A Stitch in Time (7 page)

They had now reached the little harbour. The boats there were of a scale to match it – dinghies and rowing boats dapper in new coats of white paint, their names brisk in black or blue;
My Lady, Chopper II
,
Jester.
There was a smell of tar, petrol and fish. The boats rocked gently on sheltered water that glinted here and there with rainbows of oil: beyond, on the seaward side of the Cobb the waves sucked and lashed at the stone, and the green water was marbled with foam. The curving stone barrier along which they now walked seemed to divide two
worlds. In the cosy, ordered world of the harbour each boat had its circle of admirers, grooming, coiling ropes; white seagulls screamed over pickings of orange peel, crusts, tea-leaves. Beyond the protection of the Cobb, the sea behaved as it liked, and there the gulls seemed both wilder and more competent, rocking with folded wings from one wave to another, or sailing effortlessly on the wind, their hard and staring eyes sometimes level with Maria's as they swooped low in passing. She wondered if one kind of gull settled for the squabbling life of the harbour, while others chose to rough it on the open sea, or if all gulls did both, or what. And then there seemed to be a third, inland way of life, for looking up at the patchwork of fields running back beyond the town, she could see more gulls scattered behind a ploughing tractor. Presumably, in fact, the cleverest gulls tried everything and then continued with whichever place provided most food, and so became the fattest and strongest gulls also…

But I'd choose the sea, she thought, if I were them. Not apple cores or muddy worms. Real fish, even if you hardly ever caught one.

They reached the end of the Cobb. “I'm sorry,” said Mrs Foster, “there don't seem to be any ice creams.”

“I don't want one,” said Maria. And she didn't. It was
quite enough to sit on the edge of the stone, with her legs hanging down over the water, looking across the harbour at the town. She could see their house, half hidden among trees, to the left, and then to the right the main part of the town spilling down between hillsides to a seafront of ice-cream-coloured cottages, green and pink, and a pale edging of sand before the sea began. It was a lovely day. Not, Maria thought, a straightforward lovely day with a boring blue sky and nothing in it but the sun, but better than that because the sky was pleasantly busy with clouds, huge shining heaps of cloud that roamed across the horizon, ebbed and flowed, formed and reformed as you watched them. And every now and then they blotted out the sun for a few minutes, so that bands of sunshine fled along the coastline, spread out before her here in a huge receding curve. Everything would go grey and muted, as the sun went in, and there would be this band of golden colour sweeping along the cliffs to Weymouth, lighting up now a bright slice of rock, now a green field, now the white sparkle of a house, now the turquoise of the sea itself.

“What are you looking at, Maria?”

“Nothing,” said Maria. Then she added, “Just the sun,” because that sounded rude, as well as being untrue.

“Nice day,” said her mother.

Mrs Foster took some postcards out of her handbag and began to write on them. First she addressed them (to Aunt Ruth, the neighbours, grandfather, and her friend Elizabeth), and then she wrote the messages. The messages, Maria could see, were all nearly the same. They said they were having good weather, Lyme was pleasantly unspoilt and the rented house very nice.

When I'm grown-up, thought Maria – if I ever do grow up, which isn't something you can ever imagine happening – when I'm grown-up I shall come back here and think of myself sitting here now, today. And having thought this, in an off-hand sort of way, the thought suddenly took shape, most startlingly, so that a grown-up Maria (wearing spectacles, for some reason, with a handbag tucked under her arm, and dressed in a tweed suit like Aunt Ruth's) stood before her, smiling quite benevolently, and so real that it seemed almost possible that other people might see her also.

“Please let me introduce you to my mother,” said Maria, “I mean to your mother.”

“Maria, you're muttering again,” said Mrs Foster, looking up from the postcards. “It's getting to be a habit. You really must stop.” Maria said guiltily, “Sorry,” and the grown-up
Maria smiled once more and dissolved most gracefully into the sea. Which, Maria felt, was the best place for her, because harmless as she appeared the thought of her was somehow entirely unwelcome. I don't want to be like that, thought Maria comfortably, I want to be me as I am now for ever and ever.

A boat was arriving at the end of the Cobb – a very nautical-looking boat sprucely painted in pale blue and white, with much rope and sail displayed, but that nevertheless ran on a noisily chugging engine that now spluttered to a stop as it reached the steps. A party of people got off, children and adults. They were on the Cobb before Maria realised that it was Martin and his family.

They approached, an untidy and vociferous party, the grown-ups talking loudly, the younger children clamouring and arguing. Martin trailed behind, looking, she thought, bad-tempered. He wore jeans with holes in both knees, and a jersey tied around his waist.

He saw her. “Hello.”

“Hello.” Maria shot a wary glance at her mother, who looked up from the postcards.

“They're a rotten cheat, those boats,” said Martin. “Fifty pence and all you get is ten minutes pottering about round the harbour. I think they're frightened of the real sea.”

The rest of his family had sat down a few yards away, locked in argument about which beach they should go to. Mrs Foster, looking uneasy, said, “Oh, are they?” Children often had this effect on her parents, Maria had noticed – strange children. Boys especially.

“Have you been?” said Martin to Maria. “I shouldn't bother.”

It now dawned on Mrs Foster that Maria and Martin knew one another. “You're in the guest-house next door to us?” she said.

Martin nodded. There was a silence, awkward only for Mrs Foster, who clearly could think of nothing else to say, and Maria, who yearned to, but was as usual throttled into silence by her feelings. Martin was absorbedly picking at a limpet exposed by the ebbing tide. “Can I come over and have a look at that book tonight?” he said suddenly.

They were now all three engulfed by the rest of Martin's family, younger children, older children, and two women – one, it became apparent in a confusion of explanations and remarks, being his mother and the other his aunt. The children divided fairly evenly into two families of cousins. It seemed, to Maria, like being suddenly in the middle of a flock of starlings. She saw her mother furtively gather
her possessions around her, as though they might be trodden on or removed. Martin's mother had launched straight into an impassioned account, much punctuated with laughter, of a visit to Weymouth they had made the day before. Impressively, she was able to talk uninterrupted while at the same time preventing one small child from falling into the sea and re-dressing another. Mrs Foster listened with a rather fixed smile: they were not, Maria could see, at all the same kind of person.

“…So we decided you can keep your classy resort,” concluded Martin's mother. “In future we're stopping here.” Her attention strayed to Maria as she finished buttoning someone's trousers. “Are you on your own? You must come over and play with the girls.”

“That would be nice, wouldn't it?” said Mrs Foster doubtfully.

“Any old time. Well, come along then, all. Martin?”

“I'll stay here for a bit.”

“All right. Get back in time for lunch, though. And don't be a nuisance to Mrs… er…?”

“Foster,” said Maria's mother.

“We're Lucases. Both lots. Well, 'bye for now, then.” They trailed off along the Cobb, audible long after they were out of sight behind a building.

Mrs Foster looked apprehensively at Martin. She did not much like boys. Maria always felt that one of the few things she had done right in her life was to be a girl.

“I thought I'd go to the museum,” said Martin.

Mrs Foster brightened. She had obviously expected something much more destructive or energetic.

“What a good idea. Maria hasn't been there either.”

They walked slowly back to the town. Martin explained to Mrs Foster, lengthily and patiently, how an outboard motor works. Mrs Foster said, “Yes,” and, “I see,” at intervals. Maria, happy, trotted two steps behind. It seemed to be quite all right for her to say nothing. At the entrance to the museum Martin said to her, “Actually, your mum didn't follow all that,” and she said wisely, “No, I don't think she did.”

Inside the museum, Mrs Foster said, “I'm afraid it looks a bit dull.” She began to move dutifully from glass case to glass case, spending the same length of time at each. Maria had seen her use the same system on picture exhibitions.

The cases were full of fossils. Fossils of a much greater variety and perfection than any one could imagine finding for oneself. Ammonites as big as door-knockers; chunks of rock through which swam the bony tracery of complete
fish; the vertebrae of dinosaurs; the imprint of reptilian feet on a slab of clay… And the labels describing each item battered the reader with immensities of time – forty million years ago, a hundred and eighty million, four hundred million. Here were creatures younger by hundreds of millions of years than others. And here were charts that explained, with helpful drawings of rampant dinosaurs, fish of the most weird and impractical design, and all the smaller fry by way of shells and starfish and things that creep or crawl, which creatures had lasted for how long. Ammonites, Maria noted with surprise, were a relatively late invention, sharing a swampy and tropical universe with diplodocus and pterodactyl.

And all these creatures, she saw, studying charts and pictures, have stepped out of the rock of which the place is made, the bones of it, those blue cliffs with which England ends.

“Blue lias,” said Maria.

“What?”

“It's called blue lias, the rock here.” And she said it again, to herself, because she liked the sound of it. Blue lias… And the brown rock on top of it is called upper greensand, and all these different kinds of rock are different ages, like the fossils, old and older and very old indeed.
They lie, sleeping, as it were, under fields and towns, full of the shells and bones of creatures that once were here.

“Good, isn't it?” said Martin. He pored over the cases, scowling in concentration.

Everything changes. The earth's surface heaves and boils: seas become land, continents are swallowed up by water, mountains are flung up. And through all this marches an endless procession of life-forms, from the unambitious shell-like creatures of this case, to the lumbering dinosaur of that picture. (Why, Maria wondered, reading the caption, should it matter so much that its brain was only the size of a kitten's?… Kittens manage, after all.) One thing gives way to another, and eventually all ends up, as the chart indicated at the bottom, on a note of undisguised triumph, with naked but bearded man, standing arms akimbo on what appeared to be Dover cliffs.

“Noah's Ark isn't true at all,” said Maria, with sudden illumination.

“'Course not,” said Martin. “It's a load of rubbish.”

“Then people should say so,” said Maria crossly. She felt cheated. All your life you accepted blithely one account of things, and then you found yourself presented with something entirely different (and much more appealing). It needed thinking about.

They were moving together from case to case now. Occasionally Martin would give her an amiable poke to attract her attention… “Look at that… Hey, come here…”

“It's as though,” said Maria, “somebody was messing about with it all. Trying to see what would work and throwing away the things that didn't.”

“No, it isn't. It's evolution. We did it at school. Things change themselves – or bits of themselves – so that they fit in with where they're living. They grow longer legs or stop having tails or learn to eat something different. And the things that don't just die out.”

“I see,” said Maria reflectively.

Mrs Foster had reached the exit now, having completed her tour. They could see her, from the gallery on which they now were, sitting down to wait for them, opening her newspaper.

A large chart entitled
The Descent of Man
demonstrated this in the form of a tree from whose branches burst forth one creature after another, flourishes of Alice-in-Wonderland invention whose basic wrongness became apparent as their particular branch came to an abrupt end with some bizarre and extinct animal. At the top of the tree, having scrambled triumphantly up through mammals and apes, stood naked and hairy man again.

“It's like snakes and ladders,” said Maria. “Throw a six and you stand on your hind legs.”

Martin gave her a look of guarded approval. “Except that they didn't know they were doing it. Each bit took millions of years.”

“We must be too. Changing.”

“I'll grow two more arms. Better for climbing trees. And a tail.”

“That's going backwards again. I want eyes at the back as well as at the front.”

“Two mouths. So you could eat first and second course both at once.”

“Legs that expanded, like a music-stand. So you could run faster when you need to.”

They began to giggle. Mrs Foster, down below, looked up in surprise.

“We are, though,” said Maria. “Seriously, I mean, changing all the time. Growing up. Getting taller and growing new teeth.”

“That's different.”

“More peculiar,” said Maria, “because you know it's happening.”

But Martin had lost interest. He was examining the postcards at the exit. They each bought two rather muted
postcards of fossils (“Wouldn't you rather have a nice view?” said Mrs Foster. “Or one of the beach?”), and then set off on the climb up through the town back to the house. It seemed a very much shorter walk than it had ever done before. Disconcertingly soon they were outside the drive gates and Martin was saying, “Well, 'bye then…” and, more politely, “thank you for having me.”