A Stitch in Time Read Online Free Page A

“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 yearsago, 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?
    â€œMaria,” said her mother, “Mrs Shand was speaking to you.”
    Maria jumped, and paid attention again.
    â€œI asked,” said Mrs Shand, “which room you chose for yourself.”
    â€œThe one at the back,” said Maria. “The little one.”
    â€œAh. 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.
    â€œWell,” 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 askabout.” And then her grey and white patterned silk back view vanished between the green hedges of the drive.
    â€œShe matches the house nicely,” said Mrs Foster.
    â€œWhy doesn’t she live in it any more?”
    â€œShe finds it too big. She lives in a flat in the guest-house over the road.”
    â€œI 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 quick 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