Tom's Midnight Garden (21 page)

‘But that’—said Peter indignantly—‘that’s not Hatty: that’s a grown-up woman!’

Tom, staring at Hatty as though he were seeing her for the first time, opened his mouth to speak; but he could not.

‘Time’—called the tower-keeper—‘time to go down again, if you please, ladies and gentlemen!’

The little crowd of sightseers began to cluster round the doorway to the spiral staircase; one by one they began to go through it. Only Hatty remained where she was, and the two boys.

‘But she’s grown-up,’ Peter said again.

Hatty began to come across to them; and Tom felt Peter shrinking away from her.

‘Who was he? What was he?’ Hatty breathed to Tom; and Tom, again without looking, knew that Peter had vanished from his side—thinned out and vanished. ‘He was like you,’ Hatty whispered; ‘and he was unreal-looking, just like you.’

‘Come along, lady!’ called the tower-keeper, and looked at Hatty curiously, thinking she was young to be queer in the head and muttering to herself.

‘He was my brother, Peter,’ Tom stammered; ‘but he’s real, Hatty. He’s real, like me. You agreed I was real, Hatty.’

‘Don’t you want to get home at all tonight, young miss?’ the keeper was asking impatiently.

Hatty heard him, and looked up and round her suddenly: the sun had set; in the town, yellow lights were springing up in the windows; beyond the town, the Fen level was one shadowy expanse, so that one could no longer see the windings of the river.

‘It’s late,’ she cried, in fright. ‘Yes, we must hurry!’

‘
We?
’ said the keeper. ‘It’s you should hurry! Here I’ve been waiting for you—’ Hatty, however, now started down the stairway, in great haste, with Tom at her heels; and the keeper was left to grumble to himself and lock up and come after them.

Inside the tower, it was as black as if night had already descended: Tom felt that the darkness increased Hatty’s anxiety for the homeward journey. The hurry, and the fear behind it, prevented Tom from thinking coolly about the strange meeting above, and about what had been said then. He wondered confusedly how Peter had come to them, and whether he would come again.

That did not happen. Peter Long, at home, had woken up from his dream—a bad dream, if not quite a nightmare. He lay in bed remembering it, but only in seemingly unconnected parts: he had been counting to send himself to sleep, and he remembered getting as far as two hundred and eighty-six; then, he had been at some great height, where he did not want to be, and the garden was impossibly far away; Tom had been there, too, somehow; and he remembered Tom’s pointing someone out to him and saying that she was Hatty, and his own crying out that it could not be so, because this was a grown-up young woman and not a child at all. He remembered then the look on Tom’s face: a strange, dawning amazement, and fear.

Tom and Hatty hurried from the cathedral and went down to the river again, just when most of the Ely skaters were beginning to come off it. They were the only two, it seemed, who were starting to skate.

Three old men, past skating themselves, were leaning on convenient posts along the waterfront, watching all that was going on. They considered themselves of the age and experience to give Hatty advice. One asked where she was skating to, at that time of evening; and when she said, ‘Castleford,’ they all three shook their heads.

‘If the ice holds,’ said one; ‘but this old south-west wind means rain and thaw, likely.’ The breeze that Tom and Hatty had noticed from the top of the tower had by now strengthened into a real wind; it felt softer and milder, even in Tom’s face, than the former frosty stillness.

‘There’s already someone went through, I heard,’ said the second old man. ‘Somewhere upstream it was. He didn’t drown, though. There were friends with him, and they got him out just in time, with a ladder over the ice. There’ll be a hole left, and rotten ice round it: you’d best keep a look-out for it. Now, where did they say it was, Matthew?’

The first old man did not know; but the third one thought the hole must be a biggish one, and that Hatty would be sure to notice it when she got really close to it. She must not forget to be careful, too, of treacherous ice under bridges and trees, and along reed-beds.

The first old man started the round again by saying that Hatty would do better to go by train from Ely to Castleford.

Hatty thanked them all, but went on fastening her skate straps: Tom thought she was rather brave. They stood up together on the ice, and Hatty wished the old men a cheerful good night; and they earnestly wished her the best of luck, and one of them shouted after her that at least she would have a full moon. When they had skated out of earshot, Hatty told Tom that she had not had enough money to take the train all the way from Ely to Castleford.

They were skating out against a stream of homecomers, but soon they passed the last of them and were skating alone. Tom knew that this was the time to talk to Hatty, and yet, clearly, she was disinclined for any conversation: all her powers were being put forth into her skating. Tom stole sideways glances at her as she went, weighing in his mind what Peter had said; he did not speak to her.

The moon rose, full, as the old men had said: it had a halo to it, which is supposed to mean rain. The moonlight laid open their way before them, and yet made it appear more desolate, and themselves more lonely. Except for the wind and the sound of steel on ice, there was silence. Neither Hatty nor Tom liked the silence; but neither broke it. In silence, moonlight and loneliness they were gliding onwards.

Some way ahead, on the river-bank to their right, they noticed an upright, dark shape, perhaps six feet high. It was certainly a post or a tree-trunk; and they were paying no particular attention to it. Then, suddenly, they saw it move.

Hatty gave a little gasp, but never stopped skating—it was almost as if she could not. At this curve of the river she was skating full into the moonlight, but the man—for it was a man—was black against it, and seemed unnaturally tall. He seemed to be watching something intently, and Tom felt that he was watching them.

They were nearer now; they would be level soon. The figure on the bank stirred again, and called over the ice a name that was between a question and a hail: ‘Miss Hatty …’

Tom felt himself fall out of stroke with Hatty, as she wavered in her course.

‘Who is it?’ she called; but Tom thought she recognized the voice, although he did not. Her strokes were beginning to shorten; her course was curving towards the bank.

‘It’s me, young Barty.’

‘Oh, Barty, I am glad to see you!’ cried Hatty, forgetting shyness in her relief.

He came down to the edge of the bank—a well-set young man in a caped overcoat, wearing farmer’s gaiters. ‘But where are you off to, all alone, at this time of evening, on this ice?’

‘To Castleford. From there I can take the train, or walk home. I must get home.’

‘As to getting home—why, yes,’ agreed young Barty; ‘but you shouldn’t be skating alone like this. I’d best give you a lift.’

It seemed that he had been on his way home from Castleford market, in his gig. He had turned aside down a drove-way to have a look at the river and the condition of the ice. That was when Tom and Hatty had seen him.

Delightfully, the horse and gig, although invisible from the river, were only a few yards away, on the other side of the river embankment. When young Barty had helped Hatty up this embankment they saw the horse waiting between the shafts, lit by the little yellow flames of the headlamps—the first warm-coloured light they had seen since the candlelight and lamplight in the house windows of Ely. Beyond the gig, the drove-way stretched back to meet the main road to Castleford and home.

They all got into the gig, young Barty and Hatty at either end of the front seat, with a large space in the middle which Tom took for himself.

‘I’ll drive you to Waterbeach,’ said young Barty. ‘You can take a train from there to Castleford. If you’ll excuse the question—have you enough money for the ticket? If not, I could lend you some.’

‘That is very kind,’ said Hatty, primly. Then she added, ‘I fear that I take you out of your way.’

She certainly was not taking him on the way he had been going, which was home to one of his father’s farms out in the Fens. Yet, without exactly telling an untruth, young Barty gave Hatty to understand that all this was a pleasure.

After that they drove in silence.

When they reached Waterbeach they found that the last train to Castleford had gone.

‘I’ll drive you to Castleford, then,’ said young Barty, and sounded quite cheerful about it. So they went on again, and Tom noticed that this time the other two made more conversation. They remarked upon the weather and their journey, Hatty speaking at first awkwardly, and then with more ease. Young Barty said he had talked with James that afternoon on Castleford market; and now Tom remembered hearing of this young man as one of the friends of the Melbourne cousins. They had all been at school together in Castleford.

Soon, very naturally, Hatty and young Barty were talking of skating. Young Barty admired Hatty’s achievement that day. He had done as much himself, certainly, this very winter; but few ladies had skated so far. His own mother had done so—he remembered the tale of it. Years ago, when old Barty and she had been courting, there had been one of these same widespread, hard frosts. The two of them had gone skating together from Castleford to Ely and then to Littleport and beyond. They had skated so far and so long that the young woman had nearly fallen asleep as she skated, and she had half-dreamed that she and her sweetheart had reached the sea and were skating over the smoothed-out, frozen waves of it, to far countries.

He and Hatty laughed over that. Then young Barty began to speak of the prospects of further skating that winter, and of next winter. He loved skating, as Hatty did.

Tom found the conversation uninteresting, chiefly because he could not join in it. He was also cross with Hatty: she was behaving as if she either did not remember him or did not see him—or both. Several times a gesture of her hand actually passed through him. Once she leant her arm along the back of the gig-seat, as she turned the better to listen to young Barty, and then her wrist and hand rested in Tom’s gullet and made his swallowing feel strange.

He was glad when they reached Castleford railway station. The last train had not gone, but there was a long time to wait for it: young Barty said it would be much better to drive home the last five miles, and Hatty did not object. Tom did, but he could not argue. He had been hoping for an empty railway compartment for that long, private, explanatory talk with Hatty: he must have it soon.

The gig drove on. Tom sat alone in his thoughts, while the other two talked over him or through him, with an increasing delight in each other’s company. A village church clock struck across the darkened countryside, and Tom thought of Time: how he had been sure of mastering it, and of exchanging his own Time for an Eternity of Hatty’s and so of living pleasurably in the garden for ever. The garden was still there, but meanwhile Hatty’s Time had stolen a march on him, and had turned Hatty herself from his playmate into a grown-up woman. What Peter had seen was true.

Through the clattering of the horse’s hooves, Tom listened to Hatty and young Barty: theirs was grown-up conversation, and had no interest for him; and his own thoughts displeased him. Gradually his mind fell into vacancy. He was not tired by the skating, nor was he sleepy because of the lateness of the hour, yet he slept: perhaps the monotony of the hoofbeats had something to do with it; perhaps a strange feeling that he was not in Hatty’s thoughts any longer made him feel less awake and alive.

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.

O
n 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.