Tom's Midnight Garden (20 page)

T
hat winter the frost had begun at the end of December and went on—with a milder spell for a week in January—to the beginning of March. It was of the greatest severity. Even running waters froze at last. Ice stopped the wheels of the upriver water-mills, and blocked the way for the barges that, in those days, plied from King’s Lynn as far upstream as the hithes of Castleford.

The frost was over all England. On some waters oxen were roasted whole, as though that proved what a fine frost this was, and what ice was best used for. On the Cherwell, at Oxford, a coach with six horses was driven down the middle of the frozen river, to the great satisfaction of all concerned. But the people of Castleford and the Fens knew the truest and greatest and best use of ice: they skated.

There had been skating on the river for several weeks when Tom and Hatty came down to it; and it seemed to them as if there must be more people skating than could possibly be doing market-day business in the town.

Not everyone skated well or fast: there were some learners, and a policeman who moved with the dignified pace of a navy-blue swan. There was also the newer fashion of skating—figure-skating: Hatty pointed it out to Tom. In one place an orange had been set centrally upon the ice, and four top-hatted, dignified gentlemen were describing a harmony of figures to it—from it—round it. Suddenly a town-urchin, on rusty Fen runners, partly strapped, partly tied with string to his boots, dashed in, snatched up the orange and dashed away again with his teeth already in it. The swaying, shifting crowd of skaters closed up behind him, and the figure-skating gentlemen stopped skating, and were extremely annoyed.

Like Tom, Hatty laughed aloud at the impudence of the theft; but all the time she was looking round her sharply and a little nervously. Among all the townspeople and countrypeople, someone might recognize her, and pass comment on her being there alone. However, Hatty was fortunate: no one seemed to notice her at all.

The skates were on, and now Hatty and Tom were ready for the ice: two skaters on one pair of skates, which seemed to Tom both the eeriest and the most natural thing in the world. A new skill and power came into him, as though these skates knew their work better than the skater: he could skate as well as Hatty, because he had her skates. The only difference between them was that his blades left no cut or bruise upon the surface of the ice in travelling over it.

They did not skate with linked hands, as many skating partners did, for fear of the odd appearance being noticed; but, once they had left behind the thick crowds of sociable skaters just below the town, they skated abreast, keeping time together, stroke for stroke. There was no wind at all that afternoon, and they cut through the still air faster and faster.

Hatty had pinned her skirt up above her ankles, for greater freedom of movement; and now she abandoned the use of her muff, the better to swing her arms in time with their skating. Their speed made the muff fly out behind her, on its cord, and at last a stroke gave it such a violent fling that the cord broke and the fur ball of the muff shot away and landed in the middle of a game of bandy and somehow became part of the game, and was never seen again. Hatty saw it disappear, and neither stopped nor faltered in her course, but only laughed, as though she cared nothing now for muffs or improprieties or aunts. They skated on.

They left the Castleford reaches altogether. They came to a lock, with its gates frozen fast, and its weir frozen too: they hobbled ashore and round the lock and on to the ice again. They skated under a bridge, and, even in the shelter of it, the ice bore strongly. All the ferryways were frozen as they went, with the ferrymen standing sourly by their ice-locked boats.

Hatty and Tom skated on and on. The skaters they met now were mostly men. There were few girls, that Tom could see, and none without escort. They came to a lonely river-side alehouse: its signboard said: ‘The Five Miles from Anywhere—No Hurry’. Here there were skaters, labourers from the Fen farms, resting on the bank. They called out jovially to Hatty, asking if she would like any of them to skate with her for company. They went on calling, until she called back that she had a companion with her, even if they could not see him. The skaters thought this a good hoax and laughed, taking no offence; and Hatty laughed; and Tom laughed too, but no one except Hatty heard him.

They skated on, and the thin, brilliant sun was beginning to set, and Hatty’s black shadow flitted along at their right hand, across the dazzle of the ice. Sometimes they skated on the main river; sometimes they skated along the flooded washes. Only the willows along the bank watched them; and the ice hissed with their passage.

They had stopped talking or thinking—their legs and arms and bodies seemed to throw from side to side with the precise, untiring regularity of clock-pendulums—long before Hatty cried: ‘Look, Tom—the tower of Ely cathedral!’

From the river, however, Ely’s tower plays a game with the traveller. Hatty and Tom skated and skated, and for a long time the tower seemed to let them come no nearer, but performed a mysterious movement instead, now to one side, now to the other, now ahead, according to the windings of the river. At last, however, they were certainly getting nearer, and now the cathedral tower began to disappear behind the nearer rooftops; and here they were where the river curves in to the town of Ely.

They went ashore. Hatty unstrapped and unscrewed her skates and walked in her skating-boots—she had no others; Tom slung his boots and skates round his neck and walked in his socks.

They walked through the town, making for the cathedral, and went in through the great west door. Inside, the failing of winter daylight was beginning to fill the vastness with gloom. Through this they walked down the nave towards the octagon; and it seemed to Tom as if the roof of the cathedral were like a lesser sky, for, although they walked steadily, when they looked upwards, they had moved very little in relation to its spaces. Hatty walked with dazzled eyes: ‘Oh, I never thought there was anywhere so big—so beautiful!’ she said.

They passed a verger, and Tom whispered to Hatty: ‘Ask about going up the tower.’ She turned back and did so. The verger said the young lady could go up if she would be waiting by the font at the west end, in ten minutes from now. It was the last ascent of the day. The charge was sixpence.

They spent the interval in walking round the cathedral. As they came out of the Lady Chapel, Tom lingered to read a memorial tablet to a certain Mr Robinson, Gentleman of the City, who had exchanged Time for Eternity on the 15th day of October one thousand eight hundred and twelve at the age of seventy-two. Tom reflected that, in a way, he was intending to copy Mr Robinson; he meant to exchange ordinary Time, that would otherwise move on towards Saturday, for an endless Time—an Eternity—in the garden. ‘Exchanged Time for Eternity,’ Tom repeated aloud, and noticed that the walls of the cathedral returned not the slightest echo of his voice. The silence was chilling.

Hatty had turned back to see what kept Tom. Now, over his shoulder, she too read the inscription, and her attention was caught by the same quaint phrase: ‘Exchanged Time for Eternity,’ she read aloud. ‘Time … Eternity …’ the words spoken by Hatty made a little echo, and her voice and its echo filled the silence after Tom’s speaking, so that he was somehow comforted by the sound. Impulsively he turned to Hatty: he would confide in her—he would tell her all that he intended. He would do it now.

But Hatty was looking towards the font: already people were waiting there, and she moved to join them. Nor did Tom wish to delay her, for he, too, wanted to go up the tower. He followed Hatty. After all, he could talk to her later, when they had started the long run home to Castleford. He would have plenty of time then.

P
eter Long slept only a little that Thursday night before he woke himself in dissatisfaction: his dreaming was all wrong. Night after night he had managed to dream that he was with Tom; he had been able to dream of the garden, as Tom described it in his letters. Tonight, when his ignorance of Tom’s plans made him yearn all the more to imagine what he might be doing—tonight, he could not dream of the garden at all. Instead, he had begun dreaming of a tall grey shape that rode like an anchored ship in the surrounding level. He did not know what he was seeing, until his eyes opened from sleep and fell at once upon the Ely postcard, still dimly visible on the mantelpiece by the light from the street.

Peter closed his eyes again, to shut out the sight of the cathedral tower. He concentrated his thoughts upon what Tom might be doing at this very moment; and, at the same time, he began to count, in order to send himself off to sleep. He did not count the usual sheep going through a stile, because there are neither sheep nor stiles in a garden: he simply counted.

Numbers, in their regularity, began to send Peter to sleep. He had a drowsy feeling that he was earnestly seeking for Tom, and that pleased him; surely he would see the garden soon. He had only to follow Tom … He was really asleep now; but even in his sleep he went on counting, and the numbers now began to be numbers of something particular. The garden was still not reached; and these were numbers of steps that he was counting—steps upward, winding inside a grey tower that, even in his dream, he perceived with annoyance to be the cathedral tower of Ely once again.

There are nearly three hundred steps up to the top of the tower of Ely cathedral, or—to be exact—two hundred and eighty-six. At least, that is what Tom made them, counting as he climbed. He was at the end of the file of sightseers; Hatty just before him.

They came stooping out at last through a little door on to the leads of the tower roof. Now, nothing was higher. They looked over the parapet and saw the roof of the great nave below them. They looked far down over the house-tops of Ely, and saw the black holes of the chimney-pots, through which mounted the smoke of winter fires. The lines of smoke were beginning to bend slightly out of the upright as a little wind got up. The breath of this wind and the puffing of a train in Ely station was all the sound that reached them.

They saw the town and, at once, beyond it, for Ely is very small. They saw the river bounding the town on one side; and they looked along it, downstream. They saw the whiteness of that iceway, gleaming where the sunset touched it, and winding and disappearing into distant mist and evening, in the direction of Littleport, Denver, King’s Lynn and the sea. Then they looked back along the way they had come, from Castleford: they were awed at the distance of it.

The tower-keeper pointed to something far away that he declared were the spires of Castleford; then he drew his sightseeing party aside to peer in another direction, towards Peterborough. Hatty went with the others.

Tom remained where he was, still staring towards Castleford. He was alone on that side of the leads for a moment; and then he had a strong feeling that he was not alone after all. Someone had come belatedly out through the door from the spiral staircase, and now stood beside him. He knew, even before he turned, that it was Peter.

From the other side of the leads, Hatty looked round to see where Tom had got to. She saw, instead of one boy, two: they were very much alike, and dressed identically in pyjamas. The second boy had the same insubstantial look that she had noticed recently in Tom himself: she was almost sure that she could see the tower parapet through them both. She stared in wonderment.

‘But, Tom, where’s the garden?’ Peter was saying, rather querulously. ‘I thought you were with Hatty, in the garden.’

Tom answered directly, because he felt in his bones that time was short, and shortening. ‘The garden’s back there,’ he said briefly, flinging his arm outwards, in the direction of Castleford. ‘And Hatty’s here.’

‘Where? I can’t see her,’ said Peter.

Tom was pointing with his finger, and Peter was facing Hatty across the leads—she was the only one among the sightseers who had turned in his direction.

‘There!’ said Tom. ‘Right opposite to you—the one carrying skates.’