‘Who was that?’ I said. There was no answer.
‘Who was that lady?’ I asked, more loudly.
‘It’s obviously a ghost,’ said my sister. ‘She’s haunting the little girl.’
Icicles prickled up my back. My mother looked at my father, possibly imploring him to send me to bed before something awful happened, but he was engrossed in the TV. Minutes later, Miss Giddens found both Flora and the little boy, Miles. The children leapt upon her with jolly shouts and playful embraces. I breathed more easily. Then Miles, shouting with glee, put his arm around the governess’s neck and started playfully to strangle her. ‘Miles,’ she said. ‘I can’t breathe …’
I didn’t like this film one bit. I picked up my funny book again and tried to read, but the words wouldn’t connect. My eyes seemed magnetised by the television screen. I couldn’t stop myself watching. Soon it was Deborah Kerr’s turn to hide in this horrible game. She found a hiding-place behind one of the curtains in the old house’s dining-room, and stood in the moonlit darkness, looking worried and awfully vulnerable.
And when I next trusted myself to look, something terrible was happening. We were looking more and more closely at Miss Giddens’s worried, handsome face and – Oh no, oh no! – just behind her, and through the window, a man suddenly appeared, out in the garden. He was gliding towards the window, was creeping up on her with frightening intent as she stood there, in hiding, oblivious to the danger. His face was looming up out of the darkness, coming to see, coming to look in, coming to get her, coming to …
I froze, as if I’d been immersed in icy water. Sensing some awful presence behind her, Miss Giddens turned round – and there, filling the screen, was the face of the awful man glaring at her. He was swarthy, black-haired, and he looked at her with eyes of pure hatred. His face was dark, his eyes the eyes of the Maniac in the film hoarding beside St Mary’s church, as mad as the patient I’d seen in my father’s waiting-room. He was the worst person in the world – the embodiment of everything evil – and only the glass in the window separated him from the innocent governess.
I shrieked with terror. Seconds later, I was lying on the rug, panicked out of my wits.
‘John, for God’s sake, will you calm down?’ demanded my mother. ‘’Tis just an old fillum.’
‘Ahhhhhhhrrrrggghhh,’ I shouted, my face pressed against the ticklish carpet.
‘The children shouldn’t be stayin’ up watchin’ this awful stuff,’ my father muttered, to no one in particular.
‘Blimey,’ said my sister, coolly, ‘that made me jump.’
I groaned, tears squeezing through my tight-shut eyes.
‘John, come here and sit on my lap,’ said my mother, ‘and stop that awful noise. Look, the horrible man has gone away.’
I couldn’t look. Nothing would make me look at the television ever again. I was some way beyond any dispassionate connection with the narrative on the 20-inch Pandora’s box in the corner of the room. I keened, banshee-like, unstoppably.
‘It’s not a real ghost,’ said Madelyn diplomatically. ‘Just some bloke out in the garden looking through the window. Don’t make such a silly fuss.’
‘I saw a ghost once,’ said my father, stubbing out his cigarette in his marble ashtray. ‘In a big old hotel, over in Galway. It was an old feller from another century, gliding about in a long grey cloak. And believe me, John, ’twas nothing like that feller at all.’
‘Uhhhhhhhhgggg …’
‘Martin,’ said my mother sharply. ‘I don’t really think that’s helping.’
My mother picked me up in a quivering heap and hugged me. ‘Where’s your dressing-gown?’ she said. ‘You’re going to bed right this minute.’
‘No!’ I shouted. ‘I’m not going upstairs. Don’t make me go upstairs.’
‘It’s your bedtime,’ said my mother, ‘and you’re not staying here a minute longer.’
So I was led weeping off to bed. I could hardly get up the stairs, where there were doorways and shadows and too much dark to be borne. All the cosiness of home – the warmth and comfort inside the drawn curtains of the living-room – was obliterated now, because of the man with the horrible eyes outside the windows.
I made it to my room at the top of the house and was tucked up in bed and kissed goodnight, but I couldn’t sleep. I looked at the wall on my right, where giant shadows from the traffic outside the curtains sent bars of light marching up the flocked wallpaper. They were like demons, cunningly abseiling upwards to the ceiling to hang over me all night. I twisted round in the bed. To my left was a glooming darkness, irradiated by a clock with greenly phosphorescent hands that ticked the seconds away, loudly, relentlessly, tockingly-torturously, like the grandfather clock in Dombey and Son that I’d tried to read earlier that year, the one which tocks out the words ‘How. Is. My. Lit-tle. Friend?’ while Dombey Junior is gradually dying. The face of the devilish Peter Quint – the former gardener, I later discovered, who used to bully and sexually abuse Miss Jessel, the poor former governess, and who had now come back, in the person of the innocent Miles, to brutalise the poor Miss Giddens – kept looming towards me.*
My mother came up later, to find me whimpering uncontrollably.
‘John,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t upset yourself about a stupid thing on the telly. It’s only a story.’
‘I can’t stop thinking about the horrible man,’ I said into the pillow. ‘He won’t go away.’
‘You mustn’t get so upset about things in stories,’ she said, sitting down on the bed. ‘The people who make these silly fillums are just playing on your fears. You have to learn not to take them seriously, like learning not to be scared of the dark. You’ll find that goodness always wins out at the end. Everything turns out all right, in these silly movies, provided you stick it out for long enough.’
‘I can’t sleep,’ I moaned. ‘He’s there all the time, outside the window.’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ said my mother. ‘The thing is almost over now. Any minute, the police or somebody will arrive and the man’ll be carted off to prison, and the children will be all happy and playful again.’
I ceased whimpering. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Why wouldn’t I? I’ve seen a hundred of these stupid ghost stories.’
‘So, can I come down and watch them being all right again?’
‘Well …’
So somehow we decided I should come back downstairs and watch the end of the film sitting on her lap in front of the fire.
Had I been familiar with The Turn of the Screw, I’d have known that things weren’t going to end happily. I sat on my mother’s matronly skirts to watch the final unfolding of the tragedy. It was pitiless. The death of Miles, the possessed and malevolent little boy, in the governess’s arms was pretty bad. The whirling camera that disclosed the appalling Quint, standing on a plinth like a statue presiding over the kid’s death, wasn’t a barrel of laughs either. But neither was as bad as the final shot of Miss Jessel. She was seen standing in the rain among the reeds beside a lake, a vision of utter misery in her black governess threads, her arms hanging dejectedly by her side, her long black hair drenched and clinging to her white face. Nobody in history ever looked so desolate. And to emphasise her lonesomeness, this poor, wretched, rained-on, loveless ghost was seen in the middle distance, far from any comfort that we or Miss Giddens might be able to offer. And she was seen through a window.*
God knows how I got to sleep at all that night, but it left