Tom's Midnight Garden Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 grandfather clock, and the sound of someone shuffling down the stairs.
    ‘It’s old Ma Bartholomew,’