by Susan Hill
We saw beautiful things, breathtaking, unforgettable; houses and mountains and gardens and palaces, seas and skies and churches and lakes, we went slowly down the River Rhine on an old fashioned boat fitted out entirely in gilt and mahogany, and stood at the rail or sat in the salon for hours on end, seeing the pale turrets and towers of fairy castles rise out of the dark green forests, along the opposite bank, Sleeping Beauty and Rumpelstiltskin palaces reflected in the wide water. I attached myself to them passionately, I think because they were so far from being what I had loved and wanted, so different in every respect from anything else I had seen or could long for. I did not want that gentle river journey to end.
Maxim was still wary of meeting anyone who might know of us, but all our companions were German or Dutch, we heard no English spoken apart from our own. We grew closer together again, interdependent, as we had not been during our brief time at home, we walked or were quiet together in perfect compatibility. Yet once, for no reason, as I leaned with him on the rail, gliding beside the enchanted forest, I looked at his hand, his long fingers curled loosely over the brass, and a voice in my head said ‘That is a murderer’s hand. The hand that held a gun. That man killed his wife. Rebecca,’ and almost let out a cry, of shock, and distress, bewildered as to why, why it should have come, afraid of what, somewhere in the depths of my unconscious, clearly tormented me.
I must accept this too, it seemed, like all the rest. However far we fled, wherever we were, it would never be over, never forgotten, we would never finally be able to get away.
Once, in that time, there was a worse moment and a mistaken identity, a trick of vision echoing the past, played more terribly upon my dormant fears, quickening them to destructive life.
Sailing down the River Rhine, the weather had been quite cold, but from there, we went to Italy, and caught up with the very last of the summer. Here the sun shone again, in the middle of the day, and there was warmth in it, too. We turned ourselves to it, though early and late we wore warmer things, and here, too, the birds still lingered, the martins and the swallows, diving and swooping in the blue sky and in and out of the crevices of solemn buildings.
I will remember this, I told myself, and in order to do so, I must be happy here – this time will not come again. And I thought of how it might have been with me if Maxim had not rescued me, and that by now I would have been even better travelled, I would have spent the years of my young womanhood trailing wanly around the world as a paid companion to one awful, rich vulgar woman after another and, seeing lines at the corners of my eyes, felt the chill, first anxiety about the loneliness and bleakness of a genteel, impoverished old age. When these thoughts came, I despised myself for the faintest disloyalty I might ever, fleetingly have felt towards Maxim, the slightest, momentary boredom or dissatisfaction, and said my prayers fervently, in relief and gratitude.
On the morning of that day we had come out of the crowded streets and squares, out of the sun, into cool buildings, dark churches with domed and gilded ceilings in whose recesses flights of angels soared on pennant wings to heaven, and the quiet corridors of galleries where our footsteps echoed gravely, and we moved among pale, placid statues of men and gods, saints and virgins, ecstatic choirs, bland, marble fleshed cherubs. The images we saw refreshed me in some deep part of myself, so that my own small life and trivial concerns were, at least for those hours, set in a grander, more timeless perspective.
‘I love it here,’ I said, as we reached the end of a long cloister, that led out again into the world. ‘I should like to stay – it makes me think of what matters and the rest is nothing but an irritation – like a fly buzzing about.’
‘Then we should go.’
‘Why?’
‘So as not to spoil ourselves by having a surfeit – great art and solemnity and immortal longings are to be restricted to carefully measured doses, for best effect.’
He made me laugh, standing there so languid and English beside the marble pillar, speaking to me with all the offhand arrogance I had first loved, and so, out of an uprush of joy that he was more and more becoming that person again, I loved him, and took his arm as we strolled out of the shadow and into the full sun.
‘If we are not to stay here, what shall we do?’
‘Eat lunch, and go to a garden.’
The lunch was not, for once, in some small local café tucked away in a sidestreet, it was altogether grander.
‘I’m tired of it,’ he said. ‘Come on.’ And I knew that he meant hiding, turning our faces away out of habit when anyone passed and made to glance at us, tired of being afraid and ashamed, and relief made me giddy, and want to run about, laugh, dance in the street, not so much for myself – I was still happy enough to retreat and be anonymous, it was instinctive in me – but for him.
We ate at a hotel, under an awning on the terrace, and there were flowers on the table and a smooth, heavy white cloth; the stems of the tall glasses were as fragile as twigs, and the shellfish tasted sweetly of the sea. Nothing could touch us. Once I said, ‘I am so lucky. I had forgotten and now I have remembered,’ and he laughed, and when I looked full into his face, I thought I saw only contentment there.
This will do, I said, if I cannot have the other, this will do, this sunshine and warmth and ease, these beautiful places; and I thought of how many, many would envy us. The secret is now, I said, looking down into my wine, tasting its faintly lemon freshness on my tongue. The secret is today; the past, tomorrow and the rest of our lives, are not to be thought of, we are simply not to contemplate them at all.
We lingered very happily for almost two hours over our lunch, eating more than was our habit now, and then took a bus, jostling with people, a little way out of the city, up into the gentle hills that surround it. But for the last mile, we walked, and it was wonderfully quiet, climbing up between the avenues of trees in the late afternoon sun.
The secret is now, I said over again, now, and thought that I could have stayed there, lived quietly in this beautiful place, and gone about the markets shopping, kept a small, white, neat house with shutters, and flowers in pots lining the steps.
‘There,’ Maxim said, stopping, catching my hand. ‘Look.’
The villa was ahead of us, at the end of the last slope, rising above a broad avenue, surrounded by formal gardens. It was an austere house, elegant, graceful, approached by a double flight of stone steps that curved on either side and came together outside the porticoed entrance.
‘I first saw it when I was seventeen,’ Maxim said. ‘I’ll never forget it – never forget realising all at once about the proportions of things – it pleased my eye more than any building I’d ever seen – except my own.’
I stared up at it. I was not sure. It was too formal, too severe, I could not warm to it, it held me at arm’s length and gazed at me severely.
As we walked up the smooth gravelled slopes, I saw the gardens on either side, and they were formal, too. There was water in long, stone channels, and fountains, their streams rising in fine arcs and plumes, carefully restrained. I saw lines of cypress trees and perfectly clipped little hedges, and the ilex and the poplars threw long, measured shadows.
Apart from some white geraniums, in great urns on either side of the steps, there seemed to be no flowers. But behind the house, the formal gardens led to rougher slopes, olives and orange trees, small, twisted, romantic things, in the long grass.
‘You should see it in the spring,’ Maxim said, ‘it’s carpeted with blue and cream flowers – and the blossom rises out of them – like snow – we’ll come then.’
Spring. I would not think so far, would not think ahead at all, for fear I should remember what I had planned for that time.
After a while, I began to understand a little the seductiveness of the villa, the perfect, cool lines of it, its calmness and formality reached me, they were very certain of themselves, and so were restful. One let the house take control over oneself, it could not be altered or argued with. Perhaps, a
t last, I was changing, perhaps now, I was fully mature, I thought, and it did not seem a foolish, laughable idea. I had never had a youth – though I had had a childhood, so long ago, it might have been in a story I had read – I had not been young, in any carefree, silly, frivolous way. I had married Maxim, I had lost myself in him, and in Manderley, and what happened to us there – yet I knew that in some deep, essential way I was not an adult, not mature, not a grown woman, though I often felt middle aged or even very elderly. It was a curious state. I was a wife to Maxim, and a child, too, and in our earlier exile, I had felt like a mother, leading him carefully by the hand.
We went on slowly, around the gardens, they encouraged a quiet, still way of walking, one could not imagine racing about, chattering, children’s laughter. Like Manderley, I thought. That is why he is happy here, why the house gives him pleasure – it is like Manderley – it is grey, formidable, overpowering, ordered, harmonious, silent.
There were a few other people walking about as we did, solemn couples, scarcely speaking, and as we came back to the front of the villa again they began to come towards us, and a few others appeared, to gather in a group at the bottom of the steps. Maxim looked at his watch.
‘Four o’clock. There is a tour of the house – the guide arrives here and waits – we may as well join. It’s a bit ornate, but there are some wonderful things – pictures, too, I think. I don’t remember it all.’
I was not sure that I wanted to go inside. I was happy to stay ambling about the gravelled paths, among the fountains, and not long ago it was the sort of thing that Maxim would have fled from, for the sort of people who went on such tours of public places were surely the sort who might see us, know us, stare and whisper. He did not seem to be concerned about any of that now.
A young woman was standing beside the flight of steps that led up to the entrance, tall, slender, dressed with impeccable Italian elegance, her hair pulled smoothly off her bony face into a black comb, the sort of woman who instantly made me feel scruffy, ill sorted, drab, aware of the buttons that had broken on my cardigan, the awkward way I held myself.
I did not fear women like that out of any insecurity with Maxim, no thought of his interest in anyone else had ever flickered within me. I had never for one moment been anxious that he might be unfaithful, though I sometimes wondered, as I always had, why he had married me, why he was apparently quite content, how love had come to us. I often stared at my own face in the glass and did not understand. There was only one woman I had been afraid of, one rival, but that was long over.
Yet the sight of this Italian, now, running lightly up the flight of steps, like a poised, self-assured bird, reminded me of it, and the photograph of Rebecca came into my mind, and I thought of how she would run up to the balustraded entrance of the villa, as if she were mistress of it.
We trooped obediently behind her, up the steps, a clump of a dozen or so, interested, polite, and because Maxim wanted to go inside, I followed, but I was sure, as we went into the great, shadowy hall, that I would not like any of it, it would be too forbidding, full of heavy, cold, impersonal things. And so it was, and the guide spoke Italian in a hard, high, fast voice. I could not follow anything at all and Maxim seemed distracted by her. When she pointed out this or that, he glanced away, studied some other part of the room. I wondered why he had come; perhaps simply to remember. He had said that he first came here when he was seventeen. I wondered what he had been like then, whether he had seemed boy-like, and clumsy. But I could not imagine.
We went in and out of the high ceilinged rooms. There were tiled floors, patterned formally, our footsteps rang on them, and painted ceilings, and carved swags of fruit and vines and ivy wreaths around the mouldings, above the doors. People would have listened to music here and stood in groups talking politely. They would have eaten beautifully arranged food, and never behaved impulsively, never been incorrectly dressed. They would not have done the normal everyday things, laughed and run about and argued and dropped things, and let the children shout.
The deeper we went into that impressive, perfect house, the more it repelled me. I disliked it, but I was not afraid of it, it did not intimidate me, and I was oddly proud of that.
I followed the guide, beside Maxim, faithfully for half an hour, but because I was growing too bored, too restless, and wanting a sight of the sunlit garden again, I gradually dropped back, dawdling unnoticed in a corridor, as they fluttered off towards a distant gallery, pretending to look more closely at some dull prints of amphitheatres and the colosseum, lining the walls. They were curiously soothing, a bland poultice to my restiveness.
The voice of the guide and the shuffling footsteps faded. No one had noticed me hanging back, though I supposed that before long Maxim would come to find me. A few yards ahead of me, at the end of the broad, empty corridor a staircase led up, and I followed it, feeling, as I climbed up past closed doors, like a child in a dream, wandering through a house alone, looking for someone or something without knowing what. No one else was about at all, and I supposed that the villa was deserted now, apart from the occasional influx of guides, and visitors, staring.
The staircase narrowed, and the last flight of all was quite steep. It was darker here, the windows were small and high, slits through which only fine arrows of dusty sunlight pierced, and there was nothing to see, no pictures, no furnishings. I meant to get to the top, in a superstitious way feeling that I must put my foot on the very last step before turning to descend again, but as I did so, I saw a rectangle of light ahead, falling on to the bare floor, and going towards it, I saw that two shutters stood half open, balanced together at the centre. I pushed them gently and as they swung, stepped forward into a small embrasure. There was no glass, it was an open space with a ledge around, like a balcony, and I realised that it formed part of a row of identical openings, that ran across the back of the villa.
What I saw took me by surprise, it seemed I had found the point of the house, after all. The orchard and the olive grove fell away, the formal gardens lay outspread like a carefully patterned carpet and beyond, dropping down to the drive and the great gates, the wooded slopes up which we had climbed to reach here. After that, in the distance, blue and grey and violet at the end of the day, were the roofs and domes, the turrets and campaniles of the city, with the river running through it, faintly visible.
It was beautiful. It was breathtaking, and mine, for that moment, a secret I had discovered and held to myself, pretending that no one else had ever been here, better beyond measure than the dull, pompous rooms and statues and cold corridors of the house below.
And then, leaning forward slightly, I looked not out and ahead, but directly down, and the stone terrace far below, with its urns and lions and tubs of clipped little trees, seemed to be lying in wait for me, beckoning, seductive. I began to tremble, my throat constricted, the palms of my hands were damp and slippery as I gripped the ledge.
The gardens were empty, quite empty, the shadows lay long and dark, like the shadows of tall women, standing there, stern, expectant. Then the voice came, whispering, I almost felt her breath on my neck, saw the black silk of her sleeve, her hand resting on the shutter beside me. If I glanced around, I would see her.
‘It’s no use, is it? You’ll never get the better of her … she’s still the real Mrs de Winter, not you. And what about him? You know the truth, don’t you, and so do I, and you can’t forget it. We will never let you forget. She won’t. She is still there, she is always there. You thought she had faded away into the past, that she would lie still and silent but she will never lie still, I will never let her. She wants me to help her, and I will. I never failed her, never, and I won’t fail her now. I’ll be here, I will speak for her when she cannot. He killed her, didn’t he? We all know it. I know. She knows. You know. He murdered her. Maxim de Winter shot his wife and laid her body in the boat and put out to sea, and let it sink, so that it would look like an accident. But it wasn’t an accident. It was murder. She
didn’t drown. I know the truth you see. I always suspected and now I know. So do you, and it is worse for you, isn’t it? So hard. You have to live with it for the rest of your life and you can never not know, never escape, no matter where you run, to some other beautiful place, some quiet, private little town, it doesn’t matter. You have to live with it and with him. When you wake each morning, you have to look at him and then you remember. That man is a murderer. That man shot his wife. He killed Rebecca. He is your husband now. When you go to sleep at night, you see him beside you, and it is your last waking thought, and it follows you into your dreams and curdles them so that they are dreadful, frightening things.’
The voice would not stop, would not go, it neither rose nor fell, but was monotonous, soft, the words pattered one after another, as seductive as music I could not choose but hear. The voice was in my head, yet it was outside of me, separate. I felt horribly faint, and yet I could not lose consciousness, there was no escape that way.
I opened my eyes, which had been half closed, and looked down. The light had changed, as the day drew in, it was a beautiful amber and rose, a perfumed, limpid sunlight that drew me towards itself.
‘Yes,’ the voice whispered. ‘That is the way, isn’t it? You know it now, you remember. Look down there, it’s easy, isn’t it? Why don’t you jump? It wouldn’t hurt, not to break your neck. It’s a quick, kind way. Why don’t you try it? Why don’t you go? It would solve everything. You need never remember again, no one could reach you there. Don’t be afraid. I won’t push you. I didn’t push you the last time, did I? I won’t stand by you. You can jump of your own accord. He will never know why, it will look like a terrible accident, and so it will be, won’t it? He won’t know I have been here. He thinks I am dead. So do you. They all do. Mrs Danvers, as dead as her mistress. Why don’t you get away from us all for ever? You want to, don’t you? You have never dared to tell him that you are afraid of him sometimes, because he is a murderer, you will never be happy with him, however far you run, or even if you go back and try to begin that new life you thought you wanted, you can never get away from us. Why don’t you jump and let it be over?’