Mrs De Winter (8 page)

‘I am alive!’ I wanted to shout. ‘Do you hear? I am alive and so is he, and we are together. And you are dead, and will never harm us again. You are dead, Rebecca.’

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Five

We breakfasted by ourselves in the dining room. Giles slept in, and I had seen Roger go up to the horses when I was dressing, plodding slowly and heavily, from behind the same shape as his father, the same thick neck set low down on to broad shoulders, so ordinary a man, rising thirty, dull, pleasant, his head full of little other than horses and dogs. I scarcely knew him, he had never impinged much upon our lives.

But he had flown and fought in the war with nerve, with distinction, earned a DFC and finally, been shot down and burned almost beyond recognition, so that if he had turned round now, I should have seen not the old, round and fresh, open faced Roger, but a hideous mask of stretched, shining, flaking skin, alternately white and with vivid staining, and eyes narrowed, looking out of scarred, lashless lids, so that I had to brace myself each time not to flinch, not to look in revulsion too quickly away. The damage to the rest of his body was unimaginable.

Roger, calling softly and waiting, as the grey and then

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the chestnut horse came trotting down, his future irreparable. The picture of him came to me again now as I sat, sipping my coffee, watching Maxim peel an apple, and the sight of his hands on the fruit bringing back to me, as they did every day, the memory of that first breakfast I had seen him eat, the morning in Monte Carlo when I had gone, sick with love, with misery, to tell him I had to leave for New York that day with Mrs van Hopper. Every detail of what he wore, ate, drank, every word of what he said, was immortal to me, no detail would, could, ever fade or be confused or forgotten.

He glanced up at me, and whatever the expression on my face was, read it, and through it to what I felt and thought, unerringly, I have still not learned to conceal things, my hopes and fears, every nuance of passing emotion, still show as clearly on my face as on that of a child, I know. I am still not a grown woman in that way. I think he would not want it.

Now, in that dining room full of old fashioned oak furniture, with the chill of the night still on it because the heater did not work very well, and the dreadful memory of yesterday’s luncheon when old Colonel Julyan had struggled to his feet to toast our return, now, Maxim laid down his apple and the knife neatly by his plate, and reached out across the table and took my hand.

‘Oh, my darling girl, how very badly you want to stay longer, don’t you? How much you are dreading my getting up and telling you we should pack, now, at once, and have the car come as soon as possible. You have changed since we got back, do you know that? You look different, something has happened to your eyes — your face ‘

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I was ashamed then, deeply ashamed, I felt guilty that I had failed to conceal anything at all from him, have my own secrets. Clinging to my own joy at being home, afraid that he did not share it, terrified, as he said, of having to leave too soon.

‘Listen.’ He had got up and gone to stand by the window and now he gestured for me and I went at once to stand beside him. The top gate stood open, Roger had led the horses out.

‘I can’t go there — you know that.’

‘Of course - oh, Maxim, I would never dream of asking — it would be out of the question — I couldn’t bear to go back to Manderley either.’

Though as I said it, glibly, reassuringly, I knew that I lied, and a little snake of guilt stirred and began to uncoil slightly, guilt and its constant companion deceit. For I thought of it night and day, it was always in my mind somewhere, just out of sight, waiting for me, I dreamed of it, Manderley. Not far. Just across the county, away from this low, lovely, gentle inland village, across the high, bare back of the moors and so down, slipping between hills, following the cleft in the land along the river, to the sea, and belonging to another life, years ago, to the past, and yet as close as my next breath. Empty? Derelict? Razed completely? Built upon? Wilderness? Or restored, alive again? Who knew? I wanted to find out. Dared not.

Manderley.

I scarcely faltered, all of it came into my mind and before my eye, in a single encompassing second. I said, ‘I wasn’t thinking of - of Manderley.’ It was still hard to say

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the name, I felt Maxim tense at once. ‘But, oh, Maxim, it is good to be in England. You feel it too, don’t you? The way it looks - the light - the trees - everything. Couldn’t we have a while longer? Go to a few places perhaps — out of the way places, I mean — not anywhere from — from before. New places. No one will know us or see us - and then we can go back again and take it with us — it will see us through until - whenever. Besides, I don’t think we should leave Giles just yet, it would seem so cruel.’ I had told him a little, very briefly, about the night before. ‘Just a few days more here to help him begin to sort things out and then — well, Frank invited us up to Scotland. Couldn’t we go there? I’d love to see it — I’ve never been — and meet his family — it was good to see him so happy and settled, wasn’t it?’

I babbled on, and he indulged me in the old way, and all was light and easy between us, the secrets I held close to me remained concealed. And what pathetically small things they were, I thought suddenly, going back up to our room, little enough, God knows, to suffer such guilt about.

It was agreed very easily. We would stay here with Giles and Roger until the end of the week, and then go at once to Scotland, to stay with the Crawleys. Maxim seemed quite happy, and I knew that my reassurance about not returning to any of the old familiar places, or anywhere with family connections, but most of all, any places in which we would be remembered and recognised, had meant a great deal and, I thought, quietened his most serious fears. He wanted to see nothing, go nowhere, meet no one, who had the slightest connection with his past and the old life, with Manderley, and most of all, with Rebecca, and Rebecca’s death.

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This house, Beatrice’s house, he could cope with now, I thought, and he might even enjoy ambling gently about the lanes and fields within a short distance. That was what I told myself.

And I - I was wonderfully, gloriously happy, that we could be here longer, and then go to Scotland, and, after that, perhaps, though I scarcely dared to make my ideas coherent, to spell it out even to myself — after that, when Maxim was more relaxed and unafraid, when he had discovered how easy it was to be here and that there was no threat — after that, might we not stay even longer, go elsewhere, spend the last golden autumn days gently exploring this or that quiet corner of England that was unknown to us? Would that not be every bit as good, as restful and unthreatening to him, as being abroad? So long as we kept far, far away from the old places — from Manderley.

I sang as I went upstairs to change, and realised, when I caught myself, that it was ‘On Richmond Hill’, and that I had not sung or heard it for years, not since I had learned it at school, and yet it came into my head now, fresh and clear. I found that I remembered every word of it.

I could not persuade Maxim to come out. He would wait for Giles to get up, he said, he must try and talk business matters to him, in case there was anything he had to know or attend to concerning Beatrice’s affairs. I was surprised. I thought he would have avoided anything that might bring him close to learning about how things had been disposed over Manderley, but he was curt, took The Times into the morning room and closed the door, and when I glanced there, from the garden on my way out, I saw that he had

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his back to the window, and the paper held high, and knew then how much it hurt him to be here, and that he could not bear to look out even at Beatrice’s and Giles’s old garden and orchard, which were nothing, nothing like any of the gardens at Manderley.

He is doing it for me, I thought. He is doing it out of love. And within me rose, as well as love in return, a flicker of the old insecurity, the disbelief that I could be loved — by any man, and this man, above all, for I still saw him in some sort, as a God, and in spite of the way things had been between us for all of our time in exile, how much stronger I had tried to become, how dependent he had grown on me, in spite of it all, deep down, I had no real confidence, no belief in myself as a woman who was loved in that way. Occasionally, still, I caught myself staring down at my wedding ring as though it were on some stranger’s hand, and could not possibly belong to me, turning it round and round, as I had done the whole time on our honeymoon in Italy, as if to convince myself of its reality, heard my own voice on that sunlit Monte Carlo morning, Tou don’t understand, I’m not the sort of person men marry.’

But I smiled to myself, hearing it faintly again, as I walked up through the thick dew drenched grass of the paddock, towards the slope and the trees and the hedgerows of the open, glorious, golden countryside beyond.

I walked for more than an hour, following a path, and then leaving it and striding off across the fields, and at first I wished that Maxim had come with me, I wanted so much for him to see it all, hoping, I suppose, that he would fall in love with it again, that die pull of this country, of England, the light and

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the land, would be so strong that he would be quite unable to resist. I pictured him stopping, here or there, on this little rise, beside this gate that overlooked a small copse, turning to me, We must come back, of course,’ he would say. ‘I see now how much I have missed England — I couldn’t bear to go back abroad now, we must stay, and never leave again, whatever that may mean.’ And I would reassure him that all would be well, and no one would trouble us, that the past would never rear its head. And if it did - ‘Maxim, whatever there is to face, we face it together.’

Catching myself, weaving my fantasies, even feeling my lips move in the imagined conversation, I smiled, for it was an old habit. I had dreamed all the usual schoolgirl dreams this way once, before reality overtook me, though I had indulged it very little in recent years, been too busy growing up, looking after Maxim, protecting him, being his only companion, learning tricks to keep memory from springing up, harsh and powerful, and seizing him, defenceless as he now was.

Only in my private, secret, solitary thoughts about home had I allowed fantasy free rein, only on those imaginary walks over the bare winter uplands, or through the carpet of wild flowers in the woods of spring, only in the way I could, whenever I chose, turn aside and hear in my head the songs of larks, the barking of a fox, deep in the night, the ceaseless craaw of gulls.

Now, walking towards the beech hanger on the opposite slope, putting out my hand to brush it against hawthorn and high wild rose hedge, I let my imagination run wild, saw us both walking like this every day, the dogs running ahead or even the boys perhaps, after all.

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I made up simple, innocent little exchanges with Maxim about what damage that last gale had done, or how well the corn was ripening, whether the dry spell would end soon, might we, just once, have snow at Christmas - I saw him striding a pace or two ahead of me, as he had always done, pointing to this or that, stopping to pull a thorn out of a dog’s pad, turning to smile at me in the old way, happy and free. We would be as close as we had been, as dependent upon one another as we had become during our years of exile, yet it would not be so constrained, so claustrophobic, there would be others in our life again, new friends, children, we would have the best of both worlds, we would have come through and out into the sunlight, there would be no further need to hide ourselves away.

So I fancied, so I dreamed and planned and spun my hopes into a bright cloak in which to wrap myself, coming down the long grassy, sloping track that I realised led me at last towards the back of the little grey stone church, in which yesterday there had been Beatrice’s funeral. I stopped. Just ahead, stood the gate in the low wall that ran around the churchyard, where the old graves leaned gently towards the grass, their inscriptions blotched and blurred by moss, or worn almost away, and where, as I stood, I could see the new grave, Beatrice’s, the turf still loose, the mound quite covered in the fresh, bright flowers.

For a few moments, I stayed there, resting my arms on the gate. No one was about, but suddenly, from a holly tree, a blackbird sang, a few notes, before flying wildly out, low across the grass, sensing my presence, crying a warning. Then, it was quiet again, and I felt a great peace and calm

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there, sad, still, missing Beatrice, picturing her, wishing I had seen her again, thinking of all the times we might have spoken of; but the sadness had no edge to it, it was not keen, it was only poignant, in that tranquil place. I remembered poor Giles, sobbing in raw grief, the previous night, poor inarticulate Giles, bereft, vulnerable, and suddenly old, and wondered how Beatrice would have dealt with him, whatever brisk words she might have used to pull him round.

Looking back, I can see myself there, in the morning sun, that had dispersed every trace of early mist and was so warm on my face that it might have been a summer’s day instead of one well into October. I can stand, as it were, outside myself, as if frozen in time and space, and it is as though most of my life consists of photographs of myself, and in between there is nothing but indeterminate grey. For in those moments, I was calm, I was content, I was, I suppose, happy. I liked being alone, I had quickly accepted that Maxim was not ready yet to walk the countryside and feel free, and told myself that it would come, he would do so, if I did not push him too quickly. I was entirely confident.

So that I was enjoying my own company, the day, these places I had so longed for, my sadness about the death of Beatrice was a muted, melancholy emotion, autumnal, I accepted it and it could not spoil or take away my joy, nor did I feel that it should. For once, I was not ashamed or guilty, for once, I revelled in my own self confidence.