A Stitch in Time Read Online Free PDF

wood pigeons have a wing bar, don’t they? Anyway, the call’s different.” He was wandering off now.
    â€œGoodbye,” said Maria, her voice coming out suddenly loud, which made her go pink. Fortunately the leaves hid her.
    â€œâ€™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 rustlefrom 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.
    â€œLively holidays you people go in for,” it said.
    â€œWe’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?”
    â€œI talked to quite a nice boy,” said Maria. “He’s about my age,” she added.
    â€œWell, 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.
    â€œWell?” said the cat.
    â€œMaria,” 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.”
    â€œIt 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.

Chapter Three
C LOCKS AND A S AMPLER
    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,