Tom's Midnight Garden (2 page)

Tom had never looked inside a grandfather clock, and he thought it might be something to do later, privately: surely, he could just look. Now, with his back to the clock, innocently continuing to converse with his aunt, he slipped his finger-nails under the edge of the door of the pendulum-case, to try it …

‘If Mrs Bartholomew’s particular about her clock, why doesn’t she have it upstairs with her?’ Tom asked. He levered gently with his nails: the door was resisting him …

‘Because the clock is screwed to the wall at the back, and the screws have rusted in,’ said Aunt Gwen. ‘Come away from it, do, Tom. Come up to tea.’

‘Oh!’ said Tom, as if he had not realized where he was standing. He moved away. The pendulum door had been locked.

They were going upstairs to the Kitsons’ flat when, from behind them, the grandfather clock struck one, with stately emphasis. Uncle Alan frowned and made some cutting comment. The clock kept good time—its fingers were now correctly pointing to five o’clock—but it seldom chose to strike the right hour. It was utterly unreliable in its striking, Uncle Alan said. Moreover, the voice of the clock was so penetrating that he could even hear it being unreliable when he was upstairs in bed, at night.

They had reached the first floor, where the Kitsons lived. Beyond, another, narrow staircase mounted to the attic flat of Mrs Bartholomew, who owned the grandfather clock and, indeed, the whole house. She was the landlady, and the Kitsons—like the other inhabitants of the big house—were her tenants.

‘This is our flat, Tom dear,’ said Aunt Gwen; ‘and here is the guest-room—your bedroom. I’ve put flowers in it, and books for you to read.’ She smiled at him, begging him with her eyes to like staying here.

Tom’s bedroom was lofty, but otherwise only of medium size. There was another door in it, like the door of entry. The window—large and large-paned—was one of those he had seen from outside. Tom had been preparing himself to play the grateful guest; but—

‘But there are bars across the bottom of the window!’ he burst out. ‘This is a nursery! I’m not a baby!’

‘Of course not—of course not!’ Aunt Gwen cried, equally upset. ‘It’s nothing to do with you, Tom. This window had bars across it when we came. The bathroom window had too, for that matter.’

Tom’s suspicions were not entirely stilled.

When he was left to unpack, before tea, Tom examined the room more closely. The other door only led into a cupboard for clothes; the books were school stories for girls, from Aunt Gwen’s own childhood; and there, above all—however much Aunt Gwen tried to explain them away—were the nursery bars to the window.

However, tea cheered Tom a little. Aunt Gwen had made a Devonshire tea, with boiled eggs, home-made scones and home-made strawberry jam and whipped cream. She was a good cook, she said, and she enjoyed cooking; she intended to spoil Tom for food while he was with them.

After tea, Tom wrote a letter of safe arrival to his mother. He enclosed a picture-postcard for Peter, with a very fair statement of his situation. ‘I hope your measles are better,’ he wrote. ‘This is a picture of the cathedral tower at Ely.’ (Tom knew that Peter would be interested: the two of them made a point of climbing church towers, as well as trees.) ‘We came through Ely, but U.A. wouldn’t let me go up the tower. The house here is flats and there isn’t any garden. My bedroom window has bars, but A.G. says it’s a mistake. The food is good.’

After reading this through, Tom decided—in fairness to Aunt Gwen—to underline the last sentence. He signed the postcard with his private device: an elongated cat, supposed to be a tom. It signified Tom Long.

He was marking in the whiskers of the cat, when he heard the sound of the grandfather clock from below in the hall. Yes, you could hear it striking, very distinctly; you could count the strokes. Tom counted them, and smiled condescendingly: the clock was wrong again in its striking—senselessly wrong.

T
he striking of the grandfather clock became a familiar sound to Tom, especially in the silence of those nights when everyone else was asleep. He did not sleep. He would go to bed at the usual time, and then lie awake or half-awake for hour after hour. He had never suffered from sleeplessness before in his life, and wondered at it now; but a certain tightness and unease in his stomach should have given him an answer. Sometimes he would doze, and then, in his half-dreaming, he became two persons, and one of him would not go to sleep but selfishly insisted on keeping the other awake with a little muttering monologue on whipped cream and shrimp sauce and rum butter and real mayonnaise and all the other rich variety of his diet nowadays. From that Tom was positively relieved to wake up again.

Aunt Gwen’s cooking was the cause of Tom’s sleeplessness—that and lack of exercise. Tom had to stay indoors and do crossword puzzles and jigsaw puzzles, and never even answered the door when the milkman came, in case he gave the poor man measles. The only exercise he took was in the kitchen when he was helping his aunt to cook those large, rich meals—larger and richer than Tom had ever known before.

Tom had few ideas on the causes and cures of sleeplessness, and it never occurred to him to complain. At first he tried to read himself to sleep with Aunt Gwen’s schoolgirl stories. They did not even bore him enough for that; but he persevered with them. Then Uncle Alan had found him still reading at half-past eleven at night. There had been an outcry. After that Tom was rationed to ten minutes reading in bed; and he had to promise not to switch the bedroom light on again after it had been switched off and his aunt had bidden him good night. He did not regret the reading, but the dragging hours seemed even longer in the dark.

One night he had been lying awake as usual, fretting against the dark and against the knowledge that his uncle and aunt would be sitting reading—talking—doing whatever they pleased—by the excellent electric lights of the sitting-room. Here
he
was, wide awake in the dark with nothing to do. He had borne it for what seemed many nights, but suddenly, tonight, he could bear it no more. He sat up, threw his bedclothes back with a masterful gesture, and stepped out of bed, though as yet with no clear purpose. He felt his way over to the bedroom door, opened it quietly and passed out into the tiny hall of the flat.

Tom could hear the sound of the ordered speaking of Uncle Alan, from behind the sitting-room door: he would be reading aloud from his favourite, clever weekly newspaper; Aunt Gwen would be devotedly listening, or asleep.

A moment’s thought, and Tom had glided into the kitchen and thence into the larder. This would have been a routine move at home; he and Peter had often done it.

In Aunt Gwen’s larder there were two cold pork chops, half a trifle, some bananas and some buns and cakes. Tom tried to persuade himself that he hesitated only because he didn’t know which to choose, but he knew that he was not hungry. As a matter of form, he laid hold of a very plain, stale bun. Then, a great weariness of all food overcame him, and he put the bun down, leaving it to another day of existence.

He had been moving all this time in perfect silence—he would have been ashamed for his skill in such an expedition to have done otherwise. But he had ill-luck: as he went out from the kitchen and larder, he came face to face with his uncle coming from the sitting-room. His uncle’s exclamation of surprise and disapproval brought his aunt out after him.

Tom knew that he was in the wrong, of course, but they need not have made such a fuss. Aunt Gwen was most upset because, if Tom slipped into the larder at night, that meant he was hungry. She was not feeding him properly. He was suffering from night starvation.

Uncle Alan, on the other hand, had not been unobservant of Tom at mealtimes, and he could not credit his being hungry. Besides, Tom had admitted he took nothing from the larder. Why had he been there, then? Was it a blind? What
was
it?

Tom never really convinced them of the simple truth: that a boy would naturally go into the larder, even if he were not hungry. Anyway, they pointed out, he was out of bed far too late. He was hustled back again, and his uncle stood over him to make a speech.

‘Tom, there must be no more of this. You are not to put the light on again once it has been put out; nor, equally, are you to get out of bed. You must see the reasonableness—’

‘Not even to get up in the morning?’ Tom interrupted.

‘Of course, that’s different. Don’t be silly, Tom. But you are not to get up otherwise. The reason is—’

‘Can’t I get up, even if I need to, badly?’

‘Of course you must go to the lavatory, if you need to; but you will go straight back to bed afterwards. You go to bed at nine in the evening and get up at seven in the morning. That is ten hours. You need those ten hours’ sleep because—’

‘But, Uncle Alan, I don’t sleep!’

‘Will you be quiet, Tom!’ shouted his uncle, suddenly losing his temper. ‘I’m trying to reason with you! Now, where was I?’

‘Ten hours’ sleep,’ said Tom subduedly.

‘Yes, a child of your age needs ten hours of sleep. You must realize that, Tom. For that reason, you must be in bed for ten hours, as I have said. I am making clear to you, Tom, that Gwen and I wish you, entirely for your own good, to be in bed and, if possible, asleep for ten hours, as near as maybe, from nine o’clock at night. You understand, Tom?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now I want you to promise to observe our wishes. Will you promise, Tom?’

Why could a boy never refuse to promise these large demands? ‘I suppose so,’ said Tom. ‘Yes.’

‘There!’ said Aunt Gwen; and Uncle Alan said: ‘Good. I knew I could reason with you.’

‘But, all the same, I don’t sleep!’

Uncle Alan said sharply, ‘All children sleep;’ and Aunt Gwen added more gently: ‘It’s just your imagination, Tom.’

Poor Tom had no answer except contradiction, and he felt that would be unwise.

They left him.

He lay in the dark, planning a letter to his mother. ‘Take me away. At once.’ But no, that was perhaps cowardly, and would worry his mother dreadfully. He would unburden himself to Peter instead, although Peter, because of his measles, could not reply. He would tell Peter how miserably dull it was here, even at night: nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody—to speak of—to do things with. ‘It’s the worst hole I’ve ever been in,’ he wrote, in imagination. ‘I’d do anything to get out of it, Peter—to be somewhere else—anywhere.’ It seemed to him that his longing to be free swelled up in him and in the room, until it should surely be large enough to burst the walls and set him free indeed.

They had left him, and now they were going to bed. Uncle Alan took a bath, and Tom lay listening to him and hating him. For some reason, Tom could always hear what went on in the bathroom next door to his bedroom as clearly as if he were there himself: tonight he was almost in the bath with Uncle Alan. Later he heard other movements and conversation from elsewhere in the flat. Finally, the line of light under his door disappeared: that meant that the hall-light of the flat had been switched off for the night.

Slow silence, and then the grandfather clock struck for twelve. By midnight his uncle and aunt were always in bed, and asleep too, usually. Only Tom lay still open-eyed and sullen, imprisoned in wakefulness.

And at last—One! The clock struck the present hour; but, as if to show its independence of mind, went on striking—Two! For once Tom was not amused by its striking the wrong hour: Three! Four! ‘It’s one o’clock,’ Tom whispered angrily over the edge of the bedclothes. ‘Why don’t you strike one o’clock, then, as the clocks would do at home?’ Instead: Five! Six! Even in his irritation, Tom could not stop counting; it had become a habit with him at night. Seven! Eight! After all, the clock was the only thing that would speak to him at all in these hours of darkness. Nine! Ten! ‘You are going it,’ thought Tom, but yawning in the midst of his unwilling admiration. Yes, and it hadn’t finished yet: Eleven! Twelve! ‘Fancy striking midnight twice in one night!’ jeered Tom, sleepily. Thirteen! proclaimed the clock, and then stopped striking.

Thirteen? Tom’s mind gave a jerk: had it really struck thirteen? Even mad old clocks never struck that. He must have imagined it. Had he not been falling asleep, or already sleeping? But no, awake or dozing, he had counted up to thirteen. He was sure of it.

He was uneasy in the knowledge that this happening made some difference to him: he could feel that in his bones. The stillness had become an expectant one; the house seemed to hold its breath; the darkness pressed up to him, pressing him with a question: Come on, Tom, the clock has struck thirteen—what are you going to do about it?

‘Nothing,’ said Tom aloud. And then, as an afterthought: ‘Don’t be silly!’

What
could
he do, anyway? He had to stay in bed, sleeping or trying to sleep, for ten whole hours, as near as might be, from nine o’clock at night to seven o’clock the next morning. That was what he had promised when his uncle had reasoned with him.

Uncle Alan had been so sure of his reasoning; and yet Tom now began to feel that there had been some flaw in it … Uncle Alan, without discussing the idea, had taken for granted that there were twenty-four hours in a day—twice twelve hours. But suppose, instead, there were twice thirteen? Then, from nine at night to seven in the morning—with the thirteenth hour somewhere between—was more than ten hours: it was eleven. He could be in bed for ten hours, and still have an hour to spare—an hour of freedom.