in monotonous repetition.
She must have clenched herself so tightly in her efforts to keep still that all of a sudden her sandal slipped against the bark with a rasping noise, the pigeons lumbered noisily off with cries of alarm and lurched down into another tree, and the boy, turning his head in her direction, looked straight up at her. They stared at each other through the leaves.
“I knew you were there all the time,” said the boy. “I only pretended not to so I could watch the collared doves. What did you go and frighten them away for?”
“I didn’t mean to,” said Maria.
He was examining the tree with interest now. “That’s a good tree,” he said.“The ones in this garden are hopeless. Do you live in that house all the time?”
“No,” said Mara. She wanted, urgently, to share the tree with him, to invite him into it, but even as she started to do so the usual business happened, the process whereby she never, ever, in the end, said what she wanted to say, in case it was wrong, or the other person didn’t want to do the thing suggested anyway, or would just stop listening. “No,” she said.
“We came yesterday,” said the boy. “They have rotten food. Not enough. But there’s a colour telly, so I s’pose it’s not too bad.” He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans, turning. He was about to go away.
“How did you know they were collared doves?” said Maria desperately.
“What do you mean?”
“Not pigeons. I thought they were pigeons.”
“Obviously they were collared doves, weren’t they?” said the boy.“I mean, wood pigeons have a wing bar, don’t they? Anyway, the call’s different.” He was wandering off now.
“Goodbye,” said Maria, her voice coming out suddenly loud, which made her go pink. Fortunately the leaves hid her.
“’Bye,” said the boy.“See you …” he added casually. And then with a sudden whoop he was dashing over the grass to the rest of the children. Maria heard them shouting, “Martin … Come on, Martin.”
Some time later she slid down the trunk of the tree and went back into the house. It was very silent. In the kitchen the fridge hummed softly. A clock ticked. Otherwise there was not a sound except for the rustle from the drawing-room when her father turned over a page of the newspaper. Her parents adapted rapidly to the drawing-room. They sat on either side of the empty fireplace, in identical bulbous chairs, reading. Maria lay on her stomach on a darkly patterned rug, and read also. The cat arranged itself decoratively along the arm of a sofa and watched them.
“Lively holidays you people go in for,” it said.
“We’re a quiet family,” said Maria.
It flexed its claws against the material of the sofa and said,“Do anything stimulating today? Learn anything? Go anywhere? Have any interesting conversations?”
“I talked to quite a nice boy,” said Maria. “He’s about my age,” she added.
“Well, well,” said the cat,“we are coming on, aren’t we? I suppose he asked you to go over there and play.”
Maria did not reply.
“Well?” said the cat.
“Maria,” said Mrs Foster, looking up, “don’t mutter like that. And shoo that cat off the sofa, will you. It’s ruining the material with its claws.” After a moment she added, “You didn’t need to chase it right out of the room, poor thing.”
“It wanted to go out,” said Maria. “I think I’ll go to bed now.”
She had a bath in the bath with feet like animals’ claws. It was a particularly deep bath, so that once in it, lying down, you could not see out unless you sat up, and indeed, if as small as Maria, you were in danger of drowning unless you kept constantly on the alert. Even so, she found it satisfactory. The lavatory too was pleasing. It had a brown wooden seat and a wreath of roses around the china basin, an arrangement she could not remember having come across before. Nothing in this house, she realised, was new. Everything was battered by time and use. In her own house, and those of all her friends, these were things that had been bought last month, or last year. In this one, wood was scratched, paint tattered, materials worn and faded. People had been here before. Such, for instance, as the H.J.P. who had carved her initials on the table. And the person – child, girl? – who had made those drawings of fossils in the book from the library.
Going back to her room she realised also that this helpful, no-longer-here friend had told her the name of the one she had not been able to identify. Stomechinus bigranularis she wrote neatly on a piece of card. She arranged it with the rest of her small collection, got into bed and switched the light out.
Pinned up on the kitchen wall – abandoned, presumably, by a previous tenant of the house, someone whose holiday was now over and done with – was a map of the town and the coast to right and left of it. Maria soon became very familiar with this map. She liked maps. She liked to know where she was and moreover had a deep secret pride in having learned all on her own how to find her way around a map. Once upon a time (and not so very long ago, either) maps had been as mysterious to her as the long columns of print in her father’s newspaper, or some of the more confusing kind of sums at school, before which she sat in baffled horror. There were these maps, with their network of lines all differently coloured which might be roads or rivers or railways but you could never be certain which, and their blocks of green and blue and grey which meant other things, and their innumerable names. And there were the places to which they referred, bright and moving with houses and buses and waving trees and bustling people, and how on earth you married the one to the other, as it were, she could not see at all. How you stood before a map and said to yourself, ah! I am here, and I want to be there, so I must walk (or drive, or take a bus) in that direction. And then one day she had wrestled with this problem all on her own, standing in the shopping centre near her home before the street map that said so confidently, with its red pointing arrow, YOU ARE HERE. And all of a sudden she had realised where indeed she was, and the familiar streets and shops had turned themselves into lines and writing and laid themselves handily out upon the map.
“Not very bright, were you,” said the cat.“Most would have tumbled to that a long time ago.”
“I never said I was,” said Maria, “bright.”
“Now take Sally in your class at school,” the cat went on, warming to the subject. “She’s what I’d call bright. Hand up all the time – ‘Please, miss, I know,’‘Please, miss, can I answer …’ Nice writing. Red ticks all over her exercise books.”
But Maria found suddenly that she did not want to talk about Sally in her class at school. It was too nice a day – sun making a white glittering sheet out of the sea, the fields beyond the house ablaze with buttercups and daisies – and moreover, she wanted to look at the map undisturbed. The cat, ignored, went to squat on the kitchen doorstep, and Maria returned to the map. The beach to which they went, she knew, was at Charmouth, and the cliffs beyond it, between Charmouth and Lyme Regis, were called first Black Ven, and then Church Cliffs. And today, she knew, was the day to start exploring all this on her own, very slowly, at great length and in much detail and with conversations with anything likely that happened to come along.
They drove to Charmouth and walked along the beach, as they had done the first time they had gone there. To shake off the crowds, said Mrs Foster, and Maria thought, to get closer to Black Ven, and, thinking this, wondered why it should be called Black when in fact it was grey and green and golden. Picking their way along the beach she thought of this and other