Mrs De Winter Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Susan Hill

  Title Page

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Two

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Three

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Susan Hill’s novels and short stories have won the Whitbread, Somerset Maugham and John Llewellyn Rhys awards and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is the author of over forty books, including the four previous Serrailler crime novels, The Various Haunts of Men, The Pure in Heart, The Risk of Darkness and The Vows of Silence. Her most recent novel is A Kind Man. The play adapted from her famous ghost story, The Woman in Black, has been running on the West End stage since 1989.

  Susan Hill was born in Scarborough and educated at King’s College, London. She is married to the Shakespeare scholar, Stanley Wells, and they have two daughters. She lives in Gloucestershire, where she runs her own small publishing company, Long Barn Books.

  Susan Hill’s website is www.susan-hill.com

  ALSO BY SUSAN HILL

  Featuring Simon Serrailler

  The Various Haunts of Men

  The Pure in Heart

  The Risk of Darkness

  The Vows of Silence

  Fiction

  Gentlemen and Ladies

  A Change for the Better

  I’m the King of the Castle

  The Albatross and Other Stories

  Strange Meeting

  The Bird of Night

  A Bit of Singing and Dancing

  In the Springtime of the Year

  The Woman in Black

  Mrs de Winter

  The Mist in the Mirror

  Air and Angels

  The Service of Clouds

  The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read

  The Man in the Picture

  The Beacon

  The Small Hand

  A Kind Man

  Non-Fiction

  The Magic Apple Tree

  Family

  Howards End is on the Landing

  Children’s Books

  The Battle for Gullywith

  The Glass Angels

  Can it be True?

  SUSAN HILL

  Mrs de Winter

  Part One

  One

  The undertaker’s men were like crows, stiff and black, and the cars were black, lined up beside the path that led to the church; and we, we too were black, as we stood in our pathetic, awkward group waiting for them to lift out the coffin and shoulder it, and for the clergyman to arrange himself; and he was another black crow, in his long cloak.

  And then the real crows rose suddenly from the trees and from the fields, whirled up like scraps of blackened paper from a bonfire, and circled, caw-caw-ing above our heads. I should have found it an eerie, melancholy sound on such a day. But I did not, their cry brought a lift of joy to my heart, as the cry of the owl the previous night and the distant rawk of the seagulls at dawn had done, and the tears rose up at the same time to choke me. It is real, I said. It is now. We are here. Home.

  Now, looking up, I saw the coffin. Remembered.

  But the coffin was not black, that dreadful shape was pale – plain, pale oak, and the handles and ornate corners glinted as the sun caught them, and the flowers they were placing on top of it now were golden, a great cross of chrysanthemums, all the colours of the afternoon light and of the October countryside around us, bronze and copper and lemon and greenish white, but most of all, that incomparable gold. The day was gold too, the day was not black. It was a perfect day. In the hanger that lay along the rise, the beeches were on fire, they flashed orange, and the sycamores were crimson, though the oaks were only just turning and still showed green at the heart.

  There were dark yews beside the lychgate, tall obelisks. But above them, a walnut, quite bare, spread out its elaborate, delicate tracery of branches. This place, to which I had scarcely been, was in a mild, sheltered dip of the wider, bleaker landscape; the high moors, the crags and cliffs and open sea, were far away. Here, we were near to the soft blur of woods that sloped down to the hidden river.

  Even without turning my head, and being careful not to gaze and gawp about me in a way that would have been unseemly, I noticed so much, so many different trees, and tried to name them all, for these were the very things I had thought of and dreamed about and remembered, in such detail, almost every day for so many years, these were the secret recollections that I had kept close to me, the inexpressible comforts. Trees such as these, places, days such as this. Ash, elm, chestnut, lime. Ilex. The sturdy, stubbly little hedgerows studded about with blood red berries, like currants in a cake.

  Then, I remembered how the bracken would be now, what a glorious mesh of gold and exactly how the fronds would curl. I imagined it brushing against my legs and against the silken bodies of the dogs as we walked, heard in my head the dry swish and rustle it made and the cracking of the twigs underfoot. The thought almost made me faint, I was overcome again by one of the great surges of emotion that had been rising within me, disorientating and confusing me, for the past week, ever since the call had come, and most of all, overwhelmingly, since the previous night. I did not know how to deal with them or control them, they were so unfamiliar, it was so long since I had experienced any such feelings. We had been so careful to live an even, steady, unemotional life, we who had been through such storms and at the mercy of so many battering emotions, and then thrown up on that calm, dull, distant shore at last, so relieved, so grateful. After that, what emotions we experienced had been sure and steady and deep, like some underground river which flowed through us, and upon whose strength we could utterly rely, which never varied its pace, and never pitched us to and fro, did not let us down, but above all, had no control over us.

  But now, I was no longer calm or strong, now I was at the mercy of these new feelings, this great wave that had gathered pace and force until this morning it had overwhelmed me, knocking the breath out of my body, scattering my wits; the feelings I knew on returning home, on being here again, in this English countryside, after the years of exile. I gripped my fingers together tightly in the palms of my hands, felt the bones hard inside the black gloves.

  On the slope that rose behind the church, they were ploughing, turning the last of the earth over to a deep, ruddy brown. I could see the tractor chugging along its slow, careful furrow, and the man who sat on it turn his body to look back, and the birds, like a cloud of gnats streaming behind.

  It was October. But the sun shone and it was warm on our faces, and the light lay so beautifully upon the land, I wanted to turn towards it, not to shelter from it and shade my eyes, as I had grown used to doing against that other, harsh, bright sun under which we had been living. This was the sun I would have embraced, not shrunk from, this the light I had so longed for, so missed and so often, often remembered.

  The crows caw-cawed again, and then, abruptly, fell down, plummeting into the trees, and were still, the blue sky was empty.

  The men had shouldered the coffin, and were turning, and we turned and arranged ourselve
s, took our places behind them. Beside me, Maxim held himself stiffly, and when we shuffled off, moved oddly, jerkily, as if he were a jointed thing, made of wood. His shoulder was as close to mine as it could be without quite brushing against me, and I looked at him and saw the muscles taut around his mouth and the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, saw that he was deathly white; and I was a thousand miles away and could not reach him, he had gone from me into the past and into his own, private, closed up world, the one he had re-entered the day the news had come to us and into which I could never follow him.

  I wondered if he remembered that other slow, terrible walk behind a coffin, that last funeral. I did not know. It is a mistake to believe that we can always share another’s thoughts, however close they may be to us, however much we may feel that we are a part of their innermost selves. We are not. For twelve years, in so many ways we had been as one, everything had been shared, there had been no secrets. Yet the past still held secrets, the past threw its shadows, and the shadows sometimes separated us.

  I looked away from him, and up and around me, and it came again, that wild surge of emotion, and the sense of unreality too, so that once more, I was made giddy and had to grip myself. This could not be, I was not here. Surely we could not have come back.

  We had come back, and it was as though I had been starving for years and suddenly set down at a banquet, a table laid with the most succulent and tempting of foods: or else parched, desiccated with thirst, and having had only rust and sand and ashes in my mouth, and was lying now, level with a cold, clear stream and able to cup the water into my hands and lift it to my face and drink, drink. I was greedy and I fed, thirsty and I drank, I had been blind and now I saw.

  I could not take in enough or ever have my fill of what was around me, the fields, slopes, hedges, trees, the rise of the ground ahead, the ploughed earth, the hanger of golden trees, the smell of the soil and the rustle of the late leaves, the sense of the distant sea; the narrow lanes, the small houses, the distant sound of shooting, the bark of a dog at a cottage gate as we passed in our grave procession; threads of blue smoke coiling out of chimneys, into the golden, sunlit air. A man on horseback, the great, gleaming rump of the mare rounded like a chestnut. The man had slowed for us, then stopped and taken off his hat as the cortège crept by and I had peered at him from the car window, half smiled, but he had sat at attention and not glanced at me. I wondered if he had been a friend, a neighbour, had turned to Maxim to ask. But Maxim had not seen, I thought he was quite unaware of me, or of the day, the point we had reached on our journey, of the rider standing there. Maxim stared ahead, seeing, or else trying desperately not to see, other places, other scenes. But I could no more have stopped myself from looking about me, and drowning in everything I saw, than I could have caused my own heart not to beat. However tragic the reason for our being here, I could still only be glad, light headed with joy at the beauty, the glory of this world outside the black car’s window, only weak with disbelief and gratitude – though my joy made me guilty, too, and I must keep it to me, and could not have admitted it, to him, to anyone.

  The previous night, sleeping fitfully, uneasily, in the strange, cold bed, my mind and body still unsettled by the discomfort and tedium of the journey we had made, I had woken out of some confused, troubled half dream of train wheels and flat, grey, dull French fields, to perfect stillness, perfect silence, and for a few seconds, been bewildered, uncertain where I was or why. Then, at the moment I had remembered, I had felt that first shock of excitement and happiness. To be here, to be in England, after the years of exile and homesickness and longing – the joy of it had blotted out all other reality.

  The room had been filled with a wonderful soft moonlight, it touched the white painted dressing table, gave a sheen to the pale walls, lay across the surface of the mirror and the glass of a picture and the silver backs of my brushes, and turned them to water. I had gone quietly across the room, afraid to make any sound that would awaken him, fearing even to glance at the long hunched shape, folded into itself like a foetus in the bed, knowing how exhausted he had been, drained by the physical and emotional turmoil, and that he needed the refuge of sleep. I had packed for us so quickly, uncertain which clothes to bring – for there were no servants to see to these things now, everything fell to me – and had to riffle for a few minutes through my case until I felt the soft cotton of my dressing gown against my fingers.

  Then, wrapping it around me, I went back to the window-seat and pulled the curtain open a little. Maxim had not been disturbed and after another moment I had unlatched the window and slid it open.

  To me, then, looking out over it, that garden was a magic place, a scene from some fairy-tale and I sitting at the casement. What I saw was a landscape of such tremulous beauty, such wonder, and as I looked, I knew, as one sometimes can know absolutely, that I should never forget these moments, whatever happened in the rest of our lives, they would be memories I should feed off, as I fed sometimes, secretly, off memories of the view of the rose garden, from our old window at Manderley.

  There was a great round holly tree in the centre of the lawn, that cast its shadow in perfect circle, like a dropped skirt on the pale grass; through a gap in the yew hedge at the far end, I could see the silver coin of the pond in its hollow stone basin. The last of the dahlia and chrysanthemum heads hung stiff and black, but their stalks were brushed by the moonlight, and the slates of the old lean-to roof gleamed silver grey. Beyond the garden, the orchard, hung with the last few apples, silver here and there among the dark branches, and beyond the orchard, the paddock, rising slightly, and in the paddock two of the horses, the greys, stood, pale as ghosts.

  I looked and looked and thought I could never have my fill, and as I looked, some lines came into my head, poetry I supposed I must have learned as a school child, and had never thought of again until now.

  Slowly, silently now, the moon

  Walks the night in her silver shoon.

  This way and that she peers and sees

  Silver fruit upon silver trees.

  But I could not remember any more.

  It was not only the sight of the garden that so moved, so deeply pleased and satisfied me; the smell of the night air, coming through the open window, was indescribably sweet, quite unlike the hot, heady smell of the night air we had grown used to in what I now automatically thought of as our exile. That had been sometimes exotic, often intoxicating, stifling, occasionally foetid. But always strange, foreign. This night smell was that of my childhood and my growing up, it smelled of home. I smelled the cold, and the frost touched grass, and tree bark, a faint smokiness, smelled turned earth, and damp iron, clay and bracken and horse, I smelled all of these, and yet none of them precisely, I smelled the garden and the countryside that lay beyond and all around it, in the air of an October night, under the riding moon.

  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, 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 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.