A Stitch in Time

by Penelope Lively

  “I mean it is kind… But they’ve got so many children she doesn’t notice if there’s an extra one anyway. And if I’m there Martin doesn’t fight with Charlotte and Elisabeth. So it’s quite kind to her in a way too.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs Foster. And then, “Yes, I see.” She looked at Maria with something like bewilderment and Maria turned pink and went to find her bathing costume.

  There was an oppressiveness about the weather. The sky seemed to have descended until a belt of pewter cloud, matching the cliffs in colour, lay overhead, sandwiching beach, fields and town between the layers of grey sea, sky and cliffs. Maria, looking up from the carpet of shattered blue lias amid which they were currently fossil-hunting, said, “I feel like an ammonite.”

  “How?”

  “Shut up in greyness.”

  “It’s going to rain, that’s all,” said Martin sensibly.

  “You know,” said Maria, “the other day a most peculiar thing happened…”

  Silence, if you are embarking on an important piece of information, is quite encouraging. “We were walking,” she went on, to Martin’s back view, “along the cliff path on the other side of the town – and we went down one of the bites – you know what I mean – the places where there’s been a landslip once – and I got this odd feeling…”

  She paused for a moment and then, since Martin’s back expressed no emotion either approving or disapproving, went on ‘… I got this feeling that everything was moving, like if you spin round and round with your arms out, and then stand still. But before that I kept hearing this dog yapping, only there wasn’t any dog, at least I couldn’t see one and the others – they couldn’t even hear it. And it was the same dog I’ve been hearing in the garden at the house, I’m sure of that.”

  “I’ve never heard it,” said Martin. “What dog?” He squatted down over a pile of stones, turning them over.

  “Just a dog,” said Maria lamely. Like, she had been about to say, I used to hear the swing before we found it. She did not, though, say it. Instead she said abruptly, “There’d have been landslips along there, wouldn’t there – where we walked yesterday?”

  “S’pose so,” said Martin. He hammered a stone in half and threw it aside.

  “I think,” said Maria, “I think I kind of got caught up in one that happened there once a long time ago. Heard it all again.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Martin. He stood up and stared at the grey heights of Black Ven.

  “People could have got killed in landslips, couldn’t they?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Children…”

  “Presumably.” He began to wander away through the gorse-bushes.

  “Harriet, perhaps…” said Maria, but he was out of earshot now, and as she trailed after him she said to the fossil in her hand (a small Gryphaea, worn to a shadow by forty odd million years of time and change), I’ve thought so much about Harriet that sometimes I almost feel I am her. Like on the swing the other day I swung higher and higher, she said to it, and I felt as though I was changing into someone else, someone with long skirts on and thick woolly stockings and long hair, not a bit like mine. Harriet, in fact.

  “We’ll try over there,” said Martin.

  “Yes,” said Maria, “that looks a good place.”

  It wasn’t a very good place, after all, yielding nothing but an old Coke tin and some bits of broken plastic.

  “It’s been done,” said Martin, disgusted. “It’s that man with the proper geological hammer. I wish we had one. He’s always going to get things we can’t. Unless we could get to places he doesn’t go.” He stared round at the shelving cliffs, the slipping, sliding landscape of the blue lias.

  “Not up there!” said Maria in alarm.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s dangerous.”

  “I don’t see why. I saw someone up there yesterday. It’s all right if you’re careful.”

  “I don’t think I’d like it,” said Maria. “I feel funny when I’m up high.”

  “Then I’ll go by myself. I daresay,” he said casually, “I might find a Dapedius up there.”

  Large, warm drops of rain were beginning to fall. From down below on the beach they could hear the shouting of Mrs Lucas, rounding up children.

  “Not now, I s’pose,” said Martin. “Some time. Some time soon. It’s almost the end of August. There’s not much longer.”

  Torrential rain fell that night. The swing creaked mournfully in the garden and Maria, infected as it were by the general dismalness of everything, lay in bed listening to it and thinking sad but vague thoughts about things moving and changing all the time and there being nothing at all you can do about it. Days run one into another, until they are last week, or last month, and they have got away and gone under your very fingers, as it were, like water in a river. It’s nearly September, she thought, nearly the end of our summer holiday, and then we’ll be going home and all this time here will be something we’ve put away, like old photographs. And it’ll get muzzy, like old photographs, so you can’t quite remember how it was. This house, and Martin, and the swing, and the fossils, and everything.

  Chapter Nine

  RAIN, AND A GAME OF HIDE-AND-SEEK

  NEXT MORNING, THE world ran with water. It coursed from the roof and found its way to the ground through drainpipes and over the rim of gutters and down the walls themselves, changed from white to grey with damp. The garden was bowed down by water, bushes drooping and flattened, the trees dripping incessantly, the grass treacherous with hidden bogs. The cat, picking its way across the lawn, lifted its sodden feet angrily and sat down on the far side, tail lashing, to stare at the birds who sat huddled on branches and telephone wires, enduring the weather. For still it rained: the view out of the window was blurred with water. Sometimes it fell heavily, in thick sheets, sometimes in misty curtains that swung across the backdrop of the garden and the houses beyond.

  “Well,” said Mrs Foster. “Not a day for the beach.”

  Mr Foster removed himself to the drawing-room with the newspaper.

  “A nice quiet day indoors,” said Mrs Foster with satisfaction. “Will you be all right, darling?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Maria.

  “You could have a nice day reading,” said her mother comfortably. “Or doing a jigsaw. Or playing with those fossils you’ve been finding.”

  “I don’t think I feel like reading,” said Maria. And she added, in her head, with resignation, and you don’t play with fossils.

  “Well,” said Mrs Foster, “I’m sure you’ll think of something.” Her attention, Maria could see, was already with the patchwork quilt.

  The door bell rang. Mrs Foster, peering through the window, said without great enthusiasm, “Here’s Martin,” and then, more brightly, “I expect he’s come to ask you over.”

  But this was not, as it turned out, the case. Mrs Foster’s face, listening to what he had to say, grew more and more dismayed. Finally he stopped, and there was a brief pause, during which both children gazed expectantly at Mrs Foster while she arranged her face into a less appalled expression.

  “Well, no, Martin, of course I don’t mind. No, it would be nice to have you and the girls over if your mother and your aunt want to go off for the day. And James. James is how old? Yes, I see.” The dismay came back for a moment, only rather more so, and then she went on, valiantly, “What about the babies? They’re taking the babies. Yes, well I expect that would be the best thing. Go and tell your mother to send the others over as soon as she likes.”

  Martin departed with the message. Mrs Foster said to Maria, “There now, you won’t be lonely after all.” She looked sadly at her work-basket, and then went into the larder, emerging with a lot of tins to say, “Do you think they would be happy with some kind of stew. For lunch.”

  Maria said she thought they would. And then she did something she did not often do, except when going to bed, which was to kiss her mother. Mrs Foster looked surprised,
kissed back, and became very busy opening tins and mixing things. “I can’t imagine how Mrs Lucas manages,” she said, “every day. Five of them.” And then, hopefully, “Perhaps you could all play a nice quiet board-game.”

  Martin returned, along with James, Charlotte, Elisabeth and Lucy. Martin was behaving in a way that was partly irritable and partly bossy, since this was the house of his friend, which he knew well and the rest didn’t. The others were inquisitive and somewhat overexcited. James instantly fell over the doormat and wept loudly. The girls rushed hither and thither, exploring. Mr Foster put his head round the drawing-room door, took in the situation with one horrified glance, and retreated. Within, he could be heard hastily shutting doors and windows.

  “Gosh! What a super house!”

  “What shall we do?”

  “Where do those stairs go?”

  “Sardines!”

  “Can we go in there?”

  “Hide-and-seek!”

  “Oh, dear…” said Mrs Foster, and then, with more determination, “not in the library, I’m afraid. Or the drawing-room. What about a game of Monopoly?”

  Confronted with the silence of total lack of enthusiasm, she abandoned this proposal.

  “Hide-and-seek!” said an anonymous voice.

  And Martin, in his most charming and reassuring tone for the pacifying of nervous mothers, said, “I’ll see they don’t do anything they oughtn’t to, Mrs Foster. Shut up, all of you! I promise we won’t break anything. Or disturb anyone. Honestly. You won’t know we’re here.”

  Mrs Foster seemed not entirely convinced by this. “Well…”

  “They’ll do exactly what I tell them,” said Martin grandly. “Come on, you lot.” And they were gone, all the children, up the stairs, thunderously, with Maria at the back, feeling all of a sudden lively and excitable, one of them, exclaiming and suggesting with everyone else.

  “I’m It,” said Martin. “Maria’s bedroom is Home. I’m counting fifty. Everywhere except the drawing-room and that library place. If anyone breaks anything, I’ll belt them. Right! ONE – TWO – THREE…”

  They dispersed. They melted away, with giggles and little shrieks, into rooms and cupboards and under beds and behind curtains. Maria, crouching in the broom cupboard, heard James wandering forlorn and complaining without, and pulled him in beside her. Together they trembled happily in darkness and dust, and together they crept forth and made a bolt for it up the stairs again, converging in pandemonium upon her room, everyone shouting at once, in triumph or despair. Breathless, they sprawled in heaps upon Maria’s floor until sufficiently recovered to start again. And then they dispersed…

  The house alternated between silence and commotion. A suspended, anticipating silence, and then a creeping and a pattering of feet that swelled to a frantic dashing, a leaping of stairs and banging of doors, the howling of the hunter who has seen the hunted and the despairing shriek of the hunted who know themselves to be beyond help. And Maria, in the thick of it, found herself caught up so as to become not just one of them but barely even herself at all. She was behaving in a most un-Maria-like way. She rushed; she screamed; she pushed and giggled. She charged from room to room, skidded upon mats, hurled herself under beds. Once, leaping down the stairs with wild whoops, she and her father confronted one another in the hall, her father standing with the newspaper in his hand and the persecuted look of someone returning home to find their own street made unrecognisable by an invasion of road-works. At the sight of this transformed Maria his face took on an expression of astonishment as well and for a moment the real, everyday Maria gazed back in wonder and embarrassment before the game took charge once more and she was racing through the hall and past him, shrieking.

  It was splendid fun. And then all of a sudden the mood changed. Each hunt became longer, more devious, less uproarious and more calculating. Daring gave way to stealth. They knew all the hiding-places now, and they were out of breath and becoming a little exhausted. James, sucking his thumb, curled up on Maria’s bed and went to sleep. For the rest, each hiding and each seeking became longer and longer, the hunter lurking behind doors to pounce, the hunted slipping from under bed to behind chair, from the shadow of a curtain to the concealing bulk of a chest-of-drawers. The house became a listening, waiting place – a place on two levels of consciousness, one in which Mrs Foster clattered pans in the kitchen and Mr Foster once more barricaded himself into the drawing-room, and another in which five pairs of eyes and ears preyed upon each other, waiting for the betraying creak of a floor-board or flicker of movement through the crack of a door.

  Maria had found a new hiding-place, and no one else knew about it. It was in the room at the end of the passage upstairs, beyond the bedrooms, not used for anything now except a lot of spare furniture, which stood awkwardly about the room in no kind of arrangement. Some of this furniture was shrouded in huge old sheets and counterpanes. The children had discarded as hiding-places the tables and ordinary upright chairs which wore such draperies over and around them like skirts: they were known now, every seeker peered beneath them as a ritual while combing this particular room. But one large squashy armchair, covered with a huge, flowery, rather torn counterpane, was so low upon the floor that it was not feasible to get underneath it. Unless, that is, you were as small and thin as Maria. Charlotte and the others, who were all inclined to stoutness, had cast one dismissive look at it. But Maria found that she could slide beneath it, inserting herself like a paperknife under its sagging springs and drawing the counterpane down to the floor around it. There, flattened dustily between the floor-boards and the underneath of the chair, she could lie as long as she liked, biding her time, while seekers came and went, twitching aside other dust-sheets, pulling back the curtains, and through a tear in the counterpane she watched their sandalled feet skitter past, hugging herself with glee. For once it was no bad thing to be smaller than other people.

  They stopped coming. Everyone must be looking for her now. The house had gone very quiet. I’ll wait a bit longer, she thought, till I’m sure they’re all downstairs, and then I’ll creep out and get Home. And thinking this she fell into a comfortable drowsiness, with the room quietly empty around her and no sound anywhere except the rain on the windows. And rather oddly, the piano, she thought, being played very faintly in the drawing-room. Which, had she been more alert and not in this somnolent state, would have seemed strange since her father did not play the piano. Moreover it was playing the tune that she had tried to play once from that old album in the piano stool.

  In fact, she realised, the room was not absolutely quiet either. There was a clock ticking, which was also strange since she did not remember having seen a clock. However, peering out through that convenient tear in the counterpane, she saw it now, in the far corner, and was further surprised to find that it was the same as the one in Mrs Shand’s drawing-room – the one whose face was encircled with painted flowers – violets, daisies, honeysuckle. The ones whose hands had stopped forever at ten to four. But this one had not stopped: it ticked away busily there, and said five past twelve, which must be about right, Maria thought.

  Getting on for lunch-time, because she could hear reassuring clatterings from the kitchen below, and there was a smell of roast mutton drifting through the open door. The chair pressed down rather uncomfortably on her back (or else the floor was pressing upwards), more than it had done when she first got under it, almost indeed as though she had got fatter since, and instead of feeling drowsy she found herself clasping her hands over her mouth to suppress giggles. Which again was odd because Maria was not, by and large, a giggly person. But here she was squashed beneath a chair, peering out beside its brown mahogany ball-and-claw foot, stifling waves of laughter. Because she mustn’t be discovered. There was a person in a long, dark dress sitting at a desk in the corner over there, writing, and this person must not know she was there.

  The person wrote, and the clock ticked, and downstairs someone played the piano and other people did
things in the kitchen. And then the person in the long dark dress got up and went to the door and called out into the passage “Harriet! Harriet… Will you come now please…” And, returning, she paused for a moment beside the chair so that the hem of her dress was a few inches from the nose of the watcher beneath it, which made the giggling more and more difficult to control. The person in the long dress sat down again, in a chair this time, and took something from a work-basket, which she held upon her lap and frowned at, and then tutted in irritation, and the watcher beneath the chair, at the sight of it, was swept with boredom and distaste, so that even the giggles were quelled. She stared balefully out through the fringe of stuff that hung down from the chair, and resolved to stay quiet and still and hidden for so long that she need not do her needlework, not now, not today, not ever… Because I’ll stay here for ever and ever, she thought, they’ll never find me, I’ll always be here, under the chair.

  And Maria, waking from what must have been a doze, with pins and needles in one leg, thought, I’ve been here for hours, for ever and ever, they’ve forgotten about me, they’ve all gone off and forgotten about me… And she eased herself out from under the chair into the empty room (she’d thought there was a clock just now, but that was silly, because there was no clock) and then, cautiously, into the passage.

  And at just that moment there was Martin, the seeker, edging round the bathroom door, so that he spotted her at just the moment she spotted him and there was a wild dash for Home, ending in a noisy heap on her bedroom floor.

  “Where were you?”

  And Maria wouldn’t say. I’ll never say, she thought, I’ll never tell anyone about that place. It’s private. Private to me.

  There was stew for lunch, and ice cream. The visitors were appreciative and all talked at once. Mr and Mrs Foster, at either end of the long table in the dining-room – which they were using since the kitchen seemed too small for this occasion – tried their best to impose order upon the conversation and then gave up. Mr Foster left the table as soon as he decently could and Mrs Foster devoted herself to seeing that the food was shared out equally.