Mrs De Winter (31 page)

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skull’s face gleaming pale, against the window, her eyes steady upon me.

When I lowered my hand, I felt the scald upon the back of it burning, burning.

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Eighteen

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, yes, of course I am. It’s been rather hot that’s all.’

Tes.’

‘I’m fine, Maxim.’

‘It’s glorious up here. You’d be very envious — they had a cold late spring, so everything was put back. Janet’s roses are a marvellous show still.’

‘Oh - oh, yes - I suppose they must be.’

The only tiresome things are the midges — I was eaten alive up on the moors today.’

‘Oh.’

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

“Why do you keep asking me that?’ I heard my own false little laugh.

‘You just sound a bit odd.’

‘Really, I’m perfectly all right. I like it - I’m quite happy. I went over to the farm to collect the eggs.’

I was in the study. I had had my back to the window,

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but now I turned. I did not like to think of being seen by anyone outside.

But there was no one outside, I knew that perfectly well.

‘Frank would like me to stay on a few more days to fish.’

‘Oh.’

‘But if you’d rather I come home as planned on Wednesday, I will.’

‘No — no, Maxim, of course you must stay. You’ll love it.’ No, I thought, please no. Last night I would have urged him almost guiltily to stay on in Scotland, last night I was relishing being alone. Not now. But I said, ‘Come back whenever you like.’

‘Saturday then.’

That’s fine.’

‘Don’t be by yourself too much. Get Bunty Butterley or someone over.’

‘Maxim, I shall be all right. Give them my love.’

‘Yes. If you’re sure.’

I wanted to scream.

When I had set the receiver down, the house seemed to creak around me, settling back into itself, and then was uncannily silent. I stood, for a few moments, not even able to draw the curtains, mesmerised by the darkness beyond the windows, like blank eyes, turned to me.

She had managed to destroy it all, to undermine my new found confidence and sense of peace, to make me uneasy, wary and afraid. She had made me nervous of the house and of being alone in it, of walking from room to room, and of the night outside, the deserted garden, the countryside that lay all around. I felt spied upon, as though something or

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someone lay in wait for me, breathing softly.

But I forced myself to go about swishing every curtain roughly across, turning on as many lights as I could. At first, I sang to myself but my own voice sounded odd and hollow, I let it peter out, and then there were only my footsteps.

I switched on the wireless but I did not want the crackle of voices disturbing the room, I could not hear any other sounds there might be. When it went off, there was only deathly silence again.

I felt safest upstairs. I went to bed very soon, with some toast and a boiled egg on a tray, and lay trying to read. The air was close and heavy. I had the window open, and several times, I got up and leaned out into the darkness, trying to make out the shapes in the garden, but it was a moonless night, and I saw nothing. There were none of the usual night rustlings, of small animals, no movement in the trees.

The words on the page made no sense to me, and after a time I put my book down and switched off the lamp and then, her face seemed to come floating up to me and hang suspended there. She was all I saw, all I could think of, the black figure, the white skull, the hollow eye sockets, the gleaming protuberant eyes, the hair smoothed back. Her voice spoke softly on in my head, whispered relentlessly, and after a while, what she had said to me here, in this house today, merged into my memory of things she had said at Manderley, and then into the whispers I had heard terrifyingly in the villa in Italy. I drifted in and out of a half sleep, but there was no way of escaping her, she kept pace with me quite easily, I knew she would not let me go now.

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This is such a nice house, madam. You and Mr de Winter will be very happy here, I know.’

‘Of course it is very different from Manderley. No one would ever compare it with that, would they?’

‘Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?’

‘You come here and think you can take Mrs de Winter’s place? You. You take my lady’s place? Why, even the servants laughed at you when you came to Manderley.’

‘Why don’t you go? We none of us want you. Look down there. It’s easy isn’t it? Why don’t you jump?’

That is Mr de Winter. That is your husband. Her husband. That man is a murderer. That man killed his wife. He shot Rebecca. Have you ever thought that he might do it again?’

I struggled to wake, as I had surfaced crying out from my dream of driving fast in the car with Jack Favell, but this time I could not. A hand, a cold, bony hand was over my face trying to push me back and stop my mouth so that I could not breathe, could not call, I was pressed down, down into the suffocating depths of the dream again, where her face floated and her voice was whispering and whispering.

At last, I did not wake but slept for a time more deeply, plunged into a place below and beyond the dream, and that was the only relief, when eventually I came to, her face and her voice had receded and were farther away. I sat up and switched on my lamp and at once a moth came fluttering about, its soft, pale, furred body patting against the shade. There was still no air, no breeze, or coolness from the garden. It was a little past two o’clock. I was hungry and thirsty but I dared not get up and go downstairs alone through the house, as I had done

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quite easily before, I only lay, rigid and afraid - and angry, most of all bitterly angry at what she had done to me and to the house, how her poison had begun to spread through it like a gas, permeating everything that had been light and welcoming and full of love and acceptance, and souring and staining it.

I hated her, as I had never really hated Rebecca, for how could I hate someone who was dead, someone I had never seen, never spoken to, only been made aware of through others? She meant nothing to me at all, I felt neither fear of her nor jealousy nor the slightest resentment.

It was Mrs Danvers who had power over me, Mrs Danvers I feared and hated, in a wild, unfocussed, frustrated sort of way, that had no edge to it and, as she must surely know, caused me more hurt and distress than it might ever cause her.

I did not sleep again, only waited for the relief when the first thin colourless dawn light edged into the room and I could go downstairs to make myself tea.

I went out, taking the car early into the market town, and shopping for groceries. After that, the day hung heavily and I did not know what to do. It was hot again, stale, tired August heat, the streets were dusty, people behaved irritably. I spun out an hour over coffee, but I did not want any lunch, I only walked up as far as the bridge over the river and stood there, watching the water, and looking up now and again over the rooftops to where the

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handsome tower of the parish church soared out of the low land.

I tried to think of Cobbett’s Brake as I had done, to long for it, to see it in my mind’s eye; it is the same, I said, it is no different, she has gone, she can do nothing, but I knew that it was not true, and that the blow had fallen already.

I could not look ahead, I was miserably bound to the present, as on a wheel, going round and round our conversation, and how she had looked, what she had made me feel. I wanted to cry, bitter tears of frustration and rage, at the unfairness of things. Why, I wanted to shout to the sky and the water and the innocent passers by, why must this happen, why does this come back to us, are we never to be free of it, why?

But I knew why well enough.

In the end, I drove to Bunty Butterley’s with some excuse about wanting the name of a dentist. She did not believe me, I could tell at once by the way she looked at me as I spoke. But she gave me tea, and we sat on an old, shady seat near the cedar tree, and chatted about nothing. I felt better for it, I was glad that I had come, but all the time, I was conscious of something, a physical sensation in the pit of my stomach, like a small clenched fist that bored and probed into me, and knew that it was fear.

Tou need that husband of yours back, my dear,’ she said, walking me to the car. I had a bundle of sweet peas she had cut for me in my hand.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re melancholy.’

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‘No, really.5 The easy lies again. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You need a night or two in London - see a show, get him to take you dancing. That always used to put me back in good spirits.’

I imagined her, foxtrotting cheerfully about some dance floor, dressed rather unsuitably in shiny, bright material, perfectly happy, not caring for anyone. Like Beatrice. On an impulse, I leaned forward to embrace her, because of the way Bunty had reminded me of her.

‘Now mind you do as I tell you — no good brooding.’

‘No, I won’t. Thank you, Bunty.’

She stood and waved, stout, beaming, and yet quick, I thought, perceptive, not one to be deceived. If it was cooler, I would weed and dead head the whole way along the south border, I would not let myself brood, I would not give in to fearfulness.

The brown envelope was on the top of the pile of letters Dora had put on the hallstand.

I ripped it open at once, I wanted it over and done with.

This cutting was not old and yellowing, it had come from a very recent paper. Indeed, I had already seen it, but I had turned over the page quickly. There were some things I could never bear to know about.

CLERK HANGED FOR LOVER’S MURDER.

EARLY MORNING EXECUTION AT PENTONVILLE PRISON.

There was a photograph, a mean, postage stamp thing, of a moustached, pathetic looking man with frightened eyes.

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He had been a post office clerk who had killed the woman after some violent, jealous quarrel. But it was different, I remember noticing, quite different. He had not had a gun. He had stabbed her, after she had first attacked him with the same knife. There had been a plea of self defence, but it was no use. He had been hanged a couple of weeks ago.

I crumpled the paper up in a ball in my fist, crushed it so tightly my nails hurt my palm. This had nothing to do with us, this I would not keep. I burned it.

The hollow fist in my stomach had become a pain, another sort of burning.

But it was beautiful in the garden, the shadows violet coloured across the dry grass. I took my fork from the tool shed, and knelt to prise couch and groundsel from around the old pinks that edged the border. They had been heady with sweet, clove scent in June. I planned to divide them and put in more, so that next summer this whole bed would be crammed with flowers chosen for their smell. Gradually, working my way along, not allowing myself to think, I became steadier, the fist in my stomach unclenched a little.

A blackbird had come out of the syringa bush and was watching me, eye gleaming like a bead, waiting for me to leave the freshly turned soil so that he could pick for worms.

In winter, I hoped there would be a crowd of them, all manner of birds, coming in for the berries. I would never let the children take their eggs, I thought, for all I wanted them to be country boys. And I had for a few seconds the wonderful sense that they were here with me, laughing faces peeping out from the shrubbery, hiding in case I should look

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up and shoo them away to bed. Oh, you can have a few more minutes, I thought indulgently, because it is summer holidays after all and you don’t sleep these hot nights. I shall pretend I have not seen you just yet. And I bent my head again to the border.

I heard nothing, no footsteps on the gravel, or the grass, nor the slightest rustle of clothing. She always used to do it, appear quite suddenly and silently, in a doorway, at the end of a corridor, just at my shoulder, it had been one of the things I had found most frightening about her.

Now, her shadow came across my patch of earth, shutting off the last, slanting rays of the sun. ‘A garden in the evening is such a pleasant place, I find.’

I thought that my heart had stopped. I spun round, and almost overbalanced. To save myself I put out my hand and it went deep into the soft, newly turned soil. She glanced down at it, a barely discernible trace of amusement on her lips, as I tried to wipe the earth from under my nails and between my fingers on the side of my skirt.

‘Did I startle you, madam? I am so sorry. I should have spoken to you from the path.’

‘I - I didn’t hear the doorbell.’

‘I saw you as I came down towards the house, so of course I did not bother to ring. I knew you had no one to answer it to me.’

‘Have you - have you come for tea again?’ I heard my voice sounding unnaturally friendly and cheerful. ‘It does seem rather later than yesterday but I could still make some — or a glass of sherry.’

The awful instinct to be polite, to offer hospitality was

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ingrained in me, I had been very properly brought up, and yet she despised me still because I was uncertain, and did not know on what footing our new acquaintance ought to be. She was no longer a servant and I the mistress, and in any case, perhaps that order of things was dead everywhere now. I had heard Bunty and others talk ruefully about the war as ‘the great leveller.’

‘I happened to be passing nearby and I asked Purviss to stop. There is something I want to show you.’

‘Oh, yes? Whatever is it Mrs Danvers?’

‘Not here. At my present house.’

‘Oh.’

‘I thought you would like to visit me there. It is really a very pleasant place and my duties are quite light. If you are free tomorrow afternoon, I shall have the car come across for you.’