Tom's Midnight Garden Read online

  Tom felt among many strangers, and lonely. There was no Hatty here, and his secret fear was that there might be no Hatty anywhere. Abel had said: ‘She’s alive’; but perhaps that meant, ‘She’s just alive’, or even, ‘She’s alive, but can’t live long.’ In the past Tom had managed to convince himself that Hatty was a ghost, and now he must face what went with that: that, at some time, she must have died. Ghosts had always died before they became so—Tom’s reasoning ran in anxious, confused circles.

  He needed a great deal of courage to go forward and set his foot on the bottom step of that soft, silent stair. Perhaps—although Tom could be very brave—perhaps he would have lacked the last touch of courage, but for the sound of the grandfather clock behind him. Its ticking sounded to him like a human heart, alive and beating—and he thought of Hatty when he thought that. He braced himself and began going upstairs.

  When he reached the upstairs landing he was in a part of the Melbournes’ house that he had never seen before. So it seemed to Tom: he had forgotten that this house was, too, the house in which, somehow, his aunt and uncle, as well as other tenants, lived. There was not very much to remind him of that now. The first-floor landing of the Melbournes’ house was carpeted, and wider than the corridor between the flats that Tom knew, and there were many doors off it, each leading to a bedroom, instead of two doors only, which were the front doors of two flats. The little stairway that had simply gone up to Mrs Bartholomew’s front door now ended in a tiny landing with three doors off it.

  Tom surveyed the first landing: every door was shut. So were the three doors on the attic floor. Behind which of all these doors did Hatty lie?

  There was really no clue, so Tom chose the nearest door on the first landing, took a deep breath, concentrated, tensed his muscles, and drove his head steadily through the woodwork and into the room on the other side.

  Hatty was not in this bedroom. The dustsheets over the bed and over the other furniture showed it to be a spare room. Its window looked over the garden: Tom could see, even from his position in the door, the tops of the yew-trees opposite, and the great height of the ivied fir, unfallen. He was looking only for Hatty, so he did not linger over this view, but later he had cause to remember it.

  He wrenched his head back through the door again, and considered what next to do. He had intended to push his head through each door in turn, until he found Hatty; but now he wondered whether that method would be wise. Already he was tiring; and his ears were singing and his eyes aching, and even his stomach, which had remained on the safe side of the door, was heaving a little. If Hatty were behind the last door he came to try, he might never be able to reach her.

  Surely, in these special circumstances, dishonest methods were excusable. Tom began to peep through keyholes, and to listen at them. Through the third keyhole he heard something: a very soft, rhythmic swishing sound. He could not think what made it, and the keyhole-view showed him only a washstand with basin and ewer, a length of lace curtain draped over part of a window, and a very upright chair.

  No, he could not imagine what the noise could be; surely, at least, it could not be coming from Hatty lying ill, perhaps dying. The thought of her thus made him turn desperately on to try the other doors; and then, again, even as he turned, he thought that perhaps Hatty was lying in that room, after all, but delirious, no sound or motion except for her hands that ceaselessly and softly stroked down the sheet of her bed: swish—swish—swish.

  Tom turned back to the door from behind which that sound came and began fairly to ram his head through it. He was up to his eyebrows in the woodwork when he heard—his ears were still free—a step on the stairs behind him. Tom had a horror of being caught part-way through a door: he pulled back and faced about quickly.

  A man was coming upstairs. He carried under one arm the office-ledgers that Tom had noticed in the hall below; he held the inkwell and ruler in his hand. He had the grave look of someone who earns his living and has just finished earning it for the day. Who was he? A Melbourne, Tom was sure: those were Melbourne features.

  The man came directly along the landing—directly towards Tom; but he had no concern with Tom, after all. He stopped by the very door that Tom had been trying, and knocked gently.

  ‘Mother?’

  The swishing sound stopped. A voice that Tom recognized at once as Hatty’s aunt’s said: ‘Who is that?’

  ‘James.’

  James? Tom was startled: James had only been a youth when Tom had last seen him, in the garden. Had so much of Melbourne time passed in so little of Tom’s time, that James had grown into a man—and a business man at that? Here he certainly was, broad and tall and strong, with a high, shiny collar, and that face of gravity above it.

  ‘You can come in,’ said the woman’s voice. ‘I’m only brushing my hair.’

  James went in, and Tom went with him. He had not meant to, for he was not an inquisitive, impertinent boy, but James’s question, even as he opened the door, was: ‘How is Hatty?’

  They both stood inside the bedroom door: the man and the boy. Once James looked round him uneasily, as people will who know they are alone and yet guess at some other presence in the room—a cat’s perhaps.

  In front of her dressing-table mirror stood Hatty’s aunt. Her long brown hair fell heavily as low as to her waist, and she was passing her hairbrush down it, from scalp to tips, with that steady, swishing sound. Tom saw, as he watched, that the hair was not all brown now, but greying: time had passed, too, for Hatty’s aunt.

  She was not answering James at once. She stopped brushing her hair and began twisting it and braiding it. As she did so, she said, casually and coldly, ‘Hatty will do well enough.’

  ‘Is that what the doctor says?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We must be thankful, then.’

  ‘Thankful!’ With her hands still at her hair, Hatty’s aunt turned to face her son. ‘Thankful! But what was she doing, to have the accident? Climbing trees, if you please! Has she no sense of what is fitting to her sex and to her age now? She is old enough to know better!’

  ‘Hatty is young for her age,’ said James. ‘Perhaps it comes from her being by herself so much—playing alone—always in the garden.’

  ‘Oh, you were always kind to her!’ cried Hatty’s aunt, and she made what she said sound like a bitter accusation. ‘And so she is never to grow up! What is to happen to her, if so? I don’t know. She is a strange enough girl as it is.’ Hatty’s aunt had turned back to the mirror to arrange the braidings of her hair.

  ‘Of course Hatty will grow up,’ said James, and Tom admired the way in which he stood up to his mother’s anger. ‘But what is to become of her then?’

  ‘She is not to expect anything more from me, surely. I have given her charity enough.’

  ‘In that case, Mother, she will have to earn her own living, somehow, although how she is to do that I don’t know. Or perhaps she will marry—although, again, she knows no one and meets no one outside this house and garden.’

  ‘I will not have her ruling in this house when I am gone.’ Hatty’s aunt had not turned from the mirror, but was staring intently into it at the image of her son reflected there.

  ‘What do you mean, Mother?’

  ‘You and Hubert and Edgar are all grown now, and in your father’s business, and independent as far as that goes. Very well; but if any of you thinks later of marrying Harriet, do not expect ever to have a penny from me. Hubert has never cared for the girl, and I believe Edgar dislikes her; but you have pitied her.’

  In the silence after this, Tom rather expected James, who was so bold, to cry out that he had not thought before of marrying Hatty, but now he saw what a good idea it was, and he certainly would marry her as soon as she was of age, and they would be rich and live happily ever after—all in spite of his mother. But James was not romantic. He gave a little sigh: ‘I have had no intention of ever marrying Hatty; I don’t suppose that I ever shall have; but she is certainly to be
pitied.’

  ‘She is pitiable, certainly,’ said Hatty’s aunt, grimly.

  ‘And surely, Mother, now she is growing up, she should see more of the world than this house and this garden can show her. She should meet more people; she should make acquaintances; she should make friends.’

  ‘You know perfectly well that she loves only to be alone in the garden.’

  ‘We can draw her from that. We have friends, and she must not be allowed always to hide away from them, as if she were afraid. When we make parties up she can be made to want to join them: boating on the river, and picnics; cricket matches to watch; whist-drives; carol singing at Christmas; skating …’

  ‘She doesn’t want to grow up; she wants only her garden.’

  ‘We could make her want more. I’ll go to her now, and talk to her and say that, when she is quite well again, she must go in for a gayer life. I’ll say that we all want her to go out, to make friends.’

  We all? Tom, watching the woman’s face in the glass, saw a cold disagreement in it.

  ‘Can I say that you wish it, Mother?’

  ‘You will waste your pity and your breath with Harriet.’

  ‘Can I at least say that you agree?’

  ‘You can say what you like to her; you can do what you like with her; and the less I see of her, the better.’

  She turned her head, so that she saw her son neither in reflection nor in the flesh. James withdrew, and Tom with him. James went to a door at the end of the landing, knocked softly and entered.

  Tom waited outside, until the interview with Hatty should be over. He listened to the rise and fall of James’s voice as he talked. He spoke gently, as though to someone who was ill, or had been so; but he spoke at great length, and Tom thought that Hatty’s injury could not have been as serious as he had feared, if she could listen to all that James had to tell her.

  XVIII

  The Bedroom with Two

  Barred Windows

  James came out at last, shut Hatty’s door behind him and went along the landing to what must be his own room. Tom waited until he heard that door open and shut again. Then he set himself against Hatty’s bedroom door and began pressing his way through.

  When Hatty saw him coming, she cried out in delight. ‘But, please, Tom—please come through slowly—I want to see how it’s done!’

  ‘It’s a knack,’ said Tom; but he obligingly slowed up his progress and made a very leisurely arrival on to the carpet of Hatty’s bedroom. He felt the better for it.

  Hatty was sitting up in bed, with a bandage round her head. Her face was flushed with excitement, but not with fever.

  ‘Oh, I wish I could do that!’ she sighed at Tom, and sank back among her pillows. Tom studied her for a moment: perhaps—no, certainly, she looked older than when he had first known her. Hatty had been growing up, just like the other Melbournes, and Tom had never noticed it, partly because they had been together so much and partly because he was not observant of such things.

  ‘Well, how are you?’ Tom asked. It would have been rude to stare longer.

  ‘Very well,’ said Hatty; ‘and the doctor says the scar won’t show. And Cousin James has visited me, and he says I must do other things besides falling out of trees, in the future.’

  ‘Things without me?’ said Tom, thinking of the grown-up parties of which James had spoken.

  ‘Oh, no, Tom, whenever you want to come, so you shall!’ But Tom noticed that she spoke to him as if he were a child and she were not.

  ‘Sit down and talk to me, Tom,’ she begged him.

  He sat down on the end of the bed, and looked round the room. ‘You’ve a nice bedroom.’ It was a spacious room—as were all the rooms in the Melbournes’ handsome house. It had a large cupboard, and two large windows, between which Hatty’s bed stood; and across-the bottom of the windows—

  ‘You’ve bars across the bottom of your windows,’ said Tom, ‘as if this were a nursery.’ And somewhere in his head the words seemed an echo of something he had once heard or said; and, indeed, the bars across the windows were like a remembrance of something once seen.

  ‘It was a nursery,’ said Hatty. ‘My cousins’ nursery, when they were little; and after that my nursery. And, then, because I was the last child, it just stayed my room. Now it’s my bedroom.’

  Tom stared at the windows as if he were mesmerized: he was remembering that he had seen them, or rather one of them—or, rather, again, each, but each separately, never together.

  ‘Where is the bathroom in this house?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Bathroom?’

  ‘Where do you have your bath?’

  ‘I have my bath here in my bedroom, of course; the boys do in their rooms.’

  ‘Here?’ said Tom, staring round. ‘How?’

  ‘Why, there’s the tin bath and Susan carries cans of hot water up from the kitchen. In winter there’s a fire lit here, and I have my bath by the fire.’

  ‘You could make a proper bathroom here,’ said Tom, as though he saw it already done. ‘You could run a partition somewhere down the middle of this room, here, so that there’d be a window on either side of the partition. Then this part of the room could still be a bedroom, and the room on the other side could be a bathroom.’

  Hatty thought this an unnecessary and stupid idea, and said so. ‘Besides, this would only be a slice of a room, then.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tom agreed; ‘and the partition will be—would be thin, and you’d always be able to hear the bath-water next door, as you lay here in bed.’

  ‘I’d never want to hear that,’ Hatty said positively.

  ‘I don’t suppose you ever will,’ said Tom. ‘Other people may.’

  He moved over to the window and looked out. His gaze travelled far: first of all, over a lawn, at one end of which a giant beech-tree leaned in thought; over a hedge; a lane, another hedge; a meadow, with a great elm in the middle …

  Tom took a deep breath: ‘I like your room better,’ he said, ‘and I like your view much better.’

  ‘And can you see the river beyond the meadow?’ asked Hatty. ‘But better than what, Tom?’

  ‘Better—better than if there were nothing but houses opposite.’

  Hatty laughed. ‘Don’t be silly, Tom! If that were so, we shouldn’t be living on the edge of a village, as we do, but in a town.’

  ‘Or in a village grown so big that it’s really a town.’ He seemed to change the subject. ‘How many baths do you have, Hatty?’

  ‘One a week. How many do you?’

  ‘One every other night. But I think I’d rather have fewer, and have this room and this view.’

  Hatty looked at him, puzzled: she could not understand the connexion of his thoughts, nor understand a sadness that seemed to have come over him. ‘Tom, there’s nothing to be sad about.’

  Tom was thinking about the Past, that Time made so far away. Time had taken this Present of Hatty’s and turned it into his Past. Yet even so, here and now, for a little while, this was somehow made his Present too—his and Hatty’s. Then he remembered the grandfather clock, that measured out both his time and Hatty’s, and he remembered the picture on the face.

  ‘Hatty, what does the picture on the grandfather clock mean?’

  ‘It’s something from the Bible.’

  He was surprised. ‘What?’

  Hatty drew her brows together. ‘It’s difficult: I can’t remember it—I mean, it’s difficult to understand, so I can’t remember it exactly. I’ll find out, if you want to know.’

  ‘Yes, please. Whom will you ask?’

  Hatty smiled, but made no mystery of it, as an earlier Hatty might have done. ‘I shall ask the clock; it’s written there.’

  ‘Where? I’ve never seen it.’

  ‘No, you can’t, because it’s written so low down on the clock-face that the writing is hidden by the frame of the dial glass. You have to open the dial door to read it.’

  ‘From inside the pendulum case, by a catch?’
<
br />   ‘Yes, but how did you know?’

  ‘Never mind. Who keeps the key to the pendulum-case?’

  She smiled again. ‘The grandfather clock. The key is always in the keyhole.’

  Tom was shocked. ‘But anyone might unlock it!’

  ‘Only Aunt needs to, to wind the clock; she has forbidden anyone else to touch it.’

  ‘But if strangers came to the house. Inquisitive people? Boys?’

  Hatty simply did not understand him. She promised, however, that when she was next downstairs, and if there were nobody about, she would unlock the pendulum-case and unlatch the dial-door: then Tom could read the secret for himself.

  There was nothing more that could be done now, so the subject was changed. Hatty took over the conversation, as Tom seemed thoughtful and quiet; she entertained him with tales of the nursery bedroom. Of how, behind the slatted shutters of these front windows of the house, bats slept in the daytime—you could fold back the shutters and see them hanging there, black among the grey cobwebs and dried wistaria leaves and dust; and how, one night, one had come into her room by mistake and swooped around it like a tiny black spectre, and she had screamed and screamed from under the sheet, because Susan had told her that bats made for long hair and entangled themselves in it, and then all your hair had to be cut off. (Tom smiled, and even Hatty smiled a little.) Then there had been the summer when a wistaria tendril had come in at the top of the window and twined itself the whole length of the bell-wire before Hatty’s aunt had seen it and ordered it to be cut; and when you lay still you could hear mice running races behind the skirting-boards, and there were always more mice after the harvest, in the autumn, because they came in from the fields then. And then, of course, there was the cupboard—

  At this point, Hatty jumped out of bed to show Tom the cupboard—not her clothes hanging there, but a secret hiding-place she had had, since she was a child, under the floorboards. She scrabbled with her finger-nails and levered up a section of floorboard, and there below, in a roomy space between the joists, was her little hoard: her one-bladed Fair knife, and a box of paints, and a small, pale-brown picture of a solemn-looking young gentleman leaning against an armchair in which sat a young woman. ‘That was my mother and father, long ago. You remember, Tom, I once used to pretend to you that they were a King and Queen.’