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, mater
ials 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?”
It was a bit of ammonite, not very impressive, but all she had been able to find that morning. “Super,” said the boy kindly. He fished in his pocket and brought out something that Maria recognised at once.
“Stomechinus bigranularis,” she said confidently.
The boy gaped in astonishment. “Is that what it’s called?” And then, “How do you know?”
“There’s a book in our house,” she said, after a moment. “About fossils.”
“What’s your name,” said the boy briskly. It was clear that their relationship was getting on to a different footing.
“Maria.”
“Mine’s Martin. Could I have a look at this book sometime?”
Maria glowed, and could do no more than nod.
“Ssh,” said Martin with sudden urgency, though she was standing perfectly still and silent. She followed his gaze to a small bird slipping from branch to branch of a bush. They watched it until it flew off.
“Stonechat.”
“Was it?” said Maria admiringly.
“Female. I say, what’s the time?”
“Quarter past two.”
“I’ll have to go back. We’re going somewhere this afternoon. Come on.”
Maria followed him, although she had intended to continue with her exploration of the lower slopes of Black Ven. She walked behind him in silence, stopping obediently whenever he did, anxious to shed her reputation as a confirmed bird-frightener. Once, as they crossed the bed of a gully over a plateau of dried and cracking mud, he said, “It’s dangerous here when there’s been a lot of rain.”
“Why?”
“The cliff starts slipping. The water builds up on top, see, and then it all starts slipping and sliding down. Not usually in summer, though. February and March, mostly. This part can be all a kind of bog.”
“Do you come here always?”
“Most years.”
Down on the beach he said over his shoulder, casually, “’Bye, then.”