A Stitch in Time (12 page)

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.

“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.