Free A Stitch in Time by Penelope Lively Page A

might.”
    â€œWe can’t. It comes out of the wrong kind of rock. It’s a trilobite, and you only get them in much older rock than the kind we’ve got here – blue lias. They were extinct by the time our kind of rock was made.”
    â€œPity,” said Martin. “They could roll up like woodlice,it says here. Oh, well… You know something?” he went on, looking at Maria with a dissecting stare, as though he had her at the far end of a powerful microscope.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou’re the only girl I’ve ever come across who wasn’t like somebody’s sister. Mine, for instance. I daresay it’s because you aren’t. Anyone’s sister.”
    There are some supremely agreeable moments in life that are best savoured alone – the first barefoot step into a cold sea, the reading of certain books, the revelation that it has snowed in the night, waking on one’s birthday… And others the full wonder of which can only be achieved if someone else is there to observe. Such, Maria thought sadly, as this. For having said it, Martin had already turned away to explore the rest of the room. No one else would ever know.
    â€œIt’s a pretty weird house, this.”
    â€œIt’s all Victorian. The real thing, my mother says.”
    â€œBetter than a rotten old hotel.”
    â€œThe lady it belongs to lives over the road,” said Maria. “She’s got lots of clocks. And a queer picture – a sewn picture, not a painted one. The girl who made it was about the same age as me.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œIt says so. And when she made it. 1865. I keep thinking about her. I keep wondering what happened to her.”
    â€œShe grew up, didn’t she?” said Martin briskly. “She grew up and got married and had children and all that stuff. I say, there’s a super atlas here.”
    There was a silence. Martin pulled the atlas out and flipped over the pages.
    â€œI don’t feel as if she did,” said Maria at last. “I feel as though she’s still here, somehow.” She added, in a voice which was meant to be defiant but which came out merely as quiet, “The same age as me.”
    â€œThat’s daft,” said Martin. “She isn’t, is she? Unless you think she’s a ghost or something. And that would be even more daft.” He hoisted the atlas back on to the shelf. “Fact is, she’s dead. Ages ago.”
    â€œI s’pose so,” said Maria coldly.
    â€œStands to reason. Come on, let’s go.”
    Later that evening she went and sat alone in the ilex tree, after Martin had gone back to his family. It was a very soothing tree. Not just a good, private place in which to be, but somehow enclosing and companionable with its warm rough bark and its whispering, shifting leaves, darker and more leathery than the leaves of ordinary trees. Sitting in it, back against the trunk, legs stretched outalong a fat branch, everything swayed and moved around you and yet at the same time you seemed to feel the roots of the tree reaching down, down into the ground, tethering it so firmly that it must be solid as a house, immovable. It had been making acorns, the tree; there were green berries in their scaly cups all around her, pale against the dark shiny leaves, hundreds of them. They wouldn’t, of course, make hundreds of trees. None, probably. Waste, again. Sleepily, Maria watched the shadow of the tree get longer and thinner across the lawn, and told it about her day. We fossil-hunted, she said to it, down on the beach, my friend and I, my friend Martin, that is – but of course you know about him because he’s climbed you too – and we found another Gryphaea and a bit of a Stomechinus but not a very good one, and tomorrow I’m going out for the day with Martin’s family. I’m invited. Actually, she said to the tree, I’m not all that sure about