Victorian atmosphere here,” said Maria.
“We aim to please,” said the cat.
“Where’s the swing?” Maria asked.
“There isn’t one.”
“Yes, there is. I heard it squeaking.”
“Have it your own way,” said the cat.“You’ll soon find out.” It squinted at her through half-closed eyes and went on, “And don’t maul me about. I can’t stand it. The last lot were forever patting and stroking. ‘Nice pussy, dear pussy.’ Ugh!”
“I don’t like cats,” said Maria.
“And I’m not keen on children. How old are you? Nine?”
“Eleven,” said Maria coldly.
“Bit small, aren’t you?”
“That’s not my fault.”
“Rather on the plain side too, I’d say. Mousy. Not like that Caroline next door to you at home. Her with the long fair hair. And the two sisters she’s always rushing about with. Laughing and pushing each other.”
“You would know about Caroline,” said Maria.
The cat inspected its paw, and stretched.“Is your mother a good cook?”
“Very,” said Maria.
“Lavish helpings? Plenty of scraps left – that kind of thing?”
“I should think you’ll be all right.”
“Good,” said the cat. “Last week was a bit thin. Big family. Everyone after the pickings. There’s a lot to be said for a small litter.” It eyed Maria thoughtfully, “Or don’t you agree?”
“You can’t be sure,” said Maria, “when you are. You don’t know what it would be like otherwise. They nearly didn’t have me, you know. I heard my mother say so once to her friend. But they’re glad they did now.”
“Is that so?” said the cat.“Fancy.” It sounded unconvinced. “Well, I’ll be seeing you, no doubt.” It sauntered out of the room and down the stairs, its tail waving elegantly from side to side.
With their possessions spread around the house – paperback books on the tables in the drawing-room, groceries in the kitchen, coats in the hall – its strong personality began to seem a little diluted. It became slightly more docile, as though it belonged to them instead of being entirely independent. They ate their lunch in the kitchen: somehow the dining-room seemed too forbidding, at least for cold pork pies and salad. The cat came in and fawned for a while against Mrs Foster’s legs, until fed some scraps. Toady, said Maria to it silently, sucker-up … It gave her a baleful stare and settled down to sleep beside the cooker.
The last tenants of the house had left evidence of themselves in the form of half-emptied packets of cereals on the kitchen shelf (Rice Krispie people they had been, Maria noted, with one family rebel who favoured Frosties), a plastic duck under the bath, a shredded burst balloon and some comics in the waste-paper basket in her room, some bits of Lego down the side of the drawing-room sofa and a battered fork-lift truck behind the cooker. Mrs Foster swept all these objects up and threw them into the dustbin. Maria regretted this: she had been trying to imagine from them what this invisible family might have been like. They seemed to have been of mixed ages and sexes. The house, she thought, must have been noisy last week. It was very quiet now, after lunch, as her mother washed up, her father read the newspaper, and she stood looking out into the garden.
“Shall we go and see what the beach is like?”
“Yes, please,” said Maria.
The beach that they went to was a couple of miles or so from the town. Maria, with several years’ experience of beaches behind her, found herself instantly awarding it a high mark. It was unassuming, to begin with – a row of beach huts being about the only facilities it offered. And the clutches of people spread fairly thickly over the area near the car park and beach huts soon thinned out so that to either side the beach stretched away more and more uncluttered, with just a dog or child scampering at the water’s edge, or family group encamped against the cliff.
It was the cliffs that instantly attracted her attention. Again, they made no large claims: not for them the craggy grandeurs of Cornwall or Wales. And they looked, in some indefinable way, soft rather than hard. It was the colour, chiefly, the slaty grey-blue that matched so nearly the now clouded sky, so that the sea, which had changed from milky green to a pale turquoise, lay as a belt of colour between the grey cliffs, the bright shingle of the beach, and the grey sky. And yet they were not, she saw, the same colour all the way up. They were capped at the top with a layer of golden-brown, which in turn was finished off with a green skin of vegetation. And here and there the three levels of colour became confused and inter-mixed, where grass and trees and bushes apparently tumbled in a green tongue down the face of the cliff. She stood staring, entranced, at this agreeable place where Dorset ends, and England, and both slide gracefully away into the sea.
“Here, I think,” said Mrs Foster. They spread their rug and sat.
They were sitting, as Maria soon found, upon more than just a slab of this grey-blue stone. In the first place it was not stone at all, but a hard, dry clay. A piece of it flaked off under her fingers, as she scratched idly at it. And then, looking closer, lying on her stomach with her face a few inches above the rock, it came to life suddenly under her very eyes. For it was inhabited. There, like delicate scribblings upon the clay, were the whirls and spirals of shell-like creatures – the same, she recognised, as those in the miniature chest of drawers in her room back at that house. But smaller, these were, barely an inch or so across, some of them, but perfect in each ridge and twist. And as she prised one out with the edge of a shell, it crumbled between her fingers into blue dust, but there, below and beneath, was another, and another, and another. The whole rock streamed with a petrified ghost-life.
“Look,” said Maria.
“Fossils,” said her mother. “Ammonites. This coast is famous for fossils. You could collect them.” She settled herself on her back, a hump of jerseys under her head, and turned the page of her book.
But I don’t want to spoil these any more, Maria thought. They’re so pretty. And they’ve been there for millions and millions of years so it’s stupid to spend a Friday afternoon now picking them out and breaking them. If I was good at drawing I would draw a picture of them.
Instead, she examined the rock carefully, to remember it, and then wandered off among the neighbouring rocks to see if there were any more the same. Most were smooth and empty but one or two glinted with this remote life, though less lavishly. And then she found that by exploring carefully among the pebbles and chunks of rock with which this part of the beach was littered, she could collect fossil fragments, like sections of small grey wheels, and occasionally a small, complete, flat one. Once she found a slab of the blue-grey stone, nine or ten inches across, in which two of the fossils hung one above another – ghostly creatures suspended in the small chunk of a solidified ancient sea that she held between her hands. She wrapped it in her anorak to take back with her.
Late in the afternoon they walked back to the car park along a beach from which the sea had retreated, leaving huge expanses of glistening sand on which children ran and shouted. At the edge of the distant water sea birds scurried to and fro before the waves. People were gathering themselves together, picking up buckets, spades, picnic baskets, folding chairs. What are beaches like at night, Maria wondered, all empty …
“I expect you’ll soon make some friends down here,” said her mother.
“Yes, I expect so,” said Maria, without conviction.
Back at the house, in the privacy of her room, she laid the fossils out on the chest. It did not seem her room yet. Last week, after all, someone else had called it their room, and a week or two before that, someone else. It felt impersonal – not quite rejecting her, but not welcoming either. The fossils, she felt, might establish her in some way. I will get a book about fossils,