A Stitch in Time

by Penelope Lively

  “You’ve got super parents,” said Charlotte afterwards, “they don’t interrupt.”

  Late that afternoon, at a point when the children were seated round the kitchen table playing snap in an atmosphere of the utmost peace and harmony, Mrs Lucas arrived to fetch them. What a relief it was, she said, to see that they had been so good and quiet, and now that she knew that they could behave themselves if they wanted to (at this point Mr Foster began to say something and then didn’t but went rather quickly out into the garden instead) she wouldn’t feel bad about pushing them over again another time… (At this point Mrs Foster opened her mouth to speak and then managed somehow not to.) And wouldn’t it be fun, Mrs Lucas went on cheerfully, to have an absolutely slap-up both-families picnic one day before the end of the holiday. A farewell picnic.

  “A cooking picnic!”

  “No sandwiches. Make a fire and fry things.”

  “In the evening! A night picnic!”

  “When?” said Martin.

  And it was arranged, somehow, despite Mrs Foster standing there saying things like not-absolutely-sure – about-our-plans and Mr Foster coming back in from the garden and just looking horrified. A week from then, on 5 September, the last whole day. At a place the Lucases had been to off the path to Axmouth.

  “Idyllic,” said Mrs Lucas, “I can’t tell you… Not a soul in sight. Just lots of nature. There’s a bit of a climb down, of course.”

  “The weather may put paid to it,” said Mrs Foster hopefully, and then was told by all the Lucas children at once that actually if they were going to have a picnic they had it anyway, whether it was raining or not. Mr Foster retreated into the garden again and the Lucases, after many false starts and sudden returns to collect forgotten jerseys, went.

  The Fosters had barely settled down again on their own when the doorbell rang once more. It was Mrs Shand. Maria’s father, becoming extremely genial and welcoming at the sight of someone aged well over eleven, invited her to come in for a glass of something. They all went into the drawing-room to sit and Maria found herself drawn after them, not so much because she wanted to as because she could find no appropriate moment at which to slip off on her own. Mrs Shand had a way of glancing now and then in her direction, or addressing remarks to her which could in no way be replied to.

  “Well,” said Mrs Shand, “you’ll be having to think about school again soon now,” and Maria said that she supposed she would. In her mind, a large shutter came down with a thump, like the stage-curtain lowered in the interval at a theatre. 6 September, it said. Beyond it, removed and stored, stood the swing, the blue lias cliffs, grass vetchling, horsetail and burnet saxifrage, the ilex tree and Martin.

  “Yes,” said Mrs Shand, “time and tide wait for no man.” And, this being said, she looked round the room, and then at Maria again, with a certain satisfaction.

  “Time was,” she went on, “I’ve sat in this room myself, counting days. I was at boarding-school. I sometimes wonder, nowadays…” She looked again at Maria critically, and enquired if the Fosters had never considered boarding her. Mrs Foster, just a little irritably, replied that they hadn’t. And then, changing the subject, said that it must have a lot of memories for her, this house. Had it always been the family home?

  “Not quite from its very beginnings,” said Mrs Shand. “Someone else built it, in the early years of the century. The nineteenth century, you understand,” she added, to Maria, who said nothing but assumed her cold look, and wondered if Mrs Shand knew that ammonites are about a hundred and forty million years old, and that trilobites, being older yet, are not found in the blue lias. And that the ilex is a kind of oak tree. I am not stupid, she said, inside her head.

  “Its appearance has changed, of course. My father had the brickwork plastered over.”

  “That’s why it’s brown in the sampler?” said Maria.

  “Of course.”

  “I found the swing, Harriet’s swing.”

  Mrs Shand looked over the sofa, and out into the garden. “So I see.”

  “We painted it.”

  “I should perhaps have mentioned…” began Mrs Foster. “I do hope you…”

  “That is perfectly all right,” said Mrs Shand.

  “Whose is the dog?” said Maria. “The one that keeps barking in the garden?” The question came out so abruptly as to sound rude. She had not intended this: it was merely what happened when she was interested in something. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her father look disapproving.

  “There is no dog that I know of,” said Mrs Shand. “Not in this house. My family has had a habit of keeping cats, for a long time now.”

  The next question rose to Maria’s lips. It floated, unspoken, so that it seemed to her that it must hang from her mouth like bubble-speech in a cartoon. “What happened to Harriet?”

  She said nothing.

  Mrs Shand took a sip of sherry and looked out of the window again, over the garden at the leaden sea, huddled beneath a sullen sky. “I fear there is more rain on the way.”

  “Depressing weather,” said Mr Foster.

  “An excess of rain is always worrying on this coast,” said Mrs Shand, “things being what they are.”

  “You mean,” said Maria, “it makes there be landslips?”

  “Precisely.”

  “It causes landslips,” said Mr Foster, “not ‘it makes there be’.”

  There was a silence. Mrs Shand finished her glass of sherry. The cat, who had slid through the door in time to hear the last part of the conversation, gave Maria a patronising look, and twined itself lovingly around Mrs Shand’s legs.

  “I must go,” said Mrs Shand. “We dine at seven-thirty.”

  She had been right about the rain. Having held off throughout a grey and brooding evening, it began again as soon as darkness fell. Maria, lying in bed, heard it rustling on the roof of the garage, a steady, rhythmic noise that should have been soothing but somehow was not, so that when at last she fell asleep it was to dream, disturbingly, wake, and dream again. And in her dream things were not as they should be, the world became an unstable and uncertain place, nothing could be relied upon. She walked across a green and solid lawn, but the lawn collapsed beneath her feet like the scummy surface of a duck-pond, and she went plunging down through bottomless skies that had the thick grey texture of cloud. She waited outside her school for her mother, but the person who came to fetch her was a little old woman, smaller than herself, who nevertheless spoke with her mother’s voice. She opened the front door of her own home, but beyond it, instead of the carpeted hall, with table and mirror above, was a gently lapping sea, beneath whose glassy surface there swam ammonites in shoals, Gryphaea and Promicroceras and the rest. And when at last she escaped from these unsettling places, it was to plod down endless streets in search of something that she had lost but could not identify – some book or purse – and which she knew she could never find again. She woke up in the morning irritable and unrested.

  Chapter Ten

  THE PICNIC

  THE RAIN WAS followed by several sullen and overcast days. It became cold. People said – with irritating predictability – that you could feel autumn in the air. And Maria, exasperated, shut her ears to them, partly because she disliked people to say what she had known they were going to say but mostly because she did not want to be reminded of this. She did not want autumn to come; she did not want to go home to London; she wanted each day to stretch like elastic and indeed preferably for the following day not to arrive at all. She was enjoying herself. Perhaps it had been something to do with the game of hide-and-seek, or perhaps it was the swing, which was so much regarded now as her personal property that everyone referred to it as Maria’s swing. Perhaps it was (she wondered herself secretly) that she was mysteriously changing into a somewhat different person. The fact was, though, that for the first time in her life she felt quite remarkably at ease with other people. Not only with Martin but also with Charlotte and Elisabeth and Lucy and vari
ous others with whom they played. She and Martin went off less on their own together. Instead, elaborate and complicated games took place for a great many people, organised by Martin, and in which Maria found herself occupying some kind of privileged position, as though he were a king and she his favourite minister. She became, for her, positively noisy, interrupting other people and making suggestions. She found that she could giggle with Charlotte. She did not wait for people to invite her to join in but simply did so, and nobody seemed to mind or think it strange. It was all rather surprising.

  And all the while time was leaking away. There were ten days left, and then a week, and then the days lay ahead singly, five and four and three. And as they went Maria found herself overwhelmed with the most peculiar anxiety. It was not just that she did not want the holiday to end, but that she felt also a strong sense of apprehension. She felt that something was going to happen, but she did not know what it was or when it would be. And she did not think it would be something nice. She became jumpy and nervous. The sudden slam of a door made her heart rocket most unpleasantly. The cat, sliding against her leg under the table as she wrote, made her drop the pencil.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Sorry, I’m sure,” said the cat, rasping its tongue against her ankle, a disagreeable feeling. “It’s my nature, you must remember. The stealthy movement of the hunter.”

  “Fat lot of hunting you do,” snapped Maria.

  “No need, is there? Not with eighteen different kinds of pet-food on the market. But old habits die hard. Deep down,” it went on theatrically, “I’m remembering my savage ancestors, padding around those forests and jungles after their prey. I have to keep my hand in. It’s my nature, as I said.”

  “You should control yourself,” said Maria.

  “And I thought you were so well-informed about evolution and all that. Anyway, who’s talking? What about you and your friends, up and down that tree all day, just like a lot of monkeys. Your ancestors aren’t anything to write home about.”

  “That’s entirely different. We do it because it’s fun.”

  “Huh…” said the cat. “And in any case, what’s the matter with you these days? You’re like a cat on hot bricks, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  “I don’t know. I feel nervous. I keep thinking about Harriet.”

  “Harriet, my dear child, lived over a hundred years ago. She doesn’t exist any more. Be your age.” It yawned pinkly.

  “I know,” said Maria. “I know all that. But you see,” she went on, “I think she does in a way. Because of places being like clocks – full of all the time there’s ever been in them, and all the people, and all the things that have happened, like the ammonites in the stones. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “To be absolutely frank,” said the cat, “no.” There was a rattle of plates from the kitchen below and it stretched itself and strolled out of the door and down the stairs.

  Maria stared out of the window at the dark bulk of the ilex tree. I could have asked Mrs Shand what happened to Harriet, she thought. But somehow I couldn’t. I suppose I didn’t really want to be told.

  If you ask blunt questions you get blunt answers, and the whole matter of Harriet was far too delicate and personal for that. If it weren’t for actual, real things like the sampler, and the initials on the table in her room, and, come to that, the swing, she could almost think that she’d invented her, or imagined her. Always, since she was quite small, Maria had been extremely confused between what she had imagined and what was real, so much so that she had learned to keep quiet about a good many things in case they turned out (like that burglar) to be part of the imaginings, so that everybody stared at you and you felt extremely foolish. Frequently, she was unsure whether she had thought things or actually said them out loud. Lately, she seemed to have been saying almost as much as thinking, which was un-Maria-like and part, she suspected, of this odd process of changing into someone a little different. Although, when you considered the matter, it was not really so very odd. Since people change on the outside all the time – first growing bigger year by year, going from baby to child and then to grown-up, and then getting wrinkles, and their hair turning grey – it seemed reasonable enough that they might also be changing inside, in how they felt and thought and behaved.

  “Mrs Lucas has just reminded me,” said Maria’s mother, coming into the kitchen, “about this picnic. I don’t quite see,” she went on regretfully, “how we are to get out of it.”

  “I know,” said Maria. “It’s tomorrow.” And the day after, she thought, we are going.

  “But not in the evening,” Mrs Foster continued, “even Mrs Lucas thought that was a bad idea. A lunch picnic.”

  “We’re going to cook everything ourselves. No sandwiches.”

  “That seems to be the plan,” said Mrs Foster hopelessly.

  Part of Maria was looking forward to the picnic. Part of her, though, was dreading it. The day after, they would go. And thinking of this all that morning, down on the beach, under sombre skies that threatened rain, with the wet sand chill under her feet, she became silent, more like the old Maria, and hung at the edges of the games, and finally did not want to play any more but went up early to the house, leaving the others. And that evening, alone in the garden in the twilight, she swung and swung, going higher and higher until the swing rocked a little on its black iron legs, and again Harriet was so strongly in her head that the thought of her seemed to blur the real world and alter sounds and feelings so that she, Maria, might momentarily have been someone else, some time else.

  She woke next morning to a day of wind, racing clouds and sunshine. Mrs Foster, whose hopes had been pinned to appalling weather and a forced last-minute cancellation of the picnic, stared dourly out of the window and set off for the grocer’s to buy sausages. Mr Foster, who had made a desperate but unsuccessful bid to get out of the whole thing by pleading a sudden chill, began to assemble rugs and a vast supply of matches and firelighters. Martin arrived in the middle of this and depressed him even further with tales of other picnics that the Lucases had had along the same lines in the past, packed with drama and disaster. Surreptitiously, Mr Foster added Detol, sticking-plaster and bandages to his expanding pile of equipment. Mrs Foster returned from the shops with food that Martin examined with appreciation.

  “Super nosh… Once,” he began reflectively, “we roasted an ox on Wandsworth Common. Well, not really an ox – a leg of lamb from Sainsbury’s but it was the same idea. That was the time James got his head stuck between those iron railings.” Mr Foster picked up the newspaper and retreated into the drawing-room.

  At last, after many comings and goings to fetch items that had been forgotten by way of food, drink, clothing and various small Lucas children, both families assembled on the drive in front of the house. The Fosters were dressed for every eventuality of weather, wore sensible walking shoes, and carried their possessions in convenient bags and baskets. The Lucases were clad in everything from bathing-suits to what appeared to be some kind of fancy dress, and clutched innumerable tattered carrier-bags which leaked chops, sausages, tea-bags and the odd can of beer (which Mrs Foster eyed with disapproval). Martin’s mother carried nothing except a baby and a book. The older children were weighed down with everything from fishing-tackle to beach-balls. They made a most ill-assorted party, which was apparently what Mrs Shand thought, passing the gateway and staring in at them with unconcealed curiosity.

  “An outing of some kind, I see.”

  “We’re going for a picnic,” said Mrs Foster bravely.

  “To Charmouth, no doubt?”

  There was a chorus of contempt from the Lucas children.

  “Not just the ordinary beach.”

  “A special place of ours…”

  “That way…”

  “You have to climb down miles.”

  “It’s all lovely and slippery.”

  “Ever so steep…”

  Mrs Shand l
istened with what seemed particular attention. And Maria, watching her, felt again this creep of unease and apprehension that was blighting what should otherwise be a most agreeable, indeed a thoroughly special and extraordinary day. She had never, after all, done this kind of thing before: Foster picnics were invariably matters of thermoses and foil-wrapped sandwiches, eaten at carefully selected and unhazardous places. But Mrs Shand, staring at them over the spectacles, brought back other thoughts and she found herself, suddenly, wishing that they could do something entirely different. Just stay here, for instance. And thinking that, knew it to be impossible, even if someone as small and uninfluential as herself could persuade all those other people, louder and older. There is a point at which a certain train of events is begun, and nothing in the world can stop it, and one is caught up in it and part of it, willy-nilly.

  “Mmn…” said Mrs Shand, and then, “well, I should take care, if I were you.”

  “Why?” said Maria, and although the question was drowned in an outbreak of talk from the Lucases, and no one paid any attention, it somehow reached Mrs Shand, for she looked directly at Maria and said, “For obvious reasons.”

  “Obvious…?” Nobody was listening. James had fallen over and grazed his knee. Piercing screams swamped everything.

  “The cliffs along there are notoriously unsafe. There was a tragedy in the past – many years ago now. However, I’m sure you are all extremely competent.” And Mrs Shand was gone, stumping away down the road, leaving Maria staring after her, the question she would have liked to ask left unspoken, echoing only in her head.

  What tragedy?

  “Off we go,” said Martin’s mother. “Not before time. Oh, be quiet, James, you’re not dead yet. Jane, you’ve dropped a sausage.”

  They straggled away down the track beyond the garden and over the fields towards the cliff path. Mr Foster, with a sudden assumption of command, as the only man of the party, took the lead but was rapidly overtaken by rushing, competing Lucas children. He strode along behind them, occasionally calling warnings which were ignored, and presently lapsed into a glum silence, recognising that things were out of control. The rest of the party, women and small children, trailed along behind. Maria, last of all, followed reluctantly. She was carrying a bag heavy with cups and plates, knives and forks which she had known to be unsuitable but which Mrs Foster had insisted upon packing.