A Stitch in Time (18 page)

Maria stopped tracing the shape of the roses on the sofa with her finger, and said, “You didn't say that exactly. And I thought…”

“You thought I was speaking of Harriet? How very unfortunate. Then I must apologise for not being more precise. No. It was not that at all. They had gone fossilhunting somewhere along the cliff-path to the west of the town. And there was a small landslip (you can still see the place, I'm told), from which happily the children were able to scramble clear, but their little dog – a little black creature they had, called Fido – was swept away and drowned. They were all much distressed.”

There was a pause. Mrs Shand rethreaded a needle and Maria sat in a tumultuous private silence and thought, so
that is what it was, so now I know… I did imagine it, but in a way too, I didn't. There
was
a dog, and something
did
happen, but not the something I thought. At last she said, “It could have been Harriet. Who was killed, I mean.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs Shand, “it could have been. Things always could have been otherwise. The fact of the matter is that they are not. What has been has been. What is, is.” She stabbed the needle confidently into the brown canvas.

“I suppose so,” said Maria. “But it's a very difficult thing to get used to.”

“One does eventually,” said Mrs Shand, “there being no other choice.”

“I partly imagined it all,” said Maria. “I do imagine things a bit.” She looked again at the photograph. Mrs Harriet Stanton, somebody's mother (and aunt) gave her a nice friendly smile.

“Evidently,” said Mrs Shand. “No doubt you'll grow out of it.”

And grow up into somebody else, like Harriet, thought Maria. I'm not stuck at now any more than she was. And into her head came the idea of mysterious and interesting future Marias, larger and older, doing things one could barely picture. They seemed like friends she had not yet met. Harriet became Mrs Harriet Stanton, she thought (a
bit stout, with sons) and I'll end up as somebody quite different too, but in a funny way we both go on being here for ever, aged ten or eleven one summer, because we once were. I like that.

Mrs Shand's quietly muttering transistor radio bleeped six times and said that it was eight o'clock, reminding Maria that she had better go. They said goodbye to one another with quite a lot of warmth. Mrs Shand said that she hoped perhaps she'd see them down here another year, and Maria said that she hoped so too, and then finally she turned to go. As she reached the door Mrs Shand said, “The dog's grave is at the back of the shrubbery in the garden. Or it was when I was a child.”

“The dog that was drowned?”

“Yes. Its body was washed up on the beach and ceremoniously buried by the children. An odd idea.”

“I don't think so,” said Maria.

Because that is what I would have done, she thought, crossing the road on her way back to the house. If it had been my black dog and I was fond of it. That would have been respectful. And she thought of them – Harriet and Susan, but Harriet mostly – ceremoniously burying the dog and weeping, presumably, all the time. And with the thought sympathetic tears pricked her eyes.

Back at the house, she went straight round into the garden. It was getting late now; down by the harbour the street lights had been switched on and made long shimmering yellow ribbons across the dark water. In the garden, trees and bushes were still and black. Only the ilex rustled and whispered high up at its top. In the house lights were on; Mrs Foster moved across the kitchen window.

Maria plunged straight into the shrubbery. She worked her way along, on hands and knees mostly, passing the place where she had found the swing. Since she did not really know what she expected to find (a hump in the ground? a cross, even, maybe, a wooden cross?) her progress was rather slow. And when she had almost reached the foot of the ilex tree, where the shrubbery ended, without finding anything, she began to feel cheated. And then suddenly, sticking up among the limbs of some neglected shrub, there it was. A tombstone. A small, grey-blue slab of stone (blue lias, of course…). There was something written on it. Respectfully, Maria brushed aside leaves and twigs and knelt to read. The lettering had been cut into the stone by some competent hand (they had to get someone to do that for them, she thought, that must have been quite a problem, getting the stone, and then finding a person who could do that…). “F
IDO
,” she read,
“Perished 5 Sept 1865. In fond memory of a faithful friend.
H.J.P.
and
S.M.P.
”

It was, of course, September the fifth today.

She came out of the shrubbery and walked slowly back across the lawn, stopping first to pat the scaly trunk of the ilex tree, in some kind of farewell ceremony. Somehow, she did not think she would see it again. It was always possible, of course, that they might indeed come back here another year. But something told her, some new wisdom about the way things are that she seemed just now to have acquired, that even if they did, it would not be the same. I would have moved on a year, she thought, and I wouldn't be quite the same person and I mightn't think the same things at all. I mightn't, she thought, be interested in the swing and the ilex tree any more. Or Harriet. So it is nice to make the most of it while I am.

She sat for a moment on the step of the terrace, to have a last look at the lights rippling the harbour. Beyond the end of the Cobb, a little boat with winking red and green lights puttered steadily out to sea. Along the horizon, an aeroplane had left the thin white scrawl of a vapour trail against the lemon-coloured evening sky. She could hear the steady wash of the sea on the shore, rolling pebbles on pebbles. Pebbles of blue lias, through some of which
there streamed ammonites,
Gryphaea
and
Asteroceras
and the rest. The place was settling down for the night, as it had done many, many times before, without her, and as it would do again tomorrow without her, after she had gone. Please pay no attention at all, she thought, they are just there and that is all there is to it. And thinking that, she looked fondly at this place she now knew, as you look at a person, a friend.

The cat sat down beside her, disposed, it seemed, for a chat.

“No,” said Maria, “I don't think I'm going to let you talk any more. Sometimes you say uncomfortable things. Though actually,” she went on, “I think I am getting a bit better at not being made uncomfortable. Not that you care, though, do you?” She tickled its ear, and the cat rolled on its back, purring, and then appeared to go to sleep.

She sat for a moment or two longer, listening. She was listening, in fact, for something in particular, but there was nothing to be heard except the ordinary and appropriate noises of the place – cars and people, waves and wind and seagulls. The swing was quite silent now (though it stood there still, in the middle of the lawn) and so was the little dog. I don't think I would hear them again, she thought,
even if I were staying and not going home tomorrow. She went into the house.

“There you are,” said Mrs Foster. “I was beginning to wonder.” And then she said, “Well, home tomorrow. Quite a nice holiday, one way and another.”

And Maria said, with a most un-Maria-like vehemence, “I think it's been a perfectly lovely holiday.”

“Oh,” said her mother, surprised. “Good.”

Maria sat down on the edge of the table. She watched her mother packing things up, books and clothes and her sewing-basket with the patchwork quilt. And the sight of the patchwork quilt prompted the thought that a person who is interested in patchwork quilts might also be interested in Victorian samplers, and so she began to tell her mother about Harriet's sampler. Did you know, she said, that a hundred years ago girls the same age as me had to sew these pictures? Because I've seen one that's got ammonites on it instead of flowers – sewn ammonites – and an ilex tree and a little black dog and a picture of this house. There was this girl, you see, called Harriet, in fact she grew up and became somebody's aunt, which is funny because I thought of her somehow being my age for ever and ever…

And her mother, instead of getting on with the packing,
was so distracted by this conversational, informative Maria that the books and the sewing-basket stayed where they were, littering the table. Maria talked, and her mother listened and made sounds of interest and curiosity, and beyond them on the other side of the window, night fell on Lyme Regis.

Penelope Lively spent her early childhood in Egypt before being sent to boarding school in England. She went on to study Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford. Penelope has written many award-winning books, including
The Ghost of Thomas Kempe
(which won the Carnegie Medal) and, for adults,
Moon Tiger
which won the Booker Prize). She has two grown-up children and six grandchildren, and lives in London.

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. Last month ITV Productions bought the rights of her most recent novel (
Just Henry
– Costa Award winner).

More recently 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, has just completed a tour of fourteen theatres and has received wonderful reviews. Currently, BBC radio 4 Extra is re broadcasting a four part dramatisation of
Back Home.

First published in Great Britain by Heinemann Young Books in 1976
This edition published by HarperCollins
Children's Books
in 2011

HarperCollins
Children's Books
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