The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End

V

The governess had gone pale—white as a sheet, by Mrs. Grose’s reckoning—when the housekeeper came hurrying around the corner of the house, flushed and breathless. Something was clearly very wrong. The governess reached for her hand and held it tightly, taking a strange comfort in the shy heave of Mrs. Grose’s surprise. She could not go to church. She had been frightened.

What Mrs. Grose had glimpsed from the dining-room window had been bad enough, but what the governess had seen just before was much worse. An extraordinary man, looking in. She had no idea who he was. Mrs. Grose gazed around the empty lawn in vain; the man was gone. The governess admitted she had seen him before, once, on the old tower—standing there and looking down at her, always at this same hour, never quite at dark. He was no gentleman, though he wore somebody’s smart clothes. He was a horror, with red curling hair, a pale long face, sharp fixed eyes, thin lips, an actor’s look. He had no hat.

Mrs. Grose’s round face blanched as the description unfolded. When the governess pressed—dressed in somebody’s clothes, smart but not his own?—the housekeeper broke into a breathless groan. They were the master’s. She faltered but a moment before she cried the name: Peter Quint, the master’s own man, his valet when he was here last year. He never wore his hat, but he did wear waistcoats—some of them missing. When the master went, Quint was alone, in charge of the household. What became of him? He died. On a winter’s morning, stone dead on the road from the village. Such a catastrophe as the icy slope could explain. The governess could barely whisper the word.

VI

That night, in the schoolroom, the two women had everything out. Mrs. Grose had seen nothing herself, but she accepted the governess’s truth without questioning her sanity, and ended by showing her an awe-stricken tenderness that felt like the sweetest of human charities. What was settled between them was that they would bear things together. The governess knew what she was capable of meeting to shelter her pupils; she only wondered what Mrs. Grose was prepared for.

Quint, the governess concluded with a kind of terrible clarity, had been looking for little Miles. That was whom he was looking for. He wanted to appear to them—the children. But by offering herself as the sole subject of these visitations, by accepting, by inviting, by surmounting the horror, she might serve as an expiatory victim and guard the children’s tranquillity. She would stand before them, a screen.

In the days that followed, she pressed Mrs. Grose on every detail. The children had never mentioned Quint—not his name, his presence, his history. The little lady didn’t remember; she had never heard or known. But Miles would remember. Quint, Mrs. Grose emphasized, had been much too free. Too free with everyone, including the children. He was a man of strange passages and vices more than suspected, but the wound to his head from the icy slope was what the inquest settled on.

There was, the governess found, a kind of joy in this extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded. She had been asked for a service admirable and difficult, and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen that she could succeed where many another girl might have failed. We were cut off together, she thought; united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I had them. I was to be a screen.

It was during one of those long afternoons that she was strolling by the lake with Flora (the Sea of Azof, in their geography lesson), while Miles remained indoors with his book. She had sat down on the old stone bench with her sewing. Across the lake, on the far side, she became aware—without direct vision, but with absolute certitude—that there was a third person present. The trees and shrubbery were bright in the hot still hour, and there was no ambiguity in her certainty that, when she raised her eyes, she would find a figure there. She forced herself not to look, and turned instead to watch Flora. The child was absorbed in fitting a small piece of wood into another—constructing, with intense concentration, a little boat. Her back was turned to the water. Then the governess lifted her eyes and faced what she had to face.