Mrs De Winter (15 page)

I said, ‘I want to go in.’

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We can’t, of course. There’s a padlock on the gate.’

‘The fence is broken — look there — and over there.’

‘No.’ But he did not pull away. He stood behind me, his hand resting on my shoulder, and I knew that he felt as I felt then. I had no doubt at all.

‘Come on,’ I said, and I began to make my way carefully up the bank, keeping in line with the fence, my eyes never leaving the house.

And after a moment or so, Maxim followed, and glancing back, I saw that he too could not stop looking at it. Oh, the dreams of that day, the world I had stepped into, the hopes I had. I remember them so clearly.

We made our way around the east side of the house, where the garden was most neglected. An old pergola ran on two sides, with the remnants of creeper, rose and honeysuckle hanging in strands from it, wistaria gnarled and unpruned clambered up another, and a path led through them between pillars, to a closed gate. Flowerbeds and borders were overgrown, and yet I thought it had not been so very long since someone had gardened here, it would not take too much work to get it back. I saw myself planning things out, taking this down, mending that, planting more here, working hard with perhaps one local man who knew about the place and a boy; in a couple of summers, we would make it glorious again.

At the back of the house there were stables, a stone flagged courtyard with a statue of a kneeling child in the centre, an old cart and a broken barrow stood about, there was a greenhouse with broken panes, and a robin sang to us fiercely from a branch.

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I looked up and up the walls to the little leaded windows at the very top. The sun was low, slipping off the house. ‘Maxim …’

‘They are most probably just away.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘no, they’re not, they’ve been here quite recently I think, but they have gone now.’

But then, glancing at him, I saw the sadness on his face and that he had withdrawn into it, saw that he looked old, and that he would never truly be able to leave the past, because he did not want to.

I turned back. Cobbett’s Brake stood in deep shadow now, the brick of the walls and the stone paths a soft violet darkening to grey, and not only love for it welled up within me then, but something else, a sort of steely determination. What I wanted now I wanted for me, and I was startled, frightened even, by my own defiance.

Maxim had left me and was walking slowly back, head bent, not looking at the house. He will not speak of it, I thought, we shall simply leave, get back in the car and drive away, and tomorrow or the next day be gone from here forever, I shall not have been denied or refused anything, my dream will simply not have been acknowledged, and this place will never be referred to. That will be his way of dealing with it. Resentment and bitterness and a horrible self pity began to simmer and stir about within me. I was already anticipating my disappointment and how I would mourn it. I had lost all grip on reality, I had no sense at all.

It was a hard, steep climb back up the narrow track to where we had left the car, and Maxim was ahead of me the whole time. Once, once only, I stopped to get my breath,

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and let myself look back through the clearing, between the trees, and there it lay, quiet, closed in upon itself, merging into the shadows, but the last light from the setting sun had caught three or four of the chimneys on the west side and was burning them like coals.

I had gone from joy and hope, to desolation. I felt suddenly cold.

The car was cold, too. I held my hands together to stop them shaking. Maxim had not spoken. He sat as if he were waiting for something. I looked at him.

‘I suppose we shall be too late for tea,’ I said dully. ‘I should like to have a hot bath when we get back.’

Maxim took both my hands, and pressed them close together between his own. ‘Poor little thing,’ he said, and I saw that he was looking at me with infinite fondness, infinite tenderness, in the old way. ‘You try so hard to shield me and protect me, and really, there is no need, you try so hard to hide what you want, how you feel, and of course you can’t.’

What do you mean?’ I said, suddenly angry and close to tears of disappointment and frustration with myself. Whatever do you mean? Come on, I’m very cold.’

‘I know you,’ he said, still holding my hands. ‘I know you so well.’

‘Don’t talk to me as if I were stupid, as if I were some silly little thing to be indulged and patronised.’

Tes. Yes, I was doing that. I apologise.’

‘Maxim…’

‘No, you were perfectly right to protest.’

‘It’s just…’

‘I know.’

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‘Do you?’

‘Cobbetfs Brake,’ he said then, rather thoughtfully. ‘Strange name. Who was Cobbett, do you suppose?’

But I did not reply, I did not want to speculate idly about the house, as if it were anywhere we had chanced upon and stared at, like people touring some foreign town in which they are half interested. We were going away, we would not see it again. That was all. It would have been kinder, I thought to God, if we had never been allowed to find it.

‘You are quite right about tea,’ he said.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No, though I confess I should have liked some.’

‘I’m sorry, it’s my fault — ‘

‘Is it? Why?’

We’ve spent so long here. You should have told me — made me leave.’

‘I didn’t want to. So now, as there will not be tea, we had better use the time more profitably.’

‘What do you mean?’

He let go of my hands and started the car. We passed a farm, do you remember? About a quarter of a mile from that crossroads, just before we were apparently lost. It was called Home Farm.’ He turned around expertly in the clearing. ‘I daresay that if we stop at it and ask, they will be able to tell you whatever you want to know about the house.’

They offered us tea there, strong sweet tea, but out of the best china service, got from the front room, and slices of warm

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fruit bread and butter. We were very welcome, they said, not many visitors came by, it was quiet here, always quiet. I would like that, I almost said, we are quiet people, we are used to it. Maxim talked to the farmer, about the harvest and about sheep and the dairy herd, about how the trees needed work on them, and there wasn’t the manpower after the war, and rents and the hunt, walking around the farmyard and up towards the fields. He was happy, I thought, this was what he had always liked at Manderley, going around with Frank to the tenants, the farms and the cottages, knowing instinctively how to talk to the people, easily, getting on with them, in a way I had always been too awkward and unsure of my own position to do. I stayed with the woman, Mrs Peck, in the kitchen, eating my fruit bread, warming my hands on the teacup, light headed with happiness because it was going to be all right, I knew it. I knew. In the yard the hens pecked about and a toddler went with them, on sturdy feet. We would come here often, I thought, I would bring the children, they would learn about the animals, help to feed the pigs, go out in the fields among the first lambs. They would be our neighbours.

She poured me more tea, filling the pot from the kettle on the range, and swirling it round and round as she spoke. ‘It got to the war then,’ she said, ‘and things came on that much harder, and then, of course, all the help went, the men had to leave and there was just boys. Then, for a while, they had some prisoners of war over from the camp. Italian men, they were, without a word of English and only one or two of them seemed to want to learn any. I suppose it was the strangeness of it and

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the shock, being away from their own country. You’d feel adrift.’

Yes, I thought, oh, yes — you would. You did.

‘One of them put up the vine, you might have seen it, tried to make it grow, and grow it did, at the side there, in the lee of the old wall. But still the grapes were only little black bitter things you know … ‘

Will they come back — will they try and open up the house again?’

The clock ticked in the kitchen, great loud ticks in time with the thumps of my heart.

The old couple — ? No, no. I could see they weren’t managing, a long time before they would admit it. There was nothing you could say. They had to realise it themselves. It wasn’t my place.’

She was sitting opposite to me at the kitchen table, a handsome woman, with a fine halo of pale auburn hair, and a broad featured face. I liked her. I saw myself sitting here, chatting through the afternoon, confiding in her, learning things about the house and the garden and the children — for I would do as much as I could myself, with a local girl and someone to cook, I did not want teams of servants running my house, as they had run Manderley, intimidating, a dreadful hierarchy.

‘No, they won’t come back.’

My heart leaped.

There’s the son, though, Mr Roderick - when he finishes his commission, I expect he’ll come back home and open the old place up again. He’s a sister, too, but married and with her own place, I doubt if she’d be interested. No, it will be

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Mr Roderick. He sends us letters now and then, wanting this or that done - and of course, Mr Tarrant, the land agent, he’s in proper charge.’

From the yard I heard a cry as the toddler tripped on the flags, and she went out to him, soothing, lifting him up, and I saw that Maxim and the man had come back, and were standing chatting beside the gate. The sky was duck’s egg blue, shot across with blackberry and plum and indigo skeins of cloud, the sun dropping quickly down. In the far corner of the yard, the pig was snuffling noisily into her trough. I did not want to leave, I did not want the day to be over. I looked back to where they stood, waving as we drove away, and went on looking long after we had gone too far and they were quite out of sight.

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Ten

Every morning, during the first weeks of our marriage, I had sat opposite to Maxim at breakfast, and every evening at dinner, in such a heightened, unreal state that I had often had to stare at my own wrist or ringers, or even to make an excuse and go out to find a mirror in some cloakroom, and gaze into my own face, searching for something long familiar to which I could anchor myself. I had not been able to accept it at all, that I was there, in these places, of right, naturally and easily, that Maxim had married me, so that now I was Mrs de Winter. I remember tables beside windows overlooking the lagoon in Venice, tables outside in small cobbled squares, candlelit tables, sunlit tables, tables dappled with the shade from overhanging trees, and the colours of individual pieces of food set upon white plates, the braid on a waiter’s jacket. This cannot be true, I would think, who am I? Where am I? I can’t be here, I am no longer me, it is impossible that I should be so happy. I grew used to the feeling, but it never truly left me and then, when we came home to Manderley, there was a different sense of unreality.

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And now I sat at another table, not very far from a great stone hearth in which a fire burned, opposite to Maxim in our village hotel, and in the circle of light from the parchment shaded lamp, I felt the old sense of being in a dream, of desperately trying to catch up with what had happened to me. We were no longer hiding away in another country, eating indifferent food, clinging to one another for safety, fearful of how we spoke, of strangers, of the past. We were free of all that, and out into the sunlight.

We would come home, I knew that. We had no need to run away again. Maxim had been forced to face it all, there had been no other way, but the worst was quickly over, he had drawn the sting of memory, all was well.

Cobbett’s Brake lay at the back of my mind, rose red, beautiful, in its grassy bowl, and again and again I turned to look at it and joy spurted within me. There was no reason why it should ever be ours, but I knew that it would, I wanted it and the force of my want would make it come about. I had never been in the grip of such simple conviction before, I believed passionately, like the convert to a religion, I would make it so.

The food was delicious that night, and unlike those first dinners, when I was too light headed and delirious to want to eat, now I ate greedily, hungry, relaxed, so sure within myself. There was grilled trout, and roast pheasant with the skin dark and crisp, the potatoes fluffed and dotted with pungent tasting parsley, and some sort of apple pudding sticky with sweetness and plumped out with raisins.

We ate slowly, and drank a good bottle of claret, we looked at the fire and the sporting prints and the two oil

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paintings of dogs above the sideboard, and the waitress was slow and plump and had a mole beside her eye, and there was no salt in the salt cellar, we had to ask for it. I looked at my own hands, at the old white scar beside my fingernail, at my wedding ring, long familiar now, but I was not here, I thought, surely this deep, rich, settled happiness, this wonderful new beginning, could not be; I would blink and we would be back in that other small, plain, much duller dining room, in our hotel beside the foreign lake.

I looked across at Maxim. It was real, it was true. I saw it in his face - we had come through.

The blow did not fall until a little later.

We spoke from time to time about the house, not practical talk, not sensible and cautious. Would it ever be sold? Or let perhaps? Would the old couple try to come back, or the son open it up again? How would we find out about it? What was it like inside? Did it need repairs, was it cold, shabby, unattractive?

I did not need to know. It would be right, I had no doubt in my mind, did not bother about it.

It was only the surprise of it we spoke of, the way it had lain there secretly, waiting for us, the way we had been lost, and taken the lane by chance, and so come upon it.

I did not have to say what I wanted to Maxim, nor to ask him. Perhaps I did not dare, in case, in case. Sometimes he still jumped, snapped out, startling me, sometimes he could be impatient, cold, sometimes he turned abruptly away, shutting me out. I did not risk that happening now, the house mattered too much, what it meant - or what I so longed it to mean was too important.