Tom's Midnight Garden

by Philippa Pearce

  ‘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.

  IX

  Hatty

  Tom 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.’

  X

  Games and Tales

  Tom 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 is
n’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.

  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 eag
erness 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.