A Stitch in Time (5 page)

“There's a book in our house,” she said, after a moment. “About fossils.”

“What's your name,” said the boy briskly. It was clear that their relationship was getting on to a different footing.

“Maria.”

“Mine's Martin. Could I have a look at this book sometime?”

Maria glowed, and could do no more than nod.

“Ssh,” said Martin with sudden urgency, though she was standing perfectly still and silent. She followed his gaze to a small bird slipping from branch to branch of a bush. They watched it until it flew off.

“Stonechat.”

“Was it?” said Maria admiringly.

“Female. I say, what's the time?”

“Quarter past two.”

“I'll have to go back. We're going somewhere this afternoon. Come on.”

Maria followed him, although she had intended to continue with her exploration of the lower slopes of Black Ven. She walked behind him in silence, stopping obediently whenever he did, anxious to shed her reputation as a confirmed bird-frightener. Once, as they crossed the bed of a gully over a plateau of dried and cracking mud, he said, “It's dangerous here when there's been a lot of rain.”

“Why?”

“The cliff starts slipping. The water builds up on top, see, and then it all starts slipping and sliding down. Not usually in summer, though. February and March, mostly. This part can be all a kind of bog.”

“Do you come here always?”

“Most years.”

Down on the beach he said over his shoulder, casually, “'Bye, then.”

“'Bye.”

“I'll come and look at that book sometime, I expect.”

The rest of the afternoon seemed a little flat. Maria and her mother ate their sandwich tea. They read their books. Bravely, they bathed in a sea whose chill matched its stony colour. And as the sun began to sink in the sky Mrs Foster said, as Maria had known she would, “Well, I think we've had the best of the day.”

Back at the house they found a note on the door-mat. Mrs Foster picked it up and they read, in large, loopy handwriting, “It occurred to me that you might care to borrow a small handbook to places of interest to visit in the neighbourhood, which I happen to have. Perhaps the little girl would kindly call over this evening and I will give it to her.” It was signed, “Hester Shand”.

“Our landlady,” said Mrs Foster. “Would you mind, darling?”

Maria did mind, privately. She had not taken an instant liking to Mrs Shand; rather the opposite, indeed. But there was no good reason to refuse without making her mother cross, and she preferred not to have people cross with her. “All right,” she said.

Mrs Shand lived in a large, much-turreted house called The Victoria Private Hotel over on the other side of the road. A notice at the entrance to the drive said ‘No Turning'. A further one, halfway up, said ‘Residents' Cars Only'. Small green signs warned you off the grass. There seemed to be much that was forbidden. A further notice beside the door of the hotel said flatly ‘No Children or Dogs'. Maria stared at it, thinking it pointless. There are, after all, both children and dogs – lots of them, all over the place. So there's nothing to be done about it. You might as well say No Rain or Earthquakes. But what the notice meant, of course, was There Are To Be No Children Or Dogs Here. Which, Maria thought with a sudden rush of indignation, was rude. Nobody can help being a child or a dog, and indeed they're not bad things to be, one way and another. She was just about to ring the large brass bell beside the door when a small nameplate caught
her eye, with another bell below it: Shand, Flat I. Please Ring.

She rang. After about a minute, a tube beside the bell, which she had not noticed, crackled and said, “Yes?” making her jump.

“My mother sent me to get the book.”

“Push the door,” said the tube breathily, “and go up the stairs. The door at the far end of the landing. It is unlocked.”

The Victoria Private Hotel, within, was sunk in a deep (childless and dogless) silence. Maria climbed two flights of stairs, thickly carpeted, and found herself on a wide landing, confronted by many closed doors. The one at the far end did indeed have a further nameplate beside it saying Shand. She opened the door and went in.

Her first impression was that there was some kind of machinery at work. A small room, furnished only with a mirror and a marble-topped table, opened into another, larger one, and from the large one came a confusion of rhythmical noises, and, almost at once, Mrs Shand's voice saying, “Please come through here.”

It was not machinery, but clocks. Mrs Shand sat on a large padded sofa (reminiscent of the ones in the drawing-room over the road) in the middle of a room otherwise furnished largely with clocks. There were other padded
chairs, and small wobbly tables, and glass-fronted bookcases, and a very large fern in a pot, and many pictures, but the clocks dominated. They were mostly grandfather clocks, half a dozen of them at least, standing around the walls like so many tall, insistent presences, ticking like an ill-assorted orchestra, all at odds with one another, some slow, some fast, some urgent, some with a halting note as though they would stop if only they could. She stared round at them in wonder, and they ticked at her in their different voices and at their different speeds, turning upon her their various faces. For they were all different. There were faces sternly simple and faces painted with flowers, a face ornately patterned in brass, a face above which a galleon rocked ceaselessly against a painted sea. Ten to two, said one, five to six, another – half past seven, twelve o'clock… The hands were all at odds. A muted argument about the time raged from one side of the room to another.

“The book is on the table,” said Mrs Shand. “Please be careful. There are some valuable ornaments about.” She was working on a piece of embroidery. Gingerly, Maria approached a small, unsteady table (which lurched as she came near it) and took the book. Mrs Shand, over a needle she was threading, gave her a critical look.

“Of course,” she said, “in my day a little girl would
wear a frock. Nowadays all children wear trousers, so that for the life of me I cannot tell the difference. Not that it seems to matter any more. Enjoying your holidays?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Maria.

“There's nothing like the seaside, is there?”

Maria could think of no answer to this that would not lead the conversation into another dead end, so she said nothing. In any case it was clearly not a real question, for Mrs Shand had turned away to hunt for something in the sewing-basket beside her. Maria wondered if she might go now, but Mrs Shand suddenly said, re-emerging from the sewing-basket, “I daresay you would like a chocolate.”

Maria was not, as it happened, particularly fond of chocolate, but could think of no way to refuse, so she said, “Yes, please.”

“The silver box on the desk,” said Mrs Shand. “The soft centres are on the right-hand side.”

There was a silence, invaded only by the ticking of the clocks, while Maria ate her chocolate (it tasted rather unpleasantly of violets) and Mrs Shand threaded her needle with a long length of pink silk.

“The clocks were my grandfather's collection. They will go to a museum when I die.”

This remark, also, was not one that could be followed
up with any success. Maria finished her chocolate (with some relief) and said, “How do you know what the right time is?”

“There is always the wireless.”

And there, indeed, it was, an up-to-date Japanese transistor, on a table beside the sofa.

“The clocks have not been altered since my grandfather's death. As a gesture of respect. He was a distinguished scientist.”

And in the time since then, presumably, they had run fast, or slow, or stopped and been re-wound, and thus ended in this state of fretful disagreement.

“The one beside the fireplace was the schoolroom clock, in the house you are staying in. It is not so valuable as some of the others, but attractive.”

It was indeed. The face was wreathed in painted flowers, which twined around the brass figures, and behind the brass hands, which said ten to four (it was in fact about six o'clock). Violets, clover, daisies, vetch: the flowers, in fact, of field and hedgerow. And beside each painted flower in tiny, sloping letters, was its name: Common Forget-me-not,
Myosotis arvensis
; Creeping St John's Wort,
Hypericum humifusum
; Woody Nightshade,
Solanum dulcamara…

“Unfortunately it no longer works,” said Mrs Shand.
“The only one that is beyond repair, I am told. It broke down when my own mother was a child.”

At ten to four one day. Morning or afternoon? Maria wondered. Her attention shifted from the clock to a picture above the mantelpiece beside it. That too was interesting. It was an embroidered picture, not painted at all – a stitched house, with stitched writing above and below (she was too far away to read what it said), and small stitched objects, trees or animals or something, and a patterned border enclosing the whole.

“That is a Victorian sampler,” said Mrs Shand. “Have a look at it. It is rather an unusual one. The little girl who made it would have been about your age, I imagine.”

Maria stepped closer. The letters of the alphabet ran across the top of the sampler, and then the numbers one to ten. Below them was a row of creatures – a jolly prancing black dog, very small, and some things that might have been deer, and a couple of birds. Then there were some verses, which she read through.

Below that was a squarish red brick house, neatly sewn in cross-stitch. On one side of it were a pair of garden urns, the kind that you grow flowers in, and on the other a swing. It was a large and handsome swing, stitched in black, presumably to represent black ironwork. Underneath the house was a row of objects that Maria took at first to be flowers, since they were not unlike the formal flowers in the curly pattern that bordered the whole picture. Or they might have been snails. It was only after staring at them for a moment that she realised they were in fact fossils. Ammonites – small, spiral stitched ammonites. And below them, finishing off the picture, as it were, was a handsome and elaborately embroidered tree. There was lettering underneath the tree, more small black-stitched
lettering:
Quercus ilex,
the holm oak. Finally, at the bottom, there was more lettering: Harriet Polstead aged 10 yrs her sampler. And then, below that: Susan Polstead completed this work for her sister 30 Sept 1865. Maria looked at it for a few moments in silence, and then said, “She was younger than me, actually.”

“Possibly,” said Mrs Shand.

There was a further silence, while Maria studied the sampler and thought about this girl called Harriet, and then Mrs Shand said, “Well, I daresay your mother will be wondering where you are.”

She looked expectantly at Maria and Maria said, “I think I'd better be going now. Thank you very much for the book.”

“Not at all,” said Mrs Shand. And then, as Maria was almost out of the door, she added, almost sharply, “I trust you're making good use of the piano.”

“Yes,” said Maria untruthfully.

“Quite right,” said Mrs Shand. “Goodbye, then.”

Going back down the stairs of the hotel, so smugly shrouded in its child- and dog-rejecting silence (from somewhere on the ground floor came a discreet tinkle of tea-cups), Maria decided that she did not altogether care for Mrs Shand. Which was a pity because in fact there
was a great deal that she would have liked to ask her about the clocks, and even more, about the sampler. It was still in her head as she crossed over the road – its stiffly stitched flowers and that leaping black cross-stitch dog, and the swing and the urns and the plump cushiony shape of the tree at the bottom.
Quercus ilex,
the hold oak.

Because, she thought with a sudden gush of interest, that's my tree, I'm sure it is… It's the same shape, and the same very dark green, and the same fat trunk and branches. And the house is the same house.

But there are no urns now, and no swing, and for some reason the house is a different colour. White, not brown.

She crossed the road and stood staring at the house. Behind and beyond it the sea made a grey backcloth flecked with white just as it must have done when it was built. That would always have been the same, that and the shape of the coast reaching away to right and left. And here was she, Maria, standing looking at it on an August evening just as the girl who made the sampler – what was her name, Harriet? – must have done once, a long time ago. Harriet is like the ammonites in the rock, she thought, not here any more but here in a ghostly way, because of the things she left behind. The sampler, and the drawings in the book. And it came to her, as she
turned to go into the house, that places are like clocks. They've got all the time in them there's ever been, everything that's happened. They go on and on, with things that have happened hidden in them, if you can find them, like you find the fossils if you break the rock.

Before supper Mr Foster examined Mrs Shand's guidebook and made a neat list of Places of Interest to be visited during the course of the holiday, with map-references and a note about mileages. This filled Maria with a certain gloomy apprehension: she did not like this kind of arrangement, unavoidable as it was in a family like hers. Both her parents thought that it did you good to go and see interesting places. So Maria sat in silence while plans were made, and a discussion held about how many Dorset towns were Roman in origin.