by Gwyneth Rees
‘What if it’s Geoffrey?’ Alex suddenly said. ‘What if he’s not really dead?’ He grinned before adding, ‘Or what if he’s only half dead?’ He pulled a contorted face and lifted his arms up to do a really bad ghost impression. ‘Oooooooh! I’m Geoffreeey and I’m going to haunt my gardens forever!’
‘Shut up!’ I snapped. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts!’ But I couldn’t help remembering how Mrs Daniels had told the ladies in the tea room that it was probably her dead husband’s ghost who was living in our cottage.
There had been no signs of the cottage being haunted since we’d been there, but ever since I’d seen the light up in the tower room that night I’d had another idea. What if Mrs Daniels had been keeping a person in our cottage and letting everyone think they were a ghost? It would make sense that now that Ben and I were living there, she’d had to move them to the tower room instead.
I told Alex my idea to see what he thought.
‘Well, that would explain why I never noticed her going up to the tower room until you came here,’ he said. ‘Though I still can’t really believe she’s keeping somebody prisoner up there.’
‘They might not be a prisoner,’ I pointed out. ‘They might want to be there. That would explain why they don’t make any noise – because they don’t want to be found.’
‘I suppose.’ Alex still didn’t look convinced.
When it finally got dark enough outside, Alex crept across the landing to Christopher’s room to get all the painting materials together, while I set off on a sort of reconnaissance mission to check on the exact whereabouts of the other occupants of the house.
Alex was dropping a cloth and some flat-ended paintbrushes of various sizes into a carrier bag when I rejoined him. ‘Dad’s got Chris a brand-new box of oil paints,’ he said. ‘Look.’ He showed me a shiny wooden box containing what looked like twelve or more silver tubes of paint with different-coloured labels on them. ‘Chris would love these. He really likes painting with oils. Normally he has to use acrylic paints because they’re cheaper.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked, as Alex put a glass bottle of clear liquid into the bag.
‘Turps – it’s one of the things you can use to thin the paint and clean the brushes and stuff, if you’re using oils. The guy in the art shop must have told Dad about it. Dad doesn’t know the first thing about painting . . . Hey, look at this!’ He was holding up a proper artist’s palette. ‘Dad’s really gone all out this time.’
‘You seem to know loads about it,’ I said.
‘I’ve learned a bit from listening to Chris.’ He put the palette on top of the box of paints and started to look around for a sturdier bag to put them both in so that we could carry everything downstairs at once. ‘Did you find out where Dad and Mrs Daniels are?’
I nodded. ‘Mrs Daniels is in her bedroom, though the light’s still on, and your dad’s in his study. No one will see us if we go out the side door.’
The five blank canvases were lighter to carry than they looked, so Alex took three and I took two down the back stairs. Alex took the heavier carrier bag and I took the other one. But when we reached the side door we found that it had already been shut and bolted for the night.
Alex pulled back the bolt, but the door must have been locked with a key as well because it still didn’t open when he tried it.
‘Where’s the key kept?’ I whispered, because it wasn’t in the door. I glanced at the walk-in cupboard (where all the other keys had been) as I spoke.
‘Mrs Daniels has one and there’s another in a jar in the kitchen,’ Alex said. ‘Wait here and I’ll get it.’
‘You have brought the key to the garden, haven’t you?’ I asked when he came back, and he patted his pocket to reassure me that he had. Alex and I had argued quite a lot about which one of us should look after the key and in the end we had decided to take it in turns to keep it on a string round our neck. Alex had insisted on having his turn first – though apparently he hadn’t got the string part sorted out yet.
It was creepy outside with all the trees and bushes forming dark, unfamiliar shapes around us. Alex had brought a torch with him, which he had given me to hold. The grounds seemed full of noises that I was sure weren’t there in the daytime. As a rustling sound came from behind us, I moved closer to Alex in alarm.
‘It must be an animal or something,’ he said dismissively when he saw how freaked out I was.
‘What do you mean – or something?’ I hissed anxiously, but that just made him grin.
‘Stop being such a city slicker,’ he said, giving me a playful push. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of. You’re just not used to the country. You’re letting your imagination run away with you!’
We reached the garden safely, and just as we crept inside, the moon came out from behind a cloud and everything took on an eerie glow. It lasted for a few seconds before we were left in darkness again, apart from the torchlight. We hurried over to the shed, which didn’t have a lock, but we didn’t think that mattered since no one except us could get into our garden now. Only one key had been made – to my surprise Mrs Daniels had been sympathetic about that when I’d explained that I wanted our garden to be as much like the real secret garden as possible.
‘Right,’ Alex said, after we had placed all the painting stuff safely inside the shed. ‘Let’s get back.’
We were about to return to the house when I had another idea. ‘Let’s go round to the front first and see if the light’s on in the tower room.’
So we crept round the side of the house and walked over the lawn until we could see the tower-room window. There was no light.
‘Are you sure you saw a light from that window?’ Alex asked.
I nodded. ‘That’s the only window you can see from our cottage.’
‘Look, why don’t we just ask Mrs Daniels about it? We can wait until Dad’s there, if you like. She can’t do anything to us then, can she?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t want to.’
‘Why? What are you scared of? If she is hiding somebody up there, Dad ought to know about it anyway because it’s his house.’
I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t sure what I was so scared of. Though if I was being really honest, I had to admit that the most disappointing outcome would be if we forced Mrs Daniels to show us the tower room and there was nothing there at all. But how could there be nothing, when Mrs Daniels went up and down those tower-room stairs every day carrying trays of food?
Alex and I had just gone into the kitchen to make a drink when Mrs Daniels appeared in the doorway in her dressing gown. I did a double take when I saw her because her dressing gown was pink and frilly and it seemed absurd to see her wearing something like that. I briefly thought how ridiculous the terrifying housekeeper in Rebecca would have looked in a pink frilly dressing gown, but quickly shook the image from my head in case it made me start laughing again.
‘What are you two doing up so late?’ she demanded.
‘We couldn’t sleep,’ Alex said quickly. ‘We came downstairs to get a drink.’
Mrs Daniels was holding her bunch of keys in her hand. ‘I was sure I locked and bolted the side door earlier. You haven’t opened it for any reason, have you?’
‘No!’ Alex and I both replied loudly. We looked at each other. I thought Alex had locked the door when we’d come back inside, but it was clear from the way he was looking at me that he thought I had.
‘Well, you’d better hurry up and make your drinks and get on up to bed,’ she said, placing the keys down on the surface next to the sink as she filled up the kettle to make a hot drink herself. If only we could somehow get those keys away from her. Then we could unlock the door to the tower room and go and see for ourselves just what – or who – was up there. Almost as if she could read my mind, Mrs Daniels picked up the keys and slipped them into her dressing-gown pocket before going to the fridge to fetch the milk.
Suddenly I heard myself ask, ‘Mrs Daniels, what happened
to all the keys in the walk-in cupboard?’
The housekeeper turned round to look at me in surprise. ‘Well . . .’ She seemed to flounder for a second or two. Then she replied crisply, ‘I had a clear-out the other day – there’s far too much useless junk in this house.’
‘That’s funny, because the cupboard didn’t look very cleared out when we checked inside it,’ I said. ‘Apart from the keys being gone, I mean.’
‘Really?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Well, you know what those sorts of jobs are like, Mary. One makes a start on them and then one gets distracted all too easily by something else.’
She was very good at lying, I thought. You had to give her that. But I wasn’t that easy to fool. ‘Mrs Daniels,’ I continued, trying to sound as casual as possible, ‘do you have any relatives?’
‘Relatives?’ She was looking at me in surprise again. ‘What sort of relatives?’
‘Mad ones!’ Alex blurted out before I could stop him.
Of course, that just cracked us both up, despite the fact that Mrs Daniels was fixing us with her coldest look.
‘If you were my children, I’d give you both a good slap!’ she told us sharply.
But we were shaking so much with laughter by that time that we only just managed not to spill our drinks as we left the kitchen. It was only as we reached the top of the stairs that I got enough control of myself to tell Alex off. ‘This isn’t a game, you know! If she really has got a relative in the tower room, you’ll have made her suspicious now!’
He hiccuped as he tried to stop laughing. ‘Suspicious of what? We haven’t got anything to hide.’
‘We don’t want her to suspect we’re on to her,’ I pointed out.
He raised his eyes heavenwards as if he thought I was making too much of this again. ‘If you say so. Tell you what! Why don’t we take it in turns to keep awake tonight and listen out for suspicious noises?’
I was about to agree to this when I realized that he was only teasing me. ‘Well, if either of us does happen to hear anything, we should definitely wake the other one up,’ I said, frowning.
‘I sleep here every night, remember – and I never hear a thing!’
‘Well, maybe you’re a really heavy sleeper,’ I told him sharply. ‘Maybe I’ll hear something.’
And when I went to bed in the guest room next to Alex’s, I kept awake for as long as I could, straining my ears to listen out for any strange sounds coming from Mrs Daniels’ end of the house. But just like Alex had said – there weren’t any.
The next morning Alex and his dad got into a big row over breakfast. Alex was grumbling again about not being able to watch television and his dad was saying that surely having a garden of your own was a lot more fun than having a television.
‘But you can’t garden all the time,’ Alex protested. ‘And anyhow, normal people do both. And there are some really good gardening programmes on TV which might actually help us win this competition.’
‘If you need gardening advice, I’m sure you can get it from a book,’ his father answered.
‘I don’t want to read a book!’ Alex protested, starting to lose his temper. ‘I just want to watch a bit of telly in the evenings like everyone else, that’s all.’
‘A bit, eh? Your mother tells me you’d spend the whole day in front of the television if she let you,’ his father replied drily.
‘Mum watches telly just as much as I do,’ Alex protested. ‘She just wants it all to herself – that’s why she complains about me watching too much.’
‘Can I please go and email my sister now?’ I interrupted them, getting up from the table. Before we’d sat down I had asked if I could use the computer this morning and Mr Rutherford had said that I could so long as I ate all my breakfast. (I reckon Ben must have had a word with him about my eating habits.)
I spent the next half-hour emailing Lou while Alex and his dad continued with their argument. Lou had already written back to me, so Ben was wrong about that. In her email she sounded just like she was talking to me. She had something to say about all of the things I’d mentioned last time I wrote, so I had no worries that she wasn’t still really interested in my life even though she was so far away.
It was almost eleven o’clock when Alex and I finally got to the garden that morning.
‘What do you say to your big sister when you email her?’ Alex asked me as he went to the shed to get out his painting things.
‘How do you mean?’ I asked, pulling on the gardening gloves Mrs Daniels had found for me.
‘Well, you seem to email her quite a lot. How do you think up what to say each time?’
‘I don’t have to think up what to say,’ I replied, not really getting his drift. ‘I mean, there’s loads to tell her – all about our garden and whatever else I’ve been doing and how I’m feeling and . . . I don’t know . . . just the same sort of stuff I’d tell her if she was here, I suppose.’
‘It’s just that I never know what to say to my dad,’ Alex said gloomily.
I couldn’t help laughing.
‘What’s funny?’ he demanded.
‘Nothing! That’s not how it looked this morning, that’s all!’
He smiled too then. ‘I don’t have any trouble thinking up what to say to him when I’m mad at him!’ He paused, suddenly looking more serious. ‘But when we’re just meant to be having a normal conversation together – just the two of us – I never know what to say. I always feel like he thinks I’m stupid compared with Chris.’
‘Has he said he thinks that?’ I asked, bending down to tackle my first weed of the day.
‘No, but he always seems to be in a bad mood with me, and I reckon that must be because I’m such a big disappointment to him compared with Chris. Chris always has loads of interesting things to say to him – and they hardly ever argue.’
‘Maybe your dad gets in a bad mood with you a lot because you’re always in a bad mood with him,’ I pointed out, thinking about something Lou had said in her email.
‘No way!’ he protested. ‘I get in a bad mood with him because he’s always in a bad mood with me!’
‘Whatever,’ I replied, letting out a sigh. ‘But Lou says that one of you ought to try being really nice to the other in any case, just as an experiment to see what happens – to sort of break the circle of you being horrible to him and him being horrible to you in return and then you being horrible back and—’
‘I’m not the one who’s horrible first!’ he protested.
‘I didn’t say you were. That’s the whole point of a circle – nobody starts it.’
‘Your sister sounds even weirder than you,’ Alex said, still sounding grumpy. ‘What did you tell her about us anyway?’
‘Just about you being cross at your dad because he was cross with you for eating your birthday cake so fast . . . and you throwing away the aeroplane wings because you were cross – and that making him even crosser with you, which meant you got even crosser with him, which meant—’
‘All right, all right, I get it,’ Alex interrupted, scowling. ‘But I can’t believe you wrote and told her all that in an email.’
‘I tell Lou everything,’ I said matter-of-factly.
‘Well, you’d better not have told her about this.’ He was setting up his easel now, ready to start painting.
In fact, in my email to her this morning I had told her all about his plan to paint in the garden, but I decided it was best not to admit that right now.
Alex had set up his easel in front of some yellow roses and I could see that he was squeezing out some paint on to his palette from one of the tubes. He had the bottle of turps on the ground beside him and he picked it up now, unscrewed the lid and dipped his paintbrush into it.
I stopped pulling up weeds to go over and look as he mixed the paint and the turps together. I could smell the paint mixture now. It was a sharp smell, difficult to describe. I thought it smelt a little bit like polish and a little bit like disinfectant, only that makes it sound
horrible, and it wasn’t.
The paint Alex had chosen to use first was an intense yellow colour. I picked up the tube and saw that it was called ‘Chrome yellow’. He had set aside two other tubes with yellow labels, called ‘Cadmium yellow’ and ‘Yellow ochre’.
‘Those colours all look good for painting sunflowers,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he agreed. ‘I think I’ll use all of them. I want to try painting something that’s actually here in front of me before I start the sunflowers though.’ He dipped his brush in the thinned-down paint and started to smile. ‘This is so cool,’ he said.
I stood watching as he held the tip of his brush a few inches away from the blank canvas and kept it there for ages, as if he was reluctant to put the first stroke of paint on to the surface.
‘Go on, then,’ I encouraged him eventually. ‘What are you waiting for?’
That’s when he got cross with me. ‘Look, if I’m going to do this, I need you to promise not to look until it’s finished,’ he said, lowering his brush.
‘But—’
‘I can’t do it if you’re watching me! You’ve either got to promise or I won’t do it at all!’
‘Don’t be so sensitive!’ I teased.
‘Artists are sensitive,’ Alex replied.
‘I don’t see why they should be any more sensitive than gardeners,’ I told him. ‘And I don’t mind people watching me while I work.’
‘This is different,’ he said.
‘Why?’ I demanded, starting to get impatient. ‘Don’t get all snooty about it, Alex. It’s not a work of art yet, you know.’
‘I’m not being snooty!’ he protested. ‘I’m scared to let you see it before it’s done, Mary. Can’t you see that? It’s just like you with the garden – you don’t want anyone else to see that until it’s finished, do you? That’s why you wanted the door locked.’
Of course he did have a point. Except that I wasn’t excluding him from seeing the garden before it was done, whereas he was clearly excluding me from seeing his pictures. Though I suppose I was the only person besides him who even knew about his secret painting project.
