A Stitch in Time

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.