Tom's Midnight Garden (11 page)

Tom had never seen a grief like this. He was going to tiptoe away, but there was something in the child’s loneliness and littleness that made him change his mind. This morning especially, for some reason, he could not say this was none of his business. He came up close to the child, and—it seemed silly, for no one but Hatty in all that garden had ever heard his voice—he spoke. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said.

To his surprise, she did hear him: she turned slightly towards him, as if for comfort; but she did not cease her weeping, nor take her hands from her face.

‘What are you crying for?’ asked Tom gently.

‘For home!’ she wept. ‘For my mother—for my father!’

Then Tom understood the meaning of the funeral black she was wearing and of that desolate, ceaseless crying. There was something else too—something almost unbelievable that he felt he would understand in another instant; something familiar in her voice and way of speaking; something in the way she
was
…

In the meantime: ‘Don’t cry,’ he said helplessly.

‘Oh, cousin!’ she sobbed.

Then, with a little shake of the mind, Tom knew. She had mistaken him for a cousin—for Cousin Hubert or Cousin James or Cousin Edgar. This was Hatty, exactly the Hatty he knew already, and yet quite a different Hatty, because she was—yes, that was it—a
younger
Hatty: a very young, forlorn little Hatty whose father and mother had only just died and whose home was, therefore, gone—a poor, penniless, orphan Hatty who was being taken grudgingly into this house and family by an aunt whose love went no farther than her own three sons, and whose charity was as cold as her heart.

Now was not the time to startle this Hatty by showing her that he was not one of the cousins, after all; nor was it possible to comfort her. Tom said no more, but tiptoed away.

He never saw the little Hatty again. He saw the other, older Hatty, as usual, on his next visit to the garden. Neither then nor ever after did he tease her with questions about her parents. When, sometimes, Hatty remembered to stand upon her dignity and act again the old romance of her being a royal exile and prisoner, he did not contradict her.

I
n the Kitsons’ flat Time was not allowed to dodge about in the unreliable, confusing way it did in the garden—forward to a tree’s falling, and then back to before the fall; and then still farther back again, to a little girl’s first arrival; and then forward again. No, in the flat, Time was marching steadily onwards in the way it is supposed to go: from minute to minute, from hour to hour, from day to day.

The day for Tom’s going home had already come and gone; but he was still staying with his aunt and uncle. He had managed that for himself: the very day before he was due to go, he had nerved himself, cleared his throat and said, ‘I wish I hadn’t to go home tomorrow.’

Uncle Alan had been reading the newspaper; the sheets crumpled down on to his knees, as though his hands no longer had the strength to hold them. His eyes refocused from the print on to Tom: ‘What?’

‘I wish I hadn’t to go home tomorrow,’ said Tom. He dared not go farther, but he spoke loudly. Aunt Gwen gave a cry of amazement and delight, and actually clapped her hands. ‘Would you like to stay?’

‘Yes.’

‘Several days more? Another week?’

‘Or more,’ said Tom.

‘We’ll send a telegram at once,’ said Aunt Gwen, and ran out.

Tom and his uncle were left together. Alan Kitson studied Tom with intent curiosity. ‘Why do you want to stay here?’

‘I won’t, if you’d rather not,’ said Tom, with pride; but his heart sank at the thought.

‘No … No …’ Uncle Alan still watched him. ‘But I wondered why… . What is there to interest a boy here—to pass his time even?’

‘I just like it here,’ Tom muttered.

Aunt Gwen came back from sending her telegram to Tom’s parents. Her face was flushed; she spoke fast and eagerly: ‘We’ll go about and see the sights and go on excursions—we’ll do so much now you’re out of quarantine and staying on. You needn’t be cooped up dully indoors any longer, Tom.’

Tom said, ‘Thank you’; but without enthusiasm. He would have much preferred to be left to dullness indoors, as he used to be. He lived his real and interesting life at night-time, when he went into the garden; in the daytime, he wanted only peace—to think back and to think forwards, always to the garden; to write of the garden to Peter. He did not want to sleep, but, all the same, the daytime in the flat was like a period of sleep to him. He needed its rest.

Aunt Gwen arranged several expeditions to the shops and to the museum in Castleford and the cinema. Tom bore them patiently. He liked the cinema best, because he was in the dark, and so he could sit with his eyes shut and think his own thoughts.

Towards the end of Tom’s lengthened stay, the weather changed for the worse. Still Aunt Gwen obstinately insisted on treats and trips, now with waterproofs and umbrella. After a visit to the cinema, she and Tom had been obliged to wait for some time for the bus, and Tom had stood in a puddle. It was his aunt who noticed his position, and that only as the bus came: ‘Tom, you’ve been standing in a puddle all this time—quite a deep puddle!’ He was surprised: his head had been in the clouds—in the white clouds that pile above an eternally summer garden—and he had not been noticing his feet at all. Now that he thought of them, they certainly felt very damp and cold.

‘I hope you don’t catch cold,’ his aunt said anxiously.

In answer to this, Tom sneezed.

His aunt rushed him home to a hot drink and a hot bath and bed; but a cold, once it has its fingers on its victim, will seldom loosen its grip before the due time. So Tom had a severe cold, that kept him in bed for several days, and indoors for many more. His convalescence was not hurried. Gwen Kitson wrote happily to her sister that Tom would not be fit to travel for some time yet; and Tom wrote to Peter, ‘It’s a wonderful piece of luck—the next best thing to measles.’

Every night he was able to steal downstairs as usual, into the garden; and there the feverishness of his chill always left him, as though the very greenness of trees and plants and grass cooled his blood. He played with Hatty.

In the daytime he lay back among his pillows, deliberately languid. Uncle Alan, who was touched by the idea of a sick child, offered to teach him chess; but Tom said he did not feel clear-headed enough. He did not want to talk; and he allowed his aunt to see that he was certainly not up to being read to from schoolgirl adventures.

At the beginning of Tom’s illness, his head had really felt a little light; and his eyelids gummed themselves up easily. He did not mind keeping them closed: then, in his imagination, he could look into his garden and see, in fancy, what Hatty might be doing there.

His aunt would tiptoe into his bedroom and look at him doubtfully. She would test whether he were awake by a whispering of his name. The voice recalled him, without his understanding at once to what: his eyelids opened on to his own bedroom, but his eyes printed off the shadowy figure of Hatty against the barred window and the cupboard and between himself and the figure of his aunt at the foot of the bed.

Hatty’s image haunted the room for Tom, at this time; and so it was, perhaps, that he began, at first idly, then seriously, to consider whether she herself were not, in some unusual way, a ghost. There was no one who knew her ghost story and could tell it to Tom, so he began trying to make it up for himself: Hatty had lived here, long, long ago—in this very house, with the garden he knew of; here she had lived, here died …

From below sounded the striking of Mrs Bartholomew’s grandfather clock, that knew secrets but would not tell them. Listening, Tom suddenly caught his breath: Mrs Bartholomew, of course! She, of all people, might know something of the past history of this house; or rather, there must once have been a Mr Bartholomew, and his family had perhaps owned this house for generations, and therefore he had known all about it. He would surely have told his wife the history of it, which she would still remember.

Tom resolved that, as soon as he was better, he would call on Mrs Bartholomew. True, she was an unsociable old woman of whom people were afraid; but Tom could not let that stand in his way. He would boldly ring her front door bell; she would open her front door just a crack and peer crossly out at him. Then she would see him, and at the sight of his face her heart would melt (Tom had read of such occurrences in the more old-fashioned children’s books; he had never before thought them very probable, but now it suited him to believe): Mrs Bartholomew, who did not like children, would love Tom as soon as she saw his face. She would draw him inside at once, then and there; and later, over a tea-table laden with delicacies for him alone, she would tell Tom the stories of long ago. Sometimes Tom would ask questions, and she would answer them. ‘A little girl called Harriet, or Hatty?’ she would say, musingly. ‘Why, yes, my late husband told me once of such a child—oh! long ago! An only child she was, and an orphan. When her parents died, her aunt took her into this house to live. Her aunt was a disagreeable woman …’

So the story, in Tom’s imagination, rolled on. It became confused and halting where Tom himself did not already know the facts; but, after all, he would only have to wait to pay his call upon Mrs Bartholomew, to hear it all from her own lips. She would perhaps end her story, he thought, with a dropping of her voice: ‘And since then, Tom, they say that she and her garden and all the rest haunt this house. They say that those who are lucky may go down, about when the clock strikes for midnight, and open what was once the garden door and see the ghost of that garden and of the little girl.’

Tom’s mind ran on the subject. His cold was getting so much better now that his aunt and uncle had insisted on coming to sit with him, to keep him company. One day, hardly speaking aloud, Tom began a sentence: ‘When Mr Bartholomew lived in this house—’

‘But I don’t think Mr Bartholomew ever did live here,’ said Aunt Gwen. ‘Do you, Alan?’

Uncle Alan did not answer at first, being in the depths of a chess problem in which he had failed to interest Tom.

‘But, Aunt Gwen,’ Tom protested, ‘this was his family home. How else would he have known the history of this house, and the ghost stories too? How else could he have told Mrs Bartholomew?’

‘Why, Tom—’ said his aunt, in bewilderment.

‘Mr Bartholomew, whoever he was, never lived in this house,’ Uncle Alan now said positively. ‘Mrs Bartholomew was a widow when she came here; and that wasn’t so many years ago, either.’

‘But what about the clock?’

‘What clock?’

‘The grandfather clock in the hall. You said it belonged to Mrs Bartholomew; but that clock has always been in this house. It was here long, long ago—it was here when the house had a garden.’

‘Now, what reason have you for supposing all this, Tom?’ asked Uncle Alan. He spoke less sharply than usual, because he really thought the boy must be feverish.

Tom was searching in his mind for an explanation that yet would not give away his secret, when his aunt came unexpectedly to his rescue. ‘You know, Alan, the clock certainly must have been here a long time, because of its screws at the back having rusted into the wall.’

‘Well, now, Tom, that might explain a little,’ said Uncle Alan. He patted Tom’s hand, as it lay on the counterpane, to soothe him. ‘The clock may well have been here a long time, as you say, and during that time the screws rusted up. After that happened, the clock couldn’t be moved without danger of damaging it. When old Mrs Bartholomew came, she had to buy the clock with the house. You see, Tom? It’s all quite straightforward, if you reason it out.’

From that time, abruptly, Tom ceased to hope for anything from Mrs Bartholomew.

The possibility of Hatty’s being a ghost stayed in his mind, however—at the back of his mind. He was not even aware of the presence of the idea, until one day in the garden it became the cause of a quarrel with Hatty herself. It was the only real quarrel that ever took place between them.

They were beginning to build their tree-house, in the Steps of St Paul’s; as usual, Tom was directing, while Hatty did the work of pulling and plaiting branches together, to make the walls. The floor—of old pieces of boarding that Hatty had found in the potting-shed—was already in place.

Hatty, as she worked, was singing to herself from hymns and songs and ballads. Now she was singing the end of the ballad of Sweet Molly Malone:

‘Her ghost wheels her barrow

Through streets broad and narrow,

Singing, “Cockles and Mussels,

    Alive—alive-oh!”’

And Hatty continued to hum and murmur, under her breath, the refrain: ‘Alive—alive-oh! Alive—alive-oh!’

Suddenly Tom said—he blurted it out before he could help himself: ‘What’s it like—I mean, I wonder what it’s like to be dead and a ghost?’

Hatty stopped singing at once, and looked at him slyly over her shoulder, and laughed. Tom repeated the question: ‘What is it like to be a ghost?’

‘Like?’ said Hatty. She turned fully to face him, and laid a hand upon his knee, and looked eagerly into his face. ‘Ah, tell me, Tom!’