Mrs De Winter (6 page)

We were standing beside the fence, the horses were munching the apples, picking them gently from the palms of our hands, their lips curled back. I stroked the warm mossy muzzle of the grey. Then I said, ‘Frank, I want to stay in England so much, I wish I could tell you how I have longed to come home. How I have dreamed about it. I never speak of it to Maxim — how can I? I wasn’t sure how it would be. But never mind about the people, never mind what they think or whether they care at all. It isn’t the people.’

‘I understand.’

‘It’s the places - this place, here, these fields … the sky… the countryside. I know Maxim feels it too, I’m absolutely certain, only he daren’t acknowledge it. He has been as homesick as I have, but with him…’ My voice tailed off. There was only the sound of the horses quietly chomping, and of a lark somewhere, spiralling up into the clear sky. The word Manderley lay between us, unspoken, we felt it, everything it had been and meant charged the air

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like electricity. At last I said, ‘I feel so disloyal. It is wrong for me to be saying any of this.’

‘I don’t see that,’ Frank said carefully. He had taken his pipe out of his pocket and was beginning to pack the bowl with tobacco from the old leather pouch I remembered that he had always used, and the sight of it brought back another scene like this, when I had poured out my anxieties to him and received sound support and reassurance. ‘It’s perfectly natural, surely. You are English. Very English. This is home, for all the years you have spent living abroad. As you say, it is the same for Maxim and I’m sure he knows it.’

‘Could we come back? Would … ‘ I hesitated, choosing my words. ‘Frank, would there be … anything at all to prevent us?’

He pulled on his pipe for several minutes and I watched the first, thin blue smoke plume up into the air. I was stroking and stroking the horse, rubbing its muzzle, my heart pounding, and the horse, delighted at this rush of attention and affection after perhaps too much neglect, pawed at the ground and pushed hard into my hand.

‘You mean to do with … what happened?’

‘Yes.’

And then the inquest and the verdict were there with us, too, taking their ghostly places beside the spirit of Manderley, and we did not refer to them, either.

‘I really don’t see why there should be anything to prevent your coming back if you both want to,’ Frank said.

My heart leaped. Stopped. Pounded again. And then I said, ‘Frank, did you go back there?’

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He looked at me, his eyes steady, full of concern. He said, ‘Yes, of course. I had to.’

I held my breath. Then he put his hand under my elbow, and began to guide me gently, away from the paddock and the horses, out of the orchard, back towards the house.

‘It is over,’ he said.

I did not reply. But the ghost crept after us across the grass, newly awakened. The people were gone, it was not of them that I thought. Rebecca was dead, and her spirit could not haunt me any more, I did not think of her at all that sunlit October morning. Only of the place, the house, the garden, the Happy Valley, slipping down to the hidden cove, the beach. The sea. And, secretly hugging it close and quiet to myself, I welcomed it.

Curiously, it was not seeing Frank Crawley that made things hard, for Maxim most of all, I could tell by the expression on his face, the way that his eyes seemed to have sunk, inwards, so that the sockets looked half hollow. Frank was nothing but a comfort, we were both easy with him. We sat later, listening to his talk of Inverness-shire, the mountains, the lochs, the deer, the glories of that wild countryside he had so clearly grown to love, and of his wife Janet, and the two little boys. He had snapshots, and we admired them, and now, only the present filled the room, there seemed to be no shadows at all lying between us — except a very different kind of shadow, which I could scarcely acknowledge. But at the sight and talk of the two boys, Hamish and Fergus, I felt the hollowness I had grown so accustomed to, followed by a

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spurt of wild hope. We never spoke, now, about our having children. It had been different then, with the bright future before us and Manderley for them to inherit. I was not even sure that Maxim would want any children now, there did not seem to be any place for them in our exile. But if we were to come home …

I looked up, and into the eyes of old Colonel Julyan, and felt an ice form about my hopes and small, secret, gleeful plans.

There were just a few of us left, Giles and Roger, Maxim and I, an elderly cousin, and Julyan and his daughter. His wife was dead, and she, a plump, plain, cheerful young woman, lived with him now and devoted herself, apparently quite contentedly, to looking after him. We had been speaking beforehand, haltingly, of Europe, the countries we had stayed in, the place where we lived now. Then Julyan said, ‘I remember advising Switzerland. The night after all that business in London.’ A silence fell like a sword into the room. I saw Frank glance urgently at Maxim, heard him clear his throat. But Julyan was going on, he seemed to have no sense whatsoever of the atmosphere, no idea of what he was saying. ‘Of course, it was a holiday I had thought of, just until it all blew over and the gossip died down. But then there was that shocking business of Manderley, and then the war of course. One forgets. Never expected you to leave altogether though … and be away for, what is it, ten years or more? Must be ten years.’

Then, as we were stock still, frozen with horror and embarrassment, quite unable to speak, he began to struggle to his feet, fumbling with his sticks, knocking one on to the

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floor and waiting for Frank to retrieve it for him - because no one quite knew what he was intending to do, no one did anything to stop him. Only his daughter put her hand on his arm, as he reached for his glass, lifted it and began to speak again.

‘Father, do you think …’

But he shook her off, and she subsided, flushed, giving me one, desperate glance.

Julyan cleared his throat. ‘It calls for a few words, I think. In spite of the sadness of the occasion… the reason we are all here … ‘ He looked at Maxim, and then at me. ‘You’ve been missed and that’s the plain truth. I’ve often been over here — Giles will vouch for that, and we’ve sat in this room and spoken about you.’ He paused. I looked at Giles, bent slightly forward, staring at the table, the jowls of his face plum coloured. Looked at Roger, and as quickly, away. ‘It’s up to me to say it. The past is dead and buried…’

I squirmed, not daring to meet Maxim’s eye. The old man seemed to have no idea what he had just said.

‘Done with. Well, let it be so.’

He shifted his weight on the sticks, balanced awkwardly. The hall clock struck three. ‘All I meant to say is that it’s damned good to see you both again and… and welcome home.’ And he raised his glass to us and then, alone, slowly and solemnly, drank his toast.

For a moment, I thought that I might die, or scream, cry out or faint, or simply get up and run away. I felt sick with embarrassment and disbelief, desperate with anxiety for Maxim and what he felt, and what he might be about to do.

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Even Frank seemed paralysed, and tongue tied, even he had found no way of coming to our aid.

But to my surprise, Maxim sat, very still, very composed and then, after a moment, took a sip from his own glass, his eyes on Julyan. Thank you,’ he said quietly. That was all, but it meant that somehow I could breathe again, though there was a tight pain in my chest and my face felt hot. But it was all right, nothing terrible had happened, we were still here at the lunch table, all of us as we had been, and it was today, October, the day of Beatrice’s funeral, and the past was the past and had no power over us.

In the end they went, Julyan’s daughter taking an eternity to get him to the door, for he insisted on walking without any help at all and it was an awkward, painful business over the gravel and then he had to be settled and the car cranked and warmed up and backed to and fro, under the old man’s direction.

But at last they were gone, and then there was only another hour or so before Frank, too, had to leave, a car was coming to take him to the station, from where he would go to London and then, on the night sleeper, home to Scotland.

The afternoon light lay softly over the fields, lemon coloured, with the leaves spinning and sifting down through it, the last of the apples falling. It was quite warm. I wanted to be out there because it was so beautiful, I could not bear to miss a moment of it after so long away, and could not face being shut up in the house either, hearing the clock and the creak of the stairs and the patter of the dogs’ feet as they went

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in and out of every room, looking for Beatrice, and Giles’s great, heaving sighs. But Maxim would not come out, he had gone suddenly ashen, with tiredness and strain. Til lie down,’ he said, ‘sleep a bit perhaps. Then there is only the rest of the day to get through.’

I did not reply. We were standing in the hall, the doors open on to the garden. It smelled faintly of apples. Somewhere in the shadows Frank Crawley hovered tactfully, waiting to be of use - his habitual way which had always so irritated Beatrice. ‘What a dull creature he is,’ she had said to me on that first day, ‘never has anything interesting to say.’ I had known then that she had been wrong to dismiss Frank’s dullness and steadiness, his lack of excitement, wrong to be impatient with him, and I wondered now if she had come to understand his value in the end, seen through to his true worth.

‘Go out,’ Maxim said now, ‘it’s what you want. Go out there while you can.’ And looking into his face, I saw that he knew, knew to my heart, what I felt and longed for and had tried so hard to conceal. He smiled, a wan, tired smile, and bent to kiss my forehead lightly. ‘Go on.’ Then he turned and began to go, dismissively, away from me, up the stairs.

I went out.

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Four

The previous night I had woken because of my own disorientation, after the long journey and shock of arriving here.

Now, it was a sound that awakened me from the deepest of dreamless sleeps, and for a few seconds, as I sat up in my bed, I was confused again, thinking somehow that I was back in our hotel room, and wondering vaguely why the window seemed to be in the wrong place.

Maxim was absolutely still; we were both exhausted, emotionally, with the strain of it all, I felt slow and stupid with tiredness. What had I heard? Nothing. It was perfectly quiet and the room dark, there was no moon tonight.

Then it came again, the sound that must have awoken me, an odd, muffled noise I could not place - it might have been animal or human.

I lay down again, but as soon as I put my head on to the pillow it was louder, and closer, seeming to come up to me through the floorboards, or down the walls of the house, so that in the end I got up and went quietly to the door.

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Standing in the dark corridor, I thought at first that it was one of the dogs, still distressed by Beatrice’s absence, perhaps, and confused by the changes in the household routine, whimpering and pacing about. But the dogs were shut away in the kitchen quarters below. This sound was coming from a bedroom.

And then, I realised that what I was hearing was the sound of sobbing, a man’s sobbing, interspersed with mutterings and sudden, little cries.

I did not want to go to him, I felt a dreadful sort of horror and shame of it. I wanted to return quickly to bed and stuff my fingers in my ears, pull the pillow over me to shut it out, too many long hidden emotions threatened to sneak to the surface as a result of my hearing the crying voice.

But then, out of my guilt sprang pity, and the natural desire to comfort, to help, and so I stumbled along the corridor, and round to the front of the house, feeling my way with my hand along the wall, my feet cold on the worn old carpet that ran down the centre of the polished boards - for Giles and Beatrice did not seem to have bothered about too much luxury, they lived in the house as they had first come to it thirty-odd years before, not bothering to replace or repair very much, probably not even noticing how things were or if they got worn, always preferring to be outside, and giving their attention to the horses, the dogs, the garden, as well as to their friends. It was one of the things that had endeared them to me. I had felt so comfortable in this house, the few times I had visited, after the grandeur and formality of Manderley, which had been so

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terrifying to me, and far more than I could ever have lived up to.

At the far end of the corridor I stopped outside Beatrice’s bedroom; the sound of crying was quite clear, only a little muffled by the closed door.

I hesitated, trying to be calm, trying to compose myself, hating it. And then I went in.

‘Giles.’

For quite a long time he did not see or hear me, did not look up, so that I coughed, and made a little rattling noise with the handle, and then, at last, spoke his name gently again.

‘Giles -1 heard you -1 couldn’t bear it. Is there anything I can get for you, anything I can do?’

The bedside lamps were on, and he was sitting beside Beatrice’s funny old-fashioned dressing-table. I could see the reflection of his thick neck above his navy-blue dressing-gown, in the triple mirror. The wardrobe doors were hanging open, and one or two drawers of the chest, too, and some of her clothes had been pulled out and were strewn on the floor, across the bed, over the back of the chair, her tweed skirts and sensible woollen jumpers, a purple frock, a maroon cardigan, scarves, underclothes, a camel coat, her stole with the fox’s head hanging down, its small beady eyes gleaming up at me horribly.

Giles was clutching an old peach-coloured satin wrap to his face — I remembered seeing Beatrice in it once, years ago, and I stood, staring stupidly, just inside the door, not knowing what else I might do or say. And after a while, though without any start or surprise, he looked up. His eyes