Mrs De Winter (3 page)

We were standing watching the empty, steely water that lay, ringed around by trees, and the gravelled path. I heard myself chattering pointlessly on, trying to reassure him. Not doing so. For of course it was not only of Beatrice that he was thinking. The letter, the postmark, Giles’s handwriting, the address at the top of the paper, all of it, as ever, dragged his mind back, obliged him to remember. I had wished to spare him all of it, but it would have been wrong, I knew, to hide the letters, even could I have done so successfully, it would have been a deceit and we had no deceits, or none that counted, and besides, I would not have had us pretend that he had no sister, no family anywhere but me.

It was Beatrice who had handled all the affairs from the day we left, signed things, taken decisions, Beatrice and, for the first year or two, Frank Crawley. Maxim had not wanted to be told anything of that, anything at all. Well, I thought now, perhaps it had all been too great a strain on her, we

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had taken her strength and good, open nature too much for granted. And then, there had been the war.

‘I have scarcely been a support to her.’

‘She has never expected it, she has never once said anything, you know that.’

He turned to me then, his eyes desperate. ‘I am afraid.’

‘Maxim, of what? Beatrice will be fine, I know it, she …’

‘No. Whether she is or is not… not that.’

Then … ?’

‘Something has changed, can’t you see? I am afraid of anything changing. I want every day to be as today was when we awoke. Things that are there are there, and if they do not change, I can pretend, I don’t have to think of any of it.’

There was nothing to be said to him, no platitude that could help, I knew that. I stopped burbling uselessly about how good a recovery Beatrice was sure to make. I simply walked slowly beside him along the shore of the lake and then, after a mile or so, back again in the direction of our hotel. We stopped to look at some geese on the water. Fed a pair of sparrows some crumbs I found in the bottom of my pocket. We met hardly anyone. The holiday season was all but over. When we got back there would be the papers, and a little, precious time with them, before our single glass of vermouth, a punctual, simple lunch.

All the way, in our silence, I thought of Beatrice. Poor Beatrice. But there was some movement already back in her side, the letter said, she knew Giles, had speech. We would telephone, wire flowers if it were possible, assuage our guilt that way.

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Just for a moment, as we went up the hotel steps, I had a vision of her, clear as day, striding towards me over the lawn at Manderley, dogs barking around her feet joyously, her voice ringing out. Dear, good, loyal Beatrice, who had kept her thoughts to herself and never asked a question, had loved us and accepted what we had done absolutely. My eyes had welled with tears. But by now, she would be striding out again. I even began to plan out my letter that would tell her to slow down, take more care of herself. Give up hunting.

Maxim turned as we went through the doors, and I saw from his face that he, too, had convinced himself, and so could relax the mask, turn back to our own, frail, comfortable existence with relief again.

I am ashamed now, and it is a shame I shall always live with, that we became so happy, so light hearted that evening, turning our minds away from everything outside our own selves and the comfortable bubble in which we were co cooned. How smug it seems that we were, how self-centred and unfeeling, deliberately persuading ourselves, because it suited us to do so, that Beatrice’s stroke must have been slight and that by now, surely, she would be up and about and fully herself again.

I did a little shopping in the afternoon and even bought some cologne, of a kind that was new to me, and a precious packet of bitter chocolate which was once again occasionally available; it was as though I were one of the rich, bored, frivolous women we had so often observed, passing her time in buying this and that, indulging herself. It was not

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like me, and I do not know why I behaved in such a way that day. We had tea and then dinner, and after dinner we walked again, as we usually did, beside the lake and went to drink our coffee in one of the last of the hotels to have its terrace still open in the evening and tables out under the awnings. The fairy lights were lit above our heads, shining midnight blue and crimson and an ugly orange on to the tables and our hands and arms as we stretched them out to our cups. It was milder again, the wind had dropped. One or two other couples were about, strolling past us, coming in for drinks and coffee and the tiny, cherry and frangipane tarts that were a speciality. If Maxim was sometimes unable to prevent himself from thinking of things that were far away from here, he concealed it very well from me and lounged back in his chair, smoking, the same figure, only a little more lined and grey haired, that I had sat beside in the open car driving up the mountain roads at Monte, a lifetime ago, the same man who had ordered me, gauche and red with embarrassment, to his own table, when I had been lunching alone and knocked over my glass of water. ‘You can’t sit at a wet tablecloth, it will put you off your food. Get out of the way,’ and to the waiter, ‘Leave that and lay another place at my table. Mademoiselle will have luncheon with me.’

He was rarely so imperious now, or so impulsive, and his temper was generally so much more even, he was more accepting of things, and of tedium most of all. He had changed. Yet as I looked across at him now, it was the old Maxim that I saw, the one I had first known. It should have been like so many other evenings as I sat beside him, talking of little, knowing that he needed only the reassurance of my

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presence to be content, and quite used by now to being strong, to have him dependent upon me. And if, at the very back of my mind, today as on a few other days during the past year or two, I was conscious of some faint restlessness within myself, a faint struggling, new voice, something that I could not have explained or defined but was only like ‘a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand’ I was as careful as ever to turn myself away and refuse to face or to acknowledge it.

They brought more coffee, thick and black, in tiny, glazed cups, and Maxim ordered cognac.

I said, There goes the chemist,’ and caught Maxim’s eye as always in gentle, mutual amusement, as we both turned slightly to look at the man walking past us along the waterfront, a peculiarly erect and thin man, who was the local pharmacist and spent all day immaculate as a priest in a long white coat, and each evening, punctually at this time, walked the length of the lake path and back, wearing a long, black coat, and holding a small, fat, wheezing pug dog on the far end of a lead. He made us laugh, he was so solemn, so humourless, everything about him, the cut of his clothes and of his hair, the set of his head, the way he wore his collar carefully turned up, even the type of lead the dog had, was unmistakably foreign. Such small, regular sights, such harmless shared amusement, marked our days.

I remember we began to talk of him to speculate about his status — for we had never seen him with a wife, or indeed, with any other person at all, and to match make for him with various ladies in other shops, or else in the hotel lounges and at cafe tables of the little town, eyeing other dog-walkers as likely prospects and later, as it grew chilly again and the fairy

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lights on the terrace were wholly extinguished, walked back hand in hand, beside the dark, silent water, and pretended, though without speaking a word of it, that all was as it had been. We did not mention the letter.

It is strange that, when we recall the dramas of life, the moments of crisis and tragedy, the times when we have suffered and when dreadful news has come to us, it is not only the event itself that impresses itself forever upon the memory, but even more, the small, inconsequential details. Those may remain clear and fresh, attached to the incident like a permanent marker label, for the rest of our lives, even though it might seem that panic and shock and acute distress have caused our sense of awareness to falter and our minds to go quite blank.

There are some things that I do not remember at all about that night, but others stand out like scenes of a tableau, vividly illuminated.

We had come, laughing about something together, into the hotel, and unusually, because he seemed in such a determinedly gay mood, Maxim had suggested that we have a liqueur. Our hotel had no pretensions, but, perhaps years ago, someone had decided to try and attract outsiders and made a bar out of one of the dim little lounges next to the dining room, shading the lamps and adding fringes to them, setting a few stools about here and there. In daylight it was unenticing, dull and shabby, and we saw through it, we would never have dreamed of coming in. But in the evenings, sometimes, you could catch a fleeting mood and pretend it had sophistication, and because we no longer had taste for that, for the sort of smartness as we would

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have found in the bars and restaurants of the grander hotels, we came in here just occasionally, and it pleased us, we had grown quite fond of it, and felt indulgent towards it, as one might to a plain child dressed up in grown up party clothes. Once or twice, a couple of well dressed middle aged women had sat together at the bar gossiping; once, a fat matron and her goose necked daughter had perched side by side on stools, smoking, looking greedily around. We had huddled in the corner, our backs to them, heads bent a little, for we still had a fear that one day we would come upon someone who had known us, or merely recognised our faces, we were forever in unspoken dread of a sudden dawning look, as our story began to come back to them. But we had enjoyed speculating about the women, glancing at their hands, their shoes, their jewellery surreptitiously, trying to place and assess them, wondering about them, as we wondered about the life of the lugubrious pharmacist.

This evening there was no one else in the room and we took, I remember, not our usual back table but one slightly better lit and nearer to the bar itself. But as we sat down, before the boy could take our order, the manager came in, looking round for us.

The gentleman has telephoned, but you were out. He says that he will try to speak to you again soon.’

We sat like dumb things. My heart was pounding very hard, very fast, and when I reached out my hand for Maxim’s it felt strangely heavy to lift, like a dead hand that did not belong to my body. It was then that for some bizarre reason I noticed the green beads that ran round the bottom of the lamp fringes, a horrid, glassy frog green and saw that several

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were missing, leaving gaps, breaking the pattern they had been designed to make with some other, pinkish beads. I think they should have resembled the upturned leaves of tulips. I can see them now, ugly, cheap things that someone had chosen because they thought they were chic. Yet I do not remember much of what we said. Perhaps we did not speak. Our drinks came, two large cognacs, but I scarcely touched mine. The clock chimed. There were footsteps once or twice across the floor of the room above, a murmur of voices. Then silence. Outside, in the season, there would have been the sound of guests coming in, on warm evenings we would have sat out for a while on the terrace, and the fairy lights that were strung around the lake shore would not have been switched off until midnight, there would have been so many strollers, locals, visitors. It had just enough pleasant life for us, this place, just enough activity and diversion and even a sober sort of gaiety. Looking back, I am astonished at how very little we asked of life then, those years give off such a staid, contented air, like a period of calm between storms.

We sat for almost an hour but there was no telephone call, so that in the end, because it was clear that they were waiting politely to put out the lights and close, we began to gather ourselves to go upstairs. Maxim finished my drink as well as his own. The mask was back over his face, his eyes were dull as he looked at me occasionally for reassurance.

We were in our room. It was fairly small but in the summer we were able to open two doors that led out on to a tiny balcony. It overlooked the back of the hotel, the garden not the lake, but we preferred that, we would not have wanted it to be too public.

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We had scarcely closed the door behind us when we heard footsteps, and then the sharp rapping on the door. Maxim turned to me. ‘You go.’

I opened the door.

‘Madam, the telephone again, for Mr de Winter, but I could not make the connection to your room, the line is too bad. Will you please come down?’

I glanced at Maxim, but he nodded, gesturing me to go, as I had known that he would. ‘I will take it,’ I said, ‘my husband is rather tired.’ And I went quickly, apologising to the manager as I did so, along the corridor and down the stairs.

It is the detail that one remembers.

The manager led me to the telephone in his own office, where a lamp shone on to the desk. Otherwise, the hotel was in darkness. Silent. I remember the sound of my own footsteps on the black and white tiles of the lobby floor. I remember a little wooden carving of a dancing bear on the ledge beside the telephone. An ashtray full of small cigar stubs.

‘Hello … hello …’

Silence. Then a faint voice, a lot of crackling, as if the words were alight. Silence again. I spoke frantically into the mouthpiece, trying to be heard, to make contact. And then he was shouting in my ear. ‘Maxim? Maxim, are you there? Is that you?’

‘Giles,’ I said. ‘Giles, it’s me …’

‘Hello … hello …’

‘Maxim is upstairs. He … Giles…’

‘Oh.’ His voice receded again, and when it returned

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sounded as if it were coming from beneath the sea, there was an odd, booming echo.

‘Giles, can you hear me? Giles, how is Beatrice? We only got your letter this afternoon, it was terribly delayed.’

There was an odd noise that at first I took to be some new interruption or interference on the line. Then I realised that it was not. It was the sound of Giles crying. I remember that I picked up the little carved wooden bear and began to roll it over and over in the palm of my hand, smoothing it, turning it.