LITMIR.BIZ

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“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,

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