Tom's Midnight Garden (8 page)

Tom was bitterly disappointed. He had not minded being invisible to the others—to the maid, and the severe-looking woman, and the gardener, and the little girl, and even to Hubert (who looked stupidly grown-up) and to Edgar (whom Tom actually disliked). But he would have liked to have made himself known to James: they could have been companions in adventure.

Stubborn against defeat, Tom followed more slowly, up the steps and into the house. He had gone in thus before, of course, every time he had gone back upstairs to his bed in the Kitsons’ flat at the end of each visit to the garden. This time, however, he did not close the garden door behind him: he knew from experience that would shut him at once into the house of the flat-dwellers. This time he wanted the other house—the house that went with the garden.

So he left the garden door open, and advanced down the hall, past the wooden bracket and the barometer, towards the marble bracket and all the cases of stuffed animals and birds. He held his breath: perhaps, this time he would succeed in penetrating the interior of the night-time house, and explore it.

Although Tom moved quickly along the hall, intending to turn upstairs to where he heard (or thought he heard) the boys laughing among themselves—although he moved quickly, the furniture of the hall was dissolving and vanishing away before him even more quickly. Even before he reached the middle of the hall, everything had gone from it but the grandfather clock; and when he reached the middle, and could look sideways towards the stairs, he saw them uncarpeted, exactly as they were when his uncle and aunt and the others used them during the day. These were not the stairs that could ever lead him anywhere now but to bed.

‘Bother!’ said Tom. He turned back the way he had come, towards the garden door: through it the garden lay unchanged. As he stepped out over the threshold, he glanced back over his shoulder into the house: sure enough, the hall was re-filling behind him. Brackets, barometer, glass cases, umbrella stand, gong and gong-stick—they were all stealing back; and, of course, the grandfather clock had been there all the time.

Tom was vexed; but he resolved not to let this disappointment spoil his enjoyment of the garden. He would resolutely put James and the others out of his mind. He had already as good as forgotten the girl, Hatty. She had not come across the lawn and into the house after her cousins; for some reason, she had given up the chase. He did not wonder where she was in the garden now, or what she was doing.

T
om only rarely saw the three boys in the garden. They would come strolling out with the air-gun, or for fruit. They came for apples on the second occasion of Tom’s seeing them, which was only a few days after the first.

With a terrier at their heels, they sauntered out of the house and—apparently aimlessly—took the path by the greenhouse, and so came into the kitchen-garden. Then, suddenly, they bunched together and closed upon a young tree of early ripening apples.

‘We were only told not to pick any,’ said Hubert. ‘Come on, lads! Shake the tree and make them fall!’

He and James set their hands to the tree-trunk and shook it to and fro. An apple dropped, and then several more. Edgar was gathering them up from the ground, when he paused, looked sharply across to the bushes, and cried: ‘Spying!’ There stood the child, Hatty. She came out into the open, then, as concealment had become pointless.

‘Give me an apple, please,’ she said.

‘Or you’ll tell, I suppose!’ cried Edgar. ‘Spy and tell-tale!’

‘Oh, give her an apple—she means no harm!’ said James. As Edgar seemed unwilling, he himself threw one to her, and she caught it in the bottom of her pinafore held out in front of her. ‘Only don’t leave the core on the lawn, Hatty, as you did last time, or you’ll get yourself into trouble, and us too, perhaps.’

She promised, and, eating her apple, drew nearer to the group. Each boy had an apple now, and they were eating them hurriedly, scuffling the earth with their feet as they came away from the tree, to confuse the tracks they had made.

Now they halted again—and it happened to be quite near Tom, but with their backs to him—while they finished their apples. The terrier snuffed his way round their legs and so came to Tom’s side of the group. He was closer to Tom than he had ever been before, and became—in some degree—aware of him. So much was clear from the dog’s behaviour: he faced Tom; his hackles rose; he growled again and again. Hubert said, ‘What is it, Pincher?’ and turned; he looked at Tom, and never saw him.

Edgar had turned quickly, at the same time: he looked more searchingly, through and through Tom. Then James turned, and lastly even Hatty. They all four stared and stared through Tom, while the dog at their feet continued his growling.

It was very rude of them, Tom felt, and very stupid, too. Suddenly he lost patience with the lot of them. He felt the impulse to be rude back, and gave way to it—after all, no one could see him: he stuck out his tongue at them.

In retort, the girl Hatty darted out her tongue at Tom.

For a moment, Tom was so astounded that he almost believed he had imagined it; but he knew he had not. The girl had stuck out her tongue at him.

She could see him.

‘What did you stick out your tongue for, Hatty?’ asked Edgar, who must be able to see things even out of the corners of his eyes.

‘My tongue was hot in my mouth,’ said Hatty, with a resourcefulness that took Tom by surprise. ‘It wanted to be cool—it wanted fresh air.’

‘Don’t give pert, lying answers!’

‘Let her be, Edgar,’ said James.

They lost interest in the dog’s curious behaviour, and in Hatty’s. They began to move back to the house. The dog skulked along nervously beside them, keeping them between himself and Tom, and still muttering to himself deep in his throat; the girl walked slightly ahead of them all.

Tom followed, seething with excitement, waiting his chance.

They went in single file by the narrow path between the greenhouse and the large box-bush. Hatty went first, then the three boys. Tom followed behind the four of them; but, when he emerged from the path and came on to the lawn, there were only the three boys ahead of him.

‘Where’s Hatty?’James was asking. He had been the last of the three.

‘Slipped off somewhere among the trees,’ said Edgar, carelessly. The three boys continued upon their way back into the house.

Tom was left on the lawn, gazing about him in determination and anger. She thought she had slipped through his fingers, but she hadn’t. He would find her. He would have this out with her.

He began his search. He looked everywhere that he could think of: among the bushes; up the trees; behind the heating-house; beyond the nut stubs; under the summer-house arches; inside the gooseberry wire; beyond the bean-poles …

No … No … No … She was nowhere. At last, behind him, he heard her call, ‘Coo-eee!’

She was standing there, only a few yards from him, staring at him. There was a silence. Then Tom—not knowing whether he was indeed speaking to ears that could hear him—said: ‘I knew you were hiding from me and watching me, just now.’

She might have meant to pretend not to hear him, as, earlier, she must have pretended not to see him; but her vanity could not resist this opening. ‘Just now!’ she cried, scornfully. ‘Why, I’ve hidden and watched you, often and often, before this! I saw you when you ran along by the nut stubs and then used my secret hedge tunnel into the meadow! I saw you when Susan was dusting and you waved from the top of the yew-tree! I saw you when you went right through the orchard door!’ She hesitated, as though the memory upset her a little; but then went on. ‘Oh, I’ve seen you often—and often—and often—when you never knew it!’

So that was the meaning of the footprints on the grass, on that first day; that was the meaning of the shadowy form and face at the back of the bedroom, across the lawn; that, in short, was the meaning of the queer feeling of being watched, which Tom had had in the garden so often, that, in the end, he had come to accept it without speculation.

A kind of respect for the girl crept into Tom’s mind. ‘You don’t hide badly, for a girl,’ he said. He saw at once that the remark angered her, so he hurried on to introduce himself: ‘I’m Tom Long,’ he said. She said nothing, but looked as if she had little opinion of that, as a name. ‘Well,’ said Tom, nettled, ‘I know your name: Hatty—Hatty Something.’ Into the saying he threw a careless disdain: it was only tit for tat.

The little girl, with only the slightest hesitation, drew herself up into a stiffness, and said: ‘Princess Hatty, if you please: I am a Princess.’

T
om was half-inclined to believe her, at first. Her gaze was very bright and steady; and, with her red cheeks and long black hair and stiff little dignity, there was perhaps something regal about her—something of a picture-book queen. Immediately behind her was the dark-green background of a yew-tree. In one hand she held up a twig of yew she had broken off in nervousness, or to play with; in the other hand she held her half-eaten apple: she held the two things like a queen’s sceptre and orb.

‘You can kiss my hand,’ she said.

‘I don’t want to,’ said Tom. He added, ‘Thank you,’ as an afterthought, in case she really were a princess; but he had his suspicions. ‘If you’re a Princess, your father and mother must be a King and Queen: where’s their kingdom—where are they?’

‘I’m not allowed to say.’

‘Why not?’

She hesitated, and then said: ‘I am held here a prisoner. I am a Princess in disguise. There is someone here who calls herself my aunt, but she isn’t so: she is wicked and cruel to me. And those aren’t my cousins, either, although I have to call them so. Now you know my whole secret. I will permit you to call me Princess.’

She stretched out her hand towards him again, but Tom ignored it.

‘And now,’ she said, ‘I will allow myself to play with you.’

‘I don’t mind playing,’ said Tom, doggedly, ‘but I’m not used to playing silly girls’ games.’

‘Come with me,’ said the girl.

She showed him the garden. Tom had thought that he knew it well already; but, now, with Hatty, he saw places and things he had not guessed at before. She showed him all her hiding-places: a leafy crevice between a wall and a tree-trunk, where a small human body could just wedge itself; a hollowed-out centre to a box-bush, and a run leading to it—like the run made in the hedge by the meadow; a wigwam shelter made by a re-arrangement of the bean-sticks that Abel had left leaning against the side of the heating-house; a series of hiding-holes behind the fronds of the great ferns that grew along the side of the greenhouse; a feathery green tunnel between the asparagus ridges. She showed Tom how to hide from a search simply by standing behind the trunk of the big fir-tree: you had to listen intently and move exactly—and noiselessly, of course—so that the trunk was always between yourself and the searcher.

Hatty showed Tom many things he could not have seen for himself. When she was lifting the sacking over the rhubarb-tubs, to show him the sticks of rhubarb, Tom remembered something: ‘Did you once leave a written message here?’

‘Did you once find one?’ asked Hatty.

‘Yes—a letter to fairies.’ Tom did not hide the disgust he had felt. ‘Fairies!’

‘Whoever could have put it there?’ Hatty wondered. ‘To fairies! Just fancy!’ She pulled a grimace, but awkwardly; and she changed the subject quickly. ‘Come on, Tom! I’ll show you more!’

She opened doors for him. She unlatched the door into the gooseberry wire, and they went in. Among the currant bushes at the end they found a blackbird that must have squeezed in by a less official entrance, attracted by the fruit. The bird beat its wings frantically against the wire at their approach, but they manoeuvred round it and then drove it before them down the gooseberry wire and out—in a glad rush—through the door they had left open. ‘It’s lucky we found it,’ said Hatty. ‘I’m afraid that Abel …’ She shook her head. ‘I really think he’d rather see birds
starving
than eating his fruit.’

For Tom, she opened the orchard door from the sundial path, and then the door into the potting-shed. Among the tools and seed-boxes and flower-pots and rolls of chicken-wire, they found a sack full of feathers—hen feathers and goose feathers. Hatty dug her fingers in and threw them up into the air in a brown-and-white storm so thick that even Tom thought he felt a tickling on his nose, and sneezed. Then Hatty crept over the floor, laughing, and picked up all the fallen feathers, and put them back, because otherwise Abel would be angry. Tom sat on the side of the wheelbarrow and swung his legs and pointed out any stray feathers still drifting down. He could not have helped Hatty: he knew that, with both hands and all his force, he could not have lifted even a feather’s weight. Meanwhile Hatty, on her hands and knees, seemed to have forgotten that she was a Princess.