A Stitch in Time (10 page)

She looked at James, at his face (blotched pink with iced lolly), gazing serenely out of the window, and his plump tummy bulging over the waist of his jeans, and then at Martin, locked in ferocious argument with one of his sisters. It nearly wasn't like this at all. It nearly ended up as a quite different kind of day.

Later, muddled and sleepy, she could not tell her parents what she meant.

“But if he was all right – the little boy – then everything was fine. Presumably the horses dodged him, or someone pulled him out of the way.”

“It's just everything nearly being quite different,” said Maria.

“He shouldn't have been allowed to wander off, at that age,” Mrs Foster went on, with a hint of criticism.

“Why does one thing happen and not another?”

Mr and Mrs Foster were people who believed in questions being given a proper answer. Mr Foster in particular. His answers were long and detailed and by the end of them
Maria had sometimes forgotten what the question was. She knew a great deal about what the Houses of Parliament are for and why it is necessary to go to school and the difference between Labour and Conservative people.

“Well…” said her father. He looked at Maria across the kitchen table, and then out of the window, and then back at Maria again. “Religious people think…” he began, and then, “It's a complicated sort of question…” and then, “Not entirely easy to explain…” and finally, “I don't know.” He picked up the newspaper and vanished behind it.

“Isn't it time you were off to bed?” said Mrs Foster.

Maria went upstairs to her room, in the tail-end of a day that might have been an entirely different one. Although, she thought, you could say that about every single day, which is unsettling. She got into bed, and during that shadowy period between being awake and falling asleep, images floated through her head: a marble boy wept over by a marble lady, thistledown and fossils and a prancing black dog. And, most persistent of all, the presence of a girl her own age, called Harriet, who had gone to sleep in this house on other August nights, hearing the sea outside the window.

“HOW LONG DO trees live,” said Maria. “Longer than people? Or not as long?”

“Depends,” said Martin.

That, she had discovered, was what he said when he did not know the answer to something. It was a little like the kind of thing her father said under the same circumstances. She looked speculatively at Martin, adding, in her imagination, two feet to his height, and clothing him in a dark office suit and white shirt like her father's.

“Why are you staring at me?”

“I was wondering,” said Maria, “what you were going to grow up into.”

“A person, presumably.”

“But what kind of person…”

“Like I am now, but bigger.”

“No,” said Maria, “I don't think it works like that.” She
had once seen a photograph of her father when six years old, squatting with a shrimping-net over a rock-pool: that remote figure bore little relation to the person with whom she now lived. Quite apart from the fact that he was no longer interested in shrimping.

“It would be good to change into something else,” said Martin with interest. “Like
Stomechinus
ending up as a sea-urchin. I'll be a race-horse. No, a jaguar.”

“It took
Stomechinus
millions and millions of years. And even then it didn't change all that much.”

“But we're cleverer. We should be able to find out how to speed it up.”

They were coming back from the beach, alone, after an unsuccessful fossil-hunt. They had rivals, they discovered. The beach echoed with discreet tappings as other addicts interfered with the blue lias. There were even apparent professionals with small sacks and geological hammers, collecting on an industrial scale: these they stalked resentfully, hating them.

“Actually,” Martin went on, “it wouldn't work, of course, because jaguars only became jaguars because they had to run faster than anything else so as to catch things to eat.”

“P'raps,” said Maria, “they turn into the kind of people they are because the things that happen to them make
them like that.” Which sounds a bit muddled, she thought, but
I
know what I mean. Like I'm shy and I talk to myself because of the sort of family I live with and Martin's like he is because he's got a different kind of family.

“I don't know what you're on about,” said Martin. “You know something?” he added. “You are a bit peculiar sometimes. You were talking to that tree yesterday. I heard. You were sitting in it and you suddenly said ‘Oh,
Quercus ilex
…'”

Maria went scarlet.

“I don't expect there's anything much you can do about it,” said Martin kindly. “It doesn't bother me, anyway… Why did you want to know how long trees live?”

“I just wondered. I wondered how old my tree – our tree – is. The ilex tree.”

They reached their own road, stopping at the newsagent on the corner to buy sweets. They were now regulars here. It was that kind of convenient and all-providing shop that sells everything from fishing-rods and beach-hats to biscuits and brown envelopes. And, Maria noticed for the first time, as the assistant shovelled pear-drops into the scales, postcards of the town of a kind that she had not seen before – not photographs but black and white pictures with people in old-fashioned clothes walking along the
Cobb. In one, a group gazed shore-wards to a reduced version of today's town, in which the front looked much the same but the cliffs were not spread with houses. Sailing boats like butterflies stood in a glassy sea. She tried to pick the point where their house should be, roughly, and found only fields.

“Fifteen pence,” said the assistant. “Do you want the postcard, dear?”

Or, Maria now saw, you could have a whole collection of such cards made up into a calendar. Forty-five pence. Which, at the moment, she had not got, but, she remembered, might well have after tomorrow, when Uncle David was to come down, who invariably gave her fifty pence as a present.

“I think I'll save up for the calendar,” she said. August was topped by a picture of fishermen with nets, oddly dressed. September you could not see.

“Old prints,” said the assistant. “Nineteenth century. People like that kind of thing nowadays. They don't appeal to me so much, personally. Enjoying your holidays?”

“Super,” said Martin.

“Time flies. The fifteenth already. September before we know where we are.”

They came out into the street again, sucking pear-drops.
It was lunch-time, and the population of the street's hotels, boarding-houses and rented holiday houses converged upon them, laden with wet bathing-things, folding chairs and baskets. Amid these comings and goings, like a rock defying the fretful waters of a channel, stood the sombrely dressed figure of Mrs Shand, leaning slightly upon a stick, a shopping basket set upon the pavement beside her.

“That's our landlady,” said Maria apprehensively. Mrs Shand's gaze was beamed down the road towards her, but without any sign of recognition. This did not entirely surprise Maria; people usually did forget her quite quickly, she had found. To remain in people's heads you need to be noisy, or striking-looking, or memorable in some other way, and she was not. As they reached Mrs Shand she began to slide by between her and the garden hedge, at which point Mrs Shand's head swung sharply round in her direction.

“I know you, do I not?”

Maria explained.

Mrs Shand turned her head to Martin. “And who is this?”

Maria explained further.

“And what have you been doing with yourself, young man?” said Mrs Shand.

This daunting question, which, Maria knew, would have reduced her to silence, had no such effect upon Martin. He proceeded to tell Mrs Shand, at considerable length, so that she was obliged twice to shift her weight from one leg to the other, and prevented several times from interrupting him either to ask a question or bring his account to an end.

“If you are interested in fossils,” she said at last, “you may, if you would like, come to see me and I will show you some very interesting specimens of my grandfather's.”

“OK,” said Martin.

“Yes, please,” said Mrs Shand reprovingly.

“That's quite all right,” said Martin. “This afternoon, if I've got time. We've got to go now, it's lunch-time – 'bye.” He treated Mrs Shand to an amiable grin. Maria, turning furtively as she went in at her drive gates, saw the old lady standing where they had left her. She looked in some indefinable way slightly less rock-like.

The Fosters spent what Mrs Foster called a “quiet” afternoon in the garden (but our afternoons are never noisy, thought Maria, never never, we just don't have that kind of afternoon…). Maria read, her father alternately read the newspaper and slept beneath it, and her mother sewed. She was making a patchwork quilt. She had been
making it for eight years now: it was very large, exquisitely designed and sewn, and would surely be very beautiful when finished. Maria, when she was younger, had sometimes felt jealous of the patchwork quilt and once she had taken some of the pieces of material that her mother was collecting for it and put them in the bottom of the dustbin under tea-leaves and potato peelings. No one had ever known. It was quite the worst thing she had ever done and she still went hot and cold at the thought of it. Nowadays she no longer had any emotions of any kind about the quilt but it did sometimes occur to her that it was taking her mother almost as long to make it as it had taken to make her, Maria, and that people often showed more interest in the quilt.

From the other side of the hedge, from time to time, came the sounds of intermittent warfare between the Lucas children. There was some kind of long-term, all-afternoon quarrel going on which flared up periodically into shouted argument. Sometimes the argument would end in shrill and noisy weeping from one of the younger children. When this happened Mr Foster would frown and sigh, and Mrs Foster would look up from her sewing and stare with disapproval at the hedge separating the two gardens. Once she said, “Those are really very uncontrolled
children.” On two or three occasions the tears and arguments were brought to an abrupt and unnatural close by brief but loud interruption from one or other of the mothers. On these occasions Mr and Mrs Foster exchanged glances, and Mrs Foster turned back sternly to the quilt. Maria had never, she realised, heard either of them shout, at each other, her, or anyone else. All this was quite interesting, and she lay alternately reading and thinking about it until it was time for tea.

Martin appeared as they were sitting round the table.

“Have you had tea, Martin?” said Mrs Foster.

Martin had, it appeared, but was quite open to suggestions about a second one. He sat down with them and ate four sandwiches and a slice of cake. He had a second slice when pressed – not very hard – by Mrs Foster.

“It's funny she's not fatter,” he said, nodding his head in Maria's direction. “All this food just for her. Lucky thing.”

“More cake?” said Mrs Foster doubtfully.

“No, thank you,” said Martin, after a brief but apparently careful consideration. “Shall we go and see that old lady?”

Maria was only moderately enthusiastic about this. Mrs Shand alarmed her, just a little. This time, though, she remembered, she would be fortified by Martin. One would
not need to talk, just listen and look. And those clocks could do with looking at again.

“All right,” she said.

Outside the hotel, Martin expressed his deep contempt for that notice. “Who do they think they are? No Children or Dogs… They'll be lucky.” He stumped loudly up the stairs.

Mrs Shand, when they arrived in her room, was engaged upon the same piece of pink embroidery. The effect of the room, its atmosphere, and the sight and sound of the clocks on Martin was, for a few moments at least, to silence him. He stood staring round, rubbing one plimsoll up and down against the grubby leg of his jeans.

Mrs Shand got up from the sofa and went over to a cabinet in one corner of the room, from which she took a shallow tray covered with a cloth.

“You may sit down and look at this. Please be careful where you put your feet, young man.”

Maria and Martin sat side by side upon a sofa blowsy with brown and yellow cotton roses, and examined the tray of fossils, while Mrs Shand observed, in silent irritation, the trickle of sand which marked Martin's progress across the room, and then returned to her sewing.

The fossils, they instantly recognised, were a cut above
the ordinary. No
Gryphaea
or
Stomechinus
here, not even a solitary ammonite, but belemnites like huge bullets, sharks' teeth so large that the picture they conjured up of their Jurassic owners made Maria vow silently that she would never again set foot in the English Channel, and the most delectable crumple lily-like plant etched upon a slab of rock.

“Cor…” said Martin lovingly.

“You may handle them,” said Mrs Shand (unnecessarily, for they already were).

“Who found this?” demanded Martin.

Mrs Shand lowered her spectacles and looked at him over the top of them. “My grandfather. He was a friend of Sir Charles Darwin and helped him with his researches by collecting fossils on the cliffs here. I will show you a photograph of him.”

“Where did he find it?”

But Mrs Shand was back at the cabinet now, burrowing in a drawer quite silted up, Maria could see, with papers and bundles of letters. She returned carrying a large, apparently very old (for the leather was faded and here and there quite worn away) photograph album. She set this upon Maria's lap and turned the pages over until she came to one on which was a single photograph of an
elderly man with a prolific white beard and kindly expression. The same person, Maria now saw, whose photograph stood upon the mantelpiece in the drawing-room of the house over the road. On the opposite page was another yellowed photograph of a lady in clothes both billowing and tightly buttoned, giving her the same densely upholstered effect as the Victorian chairs in the drawing-room of the holiday house. She wore a lace cap, and more frills of lace emerged at the neck and wrists of her dress. But her face, amid these oddities of dress, was an ordinary, comfortable, motherly face: you could see it today twenty times over in any high street or supermarket. And a strand of hair had escaped from beneath her cap and lay across her forehead, adding a homely touch to the otherwise formal picture. People aren't different, on the outside, Maria thought, people from other times. But the inside of their heads must be, because of everything being different all round them. She stared at the photograph, seeing also that the brooch at the person's neck, of clustered ivory roses, was the brooch worn now by Mrs Shand, seated in her chair on the opposite side of the fireplace, smoothing the embroidered panel upon her knee.