A Stitch in Time (2 page)

“The drawing-room, I should imagine,” said Maria's mother.

Bulbous chairs and small, uncomfortable-looking sofas stood about, confronting one another. A vast piano was shrouded in a brown cover made to fit it. On the mantelpiece, stuffed birds sat dejectedly on twigs beneath a glass dome: they seemed, at first glance, to be sparrows but would be worth further investigation, Maria thought. I could look them up, she decided hopefully. She liked looking things up. Perhaps they would turn out to be rare warblers, or something extinct.

They toured the room. On one wall was a huge brown oil painting of a man in Highland costume standing in front of a mountain, surrounded by a great many dead birds and animals. A glass-fronted cabinet stood against another wall, crammed with china ornaments. A bookcase was filled from top to bottom with books that tidily matched one another, all their spines lettered in gold. You could never, Maria thought, never never take a book like that to bed with you. Or read it in the lavatory. You would
have to sit on one of those hard-looking chairs, wearing your best clothes, with clean hands.

“Well,” said Mrs Foster, “what do you think of it?”

“I hadn't thought,” said Maria, “that a holiday house would be like this.”

“To be frank,” said her father, “neither had I.”

They inspected the rest of the house. Downstairs there was a dining-room, in which eight, leather-seated chairs were gathered round a very long table. Above the sideboard hung another brown oil painting in which dead hares, rabbits and pheasants were spread artistically across a chair. There was a further room, which Maria instantly identified (to herself) as a study, lined with bookcases from floor to ceiling and furnished with more brown chairs and sofas. The kitchen was relatively normal. Upstairs there were several bedrooms and a bathroom. The bath, Maria noted with delight, had feet shaped like an animal's claws. She considered it for some time before following her parents down the stairs again.

As they reached the hall once more there was a sudden disturbance. The fringed cloth upon the table twitched, and from under it emerged a large tabby cat, which strode into the middle of the carpet and sat staring at them for a moment. Then it set about washing its face.

“Fully furnished seemed to include resident cat,” said Mr Foster. “Nobody said anything about that.”

The cat yawned and wandered out of the open front door. It cast a speculative look at the car and stalked off into a shrubbery.

Mr and Mrs Foster became active and business-like, unloading the car, carrying things into the house and investigating the cooker and the electrical appliances, which seemed to be firmly of the twentieth century. Maria followed them around, helping when asked.

“Which room would you like, darling? This one, with the view of the sea?”

Maria went to the window. It was the same view of the sea and harbour, horizon and cloud, that she had studied from the garden, with, this time, the garden itself in front. The window rattled in a gust of wind and again she thought she heard a swing squeak.

“Yes, please,” she said.

The room itself was small, and much filled with furniture – little round tables with frilled edges, a rather high large bed with brass rails at head and foot, many sombre pictures, and, on one of the tables, a miniature chest about eighteen inches high with many small drawers. Maria opened one, and was confronted with
three rows of bluish-grey fossils, like little ridged wheels, neatly arranged on faded brown stuff like felt and labelled in small meticulous handwriting.
Promicroceras planicosta,
she read.
Asteroceras obtusum.

“Well,” said her mother. “We'd better get the cases up. Are you coming?”

“In a minute,” said Maria.

She closed the drawer of the chest, deciding to save the fossils until later. She got up on the bed and bounced. It was lumpy but somehow embracing. The big chest of drawers was empty and smelled of moth-balls. She turned to the window and looked out into the garden. There was a huge dark tree at one side of it that she had not noticed before, a very solid and ancient-looking tree, quite different from the more ordinary and recognisable ones that swayed and shook in the sea wind. The garden seemed to perch on the hillside, suspended above the sea, a bare, rather neglected garden, with hardly any flowers. The trees and shrubberies, though, were inviting. They would have to be explored.

The cat brushed its way into the room, making her jump and stumble against one of the small tables. An ornament fell to the floor. She picked it up and saw guiltily that it was chipped. She put it back on the table.

“Fool,” said the cat.

“What?”

“Fool, I said. I suppose you think you'll get away with that.”

“I might,” said Maria.

The cat yawned. “Possibly,” it said. “And again possibly not.” It licked one paw delicately, sitting in a patch of sunlight.

“I must say you've got some very attractive Victorian atmosphere here,” said Maria.

“We aim to please,” said the cat.

“Where's the swing?” Maria asked.

“There isn't one.”

“Yes, there is. I heard it squeaking.”

“Have it your own way,” said the cat. “You'll soon find out.” It squinted at her through half-closed eyes and went on, “And don't maul me about. I can't stand it. The last lot were forever patting and stroking. ‘Nice pussy, dear pussy.' Ugh!”

“I don't like cats,” said Maria.

“And I'm not keen on children. How old are you? Nine?”

“Eleven,” said Maria coldly.

“Bit small, aren't you?”

“That's not my fault.”

“Rather on the plain side too, I'd say. Mousy. Not like that Caroline next door to you at home. Her with the long fair hair. And the two sisters she's always rushing about with. Laughing and pushing each other.”

“You would know about Caroline,” said Maria.

The cat inspected its paw, and stretched. “Is your mother a good cook?”

“Very,” said Maria.

“Lavish helpings? Plenty of scraps left – that kind of thing?”

“I should think you'll be all right.”

“Good,” said the cat. “Last week was a bit thin. Big family. Everyone after the pickings. There's a lot to be said for a small litter.” It eyed Maria thoughtfully, “Or don't you agree?”

“You can't be sure,” said Maria, “when you are. You don't know what it would be like otherwise. They nearly didn't have me, you know. I heard my mother say so once to her friend. But they're glad they did now.”

“Is that so?” said the cat. “Fancy.” It sounded unconvinced. “Well, I'll be seeing you, no doubt.” It sauntered out of the room and down the stairs, its tail waving elegantly from side to side.

With their possessions spread around the house – paperback books on the tables in the drawing-room, groceries in the kitchen, coats in the hall – its strong personality began to seem a little diluted. It became slightly more docile, as though it belonged to them instead of being entirely independent. They ate their lunch in the kitchen: somehow the dining-room seemed too forbidding, at least for cold pork pies and salad. The cat came in and fawned for a while against Mrs Foster's legs, until fed some scraps. Toady, said Maria to it silently, sucker-up… It gave her a baleful stare and settled down to sleep beside the cooker.

The last tenants of the house had left evidence of themselves in the form of half-emptied packets of cereals on the kitchen shelf (Rice Krispie people they had been, Maria noted, with one family rebel who favoured Frosties), a plastic duck under the bath, a shredded burst balloon and some comics in the waste-paper basket in her room, some bits of Lego down the side of the drawing-room sofa and a battered fork-lift truck behind the cooker. Mrs Foster swept all these objects up and threw them into the dustbin. Maria regretted this: she had been trying to imagine from them what this invisible family might have been like. They seemed to have been of mixed ages and
sexes. The house, she thought, must have been noisy last week. It was very quiet now, after lunch, as her mother washed up, her father read the newspaper, and she stood looking out into the garden.

“Shall we go and see what the beach is like?”

“Yes, please,” said Maria.

The beach that they went to was a couple of miles or so from the town. Maria, with several years' experience of beaches behind her, found herself instantly awarding it a high mark. It was unassuming, to begin with – a row of beach huts being about the only facilities it offered. And the clutches of people spread fairly thickly over the area near the car park and beach huts soon thinned out so that to either side the beach stretched away more and more uncluttered, with just a dog or child scampering at the water's edge, or family group encamped against the cliff.

It was the cliffs that instantly attracted her attention. Again, they made no large claims: not for them the craggy grandeurs of Cornwall or Wales. And they looked, in some indefinable way, soft rather than hard. It was the colour, chiefly, the slaty grey-blue that matched so nearly the now clouded sky, so that the sea, which had changed from milky green to a pale turquoise, lay as a belt of colour
between the grey cliffs, the bright shingle of the beach, and the grey sky. And yet they were not, she saw, the same colour all the way up. They were capped at the top with a layer of golden-brown, which in turn was finished off with a green skin of vegetation. And here and there the three levels of colour became confused and inter-mixed, where grass and trees and bushes apparently tumbled in a green tongue down the face of the cliff. She stood staring, entranced, at this agreeable place where Dorset ends, and England, and both slide gracefully away into the sea.

“Here, I think,” said Mrs Foster. They spread their rug and sat.

They were sitting, as Maria soon found, upon more than just a slab of this grey-blue stone. In the first place it was not stone at all, but a hard, dry clay. A piece of it flaked off under her fingers, as she scratched idly at it. And then, looking closer, lying on her stomach with her face a few inches above the rock, it came to life suddenly under her very eyes. For it was inhabited. There, like delicate scribblings upon the clay, were the whirls and spirals of shell-like creatures – the same, she recognised, as those in the miniature chest of drawers in her room back at that house. But smaller, these were,
barely an inch or so across, some of them, but perfect in each ridge and twist. And as she prised one out with the edge of a shell, it crumbled between her fingers into blue dust, but there, below and beneath, was another, and another, and another. The whole rock streamed with a petrified ghost-life.

“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.