A Stitch in Time (15 page)

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.

“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.

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 various 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.