Tom's Midnight Garden

  Dimly he felt the swing of the gig as it turned the corner by the whitewashed cottage and started down the lane to the big house.

  When Mrs Melbourne, coldly amazed and angry, came to the front door to receive them, she saw only two people in the gig: that was to be expected. But even Hatty saw only one other besides herself, and that was young Barty.

  XXV

  Last Chance

  On Friday morning, in the peaceful hour before the others were awake, Aunt Gwen leaned out of bed, boiled the electric kettle and made an early pot of tea. She poured out a cup for her husband, one for herself, and then she rose to take the third to Tom.

  She was crossing the little hall with the tea, when she stopped dead, frozen at what she saw: the front door of the flat, which Alan himself had locked last night, was open. In a nightmare moment she saw them all in her imagination: robbers with skeleton keys, robbers with jemmies, robbers with sacks to carry away the swag; and each man wore a black mask and carried a deadly weapon—a bludgeon, a revolver, a dagger, a length of lead piping …

  Gwen Kitson was recalled from her attackers by a painful sensation in her fingers: she was trembling so much that hot tea was slopping over the teacup into the saucer and scalding the hand that held it. She set the cup and saucer down on a hall chair, and, as she did so, she saw why the hall door remained open: it was wedged at the bottom by a pair of bedroom slippers—Tom’s.

  The imaginary burglars vanished. Tom must be responsible. She remembered that he had been found roaming out of bed one night when he had first come to stay with them. She remembered, too, the high words there had been then, with Alan, and she decided to manage this by herself.

  First of all, she had a look outside on the landing: there was no sign of Tom. Then she removed the bedroom slippers, closed the door and went into Tom’s bedroom. There he was, fast asleep—not even shamming, she was sure. She stood over him, the tell-tale slippers in her hand, wondering what she should say to him. She must scold him, and yet she did not want to be too hard on him and spoil his last day.

  Even the mild reproach Aunt Gwen had prepared was never uttered. Tom, when she roused him, behaved in a way that too much alarmed her. He opened his eyes, but then at once squeezed them shut again, as if against a hateful sight. With his eyes closed, he began talking violently and in what seemed a senseless way: ‘No! Not this Time! Not Now!’

  Aunt Gwen dropped the slippers and fell on her knees by the bed, putting her arms round him. ‘What is it, Tom? You’re awake now. It’s morning. You’re safe and sound here with me.’ He opened his eyes and stared at her and then around him, as though he had expected to see someone—and somewhere—else. ‘Have you been in a nightmare, Tom? But, anyway, it’s over. Why, here we are on Friday morning, and tomorrow you’re going home!’

  Tom did not answer her, but gradually the unnatural fixity of his look was broken. His aunt kissed him, and then slipped away to fetch him a fresh cup of tea. All she said to her husband was, ‘It’s time, for his own sake, that Tom went home. He’s terribly strung up. Bad dreams—nightmares—’ She thought of a new explanation of the bedroom slippers: ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he even walked in his sleep.’

  Aunt Gwen did not mention to Tom the bedroom slippers found in the doorway; and Tom, later observing them lying by his bed, only thought they were yet another part of the mystery of his being here at all. With him under the bedclothes—the laces twined round the fingers of his left hand—were Hatty’s skates that had taken him to Ely; and yet here he was, on Friday morning, in the Kitsons’ flat. He had felt so sure of being able to exchange his Time for an Eternity of Hatty’s, and he was back again after only a few hours of her existence.

  ‘But perhaps that was because I let myself fall asleep, in the gig,’ Tom thought, and resolved that such a thing should not occur again. For he still had another chance; he had tonight. Tonight he would go down to the garden, and stay there for as long as ever he pleased.

  He debated whether to take the skates with him or not. If the great frost were continuing, he was willing to skate on the pond or on the meadow; but he was not willing to forgo the garden altogether as he had done last time.

  Perhaps, anyway, the season in the garden would be summer, as it used to be …

  Tonight, when he opened the garden door, the air that met him might be warm and soft and smelling of flowers. The yew-trees across the lawn would welcome him. He would go down the sundial path, and then turn right and run along the shadowy tunnel-path between the yew-trees and the nut stubs, and come out into the sunshine again by the asparagus beds, and perhaps see Abel digging a root of horse-radish by the early apple-tree and Hatty, a little girl again, in her blue pinafore, waiting to spin her tales for him.

  ‘For Time in the garden can go back,’ Tom reminded himself; ‘and she may be a little girl again tonight, and we shall play games together.’

  Friday was spent mostly in getting ready for Tom’s going home. His things were collected and gone through; his suitcase was polished and re-labelled; and his aunt took him out shopping to choose what delicacies he would like for his packed lunch on the train and what little presents he would take with him to his mother and father and Peter. Tom could not feign interest in what seemed so far away in time. It might be years before he saw his home again tomorrow.

  That night Aunt Gwen left both bedroom doors open so that she could hear Tom if he got out of bed in his sleep. Tom did not fail to notice his aunt’s device. His mid-night cunning and soundlessness had grown with weeks of practice: he was out of the flat and starting downstairs without having disturbed the sleepers.

  He had seen from his bedroom window that the sky was overcast; there was neither moonlight nor starlight. As he went downstairs, he could hardly see the oblong of the landing window. ‘It doesn’t matter, though,’ Tom said, and felt his way surely down the lower treads and so into the hall.

  Here he stopped to listen to the grandfather clock, as though it might have some message for him; but the clock minded its own business, and its ticking only gave a measured reproof to him for the over-hasty beating of his heart.

  He went down the hall, turned left at the old boot-cupboard, and was at the garden door. Suddenly he was in a panic to be out: he tore at the fastening of the door; and, though it was the wrong fastening that his fingers found, he would not allow himself to think of that.

  ‘I’m going to get into the garden,’ he said between his teeth; and the clock’s ticking behind him neither confirmed nor contradicted his words.

  He had got the door open now; and it was night outside, too, as black as the night indoors. He could see nothing. He stood on the doorstep and sniffed the air. There was no frost in it, and yet there was no lingering summer perfume from shut flowers and from grass and leaves. The air seemed empty of smell, except for a faint tang that he could not quite place.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Tom. The blackness did not matter either, because by now he knew the garden by heart. Blindfold, he could have found his way. Where should he go first? Across the lawn, to the yew-trees.

  He sprang forward and began running. His bare feet fell on to cold stone; he knocked against a tall metal thing, and its lid fell off and rang upon stone again. He shied away, and still ran on in the direction of the yews, but long before he reached trees, crashed into a wooden fence, and knew that the tang he smelt had been of creosote, and that this was the creosoted fence enclosing the back-yard where the ginger-bearded man kept his car and where the tenants kept their dustbins.

  He turned and ran then, like a rat with the dogs after it, back into the house. He could not have intended to make another attempt, for he did not close the garden door after him; he could not have intended to go back to bed, for he halted in the middle of the hall by the grandfather clock, sobbing. The grandfather clock ticked coldly on.

  A light had gone on, somewhere along the landing upstairs, and by it he could see a figure coming down the stairs. He knew in his he
art that it could not be she, and yet he screamed to her for help: ‘Hatty! Hatty!’

  All over the big house, tenants were startled from their sleep. Tom’s call, sharp like a bird’s warning, reached up even to the topmost flat and woke Mrs Bartholomew from a dream of her wedding one Midsummer Day some sixty-odd years before. The cry seemed to call her, and Mrs Bartholomew, muddle-headed with sleep like her tenants, put on the light and began to get out of bed.

  Alan Kitson jumped the last few steps of the stairs and ran forward and caught Tom in his arms. The boy sobbed and fought as though he were being taken prisoner. Then his uncle felt his body go limp, and he began weeping softly now, but as though he would never stop.

  Uncle Alan carried Tom upstairs, to where his aunt was waiting. Then he went down again to shut the garden door and to reassure the ground-floor tenants. Then he went up to his own floor and explained to the other tenant there that his wife’s nephew had been sleep-walking. Finally, he mounted to Mrs Bartholomew’s flat. He found her with the front door open, but on a chain. She was pale and trembling, and agitated by the crying she had heard. She listened to his explanation, but without seeming to believe or even to understand. She asked wilder and wilder questions, and asked the same ones again and again. At last, Alan Kitson lost patience with her, bade her an abrupt good night and hurried back to the flat below.

  Aunt Gwen had got Tom back into bed and was giving him hot milk and aspirin. She came outside when she heard her husband in the hall. ‘I shall stay with him until he sleeps,’ she said in a low voice, ‘for he seems quite ill with shock. I suppose it was his waking up and finding himself standing there, in the dark, all alone, not knowing he was in the hall—or, at least, not knowing how he got there.’

  ‘Look,’ said Uncle Alan, and held up a pair of old-fashioned skating-boots and skates. ‘He was carrying these.’

  Aunt Gwen was dumbfounded. ‘What can have possessed him, even in sleep-walking?’

  ‘And where can he have got them, that’s what I’d like to know,’ said Uncle Alan, examining them with curiosity. ‘They’ve been oiled and polished recently, and yet they don’t look as if they’d been used for fifty or a hundred years. I wonder …’

  ‘You mustn’t question him, Alan. Promise me that. He’s not fit to be worried.’

  ‘Very well. If they’re his skates—and they’re certainly not ours—I’d better put them with his things tomorrow, before he leaves.’

  Aunt Gwen was going back into Tom’s bedroom, but she remembered something that had puzzled her: ‘When he called out, it sounded, from up here, as if he were calling someone.’

  ‘He screamed for his mother, you mean, or his father?’

  ‘No. Yet I thought it was someone’s name.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been. He just screamed.’

  XXVI

  The Apology

  Sometimes before in his life, Tom had gone to sleep in disappointment or sadness, but always he had woken up to a new day and a new hope. This time he found that the morning was only a continuation of the night and the day before: even as his mind stirred awake, the horror and grief of yesterday were already there.

  This was Saturday; he had lost his last chance; he had lost the garden. Today he went home.

  The tears fell from his eyes, and he could not stop them falling. Aunt Gwen came to him early, and put her arm round him: ‘But, Tom, tell me—tell me what’s the matter!’

  Now, at last, he wanted to tell her—to share and perhaps thereby lessen his grief. But now it was too late: his story was too long and too fantastic for belief. He gazed at her in silence, and wept.

  Tom had breakfast in bed, like an invalid. Over their own breakfast, the Kitsons discussed him.

  ‘He really can’t make that long train journey alone and in this state,’ said Aunt Gwen. ‘Couldn’t we drive him home by car?’

  Alan Kitson was perfectly willing. He worked on Saturday morning, so that they could not start until the afternoon. A telegram was sent to the Longs.

  Tom got up and dressed very soon after his breakfast, because lying in bed and thinking was worse than being up could possibly be. He came out into the little hall just as his uncle was going off to work. His uncle and aunt told him of the change of plan, and Tom nodded.

  Uncle Alan said good-bye and went out of the front door, and Aunt Gwen shut it after him. Almost immediately, however, she and Tom heard his voice in conversation outside, and in a few minutes he was back again, looking annoyed. ‘It’s that old woman,’ he said. ‘Why can’t she let well alone?’

  ‘Mrs Bartholomew? What does she want now?’

  ‘An apology for the disturbance last night. Of course, I gave her one at the time, and I apologized again just now; but she says the boy himself must go to her.’

  ‘I shouldn’t dream of sending him!’ cried Aunt Gwen. ‘It’s outrageous of her to expect it! I shall tell her so!’ Fully roused against Mrs Bartholomew, Tom’s aunt made a move to the front door. Her husband stopped her.

  ‘Careful, Gwen! She is the landlady. If we upset her, she could be very awkward.’

  ‘All the same!’

  ‘I’ll try to soothe her myself,’ said Uncle Alan.

  ‘No,’ Tom said suddenly, in a dull, steady voice: ‘I’ll go to her. I ought to. I don’t mind.’

  ‘I shan’t let you, Tom!’ cried Aunt Gwen.

  ‘I shall go,’ he repeated. It was like getting up instead of staying in bed, crying. You had to do these things—even unpleasant things: in a strange way, there was a relief in doing them.

  There was something in Tom’s manner that made his aunt and uncle respect his decision.

  A little later that morning Tom climbed up to Mrs Bartholomew’s flat and rang the front door bell. Mrs Bartholomew opened the door, and was face to face with him: she was as he had expected her to be—old and small and wrinkled, with white hair. All that he had not been prepared for were her eyes: they were black, and their blackness disturbed him—that, and the way they looked at him.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve come to say I’m sorry,’ Tom began.

  She interrupted him: ‘Your name’s Tom, isn’t it? Your uncle mentioned it. What is your other name?’

  ‘Long,’ said Tom. ‘I’ve come to apologize—’

  ‘Tom Long …’ She had stretched out a hand and touched his arm with the tips of her fingers, pressing with them so that she might feel the fabric of his shirt and the flesh under the fabric and the bone beneath the flesh. ‘You’re real: a real, flesh-and-blood boy: the Kitsons’ nephew … And in the middle of last night—’

  Tom, trying not to be frightened by a queer old woman, said: ‘I’m sorry about last night.’

  ‘You screamed out in the middle of the night: you woke me.’

  ‘I’ve said I’m sorry.’

  ‘You called out,’ she insisted. ‘You called a name.’ She lowered her voice; it sounded gentle, happy, loving—Tom could not say all the things it sounded, that he had never imagined for Mrs Bartholomew. ‘Oh, Tom,’ she was saying, ‘don’t you understand? You called me: I’m Hatty.’

  The words of the little old woman were meaningless to Tom; only her black eyes compelled him. He allowed her to draw him inside her front door, murmuring to him softly and delightedly. He was in the tiny hall of her flat; and facing him was a Gothic barometer of familiar appearance.

  ‘That’s the barometer from the Melbournes’ hall,’ said Tom, as in a dream.

  She was pushing him ahead of her into the sitting-room; and facing him, from over the mantelpiece, was a large, brown, portrait-photograph of a young man with one of those ordinary faces that you yet remember and recognize again. Tom recognized this face: he had seen it last by moonlight.

  ‘That’s young Barty,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Bartholomew: ‘a likeness taken soon after we were married.’

  With difficulty Tom’s mind took in the meaning of what had been said: young Barty and t
he late Mr Bartholomew were one and the same.

  He sat down heavily upon a chair, and faced her. ‘You married young Barty? Who were you?’

  ‘I’ve been telling you, Tom,’ said Mrs Bartholomew patiently: ‘I’m Hatty.’

  ‘But Hatty was a girl when Queen Victoria reigned.’

  ‘I’m a Victorian,’ said Mrs Bartholomew. ‘What is odd about that?’

  ‘But Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837.’

  ‘That was a long time before I was born,’ said Mrs Bartholomew. ‘I was born towards the end of the Queen’s reign. She was an old lady when I was a girl. I am a Late Victorian.’

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ said Tom; ‘I don’t understand … The garden gone … and yet the barometer here … and you say you were Hatty … What happened after the day I skated to Ely with Hatty—the last time we saw each other?’

  ‘The last time?’ said Mrs Bartholomew. ‘But, no, Tom, that wasn’t the last time I saw you. Have you forgotten?’ She looked at him earnestly. ‘I see you don’t know all of our story, Tom: I must tell you.’

  Tom listened as she began her tale; but at first he listened less to what she was saying than to the way she was saying it, and he studied closely her appearance and her movements. Her bright black eyes were certainly like Hatty’s; and now he began to notice, again and again, a gesture, a tone of the voice, a way of laughing that reminded him of the little girl in the garden.

  Quite early in Mrs Bartholomew’s story, Tom suddenly leaned forward and whispered: ‘You were Hatty—you are Hatty! You’re really Hatty!’ She only interrupted what she was saying to smile at him, and nod.

  XXVII