Mrs De Winter Read online

  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 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 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.

  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 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.

  ‘This morning … early this morning.’ His voice came out in odd gulps, and kept tailing away into tears. Once he paused for several seconds to overcome them, but did not succeed. ‘She was still in the nursing home, we didn’t get her home … she wanted to come home … I was trying to work things out, do you see? I meant her to be at home …’ He sobbed again, and I did not know what to say to him, how to cope with it at all, it made me sorry for him, but embarrassed too, I wanted to drop the receiver, to run away.

  ‘Giles …’

  ‘She is dead. She died this morning. Early this morning. I wasn’t even there. I’d gone home, do you see, I’d no idea … they didn’t tell me.’ He took a deep, deep breath, and then said, very loudly and slowly, as if I might not have heard or understood, was deaf, or a small child. ‘I am ringing to tell Maxim that his sister is dead.’

  He had opened the balcony windows and was standing there, staring out into the dark garden. Only one lamp, beside the bed, was lit. He said nothing when I told him, nothing at all, he did not move, or look at me.

  I said, ‘I didn’t know what to say. I felt awful. He cried. Giles was crying.’

  I remembered the sound of his voice again, as it had come to me over the bad line, the great sobs and the heaving of his breath as he tried to control them and could not, and then I realised that all the time I had been standing there, in the hotel manager’s stuffy office, clutching the receiver so tightly, I had had in my mind a terrible picture not of Giles sitting somewhere on a chair in their house, perhaps, in his study, or the hall, but of him dressed as an Arab Sheikh, f
lowing white robes covering his huge frame and some sort of a cloth tied around his head, as he had been on the dreadful night of the Manderley fancy dress ball. I had imagined the tears coursing down his spaniel’s cheeks, staining rivulets in the brown make up he had taken such trouble over. But the tears that night had not been his, he had been awkward and embarrassed; the tears, of shock and bewilderment and shame, had only been mine.

  I wished I did not think of it so much now, I wanted that time wiped clean from my memory, but instead, it only seemed to grow more vivid and I had no power to hold back the memories, the pictures that came quite unbidden, at all sorts of odd times, into my mind.

  A cold breeze blew in through the open window.

  Then Maxim said, ‘Poor Beatrice,’ and again, after a moment, ‘poor Beatrice,’ but in an oddly dead, toneless voice, as if he had no feeling about her at all. I knew that he did, must. Beatrice, more than three years older, and very different, had been loved when nobody else at all had been able to arouse any feeling within him. They had spent little time together since childhood, but she had supported him, sided with him unquestioningly, loved him naturally and loyally, for all her bluff, undemonstrative manner, and Maxim, forever impatient and peremptory with her, he had loved her, and relied upon her and been dumbly grateful to her, too, so many times in the past.

  I moved away from the window and began to go restlessly about the room, opening drawers and looking into them, wondering about packing, unable to clear my mind or to focus, tired but too tense, I knew, to sleep.

  At last, Maxim came inside, and latched the windows.

  I said, ‘It will be far too late tonight to find out anything about tickets – which will be the best way to go. We don’t even know what day the funeral is, I didn’t ask. How stupid, I should have asked, I’ll try and telephone Giles tomorrow, and make the arrangements then.’

  I glanced across at him, a confusion of thoughts and questions and half plans bubbling about inside my head. ‘Maxim?’ He was staring at me, his face appalled, disbelieving. ‘Maxim, of course we shall have to go. You see that, surely. However could we not go to Beatrice’s funeral?’

  He was white as paper, his lips bloodless. ‘You go. I can’t.’

  ‘Maxim, you must.’

  I went to him then, held him without speaking more than murmured reassurances, and we clung to one another as it began to creep over us both, the terrible realisation. We had said that we could never go back, and now we must. What else could possibly have made us? We did not dare begin to speak of what it meant, the enormity of what was to happen lay between us, and there was nothing, nothing to be said.

  In the end we went to bed, though we did not sleep and I knew that we would not. At two o’clock, three, four, we heard the chimes of the bell tower from the square.

  We had fled from England more than ten years ago, had begun our flight on the night of the fire. Maxim had simply turned the car and driven away from the flames of Manderley, and from the past and all its ghosts. We had taken almost nothing with us, made no plans, left no explanations, though in the end, we had sent an address. I had written to Beatrice, and there had been a formal letter and two sets of legal documents, from Frank Crawley and the solicitor and then from the bank in London. Maxim had not read them, scarcely even glanced at the paper, had scrawled his signature and pushed them back to me as if they, too, were burning. I had dealt with everything else, what little came to us, after that, and then there had been our fragile year or so of peace, before the war had sent us in search of another place, and then another, and after the war, at last, we had come to this country, and finally, this little lakeside resort, and found relief again, become settled, resumed our precious, dull, uneventful life, completely closed in upon ourselves, needing and wanting no one; and if I had begun recently to be restless, to remember again, and known that it had been there, the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, I had never spoken of it to him, and would have cut out my tongue before doing so.

  I think that I was not only too tense to sleep that night, I was afraid too, in case I had nightmares, images I could not bear and could not control, of things I wanted to forget forever. But instead, when I did fall into a half sleep, a little before dawn, the images that slid before my eyes were entirely tranquil and happy ones, of places we had visited and loved together, views of the blue Mediterranean, the lagoon in Venice with the churches rising and floating out of a pearly mist in the early morning, so that when I came awake again I was quite calm and rested, and lay quietly beside Maxim in the darkness, willing for him to catch my mood.

  I had not yet fully faced what else was with me in the dream, the curious excitement and joy that were fluttering there. I had been too ashamed of them. But now, I admitted them quite calmly.

  Beatrice was dead. I was very sorry. I had loved her dearly and I think that she had loved me. In time, I knew that I would weep for her, and miss her and feel very great distress. And I must face Maxim’s anguish, too, not only at her loss but at what it meant we had to do.

  We had to go back. And lying there in our hotel bedroom in that foreign town beside the lake, I allowed myself to feel, secretly, guiltily, a wonderful anticipation, although it was mingled with dread – for I could not imagine what we would find, how things would look to us, and above all, how Maxim would be and what anguish our return would cause him.

  It was clear in the morning that it was very great but that he had instinctively begun to deal with it in the old way, by shutting things out and refusing to think or feel, concealing everything behind a mask and acting like an automaton, going through movements in the detached, mechanical way he had mastered long ago. He scarcely spoke, except of trivial things to do with the preparations, but stood at the window or on the balcony staring out at the garden, silent, pale, distant. It was I who made the arrangements, organised our travel, telephoned, telegraphed, booked tickets, worked out connections, I who packed for us both, as I usually did now, and it was when I stood looking at the row of clothes in the wardrobe that I felt the old feeling of inadequacy creeping back. For I was still not a smart woman, I still did not care to waste much time in choosing clothes, though goodness knows I had enough time to pass. I had gone from being a gauche, badly dressed girl, to being an uninterestingly, dully dressed married woman, and indeed, looking at them now, I saw that my clothes were those of someone entirely middle aged, in unadventurous background colours, and it suddenly struck me that in this way too, I had never been young, never been at all frivolous and gay, let alone fashionable or smart. At the beginning, it had been through a combination of ignorance and poverty; later, untutored, in awe of my new life and position, and in the shadow of Rebecca, the immortally beautiful and impeccably, extravagantly dressed, I had chosen safe, uninteresting things, not daring to experiment. Besides, Maxim had not wanted it, he had married me because of, not in spite of, my ill chosen, unbecoming clothes, they were all part of the innocent unworldly person I had been.

  So, I had taken out the plain, tailored, cream blouses, the sensible beige- and grey- and mole-coloured skirts, the dark cardigans and neat, self-effacing shoes and packed them carefully, and was oddly unable to imagine whether it would be warm or cold in England, and afraid to ask Maxim for his opinion, for I knew that he would have closed his mind to it completely. But it was all done quite quickly, and the rest of our belongings locked away in the wardrobes and drawers. We would return, of course, though I did not know when. I went down to reassure the hotel manager that we were keeping on the room. He had tried to make us pay a deposit and, confused, anxious to get everything over with, I had been about to agree, thinking that it must be usual and was only fair. But when Maxim had heard he had suddenly sprung to life, like a dog that has been sleeping and is roused to temper, and snarled at the man in his old, thin lipped, imperious way, told him we had no intention of paying more money than we would owe in the normal course of events, he must accept our word that we would return. ‘He hasn’t a chance of
letting the rooms to anyone else at this end of the season and he knows it perfectly well. The place is emptying now. He’s lucky to get us. There are plenty of other hotels.’

  I bit my lip and could not meet the manager’s eye, as he watched us climb into the taxi. But Maxim’s spurt of temper had died and for the rest of the journey, all that day and night and for the whole of the following day, he was shrunken into himself, silent for the most part, though gentle with me, taking food and drink when I proffered it, like a child.

  ‘It will be all right,’ I said, once or twice. ‘Maxim, it will not be as bad as you expect.’ He smiled wanly, and turned his head to look out of the train window at the endless, grey plains of Europe. Here, there was no autumn sunshine, no glorious, sifting light, here there were only rain sodden fields and ragged trees and dull, huddled villages, bleak little towns.

  There was just one other thing. It was fleeting, momentary, but it terrified me, it came so unexpectedly and with such force, and for a second it froze my heart.

  We were at a railway station on one of the borders, and because they were changing engines we had half an hour to wait, enough time to get out and walk up and down the long platform to stretch our legs. There had been a stall selling cooked sausages, good hot coffee and schnapps, and sweet, spicy cakes which we dipped in and soaked, before eating greedily. Maxim was watching some pantomime to do with a man and a great heap of luggage piled on to a rickety trolley. Amused, standing beside him, I was thinking at that moment of nothing, nothing in particular at all, neither past nor future, simply enjoying the break from the motion of the train, the taste of the cake and coffee. Then Maxim had turned and glanced at me, caught my eye and smiled, and as I looked into his face I heard, falling into my head as clearly as drops of water falling on to stone, ‘That man is a murderer. He shot Rebecca. That is the man who killed his wife,’ and for one terrible moment, staring at Maxim, I saw a stranger, a man who had nothing to do with me, a man I did not know.