by Gwyneth Rees
‘Well maybe you’ve got a natural talent too,’ I told him. ‘Maybe you’re a born gardener, only you just don’t know it yet.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I mean, I’m not exactly famous for my horticultural prowess, am I?’
I thought about him killing that plant of Lou’s by giving it aspirin and I had to admit that he had a point.
On Monday, just before Ben was due to start work, we had a big row. As there were only two weeks of the summer term left, Ben had already agreed that I could forget about going to a new school until it was time for me to start secondary school after the summer holidays. The row started when he asked what I was going to be doing all day instead.
‘Apart from going to social services to tell them I’m home alone, do you mean?’ I joked. (Ben had already started worrying that, with Lou gone, I was going to be left in the house on my own too much.)
Ben glared at me like he didn’t think that was at all funny.
‘Look, I was only joking,’ I told him quickly. ‘Don’t worry! I’ll be fine! I’m going to go exploring today, OK?’
And that’s when he told me I wasn’t to go nosing around Thornton Hall – or its gardens.
‘But it’s the gardens I want to explore!’ I protested. ‘Why can’t I?’
‘Thornton Hall isn’t our house,’ Ben reminded me. ‘Just because I work in the garden, it doesn’t mean it’s some sort of playground for you.’
‘I wasn’t going to use it as a playground! Anyway, Mr Rutherford already said I could go on his swing.’
‘Only while I was having my interview. If you want swings, you can go to the village. There’s a park there.’
‘I don’t want to go to the village!’
‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary,’ Ben said dismissively. ‘That’s you today, is it?’
I glared at him. He knows I hate that stupid nursery rhyme. That’s another thing I’ve got in common with Mary in The Secret Garden. She hates that rhyme too, because the other kids used to sing it to her in a nasty way when she was all alone and bad-tempered at the start of the story.
‘I’ll just stay inside and watch TV and get paler and paler then, since you don’t seem to care about me getting healthy outside any more!’ I snapped. (Unfortunately, thinking about Mary in The Secret Garden seems to turn me into her sometimes.) I stomped off into my bedroom and slammed the door.
Ben yelled after me, ‘You do that, you little drama queen!’
‘I am not a drama queen!’ I screeched back at him.
‘You’re a little madam who thinks the whole world revolves around her, that’s what you are!’ I heard him leave the house, banging the front door shut really loudly. Sometimes – especially if he’s very stressed out about something – Ben can get in just as bad a mood with me as I’m in with him.
I was so angry I punched my pillow and swore out loud. It wasn’t fair! I knew Ben was nervous at the prospect of starting his new job, which was why he was so tense. But I was new here too – with no friends and nothing to do – and I didn’t see why I shouldn’t go off and explore the gardens if I wanted to.
I reckoned Ben would be tied up for quite a while with Mrs Daniels since she was showing him the gardening equipment in the outbuildings at the back of the house. Apparently there was a big sit-on lawnmower that Ben had to learn how to use today because the grass already needed cutting again. So he wasn’t going to see what I did – or where I went – was he?
I put on my trainers and stepped outside. It was a lovely sunny day and straight away I started to pretend that I was Mary in The Secret Garden when she first goes out into the grounds of the house to go exploring. It’s winter then, not summer, and the grounds are cold and bare. That’s when she first sees the robin that lives in the garden and it starts to become her friend.
I didn’t see any robins as I followed the path that Mrs Daniels had brought us along when she’d first shown us the cottage. After it came out on to the main drive, I walked along it for a bit, then cut across the grass between some trees, heading for the side of the house where the square tower made it look lopsided. Mrs Daniels had said that the walled garden was on the south side of the house. I didn’t know which side was south but I guessed it was the opposite side to where I’d gone on the day of Ben’s interview, since the garden there had been open and full of rose beds.
A narrow stone path led round to the back of the house, so I followed it. I stopped short when I got to where the outbuildings were, but I couldn’t see anybody. I made a run for it, past the old brick sheds and the area where the bins were kept, still following the path, which turned abruptly away from the house and went through a bit of the garden that looked like it hadn’t been worked in for a while. I heard the sound of a lawnmower starting up somewhere nearby so I guessed that Ben was already being kept busy.
The path ran alongside a high grey stone wall and after a while I came to the end of it and found an adjoining wall at a right angle. The path split here – one branch carried on straight ahead but the other turned off and ran along the new wall. I followed the second path, starting to feel excited. This wall was much shorter, and by the time I reached the next corner and the next wall I knew I had found what I’d been looking for. Inside these walls there must be a garden.
I was almost too excited to breathe properly as I crept along the third stretch of wall. Would there be a door here? Would it be unlocked? I knew this garden wasn’t really a secret like the one in the story – but I could pretend that it was, couldn’t I? And if nobody knew I was coming here, then the fact that I was would be some sort of secret at least.
I soon came to a black wooden door in the wall. I twisted the handle and found that it turned quite easily. I pushed the door inwards, stepped over a cracked paving stone – and found myself inside.
Straight away I saw that the garden was nothing like the secret garden in my video. That garden was all wild and rambling, with trees and twisting things growing everywhere in a charming, mysterious sort of tangle. This garden had nothing tall in it whatsoever. There were no trees – just grass and flower beds and walls that were partly bare and partly covered in ivy. In one corner there was a small wooden shed. The grass in the centre obviously hadn’t been cut in a while and the flower beds looked like they had been left to their own devices for a long time too.
The path was very weedy. It curved round the garden between the overgrown lawn in the middle and the flower beds on the edges, and I followed it all the way round until I got back to the entrance again. The garden wasn’t very big really. In the very centre was a stone pillar thing and I went over to look at it. It was a sundial. Its face was brass but in need of a good clean and its stone base had long grass and yellow dandelions growing halfway up it. I remembered now that Mrs Daniels had called this the old sun garden.
‘Why isn’t anyone looking after you?’ I said out loud to the garden. Of course it was probably just because there was no gardener, but then I thought about Mary Lennox’s secret garden and how it had been locked up and neglected because the wife of the master of the house had fallen out of a tree there and died. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know anything about Mr Rutherford’s wife. Was it possible that some tragedy had befallen her while she was in this garden and that was why it had been left in this state? After all, the rest of the grounds had been kept reasonably tidy, even if they didn’t satisfy Mrs Daniels’ high standards, whereas the garden inside these walls hadn’t been touched all year by the look of it.
There were roses in the flower beds – all yellow ones – and lots of other plants growing in among them, as well as yellow daisies of different types and sizes, and some other yellow flowers that looked a bit like lilies, growing in big clumps. Everything was growing into everything else.
A sort of bindweed with floppy white flowers that I recognized from one of Ben’s gardening books was twisting itself around everything. I remembered that the book had given this weed a special name that so
unded just right for it – convolvulus. ‘You’re a weed – not a flower,’ I told it sternly, ‘and you shouldn’t be strangling those roses.’ I stepped closer and started to tug at some of the bindweed that was choking the yellow rose bush nearest to me.
‘Ouch!’ I drew back my hand as I got pricked by a rose thorn. I didn’t let that stop me though. I went back to the rose, more carefully this time, finding a place where I could break the bindweed easily. I unwound it in both directions from the rose stem, taking care not to touch any of the thorns, and threw the weed on to the path.
I started to imagine that Mary Lennox was with me and that we were working together in the real secret garden. ‘Can’t you just hear the poor roses sighing with relief as we free them?’ Mary said in her old-fashioned, slightly imperious voice, and I nodded as I replied, ‘Now they’ll be able to breathe properly again.’ Only I said it in a posh voice too – and all of a sudden I felt like I was Mary Lennox.
It took quite a while to free each prickly stem and it wasn’t until I glanced at my watch some time later that I realized I’d been working in the garden for nearly an hour. My hands and arms were all scratched because it was difficult to avoid the rose thorns completely, but I didn’t care. I was enjoying myself.
‘You should wear gardening gloves if you’re going to do that!’ a voice said from behind me.
And I turned to see – standing grinning at me – the plump boy with the freckled face and curly hair who I had seen that day in the car with Mr Rutherford.
‘Hi,’ I murmured, not knowing what else to say.
The boy was standing in the doorway, eating a big bar of chocolate and, as I spoke, he stuffed a double chunk into his mouth and started to munch it. His mouth was so full of chocolate that it was a while before he could speak again. ‘I know you,’ he finally mumbled. ‘You were talking to my dad the other day. Your brother’s our new gardener, isn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m Mary.’ And that’s when I decided that I wanted to be called Mary by everyone from now on.
‘So, are you helping him or something?’ he asked, glancing at the pile of weeds I’d left on the path.
‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘I just really wanted to find this garden.’
‘Why?’ He looked curious.
‘Mrs Daniels told me about it yesterday. This is the walled garden, you see,’ I explained lamely.
‘I guess it is . . . since it’s got walls and it’s a garden,’ the boy said, smirking.
I scowled with embarrassment – just as fiercely as Mary Lennox would have done. ‘I don’t like people making fun of me!’
He just grinned even more. ‘That’s exactly what Mrs Daniels said to Dad! Didn’t you and your brother laugh at her or something when she opened the door to you?’
I felt myself growing hotter. ‘We didn’t do that on purpose. It’s just that—’
But before I could go into any explanation, he interrupted me. ‘It’s OK. I’m glad you laughed at her. She needs to loosen up a bit. Here . . .’ He held out his bar of chocolate to offer me some. ‘I’m Alex, by the way.’
I shook my head at the chocolate. I didn’t feel like accepting any sort of peace offering from him just yet – if that’s what it was meant to be. Besides, his fingers looked sticky and they’d been all over that chocolate. I wished he’d go away so I could go back to my task of unwinding the convolvulus from the roses.
‘It’s really terrible that this poor garden’s been left to get in such a mess,’ I said in quite a haughty voice. I was half inclined to ask him if there had been some sort of tragedy here, but I thought I’d better not. After all, if someone had fallen out of a tree in this garden and died – not that there were any trees, but maybe Mr Rutherford had had the culprit cut down afterwards – then Alex was highly likely to be related to them, wasn’t he?
‘Jimmy hardly ever did any work in here, that’s why,’ Alex explained, sitting down on one of the two wooden benches at the side of the path. ‘He was the last gardener here. He was a nice guy, but he was pretty lazy. I think he did cut the lawn in here once – not that you’d know it now. Mostly he just came in here to smoke. Look.’ He pointed to some old cigarette butts on the ground by his feet. Jimmy had obviously favoured this bench when he was taking his breaks. ‘I used to come in here and sit with him sometimes. He told me some really funny stories! He’s got these gossipy aunts who run the tea room in the village and they know the comings and goings of everybody!’
‘I’ve met them,’ I said. ‘And you’re right – they are gossipy!’
‘So was Jimmy,’ Alex said. ‘He said he reckoned it ran in the family!’ He broke himself off another chunk of chocolate, then held out the rest of the bar to me again. ‘Sure you don’t want some?’
I looked at it. I do like chocolate and I was in a better mood with him now. The bar was nearly finished, so I knew that this was probably my last chance to take up his offer. ‘OK,’ I said, going across to join him. ‘Thanks.’ I sat down beside him on the bench, swinging my feet and prodding with my toes at the grass that was growing up through the cracks in the path. ‘Do you live here too then?’ I asked him.
‘Just in the holidays. Most of the time I live with my mum in London. I’m only staying with Dad for the summer. My school broke up a week ago so I came here then. I go to a private school. We get longer holidays.’ He said it as if he thought I might not know anyone who went to a fee-paying school and was therefore unlikely to know that fact.
‘So are your mum and dad divorced?’ I asked, trying not to feel too disappointed that his mother was clearly alive and therefore not part of some tragic, romantic story involving the garden after all.
‘Yeah. My brother and me always spend the holidays with Dad. We came here for Easter just after Dad moved in. That was cool. But now Christopher’s gone off on holiday with his mates so I’m stuck here on my own for the whole summer.’
‘My big sister’s just gone off travelling too,’ I said sympathetically. ‘She’s gone to India.’
‘Chris has gone to Italy. He’s going to do loads of painting there. He’s a brilliant artist. I reckon he’s going to be really famous one day. He’s going to art college after the summer. It’s in London, which means he gets to stay at home, so that’s good! I think I’d really miss him if he went away anywhere.’
I thought about Lou and bit my lip. ‘How old is he?’ I asked.
‘Eighteen. I’m twelve. How old are you?’
‘Eleven and a half,’ I told him. ‘You’ve only just had your birthday, haven’t you? I know because your dad showed me your birthday cake when I met him that time on the train. I saved it from being sat on. Did he tell you about that?’
He nodded. ‘He doesn’t usually get me a birthday cake. He only did this year because I had to stay with him that weekend because Mum was away on business. I was pretty annoyed with her for going away on my birthday actually.’
‘But did you like the cake?’ I asked.
‘Yeah – but Dad and I had a big argument about it afterwards.’
‘An argument?’ I was puzzled. ‘Why?’
‘Dad reckoned I shouldn’t have eaten it so quickly!’
‘Why? How quickly did you eat it?’
‘In three days! I finished it off the day after I took it home with me and Mum went and told him. The next time Dad spoke to me on the phone he said I was greedy, so then we argued really badly and I was so angry I threw the wings away.
‘The aeroplane wings?’
He nodded. ‘See, they weren’t just there to decorate the cake – they were part of a model aeroplane kit Dad got me as a birthday present. Not that I wanted a model kit. I hate the idea of sitting putting all those fiddly bits together – it’s really nerdy, if you ask me. But Dad never thinks about what I want. He thinks all boys should either be outside playing healthy games in the fresh air, or inside doing things that improve their minds – like making models.’ He pulled a pained face as he spoke
. ‘He used to spend hours making model planes when he was my age, so he says . . . Anyway, he wasn’t very pleased when I told him that unfortunately I couldn’t make this particular model plane because the wings had already been taken away by the binmen.’
‘I can imagine,’ I said, staring at him with something like awe. I didn’t like to think about what Ben would say if he’d spent loads of money on a birthday present for me and I’d chucked half of it away.
Suddenly the garden door swung open and Ben walked in. He did a double take when he saw me. He was red-faced and sweaty-looking and he had grass cuttings on his shirt and in his hair. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked me crossly.
I quickly pointed at Alex. ‘It’s his garden. He says I can be here.’
Mr Rutherford walked in through the gate behind Ben. His eyes fell first on me, then on Alex and finally on the remains of the large chocolate bar in Alex’s hand. He looked irritated. ‘Alex, you’ve only just had your breakfast.’ It was very clear that he was about to say more to his son, whose face had instantly become redder and more defiant-looking.
But before he could speak again, I snatched the chocolate out of Alex’s hand and said quickly, ‘I bought myself some chocolate, Ben – I was just giving Alex a bit. You know how you’re always going on at me to drink more milk? Well this has got a pint and a half of full-cream milk in it! It says so on the label.’ (Ben had recently decided that I had to drink plenty of milk every day, because he reckons it’s good for you. Since I hate milk, we’d been arguing about it quite a lot.)
Alex looked so surprised that I was afraid his father would guess straight away that I was lying, but fortunately Mr Rutherford wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at me – not bothering to mask the fact that he thought I was quite a strange child. (Unfortunately, Ben was looking at me too – not bothering to hide the fact that he thought I was making fun of his new milk rule and that, when he got me home, he was going to make me drink a pint and a half of the stuff in our fridge.)
