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

XIII

For an entire month the strange compact between the governess and her pupils held. She could sit with them, walk with them, teach them their lessons—but to speak freely to them proved as impossible as it had ever been, the difficulty only sharpened by their proximity. And what struck her most, looking back, was the small ironic consciousness that lived in the children’s manner. They knew exactly where the forbidden ground lay. They had, without a word exchanged on the subject, constructed a tacit arrangement by which the three of them skirted every dangerous topic as if by instinct. The governess was certain she was not imagining it. More than once she could have sworn that one child, with an invisible nudge, said to the other: “She thinks she’ll manage it this time—but she won’t.” To “manage it” would have been to speak directly of the previous governess, of the dead, of the things that lay behind. Instead, the children drew her relentlessly into the story of her own life—the eccentricities of her father, the furniture of her home, the sayings of old Goody Gosling, the cleverness of the vicarage pony. Over her past alone could they take their ease.

Meanwhile the apparitions had ceased. Since that second night on the upper landing, when something brushed past her in the dark, she had seen nothing she ought not to have seen. The summer had turned, the autumn had dropped upon Bly and blown out half the lights. The house, with its grey sky and scattered dead leaves, was like a theatre after the final performance. She recognized the portents, the particular stillnesses that had once preceded a sighting—yet nothing came, and she continued unmolested, if a young woman whose sensibility had deepened rather than declined could be called that. She had told Mrs. Grose she would rather lose her power to see than keep it, for the danger was that her own eyes might be sealed precisely when the children’s were widest. And so it seemed—they were sealed, and yet in another way they were opened, for she was now convinced the children had visitors of their own. She would have liked to cry out: “They’re here, you little wretches, and you can’t deny it!” But the children only answered with greater sociability, with tender embraces, with the inveterate kissing that always followed a moment of strain, and with the precious question—“When do you think he will come? Don’t you think we ought to write?”—about their uncle in Harley Street, which had become the perfect device for filling any awkward silence. She had even kept the children’s charming letters, all of which she judged too beautiful to be posted, and this only sharpened the irony of being plied with the supposition that the uncle might at any moment appear.

XIV

It was on a crisp Sunday morning, walking to church with Miles at her side and Flora ahead with Mrs. Grose, that the boy chose his moment. The air was bright and sharp, the church-bells almost gay, and the governess had been struck, with a kind of grateful wonder, by the obedience of her little charges—how they never resented her perpetual company, her pinning of the boy to her shawl. Then, with the casual sweetness that was his weapon, Miles asked: “Look here, my dear, you know—when in the world, please, am I going back to school?”

She stopped as if a tree had fallen across the road. The whole thing, she felt, was now virtually out between them. He could see the advantage he had gained; he waited, smiling his suggestive, inconclusive smile, and added that, after all, he was a fellow getting on. She managed to falter that he was indeed getting on. He played with the idea that she could not say he had not been awfully good. She laid her hand on his shoulder and admitted that she could not say it. He pressed, with childish reproach, that there had been “just that one night”—the night he had gone down, gone out of the house. He had done it, he explained with innocent extravagance, to show her he could. She felt a desperate wish to keep her wits about her. She assured him he could, that he certainly could again, but that he would not. He then took her arm and asked, with no less apparent innocence, when he was going back.

When she asked if he had been very happy at school, he was more than contented anywhere. When she suggested that, if he was happy here—his face opened with the lovely impatience of his kind. He wanted to see more life. He knew almost as much as she did, he confessed, and wanted to know more. She hurried their steps toward the church, hungry for the comparative dusk of the pew and the help of the hassock under her knees. But before they had even entered the churchyard, he threw out: “I want my own sort!” She laughed that there were not many of his own sort, unless perhaps dear little Flora. He reproached her for comparing him to a baby girl. She asked if he did not love their sweet Flora. He repeated, with charming evasion: “If I didn’t—and you too—”; and then, by a low oblong tomb among the old graves, he brought her to a halt and asked the question he had been working toward: “Does my uncle think what you think?” She was careful, but in the end she conceded that she did not think the uncle much cared. Miles stood looking at her, his face extraordinary with brightness, and said: “Then don’t you think he can be made to? In what way?” “By his coming down.” “I will!” the boy said, with an emphasis that made her feel the curtain had risen on the last act of her drama, and he marched alone into the church.