Penelope Lively - A Stitch in Time

“Look,” said Maria.

“Fossils,” said her mother. “Ammonites. This coast is famous for fossils. You could collect them.” She settled herself on her back, a hump of jerseys under her head, and turned the page of her book.

But I don’t want to spoil these any more, Maria thought. They’re so pretty. And they’ve been there for millions and millions of years so it’s stupid to spend a Friday afternoon now picking them out and breaking them. If I was good at drawing I would draw a picture of them.

Instead, she examined the rock carefully, to remember it, and then wandered off among the neighbouring rocks to see if there were any more the same. Most were smooth and empty but one or two glinted with this remote life, though less lavishly. And then she found that by exploring carefully among the pebbles and chunks of rock with which this part of the beach was littered, she could collect fossil fragments, like sections of small grey wheels, and occasionally a small, complete, flat one. Once she found a slab of the blue-grey stone, nine or ten inches across, in which two of the fossils hung one above another – ghostly creatures suspended in the small chunk of a solidified ancient sea that she held between her hands. She wrapped it in her anorak to take back with her.

Late in the afternoon they walked back to the car park along a beach from which the sea had retreated, leaving huge expanses of glistening sand on which children ran and shouted. At the edge of the distant water sea birds scurried to and fro before the waves. People were gathering themselves together, picking up buckets, spades, picnic baskets, folding chairs. What are beaches like at night, Maria wondered, all empty …

“I expect you’ll soon make some friends down here,” said her mother.

“Yes, I expect so,” said Maria, without conviction.

Back at the house, in the privacy of her room, she laid the fossils out on the chest. It did not seem her room yet. Last week, after all, someone else had called it their room, and a week or two before that, someone else. It felt impersonal – not quite rejecting her, but not welcoming either. The fossils, she felt, might establish her in some way. I will get a book about fossils, she thought, and see what kind they are, and put labels on them like that other person did once, who found the ones in the miniature chest of drawers. Had that person, she wondered, collected them from that same stretch of beach? They were much superior to her broken fragments. Taking them out of the drawers to examine more carefully, one by one, she heard the squeak of that swing again, and went to the window to see if she could see it in the next-door garden. Trees, though, blocked the view.

Her father came along the passage and stopped at the open door of the room.

“Well, then … All settled in?”

“Yes,” said Maria. Her father was older than most people’s fathers; he was beginning to go bald, his hair forming a neat horse-shoe around his scalp. He had changed from his holiday shirt into a special holiday sweater, she noticed. They looked at each other, as they often did, both wondering what to say next.

“Explored everything by now, I expect,” said Mr Foster.

“I haven’t seen all of the garden yet.”

Mr Foster looked out into the garden with faint alarm, as though it might make demands of him. In London they had no garden.

“Yes,” he said.“Well, I daresay it could come in useful.”

There was silence. “Well,” said Mr Foster, “I suppose it’s about time for supper.” He went downstairs.

They spent a quiet evening, going early to bed. Maria, feeling drugged by wind and sea, slept soundly, woken only once by some small dog that barked shrilly from somewhere outside.

The garden, she discovered the next day, had possibilities. Without flower-beds, and furnished entirely with trees and shrubs that were clearly more or less indestructible, it was not at all the kind of garden in which you are being forever told not to step on the flowers or climb the trees. The huge, dank shrubbery that separated it from the next-door garden was a rabbit-warren of leafy tunnels and tents, inviting games of one kind or another. The trouble was that there was no one to play them with. Maria crawled aimlessly through and around. Then she turned to tree-climbing. One tree in particular attracted attention. It was the big dark tree she had noticed from the window, thickly leaved with shiny dark green leaves, and with massive trunk and branches that led on enticingly one from another, and met the trunk in ample curves that made natural sitting places. One, she found, was a perfect armchair vantage-point, not too alarmingly far above the ground, but commanding a view through the leaves into the next-door garden.

She sat there, watching unobserved the comings and goings from within the next-door house – a sprawling and ornate building that was now a private hotel. Ironwork chairs and tables, with sun-umbrellas, adorned the neatly mown lawn. There did not seem to be a swing there either, though there was a small bowling green and a badminton net.

The cat appeared, and sharpened its claws against the trunk of the tree with a rasping noise.

“What did you say your name was?” it said.

“Maria.”

“Mary, you mean.”

“No. Maria.”

“That’s a bit fancy, isn’t it?” said the cat scornfully.

“My mother thinks old-fashioned names are nice.”

“Pretentious, I call it,” said the cat. It watched a clump of grass intently, its tail twitching.

“Does the dog live next door?” said Maria. “The one that barks in the night?”

The cat shuddered. “Do you mind? One has some feelings.”

“I just wondered.”

Some children had come out into the hotel garden and were playing an energetic game of badminton, with much shrieking and shouting.

“Jolly lot,” said the cat. “Why don’t you ask if you can play with them?”

“I might.”

“Go on then.”

“In a minute.”

“You’re scared they wouldn’t want you,” said the cat.

Maria slid down the tree and walked slowly towards the ragged hedge that separated the two gardens at this point. The cat watched her through half-closed eyes. She stood looking at the children for a minute or so and then said, “Actually, I’ve got to go in and help my mother.”

“Sez you,” said the cat.

In the kitchen, her mother was energetically filling shelves and cupboards with their kind of food, and sorting out the crockery.

“Why were you chasing that cat away?”

“It’s an unfriendly cat,” said Maria.

“Nonsense. It’s been purring round my legs all morning.”

Hasn’t she ever noticed, Maria wondered to herself, that people can be quite different depending on whom they’re with? Animals too, presumably. Like Mrs Hayward at school smiles and smiles when there are parents there so you see her teeth all the way round and then when there’s only children again, her face goes all long and thin and you don’t see her teeth any more and her voice goes different too, kind of quicker and crosser …