Copyright

First published in Great Britain by Heinemann Young Books in 1976

This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,

HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is

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Text copyright © Penelope Lively 1976

Why You’ll Love This Book copyright © Michelle Magorian 2011

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Cover illustration © Elisabet Portabella 2016

Penelope Lively asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007443277

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007542192

Version: 2016-05-25

To Joy, Max, Tim and Nick

Why You’ll Love This Book by Michelle Magorian

Imagine a time when you could while away a holiday listening to the sea. Unimpeded by noises from the modern world, you could gaze, and daydream, and maybe imagine another person looking at the same seascape and cliffs in a previous century, surrounded by the same billion-year-old fossils in the rocks.

In A Stitch in Time by Penelope Lively, eleven-year-old Maria, plain and small, is a thoughtful girl with a sense of humour that few people are aware of. Her parents, a quiet, self-contained couple, live a life of order and routine and treat Maria like pleasant wallpaper.

It is summer in the nineteen seventies. For the whole of August and the first week of September, her parents have rented an old house whose back garden, bordered by dense shrubbery, drops down to a hedge, beyond which the sea meets the sky. The brown interior of the house with its brown velvet curtains still contains its original Victorian furniture. Inside its walls all Maria can hear is the humming of the fridge, the clock ticking and the rustle of her father’s newspaper. Outside, there are other sounds, a squeaky swing and a dog barking but when she looks they are nowhere to be found.

Maria, out of habit, returns to her interior world of make believe conversations with objects and animals, including the large tree at the bottom of the garden and the house’s smug resident cat.

It is up in her small bedroom that she discovers a tiny chest of drawers containing a collection of hand written labelled objects, objects as blue grey as the surrounding cliffs where they had been discovered. Fossils.

On a visit to the elderly neighbour who owns their rented house, tongue-tied Maria notices a framed Victorian sampler in her flat and is told that it was made by a little girl called Harriet. Maria recognises the house stitched onto it as the one where she and her parents are staying. She spots the tree at the foot of the garden, now big enough for Maria to hide in its branches and spy on the noisy family staying at a hotel next door. Among the stitched flowers there is a black iron swing and a dog cavorting about and at the bottom, a line of fossils …

Noticing the absence of Harriet in later family photographs in the flat, Maria begins to wonder if something terrible had happened to her.

On another visit a girl looks back at her from the framed sampler and then disappears. Is Harriet attempting to reach her? Is she trying to warn her of some impending danger? Or is Maria becoming her?

Through Maria’s growing fascination with fossils she makes friends with Martin, one of the children from the loud and squabbling family, and awkwardly begins to open up and have conversations with him instead of petrol pumps.

A Stitch in Time is a story of light and shade, of collecting fossils and playing hide and seek, picnics on the beach amid notices warning of the dangers of landslides on the cliffs, sunny days with watercolour views of blues and greens interspersed with grey skies, dark shadows, rainy afternoons and chilly seas. It’s a time for finding out what is true and what is imaginary and of discovering that people from the past are not mere faces in a sepia photograph but flesh and blood.

It’s a story where a solitary girl who lives in an imaginary world is shaken out of her silence by a Victorian sampler and a friendly but disorganised family who draw her into their chaos, gently transforming her into a talkative and laughing girl with a new voice. A more direct voice. A voice to be listened to by real people not imaginary ones, and that includes her surprised parents. Gentle and humorous with a touch of mystery.

Michelle Magorian

Trained at Rose Bruford College and L’Ecole Internationale de Mime, has a postgraduate Certificate in Film Studies (BFI/ London University) and an Honorary Doctorate (Portsmouth University).

Has performed in plays, musicals and one-woman shows and written lyrics for Gary Carpenter, Stephen Keeling, Bob Buckley and Alexander L’Estrange.

Has just completed her seventh novel and is currently researching a new novel. ITV Productions bought the rights of Just Henry – Costa Award winner.

Her first book Goodnight Mister Tom has celebrated its 30th anniversary and has been brought out in a special edition alongside Back Home.

A stage version of Goodnight Mister Tom, which opened at Chichester, completed a tour of fourteen theatres and received wonderful reviews. More recently, the tour has played in the West End, winning an Olivier award.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Why You’ll Love This Book by Michelle Magorian

Chapter One: A House, a Cat and Some Fossils

Chapter Two: An Ilex Tree and a Boy

Chapter Three: Clocks and a Sampler

Chapter Four: The Cobb and Some Dinosaurs

Chapter Five: The Day that was Almost Entirely Different

Chapter Six: Harriet

Chapter Seven: An Afternoon Walk and a Calendar

Chapter Eight: The Swing

Chapter Nine: Rain, and a Game of Hide-and-Seek

Chapter Ten: The Picnic

Chapter Eleven: A Small Black Dog and One Final Piece of Blue Lias

About the Author

Collins Modern Classics

About the Publisher

Chapter One
A HOUSE, A CAT AND SOME FOSSILS

“All right, back there?” said Maria’s father.

“Not much longer now,” said Maria’s mother.

Neither of them turned round. The backs of their heads rode smoothly forward between the landscapes that unrolled at either side of the car; hedges, trees, fields, houses that came and went before there was time to examine them. Fields with corn. Fields with animals. From time to time, on the left, snatches of a milky green sea bordered with a ribbon of golden sand or shingle. That is the English Channel, said Maria, inside her head, to the ashtray on the back of the car seat, the sea. We have come to spend our summer holiday beside it, because that is what people do. You go down to the beach every day and run about and shout and build sandcastles and all that. You have blown-up rubber animals and iced lollies and there is sand in your bed at night. You do that in August. As far as I know everybody in the world does.

The car slowed down and turned into the forecourt of a garage. “QUAD GREEN SHIELD STAMPS!” screamed the garage, “WINEGLASS OFFER! JIGSAWS! GREAT PAINTING OF THE WORLD!”

“Just short of three hours,” said Mr Foster. “Not bad.”

“Quite good traffic,” said Mrs Foster.

They both turned round now to look at Maria, with kindly smiles.

“You’re very quiet.”

“Not feeling sick or anything?”

Maria said she was quite all right and she wasn’t feeling sick. She watched her father get out of the car and start to fill it with petrol from the pump. He was wearing a special, new, holiday shirt. She could tell it was a holiday shirt because it had red and blue stripes. His shirts for ordinary life were never striped. On the far side of the petrol pump another car drew up. It was full of children, most of them small and several of them wailing. A boy of about Maria’s age looked at her for a moment through the window, his expression irritable and bored. A woman got out of the car, saying loudly, “Now just shut up for a moment, the lot of you.”

Maria stared at the face of the petrol pump. It had a benevolent face, if you discounted a bright orange sticker across its forehead, which referred to the Wineglass Offer.

“Noisy lot,” said the petrol pump. “You get all kinds, this time of year.”

“I expect you do,” said Maria.“It’ll be your busy season, I should imagine.”

“Too right,” said the petrol pump. “It’s all go. Rushed off my feet, I am, if you see what I mean.” In the other car, the two youngest children had struck up a piercing argument about who had kicked whom, and the petrol pump spluttered as it clocked up the next gallon.“Excuse me … It goes right through my head, that racket. Personally I prefer a nice quiet child. You’re just the one, are you?”

“That’s right,” said Maria. “I’m an only.”

“Very nice too,” said the petrol pump. “I daresay. Had a good journey down?”

“Not bad,” said Maria. “We had quite good traffic.”

“I’ll tell you where you get good traffic,” said the petrol pump with animation. “The coast road on a Saturday night. Nose to tail all the way. Spectacular. Now that’s what I call traffic.”

“We get good rush-hours,” said Maria,“where we live. On the edge of London.”

“Is that so? Jammed solid – that kind of thing?”

There was no time for more. Maria’s father got into the car again and started the engine.

“Cheerio,” said the petrol pump. “Nice meeting you. All the best. Take care. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.”

“Right you are,” said Maria. “Thanks for the petrol.”

“You’re welcome.”

Back behind her parents’ travelling heads, with Dorset unrolling tidily at each side of her, Maria hoped there would be something to talk to at this holiday house her parents had rented for the month. You can always talk to people, of course. It’s usual, indeed. The trouble with people is that they expect you to say particular things, and so you end up saying what they expect, or want. And they usually end up saying what you expected them to. Grown-ups, Maria had noticed, spent much time telling each other what the weather was like, or wondering aloud if one thing would happen, or another. She herself quite liked to talk to her mother, but somehow her mother was always about to go out, or into another room, and by the time Maria had got to the point of the conversation, she had gone. Her father when she talked to him would listen with distant kindliness, but not as though what she said were of any great importance. Which, of course, it might not be. Except, she thought, to me. And so for real conversations, Maria considered, things were infinitely preferable. Animals, frequently. Trees and plants, from time to time. Sometimes what they said was consoling, and sometimes it was uncomfortable, but at least you were having a conversation. For a real heart-to-heart you couldn’t do much better than a clock. For a casual chat almost anything would do.

“A holiday house,” she said to the ashtray,“is presumably bright pink or something. Not normal at all. With balloons tied to the windows and a funny hat on the chimney. And jolly music coming out of the walls.”

“Here we are,” said Mrs Foster, and as she spoke Maria saw this place announce itself with a road-sign. Lyme Regis. She had been studying road-signs throughout the journey. The places to which one was not going were always the most enticing, lying secretly to right and left out of sight beyond fields and hills, promised by signposts that lured you with their names – Sixpenny Handley, Winterborne Stickland, Piddletrenthide and Affpuddle. They seemed not quite real. Could they be like other places, with bungalows, primary schools and a Post Office? Like the green tracks that plunged off between hedges and fields, they invited you to find out. And I’ll never know now, she thought sadly. That’s one of the lots of things I’ll never know.

She turned her attention to Lyme Regis, which she would have to know, like it or not. It did not seem too bad. It did not, for instance, have houses in rows. Maria had quite strong opinions about a fair number of things, though she seldom mentioned them to anyone, and she did not care for places in which houses were lined up in rows, staring blankly at you as you passed, though in fact she lived in this kind of house herself, and so did everyone she knew. The houses in this town, on the whole, were differently arranged. Their problem, if you could call it that, was that the town was built upon a hillside, or several hillsides, and seemed in grave danger of slithering down into the sea, so that each house had to dig its toes in, as it were, bracing itself against the slope with walls and ledges and gardens. The houses rose one above another, lifting roofs and chimneys and windows out of the green embrace of trees. She had never seen a place with so many trees, big ones and little ones, light and dark, all different. And between them you could see slices of a sparkling sea, tipped here and there with the white fleck of waves.

“Delightful,” said Mrs Foster.

“Nice Victorian atmosphere,” said Mr Foster. And then, “This must be it, I think.”

They turned into a gravelled drive, tightly lined with bright green hedge. The drive made a little flourish between hedge and a somewhat unkempt shrubbery, and then ended up in front of a house. Maria and her parents got out of the car and stood in front of the house, considering it. At least Maria considered it. Her mother said, “How pretty. I like the white stucco,” and her father began to take the suitcases from the car. Maria went on considering.

It was a tidy house. It did not sprawl, as some of its neighbours sprawled, into such follies as little towers and turrets, glassed-in verandas, porches and protrusions of one kind and another. It stood neat and square – or rather, rectangular, for it was longer than it was high – with a symmetrical number of green-shuttered windows upstairs and down, at either side of a black front door with a fan-light above it. Its only frivolity was a pale green iron canopy with a frilled edge that ran the length of the house just beneath the upstairs windows.

“Well, Maria,” said Mr Foster. “Is it anything like you imagined?”

“No,” said Maria.

“About 1820, I should think,” said Mr Foster, in his instructing voice. “That kind of architecture is called Regency.”

And Maria thought, never mind about that, because somewhere there’s a swing. It’s blowing in the wind – I can hear the squeaking noise it makes. Good, I shall like having my own swing. And someone’s got a little dog that keeps yapping. She walked round the corner of the house into the garden, to see where this swing might be, but there was nothing to be seen except a large square lawn, edged with more dense and shaggy shrubbery and a good many trees. At the end of the garden was a hedge, and beyond that the hillside dropped away steeply down towards the sea. The sun had gone in now, and the glitter was gone from the sea. Instead it reached away upwards to the sky, grey-green splashed here and there with white, to melt into a grey-blue sky so gently that it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. To right and left the coast stretched away in a haze of greens and golds and misty blues, and immediately in front of the town a stone wall curled out into the sea to put a protective arm round a little harbour filled with resting boats, their masts like rows of toothpicks. Gulls floated to and from across the harbour, and on the beach behind it people sat in clumps and dogs skittered in and out of the water. It was a view you could spend much time examining.

The swing, she decided, must be in the adjoining garden, which was almost completely hidden by trees. The house next door, which was large, and of the towered and turreted kind, could just be seen between them. She went back to the front of the house again, where her father was just unlocking the door. They went inside.

“Good grief!” said Mrs Foster. “It’s the real thing! Stopped dead in 1880.”

Whereas outside all had been softly coloured – green and blue and gold – within the house all was solidly brown. The walls, in the hall at least, were panelled. A brown clock ticked upon a table over which was spread a brown velvet tablecloth (“Tassels and all,” said Mrs Foster, picking up one edge and letting it drop again. “My!”). A brownly patterned carpet was spread across part of the brown tiled floor. Thick brown curtains hung at either side of the French windows opening on to the garden, visible through the door of what was clearly the main room. (This, said Maria to herself, is what is called a drawing-room, like they have in books and I have never seen before.) They all three walked into this room, and stood for a moment in silence.

“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.

“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.

Chapter Two
AN ILEX TREE AND A BOY

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 …

The front doorbell rang.

“A caller!” said Mrs Foster.“But we don’t know anyone.”

She went through to the hall. Beyond the open door Maria could hear the mixture of voices – a strange one and her mother’s (that’s her talking-to-people-she-doesn’t-know voice, she thought). The voices ebbed and flowed; the kitchen clock ticked; the sun came out and made a neat golden square across half the table, down its legs and on to the floor. Maria became aware that she was being called, and went reluctantly into the hall.

“This is Maria,” said her mother. “Mrs Shand is our landlady. She lives over the road.”

Mrs Shand was very old. Her clothes were old-fashioned but lady-like, Maria recognised; silk dress and brooches and necklaces, and stockings that ended oddly in a pair of white plimsolls. She stared at Maria and said,“The last tenants had four. Just the one will be quite a change. Not that I mind children.”

I have never met a landlady before, thought Maria, so I don’t know if I mind them or not. I expect I shall find out.

“Well,” said Mrs Shand,“there’s plenty of space for the three of you, that’s for sure.”

“Plenty,” said Mrs Foster.“We hadn’t realised quite how large the house was.”

“Tenants are often surprised. The furnishings arouse comment also, from time to time.”

“We like Victorian things,” said Mrs Foster. “Aren’t you afraid of damage, though? With children about, and people being careless …”

“The house has been subjected to children all its life,” said Mrs Shand, a little tartly.“I grew up in it myself, with six brothers and sisters. And my mother before me. It is too old to change, like me. I had the kitchen modernised, as they call it. People seemed to object to the old arrangements.”

Maria, who had been studying the face on a cameo brooch pinned to the neck of Mrs Shand’s dress, and only half listening to the conversation, began suddenly to pay attention. How very strange to be staying in a house in which a great many children had grown up. In her own home, there had only been her: it was built eight years ago, and was younger, in fact, than she was. She thought of Mrs Shand, standing in this same doorway years ago as a girl her own age. She stared at the landlady’s face – hatched over with tiny, thread-like lines – for the shadow of this other person she must once have been, and could not find it. Had she, and others, leapt down those stairs three steps at a time, and sat in the tree in the garden?

“Maria,” said her mother, “Mrs Shand was speaking to you.”

Maria jumped, and paid attention again.

“I asked,” said Mrs Shand, “which room you chose for yourself.”

“The one at the back,” said Maria. “The little one.”

“Ah. The old nursery. That was always the children’s room. You can hear the sea at night.”

And the swing, thought Maria, and was going to ask about this swing when her mother began to speak. The conversation moved away to matters of newspaper deliveries and the electricity meter.

“Well,” said Mrs Shand, in a concluding tone of voice, “I think that is about all I need to tell you. The piano was tuned last month. Please feel free to use it.” She looked reflectively at Maria.“Quiet little thing, isn’t she? You are welcome to call in if there is anything you wish to ask about.” And then her grey and white patterned silk back view vanished between the green hedges of the drive.

“She matches the house nicely,” said Mrs Foster.

“Why doesn’t she live in it any more?”

“She finds it too big. She lives in a flat in the guest-house over the road.”

“I wish she’d taken her cat with her,” said Maria. And I wish I’d asked her about the swing, she thought. Never mind. Another time.

In the afternoon it rained. Excused the beach, Mrs Foster settled herself in the drawing-room to read, with barely concealed relief. Mr Foster went to sleep. Maria stared at the rain from her bedroom window for a while: it coursed down the glass in oily rivers, making the outline of the dark tree in the garden (her tree, as she now thought of it, the one that she had climbed that morning) swim and tremble like seaweed in a rock-pool. The thought of seaweed reminded her of the fossils from the beach and it occurred to her that she had meant to find out what they were called, and label them. She began to arrange them, comparing them with the ones in the miniature chest of drawers. Some were just the same, which made identification easy enough. She wrote their names in her best writing on small pieces of paper – Promicroceras … Asteroceras … – and arranged them in nests of cotton wool from the bathroom. It looked professional and scientific. One fossil, though, refused to be identified. It was a very ghostly thing, in the first place, just a hint of patterning on a lump of the blue rock that seemed at first glance to be nothing in particular. Only after a while did its lines and patterning become deliberate, the stony shadow of some ancient creature.

What I need, she thought, is a book. And downstairs in that room there are lots of books.

The books, though, when she stood among them in that library between the drawing-room and the dining-room, were quite remarkably unenticing. They reached from floor to ceiling in tiers of brown, maroon and navy blue. There was nothing gay in sight – not a coloured jacket or illustration – and when she pulled a book or two out at random they each had the same queer smell. It was the smell, she decided, of books that no one has got around to reading for a long time. And the gold-lettered titles on their spines were far from inviting … The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, The Testament of the Rocks, The Principles of Geology. It was as she stared at them with distaste, though, that it occurred to her that words like “rock” and “geology” were to do with fossils. She took one of the books down and there, sure enough, was a page of neat drawings of rock sections, and, a few pages later, of shells. The text, though, was as unintelligible, almost, as though it were in a foreign language, laden with cumbersome words that she could not understand and sentences so long that it was quite impossible to find out what they meant. The drawings, on the other hand, were nice, and one book at least looked as though it might be helpful. She selected an armful and took them upstairs to her bedroom.

Arranged in a row on the table they looked important, if daunting. She sat down at the table – an old, battered one it was, with inky grooves and at one side some deeply inked initials, H.J.P. – and opened The Origin of Species, not very hopefully. It was an extremely solemn book, though one page through which she skipped did talk quite interestingly about striped horses. Most of it she could not understand at all. She scowled at the book, scrubbing the heels of her sandals on the rung of the chair, while outside in the garden that small dog was barking again. This book isn’t going to be any good, she thought, I don’t really understand a word of it. She flipped through the pages, and as she did so the book fell open at the end, and there, on the blank last page, somebody had made drawings with a fine-nibbed pen, with writing beside each one.

Disapprovingly, because she had been brought up to believe that you should never scribble in books, Maria examined the writing, which she recognised as old-fashioned in its neat, sloping style, but a little uncertain, probably that of someone around her own age. There were several instances of mis-spelling. “Specimins collected upon the cliffs” she read, and then there was a list of Latin names – Gryphaea … Phylloceras … (it was impossible, of course, to know if these were correctly spelt or not) – with, beside each, a neatly penned drawing of a fossil. Several times the nib of the pen had caught on a rough bit of paper and spat a shower of minute ink dots which, in one place, the writer had turned into a little figure wearing a dress to below her knee, with a frilled pinafore on top, and black boots with many buttons. And long hair held back by a band. It was quite a good drawing. Better, thought Maria, than I could do. And then, running her eye down the page, she saw suddenly a drawing that looked familiar.

That’s mine, she thought, that’s the one I don’t know the name of … And, laying her fossil beside the drawing, she saw its shadowy shape and patterning confirmed and defined in the tidy pen-strokes. Stomechinus bigranularis, said the writing alongside it,“an extinct form of sea-urchin. Found below the west cliff, 3 August 1865.”

And it’s August now, thought Maria, a different August … And with the book still open on the table in front of her she sat looking out of the window and thinking about someone else (a girl, I’m somehow sure she was a girl …) who had held the same book just about a hundred years ago – no, more than that – and looked perhaps out of the same window maybe at the same shaggy lawn and gently heaving trees. Because, thought Maria, I suppose she lived here, since the book is here, and the fossils in the cabinet, which must have been hers … And, thinking about this, and stroking her fingers over the smooth, but so faintly ridged, surface of the piece of grey rock containing Stomechinus bigranularis, she heard the squeak and whine of that apparently non-existent swing again.

Into which agreeable private dream intruded – as such things inevitably do – the voice of her mother calling that it was time for tea. But we’ve only just had lunch, thought Maria, I’m sure we have, it’s not true at all that time is always the same, it simply isn’t, there are slow afternoons and ordinary afternoons and afternoons like this one that are so fast they hardly seem to have happened … She went downstairs two steps at a time, jumping the last four in one leap, and noticed that the rain had stopped. She would be able to go and climb that tree again after tea.

The tree seemed, half an hour later, like an old friend. She settled herself in her armchair curve where branch met trunk. The bark was warmly rough against her back, through her cotton T-shirt, and the leaves hissed and whispered around her conversationally. After a while she was joined by a pair of pigeons who settled in another part of the tree and moaned at each other along a branch.

The sun had come out now and it was a bright, sparkling evening after the rain. The children from the hotel erupted into the next-door garden with much screaming and began to play badminton at the net not far beyond her tree. She made herself even smaller and more silent than she had done before, and watched them intently. There were three girls a little younger than herself, several smaller fry, and an older boy, who she assessed at, also, around eleven. She realised suddenly that they were the family she had seen at the petrol pump, on the way to Lyme – at least, given their ages and the number of them, they seemed to be a mixture of two families. The boy, she noticed, was slightly bored with the others. He played quite good-naturedly with the younger ones for a while, and then had an argument with the girls which sent him off on his own, kicking moodily at the stones around the edge of the flower-bed. Then, something in her tree attracted her attention and to her considerable alarm he came over and stood directly underneath it, staring up into the leaves. Maria froze against the trunk. The pigeons cooed at each other in monotonous repetition.

She must have clenched herself so tightly in her efforts to keep still that all of a sudden her sandal slipped against the bark with a rasping noise, the pigeons lumbered noisily off with cries of alarm and lurched down into another tree, and the boy, turning his head in her direction, looked straight up at her. They stared at each other through the leaves.

“I knew you were there all the time,” said the boy. “I only pretended not to so I could watch the collared doves. What did you go and frighten them away for?”

“I didn’t mean to,” said Maria.

He was examining the tree with interest now. “That’s a good tree,” he said.“The ones in this garden are hopeless. Do you live in that house all the time?”

“No,” said Mara. She wanted, urgently, to share the tree with him, to invite him into it, but even as she started to do so the usual business happened, the process whereby she never, ever, in the end, said what she wanted to say, in case it was wrong, or the other person didn’t want to do the thing suggested anyway, or would just stop listening. “No,” she said.

“We came yesterday,” said the boy. “They have rotten food. Not enough. But there’s a colour telly, so I s’pose it’s not too bad.” He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans, turning. He was about to go away.

“How did you know they were collared doves?” said Maria desperately.

“What do you mean?”

“Not pigeons. I thought they were pigeons.”

“Obviously they were collared doves, weren’t they?” said the boy.“I mean, wood pigeons have a wing bar, don’t they? Anyway, the call’s different.” He was wandering off now.

“Goodbye,” said Maria, her voice coming out suddenly loud, which made her go pink. Fortunately the leaves hid her.

“’Bye,” said the boy.“See you …” he added casually. And then with a sudden whoop he was dashing over the grass to the rest of the children. Maria heard them shouting, “Martin … Come on, Martin.”

Some time later she slid down the trunk of the tree and went back into the house. It was very silent. In the kitchen the fridge hummed softly. A clock ticked. Otherwise there was not a sound except for the rustle from the drawing-room when her father turned over a page of the newspaper. Her parents adapted rapidly to the drawing-room. They sat on either side of the empty fireplace, in identical bulbous chairs, reading. Maria lay on her stomach on a darkly patterned rug, and read also. The cat arranged itself decoratively along the arm of a sofa and watched them.

“Lively holidays you people go in for,” it said.

“We’re a quiet family,” said Maria.

It flexed its claws against the material of the sofa and said,“Do anything stimulating today? Learn anything? Go anywhere? Have any interesting conversations?”

“I talked to quite a nice boy,” said Maria. “He’s about my age,” she added.

“Well, well,” said the cat,“we are coming on, aren’t we? I suppose he asked you to go over there and play.”

Maria did not reply.

“Well?” said the cat.

“Maria,” said Mrs Foster, looking up, “don’t mutter like that. And shoo that cat off the sofa, will you. It’s ruining the material with its claws.” After a moment she added, “You didn’t need to chase it right out of the room, poor thing.”

“It wanted to go out,” said Maria. “I think I’ll go to bed now.”

She had a bath in the bath with feet like animals’ claws. It was a particularly deep bath, so that once in it, lying down, you could not see out unless you sat up, and indeed, if as small as Maria, you were in danger of drowning unless you kept constantly on the alert. Even so, she found it satisfactory. The lavatory too was pleasing. It had a brown wooden seat and a wreath of roses around the china basin, an arrangement she could not remember having come across before. Nothing in this house, she realised, was new. Everything was battered by time and use. In her own house, and those of all her friends, these were things that had been bought last month, or last year. In this one, wood was scratched, paint tattered, materials worn and faded. People had been here before. Such, for instance, as the H.J.P. who had carved her initials on the table. And the person – child, girl? – who had made those drawings of fossils in the book from the library.

Going back to her room she realised also that this helpful, no-longer-here friend had told her the name of the one she had not been able to identify. Stomechinus bigranularis she wrote neatly on a piece of card. She arranged it with the rest of her small collection, got into bed and switched the light out.

Chapter Three
CLOCKS AND A SAMPLER

Pinned up on the kitchen wall – abandoned, presumably, by a previous tenant of the house, someone whose holiday was now over and done with – was a map of the town and the coast to right and left of it. Maria soon became very familiar with this map. She liked maps. She liked to know where she was and moreover had a deep secret pride in having learned all on her own how to find her way around a map. Once upon a time (and not so very long ago, either) maps had been as mysterious to her as the long columns of print in her father’s newspaper, or some of the more confusing kind of sums at school, before which she sat in baffled horror. There were these maps, with their network of lines all differently coloured which might be roads or rivers or railways but you could never be certain which, and their blocks of green and blue and grey which meant other things, and their innumerable names. And there were the places to which they referred, bright and moving with houses and buses and waving trees and bustling people, and how on earth you married the one to the other, as it were, she could not see at all. How you stood before a map and said to yourself, ah! I am here, and I want to be there, so I must walk (or drive, or take a bus) in that direction. And then one day she had wrestled with this problem all on her own, standing in the shopping centre near her home before the street map that said so confidently, with its red pointing arrow, YOU ARE HERE. And all of a sudden she had realised where indeed she was, and the familiar streets and shops had turned themselves into lines and writing and laid themselves handily out upon the map.

“Not very bright, were you,” said the cat.“Most would have tumbled to that a long time ago.”

“I never said I was,” said Maria, “bright.”

“Now take Sally in your class at school,” the cat went on, warming to the subject. “She’s what I’d call bright. Hand up all the time – ‘Please, miss, I know,’‘Please, miss, can I answer …’ Nice writing. Red ticks all over her exercise books.”

But Maria found suddenly that she did not want to talk about Sally in her class at school. It was too nice a day – sun making a white glittering sheet out of the sea, the fields beyond the house ablaze with buttercups and daisies – and moreover, she wanted to look at the map undisturbed. The cat, ignored, went to squat on the kitchen doorstep, and Maria returned to the map. The beach to which they went, she knew, was at Charmouth, and the cliffs beyond it, between Charmouth and Lyme Regis, were called first Black Ven, and then Church Cliffs. And today, she knew, was the day to start exploring all this on her own, very slowly, at great length and in much detail and with conversations with anything likely that happened to come along.

They drove to Charmouth and walked along the beach, as they had done the first time they had gone there. To shake off the crowds, said Mrs Foster, and Maria thought, to get closer to Black Ven, and, thinking this, wondered why it should be called Black when in fact it was grey and green and golden. Picking their way along the beach she thought of this and other things while her mother selected and then discarded likely sitting-places with all the deliberation of someone buying a house. At last a place was found that was neither too windy nor too shady, neither too near the sea nor too far, unencumbered by seaweed or noisy neighbours. Mrs Foster set about the process of making herself comfortable and establishing the boundaries of their territory, and Maria, watching her, thought that if you were a person who didn’t know about seaside holidays – a visitor from outer space, say, or a prehistoric person – you might be amazed to find that at certain times of the year everybody gathers on the edges of England (and Scotland, and Wales) and just sits on them, looking at the sea. It might seem a very odd thing to do.

“All right?” said Mrs Foster.

“All right,” said Maria. And then, after a moment or two, “I think I’ll go and explore.”

“Mmn,” said Mrs Foster, opening her book.

Maria began to climb the slopes at the back of the beach, the toes of the cliff. Grey, muddy toes they were, and looking up she saw that this dried grey mud had slid in long tongues down from the top, like pictures of glaciers in geography books. The mud had cracked into scaly patterns, and here and there, as you walked upon it, it quaked a little as though deep down its foundations were uncertain. A notice back at the car park had warned sternly that these cliffs were dangerous and might fall at any time. And Maria, looking up at the blasted slopes of Black Ven, thought with a shudder, I’m not going up there, I don’t fancy that at all.

For it was an eerie place. It seemed both very old and very young – old and infertile as the moon, with its barren reaches of mud and rock, and yet young as last week in its impermanence. For this, she saw, was the landscape of collapse. The cliffs had slipped and slid – sometimes long, long ago, so that the place that had crumbled away was now clothed in scrub, grass, reeds and sapling trees – and sometimes so recently that nothing yet grew at all except a few valiant seedlings poking out from the mud to show what they could do, given time and a world that would stop moving.

She followed a path that wound between bushes and over dried gullies lined with whispering reeds. It was a garden, this place, a wild garden over which the ashen cliffs presided like cathedral walls. There were flowers all around. Some of them she could recognise – the more ordinary ones. Vetch and ragwort and those little yellow things called eggs and bacon that are really birds’ foot trefoil, and clover. But there were plenty of others she did not know, including a most abundant green plant growing in forests like small pine trees, and something like a wild sweet-pea. She picked a piece of this and tucked it in her buttonhole, meaning to look it up in a book, if possible. She picked a dandelion head, and blew babyishly, and it erupted into the wind in a shower of shiny fragments that drifted uselessly away towards the sea. Where, thought Maria, they haven’t a hope of growing. Waste. You’re always being told not to waste things – time and electricity and left-over food – but things waste themselves much more. All that growing and flowering and making seeds for nothing. Dandelions and those millions and millions of seeds from elm trees in the spring. And tadpoles. And all those ammonites that got fossilised in the rock, there must have been millions and millions of them too. Seas full of them. All getting eaten by other things before they grew up. Talk about waste …

“What?”

She came round a large gorse bush to find herself face to face with someone who had been standing on the path, and realised with sudden shame that some at least of these thoughts had been said aloud. And the person, to make it worse, was the boy from the hotel next door.

“You’ve done it again,” he said. “But I daresay you didn’t mean to.”

“Done what?”

“Frightened the birds away. There was a pair of linnets.” He looked at her with mild irritation, which turned to active exasperation as something about her caught his attention. “Where on earth did you get that?”

“What?”

“The grass vetchling,” said the boy crossly, “stupid.”

Maria’s hand flew to the now wilting flowers in her buttonhole. “These? I didn’t know what they were.”

“Only the rather rare grass vetchling,” said the boy. “That’s all. Don’t you know this is a nature reserve?”

“No,” said Maria dolefully. The grass vetchling felt now as though it were burning a reproachful hole in her shirt.

He looked down at her – he was at least a head taller – and apparently relented a little for he said more tolerantly, “Oh well, don’t do it again, anyway.” And then, looking at her hand, “Can I see your fossil?”

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