Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies. John Walsh

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СКАЧАТЬ in a black dress, her fair hair drawn back from her forehead and clamped in a matronly helmet over her tiny ears. The man was brisk and slightly bullying, but he hired Miss Giddens anyway, and she was soon riding in a horse-drawn trap on a sunny morning towards a country house to take up her new position.

      The children, Miles and Flora, were cute but rather stiff, unlike any children I’d ever met. The housekeeper (Megs Jenkins) wore a starched white head-dress and a pleated apron and was obviously a pushover, keen to be liked by the new arrival.

      Everybody was getting on fine. Nice house, nice children, nice servant, all of them glad to see the nice nanny. My crisps were a nice treat, the fire was warming, the room breathed family togetherness. Maybe I’d been wrong to be worried by the credit sequence. The Saturday-evening world inside the curtained windows was as nice as could be, and so was the posh-kids drama on the television screen.

Then it started to go wrong. There was a scene in which Deborah Kerr was talking to Megs Jenkins and Flora, the little girl, out in the garden – and the governess suddenly saw, on the battlements of the house, a man looking down at them. She gazed up at the figure, trying to make out who it could be, but was blinded by sunlight, as the music emphasised her sudden panic. Tiny hairs prickled on my arm. Assuming the man to be an intruder, Deborah Kerr rushed inside the house, up the stairs, up to the flat roof – and discovered only the brilliantined Miles, sitting there playing with some pigeons. The governess asked if anyone else has been standing there. No, said Miles, there’d been nobody around but himself. But the scene intimated some evil and dread about to take over the ordinary world.^*

      ‘This is awful boring grown-up stuff for you to be watching,’ said my mother. ‘I think it’s time you had your bath and got in your pyjamas.’ How shrewd of her to sense that the film wasn’t going to be a joyful experience for a highly-strung kid.

      I looked at Madelyn. She was eating a Kit-Kat, unconcerned, her eyes fixed on the TV. ‘Tell me what happens, Mad, OK?’ I said.

      ‘Sure, yeah. Don’t take too long or you’ll miss the plot.’

      Outside, on the landing, the bathroom door yawned open on the right. It seemed like a dark cave, the invitation to some frightful ambush. I looked up at the 40-watt bulb. The figure of the man in the film, standing in blinding sunlight, seemed to lurk there. On the wall outside my parents’ bedroom, the pictured face of Christ the Saviour regarded me calmly, his opened-up heart (that classic piece of bad-taste Catholic iconography) streaming light.

      I rushed into the bathroom, closed the door and locked it firmly. There’s nothing wrong, I told myself, it’s only a silly film from a hundred years ago. The long bathroom window had a venetian blind which threw slatted shadows from the streetlamp onto the vinyl floor. I switched on the light over the sink and peered out the window while the bath was running. Nobody was around on Battersea Rise. No walkers, no dogs, no drunks. Maybe they were all indoors, watching two Victorian children explaining away their ghostly visitations.

      Ten minutes later, bathed, towelled, pyjamaed, tooth-brushed and ready for bed, I stood in the bathroom doorway. The living-room door was three steps away, but it seemed like half a mile through a graveyard. A nagging alarm was dinging in my head, because I had to turn out the bathroom light, and I couldn’t bear to. I wanted the whole house to be lit up like a pantomime stage. I wanted to be un-frightened. Eventually I took a deep breath, yanked the light switch, crossed the big hallway and opened the living-room door.

      My family’s eyes were fixed on the TV screen. I reclaimed my position on the white rug.

      ‘What’s happened?’ I asked, as airily as I could.

      ‘Shhhh,’ they all said, in chorus.

      ‘Mad? What’s happening now?’

      ‘It’s nothing,’ said my sister. ‘They’re just playing Hide and Seek.’

      That sounded OK. How frightening could that be? Back beside the fire, I saw that Miss Giddens was looking for her young charges in the dark upstairs rooms of the old house. As she moved along a spooky corridor, the wraith-like figure of a young woman suddenly glided across it and disappeared into the wall.

      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ