A Stitch in Time by Penelope Lively Page A

be if it were – to somehow arrive within someone else’s head and listen to thoughts as though to the radio, other people’s would be as perplexed and as peculiar as her own, she sank gradually into sleep.
    And heard, she thought, though by the morning she hardly remembered having done so, the distant sound of the piano being played. The very song she had tried to play herself, but more competently managed.

Chapter Four
T HE C OBB AND S OME D INOSAURS
    â€œWHAT WOULD YOU like to do?” said Mrs Foster. “Beach? Or something different?”
    â€œSomething different.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI don’t know,” said Maria. They looked at each other, a little disagreeably, across the breakfast table. Mrs Foster thought that Maria was being unhelpful; Maria thought that her mother should have some interesting alternative already worked out.
    â€œIn that case,” said Mrs Foster, “you can come down into the town with me, to the library. And then we could go for a walk along the Cobb.”
    â€œThe what?”
    â€œThe Cobb is the harbour wall. You can walk along it. It’s very old. I daresay,” Mrs Foster added withoutenthusiasm, “you could buy an ice cream or something at the end of it.”
    Maria stared at her mother coldly. She was not in fact thinking of either ice cream or the prospect of walking along the harbour wall, and she did not mean to look cold. It had occurred to her that she had a reason for wanting to go to a library herself: the cool expression was simply what happened to her small, rather pale face when she was deep in thought. It frequently gave rise to misunderstandings.
    â€œAnd there’s no need to look so cross about it,” said Mrs Foster.
    Coming out of the drive Maria noticed for the first time that the house had a name. It was a well-concealed name, the letters being simply cut into the white plaster of the two columns at either side of the drive gates but not picked out in any way, so that they were white against a white background: Ilex House.
    They descended the steep streets that led down into the town. When places are clothed in tarmac, houses, walls, shops and lamp-posts, it is difficult to remember that beneath lies earth, rock and the natural shape of the land. In the heart of London, in Oxford Street, Maria had been startled once to see workmen lift a slab of paving to reveal,beneath, brown earth. It was as though the new, shrill street of concrete and plate-glass windows had shown its secret roots. But here, she noticed, in this small seaside town, the roots came boldly out on to the surface, for walls and the occasional house were made of the same grey-blue stone as the cliffs. It seemed, somehow, satisfactory, as though the houses had grown out of the soil just like the trees and grass and bushes, settling down to match the pewter sky and the pale green sea below it. And as they passed a terrace of cottages she saw suddenly the coiled glint of an ammonite, enshrined there for ever in the wall beside a net-curtained window in which stood a vase of plastic flowers.
    They arrived at the library, and Mrs Foster became involved in the complicated process of acquiring temporary tickets. Maria left her and began to search for what she wanted. It did not take very long: libraries are obliging places once you have got the hang of them. ‘Trees’, she soon discovered, came under ‘Botany’, and here was a fat book, lavishly illustrated with trees in all sizes and shapes. She found what she wanted and sat reading with quiet satisfaction; “ Quercus ilex, the holm oak – common in gardens and parks, this handsome tree with dark, evergreen foliage and brownish-black, deeply fissured bark wasintroduced from Southern Europe during the sixteenth century…”
    Her mother’s face appeared at her shoulder. “What are you reading?”
    Maria indicated, in silence.
    â€œOh,” said Mrs Foster.