A Stitch in Time by Penelope Lively Page B

“That tree you were talking about…” Then, after a moment she added, “Actually you were right. It does seem to be a kind of oak tree.”
    Maria said nothing. She closed the book and put it carefully back on the shelf, patting it into line with its neighbours.
    â€œYes,” said Mrs Foster, after a brief silence during which she looked rather oddly at her daughter. “Well, I suppose he was wrong, as it happens.” She seemed about to say something else, and then stopped.
    They walked out of the library in silence, books tucked neatly under their arms, and down the steps into the street. As they turned towards the harbour Mrs Foster said, “Of course, living in a town all the time that’s the kind of thing you never really know much about. One tree seems much like another.”
    â€œNot really,” said Maria.
    Her mother looked mildly surprised. “Well, I suppose not, when you look.”
    After a moment she went on, “Do you do about plants and things at school?” She sounded quite respectful, as though, Maria thought, she were talking to someone important, not me at all.
    â€œNot very much,” said Maria. She thought of plants at school – beans in jam-jars with blotting-paper that got all smelly and enormous white roots twining round and round inside the jar. And mustard and cress on bits of flannel. But what I like, she thought, is not all that but the names of things. And every single kind of thing having a different name. Holm oak and turkey oak and the sessile and pedunculate oak. Sessile and pedunculate…
    â€œWhat?” said Mrs Foster.
    â€œNothing.”
    They had now reached the little harbour. The boats there were of a scale to match it – dinghies and rowing boats dapper in new coats of white paint, their names brisk in black or blue; My Lady, Chopper II , Jester. There was a smell of tar, petrol and fish. The boats rocked gently on sheltered water that glinted here and there with rainbows of oil: beyond, on the seaward side of the Cobb the waves sucked and lashed at the stone, and the green water was marbled with foam. The curving stone barrier along which they now walked seemed to divide twoworlds. In the cosy, ordered world of the harbour each boat had its circle of admirers, grooming, coiling ropes; white seagulls screamed over pickings of orange peel, crusts, tea-leaves. Beyond the protection of the Cobb, the sea behaved as it liked, and there the gulls seemed both wilder and more competent, rocking with folded wings from one wave to another, or sailing effortlessly on the wind, their hard and staring eyes sometimes level with Maria’s as they swooped low in passing. She wondered if one kind of gull settled for the squabbling life of the harbour, while others chose to rough it on the open sea, or if all gulls did both, or what. And then there seemed to be a third, inland way of life, for looking up at the patchwork of fields running back beyond the town, she could see more gulls scattered behind a ploughing tractor. Presumably, in fact, the cleverest gulls tried everything and then continued with whichever place provided most food, and so became the fattest and strongest gulls also…
    But I’d choose the sea, she thought, if I were them. Not apple cores or muddy worms. Real fish, even if you hardly ever caught one.
    They reached the end of the Cobb. “I’m sorry,” said Mrs Foster, “there don’t seem to be any ice creams.”
    â€œI don’t want one,” said Maria. And she didn’t. It wasquite enough to sit on the edge of the stone, with her legs hanging down over the water, looking across the harbour at the town. She could see their house, half hidden among trees, to the left, and then to the right the main part of the town spilling down between hillsides to a seafront of ice-cream-coloured cottages, green and pink, and a pale edging of sand before the sea began. It was a lovely day.