back through the other pages of the calendar, and thought as she did so of her own January (when she had had chickenpox) and March (her birthday, and the month in which she started to have skating lessons) and June (containing her first train journey alone, to visit her godmother). Those months seemed like the filled and labelled jam-jars in the larder at home: the rest, September and October and their neighbours, stood empty and unpredictable.

  Chapter Eight

  THE SWING

  “WHAT WE REALLY need,” said Martin, “is some old curtains. Or a rug or something.” He looked speculatively across the grass at the kitchen window to where Mrs Foster’s head could be seen above the sink, attending to the washing-up.

  “I don’t think it would be much good,” said Maria, “asking.”

  “Is she in a bad mood?” Martin was an expert on the moods of his mother. He observed her with the professional interest of a weather forecaster, and laid his personal plans according to what the outlook seemed to be.

  “Not specially,” said Maria. “It’s just she wouldn’t let us have things out of somebody else’s house.”

  They were making a camp in the shrubbery, to the intense indignation of the cat, whose private jungle this was, for the molesting of the bird and mouse life therein. It sat on the edge of the lawn, staring resentfully at them and twitching the tip of its tail. Maria, trotting to and fro as she carried out Martin’s instructions, avoided it as far as possible.

  “Oh, well,” said Martin, “never mind. We’ll have to make a roof out of sticks and things. You get in that thick bit there and see what you can find.”

  Maria, wriggling on her stomach through an especially resistant bush, thought how peculiar it is that one does not mind being ordered about by certain people. Indeed, one can positively enjoy it. Even when, as in this case, it involved being beaten around the head by the branches of a bush which seemed actually to have a life of its own. Oh, bother, she thought, as a leafy switch came lashing back into her face, and then, out loud, “Ow…” as her knee caught on something hard and sharp which rent a triangular tear in her jeans.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I cut my knee,” said Maria, fighting back tears and sitting down where she was in this inhospitable bush. The rip in her jeans would have to be sorted out later on with her mother. Beneath it was a pink graze on her knee, which, as she examined it, began to ooze blood. She looked down at the ground to see what it was she had come up against.

  It was a piece of rusty iron, with a smattering of black paint clinging to it here and there, which reached away beyond her further into the shrubbery. Attached to it was a length of thick chain. She gave this a pull and it came lifting up from the leafmould with, attached to it, an oblong of black metal in which was punched a pattern of holes.

  Martin’s face appeared through the leaves. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can mop it up on my shirt.”

  “Thank you,” said Maria humbly.

  “What’s this thing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s get it out. It might be useful.”

  With something of a struggle, they got the lengths of metal, the chain, and the attached oblong out on to the grass. It was heavy and there was a good deal of it. Once there, it looked like the collapsed framework for some unidentifiable piece of industrial machinery. Martin heaved it around thoughtfully, and finally sat down and looked at it. He was, Maria knew, considering its future rather than its past, and thinking of this, everything suddenly fell into place with beautiful clarity.

  “It’s a swing,” she said.

  Martin stared.

  “Those are the side bits, and the chains hang from that bar, and that thing with holes in it is the seat. Was the seat.”

  “Actually,” said Martin, after a moment, “you’re right.”

  “I know,” said Maria.

  Like I’ve always known it was here somewhere, she thought. Because it’s been making noises to tell me it was (and all right I know it’s impossible for it to do that buried away under a whole lot of leaves lying on its side, but it did, and that’s that). And of course, she thought, it’s their swing – Susan’s and Harriet’s. Their swing that they put in the sampler. The dog and the swing, I’ve been hearing them both…

  “Come on,” said Martin, “let’s get going…”

  All thoughts of the camp were abandoned. They laid the framework of the swing out on the lawn in its correct position and then, with much heaving and three pinched fingers between them, got it up on its feet. It lurched at an uncomfortable angle owing to the fact that one of the bars separating the supports on one side had lost a screw and hung down uselessly, and the seat was not properly attached to the chain in one place. And it was rusty. Otherwise it was magnificent.

  “Screwdriver,” said Martin. “And screws. And black paint. And two brushes. And stuff for scraping rust off. Go and ask her.”

  “Only if I have first go,” said Maria decidedly.

  Martin stared for a moment as though he thought he could not have heard her right. Then he said, “OK. But hurry.”

  “You won’t get on it while I’ve gone? Promise?”

  “What on earth’s the matter with you?”

  “I found it,” said Maria. “It’s mine. But you can share it,” she added.

  “Thanks,” said Martin, in not quite his usual voice.

  At least, she thought, as she rushed into the house, it’s theirs really but it’s mine as though I’d kind of inherited it, and I know they wouldn’t mind that in fact I should think they’d be quite pleased if we get it all nice again.

  “You want what?” said Mrs Foster, looking out of the window in surprise at what had suddenly blossomed upon the lawn in the middle of this August Thursday afternoon. “Good heavens, Maria, what have you got hold of…?”

  Screws and screwdriver could be managed, it seemed. Black paint and brushes were another matter. Mrs Foster, out in the garden, watched with apprehension while Martin ministered to the swing with tools and an expression of ferocious concentration.

  “If you could just wait till this evening, Martin, when Maria’s father gets back, he’d do it all for you and I would feel happier really if…”

  “No…” said Maria in anguish and her mother, quelled by the passion in her voice, stood back and watched in a nervous silence.

  “There,” said Martin. “It’s safe now…” He put a hand on the seat and pressed. The swing, foursquare on its feet now, stood firm in the middle of the lawn and sent a long, elegant shadow, pierced and patterned where the ironwork of the swing was pierced and patterned, streaming down the lawn in
the late afternoon sunshine. “Go on. Try it.”

  “No,” said Maria. “Not till it’s finished. Painted and all.”

  “Painted…” said Mrs Foster doubtfully. “Really I’m not at all sure that I…”

  “The shop on the corner,” said Martin to Maria.

  “I’ve got sixty-five pence holiday money still…”

  “Mum owes me last week’s pocket-money. And forty pence she borrowed yesterday.”

  They had gone before Mrs Foster could marshal her misgivings. In the shop, choice and decision confronted them. There is not just paint, it seemed. There is paint that is non-drip and paint that is vinyl or emulsion and paint that is specially good for this, that or the other.

  “Shiny paint,” said Maria. “The shiniest kind of black paint.”

  “We don’t mind a bit of drip,” said Martin. “Actually we quite like it.”

  “Gloss,” said the assistant. “You want a high gloss black enamel. Pint or half-pint?”

  “Pint,” said Martin. “And sandpaper. Two bits.”

  The problem of the brushes nearly wrecked the whole thing. There was only enough money for one very small one. But then, after a feverish hunt, another was found in a box of junk at the back of a cupboard in the house, and they were equipped.

  “You rub it down first,” said Martin. “I know. I’ve seen my dad. Otherwise the paint doesn’t go on properly.”

  They rubbed, as the shadow of the swing grew longer and then was engulfed in a huge tide of shadow that came creeping down the lawn from the house. And then when they had rubbed they began to paint and as the sun sank slowly behind the house they painted away there in a companionable silence interrupted by nothing but the swish of their brushes and the distant, satisfactorily distant, noise of the rest of Martin’s family squabbling in the next-door garden.

  “Great…” said Martin once, with a long, succulent sweep of the brush down a leg of the swing, and Maria nodded. Because painting, she had already decided, was in fact one of the very best things she had ever done. Out of all the many things that she had never done before. Better, almost, than swimming in a swimming-pool. Or skating.

  “I’m doing the seat,” she said. “Please.”

  “OK,” said Martin.

  There is the moment you dip the brush in the paint, and tap it on the edge to get rid of the drips, and there it is all lush and fat with paint in your hand, ready for the stroke down that sad, hungry, unpainted surface. And there is the moment you lay it on the dull, unpainted surface, and what was rusty and tattered is transformed with one majestic sweep into glistening sparkling black. And there is the dabbing at the links of the chain to make them all neat and painty once more, and the picking out of every curl and flourish of the swing’s seat, and the lying on your back to get at the underneath…

  “That’s it,” said Martin.

  They stood back and surveyed it. It gleamed. It shone. It was reborn. It had died and been buried under a bush and now it was reborn. It was brand new. Brand, shining, black new. It was made yesterday.

  “It must be quite old,” said Martin.

  “It’s more than a hundred years old,” said Maria. “Quite a bit more. You see they…” and she stopped. “I just know,” she said.

  “Tomorrow,” said Martin, “when it’s dry…” and she nodded. “Early. Straight after breakfast.” And he was gone, through the hedge and back to the hotel to explain to his mother about the black paint that had, most perversely, appeared all over arms, legs, faces, shoes, jeans…

  And even, as Maria discovered, standing at her window in the twilight, in one’s hair. She tugged at the comb until her eyes smarted, and then, guiltily, abandoned the problem and her uncombed hair with it. Maybe it would melt out, somehow, during the night. She looked out at the swing, slowly disappearing now into the dusk that crept over the garden so that what had been lawn merging into the gloom of the shrubbery and encircling trees was now all one single pool of darkness with the swing just holding its own as a darker outline in the centre. And then the light ebbed away still more so that she could not really see the swing, and she put her light out and got into bed. She slept profoundly, except that once she woke in the night to hear a wind stirring the trees and gently rattling the window, and, above that, the melancholy noise of the swing.

  And this time, she thought, falling away into sleep again, I’m not imagining it, whatever I may have been doing before. Because it’s out there, real, and tomorrow I’m going to have first go on it.

  She was tempted, in the morning, to rush straight out and on to it. She did, indeed, go out before breakfast, and the sun was shining and that wind in the night had made the paint as hard and dry as bone, with a glorious satin feel to it as you slid your hand down the shafts, or over the seat. But she resisted the temptation, ate her breakfast, and then sat at the edge of the lawn waiting for Martin.

  He came at last.

  “It needs oiling. I could hear it squeaking in the night.”

  “It always squeaked,” said Maria.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “It doesn’t matter. All right, we’ll oil it.”

  There was a pause. “Go on,” said Martin.

  She sat on the seat. It was hard, and she could feel through her jeans the patterning of the iron, holes and curls and lines (how odd that you can feel a pattern even if you can’t see it…), and the warmth of it, from the sun.

  “Shall I push you?”

  “No,” said Maria.

  She began to work at it, leaning back and putting her legs out straight in front and pulling at the chains, and it swung, in wider and wider sweeps. She was leaving the lawn, and Martin standing down there watching her, and flying up and up, so that at the peak of each sweep she hung for an instant looking down at the house and the ilex tree and the brick terrace behind the house with its plants in pots – no, urns, those things are called – that somehow you didn’t normally notice from down below, on the same level. Like, somehow, the ilex tree looked very much smaller from up here, quite a young tree, really, without that great thick trunk and branches like armchairs… And the house looked different too, more like the house in the sampler, brown not white. She worked harder, pulling and letting go at just the right moment so that the swing flew up and bucked for a moment at the end of its flight, and then swept back again so that her skirts which had belled out as she went up, letting a gale of glorious cool air up her legs, went swishing down again, and the hair which had streamed away backwards came forward all over her face… Up and down, backwards and forwards, carving half-circles to and fro above the grass, an upward climb, and then a lovely shivery descent, rushing feet first down to the ground again, and then forward and up only to be snatched back and down again in a breathtaking swoop, skirt and pinny flying, hair everywhere now because her band had come off and blown away down the lawn. I want to go on doing this for ever and ever, she thought, I’ll never stop, I’ll stay here for ever swinging. I’ll always be here…

  And thinking this she paid no attention to someone who stood shouting, “It’s my turn now. It’s not fair, Harry, it’s my turn.” She pretended not to hear, swooping down and up, down and up, her feet skimming the grass before she flew up again level with the trees and the sky itself, it seemed, away from Susan down there wanting her turn and Fido rushing round in circles yapping…

  “It’s my turn!”

  “What?”

  “I said,” said Martin. “It’s my turn. You’ve had ages…”

  She stopped leaning back, and let her legs sag, and the flights of the swing sagged also down and down until it was just rocking a little, and she was sitting there staring at Martin and the great brooding presence of the ilex tree and the crisp white back of the house and the brick terrace (crumbling rather, with clumps of grass pushing up through the brick – no urns) and Martin, scowling somewhat.

  “What on earth’s the matter? You look most peculiar.”

  “So do you,” s
napped Maria, tears suddenly springing to her eyes. And she slid off the swing, caught and ripped her jeans again on a jutting piece of iron as she did so, and went running into the house and up to her room.

  From where, two remorseful hours later, she came back down into the garden in search of him. Recovering from a surge of emotion is like recovering from a sudden attack of fever. You are left feeling exhausted, ill-used, and, in Maria’s case, distinctly guilty as though the illness were entirely your own fault as a result of eating too much rich and forbidden food. Because she was not, as it happened, a bad-tempered person, in the normal way of things. And, in all fairness, it had been Martin’s turn. Accordingly, it was in a shrivelled and tormented state that she lurked by the gap in the hedge, waiting till he should appear in the hotel garden. The cat, with something unpleasant that it had taken from the dustbin, squatted under a bush and made remarks about people who were nasty to their friends.

  He arrived just before lunch, with wet hair, straight from the beach.

  “I’m sorry,” said Maria.

  “What about?”

  And as he said it, honestly wanting to know, it occurred to her that for someone as used as Martin to the kaleidoscopic emotions of a large family, an outburst of temper a couple of hours ago is really neither here nor there. It is digested, along with the last meal.

  “I’m sorry I was cross and didn’t let you have your go on the swing.”

  “That’s all right,” said Martin cheerfully. “I did, anyway. Good, isn’t it?”

  “Super,” said Maria.

  And they swung, alternately, five minutes each, until it was time for lunch.

  The afternoon was spent on the beach with the Lucases. Mrs Foster was always pleased (if faintly guilty) to accept an offer for Maria to go off with them, thus excusing her the beach and freeing her for a contented and solitary afternoon with the patchwork quilt.

  “It’s very kind of Mrs Lucas.”

  “Not really,” said Maria thoughtfully. Her mother stared.