by Gwyneth Rees
‘Well . . . you two have met each other then,’ Mr Rutherford grunted. ‘That’s good.’ He turned away from Alex and me to look at my brother. ‘This is the walled garden I was telling you about, Ben. Mrs Daniels tells me it shouldn’t be difficult to get it into shape in time.’
‘In time for what?’ I asked curiously.
‘For the competition,’ Mr Rutherford said, turning back to face me. He explained that Lower Thornton and all the neighbouring villages held a garden open day on the first weekend in August every year. ‘All the local houses who want to take part open up their gardens for the public to view. There are several competitions and one of them is for the best small garden. Mrs Daniels suggested that since we’ve got a proper gardener now, we might as well enter. What do you think, Ben?’
Ben was scowling at the garden as if he would dearly love to give it – and Mrs Daniels herself – a large dose of aspirin. ‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled gruffly.
‘You don’t know what?’
‘I don’t know if it’s going to be ready four weeks from now,’ Ben answered in a tight voice.
Ben looked like he was being slowly strangled by bindweed himself and I had a horrible feeling that this news, added to whatever other gardening horrors he had already encountered today, might be enough to make him crack completely. And if he cracked, he might blurt out to Mr Rutherford that he had never gardened before in his life, and then we would have to leave Thornton Hall.
Suddenly I had an idea.
‘Can I have this garden to look after?’ I asked. ‘I’d really like to have something special to do here. I could make this garden win that competition – I know I could!’
Mr Rutherford, Ben and Alex all stared at me.
‘Please?’ I begged. And suddenly I thought of something else that made the whole idea seem even more exciting. ‘I can make it my very own secret garden until I’m ready to show it to everyone. I can lock the door so no one can come in until it’s finished.’
‘May, this isn’t make-believe,’ Ben said impatiently. He looked at Mr Rutherford apologetically. ‘She’s got this video about a girl who finds a secret garden. She thinks it’d be like that.’
‘Are you talking about The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett?’ Mr Rutherford asked, looking at me with renewed interest.
I nodded. (I recognized the name of the author who’d written the original book because it always appeared on the TV screen along with the title while the oboe music was playing at the beginning.)
‘She must’ve watched that video about a hundred times,’ Ben added.
‘You should read the book,’ Mr Rutherford told me. ‘I think you’d enjoy it.’
‘She might not enjoy it as much as watching it on TV though,’ Alex said in a challenging voice. He was looking at his father as he spoke, as if he was deliberately having a dig at him about something.
Whatever it was, Mr Rutherford ignored him and continued briskly, ‘Mary, I admire your enthusiasm, but this garden would be far too much work for you to do on your own. Unless . . .’ He suddenly looked at Alex, as if an idea had just come to him. ‘Unless you were to help her, Alex. Then the two of you could do it together.’
‘Oh yes!’ I gasped. ‘That’s a brilliant idea!’ I grasped Alex’s arm excitedly. ‘Then it’d be even more like The Secret Garden! Mary had a boy friend who helped her.’
‘A boyfriend?’ Alex looked alarmed.
I felt myself blushing as I said quickly, ‘I mean, a friend who was a boy. Oh, please say you’ll do it, Alex. It’ll be cool.’
I could tell Alex was torn between wanting to have some fun with me and not wanting to please his father too much, but finally he nodded his agreement. ‘OK.’
‘Good!’ Mr Rutherford smiled warmly at both of us before turning to Ben, who had been watching all this with a dazed expression. ‘Well, Ben, it looks like you’re off the hook as far as this garden goes. But I’m sure you can find plenty of other work to keep you busy, can’t you? If you need any help with anything, Mrs Daniels is the person to ask. She knows a surprising amount about gardening.’
‘So I’ve gathered,’ Ben said.
‘Dad, we’re going to need some money if we’re going to buy new plants and stuff,’ Alex put in suddenly.
‘When we’ve cleared some space, we could plant some seeds,’ I suggested. ‘Seeds aren’t expensive.’
‘It’s too late to grow anything from seed now,’ Ben informed us. ‘And even if you bought annuals as bedding plants and watered them in, they wouldn’t be ready in time for the competition.’
‘What’s an annual?’ Alex asked my brother, and for an awful moment I thought Ben was going to be exposed as a fraud, right there in front of Mr Rutherford. But I needn’t have worried. Apparently that was quite an easy question if you’d read a few gardening books. ‘It’s a plant that only flowers once – it doesn’t come back the following year like perennials do,’ Ben explained.
‘I think you should concentrate on sorting out what’s already here, don’t you?’ Alex’s father said, looking around at the overcrowded flower beds.
‘OK,’ I agreed, going over to the garden door to inspect the keyhole. The most important thing to me was that this was a secret garden and it could only be that if we were able to lock it. ‘But we need to find the key first.’
Alex came over to inspect the door too. ‘Do you know where the key is, Dad?’ he asked.
‘I imagine if it’s anywhere, it’ll be in the cupboard in the kitchen passage – the one opposite the laundry room. That’s where all the keys were kept when your great-aunt lived here. But you and Mary had better ask Mrs Daniels about it.’
‘Come on, Mary. Let’s go and ask her now!’ Alex said.
‘Since when have you started calling yourself Mary?’ Ben suddenly asked me. ‘I thought you only liked May.’
‘Well, now I like Mary better,’ I said firmly. ‘And I want you to call me Mary too from now on, because that’s my proper name.’
He gave a little grunt and murmured, ‘Whatever . . .’ but somehow he didn’t sound like he was planning on busting a gut trying to remember.
‘Is it OK if I go with Alex now?’ I added, thinking that I ought to at least make a show of asking his permission before heading off, especially since I’d already disobeyed him once today by coming here when he’d told me not to.
‘So long as it’s OK with Mr Rutherford,’ Ben replied. ‘It’s his house.’
‘Of course it’s all right with me!’ Mr Rutherford’s eyes seemed almost twinkly as he added, ‘I’m delighted that Alex has found someone his own age to keep him company this summer.’ And for a fleeting moment I wondered if he had employed Ben rather than that other, more experienced gardener just because Ben came with a ready-made friend for his son.
It was the second time I had been inside the house. The first time had been on the day of Ben’s interview, when we’d been invited into the library on our return after lunch to find out whether or not Ben had got the job. But on that day we’d entered through the front door whereas this time Alex showed me in through a side door and I found myself in a corridor with a stone floor that led to some steps further ahead.
‘That’s the old laundry,’ Alex said, pointing to a door on the left. ‘This is the cupboard Dad was talking about.’ He opened a door on the right to reveal a walk-in cupboard. He switched on a dim light and stepped inside. The cupboard looked like it was mainly used to house things that were no longer needed. There was an old-fashioned hoover, a couple of ancient heaters and some rolls of carpet sitting on the floor. The shelves were full of cardboard boxes with things stuffed into them. Poking out of the top of the nearest box were some rusty saucepans, another was filled with chipped crockery and lined up along one shelf were some dusty oil lamps. There were some wellington boots piled up in one corner, along with an assortment of umbrellas, half of them twisted-looking and broken.
On one wall of the cupboard was a board with
hooks on it. Bunches of keys were dangling from the hooks, some of them tagged with faded paper labels. Alex was inspecting all the keys, reading the various labels. ‘Outhouse 1, Outhouse 2, Side door, Conservatory, Attic, Cellars . . . Those are all the ones with labels.’
‘The garden key should be a very old one,’ I said. ‘And bigger than these, I reckon.’
‘We’d better ask Mrs Daniels if she knows where it is,’ he said.
He led me up the steps into a small hall, off which there were two more closed doors and a staircase leading upwards. Straight ahead was the main passageway leading into the bulk of the house, and to our right was a narrower passageway, which Alex told me led to the family living room, his father’s study and the conservatory.
‘That’s the breakfast room and that’s the staircase to the cellars,’ Alex explained, pointing to the two closed doors in turn. ‘The breakfast room leads into the kitchen. Mrs Daniels might be in there.’ He led me into a nice light room with a large oak table in the middle and big windows that looked out on to the back terrace and gardens. ‘We eat all our meals in here,’ he said. ‘Not just breakfast.’ The room was linked to the kitchen but Mrs Daniels wasn’t there. Alex led me through the kitchen door and out into the corridor again. ‘That’s the dining room,’ he said, pointing to a door opposite the kitchen one. ‘It’s really posh. We never use it. Do you want to see?’
I nodded so he led me into the room, which was huge and very grand indeed. It had a polished wooden floor with a big red patterned rug covering the main part of it, and there was a highly polished mahogany table in the centre with eight finely-carved chairs set around it. There was also a huge marble fireplace with a white marble bust of some Greek goddess sitting at one end and a large blue vase at the other, which Alex told me was made of Venetian glass and had been brought back from Italy by his great-aunt fifty years ago. The room had three big windows to the front of the house and another door at the far side.
‘This is the grandest house I’ve ever been in,’ I told Alex.
‘Do you want to see the rest of it?’ he asked.
I nodded. ‘But remember, we’ve got to find Mrs Daniels too.’ Alex strode across the room, saying, ‘Excuse us, madame,’ in a mock-deferential tone to the white marble head as he passed it. He opened the other door and we were in the main hall, which I recognized from the day of Ben’s interview. The room on the right as you entered the house was the living room I had seen that day when I’d looked in through the window. Ahead of us was the rear hall with the library off it. It had an ornate wooden staircase leading upwards in a sort of arc.
I paused outside the door to the library, because I knew from my previous visit that there was a computer in there. ‘Are you on the Internet here?’ I asked Alex.
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘Do you think your dad would mind if I emailed my sister?’
‘We’ll need to ask him. He’s got this rule about me not going online without his permission.’ He led me up the staircase to a landing where three large bright modern pictures were hanging on the wall. ‘My brother painted those,’ Alex said proudly. ‘Dad took down the gloomy old portraits my great-aunt had up there.’
‘Is your brother into modern art then?’ I asked, taking in the large colourful shapes which were quite striking to look at but which didn’t seem to represent any real objects as far as I could make out.
Alex nodded. ‘He does more traditional stuff too, but that’s the kind of painting he likes doing best.’
‘I think I like more normal pictures myself,’ I said. ‘You know – when you can actually tell what it is.’
Alex laughed again. ‘I’ll show you some of his other stuff if you like.’ We were standing at one end of the long upper-floor landing and he showed me into a small room which he told me his brother had used as a studio when they’d stayed there at Easter. ‘There are twelve bedrooms in total, so Dad said Chris could have this one to work in,’ Alex said, pointing to some large blank canvases leaning up against one wall. ‘Dad bought those for him as a surprise because he thought he’d be coming here this summer.’
But my attention had been caught by something else. ‘Did your brother do these?’ I asked, pointing to a pile of sketches lying on top of an old chest of drawers.
‘Yeah.’
I picked them up to study them better. There were drawings of the house from several different angles and some sketches of people, one of which was clearly Mr Rutherford.
‘He did a drawing of me too,’ Alex said. ‘Dad got it framed. It’s hanging in my room, if you want to see it.’
He led me further along the corridor past two or three closed doors before stopping at one on the left which had a sticker on the outside saying: PRIVATE: KEEP OUT!
He opened the door and walked in. The room had an old-fashioned wardrobe and chest of drawers, a single bed with a Bart Simpson duvet cover and a large square rug on the floor that looked like a snakes-and-ladders board. ‘Dad chose that,’ Alex said, seeing me looking at the rug. ‘I hate board games.’ There were two windows overlooking the front grounds and between them was a table piled up with comics and a chair with a cushion on it.
‘It’s very tidy,’ I said. ‘Much tidier than my bedroom is.’ Although, since I had stopped sharing with my sister, my own room was a lot tidier than it used to be. Ben had noticed that too and had made a wry comment the other day about how he could see now that it wasn’t me who had been the messy one.
‘Yeah, well, there’s not much to keep tidy – most of my stuff is back in London,’ Alex replied.
On the wall above Alex’s bed there was a framed sketch in bold pencil of Alex’s head and shoulders. ‘It’s brilliant,’ I said. ‘It looks just like you!’
‘He said he’d do a proper painting of me this summer. That was before he decided to go off to Italy instead.’
‘Is this his too?’ I asked, picking up a sketch pad that was lying on Alex’s bedside table. I started to flick through it. The first three pages were half-finished sketches of the view from Alex’s window. I was about to turn over to the next page when he snatched the pad away from me.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, looking at him in surprise.
‘Nothing.’ His face had gone tense all of a sudden. ‘Come on. We still have to find Mrs Daniels.’
I was curious about what it was he didn’t want me to see, but there was no time to ask any more because he was already leading me out of the room.
At the far end of the house there were several spare bedrooms, and at the end of the landing was the other staircase, which descended to the small back hall we had passed through downstairs. Another short corridor led off from here, at a right angle to the main landing.
‘This is where Mrs Daniels’ rooms are,’ Alex said, leading me along the corridor. I guessed we were now in the bit of the house that jutted forwards and which made the house look uneven when you saw it from the outside. ‘That’s her bathroom and that’s her bedroom,’ Alex said, pointing to two doors on our right. ‘This one is her sitting room.’ We had come to the end of the corridor and Alex was knocking on a door straight ahead.
‘Where does that one go to?’ I asked, pointing to a door on the left which he had ignored.
‘Oh, that’s the door to the tower room. It’s locked because nobody’s allowed to go up there. The floor’s rotten so it’s too dangerous until it gets repaired.’ He was pushing open the door to Mrs Daniels’ sitting room, calling out her name. I followed him into the room curiously, taking in the chintz-covered sofa, the small fireplace with the mirror above it, the bookshelves filled with old paperbacks and the sewing machine on the table in the corner. There was no sign of the housekeeper.
‘Maybe she’s having a lie-down,’ I suggested as we stepped back out on to the landing.
‘She never lies down – she’s always working during the day,’ Alex said, knocking on her bedroom and bathroom doors as we passed them, but receiving no response. ‘I suppose
she must have gone out to the shops or something.’
But as we retreated to the end of the corridor and started to walk back along the main landing, we heard a noise behind us like a door closing. We looked at each other.
‘Come on.’ Alex led the way back to Mrs Daniels’ corridor, where we found her standing facing us at the far end, holding a tray.
‘What are you doing here?’ she snapped.
‘We were looking for you,’ Alex replied. ‘Where were you just now?’
‘In my sitting room, having a rest!’ she replied sharply. ‘Now, what do you want?’
‘But—’ Alex broke off, clearly thinking better of telling her we had already been inside her sitting room. ‘Dad thought that you might know where the key to the garden is . . . the walled garden.’
She stared at him blankly for a moment, then started briskly towards us with the tray. ‘Here.’ She handed it to Alex. ‘Take this down to the kitchen. I’ll come in a minute.’
Alex and I looked at each other again. I knew we were both thinking the same thing. Why had she lied about being in her sitting room just now? And where had she really been? We were halfway down the stairs when my curiosity suddenly got the better of me. ‘I’m going back to see what she’s doing,’ I whispered. Alex remained where he was as I tiptoed back upstairs and peered round the corner into Mrs Daniels’ corridor. The housekeeper was standing outside the door that Alex had said led to the tower room. She was locking it with a key.
I went back quickly to rejoin Alex. ‘She’s locking the door to the tower room,’ I whispered to him. ‘That must be where she came from just now!’
We could hear her footsteps moving along the corridor.
‘Quick – before she sees us!’ Alex led the way down the remainder of the stairs, but thankfully Mrs Daniels didn’t immediately follow.
‘Why do you think she lied about where she was?’ I asked Alex when we had reached the safety of the kitchen and closed the door behind us.
