by Julia Green
“It’s very old,” Dad said. “It’s probably worth something. But it must have belonged to the old lady, and I’m sure she would have wanted you to play with it.”
Tilly thought quickly of the girls in her new class at school. None of them would play with dollhouses. Not at their age! She could imagine them saying the words, sneering at her. But they weren’t here. They would never know. She made herself stop thinking about them.
“It’s lovely,” she said. “Can I keep it here, in my room?”
“Of course.”
When Dad went downstairs to cook supper, Tilly moved everything around in the dollhouse to make it cozier. She put the father doll in the kitchen. She laid the mother doll on the bed upstairs and sat the girl doll on the chair next to her.
That tune was in her head. The one she’d heard in the garden. The thin notes like a bird’s song, but in a girl’s clear voice, over and over.
Chapter 4
Tilly sat on the edge of Mom’s bed. It was Dad’s bed too, but because Mom was still ill she was lying right in the middle, her head on a bank of pillows. Tilly didn’t like seeing her like that. Normally, Mom would be rushing about and chatting and singing and doing her drawings for college. Mom was going to be an illustrator when she finished college. One day, Mom sighed, as if it was a long way off. When she was better, she was going to turn one of the spare bedrooms into her studio. It would be like Dad’s study, only nicer, with boxes of paints and pastels and thick, creamy paper.
“What have you been up to?” Mom asked.
Tilly thought about the dollhouse and the garden, and the rose petal scent, but her voice didn’t want to speak and her throat ached.
Dad talked instead. He told Mom about the old dollhouse he’d brought down from the attic for Tilly. “It must have belonged to the old lady who used to live here.”
“Miss Helen Sheldon,” Mom told Tilly. “I met her once or twice when I was little. She was friends with my mother—that’s your Nana. She would be pleased to think you have her dollhouse now.”
Mom stroked Tilly’s hair and Tilly laid her head down on the bed, close to her. She closed her eyes to smell Mom’s special scent. In her head Tilly asked how much longer it was going to be like this, and when Mom could get up again, but her voice wouldn’t say the words out loud. There was a lump getting in the way, deep in her throat.
“It won’t be forever, sweet pea,” Mom whispered into Tilly’s hair, as if she knew how much she wanted to know. “Thank you for being so good and patient.”
Tilly leaned in close, and she was nearly asleep, lying there while Mom talked with Dad about arrangements and the new chapter…the words all blurred into one soft hummmmmm.
Bedtime.
Tilly crouched down to look into the dollhouse windows. Everything was as it should be. She opened up the front, put her hand carefully into the kitchen, and pulled the china dog from his basket. She lifted him up close to look at him properly. He had golden fur and a white bib and a long tail, a bit like the fox. A fox wouldn’t sleep in a basket under the kitchen table. Tilly put the dog/fox down on the carpet, outside the dollhouse, looking in.
She climbed into bed. She was sleepy, drifting off almost as soon as she lay down and pulled the blanket up under her ears.
The fox padded across the silent night garden. It placed each foot carefully, stopping every few paces to sniff the air, nose twitching, tail held high, stiff like a brush. It looked up at Tilly’s bedroom window.
She sat as still as a stone, watching it back. Her breath clouded the glass, and in the second it took for her to rub it clear, the fox had gone again.
Tilly climbed back into bed. She thought about the night garden, and the fox. She imagined him squeezing through the metal gate, crossing the grassy path, and slipping around the gap in the old wooden gate, and then what? Next time, Tilly thought, next time I’m going to follow him and see where he goes.
The night-light by her bed cast its soft silver glow over the bedroom. Tilly reached out to look at the clock next to her glass of water. Five to five. Nearly morning. She had expected it to be much earlier: the middle of the night, even. The bark of the fox must have woken her up.
She thought about Mom, pale against the pillow, and the worried crease on Dad’s face, in between his dark eyebrows, when he looked at her.
What if Mom didn’t get better? What if…?
Tilly pulled furry Little Fox closer. She stroked his head with her cheek.
Chapter 5
Tap tap tap…Dad was busy in his study, typing on the laptop. Tilly listened. The taps made a sort of pattern, a rhythm, as if Dad was playing a tune instead of writing a story. The stories he wrote were for grown-ups and looked boring because there were so many words and no pictures at all. Mom wanted Dad to write a book for children one day, so she could do the illustrations.
Tilly picked at a piece of toast with butter and honey. She was glad it was Saturday and there was no school. But she still wasn’t hungry. She took the toast with her out into the garden, and the bird flew down from the tree as if it had been waiting for her.
The garden was waking up in the sun, but it was still chilly and the grass was wet with dew. Spiders’ webs stretched out like fairy nets across the lawn; bigger spiders had made traps by spinning long, sticky strings between the bushes on either side of the path. Tilly stopped to watch a speckledy-brown spider sitting very still in the middle of its web. Spiders were good at waiting.
She went to check on the rose-petal perfume in the shed. The liquid had turned sludgy brown and stank. Tilly chucked it out over the ground next to the rose bush in disgust. She hadn’t made rose scent after all.
She wished there was a swing in this garden. Or a tree house or a pond or something more interesting than grass and flower beds and an old vegetable plot. She sat under the tree for a while but it was too cold. She put her hands in her coat pockets and felt something warm and furry. Little Fox! She had forgotten she’d put him in there. She fished him out and sat him on the arm of the bench so he could see the garden. His beady eyes twinkled in the sun.
Tilly looked around quickly. But there was no one there, no one to see and be mean and tell her she was too old to play games like this…
Little Fox didn’t like sitting still. Little Fox wanted an adventure. Come on, Little Fox said to Tilly. What are you waiting for? He led the way to the gate. He could slip through easily, but Tilly needed to undo the latch and open the gate properly. Tilly looked back at the house, once. She could see the windows at the top of one end of the house, but no one was watching.
It was sunny and much warmer on this side of the gate. The hedge sheltered the grassy path. The hedge smelled sweet and strange.
Now where? Tilly asked Little Fox.
Little Fox wanted to explore the grassy path, to see where it went, but then he saw the wooden gate. This way, Little Fox said.
Tilly pushed the gate to make a bigger gap, big enough for her, and it squeaked as it inched wider.
“It’s another sort of garden,” Tilly whispered. But the grass hadn’t been cut for a long time. It grew tall and papery, almost higher than Tilly. Big, overgrown clumps of purple flowers were mixed in with the grass, and baby trees were pushing up everywhere, where seeds from a big tree had taken root. This will be a forest one day, Tilly thought, if no one cuts them down.
Tilly pushed through the long grass. Crickets clicked and jumped ahead of her. Insects hummed and hovered and buzzed. She stopped to watch two ladybugs climbing down a spear-shaped leaf. Farther along, she found a wild brambly patch with a few overripe blackberries still clinging to the prickly branches. Tilly picked and ate the ones she could reach. The juice stained her fingers red: like blood, Tilly thought. When Tilly trailed her hand along the top of a rough hedge with gray-green leaves, the smell made her sneeze. Lavender! She
found a thicket of overgrown roses, with a few last pink flowers and huge thorns along the wiry stems. Like in Sleeping Beauty, Tilly thought. Perhaps there’s a castle on the other side.
This was a wild garden. Anything might happen here. A secret garden, just for her and Little Fox to play in. It was a magic garden, Tilly decided, where the sun always shone and she could be happy and safe, and no one would know she was here. Unless…
She thought about the sound she’d heard the other day, like someone singing. Perhaps it had been a bird after all. There was no sign of anyone else ever coming here. It was all overgrown and wild, as if it had been neglected for a long time. But there was much more to explore. Maybe, if she went farther in, she would find a house and a girl a bit like Ally, who would be her friend.
She’d been out for a long time. Dad would be looking for her.
“We can come back,” Tilly whispered to Little Fox. “But we can’t tell anyone else. They might try and stop us.”
For the first time since they’d moved, Tilly felt a little bit excited.
Chapter 6
It was Saturday again. “We’ve got shopping to do, Tilly,” Dad said.
Tilly put Little Fox on Mom’s bedroom windowsill so he could watch over the garden and keep an eye on Mom.
Mom helped Dad make a shopping list. Dad wrote it all down so he wouldn’t forget anything or get the wrong things. Tilly didn’t listen to their boring list. She had her own things to think about.
The town was busy. It took ages to find a place to park the car. Crowds of people all dressed in the same blue, white, and black sweaters and scarves were pushing and shoving their way toward the rugby field.
“Must be a home match,” Dad said. “I’d forgotten.”
Tilly and Dad were walking the opposite way of everyone else along the riverside path, moving against the flow. It took a long time to reach the steps leading up to the bridge and the main street.
“What shall we do first? Food or fun?” Dad asked.
“Boring food first,” Tilly said. It was best to get it over and done with. That’s what Mom would do: supermarket shop first then something for fun, like a café or a bookshop or sometimes both. “Then I know where I want to go for a treat.”
The dollhouse shop was in a small street that climbed up a hill to the traffic lights. Tilly stopped to look in the window. It was all lit up with special lights on glass shelves: rows of tiny beds and tables and chairs; a shelf full of food on tiny china plates; garden stuff like benches and flowerpots and a tiny watering can and tools. Tilly looked at the nursery section: a tiny crib on rockers, a cot, a little stroller. There were animals too: a family of kittens in a basket; a black and white collie dog. She liked the little wooden toy box, a bit like her real one, with a hinged lid and everything. Best of all was the tiny dollhouse. A dollhouse to go inside a dollhouse! Like Russian dolls, where the dolls go on getting smaller and smaller as you take them apart, until you get to the last teeny one that doesn’t open.
Dad was looking at his watch. “How about I leave you here for ten minutes or so, Tilly, and then come back to get you? Then I can take care of a few things I need to do.”
Tilly nodded. Mom would have enjoyed coming right in with her and looking at everything: the special wallpaper and the electric light sets and the rows of tiny dolls, and the houses themselves. But Dad would fidget and be bored. He would say how everything was too expensive.
Tilly watched him going off down the hill. Suddenly, the street seemed too big and busy, and she was too small and alone. She pushed the shop door open and went inside.
The shop lady smiled from behind the counter. She didn’t say anything, and she went back to shuffling papers and writing things down.
Tilly began to relax. First she looked at the rows of dollhouses on a big shelf on one side of the shop, then she crossed over to where there were more cabinets full of stuff like in the window, and then she studied the families. It was important to get the size right. Most of these people were too big for Tilly’s dollhouse. That was because her dollhouse was very old.
She thought about what Mom had told her. The dollhouse was older than Mom or Granny even. It had belonged to the old lady called Miss Sheldon who had lived in the house before them. It had been Miss Sheldon’s dollhouse when she was a girl, a long, long time ago. She hadn’t had any children of her own. And that’s how Mom, Dad, and Tilly had come to live in her house. Miss Sheldon died when she was nearly one hundred years old. She had left the house to Mom in her will.
Tilly only had enough money for one thing from her list. She went to the window to choose. The lady was watching her now. Tilly took a long time to decide. The tiny dollhouse was best of all, but it cost too much. She picked up the cradle instead.
“You made a good choice,” the lady said as she handed Tilly her change. “I love that cradle too. I like the way it actually rocks.” She wrapped it up in pale pink tissue paper and put the package into a blue paper bag. “Have you got a baby to put in it?” the lady asked.
“Not yet,” Tilly whispered.
Now she didn’t know what to do. The door jangled again as she opened it and stepped out into the street. She looked up and then down the street, but there was no sign of Dad. He’d said ten minutes, but it seemed much longer than that. She was glad no one spoke to her or asked her what she was doing there. She felt too small all by herself in town, even though lots of the girls in her new class wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Harriet, Lucy, and Simone came to town by themselves every Saturday, they said.
She didn’t want to think about those girls. She imagined meeting them now, and the way they’d smile and stare at her clothes and toss their hair and giggle to each other. They’d think she was weird, still being interested in dollhouses at her age!
Dad was running up the hill at last, laden with bags, and smiling.
“Sorry! I got carried away!” Dad said. “Got what you wanted?”
Tilly nodded.
“Come on then, before the parking meter runs out.”
They jogged together back to the car. This end of town wasn’t so busy, now that the match was in full swing. Every so often the roar of thousands of voices echoed up from the riverside field as someone scored.
Tilly shoved the paper bag deep in her pocket to keep it safe.
She climbed into the front seat while Dad stowed all the bags in the trunk. Dad was in a good mood. He chattered all the way home about the books he’d found in the thrift store. Her hand curled around the package in her pocket, feeling the small wooden shape nestling in the paper.
“We should have bought a get-better-soon present for Mom,” Tilly said.
Dad looked at her. “Flowers?” he said. “What do you think? I can stop at the florist on the corner if it’s still open. You could run in and choose her some.”
Dad stopped the car just outside the flower shop. “Here,” he said to Tilly. He gave her some money.
Tilly looked at all the buckets of flowers on the pavement outside the shop. Then she went inside to see what was there. She picked out a bunch of pink and creamy-white flowers, and the florist wrapped them up and tied a ribbon around them. “Someone’s birthday?” she asked. “She’s going to be very pleased.”
Tilly didn’t say anything. She just smiled and handed over Dad’s money and went back out to the car with the change in one hand and the flowers in the other.
“That’ll do the trick,” Dad said. “And we’ll make tea and sandwiches for the three of us when we get home.”
Little Fox was bored. He wanted an adventure. Can’t we go back to the magic garden? he asked Tilly when she picked him up off the windowsill.
It’s getting dark, Tilly said. It’s cold outside now.
So? I’ve got fur and you can put on your coat! Little Fox said.
Dad and Mom were deep in conversation. Dad was eating his way through the pile of sandwiches. The pink and white flowers were in a big glass vase on the table. Mom had said they were truly beautiful, the perfect choice.
Tilly slid down off the windowsill. “Can I go and play?” she asked Dad.
He nodded. He didn’t ask where. He didn’t say not outside.
Downstairs, Tilly put on her coat. She slipped her feet into rain boots. She put Little Fox in her pocket. She opened the back door and went into the garden. Birds were flying high in the blue-dark sky, calling to each other. Lots of birds, flying together in a V-shape, with one bird leading the way, as if they were traveling a long distance.
It was nearly dark, but once you were outside, your eyes got used to it and it wasn’t really dark at all.
Hurry up! Little Fox said.
They crossed the grass. The little bird scolded from the tree—tut tut!
Tilly opened the gate, crossed the grassy path, and squeezed around the wooden door into the magic garden.
Chapter 7
Tilly put Little Fox down on the ground at the foot of a big tree, where the trunk turned into twisting roots and dead leaves had piled up in between to make a soft sitting place. Tilly settled down to think.
A blackbird flew over, calling out its warning cry. Above her, high in the tree, a robin began to sing. Tilly remembered that other song, from before. But there was no sign of anyone here today. Just her and the wild birds, and maybe a fox, hidden somewhere.
