Tom's Midnight Garden Page 9

  He put his arm round her: ‘All right, then, Hatty! You’re not a ghost—I take it all back—all of it. Only don’t cry!’

  He calmed her; and she consented at last to dry her tears and go back to plaiting the branches, only sniffing occasionally. Tom did not reopen a subject that upset her so deeply, although he felt that he owed it to himself to say, some time later, ‘Mind you, I’m not a ghost either!’ This, by her silence, Hatty seemed to allow.

  XIV

  The Pursuit of Knowledge

  And yet, in spite of his assurance to Hatty, Tom continued secretly to consider the possibility of her being a ghost, for two reasons: firstly, that there seemed no other possibility; and secondly—and Tom ought to have seen that this was the worst kind of reason—that if Hatty weren’t a ghost, then perhaps that meant he was. Tom shied away from that idea.

  On the afternoon of the quarrel he had been impressed —although he had been careful to hide this from Hatty—by her method of argument. She had a girl’s quick eye for clothes, and she had used it, on this occasion, against him. Tom wished that he were able to do the same kind of thing; but he found that he remembered only vaguely the appearance of the people of the garden. He had, it was true, a strong general impression that they were not dressed like himself and his aunt and uncle; but ‘old-fashioned’ was the nearest that he could get to the difference. Both Susan the maid and Hatty’s aunt, for instance, had worn skirts nearly to the ground.

  Naturally their clothes would be old-fashioned, if Hatty were a ghost. Yet to prove her that, he must be able to put an exact date to the clothes in the garden, and so to Hatty herself.

  He thought he knew where he could find information. He had often noticed on his aunt’s kitchen shelf, together with Mrs Beeton’s and all the other cookery books, a volume invitingly called Enquire Within Upon Everything. Now, when his aunt was out shopping, he slipped out of bed and borrowed it.

  He looked in the Index for CLOTHING—Styles of Clothing in the Past. There was nothing under STYLES, or under PAST. Under CLOTHES there were subheadings that Tom would certainly have found interesting at any other time—Loose Warmer than Tight, and Rendering Fireproof; but there was nothing about the changing fashions of history. He felt dispirited, as though he had been invited to call, and promised a feast, and then, when he had knocked at the door, found no one Within.

  Before he shut the book, however, Tom came by chance across something that proved useful in another way. On a page headed kindly ‘The Good is Oft Interred with their Bones’, he found a list of the Monarchs of England from the Norman Conquest to the Present. He remembered that Hatty had once mentioned a monarch of England. They had been looking at Abel’s little pile of books in the heating-house; and Hatty had pointed out that the topmost book was a Bible, because Abel believed in the Bible being above all, ‘like the Queen ruling over all England’. Hatty, then, lived when a Queen, not a King, ruled in England. Tom consulted his list of Monarchs: there had been very few Queens in the past. The possibilities suddenly narrowed: Hatty couldn’t, for instance, have lived in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth centuries at all, because there had only been Kings then, according to Enquire Within. For the same reason, she could not have lived in most of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. That left the other parts of those centuries, and most of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  Tom returned Enquire Within, and, on the next occasion of his being left alone in the flat, prowled round looking for any other book of useful information. In his uncle’s and aunt’s bedroom he had a find: a complete set of volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in their own special glass-fronted bookcase, kept to hand on Uncle Alan’s side of the bed.

  Tom looked up CLOTHING, and that asked him to ‘See COSTUME’, which he did. There were many pages in double columns of small print, whose appearance somehow discouraged him. He preferred to look at the pictures, although none of them really corresponded with what was worn by the people of his garden.

  He noticed an oddity in the earlier illustrations. The men wore various kinds of leg coverings, but never trousers: the first pair of trousers to be represented was worn by a French Man of Fashion in the Early Victorian Period. Tom did at least know that the men and boys in his garden had all worn trousers—with the exception of Edgar, who sometimes wore a kind of breeches with woollen stockings.

  Hot on the scent now, Tom turned to the volume TON to VES of the Encyclopaedia, and looked up TROUSERS. There were no illustrations, but the written account was short. In order to clear up any misunderstanding, it began by defining trousers: ‘the article of dress worn by men, covering each leg separately and reaching from the waist to the foot’. Well, Tom agreed to that, and read carefully on. The wearing of trousers, it seemed, had been introduced in the early nineteenth century; the Duke of Wellington had caused a sensation with his. The article ended: ‘Strong opposition was taken against them by the clergy and at the universities. (See COSTUME.)’

  Tom now felt he had enough information to arrange into an argument. ‘Hatty lived when men wore trousers, so she can’t have lived earlier than the nineteenth century, when trousers came into fashion. Very well.’ He remembered Enquire Within: ‘And there was a Queen ruling in England in the nineteenth century: Queen Victoria 1837 to 1901. She must be Hatty’s queen. And then there’s the French Man of Fashion in trousers: he belonged to the Early Victorian Period. That’s where Hatty belongs. That Period is over a hundred years ago, so, if Hatty were a girl then, she must be dead by now, and all I can have seen in the garden is a ghost.’

  The proof seemed final to Tom; but he double-checked it with a question in just the way that would, he thought, have delighted his uncle. What about the long skirts worn by the women of the garden? When had they been in fashion?

  By now Aunt Gwen was back from her shopping and Tom was innocently back in bed. He tried her with his question; she answered promptly: ‘Why, Tom, long skirts were always the fashion, until not so long ago. Up to the First World War, certainly.’

  ‘Would women have been wearing long skirts at, say, the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign?’

  ‘Oh, yes; all during Victoria’s reign, and after,’ said his aunt. ‘Why, there must be many people alive today who remember long skirts well!’

  Tom, however, was not at all interested in how recently such skirts had been the fashion; he was intent upon a remote Past, and in proving that Hatty had belonged to it, and was now a ghost—a little Early Victorian ghost. Well, all his information surely pointed that way. The question having been settled to his satisfaction, he put it out of his mind.

  XV

  The View from the Wall

  In following the course of Tom’s historical researches and his reasoning, we have gone a little ahead upon the order of events—as Tom perceived them—in the garden. The tree-house in which he and Hatty quarrelled was not built immediately after the episodes of the geese upon the lawn and the little girl in mourning. Indeed, on his next visit to the garden after those happenings, Tom thought for a time that he had lost Hatty for good. The garden appeared absolutely deserted.

  He called, and searched through all the usual hiding-places. He dashed round and round the trunk of the fir-tree, imagining he heard her slippers moving nimbly on the dry earth the other side, always evading him. But if Hatty had hidden, she had hidden better than ever before, and made the garden seem a green emptiness.

  He saw over the south wall a thread of smoke that mounted vertically into the soft, still summer air, and it occurred to him that Abel was perhaps tending his bonfire. He stopped dead by the orchard door, wondering whether he should thrust himself through it again. If Abel were the other side he might provide some clue to Hatty’s whereabouts.

  Suddenly the orchard door opened and Hatty came through. At once all Tom’s anxiety turned to annoyance, especially as Hatty looked far from anxious—excited, rather; even pleased. Her face was flushed, and there was a bonfire smut on one chee
k; she held something in her pinafore pocket.

  ‘Why didn’t you answer?’ Tom demanded. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I called and called and called.’

  ‘I was helping Abel with his bonfire.’

  ‘You could just have come and opened the orchard door and let me through. I like bonfires, too.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have liked this bonfire—you wouldn’t have liked what we were burning on it.’ She looked at him defiantly.

  ‘Well, what were you burning on it?’

  Now she lost courage, and cast her eyes down; but finally said: ‘The bow and arrows. Oh, Tom, it was Abel who wanted to have them burnt!’

  Tom was silent, guessing why Abel had wished it: he had always said that the bow might bring trouble to Hatty; and, indeed, it had done.

  Hatty went on, ‘And, as well as that, he wanted me to promise not to borrow any more knives from the kitchen, because they’re so sharp and might cut and hurt me. And if I promised to let him burn the bow and arrows and if I promised not to use the kitchen-knives again, he said he’d give me a little knife all of my own.’

  ‘What kind of knife?’

  She brought her hand out of her pinafore pocket, and opened it: across the palm lay a gaudy, cheap little penknife, ornamented with true-love-knots in blue. ‘He bought it at the Fair, to give to Susan; but she wouldn’t have it from him, because it’s unlucky to have a knife from your sweetheart. So Abel gave it to me. It’s a dear little knife.’ She turned it over lovingly.

  ‘Open it,’ ordered Tom. Hatty did so, and held it towards him so that he could see the blade—there was only one.

  ‘Well!’ Tom laughed shortly. ‘You certainly couldn’t cut yourself with that! You could just about cut butter with it, that’s all!’

  Hatty was still admiring the coloured decoration of the haft; but she said, ‘I’ve cut more than butter with it, already. Come, and I’ll show you.’

  There was a touch of mystery and pride with which she took Tom to one of the yew-trees—it was the one called Matterhorn—and showed him the tree-trunk on which were carved—or, rather, half scratched, half pressed—the initials: ‘H. M.’

  Tom was wondering what surname the ‘M’ stood for, but not liking to ask, when Hatty said: ‘That means: “Hatty Melbourne has climbed this tree.” With my knife, I’ve carved my initials on all the yew-trees—except for Tricksy, of course.’

  ‘It’s very wrong to carve things on trees,’ said Tom, remembering suddenly to be severe. ‘It’s like leaving litter about.’

  Hatty opened her eyes wide, as though she had never heard of litter; and Tom could tell by her expression that she didn’t think her carving could be wrong, on her trees, and anyway, she intended to go on doing it if she liked, without telling him.

  ‘And,’ Tom pointed out, ‘you’ll only get yourself into trouble if anyone sees those tree-trunks. They’ll see “H. M.”, and they’ll know they’re your initials, and they’ll know you’re to blame. Now, if I wanted to carve my mark on a tree—which, of course, I wouldn’t, ever—but if I wanted to, I’d make a secret mark.’ He told her of his device of the long tom-cat, for Tom Long.

  Hatty was envious. ‘Melbourne’s such a stupid name.’

  ‘There’s Hatty,’ said Tom. ‘You could draw a hat.’ Hatty’s eyes sparkled. ‘Only, of course, you mustn’t—I’ve told you why not. And now,’ he said, suddenly tiring of talk, ‘let’s do something.’

  ‘Let’s,’ agreed Hatty. So, at once, their play began again in the garden, and went on as though the garden and their games need never end.

  They went tree climbing again—it was a passion with them. As Hatty had mentioned not being able to climb Tricksy, Tom taught her how to swarm. She did not learn easily—chiefly from a horror of dirtying her clothes so much that her aunt might notice and punish her; but after a while she learnt how to wind her arms and legs about the trunk, and worm her way upwards. In the end, she climbed Tricksy: she was triumphant.

  They played new games. Hatty found grasses of wild barley growing in the wilderness, and picked them. She showed Tom how to nip the top out of the grass-head and then replace it; and, then, holding the grass in one fist, she would knock against it with the other, repeating: ‘Grandmother—Grandmother—jump out of bed’. On the word ‘jump’, she would give a particularly hard knock, and the top of the grass would spring out of its green bed into the air and Hatty would laugh, and Tom too.

  Together they hunted for young frogs under the leaves of the strawberry-bed (‘Abel says they suck the strawberries’) and set them hopping elsewhere; and once they had the sight of a toad in a crevice under the threshold stone of the greenhouse—like a stone himself, brown and dull and unmoving except for the breath in his sides.

  They teased the birds of the garden—Tom was particularly good at surprising them, and at hoaxing the watchful jay; yet they protected them against all comers, too. Hatty let out birds from the gooseberry wire and from under the strawberry nets; and—when she was sure Abel was far away—she unlatched the door of his sparrow-trap. When any of the cousins came into the garden with a gun, Tom ran ahead, waving his arms and shouting, to warn the birds. Wild pigeons rose heavily from the rows of peas where they had been browsing, and made their way back to the safety of the wood. Nothing was ever shot—unless you could count Tom himself, who once received a spatter of pellets through his middle. Hatty went pale; but Tom laughed—they tickled him.

  One day, when Tom and Hatty had been gazing at the sundial on the south wall, trying to make out how it told the time, they saw a wren light on one of the stone sunbeams above the dial, and then—the beams projected a little way away from the wall—disappear behind them.

  ‘Do you think there’s a wren’s nest there?’ whispered Hatty; and Tom thought there well might be; but, of course, one couldn’t be sure from the path below.

  ‘James once walked along the top of the sundial wall,’ said Hatty.

  ‘Well, I’m not going to,’ said Tom. ‘It would be just silly, not brave. That wall’s far too high, and it’ll be very narrow along the top: it would be far too dangerous.’

  ‘Oh, Tom, I didn’t mean that you should walk it!’ said Hatty, in dismay. ‘James only did it for a dare. Cousin Edgar dared him, and James did it. He walked the whole length, and then he climbed down, and then he fought Cousin Edgar, and then he was sick. And Cousin Hubert heard about it all afterwards and was very angry, because he said James might have fallen and broken his neck.’

  Tom was silent, turning over in his mind what Hatty had just said. He was beginning to change his mind about climbing the wall, because he saw that there could not be—for him—the danger that there had been for James. He might possibly fall off the wall, but a fall, even from such a height, could neither bruise nor break him.

  He said to Hatty, ‘I’m going to see if there really is a nest behind the sundial; I’m going to walk along that wall.’

  ‘Oh, Tom!’

  The way in which Hatty said, ‘Oh, Tom!’ made Tom feel warm and kind. He patted her hand. ‘Don’t worry. It’s all right for me.’

  He climbed, by means of the laddering branches of an espalier pear, to the top of the wall. In spite of all he had told himself, he felt a pang of horror when he stood upright upon it. The wall top was so narrow—nine inches, in some places weathered away to even less by the crumbling of brickwork; quite bushy plants grew along it, over which Tom would have to step; and on either side of that narrow, hazardous path the wall face went sheer and far: down to the orchard on one side; on the other, down to the garden, where Hatty stood, her pale face upturned to him. Tom knew, however, that he must not look down, if he were to keep his head and walk that wall top. He lifted his eyes and stepped resolutely forward.

  Very soon he was over the porchway into the orchard, and then over the vine against the wall, and then over the sundial. He could see that dead leaves and other airy garden rubbish had drifted into the space between the stone sunbeams and the wall. At one e
nd they seemed much denser than elsewhere: Tom got upon his hands and knees on the wall top and, peering closely, saw that this was indeed a wren’s nest, with moss still greeny brown worked into it. He could see the little hole of entry.

  ‘There is a wren’s nest,’ he called softly to Hatty. ‘But I daren’t touch it—I mean, I daren’t for her sake.’

  ‘Come back and come down now, Tom!’

  He stood upright again, intending to turn back, as Hatty had said; but now, standing there, gazing freely about him, he was taken by a sudden joy. He began to pace along the wall like a king. Hatty was keeping step with him below, and whispering up to him; but he paid no attention, he was so far above her and the garden altogether. He had thought himself high when he had climbed to the top of the yew-trees, but he was higher now. In one sweep of the eye, he could see the whole lay-out of the garden, and the boundaries of walls and hedges that enclosed it. He could see the house: there was Susan leaning from an upper window to blow a kiss to somebody in the garden—Abel, he supposed. He could see into a courtyard of the house—a courtyard whose existence he had never suspected before: he saw Edgar there, engaged in washing Pincher in a tin bath of soapy water. Pincher looked very clean and wretched, with his neck poked forward and his ears back and his tail down. Tom, in exhilaration, called to him, ‘Cheer up, Pincher!’ Pincher heard him, or saw him, or even smelt him—it was difficult to tell which: even under the lather, his hackles rose, and he suddenly bolted from the bath, and had to be chased round the yard and caught by Edgar, who was very much annoyed and covered with splashes of soapsuds and water.

  Tom saw beyond the garden and the house, to a lane, down which a horse and cart were plodding. Beyond the lane was a meadow, and then a meandering line that he knew must be the river. The river flowed past the meadow, and reached the village, and passed that. It reached a white handrailed bridge and slipped under it; and then away, towards what pools and watermills and locks and ferries that Hatty and Tom knew nothing of? So the river slipped away into the distance, in the direction of Castleford and Ely and King’s Lynn, to the grandeur of the sea.