Tom's Midnight Garden (12 page)

For a moment, Tom did not understand her; then he jumped to his feet and shouted: ‘I’m not a ghost!’

‘Don’t be silly, Tom,’ Hatty said. ‘You forget that I saw you go right through the orchard door when it was shut.’

‘That proves what I say!’ said Tom. ‘I’m not a ghost, but the orchard door is, and that was why I could go through it. The door’s a ghost, and the garden’s a ghost; and so are you, too!’

‘Indeed I’m not; you are!’

They were glaring at each other now; Hatty was trembling. ‘You’re a silly little boy!’ she said (and Tom thought resentfully that she seemed to have been growing up a good deal too much recently). ‘And you make a silly little ghost! Why do you think you wear those clothes of yours? None of my cousins ever played in the garden in clothes like that. Such outdoor clothes can’t belong to nowadays,
I
know! Such clothes!’

‘They’re my pyjamas,’ said Tom, indignantly, ‘my best visiting pyjamas! I sleep in them. And this is my bedroom slipper.’ His second slipper had been left, as usual, to wedge the flat-door upstairs.

‘And you go about so, in the daytime, always in your night-clothes!’ Hatty said scornfully. ‘And it’s the fashion nowadays, is it, to wear only one slipper? Really, you are silly to give such excuses! You wear strange clothes that no one wears nowadays, because you’re a ghost. Why, I’m the only person in the garden who sees you! I can see a ghost.’

Hatty would never believe the real explanation of his clothes, and Tom chose what he thought was a shorter counter-argument: ‘Do you know I could put my hand through you—now—just as if you weren’t there?’

Hatty laughed.

‘I could—I could!’ shouted Tom.

She pointed at him: ‘You’re a ghost!’

In a passion, Tom hit her a blow upon the outstretched wrist. There was great force of will as well as of muscle behind the blow, and his hand went right through—not quite as through thin air, for Tom felt a something, and Hatty snatched back her wrist and nursed it in her other hand. She looked as if she might cry, but that could not have been for any pain, for the sensation had not been strong enough. In a wild defence of herself, Hatty still goaded him: ‘Your hand didn’t go through my wrist; my wrist went through your hand! You’re a ghost, with a cruel, ghostly hand!’

‘Do you hear me?’ Tom shouted. ‘You’re a ghost, and I’ve proved it! You’re dead and gone and a ghost!’

There was a quietness, then, in which could be heard a cuckoo’s stuttering cry from the wood beyond the garden; and then the sound of Hatty’s beginning softly to weep. ‘I’m not dead—oh, please, Tom, I’m not dead!’ Now that the shouting had stopped, Tom was not sure of the truth, after all, but only sure that Hatty was crying as he had never seen her cry since she had been a very little girl, wearing mourning-black and weeping her way along the sundial path—weeping for death so early.

He put his arm round her: ‘All right, then, Hatty! You’re not a ghost—I take it all back—all of it. Only don’t cry!’

He calmed her; and she consented at last to dry her tears and go back to plaiting the branches, only sniffing occasionally. Tom did not reopen a subject that upset her so deeply, although he felt that he owed it to himself to say, some time later, ‘Mind you, I’m not a ghost either!’ This, by her silence, Hatty seemed to allow.

A
nd yet, in spite of his assurance to Hatty, Tom continued secretly to consider the possibility of her being a ghost, for two reasons: firstly, that there seemed no other possibility; and secondly—and Tom ought to have seen that this was the worst kind of reason—that if Hatty weren’t a ghost, then perhaps that meant he was. Tom shied away from that idea.

On the afternoon of the quarrel he had been impressed —although he had been careful to hide this from Hatty—by her method of argument. She had a girl’s quick eye for clothes, and she had used it, on this occasion, against him. Tom wished that he were able to do the same kind of thing; but he found that he remembered only vaguely the appearance of the people of the garden. He had, it was true, a strong general impression that they were not dressed like himself and his aunt and uncle; but ‘old-fashioned’ was the nearest that he could get to the difference. Both Susan the maid and Hatty’s aunt, for instance, had worn skirts nearly to the ground.

Naturally their clothes would be old-fashioned, if Hatty were a ghost. Yet to prove her that, he must be able to put an exact date to the clothes in the garden, and so to Hatty herself.

He thought he knew where he could find information. He had often noticed on his aunt’s kitchen shelf, together with Mrs Beeton’s and all the other cookery books, a volume invitingly called
Enquire Within Upon Everything
. Now, when his aunt was out shopping, he slipped out of bed and borrowed it.

He looked in the Index for C
LOTHING
—Styles of Clothing in the Past. There was nothing under S
TYLES
, or under P
AST
. Under C
LOTHES
there were subheadings that Tom would certainly have found interesting at any other time—Loose Warmer than Tight, and Rendering Fireproof; but there was nothing about the changing fashions of history. He felt dispirited, as though he had been invited to call, and promised a feast, and then, when he had knocked at the door, found no one
Within
.

Before he shut the book, however, Tom came by chance across something that proved useful in another way. On a page headed kindly ‘The Good is Oft Interred with their Bones’, he found a list of the Monarchs of England from the Norman Conquest to the Present. He remembered that Hatty had once mentioned a monarch of England. They had been looking at Abel’s little pile of books in the heating-house; and Hatty had pointed out that the topmost book was a Bible, because Abel believed in the Bible being above all, ‘like the Queen ruling over all England’. Hatty, then, lived when a Queen, not a King, ruled in England. Tom consulted his list of Monarchs: there had been very few Queens in the past. The possibilities suddenly narrowed: Hatty couldn’t, for instance, have lived in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth centuries at all, because there had only been Kings then, according to
Enquire Within
. For the same reason, she could not have lived in most of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. That left the other parts of those centuries, and most of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Tom returned
Enquire Within
, and, on the next occasion of his being left alone in the flat, prowled round looking for any other book of useful information. In his uncle’s and aunt’s bedroom he had a find: a complete set of volumes of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in their own special glass-fronted bookcase, kept to hand on Uncle Alan’s side of the bed.

Tom looked up
CLOTHING
, and that asked him to ‘See
COSTUME
’, which he did. There were many pages in double columns of small print, whose appearance somehow discouraged him. He preferred to look at the pictures, although none of them really corresponded with what was worn by the people of his garden.

He noticed an oddity in the earlier illustrations. The men wore various kinds of leg coverings, but never trousers: the first pair of trousers to be represented was worn by a French Man of Fashion in the Early Victorian Period. Tom did at least know that the men and boys in his garden had all worn trousers—with the exception of Edgar, who sometimes wore a kind of breeches with woollen stockings.

Hot on the scent now, Tom turned to the volume
TON
to
VES
of the
Encyclopaedia
, and looked up TROUSERS. There were no illustrations, but the written account was short. In order to clear up any misunderstanding, it began by defining trousers: ‘the article of dress worn by men, covering each leg separately and reaching from the waist to the foot’. Well, Tom agreed to that, and read carefully on. The wearing of trousers, it seemed, had been introduced in the early nineteenth century; the Duke of Wellington had caused a sensation with his. The article ended: ‘Strong opposition was taken against them by the clergy and at the universities. (See
COSTUME
.)’

Tom now felt he had enough information to arrange into an argument. ‘Hatty lived when men wore trousers, so she can’t have lived earlier than the nineteenth century, when trousers came into fashion. Very well.’ He remembered
Enquire Within
: ‘And there was a Queen ruling in England in the nineteenth century: Queen Victoria 1837 to 1901. She must be Hatty’s queen. And then there’s the French Man of Fashion in trousers: he belonged to the Early Victorian Period. That’s where Hatty belongs. That Period is over a hundred years ago, so, if Hatty were a girl then, she must be dead by now, and all I can have seen in the garden is a ghost.’

The proof seemed final to Tom; but he double-checked it with a question in just the way that would, he thought, have delighted his uncle. What about the long skirts worn by the women of the garden? When had
they
been in fashion?

By now Aunt Gwen was back from her shopping and Tom was innocently back in bed. He tried her with his question; she answered promptly: ‘Why, Tom, long skirts were always the fashion, until not so long ago. Up to the First World War, certainly.’

‘Would women have been wearing long skirts at, say, the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign?’

‘Oh, yes; all during Victoria’s reign, and after,’ said his aunt. ‘Why, there must be many people alive today who remember long skirts well!’

Tom, however, was not at all interested in how recently such skirts had been the fashion; he was intent upon a remote Past, and in proving that Hatty had belonged to it, and was now a ghost—a little Early Victorian ghost. Well, all his information surely pointed that way. The question having been settled to his satisfaction, he put it out of his mind.

I
n following the course of Tom’s historical researches and his reasoning, we have gone a little ahead upon the order of events—as Tom perceived them—in the garden. The tree-house in which he and Hatty quarrelled was not built immediately after the episodes of the geese upon the lawn and the little girl in mourning. Indeed, on his next visit to the garden after those happenings, Tom thought for a time that he had lost Hatty for good. The garden appeared absolutely deserted.

He called, and searched through all the usual hiding-places. He dashed round and round the trunk of the fir-tree, imagining he heard her slippers moving nimbly on the dry earth the other side, always evading him. But if Hatty had hidden, she had hidden better than ever before, and made the garden seem a green emptiness.

He saw over the south wall a thread of smoke that mounted vertically into the soft, still summer air, and it occurred to him that Abel was perhaps tending his bonfire. He stopped dead by the orchard door, wondering whether he should thrust himself through it again. If Abel were the other side he might provide some clue to Hatty’s whereabouts.

Suddenly the orchard door opened and Hatty came through. At once all Tom’s anxiety turned to annoyance, especially as Hatty looked far from anxious—excited, rather; even pleased. Her face was flushed, and there was a bonfire smut on one cheek; she held something in her pinafore pocket.

‘Why didn’t you answer?’ Tom demanded. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I called and called and called.’

‘I was helping Abel with his bonfire.’

‘You could just have come and opened the orchard door and let me through. I like bonfires, too.’

‘You wouldn’t have liked this bonfire—you wouldn’t have liked what we were burning on it.’ She looked at him defiantly.

‘Well, what were you burning on it?’

Now she lost courage, and cast her eyes down; but finally said: ‘The bow and arrows. Oh, Tom, it was Abel who wanted to have them burnt!’

Tom was silent, guessing why Abel had wished it: he had always said that the bow might bring trouble to Hatty; and, indeed, it had done.

Hatty went on, ‘And, as well as that, he wanted me to promise not to borrow any more knives from the kitchen, because they’re so sharp and might cut and hurt me. And if I promised to let him burn the bow and arrows and if I promised not to use the kitchen-knives again, he said he’d give me a little knife all of my own.’