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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 me with a scar. For years, I had a fetish about windows. I learned not to look at them when approaching a friend’s house, especially when it was night-time, lest I should see something I’d rather not see. When I entered my bedroom each night, I used to play a foolish game of Scare Yourself. I’d stick out my left hand and, walking over the threshold, I’d sweep it down the wall to switch the light on. If my hand connected with the switch, the light would come on and all would be well, and I’d walk to the windows and draw the curtains without a care. But if, in that downward swipe, I missed the switch, and walked into the darkness, I somehow convinced myself that there, right before me, the worst person in the world would be staring in at me through the glass …

      It was a masochistic little game, the kind of challenge you set yourself when you’re young, but it was a paradigm of the impulse that takes us to scary movies. We dare ourselves not to be scared by the demons lurking on screen. We test, in some perverse way, our capacity to become, voluntarily, gibbering wrecks when confronted by our own paranoia.

      Windows, for me, became emblems of seeing the world all wrong. There is a long pedigree of minatory casements in English literature to legitimise my personal dread about the things. Poets from Chaucer to Wordsworth have presented windows as the eyes of houses, and, by extension, the eyes of the beloved figure within, who has turned her face away from the poet, leaving the house shuttered and forever blind to him.

      Louis MacNeice in ‘Corner Seat’ identifies a moment of paranoia we’ve all felt on the 11.58 p.m. ride home from the fleshpots of the West End:

      Windows between you and the world

      Keep out the cold, keep out the fright –

      So why does your reflection seem

      So lonely in the moving night?

      It may be a universal emotion to be upset by seeing your reflected face, not as a reflection in a mirror but as a face beyond the glass – as if some alter ego had come a-calling through the window from another world, full of worry and pain; the face of someone who is not the real you, but a subconscious stranger who surfaces only in dreams.

      When I was older, and saw The Innocents again at fifteen, and was still petrified by it, I wondered about my neurotic dread of windows. It seemed there must have been some earlier image that lay deep inside me, a fundamental dread summoned back by the horrible face of Peter Wyngarde. Eventually, I worked out what it was: The Snow Queen, an animated version of the Charles Perrault fairy tale about a cold-hearted monarch who steals away a little boy and takes him to her kingdom, where he is eventually rescued by his sister.

      I was about three or four, at my first home, in Balham, South London. We’d had a television only a short time (this would have been 1957 or 1958) and Madelyn and I watched it obsessively. She and I had a cunning strategy for the moments when anything scary or unpleasant appeared on screen. One of us would pretend to go to the loo, crying СКАЧАТЬ