Tom's Midnight Garden (9 page)

After that, they went to the little brick-built heating-house, at the end of the greenhouse, and Hatty set about opening that door for Tom. She was far too small to be able to reach the flat square of iron that latched the top of the door; but, standing on tiptoe and straining upward with her yew-twig, she was finally able to poke it aside. She opened the door, and they went down steps inside into darkness and the smell of rust and cold cinders—the weather was so warm that the stove for the greenhouse was not working. There was a small shelf with two or three books on it, that Hatty said belonged to Abel. The shelf was just out of reach, but they could see that the topmost book of the pile was a Bible. ‘Abel says the Bible must be above all the other books, like—like the Queen ruling over all England.’

They went into the greenhouse, among the cacti and the creepers that swayed down from their roof-suspended cage-pots, and plants with strange flowers that could never be expected to live, like other plants, out of doors. Tom gasped for breath in the greenhouse, and wondered how they endured the stifling air. There was a Castor-oil Plant—Tom felt a little sick when Hatty named it. There was a Sensitive Plant, too, and Hatty showed Tom how, when she touched a leaf-tip, the whole frond drooped and shrank from her by folding itself together. The plant’s sensitivity was something quite out of the ordinary; it seemed to feel even Tom’s touch. He was so delighted that he worked his fingers over the whole plant, and left it in one droop of nervous dejection.

Then they leant over the water-tank and tried to see the goldfish—and tried to catch them. Hatty bared her arm, to plunge it in; and Tom laid his arm along hers and behind it, with his open hand behind hers, finger to finger. So, as with one arm and one hand, they dipped into the water and hunted. Tom could have done nothing by himself; but when Hatty very nearly caught a fish, Tom’s hand seemed one with hers in the catching.

Then Hatty led Tom back to the doorway of the greenhouse and showed him the coloured panes that bordered the glass panelling of the upper half. Through each colour of pane, you could see a different garden outside. Through the green pane, Tom saw a garden with green flowers under a green sky; even the geraniums were green-black. Through the red pane lay a garden as he might have seen it through the redness of shut eyelids. The purple glass filled the garden with thunderous shadow and with oncoming night. The yellow glass seemed to drench it in lemonade. At each of the four corners of this bordering was a colourless square of glass, engraved with a star.

‘And if you look through this one …’ said Hatty. They screwed up their eyes and looked through the engraved glass.

‘You can’t really see anything, through the star,’ said Tom, disappointed.

‘Sometimes I like that the best of all,’ said Hatty. ‘You look and see nothing, and you might think there wasn’t a garden at all; but, all the time, of course, there is, waiting for you.’

They went out into the garden again, and Hatty began to tell Tom about the yew-trees round the lawn. The one he had climbed and waved from was called the Matterhorn. Another tree was called the Look-out, and another the Steps of St Paul’s. One tree was called Tricksy, because of the difficulty of climbing it: its main trunk was quite bare for some way up from the ground and could only be swarmed. Hubert and James and Edgar had all swarmed it in their time; Hatty could not swarm. (Tom felt superior—Princess or no Princess.)

Sometimes Hatty’s information seemed doubtful to Tom. They paused by a bushy plant, to which Hatty drew attention. ‘This is the Burning Bush,’ she said. She plucked a leaf, rubbed it between her fingers, and then held them up to Tom’s nose.

He sniffed the finger-tips; the smell was of the faintest to him. ‘Should it be a smell of scorching?’ he asked doubtfully.

‘No, James says the smell is of lemon-verbena.’

‘Why is it called Burning Bush, then?’

‘They say that if you come out at midnight on Mid-summer Eve, and set a flame to this, the whole plant will blaze up.’

‘How do you know—have you ever tried?’

‘No, of course not. Because there’s only one plant in the garden, and we don’t want that burnt to ashes.’

‘Oh!’ Tom supposed to himself that it might be true.

Hatty drew nearer to him. ‘Shall I tell you something—something secret?’

‘If you like.’

‘This bush is grown from a slip of the real burning bush—the one that burnt when Moses was there.’

‘But that was long, long ago, and in the Bible!’

‘I shan’t tell you secrets again!’ said Hatty, offendedly.

But she could never resist telling him. Not only on that first day of meeting, but on all the days following, her secrets and stories poured from her with haste and eagerness as though she were afraid that Tom’s company would not be hers for long. When they were tired with playing in the garden, Hatty would lead the way to the summer-house. They went up the steps and Hatty opened the door for them. From the back of the summer-house she brought forward two twisted iron garden chairs, and put them in the doorway, for herself and Tom. There they used to sit, looking over the oblong pond, watching the fish rise, and Hatty talked.

Once Edgar found them. They were not aware that he had been standing staring and listening, until suddenly—from one side of their view down the garden—he called to Hatty: ‘What are you up to there, Hatty?’

‘I am not “up to” anything, Cousin Edgar.’

‘For the last five minutes you’ve been talking and nodding and smiling and listening, all by yourself.’

‘I am not by myself. I am talking to a friend of mine.’

‘Where is he?’

‘On this other chair, of course.’

Edgar burst out laughing, very unpleasantly. ‘Really, Cousin Hatty, people will think you’re queer in the head—once it used to be fairies, which was just silliness; and now it’s somebody who isn’t there!’ He went off, laughing.

Hatty was trembling, when she turned back to Tom. ‘And now he’ll go and tell the others, and they’ll jeer at me, and Aunt Grace will say it shows how unfit I am to go anywhere with other children, outside, in the village.’

‘Well, then,’ said Tom, ‘why did you tell Edgar about me?’

She opened her eyes very wide at him: ‘But one must tell the truth, mustn’t one?’

Often, from their seat, they could see Abel at work down the garden. He would sometimes stop and look in the direction of the summer-house, and Hatty would then wave to him, in a Princess-like manner.

‘So sad about Abel,’ said Hatty, mysteriously.

‘Sad?’

‘The whole family is a sad one. But you must promise not to tell, if I tell you.’

Tom said nothing, and Hatty went straight on.

‘He had just one brother, and they were together in the fields one day—it was just before Abel became gardener here. His brother was very jealous of him, and one day, in the fields, they fought. Well, really, his brother just attacked Abel—with a weapon—murderously.’

‘Go on.’

‘He killed Abel—that is, of course, he very nearly killed him. There was a great deal of blood. It lay smoking on the ground of the field.’

There was a horrified silence; and then Tom said suddenly, ‘What was Abel’s brother’s name?’

‘Really, I don’t remember,’ said Hatty, looking away from Tom at a bird in the sky.

‘Was his brother’s name Cain?’ asked Tom. Hatty pretended not to have heard him. This was particularly irritating to Tom, as it was what he had to suffer from all the other people in the garden. ‘Because the story of Cain and Abel is in the Bible, and Cain really killed Abel. I don’t believe this Abel who gardens here has anything to do with the Bible Abel—except that he was called after him. I don’t believe this Abel ever had a brother who tried to murder him.’

‘Suppose I told you that Susan had told me—and Susan is Abel’s sweetheart? Or suppose I told you that Abel himself told me, as a secret?’

‘I’m not sure you don’t tell fibs,’ said Tom; and even then he knew that he was choosing a mild word, to be kind to Hatty. ‘I dare you to go to Abel now, and ask him whether he has a brother who tried to murder him!’

‘I shan’t ever—ever—tell you any more secrets—ever!’ Hatty cried passionately; but Tom knew how much to fear that. Meanwhile, she did not take up his challenge to have the matter out with Abel, and Tom took this as permission to disbelieve her story. It was only a step from that to disbelieving that Hatty herself was the Princess she claimed to be.

Yet it was true that she had made this garden a kind of kingdom.

‘I
meant to ask Hatty questions about the garden,’ Tom wrote to Peter, ‘but somehow I forgot.’ He always forgot. In the daytime, in the Kitsons’ flat, he thought only of the garden, and sometimes he wondered about it: where it came from, what it all meant. Then he planned cunning questions to put to Hatty, that she would have to answer fully and without fancy; but each night, when he walked into the garden, he forgot to be a detective, and instead remembered only that he was a boy and this was the garden for a boy and that Hatty was his playmate.

There was always so much to do in the garden. They were to build a tree-house in one of the yew-trees, as soon as Hatty could spy out some floor boarding for them; in the meantime, there were bows and arrows.

Hatty had said wistfully that Hubert and James and Edgar used to play at forest outlaws, with bows and arrows made in the garden.

‘Why didn’t you?’ asked Tom.

‘They said I was too young; and, then, when I was old enough, they said they were too old.’

‘Well, why didn’t you play by yourself? You could make your own bow and arrows.’

‘I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. At least, I think I know how to make arrows, because James once showed me—they’re easy; but not a bow.’

Then Tom told Hatty to get a sharp knife. She went indoors and came back with a kitchen-knife hidden under her pinafore. Directed by Tom, she hacked free a suitable stave of yew; it was unseasoned wood, but they could not help that. Then Hatty trimmed it roughly, and notched it round at either end for the bow string. She was clumsy with the knife at first, and Tom had even to explain to her about cutting always away from herself for safety.

When the yew stave was ready at last, Hatty found that she had not the strength to bend it and string it. Tom could not help her; and in the end she went to Abel.

Before stringing her bow for her, Abel examined its knifework.

‘You did this, Miss Hatty?’

‘Yes, indeed I did.’

‘Aye, but who taught you to do it?’

‘Someone.’

‘Well, whoever it was taught you—take care he don’t teach you trouble with it.’

‘Trouble?’

‘Trouble for yourself, Miss Hatty.’ Abel gave her a long stare, which Tom, watching from a distance, could not understand. Then Abel strung the bow, as Hatty had asked.

Arrows were easy to make, and Hatty—as she had said—knew how. She sought out the straight, unknotted wands from among the old wood of the nut stubs. One end of each hazel-wand she trimmed and then notched, to fit on to the bow-string. The other end she capped and weighted with a short piece of elder. The cousins had always used elder, it seemed: you pushed the tip of the arrow into the elder pith until it held fast.

Tom wanted to have the arrows feathered; but Hatty was impatient to use them as they were, and Tom gave way. His only grief was that he could never shoot the arrows for himself. However, he gave advice.

He wanted Hatty to shoot at birds, but she refused, although—as he pointed out with truth—there was not the slightest danger of her ever hitting them. Instead, Hatty shot up into the air: she liked to shoot, and then screw up her eyes and watch the thin line of the arrow against the dazzling blue of the perpetual summer sky.

They lost four arrows in the tree-tops, from Hatty’s shooting upwards at random; and then the fifth arrow fell through the greenhouse roof.

The only witness of the accident, fortunately, was Abel; and he seemed to be on their side. In silence, he fetched a broom, to sweep up the broken glass, and a ladder and a spare pane of glass and some putty. When he had done the repair and had come down the ladder again, fear lifted from Hatty like a cloud—Tom could see that.

‘Thank you,’ she said to Abel. ‘Aunt won’t even know.’

‘No,’ said Abel. Then he said, with deliberation, ‘But do you remember what I told you of.’ It was not a question; it was not an order; rather, it was a warning, heavily foreboding.

‘You mean,’ said Hatty, after a moment’s thought, ‘about being taught trouble?’

Abel simply nodded, and walked away.

The next trouble they got themselves—or rather Hatty—into, was something from whose consequences Abel was powerless to save. The trouble had its first cause far back in their anxiety not to do more damage in the garden by arrow shooting. To avoid that, Hatty started a practice of shooting over the garden-hedge into the meadow beyond; then she and Tom would worm their way through the hedge tunnel, to retrieve their arrow.

They did no harm by going over the meadow, for it was already grazed close by cows. The search rather held up the archery; but Tom enjoyed the expeditions. So did Hatty; and, once the arrow was found, the river that bounded the meadow drew her like a charm. She even braved the geese in order to reach the river-bank.