A Stitch in Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

faintly ridged, surface of the piece of grey rock containing Stomechinus bigranularis, she heard the squeak and whine of that apparently non-existent swing again.
    Into which agreeable private dream intruded – as such things inevitably do – the voice of her mother calling that it was time for tea. But we’ve only just had lunch, thought Maria, I’m sure we have, it’s not true at all that time is always the same, it simply isn’t, there are slow afternoons and ordinary afternoons and afternoons like this one that are so fast they hardly seem to have happened… She went downstairs two steps at a time, jumping the last four inone leap, and noticed that the rain had stopped. She would be able to go and climb that tree again after tea.
    The tree seemed, half an hour later, like an old friend. She settled herself in her armchair curve where branch met trunk. The bark was warmly rough against her back, through her cotton T-shirt, and the leaves hissed and whispered around her conversationally. After a while she was joined by a pair of pigeons who settled in another part of the tree and moaned at each other along a branch.
    The sun had come out now and it was a bright, sparkling evening after the rain. The children from the hotel erupted into the next-door garden with much screaming and began to play badminton at the net not far beyond her tree. She made herself even smaller and more silent than she had done before, and watched them intently. There were three girls a little younger than herself, several smaller fry, and an older boy, who she assessed at, also, around eleven. She realised suddenly that they were the family she had seen at the petrol pump, on the way to Lyme – at least, given their ages and the number of them, they seemed to be a mixture of two families. The boy, she noticed, was slightly bored with the others. He played quite good-naturedly with the younger ones for a while, and then had an argument with the girls which sent him off on his own,kicking moodily at the stones around the edge of the flower-bed. Then, something in her tree attracted her attention and to her considerable alarm he came over and stood directly underneath it, staring up into the leaves. Maria froze against the trunk. The pigeons cooed at each other 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.
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œNo,” 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 todo the thing suggested anyway, or would just stop listening. “No,” she said.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œHow did you know they were collared doves?” said Maria desperately.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œNot pigeons. I thought they were pigeons.”
    â€œObviously they were collared doves, weren’t they?” said the boy. “I mean,