Tom's Midnight Garden (7 page)

‘N
ot unless you put the clock back,’ Uncle Alan said carelessly, in answer to Tom’s last question.

Tom doodled with his pen in the corner of the letter he was writing to Peter: a clock-dial, which he then enclosed at the top of a tall, rectangular case—a grandfather clock, in fact. He took some minutes to complete it; then he addressed his uncle again.

‘What clock?’

‘What did you say, Tom?’

‘You said a tree could not be lying fallen at one time, and then be standing up again as it was before it fell, unless you put the clock back. What clock?’

‘Oh, no particular clock.’ Tom scribbled out his sketch of the grandfather clock. ‘It’s just a saying, Tom—“to put the clock back”. It means, to have the Past again, and no one can have that. Time isn’t like that.’

His uncle returned to his reading; and Tom began doodling in another part of the writing-paper. After some time he found that he had drawn the shape of an angel-like creature with wings from his shoulders and with straddling legs. He had drawn the creature before he was aware, and then was startled at his own handiwork. He could not at once think whence the design had come into his mind. Then he remembered that it belonged to the grandfather clock and he scribbled that out too.

Then, ‘What
is
Time like, Uncle Alan?’ asked Tom.

His uncle put his book down altogether; and his aunt nervously put down her mending, too.

‘Tom,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t always be asking such very odd questions of your uncle. He’s tired after his day’s work.’

‘No, no, Gwen. A child’s questions should certainly be answered. All I would object to Tom’s questions is their lack of connexion, and sometimes of seriousness, too. Look at his first question: he asked whether it would be possible to go through a door—he actually asked
how
it would be possible!’

‘Well!’ cried Tom’s aunt, with a relief that came from her not having paid attention to the earlier conversation. ‘Well, that seems a very sensible idea—so sensible that it’s almost silly!’

Alan Kitson raised his eyebrows, and his wife went on hurriedly: ‘You know what I mean—going through a door’s such an everyday happening.’

‘Not when the door is shut … Then Tom went on to ask about the invisibility—the
invisibility
—of a person like himself.’

‘Sometimes, in fairy stories—’ Aunt Gwen began.

Tom shook his head indignantly.

‘And finally,’ his uncle continued, ‘we have this question about a tree’s being able to lie fallen one day, and then, on the next day, against all the known laws of Nature—’

‘It was a dream!’ interrupted Aunt Gwen, ‘just a queer dream, wasn’t it, Tom?’

‘No, it wasn’t!’ Tom cried passionately. ‘It was real!’

‘Indeed!’ said Uncle Alan, with slow relish. ‘So this tree has really existed—this extraordinary incident has really happened! Tell us where, Tom, and when. Where and when, Tom?’

Tom remained silent. He dug his pen in a row of inky holes down the side of his paper.

‘Come, Tom!’

‘It was a fairy tree!’ said Aunt Gwen, returning with desperate playfulness to her first suggestion. ‘Goblin woodcutters laid it low, didn’t they, Tom?’

Uncle Alan smiled and picked up his book again. ‘I am inclined to think you are right, after all, Gwen.’

‘It fell in a storm,’ Tom said in a strangled voice. ‘Lightning struck it.’ He looked at his uncle as if he would willingly have seen him struck in the same manner.

His aunt intercepted the look, and saw her husband’s mouth opening to speak. She rushed into the conversation again, and, this time, won: ‘And now Tom mustn’t speak again until he’s finished his letter to Peter, nor be interrupted!’

So Tom went back to the letter, cramping his writing between the doodlings and stab-marks.

‘… All I have told you is true,’ he wrote, ‘about the door and being invisible and the fir-tree. It is all very strange, but I don’t
mind
any of it, except perhaps being invisible to everybody. For instance, there are three boys that have come into the garden. Their names are Hubert and James and Edgar. Edgar is about my age, but I think I would like James better. There is a girl who tags round after them. She is very young and is called Hatty or something …’

Without appearing to detach his attention from his book, Uncle Alan spoke: ‘It’s useless to write at length to anyone recovering from measles. After measles, the patient has to be particularly careful not to strain his eyes by overuse.’

‘If Tom’s letter is too long for Peter, then no doubt his mother will read it aloud to him,’ said Aunt Gwen.

In alarm, Tom wrote ‘PRIVATE’ in the biggest capitals across the top of the letter, folded it intricately, and wrote ‘Peter—PRIVATE’ on both sides. He had to undo it again, to sign it, having forgotten that, in the panic. He then put the letter into an envelope, addressed it and wrote ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ in the top left-hand corner.

He found his uncle’s eyes watching him ironically over the top of his book. Tom felt defiant. He licked the flap of the envelope and pressed it down. Then he drew the outline of his long tom-cat across the edge of the stuck-down flap. Like a seal, it guarded against any tampering. Beneath the cat, Tom wrote: B.A.R.

Uncle Alan brought out his wallet. ‘Here’s a stamp for your precious letter.’ Tom thanked him stiffly.

The letter finished, Tom had nothing more to do. He composed himself to wait patiently for bedtime. There was no real use in his going to bed early: he could not go down to the garden, anyway, until his aunt and uncle were in bed and asleep.

His thoughts ran on the garden, as they always did nowadays. He reflected how dangerously near he had been to betraying it, just now. Fortunately his uncle and aunt had only laughed at him; if they had been more attentive and sympathetic, he might have been trapped into telling more. They might have found out his secret. The very next time he visited the garden, they would have insisted upon going with him …

Tom went chill at the idea.

‘Are you feeling quite well, Tom?’ asked his aunt.

‘Yes, thank you, Aunt Gwen.’

Nevertheless, she fetched the thermometer and made him put it into his mouth. ‘You were shivering just now, as if you had a chill.’

Tom shook his head.

‘I hope it’s not the onset of measles, for your sake, Tom. It would mean your staying away from home several weeks longer, perhaps, instead of only ten days.’ She withdrew the thermometer and took it over to the light.

‘Only ten days?’ repeated Tom.

‘I know you must be longing to get home,’ said Aunt Gwen sadly; she would have liked him to have stayed much longer. Uncle Alan was saying nothing.

Only ten days! Only ten days more for the garden! ‘I think perhaps I have a temperature, and it is measles,’ said Tom. Surely, even with measles, he could still go down every night to the garden during those extra weeks while the disease ran its course.

‘I can never find the thread of mercury at first,’ Aunt Gwen was saying. She twisted and twisted the thermometer; then, at last, she held it still. ‘No, Tom, you’ve no temperature, so you’ve no measles. That’s a relief for you, isn’t it? Home soon.’

‘But—’

‘Yes, Tom?’

He dared not say it: that suddenly he found that he did not want to go home. He wanted above all to stay here—here where he could visit the garden. His home now seemed a long, long misty way away; even Peter was a remote boy with whom he could only correspond by letter, never play. The boys nearer to him now were called Hubert and James and Edgar—James especially. There was a girl too—but she was only a girl. What had her name been? Hatty …

H
ubert was the eldest of the three boys Tom had seen in the garden. Indeed, in writing to Peter, Tom should perhaps hardly have called him a boy at all: he was, rather, a young man. Along his upper lip he already had dark, sparsely growing hairs, which he sometimes touched anxiously, appreciatively. He was already grown to man’s height, although he had by no means properly filled out yet.

James, too, and even Edgar, were older than Tom. James’s voice was a soft, hesitant growl, which, in the midst of speech, would occasionally slip upwards into a creaky treble, to his consternation. ‘Oh!’ he would say, and stop, and flush, in the presence even of his brothers.

The third brother, Edgar, had brindled hair and brindled brown eyes that moved round remarkably quickly, missing nothing. He talked quickly and sharply, too. Tom liked Edgar the least, although he was the nearest to him in age.

The three of them had walked from the house into the garden one day when Tom was already there. They were followed by a little girl in a frilled blue pinafore and with hair worn long to her shoulders. The only word you could have used about that child was ‘tagging’. She tagged along after them, and then circled them every so often—in what might well have become an exasperating way—in order to face them and to listen to what they were saying. They were talking about a rat-shoot they were going to that evening: the miller had asked them to it; it was to be after dark, of course; and Bertie Codling would be there, and young Barty would come over too, perhaps; and they would take a hurricane lamp; and they would take their air-gun; and wasn’t it a pity they hadn’t an air-gun each, instead of only one between them.

Tom, from among the nearby trees, listened eagerly; and the little girl circled, and circled again.

‘Let’s all run from Hatty!’ said Hubert suddenly, and at once did so, his long legs covering great distances with each stride. James swerved away from her, too, laughing; and Edgar followed him. Hatty, as if she were used to such treatment, had already started a quick trot of pursuit, when Edgar turned and, stooping, flung before her the hazel-switch that he had been carrying. It did not touch her—it was not exactly meant to; but it made her stumble. She fell forwards on her face in the grass, and began crying.

James heard the sound, and turned back and picked her up. He shook her as he did so, but gently, saying, ‘You juggins—you silly little juggins, you!’ Tom, in justice to the girl, really could not see anything very silly in tripping over something suddenly thrown at your feet.

‘What will aunt say?’ wept Hatty, pointing to green grass-stains on her pinafore.

James batted at them with his hands, but, of course, that brought no improvement. Suddenly he seemed to lose patience. ‘Why did you fall, then? You should look where you’re going! I can’t help you—I’m off with the others!’ And he fled away after them, among the trees.

Hatty followed, sobbing to herself, but almost absent-mindedly. She went among the trees and paths, searching. Her eyes glanced continually hither and thither, and she soon stopped crying and carried her head in the position of one intently listening. Tom could see that there was something expert in the way she looked for the three boys: this game had often been played before.

Tom decided to follow Hatty in her search.

She came across the gardener by the pond. ‘Abel, have you seen Cousin James, or Cousin Hubert, please? I don’t want to find Cousin Edgar, though.’

‘They didn’t come as far nor this, Miss Hatty. Are they playing Catch with you again?’

‘It’s the only game they’ll ever play with me.’

‘Why don’t you ask them to let you do the running away, for once, and they do the catching?’

‘It would be no good: I can’t run as fast as they can.’

‘They could give you a start.’

She brightened: ‘If they did, they wouldn’t find me easily once I’d hidden. I could hide better than they do.’ She became boastful, jumping about on her toes in front of the gardener. ‘I know better secret places—many better secret places, and I can keep quieter than they can. So quiet, that nobody ever knows I’m in the garden at all.’

‘Can you, now?’ said the gardener, admiringly—to please her, Tom thought.

‘I see everybody, and nobody sees me,’ said the little girl. She was very cheerful now.

Suddenly, from the trees behind her, came a ‘Coo-eee!’ She turned, and Tom did likewise: Edgar was showing himself, to renew her pursuit.

Although she had said she did not want to find him, Hatty made for him at once. Almost immediately the other two boys broke cover. Together they all doubled back across the lawn towards the house. They would easily reach it before their pursuer, and Tom feared that he, as well as the unfortunate Hatty, would lose them. James was the last of the three runners, and Tom had taken to James: he was the kind of boy you might risk picking as a companion in tree-climbing or in any other pursuit. James was going rat-hunting that very evening—

‘Hey!’ shouted Tom, and, coming out into the open, put on a brilliant spurt in his running. ‘Hey, James!’ It was the first time he had ever shouted in the garden. Several birds rose in a flurry, but the boy he had called so loudly by name paid no attention. Tom overtook him, swerved across his path, calling him again as he did so: to James, Tom was invisible and inaudible. James pounded up the doorsteps and into the house and disappeared. All three had gone.