Florence and Giles and The Turn of the Screw

11

In the morning, when Giles and I arrived downstairs for breakfast, the table in the breakfast room was once again set for three. As I sat down, I saw, through the open door to the kitchen, Mrs Grouse seated at the table there, over breakfast with Meg and Mary and John. When she heard me she wistfulled me such a look that I was near too guilty to eat. For all her faults, Mrs Grouse was at heart a kindly soul and also easy for a little finger twistery. Some part of me already knew Miss Taylor would not be at all like that.

Speaking of that devil (for such she was, as you shall see), at that moment she arrived. She good morninged Giles and me and walked to the kitchen door and good morninged all the servants and Mrs Grouse too. Meg and Mary flummoxed about, scraping their chairs to rise from their own meal and hithering and thithering to supply us with oatmeal and eggs and waffles and syrup. I wondered at this, for Miss Whitaker had been treated somewhat as a kind of servant, albeit on another level, along with Mrs Grouse. Miss Taylor occupied the same position and yet, already, by some force of will, had everyone behaving toward her as if she were royalty. How had that happened?

As we nervoused our food we did not speak and carefulled not to let a fork tinkle against a plate, and in the silent setting down of our milk glasses upon the table, for both Giles and I feared to draw attention to ourselves as if, by our very existence, we might somehow offend. It would have been a good time for pin droppery if you happened to have one you were having difficulty holding on to, because you would surely have heard it loud and clear. It was Miss Taylor who broke the silence. ‘Giles,’ she said, then took a swig of her coffee and set the cup back down, ‘Giles, we do not eat in that manner.’

Giles gulped. ‘What manner would that be, Miss Wh—, I mean, Miss Taylor?’

‘Why, taking all those bites without recourse to chewing or swallowing. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, after all.’ She beamed at me and I weaked her one back; it wasn’t a very good joke.

Giles got stuck into his waffle again, whereupon Miss Taylor’s hand shot out like a whipcrack and knocked it from his hand. ‘I told you,’ she hissed. ‘Not like that.’

Giles’s eyes started to tear up. ‘I – I’m sorry, miss, but I don’t understand. Like what?’

‘Why, like this!’ She snatched up the waffle and began a frenetic biting of it, like some demented bird pecking at it, one bite after another, without pause to chew or swallow, until the whole thing had disappeared. There was a long silence while Giles and I open-mouthed her, for her cheeks were packed out like a hamster’s, and then she finally gulped the whole lot down and said, ‘That’s how you don’t eat, my boy. Now do you see?’

Giles’s cheeks glistened and he brushed away the tears with the back of his hand. I had rarely seen Giles cry and yet this wiping of the tears was such an unconscious and therefore, I presumed, familiar action I wondered how much crying had occurred while he was away at school. We silenced our way through the rest of our breakfast.

After it was over, when we left the dining room, Giles and I turned toward the stairs to go up to the schoolroom and I heartsank at the thought of spending my day over some pointless needlepoint when I yearned to be in the library, but before we could begin to ascend, Miss Taylor called out to us. ‘Not that way, children. Look, the sun is shining. I suggest that as it’s such a lovely day and my first one here too, why don’t you show me the grounds?’

Giles, suddenly unbound from Latin and history, as hateful to him as embroidery was to me, broke into a smile that instanted her forgiveness for the slapping of the waffle from his hand. And I, I too, thought that maybe this wasn’t so bad, that perhaps this was a woman with a sharp temper, but nevertheless good-willed beneath. I little knew.

In the grounds, Giles and I ran before her, dodging behind bushes and leaping out upon one another. At first we cautioned, for we had no idea what restrictions we might be under, but as she did nothing but smile fondly at our actions and nod approval of them at us, we bolded and all but became our old selves as though no new governess had come at all.

Miss Taylor surveyed the shrubbery where we hide-and-seeked most because it was so overgrown it offered the best concealment, and shook her head. ‘It is all sadly neglected and unkempt,’ she murmured. ‘Why have they let it get into such a state?’

I paused in my play, not realising she was talking to herself, and answered, ‘Well, you see, miss, there is only John to look after everything and he has all the jobs about the house, and the feeding and rubbing down and exercising of the horses, as well as all the grounds, and it is too much for one man, especially one who is not getting any younger.’

She shot me a look.

‘I mean, that’s what he says, miss, about not getting any younger.’

She distanted a smile and surveyed the shrubbery again and shook her head in a weary way. She walked on and we followed, tagging one another in her wake. Eventually we reached the lake.

‘Ah, the lake,’ she obvioused.

‘Yes, miss,’ I polited back.

She began to walk around it and we followed her, past the old wooden jetty and the boathouse, and we were about halfway round when she stopped, and stared out over the water. It shivered me that she should pick out this particular spot. Just at that moment I happened to look down at the water’s edge and saw the lilies were in bloom and all at once I remembered their scent on the unseen woman who had passed me in the night, their icy whiteness on Miss Whitaker’s coffin. And I thought now, as I had on the day of the funeral, of Shakespeare’s line, of how ‘lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’, and it spinetingled me quite.

Before I had gotten hold of myself again I realised someone was speaking to me and then that it was Miss Taylor. ‘Pray tell me, where did it happen?’

I knew what she meant immediately. This after all was the very place. But I couldn’t say that. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The accident, of course. Weren’t you in the boat with her? I understood that you were.’ She stared at Giles, who wriggled around as though his collar was suddenly too tight.

‘I – I –’ he stammered.

‘Not Giles,’ I said. ‘Just me. He was in the schoolroom.’

Giles nodded. ‘Yes, I was in the schoolroom.’

‘Miss Whitaker had set him some Latin sentences to write out. It was only she and I in the boat.’

‘And what exactly happened?’

I turned my back on her. ‘I would rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind. I don’t like to think about that day.’

She didn’t reply, and when I decided it safed to face her again I found her not looking at me at all, even though I had felt sure of the weight of her eyes upon my back, but gazing out over the lake, at the very spot where the boat had been when poor Miss Whitaker was tragicked away.

Miss Taylor turned and shot me a knowing smile and then walked past me, back the way we had come, and at that moment a breeze got up and stirred the flimsy material of her blouse and there it was again, the death smell of lilies, but I did not know if it was from the actual lilies growing by the lake or the scent the new governess wore.

Afterward we wandered the grounds and rambled the woods and she would ask me questions about the place but not really listen to my replies, as if she already knew the answers or had no interest in them. It was only when we were in the woods and I explained that the footpath we were on led all the way to the Van Hoosier house, and that it was the way my special friend Theo took except when there was snow about, that her interest perked up and she questioned me some about him. I explained that with the summer nearly over he’d soon be going back to New York and school, at which she said, ‘Ah,’ as though that was all right, although then I added, ‘But with a bit of luck he’ll get ill again soon,’ which made her face a puzzle, so that I laughed and explained how Theo always came here when he had asthma and so I kind of hoped he’d have another bout before too long.

‘It’ll start turning cold and damp in a few weeks,’ I enthused, ‘and that’s really bad for his chest.’

It was past noon when we got back to the house, but she told us to wait outside and went into the house, where she asked Meg to set us up a picnic and Mary came and spread a big rug out on the lawn in back of the house and she and Meg brought our food out there, and afterward Miss Taylor sat with her back against a tree trunk and seemed to be dozing while Giles and I played tag, but whenever I looked at her it seemed she was watching us, her eyes strangely hooded, like a reptile’s, so I had this feeling she had swallowed a snake or a lizard, and that it was trapped inside her and had taken over her body and now gazed greedily out through her eyes.

12

That night I thought about pretending another nightwalk, but then I remembered that figure brushing against me in the dark, the scent of death lilies in my nostrils and most of all, Miss Taylor sitting watching us by the lake, with those hooded snake eyes, and I decided the risk of doing it a second night running was too great. Staying in bed, though, I samed as before: I restlessed and could not sleep. At one point, I’m sure it was long after midnight, I must have dropped off, for I began to have the dream, my nightwalking dream, but then it was interrupted and I awoke to find myself still in bed. I alarmed at the dream and anxioused about Giles. Who, after all, was this woman? How had she been employed? What did any of us know about her? She’d given nothing away.

The way our bedrooms were arranged, which had been carried out by Miss Whitaker, was that Giles and I each had our own room, betweened by the schooolroom, though that could only be reached from the corridor, not from our rooms. On the other side of Giles’s room was where Miss Whitaker, and now of course Miss Taylor, bedded, though in her case with not only a door onto the corridor, but also another into Giles’s room.

I realised that some sound alonged the corridor from that direction, a queer sound, almost like singing, but not quite, as if the woman – for it was a female voice, no doubt about that – could not make up her mind whether she was singing or something else, keening perhaps, for someone who had died. Now, if you had asked me before what sort of noise a ghost would make, I could not have answered because I had never given any thought to them having a sound, other perhaps than a clanking of chains or outright wailing or something of that sort, but I recognised now that if the spirits of the dead did indeed walk and were able to give voice to their unquiet feelings, this is how they would sound.

I instincted to over-my-head the blankets to hide myself away from whatever it should be that walked the night and to block out the noise it made, but then, how could I think of myself when Giles all-aloned and – even if the thing meant no harm – would be in mortal terror at that awful sound? I slipped from my bed, felt for my robe and drew it about me, as much for comfort as anything else, as it was a warm late summer night and there was no one, no one living, at least, to see me in my nightgown. I barefooted it to the door, listened at it awhile but heard only the vague whistling of the night wind and comforted myself that it must have been that I had heard all along. Be that as it might, I still had to proceed, for I knew I could never rest until I had satisfied myself my precious little brother was safe. I slowed open the door, checking myself for a moment when it creaked, and then, there being no change, slipped into the passage outside.

I had scarce one footed in front of the other when I caught it again, that low keening noise, sounding like nothing so much as the wind itself, but as though it had somehow learned music and was howling in tune. I found myself almost enchanted by it, so it was a few seconds before I realised whence the noise came. It was worse than I had thought, for it, the thing making the noise, whatever it was, was in Giles’s room. I pitter-pattered along the bare boards, unheeding the sound I made, indeed thinking by louding my approach to perhaps scare the thing off. But when I reached Giles’s door I knew that my presence was unnoticed for the singing still persisted as before, low and eerie like a funeral dirge. I gingerlied my hand upon the handle of the door and turned it slowly, fearing once again to make any noise. I pushed open the door and what I saw near took my breath away. I shook my head in disbelief, trying to clear it of the vision before me, then somehow had the presence of mind to pinch my arm, as I have heard tell a body should to ascertain whether she dreams or not. The scene before me did not vanish, nor did I wake up.

It was almost exactly as in my dream of all those years; the same woman was bent over Giles’s bed, singing softly, except now, instead of the black of my dream, she was dressed all in white, a lacy nightgown and robe. She reached out her hand toward my brother and stroked the hair from his eyes and then she said, ‘Ah, my dear, I could eat you!’

The woman was Miss Taylor. I dizzied and reached out a hand to grab hold of the doorpost to save myself, but too late. The last thing I think I heard, although I felt it not, was the thud of my body hitting the floor.

I awoke in my own bed with sunlight streaming through the gaps in the drapes. So after all it had merely been my dream again. But had I simply had the dream, or had I nightwalked as well? There was something queer about all of this and for a minute or two my groggy head could not figure it out. I sensed something different from the way things always were, but what? Then it came to me. Always, I began with the dream, that was how it started. I saw the woman hovering over Giles’s bed, and then I walked. But last night I had walked first, and then I had seen her. I had begun the dream, that’s true, but then I’d awoken, risen from my bed and walked fully conscious. Or at least it seemed to me now that that was how it had been. Normally when I nightwalked I had afterward no recollection of having walked at all. Gradually, I began to remember more and more, the strange ghostly singing that had led me from my bed in the first place, which was not like anything in my dream.

There was a knock at the door, followed by Mary coming in bearing a tray. ‘Good morning, Miss Florence, are you all right now? I’m glad to see you awake, you gave us quite a fright last night, but then your walks always do. Now sit yourself up, there’s a good girl, miss, and I’ll set your breakfast down in front of you.’

I obeyed her. ‘S-so it happened then, I had one of my nightwalks?’

She set down the tray on my lap, opened the drapes so sunlight flooded the room, and busied herself pouring me some tea and lifting the little cosy from a boiled egg. ‘Oh yes, miss, though you didn’t get far. Only to Master Giles’s room, where you fell down in a faint on the floor. Would you believe Master Giles slept right through the whole thing? Lucky for you Miss Taylor heard you hit the floor or you’d have been on it all night and you’d be waking up now stiff as a board.’

‘Miss Taylor heard, you say? But wasn’t she already there?’

Mary stared at me and chuckled. ‘Good gracious no, miss. It was one o’clock in the morning. What would she be doing there at that time? No, she heard you and she was quite put out as she’d not been told of your night pursuits. She woke the whole household and in the end we had John pick you up and put you back in your bed. Now, that’s enough talking for you, miss.’ (Though it was she who’d done all the talking.) ‘You get your breakfast down you and then snuggle down and get back to sleep. You know you’re always tired after one of your nocturnal adventures. Miss Taylor said you’re not to think of coming down before noon.’

After Mary had gone I ate my breakfast, for I hungered terribly, but as for the snuggling down and going back to sleep, I could not, for my mind was a beehive of thoughts. On the one hand, all seemed simple enough. I had had the dream and one of my walks. In the past it had often happened that I had collapsed somewhere and been carried back to my bed unconscious. But what troubled me here was the order of things. Always the dream started with me in the same room as Giles, as we had been when we were small, not in the separate rooms we had now. And I had always sensed that the walking began after the dream, not before.

And it hadn’t felt like the dream. For one thing there was the singing. There had never been any such sound in my dream before. In fact, there was normally no sound at all until the woman bending over the bed said, ‘Ah, my dear, I could eat you!’ Also I realised now that I was still wearing my robe; they had evidently picked me up in it and straighted me to bed, probably not wishing to wake me by trying to take it off me. But last night I had gone to bed nightgowned only. I certained I had not got into bed with my robe on, and when I nightwalked I always did so in what I was wearing in bed; just as I never stopped for a candle, I never put on my robe. The whole thing did not make sense but that it had been exactly as I first remembered. I had begun the dream, but had then been woken by the noise the woman – Miss Taylor – had been making and, anxiousing for Giles, had risen, slipped on my robe, gone to my brother’s room and had there been so shocked by the sight of my dream now come true before my very eyes that I fell into a faint.

If all that trued, and I certained of it, then so did something else, namely that Miss Taylor had lied when she said she heard me fall and had got up from her bed to investigate. And of course she would lie, because she wouldn’t want anyone to know she had middle-of-the-nighted in Giles’s room. And when they told her of my nightwalks, she had reckoned to fool me into accepting her version of the truth.

Even though I sat in bed, too terrified to move a muscle, indeed, unable to, like the man in ‘The Premature Burial’ by Edgar Allan Poe, my heart was racing as though I had just been running. What did it all signify? Only that the new governess meant to do us harm. Or if not us, perhaps, then certainly Giles.

In the course of a troubled morning more thoughts came to me. Principal among them was my dream. My dream had come true! Exactly as it had always happened, I had now seen it in real life. I realised at last why from the beginning there had been this feeling of familiarity with Miss Taylor, for since my early childhood I had seen her a score of times in the dream. It was not that she resembled Miss Whitaker after all, indeed she didn’t look anything like her, although, strangely, when I thought about that, there was something of her that was the first governess, a look, an expression, a something in the falseness of her smile.

But how could it be that I had dreamed her before I’d even met her? How could that happen? I arounded and arounded this in my mind and could come up with no rational explanation. Eventually my frustration got the better of my fear and I got up and paced the room. And the more I paced and thought, the more there seemed but one explanation, although the thing itself impossibled, except by supernatural means, and it was this: that I had premonitioned what was to come. I had forewarned me in my dream of this woman who would one day enter our lives, and my dream had purpose: to save my brother from whatever evil she had planned. I made no mistake that it was evil, from the way she enthused those words, ‘Ah, my dear, I could eat you!’; and from the way she looked at Giles I doubtlessed he was the object of her attentions, the reason for her being here. She meant to do him harm.

At noon I made my way down to the breakfast room, but Miss Taylor and Giles were not yet there so I casualled into Mrs Grouse’s sitting room, where I found her alone.

‘Ah, there you are, Miss Florence,’ she beamed me. ‘Feeling better, I hope?’

‘Yes, thank you. Quite well.’ I had thought to tell her all about the supposed nightwalk and how it had never been and of what I had seen, but, seeing her face now, dismissed the thought; she would never believe me. Oh, she would not think me to be untruthing, merely mistaken. For what person who suddenly awakes somewhere inappropriate for sleep, perhaps in a carriage or the theatre, does not insist he or she has not been asleep at all? I decided to try a different tack.

‘Mrs Grouse,’ I said, fiddling idly with the blotter upon her desk as though what I was saying had no significance at all for me, ‘Mrs Grouse, what do you know of Miss Taylor?’

‘Why, no more than you, miss, only what she has told us all.’ She drew herself up huffily and sniffed. ‘I am sure I receive no special confidences from her. She is the governess and I am merely the housekeeper, the person who keeps all this’ – she spread her arms out to indicate everything around her, meaning Blithe and the household – ‘running smoothly.’

‘Did not my uncle write you about her and tell you of her history? Would he not have had references from her, you know, of her family and previous employment?’

‘Your uncle had nothing to do with it.’ Mrs Grouse gave another sniff, always a sign of disapproval in her. It was the nearest she ever came to criticising my uncle, although I sured she considered him neglectful of us children, ignoring us and wanting to be as little troubled over us as possible. ‘He said he had only just had the inconvenience of interviewing Miss Whitaker and could not be bothered with having to interview one governess after another. Besides, he was abroad, so he appointed an educational agency to take care of the matter. The people there will have checked out her qualifications, you may be sure of that. You may depend she comes thoroughly recommended.’

I fiddled with the blotter some more, not knowing what to say. It seemed I had dead-ended. There was not another question I could think to ask. I looked up. Mrs Grouse was staring at me thoughtfully. ‘But why do you ask, miss? Is there something that bothers you about Miss Taylor?’ I didn’t answer. ‘Is it, well, is it perhaps, that you don’t like her?’

This last was spoken in a wheedling tone and I knew that, nose outjointed as she was by the new governess, Mrs Grouse wished to make me her ally. I circumspected, sensing this was a dangerous course to follow. For if I shared confidences with Mrs Grouse I would be vulnerable should relations between her and Miss Taylor take a turn for the better. I had not forgotten how she had confederated Miss Whitaker. I shook my head. ‘No, I like her fine. I was just curious, is all.’

We awkwarded a moment or so and then I heard the voices of Giles and Miss Taylor and excused myself and went off to eat.

Miss Taylor was all smiles. ‘I hope you are recovered from your adventure last night?’

I stalled at that word and the way she emphasised it. In one way she was acknowledging what we both knew, that I had not nightwalked but had been conscious and had seen what she was up to, and yet, at the same time, her smiles, her dismissal by her jocular tone of what had happened as not the manifestation of some deeper disturbance but a light thing of no account, signalled that there was to be some kind of truce between us in which the truth was let slumber.

‘Yes, miss. Thank you, miss.’ I concentrated hard on cutting up my chop.

‘And I slept through the whole thing,’ said Giles gaily.

‘Yes, my dear, you slept through the whole thing.’ Miss Taylor reached out and ruffled his hair. I wanted to protest, for no one else had ever so familiared with either of us, but how could I when Giles fond-puppied a look up at her? I near expected him to lick her hand. Had he already forgotten the incident at breakfast yesterday? But then, that was Giles all over. I well imagined how he had responded to those bullies at his school, not with resentment, but with gratitude when, during those intervals when they did not tease or hurt him, they showed him any little act of kindness, no matter how trivial or even unconscious on their part.