Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce

was flushed; she spoke fast and eagerly: ‘We’ll go about and see the sights and go on excursions—we’ll do so much now you’re out of quarantine and staying on. You needn’t be cooped up dully indoors any longer, Tom.’
    Tom said, ‘Thank you’; but without enthusiasm. He would have much preferred to be left to dullness indoors, as he used to be. He lived his real and interesting life at night-time, when he went into the garden; in the daytime, he wanted only peace—to think back and to think forwards, always to the garden; to write of the garden to Peter. He did not want to sleep, but, all the same, the daytime in the flat was like a period of sleep to him. He needed its rest.
    Aunt Gwen arranged several expeditions to the shops and to the museum in Castleford and the cinema. Tom bore them patiently. He liked the cinema best, because he was in the dark, and so he could sit with his eyes shut and think his own thoughts.
    Towards the end of Tom’s lengthened stay, the weather changed for the worse. Still Aunt Gwen obstinately insisted on treats and trips, now with waterproofs and umbrella. After a visit to the cinema, she and Tom had been obliged to wait for some time for the bus, and Tom had stood in a puddle. It was his aunt who noticed his position, and that only as the bus came: ‘Tom, you’ve been standing in a puddle all this time—quite a deep puddle!’ He was surprised: his head had been in the clouds—in the white clouds that pile above an eternally summer garden—and he had not been noticing his feet at all. Now that he thought of them, they certainly felt very damp and cold.
    ‘I hope you don’t catch cold,’ his aunt said anxiously.
    In answer to this, Tom sneezed.
    His aunt rushed him home to a hot drink and a hot bath and bed; but a cold, once it has its fingers on its victim, will seldom loosen its grip before the due time. So Tom had a severe cold, that kept him in bed for several days, and indoors for many more. His convalescence was not hurried. Gwen Kitson wrote happily to her sister that Tom would not be fit to travel for some time yet; and Tom wrote to Peter, ‘It’s a wonderful piece of luck—the next best thing to measles.’
    Every night he was able to steal downstairs as usual, into the garden; and there the feverishness of his chill always left him, as though the very greenness of trees and plants and grass cooled his blood. He played with Hatty.
    In the daytime he lay back among his pillows, deliberately languid. Uncle Alan, who was touched by the idea of a sick child, offered to teach him chess; but Tom said he did not feel clear-headed enough. He did not want to talk; and he allowed his aunt to see that he was certainly not up to being read to from schoolgirl adventures.
    At the beginning of Tom’s illness, his head had really felt a little light; and his eyelids gummed themselves up easily. He did not mind keeping them closed: then, in his imagination, he could look into his garden and see, in fancy, what Hatty might be doing there.
    His aunt would tiptoe into his bedroom and look at him doubtfully. She would test whether he were awake by a whispering of his name. The voice recalled him, without his understanding at once to what: his eyelids opened on to his own bedroom, but his eyes printed off the shadowy figure of Hatty against the barred window and the cupboard and between himself and the figure of his aunt at the foot of the bed.
    Hatty’s image haunted the room for Tom, at this time; and so it was, perhaps, that he began, at first idly, then seriously, to consider whether she herself were not, in some unusual way, a ghost. There was no one who knew her ghost story and could tell it to Tom, so he began trying to make it up for himself: Hatty had lived here, long, long ago—in this very house, with the garden he knew of; here she had lived, here died …
    From below sounded the striking of Mrs Bartholomew’s grandfather clock, that knew secrets but would not tell