Tom's Midnight Garden

by Philippa Pearce

  That made Tom remember his anger against them, and he determined to shame them. He would have to play a very careful game: by innocent-seeming references he must hit home, without ever letting them suspect that he knew of the garden and intended to go there.

  He began at breakfast.

  ‘Do you believe that lying is wrong?’

  ‘Oh, Tom!’ cried Aunt Gwen. ‘Always!’

  ‘I mean,’ said Tom, ‘do you think that some special lies might be right, sometimes?’

  ‘Is lying ever justifiable?’ This was the kind of question Uncle Alan liked to discuss. He folded away his paper and cleared his throat. ‘I suppose, Tom, you are thinking of what are commonly known as white lies?’

  ‘I don’t think so, exactly,’ said Tom. ‘At least, I mean—well, someone being kept in the dark about something he’d enjoy, because some other people didn’t want to tell him about it. I mean, supposing the other people went so far as to say the thing just wasn’t there, in order not to have the bother of the first person using it.’

  Aunt Gwen looked confused. ‘What kind of thing was it the second people didn’t want the first people to know about and use?’

  ‘First person, not first people,’ said Tom. ‘And the thing was—well—’

  ‘A hot-water bottle, say?’ suggested Aunt Gwen.

  ‘No,’ said Tom, ‘more like’—he tried to think of something between a hot-water bottle and a large garden—‘more like a couch, say—a large outdoor couch.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard of such a thing,’ said Aunt Gwen. ‘A large outdoor couch?’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter what the thing is, Gwen,’ said Uncle Alan impatiently. ‘If I understand Tom, the point is that some person or persons were lying simply for their own convenience, and to the harm of another person or persons. Is that so, Tom?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘I just wondered if you thought that kind of lie might be right. I just wondered.’

  ‘Of all possible forms of lying,’ said Uncle Alan, ‘that is surely the least justifiable. Indeed, it is utterly and obviously unjustifiable.’ He looked severely at Tom. ‘I am surprised, Tom, that you should have any doubts about it.’ He gathered his newspaper and post together and went off to work.

  ‘Never mind, Tom,’ said Aunt Gwen. ‘Uncle Alan has a very highly developed sense of right and wrong. He says so himself. You will have one too, I’m sure, when you grow up.’

  ‘I have one now!’ said Tom indignantly. ‘It’s other people who haven’t!’

  Tom had not intended to harry Aunt Gwen apart from Uncle Alan: that had seemed unsportsmanlike. Generous resolutions, however, often break down under the strain of nothing more serious than annoyance, and Tom was now very much annoyed. He had been made to feel in the wrong, when he was in the right; and the people who had made him feel that were themselves the wrongdoers.

  Tom helped to clear the breakfast-table and followed his aunt to the sink. He began to dry up, darkly intent.

  ‘Aunt Gwen.’

  ‘Yes, Tom?’

  ‘It was kind of you to put flowers in my bedroom when I came.’

  ‘Tom, dear, I didn’t know you’d noticed them!’

  ‘Had you to buy them?’

  ‘Yes, but you mustn’t bother about that.’

  ‘It would have been easier for you if you’d been able to get flowers from a garden of your own.’

  ‘Yes, but there isn’t a garden to this house, of course.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘What do you mean by “No”, Tom?’

  ‘I meant, What a pity! Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a garden at the back of the house—with a lawn and trees and flowers and even a greenhouse?’

  ‘It would be nice, too, if we had wings and could fly, Tom.’

  ‘Suppose you could walk out of the door at the back this very minute, Aunt Gwen—this very minute—and walk on to a lawn and cut hyacinths from the flower-beds on that lawn—from little corner beds shaped like the quarters of an orange—what would you say, Aunt Gwen? What do you say now?’

  He had as good as told her that he knew all about the garden; he had challenged her openly.

  Aunt Gwen did not start or show shame; she laughed. ‘To begin with, Tom, I should be very surprised indeed if you picked me a hyacinth from anywhere outside, now.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Hyacinths don’t flower even out of doors at this time of year—it’s too late in the summer. See what your romancing has led you into!’

  ‘But I’ve s-seen hyacinths flowering out of doors, at just this time of year,’ said Tom. He stammered because he was frightened.

  ‘No, Tom, you can’t have. They’re quite over.’

  Tom put down the plate he had been drying—it was still damp—and the tea-cloth. ‘I’m going downstairs, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘What for, Tom?’

  ‘Nothing special. I won’t do anything wrong.’

  ‘Don’t go this morning. This is the morning that Mrs Bartholomew always goes downstairs to wind the grandfather clock.’

  His aunt’s warning only sped Tom: he told himself that she was inventing an excuse to keep him from the garden. He was still afraid, all the same—and not of Mrs Bartholomew.

  As he ran down the stairs to the hall, Tom was remembering the hyacinths: he had seen the curling back of the petals; he had smelt them. They had been real last night; they were real now. He had only to open the garden door to see them again—to see the whole of his garden again.

  He reached the garden door and turned its handle; but the door was fastened. He found the bolt, as he had done last night, but it was already drawn; and the bolt had a granular roughness to the touch that he recognized as rust—more rust than could have been formed in one night. Tom tried to move the bolt in its socket, but it was rusted up completely. It had been rusted up, one could tell, for years.

  The door was fastened now by an ordinary, modern Yale lock. Tom turned its little knob, but hesitated to open the door. He felt a sickness in his stomach, as though he had eaten the wrong things at breakfast: perhaps he ought to go straight back upstairs to bed. Besides, his head was swimming a little, and he felt a chill over his skin.

  Suddenly he cried aloud angrily: ‘Don’t be a fool! It’s there, I tell you! The garden’s there!’ He flung the door wide open, and blinked into the morning sunlight.

  At the back of the house was a narrow, paved space enclosed by a wooden fence, with a gateway on to the side-road at one end. There were five dustbins, and near the dustbins was parked an old car from beneath which stuck a pair of legs in trousers. A piece of newspaper bowled about, blown in from outside and imprisoned here; and the place smelt of sun on stone and metal and the creosote of the fencing.

  The man under the car crawled out at the sound of the door’s opening. He had a short ginger beard; otherwise there was nothing whatsoever of interest about him.

  ‘Hallo!’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

  Tom did not answer.

  ‘Oh, I know—you’re the boy from the first-floor front—the Kitsons’. A bit dull for you here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘Do you live in the ground-floor back flat?’

  ‘Yes,’ said ginger beard. He looked at Tom curiously: the boy’s voice sounded strange.

  ‘Do you have a maid that lights your fire for you?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘And you don’t—you don’t have a garden either?’

  To ginger beard’s amazement, the boy on the doorstep, without waiting for an answer to his last question, burst into tears.

  ‘Here, I say! What on earth’s the matter?’

  ‘Leave me alone!’ Tom turned to stumble indoors again.

  ‘Wait—wait a minute!’ There was something imperative in the man’s voice. ‘Listen!’ Tom halted, and held back his desolate crying. ‘I thought so,’ said the man softly.

  In the quiet, they could hear, from indoors, the ticking of the gran
dfather clock, and the sound of someone shuffling down the stairs.

  ‘It’s old Ma Bartholomew,’ whispered ginger beard. ‘Coming to wind up her precious clock. You don’t want to run into her. There’ve never been children here, and she might not like it.’

  Tom drew back out of sight into the doorway. His arm was still up to his face to hide the tears, but his eyes now looked over the top.

  The shuffling steps came nearer; the figure of Mrs Bartholomew appeared. She was old, small and bowed; she was dressed all in black.

  When she reached the clock, Mrs Bartholomew took from her purse a key, and opened the door of the pendulum case with it. She reached inside the case and brought out something small and polished that looked like the starting-handle of some tiny car. She reached up inside the case again, and must have pressed a lever that latched the glass front of the clock-dial: the front swung open at her touch.

  She took what had looked like a miniature starting-handle and fitted it into a slot on the right-hand side of the dial, and turned and turned it. As she wound, there was a gentle whirring sound. Then she wound on the other side of the dial.

  Finally, she latched the dial-front again, put the winding-key back inside the pendulum-case, locked the case-door, and shuffled away with the key. Her footsteps climbed the stairs and died away.

  While he was watching the clock being wound, Tom had had time to calm himself. He began to reason about the garden. It was true that there was no garden this morning, but there certainly had been last night—hyacinths and all. He turned back to look again at what was outside, searching for some link between last night and this morning. Up to the fence of the back-yard ran strips of garden that belonged to the pink brick, semi-detached houses beyond. In one of the garden strips stood an old yew-tree. Once, certainly, the tree had been clipped to a shape.

  Tom stared at it with a kind of hope.

  ‘What’s bitten you now?’ said the man.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Tom. ‘Thank you for warning me about Mrs Bartholomew. Good-bye.’

  He went slowly down the hall, thinking. The tree was perhaps a link; but it was out of his reach, in another garden. The big house itself was a link, of course; but it would tell him nothing. He had already taken the turn to the stairway when the voice of the grandfather clock behind him reminded him: the clock was a link.

  He went back to the grandfather clock and studied it intently. The clock-case was plain. The dial bore only twelve numbers, after all; but it was decorated with a design that now struck Tom as peculiar and interesting. In the semicircular arch above the dial itself stood a creature like a man but with enormous, sweeping wings. His body was wound about with something white. His face was a round of gold, and his feet were of the same colour and were planted on either side of the clock-dial. One foot seemed to stand on a piece of grassy land: the other went into the sea—Tom saw painted fishes that swam round the creature’s foot, and seaweed. In one hand he held a book, opened towards himself.

  If Tom had been able to look over that winged shoulder, what might he have read in that book?

  What the clock told him, Tom could not yet understand, and his mind turned away from it. He was back at thinking of the yew-tree he had seen over the yard-fence. ‘That fence looked easy to climb,’ Tom said to himself.

  During the rest of the day, Tom matured his plan. He also wrote to Peter—the first of an important series of reports. He told Peter, as well as he was able, what had happened last night; he told him of his intentions tonight. He meant to climb into the next-door garden and examine the yew-tree there, because—surely—it was one of the trees that he had seen in his garden. He would go all round it; he would climb it; he would search it for any clue.

  When he had finished his letter, Tom wrote across the top the initials: B.A.R. They stood for Burn After Reading. All Tom’s letters to Peter, from now on, bore that direction. Only the picture-postcard of Ely tower was without it, and only that was not destroyed.

  That evening Tom went to bed as usual, and kept deliberate watch. His uncle and aunt seemed so slow in going to bed and to sleep! Twice Tom dozed, woke with a start, and went to his bedroom door and looked out; and there was still a light from under the door of the other bedroom. The third time, it had gone; and, after the shortest wait that prudence required, Tom crept out and downstairs as before, to the hall. As he went along it, the grandfather clock began striking for what must be midnight.

  ‘I hope the moon’s well up, outside,’ Tom thought. ‘I shall need light for getting across the yard. It would be awkward to make a noise out there—falling over dustbins or the car or anything.’

  The grandfather clock had reached the thirteenth stroke as he slid his fingers up the edge of the door to find the knob of the Yale lock. He could not find it. He felt again. There was no Yale lock.

  He did not understand; but he tried the bolt. It had been shot home: that was how the door was fastened now. Now he knew—he knew! With trembling fingers he began to ease the bolt back into a well-oiled, rustless socket.

  The grandfather clock was striking on and on. Upstairs Alan Kitson, wakened by it, humped his shoulders fretfully: ‘It’s midnight. What on earth does the clock think it’s striking?’

  His wife did not answer.

  ‘Striking hours and hours that don’t exist! I only hope it’s keeping Mrs Bartholomew awake, too!’

  But Alan Kitson would have been disappointed if he had seen Mrs Bartholomew. She was lying tranquilly in bed: her false teeth, in a glass of water by the bedside, grinned unpleasantly in the moonlight, but her indrawn mouth was curved in a smile of easy, sweet-dreaming sleep. She was dreaming of the scenes of her childhood.

  And the grandfather clock still went on striking, as if it had lost all count of time; and, while it struck, Tom, with joy in his heart, drew the bolt, turned the door-handle, opened the door and walked out into his garden, that he knew was waiting for him.

  V

  The Footprints in the Dew

  There is a time, between night and day, when landscapes sleep. Only the earliest riser sees that hour; or the all-night traveller, letting up the blind of his railway-carriage window, will look out on a rushing landscape of stillness, in which trees and bushes and plants stand immobile and breathless in sleep—wrapped in sleep, as the traveller himself wrapped his body in his great-coat or his rug the night before.

  This grey, still hour before morning was the time in which Tom walked into his garden. He had come down the stairs and along the hall to the garden door at midnight; but when he opened that door and stepped out into the garden, the time was much later. All night—moonlit or swathed in darkness—the garden had stayed awake; now, after that night-long vigil, it had dozed off.

  The green of the garden was greyed over with dew; indeed, all its colours were gone until the touch of sunrise. The air was still, and the tree-shapes crouched down upon themselves. One bird spoke; and there was a movement when an awkward parcel of feathers dislodged itself from the tall fir-tree at the corner of the lawn, seemed for a second to fall and then at once was swept up and along, outspread, on a wind that never blew, to another, farther tree: an owl. It wore the ruffled, dazed appearance of one who has been up all night.

  Tom began to walk round the garden, on tiptoe. At first he took the outermost paths, gravelled and box-edged, intending to map for himself their farthest extent. Then he broke away impatiently on a cross-path. It tunnelled through the gloom of yew-trees arching overhead from one side, and hazel nut stubs from the other: ahead was a grey-green triangle of light where the path must come out into the open again. Underfoot the earth was soft with the humus of last year’s rotted leaves. As he slipped along, like a ghost, Tom noticed, through gaps in the yew-trees on his right, the flick of a lighter colour than the yew: dark—light—dark—light—dark … The lighter colour, he realized, was the back of the house that he was glimpsing, and he must be passing behind the line of yew-trees that faced it across the lawn.

&n
bsp; His path came out by the asparagus beds of the kitchen-garden—so he found them later to be. Beyond their long, grave-like mounds was a dark oblong—a pond. At one end of the pond, and overlooking it, stood an octagonal summer-house with an arcaded base and stone steps up to its door. The summer-house, like the rest of the garden, was asleep on its feet.

  Beyond the pond and the summer-house was another path, meandering in idle curves. On the other side of this path was a stretch of wilderness, and then a hedge.

  Of the four sides of the garden, Tom had already observed that three were walled: one by the back of the house itself, another by a very high south wall, built of clunch blocks and brick; and another by a lower wall that might well prove climbable. A hedge, however, is almost always more easily passed than any wall; and Tom had no sooner got into his garden than he was curious to see outside it. Sharp-eyed, he searched the hedge for a way through: he only needed such a little hole for a push and a wriggle. Here was a narrow gap, at last; but, to his surprise, it led into the hedge instead of directly through it. From this entry a passage—about a foot wide and three feet high—had been worn along in the heart of the hedge. Tom crept along it.

  The tunnel came to an end where there was another, bolder gap into the open, this time out on to the far side of the hedge. Tom found himself looking out over a meadow. There were cows in the meadow: some still at their night’s rest; one getting up, hindlegs first; and one already at the day’s work of eating. This last cow stopped grazing to stare at Tom, as though she thought she must still be dreaming. Stalks of grass hung from the sides of her mouth, and a long trickle of saliva descended from her lip and swung slightly in the little morning breeze that was getting up.

  At the far side of the meadow a long, grey goose-neck rose from among the grasses, and Tom could see the bird’s head turn sideways so that an eye could fix itself upon the gap in the hedge and the movement there. As a matter of fact, the look-out was a gander, although Tom did not know it; a moment later, the white necks of his wives rose round him, watching too. Then the gander strained his neck and breast upwards, and stretched his wings out into a splendid double curve—every pinion apart—and clapped them to and fro. First one goose and then another did the same, saluting the new morning.