A Stitch in Time (6 page)

“Well,” said Mr Foster, “and what has Maria been doing?” He often referred to her as Maria when he was in fact speaking to her.

“I sat in the ilex tree,” said Maria.

“The what tree?” said Mrs Foster.

“The ilex tree. The one at the end of the garden.”

“Who told you it's called an ilex tree?” said Mr Foster.

Mr and Mrs Foster were town people: they tended to know a great deal about things that are discussed in the
papers and on television, and to be good at finding the quickest way from one part of London to another, but not to know the names of things. Plants and trees and stars and that kind of thing. Maria had long observed that one of the many ways in which people are divided up into different kinds is the division between people who know the names of things, who usually live in the country, and people who do not, who usually live in town, but thought that she was probably, secretly, inside, the other kind.

“Nobody, really,” said Maria. For some reason that she could not pin down, she found that she did not want to talk about the sampler. Probably they would not be interested, in any case. “It's a kind of oak tree,” she added.

“No, it isn't,” said her father. “Oak trees have acorns. And an entirely different leaf.” He spoke firmly and confidently: he was used to being right about things. It was always assumed, within the family, that he was right.

Maria said nothing. She looked at her father over the table and said nothing. He smiled affectionately at her as though to say that no one expected a person of eleven to be well-informed, and began to talk to his wife about matters arising from an article he had read in the newspaper, and presently Maria finished her supper and
left the kitchen without either of them noticing. She was good at not being noticed. It was, she sometimes thought, the only thing she was good at.

She went out into the garden and lay on her stomach on the grass for a bit in the last warming rays of the sun. (The cat, purring with unctuous charm, came and lay beside her to begin with – “Oh, no you don't,” said Maria, “I'm not talking to you this evening. You'll just spoil a nice day.” It stalked off in a huff, to roll destructively on the only flowers.) Presently, though, the sunlight ebbed away from the lawn and she wandered back into the house through the open French windows of the drawing-room.

It could never be a comfortable room, somehow, but it did now feel familiar. Even the huge dark pictures seemed to have been part of her life for much longer than two days. Though there were still things she had never noticed, like, for instance, the other glass dome on the table in that corner by the window, in which were two more stuffed birds (so faded that it was impossible to tell what their original colouring might have been). My friend, Maria told them, my friend Martin wouldn't approve of you being stuffed and put under a glass dome like that. And I quite agree. He knows all about birds and
plants and what their names are and things like that but he didn't know the name of the fossil he'd found and I told him and he may be coming to look at the book about fossils. He said he would. I expect he will.

And like the silver-framed photographs on the mantelpiece, one of a whiskery man with a nice, benign face, the other of a group of people, grown-ups and several children, sitting under a tree in a garden. The ladies wore long dresses, and the children were much encumbered with bulky clothes and straw hats or bonnets. Everything was in shades of yellowish-brown. She examined them for a moment before moving over to the piano, with the thought – somewhat unenthusiastic – that she might play it.

Maria was only moderately good at playing the piano. She had had lessons since she was six and in fact quite enjoyed them. But she was not, she knew, good at it. Not like Julia next door at home, who was Grade VI and had won a competition. But it was a very splendid piano – a proper grand piano, not like the unobtrusive upright that fitted into the corner of the living-room at home. Sitting down at it, with the brown cover removed, she felt both swamped by it and somehow uplifted, as though one might indeed suddenly be able to place one's
hands upon the keys and bring forth a fluent and silvery stream of music.

Which was not, of course, at all the case. She played through as much as she could remember of the piece she was learning at the moment, and it sounded much as it always did, jumpy with hesitations and wrong notes. She got off the piano stool and, lifting its lid, discovered within a pile of tattered and yellowing sheet-music. Most of the pieces were far too difficult. At the bottom, though, there was a thin leather-bound album, a collection of songs and tunes all bound together in a gold-tooled binding on which was stamped in gold lettering, S.C.P. 1860. One or two of these seemed more approachable to someone of her modest abilities, and she played them through, not worrying too much at her mistakes and enjoying the large, competent sound of the piano.

A movement, in the shadowy evening gloom of the room, distracted her and made her produce an ugly discord. The cat was squatting on the arm of a chair observing her.

“We aren't concentrating, are we? Not giving the matter our full attention. There's a certain basic lack of talent too, I'd say.” It stared squint-eyed into the garden, its tail twitching slightly.

“You again,” said Maria. “Thinking about eating the birds, I suppose.”

“That's always an interesting possibility,” said the cat.

“Beast.”

“Perfectly true. Of the species ‘cat', to be precise.
Felix felix.
So what's wrong with behaving like one?”

“Just because it's your instinct doesn't make it a
nice
way to behave. Sometimes I feel like hitting people and I suppose that's instinct but it's still a nasty thing to do,” said Maria.

The cat curled up like a bun and closed its eyes. “My, we are feeling argumentative this evening, aren't we?”

“In fact,” Maria went on, “when I come to think about it I suppose that's the difference between us. That I try not to do things that might be nasty even if they are my instinct and you just don't bother. In fact you don't know what nasty is.”

“Oh, clever clever,” said the cat irritably.

“And the other thing, of course, that's different is that you can't remember things like I can. What did we have for lunch yesterday?”

“Don't pester me with details,” said the cat.

“There you are! And of course the most important thing is that you can't talk. Unless I let you.”

“Oh, shut up,” said the cat. It slid off the arm of the chair and made a sinuous exit into the garden, without looking at her.

And the other thing, of course, Maria thought, is that it can't expect things either. Like wondering what we're going to do tomorrow and if it'll be good or bad, and thinking how funny that I don't know now – anything might happen, there might be the end of the world, or an earthquake, and I simply don't know but by this time tomorrow I will. She put the music away and closed the lid of the piano.

Lingering over this odd thought, and with it other confused but not really unpleasant thoughts – of that sampler, of fossils, of Martin – she went upstairs to her room, undressed, washed, and was lying tidily in bed when her parents called in, singly, to say goodnight. Mrs Foster adjusted the bedclothes, removed some dirty socks and a shirt, and said, looking out of the window, that there was a lovely sunset and she thought that meant good weather.

“Not an earthquake, then,” said Maria, from deep within the bed, mostly to herself.

“What, dear?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, goodnight, then.”

“Goodnight.”

Her father came in and gave her one kiss with exactly the same careful deliberation that he gave her twenty pence pocket money every Saturday morning. This did not, Maria had worked out, mean that he did not love her but just that he believed money to be important. He always knew exactly how much money he had, or should have, in his pocket, in just the same way that he always cleaned his shoes at the same time every evening and always folded the newspaper right side out before throwing it in the dustbin. He was a very tidy person. I am tidy too, thought Maria, I suppose I have inherited tidiness like I have inherited my mother's straight hair, but I am untidy in my head, in the things I think about… And, thinking this, and wondering if, were it possible – and oh, how amazing and interesting it would be if it were – to somehow arrive within someone else's head and listen to thoughts as though to the radio, other people's would be as perplexed and as peculiar as her own, she sank gradually into sleep.

And heard, she thought, though by the morning she hardly remembered having done so, the distant sound of the piano being played. The very song she had tried to play herself, but more competently managed.

“WHAT WOULD YOU like to do?” said Mrs Foster. “Beach? Or something different?”

“Something different.”

“What?”

“I don't know,” said Maria. They looked at each other, a little disagreeably, across the breakfast table. Mrs Foster thought that Maria was being unhelpful; Maria thought that her mother should have some interesting alternative already worked out.

“In that case,” said Mrs Foster, “you can come down into the town with me, to the library. And then we could go for a walk along the Cobb.”

“The what?”

“The Cobb is the harbour wall. You can walk along it. It's very old. I daresay,” Mrs Foster added without
enthusiasm, “you could buy an ice cream or something at the end of it.”

Maria stared at her mother coldly. She was not in fact thinking of either ice cream or the prospect of walking along the harbour wall, and she did not mean to look cold. It had occurred to her that she had a reason for wanting to go to a library herself: the cool expression was simply what happened to her small, rather pale face when she was deep in thought. It frequently gave rise to misunderstandings.

“And there's no need to look so cross about it,” said Mrs Foster.

Coming out of the drive Maria noticed for the first time that the house had a name. It was a well-concealed name, the letters being simply cut into the white plaster of the two columns at either side of the drive gates but not picked out in any way, so that they were white against a white background: Ilex House.

They descended the steep streets that led down into the town. When places are clothed in tarmac, houses, walls, shops and lamp-posts, it is difficult to remember that beneath lies earth, rock and the natural shape of the land. In the heart of London, in Oxford Street, Maria had been startled once to see workmen lift a slab of paving to reveal,
beneath, brown earth. It was as though the new, shrill street of concrete and plate-glass windows had shown its secret roots. But here, she noticed, in this small seaside town, the roots came boldly out on to the surface, for walls and the occasional house were made of the same grey-blue stone as the cliffs. It seemed, somehow, satisfactory, as though the houses had grown out of the soil just like the trees and grass and bushes, settling down to match the pewter sky and the pale green sea below it. And as they passed a terrace of cottages she saw suddenly the coiled glint of an ammonite, enshrined there for ever in the wall beside a net-curtained window in which stood a vase of plastic flowers.

They arrived at the library, and Mrs Foster became involved in the complicated process of acquiring temporary tickets. Maria left her and began to search for what she wanted. It did not take very long: libraries are obliging places once you have got the hang of them. ‘Trees', she soon discovered, came under ‘Botany', and here was a fat book, lavishly illustrated with trees in all sizes and shapes. She found what she wanted and sat reading with quiet satisfaction; “
Quercus ilex,
the holm oak – common in gardens and parks, this handsome tree with dark, evergreen foliage and brownish-black, deeply fissured bark was
introduced from Southern Europe during the sixteenth century…”

Her mother's face appeared at her shoulder. “What are you reading?”

Maria indicated, in silence.

“Oh,” said Mrs Foster. “That tree you were talking about…” Then, after a moment she added, “Actually you were right. It does seem to be a kind of oak tree.”

Maria said nothing. She closed the book and put it carefully back on the shelf, patting it into line with its neighbours.

“Yes,” said Mrs Foster, after a brief silence during which she looked rather oddly at her daughter. “Well, I suppose he was wrong, as it happens.” She seemed about to say something else, and then stopped.

They walked out of the library in silence, books tucked neatly under their arms, and down the steps into the street. As they turned towards the harbour Mrs Foster said, “Of course, living in a town all the time that's the kind of thing you never really know much about. One tree seems much like another.”

“Not really,” said Maria.

Her mother looked mildly surprised. “Well, I suppose not, when you look.”

After a moment she went on, “Do you do about plants and things at school?” She sounded quite respectful, as though, Maria thought, she were talking to someone important, not me at all.

“Not very much,” said Maria. She thought of plants at school – beans in jam-jars with blotting-paper that got all smelly and enormous white roots twining round and round inside the jar. And mustard and cress on bits of flannel. But what I like, she thought, is not all that but the names of things. And every single kind of thing having a different name. Holm oak and turkey oak and the sessile and pedunculate oak. Sessile and pedunculate…

“What?” said Mrs Foster.

“Nothing.”