He needed no light in his bedroom. He felt for the cupboard door and opened it, and then felt among the cracks of the floorboards inside. He had to fetch his penknife from his trouser pocket before he could lever the right one up. He felt in the space underneath and touched two largish objects wrapped in paper.
His hands were at the paper wrappings when he heard a door open—the door of the other bedroom in the flat. He realized that, in his excitement, he must have been making more noise than he should have done. They had heard him; they were coming.
He closed the cupboard door as far as he could, without clicking it, and slid swiftly into bed. He was only just in time; a second later his aunt opened his bedroom door and switched on the light. He covered his creaking of the bed-springs, which she must have heard, by turning noisily in bed, with his eyes still shut, and moaning, as if in a bad dream. His aunt came over to him, felt his forehead to make sure he had no fever, kissed him and went out again. She left his bedroom door ajar behind her; Tom heard her go into her own room, but he did not hear her close the door of that either. She had left them both open in order to be able to listen for him.
Tom lay wide-eyed in bed, quivering with impatience, knowing that the slightest sound might bring his aunt back. He would have to wait until she was asleep again, and how long that might be he could not know.
In the end, it was Tom who slept first—slept and dreamt of skating to the world’s end and the end of Time.
XXII
The Forgotten Promise
When Tom woke, on Thursday morning, his first thought was that he had missed his precious chance of going back to the garden last night; his second thought was for the hiding-place under the floorboards.
Almost he thought that he must have dreamt of the discovery, but when he opened the cupboard door there was the raised floorboard with his penknife beside it. He saw the two brown-paper packages in the hole, drew them out and unwrapped them: they were a pair of skates, with boots still screwed and strapped to them.
Then he saw a slip of paper left behind in the floor-cavity. He brought it out and read what was written on it:
‘To whomever may find this. These skates are the property of Harriet Melbourne but she leaves them in this place in fulfilment of a promise she once made to a little boy.’
The note was signed, and dated June 20. The year was there too, but so smudged by the death of some insect that Tom could only read the first two numbers: a one and an eight.
Tom spent a good deal of that day gloating over Hatty’s skates—his skates. They were of an older fashion than Tom knew, and belonged to an older fashion of skating, too. They were Fen Runners, whose blades end in a long, curved prow to cut through the rougher surfaces of outdoor ice, as the skater travels mile after mile over the great frozen distances that the Fens afford.
He tended the skates as best he could. He said nothing to his uncle or aunt; but he looked for emery paper, and at last found some in his uncle’s tool box, and rubbed the rust off the skate-blades. The blades ought to have been re-ground, perhaps, but that was more than Tom could manage. He borrowed a bottle of olive oil from his aunt’s larder, and oiled the wooden foot-stock and the parched leather of the straps and the boots. He tried on the boots: they were almost a perfect fit—perhaps a little on the large size, but that was all to the good. He could wear two pairs of socks inside them.
While Tom was oiling the boots, the thing he had so long been seeking for came to him: the solution—rounded and perfect—of his problem of Time.
His aunt was out shopping, so that Tom was working with the olive oil quite openly on the kitchen-table. The kitchen clock was facing him—staring at him intently; and suddenly Tom thought of that night—many nights ago now—when he had returned its gaze, at first with disbelief, and then with an immense wonder. The clock had told him then that, whereas he took several minutes to get downstairs to the garden door and then up again, he took no time at all to wander all round the garden. However long a time he spent in the garden, the kitchen clock measured none of it. He spent time there, without spending a fraction of a second of ordinary time. That was perhaps what the grandfather clock had meant by striking a thirteenth hour: the hours after the twelfth do not exist in ordinary Time; they are not bound by the laws of ordinary Time; they are not over in sixty ordinary minutes; they are endless.
Tom rubbed the oil along the straps, and his reasoning seemed smooth and right: he could spend an endless time in the garden, if he liked. He could, after all, have both things—the garden and his family—because he could stay for ever in the garden, and yet for ever his family would be expecting him next Saturday afternoon. Time here would stand still at Thursday, and wait for him; it would only start again if he left the garden and came back to the flat.
‘I could stay in the garden for ever,’ Tom told the kitchen clock, and laughed for joy; and then shivered a little, because ‘for ever’ sounded long and lonely. ‘But, anyway,’ he reasoned, ‘tonight I could try it out: I could stay just a few days or a few weeks or a year perhaps; but if I get tired of it’—he really meant, if he grew home-sick—‘well, then, I can always come back. And then there is another chance on Friday night: I can stay longer then—only come back after I’ve seen everything in the garden, and done everything.’
Tom thought of all the delights of the garden while he tended his skates. By the time the work was done, he was settled in his mind, and happy. He was ready for the night.
Only one thing went badly amiss that Thursday. Just as he was getting into bed, he remembered: ‘I never wrote to Peter yesterday!’
‘Never mind,’ said his aunt, tucking him up.
‘But I promised to.’
‘It’s bad to break a promise, but I’m sure you didn’t mean to. Luckily, it won’t matter very much to Peter. Why, he’ll be seeing you the day after tomorrow.’
Tom knew that it did matter. The broken promise was bad enough; but he knew, as well, that Peter would be feeling desperate without his letter. Peter needed all that Tom could write to him, to feed his imaginings—to feed his dreams. ‘Write to me more about the garden and Hatty,’ he had begged Tom. ‘Tell me what you did … Be sure to tell me what you’re going to do.’
‘Sorry, Pete,’ Tom murmured into his pillow, and felt wretched. He hoped that Peter had by now got over the bitterness of this betrayal. Peter went to bed earlier than Tom, so that probably he had already ended his day of disappointment with sleep.
In this, Tom was wrong: Peter was still awake, grieving. He had had no letter from Tom today, and he did not know why—Tom did not lightly forget promises. He did not know what Tom had been doing last night and the night before; he did not know what secrets Tom might now be master of; he did not know what wonderful things Tom might be doing this very night.
Peter stared and stared across the half-darkness of his bedroom, until his eyes blurred with tears and then cleared again. He longed, more than ever he had done before, to be with Tom—to know what he was doing. He fell asleep at last with that longing in his mind; and the last view that his eyes closed upon was Tom’s postcard view of Ely, on the bedroom mantelpiece opposite.
Tom fell asleep too; but woke promptly when the time came. He put on his two pairs of socks. This time he left both of his bedroom slippers to wedge open the front door of the flat; carrying the skates, he went downstairs. Of course, it was quite possible that the season outside was no longer winter, after all—and yet he felt sure that it was. When he opened the door, he found that he was right. A deep frost lay everywhere, binding fast the trees and all the plants of the garden so that there seemed not the slightest movement or life. The garden might have been sculptured in stone. Such a frost there was.
In the deep silence, Tom heard his name whispered hesitantly from behind him. He turned. Hatty was standing in the hall, dressed in thick, warm clothes, with a fur cap on her head and with a fur muff, in which her hands were concealed.
‘I wasn’t sure if it
were you, Tom, or a trick of the frost-light.’
‘Of course it’s me,’ said Tom, and really wondered whether Hatty’s eyesight were failing.
‘I was hoping you might turn up—you and no one else. Look!’ Hatty withdrew one hand from her muff, and Tom saw that, tucked inside it, was her pair of skates. In reply, he held up his own. Hatty nodded in satisfaction; but she did not seem struck by any similarity of appearance. She did not know what Tom knew.
‘James will be down in a minute,’ said Hatty. ‘It’s his turn to go to market in Castleford, and I’m going with him. He doesn’t know that I mean to skate this afternoon, and where to. I mean to skate right down to Ely.’
‘Can you?’ asked Tom, awed.
Hatty misunderstood him. ‘Well, of course, I shouldn’t. It really isn’t quite ladylike, so I mustn’t tell anyone of it; and yet it would be even more improper to go alone …’
‘But I meant, is the river really frozen over?’
‘Frozen so hard, Tom—why, Abel’s grandfather says this is one of the hardest, longest frosts he’s ever known. The river’s frozen from above here to below Castleford and below Ely. The river here is too near the source for the ice to be safe, but below Castleford and all through the Fens—Oh, Tom, do come with me!’
Tom was excited, and yet aghast. ‘Now? Without going into the garden at all? Without even going through it?’
‘The garden will always be there,’ Hatty coaxed him; ‘but this great frost—’
She stopped speaking suddenly and turned to face the stairs, down which someone was now coming. Tom made up his mind quickly, and advanced to stand beside Hatty: he would leave the garden for the time being, and go with her.
The newcomer was James, and he, too, was dressed for going out. He greeted Hatty, and took his market bag and two thick travelling rugs off one of the hall brackets. Then all three of them went out by the front door—the front door of the Melbournes’ house, through which Tom had never before gone.
Outside in the drive, a pony and trap were waiting, with Abel at the pony’s head. Abel’s expression, at the sight of Tom, clearly said, ‘Never thought to see you again!’ All the old horror had vanished from his look.
They climbed into the trap, and the rugs were wrapped round James and Hatty. Abel took the opportunity to give Tom a private, friendly wink. Then James flopped the reins along the pony’s back, and they started off: down the Melbournes’ drive, up a lane with an orchard on one side and a meadow on the other, turn right at a whitewashed cottage, then five miles or more of a brisk, ringing trot on ice-bound roads between ice-bound fields and meadows. To the east of them lay the low hills that look like sleeping giants in that flat countryside; to the west of them, unseen, wound the river, taking the same direction as the high road, towards Castleford.
Tom had been this way before with his uncle and aunt, but the view then had always been shut out by houses; and he had always gone by bus or car. Indeed, never in all his life had he travelled behind a horse. Now he watched in fascination the muscular movement of the pony’s foreshortened back and its hindquarters, almost under his feet; he felt the harsh springiness on the untyred wheels as they bowled along.
They reached Castleford in a market-day throng. James put up the pony and trap at the University Arms (an odd name for the inn, since Castleford has no University); many of the farmers, millers and other businessmen from the country parts seemed to be doing the same. Then James, market-bag in hand, prepared to go his way. ‘Do you want a lift back later, Hatty?’
‘Thank you, Cousin James,’ she said; ‘but I don’t quite know when I shall be ready to return.’
‘There’s always the train,’ he said; and so they parted.
In the streets of Castleford many people were carrying skates. Some were making for the river where it passes beneath the bridges of Castleford, between sloping lawns of grass. The ice here was already good; but the distances to be skated could not be great. Hatty was after something better. She took some of the narrower back-streets, darted—with Tom after her—down a certain Gas Lane, and so brought him at last to the river where it begins to leave Castleford, broadening and deepening as it goes. Here it prepares to enter the Fenland, where many other waterways—lodes and cuts and drains, with a man-made directness, rivers with ancient meanderings—will, in their own time, join it. The stream that flowed narrowly, across the meadow from Hatty’s garden, becomes already, before Ely, the Great Ouse; below Ely, the greatness of the Ouse swallows up whole rivers, like the Lark and the Wissey; and so it goes on, to be swallowed up itself in the greatness of the sea. All these and other Fenland waters, at the time of Tom’s visit, were in the grip of a memorable frost.
XXIII
Skating
That winter the frost had begun at the end of December and went on—with a milder spell for a week in January—to the beginning of March. It was of the greatest severity. Even running waters froze at last. Ice stopped the wheels of the upriver water-mills, and blocked the way for the barges that, in those days, plied from King’s Lynn as far upstream as the hithes of Castleford.
The frost was over all England. On some waters oxen were roasted whole, as though that proved what a fine frost this was, and what ice was best used for. On the Cherwell, at Oxford, a coach with six horses was driven down the middle of the frozen river, to the great satisfaction of all concerned. But the people of Castleford and the Fens knew the truest and greatest and best use of ice: they skated.
There had been skating on the river for several weeks when Tom and Hatty came down to it; and it seemed to them as if there must be more people skating than could possibly be doing market-day business in the town.
Not everyone skated well or fast: there were some learners, and a policeman who moved with the dignified pace of a navy-blue swan. There was also the newer fashion of skating—figure-skating: Hatty pointed it out to Tom. In one place an orange had been set centrally upon the ice, and four top-hatted, dignified gentlemen were describing a harmony of figures to it—from it—round it. Suddenly a town-urchin, on rusty Fen runners, partly strapped, partly tied with string to his boots, dashed in, snatched up the orange and dashed away again with his teeth already in it. The swaying, shifting crowd of skaters closed up behind him, and the figure-skating gentlemen stopped skating, and were extremely annoyed.
Like Tom, Hatty laughed aloud at the impudence of the theft; but all the time she was looking round her sharply and a little nervously. Among all the townspeople and countrypeople, someone might recognize her, and pass comment on her being there alone. However, Hatty was fortunate: no one seemed to notice her at all.
The skates were on, and now Hatty and Tom were ready for the ice: two skaters on one pair of skates, which seemed to Tom both the eeriest and the most natural thing in the world. A new skill and power came into him, as though these skates knew their work better than the skater: he could skate as well as Hatty, because he had her skates. The only difference between them was that his blades left no cut or bruise upon the surface of the ice in travelling over it.
They did not skate with linked hands, as many skating partners did, for fear of the odd appearance being noticed; but, once they had left behind the thick crowds of sociable skaters just below the town, they skated abreast, keeping time together, stroke for stroke. There was no wind at all that afternoon, and they cut through the still air faster and faster.
Hatty had pinned her skirt up above her ankles, for greater freedom of movement; and now she abandoned the use of her muff, the better to swing her arms in time with their skating. Their speed made the muff fly out behind her, on its cord, and at last a stroke gave it such a violent fling that the cord broke and the fur ball of the muff shot away and landed in the middle of a game of bandy and somehow became part of the game, and was never seen again. Hatty saw it disappear, and neither stopped nor faltered in her course, but only laughed, as though she cared nothing now for muffs or improprieties or aunts. They skated on.
&n
bsp; They left the Castleford reaches altogether. They came to a lock, with its gates frozen fast, and its weir frozen too: they hobbled ashore and round the lock and on to the ice again. They skated under a bridge, and, even in the shelter of it, the ice bore strongly. All the ferryways were frozen as they went, with the ferrymen standing sourly by their ice-locked boats.
Hatty and Tom skated on and on. The skaters they met now were mostly men. There were few girls, that Tom could see, and none without escort. They came to a lonely river-side alehouse: its signboard said: ‘The Five Miles from Anywhere—No Hurry’. Here there were skaters, labourers from the Fen farms, resting on the bank. They called out jovially to Hatty, asking if she would like any of them to skate with her for company. They went on calling, until she called back that she had a companion with her, even if they could not see him. The skaters thought this a good hoax and laughed, taking no offence; and Hatty laughed; and Tom laughed too, but no one except Hatty heard him.
They skated on, and the thin, brilliant sun was beginning to set, and Hatty’s black shadow flitted along at their right hand, across the dazzle of the ice. Sometimes they skated on the main river; sometimes they skated along the flooded washes. Only the willows along the bank watched them; and the ice hissed with their passage.
They had stopped talking or thinking—their legs and arms and bodies seemed to throw from side to side with the precise, untiring regularity of clock-pendulums—long before Hatty cried: ‘Look, Tom—the tower of Ely cathedral!’
From the river, however, Ely’s tower plays a game with the traveller. Hatty and Tom skated and skated, and for a long time the tower seemed to let them come no nearer, but performed a mysterious movement instead, now to one side, now to the other, now ahead, according to the windings of the river. At last, however, they were certainly getting nearer, and now the cathedral tower began to disappear behind the nearer rooftops; and here they were where the river curves in to the town of Ely.