Mrs De Winter (2 page)

It had been late and quite dark when we had arrived the previous evening. We had eaten dinner without tasting the food on our plates, as we had eaten all the lumpen, dreary meals on the journey, and we had felt stunned,

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exhausted with the disorientation of travel, and grimy and uncomfortable in our clothes. My face had felt stiff, my mouth seemed difficult to move, and my tongue somehow peculiarly swollen. I had looked down the table and seen that Maxim’s skin was transparent, and that there were smears of tiredness beneath his eyes, and the eyes themselves were dulled. He had smiled slightly, wearily, wanting reassurance, and I had tried to send it to him, for all he seemed by now quite distant from me, and oddly unfamiliar, as I remembered him seeming long ago, during that other time.

The coffee had tasted queer, bitter and muddy, the dining room was cold, and too barely lit by an overhead fitting. I had noticed that there was a tear in the ugly yellow parchment of one of its shades, and that the beautiful furniture had a bloom to its surfaces, the carpet was slightly stained. Everything seemed to lack love, lack care. We had struggled to pick over the meal and had said very little once we had come upstairs, only murmured this and that, nothing of consequence, remarks about the journey, the dreary, tedious miles across a sad, grey Europe. We had endured it, staring out of the windows of the train, seeing such ugliness and damage everywhere, so much dereliction, and so many sad, sallow faces, staring without animation at ours as the heavy train passed. Once, I had waved at a little file of children, waiting at a crossing, somewhere in the central plain of France. None of them had waved back — perhaps because they had not even seen me — they had only stared too. But because of my tiredness and emotion, the anxiety like a sickness in the pit of my stomach, after the shock and sudden upheaval, I had felt oddly rebuffed and saddened by the incident, so that I had

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begun to brood upon other things and been unable to redirect my thoughts.

Now though, looking steadily out over the moonlit garden, I was quite calm, quite steady. I sat on and on, and somewhere in the depths of the house heard a clock strike three, and was still wide awake and only glad to be so, grateful for the tranquillity around me, and the coolness of that silent garden, the sweetness of the air. I knew, even though I was ashamed of it, deep contentment, great peace.

I had not moved for almost another hour, not until Maxim turned suddenly, flailing his arms about abruptly and muttering something incoherent, and then I had closed the window against the chill that had crept into the room, and slipped back to my bed. Though first I had straightened the covers around him and smoothed his face, settled him as one would settle a restless child.

He did not wake, and just before dawn, I too, had slept.

In the morning, the instant I awoke, it was the light I was so aware of, how very different it was and how welcome and familiar. I had gone again to the window and looked out at the pale sky, blue slightly filmed over, and the dawn that was strengthening over the frost touched garden. I could have been nowhere else in the world but here and I had almost wept then at that early light, at its clarity and subtlety and softness.

As we had set off for the church there had been skeins of mist weaving in and out of the trees, dissolved by the sun even as we watched, as the frost was melted by it, and I had instinctively looked over to where I knew that, miles away,

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the sea lay. When we had arrived at Dover on the previous evening it had already been dark, and coming across the channel the sea had simply been dull, grey and heaving about outside the ship’s windows, so that in a curious way, I had no real sense of its being the sea at all: and then the car had sped us away, and on to the long road.

In spite of all that it had meant to us for ill, all the harm it had caused, I had missed the sea while we had been abroad, missed the slow drag of it up the beach, the hiss and suck over the pebbles, the crash of it, smacking down on to the shore of the cove — the fact that it was always there, sensed even through the densest fog that muffled every sound, and that whenever I wanted to I had been able to go down and simply look at it, watch its movement, the play of the light upon it, see it change, the shadows shift, the surface roughen. I had often dreamed of it, dreamed that I had gone there at night when it was calm and still and gazed from some place above down upon the moonlit water. The sea we had lived close to and walked beside at times during our exile was a tideless, glittering sea, translucent, brilliantly blue, violet, emerald green, a seductive, painted sea, quite unreal.

Climbing into the black car that morning, I had paused, turned and strained my eyes and ears, willing myself to have some greater sense of it. But there was nothing, it was too far away, and even if it had been there, at the end of the garden, Maxim would have shrunk from any awareness of it.

I had turned and climbed into the car beside him.

The men in black had reached the church porch and paused there to shift their burden slightly, settling its weight between them. We stood uncertainly behind, and suddenly a

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robin flitted into the dark hollow of the porch and out again, and the sight of it lifted my heart, I felt that we were people in a play, waiting in the wings to go on to a stage, the lighted open space ahead of us. We were very few. But as we began to move under the arch I saw that the church itself was full. They rose as they heard us. I supposed they were all old neighbours, old friends - though I did not think that by now I would recognise many of them.

‘I am the Resurrection and the Life saith the Lord. Whosoever believeth in me, though he should die, yet shall he live …’

We stepped inside and the heavy wooden door was closed behind us, shutting out the autumn day, the sunlight and the turned fields, the man ploughing and the larks spiralling upwards and the robin singing from the holly branch, the ragged, black crows.

The congregation stirred like standing corn as we passed on our way to the front pew, I felt their eyes burning into our backs, felt their curiosity and fascination with us, and all the unspoken questions, hanging in the air.

The church was beautiful, and the beauty of it made me catch my breath. I had never let myself think very much of how I missed such places as this. It was an ordinary, unremarkable English country church and yet to me, as rare and precious as the greatest cathedral. Sometimes I had slipped into a church in some foreign village or town, and knelt in the darkness among the black-shawled old women mumbling over their beads, and the smell of incense and guttering candles had been as strange as everything else to me, they had seemed to belong to some exotic religion, far

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removed from the austere stone church of home. I had needed to be there, and valued the quietness and the atmosphere of reverence, been half attracted, half repelled by the statues, the confessional boxes. I had never managed to put any prayer into words, never formed actual phrases, either on my lips or in my mind, of confession or petition. Only a sort of incoherent but immensely powerful emotion had sometimes surged up, as though forced by some pressure deep within me, and it had come close to the surface without ever erupting. It could never be properly expressed, and I supposed it was like a desperate touching of wood, for … For what? Our protection? Salvation? Or merely that we should continue to be left alone in our safe, dull haven for the rest of our lives, untroubled by ghosts.

I dared not admit to myself how much I had missed and longed for an English church, but sometimes in reading and re-reading the newspapers, when they managed to reach us from home, I came upon the public notices for the services on the following Sunday, and reading slowly down them the words filled me with great longing. Sung Eucharist. Mattins, Choral Evensong. Stanford in C. Darke in E. Byrd. Boyce. Lead Kindly Light (Stainer). Thou wilt keep him … Like as the Hart…

Preacher. The Dean … the Precentor… the Bishop.

I had spoken the words silently to myself.

Glancing surreptitiously to either side of us now, and then up to the altar ahead, I saw the grey stone arches and ledges and steps, and the austerely carved memorial tablets to local squires long dead, and the Biblical texts lettered in the clear windows.

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Come to me all ye that are heavy laden.

I am the vine, ye are the branches.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

I read the grave, measured words as our steps fell, like the steps of soldiers treading the dead march, down the stone flagged aisle to where the trestles stood. There were flowers, golden and white as the sun and stars, in great jugs and urns on the table beside the font. I had thought that we were shut in from the countryside beyond the church, but we were not. The sun came striking through the side windows, on to the wood of the pews and the pale stone, the beautiful, limpid English autumn sunlight that filled me with such joy and recollection and sense of homecoming, it fell on the backs of heads and of raised prayer books, set the silver cross momentarily on fire, fell softly, gently, on to the plain, good oak of Beatrice’s coffin as the men set it down.

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Two

Maxim had brought out the letter. He had left me sitting at our usual table overlooking the little square of which we had grown so fond, and gone back to the hotel for cigarettes.

It was not so warm, I remember, clouds kept slipping in front of the sun and a sudden gust of wind had rushed down one of the narrow side alleys between the high houses, swirling a few scraps of paper and leaves. I had pulled my jacket up round my shoulders. The summer was over. Perhaps, later this afternoon, we would have one of the storms which had begun to break up the weather in the past week. The clouds came again, and the square was in shadow, featureless, oddly melancholy. Some small dark haired children were playing in a bowl of mud they had made among the cobbles, stirring it with sticks, fetching more dust in little wooden ice cream scoops, their voices, bright as birds, chattered across towards me. I always did watch them, always listened and smiled. I tried not to let children upset me.

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The waiter passed by and half glanced at my empty cup but I shook my head. I would wait for Maxim. Then, the church bell began to sound the hour, a thin, high, tinny note, and the sun came flooding out again, sharpening the edges of the long shadows, warming me, lifting my mood. The small boys all clapped and let out a cheer at something that delighted them, in their mud. Then, I looked up and saw him coming towards me, his shoulders hunched, his face the mask behind which he always, automatically, tried to hide any distress. He was holding a letter, and as he sat down in the flimsy, metal cafe chair he threw it on to the table, before swinging round and snapping his fingers to the waiter in a way he so rarely did now, the old, arrogant way.

I did not recognise the handwriting at all. But I saw the postmark and put out my hand to cover his.

It was from Giles. Maxim did not look at me as I read quickly through it. ‘… found her on the floor in the bedroom … heard a heavy thump … managed to get her up … Maidment came … some movement back in the left side almost at once … speech poor but clearing a bit … she knows me all right… nursing home and medical people don’t say much … awful… live in hope …’ I glanced back at the envelope. It was dated three weeks before. Our mail took so wretchedly long sometimes, communications seem to have deteriorated since the end of the war.

I said, ‘She’s sure to be much better, Maxim. Perhaps even recovered completely. We would have heard by now otherwise.’

He shrugged, lit a cigarette. ‘Poor Bea. She won’t be able to bray across four counties. No hunting for her.’

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Well if they make her give it up altogether that will be nothing but a good thing. I never think it can be sensible for a woman turned sixty.’

‘She has held everything together. I’ve been no use to her. She doesn’t deserve this.’ He got up abruptly. ‘Come on,’ took out some coins and dropped them on the table, and began to walk away across the square. I looked back to smile apologetically at the waiter, but he was inside, talking to someone, his back to us. I don’t know why it had seemed to matter, to make some slight contact with him. I stumbled, almost slipping over on the cobbles, to catch Maxim up. In their huddle, squatting, the little boys bent their heads close together and were quiet.

He was walking out towards the path that ran around the lake.

‘Maxim…’ I reached him, touched his arm. The wind blew, rippling the water. ‘She will be all right now … fine… I’m sure of it. We can try and telephone Giles this evening can’t we? But we would have heard … he wanted to let you know, and it’s wretched that the letter was so delayed … he might even have written again, though you know he isn’t one for letters, they neither of them are.’

It was true. For all these years, we had received occasional, short, dutiful letters in Beatrice’s enormous, girl like hand, telling us very little, mentioning neighbours sometimes, trips to London, the war, the blackout, the evacuees, the shortages, the hens, the horses, and carefully, tactfully, nothing of very personal importance, family matters, the past. We might have been distant cousins, long out of touch. Because we had moved about, and then come here, after the war, the

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letters had often been addressed to a poste restante, and for a long time had come only once or twice a year and been hopelessly delayed. I was the one who replied, in the same, cautious, stilted fashion, my own handwriting as unformed as Beatrice’s, ashamed of the triviality of our little bits of news. As Beatrice simply never referred to them, I had no idea at all whether they arrived.

‘Please don’t look so worried. I know a stroke is a dreadful thing and it will have been so frustrating for her, she longs to be active, can’t bear to sit still, stay indoors. She won’t have changed.’ I saw the flicker of a smile flit across his mouth, knew that he was remembering. ‘But plenty of people have strokes, quite minor ones, and recover completely.’