Tom's Midnight Garden

by Philippa Pearce

  Tom, made uneasily aware of the passage of time, crept back by the way he had come—back into the garden. He began to make himself familiar with it—its paths and alleys and archways, its bushes and trees. He noted some of its landmarks. At a corner of the lawn, a fir-tree towered up above all the other trees of the garden; it was wound about with ivy, through which its boughs stuck out like a child’s arms through the wrappings of a shawl. On the high south wall, half covered by the sporting of a vine, there was a sundial; it was surmounted by a stone sun with stone rays, and its chin was buried in curly stone clouds—looking like his father’s chin covered with shaving lather, Tom thought. To one side of the sundial, under a honeysuckle archway, was a door: Tom might have tried it, but the sight of the sundial, even without the sun upon it yet, had reminded him again of the passing of time. He hurried.

  At the greenhouse, he did no more than look through the glass at the plants inside, and at the water tank, where a gleam came and went—perhaps a goldfish waking. The raised cucumber-frames by the greenhouse were walked round in less than a minute. He passed hastily along beside the aviary, where fan-tail pigeons were beginning to pick their way across the brick floor.

  He criss-crossed the kitchen-garden beyond the asparagus beds: fruit trees and strawberry beds and bean poles and a chicken-wire enclosure where raspberry canes and gooseberry bushes and currant bushes lived sheltered from the attack of birds. Beside the gooseberry wire grew a row of rhubarb. Each clump was covered with the end of an old tub or pot drain-pipe with sacking over the top. Between the loose staves of one of the tub-ends was something white—a piece of paper. It was folded, and addressed in a childish hand—if one could call it an address: ‘To Oberon, King of Fairies.’ Tom certainly did not want to be mixed up with talk of fairies and that kind of thing; and he moved very quickly away from the rhubarb bed.

  He came out upon the lawn again. Here were the flower-beds—the crescent-shaped corner-beds with the hyacinths, among which an early bee was already working. The hyacinths reminded Tom of his Aunt Gwen, but no longer with resentment. She knew nothing—poor thing!—and could be blamed for nothing, after all.

  At the verge of the lawn, Tom stopped abruptly. On the grey-green of the dewed grass were two clearly defined patches of darker green: footprints. Feet had walked on to the lawn and stood there; then they had turned back and walked off again. How long ago? Surely since Tom had entered the garden. ‘I’m sure they weren’t here when I came out. Certain.’

  How long had whoever it was stood there, and why? He or she had faced the line of yew-trees opposite; and that thought made Tom uneasy. When he had passed behind those trees and seen the flick-flick-flick of the house between them, had someone stood on the lawn watching the flick-flick-flick of Tom as he went?

  Tom looked at the house, letting his eye go from window to window. Had someone drawn out of sight at an upper window? No, no: now he was just imagining things.

  Tom’s nerves were on edge, and he actually jumped when he heard a noise from up the garden. It was the sound of a door opening. He took cover at once, and then worked his way towards the sound. Someone had come through the door in the sundial path—a man with a wheelbarrow.

  Tom took a moment to realize that this must be a gardener, and that he was doing nothing more sinister than beginning a day’s work. He was whistling; and now Tom became aware that for some time the garden had been filling with sounds—the sound of birds, the sound of leaves moving in morning winds, and all the minute living, breathing sounds of trees and bushes and plants and insects. The sun’s rays gleamed over all the garden, warming it to life and sucking up the drenching dew; the sundial’s iron finger threw a shadow at last, and told the time. Day was beginning, and Tom was afraid of being caught in a daytime not his own. Once again he crossed the lawn, this time with intent to get back into the house and upstairs to bed—if, indeed, his own room and bed were still there. He could see that the hall of the house was furnished with all the objects he had seen last night: the morning sunshine lit them clearly. They looked forbiddingly real.

  Fear made him hurry now; yet, even so, he paused on the threshold of the house and turned back to look at the footprints on the grass: they were still plainly visible, although the warmth of the rising sun was beginning to blur their edges. (It did not strike him as odd that his own footsteps, which had crossed the lawn again and again, had left no similar trace.)

  He went inside and shut the garden door behind him and bolted it. He had shut himself into absolute darkness; but he could still hear the ticking of the grandfather clock, and that gave him his bearings. He felt for a bracket to guide himself forward; unaccountably, he missed finding any bracket. He made for where the barometer should be; he found only a blank wall. Then he realized there was an emptiness all around him: the furniture had gone. Only the clock was left, but the clock was always there, time in, time out. It had been in the hall with the furniture and rugs and pictures; and now it was here in the bare hall of the daytime.

  If the hall were as usual, then everything was as usual, and Tom was safely back in his own time, and his bed would be waiting for him upstairs. Yet now a lesser fear came to him, with a pang of conscience. The ticking of the grandfather clock reminded him. There was no thirteenth hour marked on the clock face; he had not that excuse for being out of bed. Nor had he been right in thinking this little expedition would take only a few minutes, anyway. He dared not think how much time he had spent in the garden: he had gone there before dawn; he had come away when the sun was up.

  He went back upstairs into the flat and straight into the kitchen to consult the clock there. It was an ugly little clock, but it always kept perfect time.

  He found the kitchen matches, and struck one, shielding both the sound of the striking and the flame—he had thought it wiser not to click on the electric light, lest even that might waken his uncle and aunt. He held the lighted match to the clock-face: the fingers pointed to only a few minutes past midnight.

  Still only a few minutes past midnight!

  Tom stared so long that the match burnt down, and he had to drop it. He was bewildered; but one thing he knew now: that he had not broken his promise to his uncle.

  Tom tiptoed back to bed. He was right to make little noise, for his uncle was still only upon the edge of sleep. Alan Kitson had just finished a one-sided conversation begun a few minutes earlier. ‘If that grandfather clock strikes one in anything like the way it’s just struck twelve—on and on and on—then I’ll go upstairs and knock Mrs Bartholomew up and complain. She needn’t think I’m frightened of her.’

  VI

  Through a Door

  Every night now Tom slipped downstairs to the garden. At first he used to be afraid that it might not be there. Once, with his hand already upon the garden door to open it, he had turned back, sick with grief at the very thought of absence. He had not dared, then, to look; but, later the same night, he had forced himself to go again and open that door: there the garden was. It had not failed him.

  He saw the garden at many times of its day, and at different seasons—its favourite season was summer, with perfect weather. In earliest summer hyacinths were still out in the crescent beds on the lawn, and wallflowers in the round ones. Then the hyacinths bowed and died; and the wallflowers were uprooted, and stocks and asters bloomed in their stead. There was a clipped box bush by the greenhouse, with a cavity like a great mouth cut into the side of it: this was stacked full of pots of geraniums in flower. Along the sundial path, heavy red poppies came out, and roses; and, in summer dusk, the evening primroses glimmered like little moons. In the latest summer the pears on the wall were muffled in muslin bags for safe ripening.

  Tom was not a gardener, however; his first interest in a garden, as Peter’s would have been, was tree-climbing. He always remembered his first tree in this garden—one of the yews round the lawn. He had never climbed a yew before, and was inclined to think ever afterwards that yews were best.

 
; The first branches grew conveniently low, and the main trunk had bosses and crevices. With the toes of his left foot fitted into one of these last, Tom curved his hands round the branch over his head. Then he gave a push, a spring and a strong haul on the arms: his legs and feet were dangling free, and the branch was under his chest, and then under his middle. He drew himself still farther forward, at the same time twisting himself expertly: now he was sitting on the bough, a man’s height above ground.

  The rest of the ascent was easy but interesting: sometimes among the spreading, outermost branches; sometimes working close to the main trunk. Tom loved the dry feel of the bark on the main trunk. In places the bark had peeled away, and then a deep pink showed beneath, as though the tree were skin and flesh beneath its brown.

  Up he went—up and up, and burst at last from the dim interior into an openness of blue and fiery gold. The sun was the gold, in a blue sky. All round him was a spreading, tufted surface of evergreen. He was on a level with all the yew-tree tops round the lawn; nearly on a level with the top of the tall south wall.

  Tom was on a level, too, with the upper windows of the house, just across the lawn from him. His attention was caught by a movement inside one of the rooms: it came, he saw, from the same maid he had once seen in the hall. She was dusting a bedroom, and came now to the window to raise the sash and shake her duster outside. She looked casually across to the yew-trees as she did so, and Tom tried waving to her. It was like waving to the He in blind-man’s-buff.

  The maid went back into the depths of the room, to her dusting. She left the window open behind her, and Tom could now see more. There was someone else in the room besides the maid—someone who stood against the far wall, facing the window. The maid evidently spoke to her companion occasionally as she worked, for Tom could hear the faint coming and going of voices. He could not see the other figure at all clearly, except that it was motionless, and there was the whiteness and shape of a face that was always turned in his direction. That steadfastness of direction embarrassed Tom. Very gradually he began to draw his head downwards, and then suddenly ducked it below tree-level altogether.

  Tom saw more people later, in the garden itself. He stalked them warily, and yet—remembering his invisibility to the house-maid—with a certain confidence too.

  He was pretty sure that the garden was used more often than he knew. He often had the feeling of people having just gone—and an uncomfortable feeling, out of which he tried to reason himself, again and again, of someone who had not gone: someone who, unobserved, observed him. It was a relief really to see people, even when they ignored his presence: the maid, the gardener, and a severe-looking woman in a long dress of rustling purple silk, face to face with whom Tom once came unexpectedly, on a corner. She cut him dead.

  Visibility … invisibility … If he were invisible to the people of the garden, he was not completely so at least to some of the other creatures. How truly they saw him he could not say; but birds cocked their heads at him, and flew away when he approached.

  And had he any bodily weight in this garden, or had he not? At first, Tom thought not. When he climbed the yew-tree he had been startled to feel that no bough swung beneath him, and not a twig broke. Later—and this was a great disappointment to him—he found that he could not, by the ordinary grasping and pushing of his hand, open any of the doors in the garden, to go through them. He could not push open the door of the greenhouse or of the little heating-house behind it, or the door in the south wall by the sundial.

  The doors shut against Tom were a check upon his curiosity, until he saw a simple way out: he would get through the doorways that interested him by following at the heels of the gardener. He regularly visited the greenhouse, the heating-house, and used the south wall door.

  Tom concentrated upon getting through the south wall door. That entry promised to be the easiest, because the gardener went through so often, with his tools. There must be a tool-shed somewhere through there.

  The gardener usually went through so quickly and shut the door so smartly behind him, that there was not time for anyone else to slip through as well. However, he would be slower with a wheelbarrow, Tom judged; and he waited patiently for that opportunity. Yet even then the man somehow only made a long arm to open the door ahead of the wheelbarrow, wheeled it very swiftly through, caught the door-edge with the toe of his boot as he passed and slammed the door in Tom’s face.

  Tom glared at the door that once more was his barrier. Once more, without hope, he raised his hand to the latch and pressed it. As usual, he could not move it: his fingers seemed to have no substance. Then, in anger, he pressed with all imaginable might: he knitted his brows, and brought all his will to bear upon the latch, until he felt that something had to happen. It did: his fingers began to go through the latch, as though the latch, and not his fingers, now, were without substance. His fingers went through the ironwork of the latch altogether, and his hand fell back into place by his side.

  Tom stared down at that ever-memorable right hand. He felt it tenderly with his left, to see if it were bruised or broken: it was quite unhurt—quite as before. Then he looked at the latch: it looked as real as any latch he had ever seen anywhere.

  Then the idea came to Tom that the door might be no more solid than the latch, if he really tried it.

  Deliberately he set his side against the door, shoulder, hip and heel, and pressed. At first, nothing gave, either of himself or the door. Yet he continued the pressure, with still greater force and greater determination; and gradually he became aware of a strange sensation, that at first he thought was a numbness all down his side—but no, it was not that.

  ‘I’m going through,’ Tom gasped, and was seized with alarm and delight.

  On the other side of the wall, the gardener had emptied his barrow-load of weeds and was sitting on the handle of his barrow, in front of a potting-shed, eating his midday dinner. If he had been able to see Tom at all he would have seen a most curious sight: a very thin slice of boy, from shoulder to foot, coming through a perfectly solid wooden door. At first the body came through evenly from top to bottom; then, the upper part seemed to stop, and the bottom part came through in its entirety, legs first. Then one arm came through, then another. Finally, everything was through except the head.

  The truth was that Tom was now a little lacking courage. The passing through the door of so much of his body had not been without enormous effort and peculiar, if indescribable, sensations. ‘I’m just resting a minute,’ said Tom’s head, on the garden side of the door; yet he knew that he was really delaying because he was nervous. His stomach, for instance, had felt most uncomfortable as it passed through the door; what would the experience be like for his head—his eyes, his ears?

  On the other hand—and the new idea was even worse than the old—supposing that, like a locomotive-engine losing steam-pressure, he lost his present force of body and will-power in this delay? Then, he would be unable to move either forwards or backwards. He would be caught here by the neck, perhaps for ever. And just supposing someone came along, on the far side of the wall, who by some evil chance could see him—supposing a whole company came: they would see an entirely defenceless stern sticking out—an invitation to ridicule and attack.

  With a convulsive effort, eyes closed, lips sealed, Tom dragged his head through the door, and stood, dizzy, dazed, but whole, on the far side of it.

  When his vision cleared, he saw that he was standing directly in front of the potting-shed and the gardener. Tom had never been front to front with the gardener before: he was a large-framed young man, with a weather-reddened face, and eyes the colour of the sky itself—they now looked straight through Tom and far away. Into his mouth he was putting the last fragments of a thick bacon-and-bread sandwich. He finished the sandwich, closed his eyes and spoke aloud: ‘For all good things I thank the Lord; and may He keep me from all the works of the Devil that he hurt me not.’

  He spoke with a country voice, clipping short hi
s t’s and widening his vowels, so that Tom had to listen attentively to understand him.

  The gardener opened his eyes again, and, reaching behind him, brought out another sandwich. Tom wondered, in some surprise, whether he said grace after every sandwich. Perhaps he never knew how many he was going to eat.

  The gardener went on eating, and Tom turned away to look around him. He was in an orchard, that also served for the keeping of hens, the pegging out of washing and the kindling of a bonfire. Beyond the orchard were meadows and trees, from among which rose the roofs of what must be a village.

  While he looked, Tom was also keeping a sharp eye upon the gardener. When the man had really finished his meal he grasped the handles of his wheelbarrow, to return to his work in the garden. In a moment, Tom was beside him. He had not at all enjoyed the experience of going through a shut door, and he did not now intend to have to repeat it. This time there was an easy way through: he got nimbly up into the empty barrow and was wheeled back into the garden in comfort.

  It was a long time before Tom literally forced his way through a door again. Anyway, he had seen the orchard, and that was enough in that direction; other doors could wait. Meanwhile, he climbed the low wall at the bottom of the garden and explored the wood beyond. On the third side of the garden he wormed his way through the hedge again and crossed the meadow. The only surprise there was the boundary: a river, clear, gentle-flowing, shallow, and green with reeds and water-plants.