by Susan Hill
I felt dead and sick inside. I had not forgotten the morning and my sense of joy and strength, they were simply gone, I could remember but not feel them any more. From being sure, I was in doubt, for what, after all, had been said, what difference was there? He could find no reason – yet things might never be right, reason or no. Plenty of people were childless, and there seemed to be no reason. He had only examined me briefly, only talked. What did he know? What had he changed?
I had not told Maxim where I was going, but as I came out from Dr Lovelady’s rooms, into that golden street, I had known that I would be able to say, at once, it would have been impossible to remain with my secret: ‘We may have children.’ I had planned to say it in the garden that evening, walking quietly among the roses – ‘there is no reason why not and every reason, now we are settled and happy, why we will.’
I would not speak of it now. There would be dull talk of shops and the heat, I would make up this or that, drop the subject as quickly as I could. Above all, I could not tell him about Favell. There were still some things I had to protect him from whatever the cost. He was happy, he had said so, Manderley no longer mattered, and the past had no power over him – nothing must alter that.
I realised that I loathed and despised Jack Favell, that he disgusted me: I was angry with him for what he had done to this day, but I was not afraid of him. He was too weak, too pathetic. And gradually, as the miles increased between us, and London receded and I began to feel myself near to home, I felt that the worst was over, it had been a short unpleasantness, no more. He had not followed me, he did not know where we lived – even, I realised, that we had come back here for more than a short time. He had not asked – I was surprised that he had not, but it meant that we were not very important to him. Only a few phrases lingered in my mind. ‘You found out the truth. He told you, didn’t he? That makes you a guilty party too.’ … ‘He should have hung. You know it as well as I do.’ ‘Tell Maxim – money’s the least of it. I want more than money out of him.’ But he had always made hasty, empty threats, tried to impress me by insinuating things, dropping hints. He had not changed.
By the time the train slowed down, coming up to the village halt, I had put it into perspective, talked myself round, I thought, quite successfully, and dismissed Favell almost completely, so that I could go to Maxim, cheerful, smiling, ready to trot out all the little sentences I had composed for him, about my day.
But I dreamed of Favell. I had no power over my unconscious mind. He had come to Manderley bragging of the sports car he was driving – ‘much faster than anything poor old Max ever has,’ and today he had mentioned selling cars, until the war spoiled his luck, and so, it was of Jack Favell in a car that I dreamed. We were driving up a steep, narrow road, and I had thought that I was with Maxim, but then he had turned to grin at me and the face, the fleshy blue jowls and bloodshot eyes, was Favell’s, and it was his podgy hands with their dirty fingernails, on the wheel. It was dark, as if there might be a rainstorm at any moment, and the road was lined with tall trees, their dark, gleaming trunks rising above us threateningly, crammed together like teeth in an overcrowded mouth, and leafless until the very top, when most of them spread out overhead, blocking what was left of the light. I knew that soon, we must reach the brow of the hill and come out into the open, but the car was grinding, too slowly, I felt desperate to urge it on, to get ahead, because I knew that when I did, Maxim would be waiting for me, with his own car. I could not understand why I was not with him now.
Favell went on glancing at me, leering in an awful sort of gloating triumph, I felt he had made a fool of me and yet I did not know how, and so, could do nothing about it.
Then, at last, I almost cried out with relief and joy, the trees were thinning out, and sky was clearer here, a bright, brittle blue, the air was not foetid as it had been as we climbed between the trunks and mould damp, earth banks. I saw the sunlight ahead, framed in an archway. The car began to speed up, it was smooth now, oiled, we went without noise, faster and faster, hardly seeming to touch the ground.
‘Stop here!’ I said – cried out, for we seemed to be racing towards the light, no power could make us brake or slow down. ‘Stop, please – oh, stop! STOP!’
But we did not, we went faster, and I began to feel breathless, and to choke at the speed, and then, I realised, as I had realised once before, that the blazing light was not that of the sun, but of fire. Fire.
‘It’s fire!’ I came to, sitting up and gasping for air, and trying to shield my face from the heat.
The window was open, the air was quite cold, and smelled of the night coming in from the garden. I had woken Maxim, he was there, leaning down to me.
‘It’s nothing. I got too hot and tired. London was so exhausting. You were right.’ I got out of bed, to go for a glass of water. ‘I do hate it.’ And I made up a confused nightmare, of baking pavements and hooting, jarring traffic, and told it to him in elaborate, lying detail, and allowed myself to be comforted, while Favell’s face went on smirking at me from the heart of the real dream.
It was over and done with, I said. Jack Favell could not touch us; but he did, because I let him, I could not forget. He was the past, and again and again, I turned to look at it over my shoulder, but he was the present, too, and I feared as well as despised him, because of the things he had said. He hated us, and he knew the truth, and I did not trust him. He was not quite sane either, and that frightened me. Every day I woke, I was aware of his existence, somewhere in London, and I let that awareness lodge like a thorn in my flesh, I could not pull it quickly and cleanly out.
We make our own destiny.
The weather changed; it turned cooler, the mornings were grey, and sometimes there was rain. Frank Crawley came down from Scotland for four days to go to a farm sale with Maxim, and then advise him about the future, and the plans for enlarging the estate. It was a pleasure to have him in the house, he brought his old, even tempered, steadying presence, his loyalty and cheerful common sense. Yet he, also, belonged too much to the past, so that part of me wished that he was not here. Manderley had been his, as well as Maxim’s; I realised that I did not want Cobbett’s Brake to gain a place in his heart, it was to be a new life here, and ours, only ours.
But I wished that I could have talked to him more easily. If he had been a woman, I could perhaps have told him of my new hopes for children, as I had told Bunty Butterley, for there was enough I had to keep to myself, I needed one person to share things with. She had been as I would have expected, supportive, interested and pleased. ‘Now, take my advice, my dear. I’m a good few years older, so I shall talk to you like a mother hen. Try and throw yourself into other things – cram your life absolutely full. Don’t brood about it, don’t watch and wait, it’ll do no good at all.’
‘No. I think you must be right.’
‘You’ve had your reassurance – and if it’s meant to be, it will be.’
I listened to her, and I was touched, and heartened too: she believed what she said, her own life had been guided by such simple, wholesome platitudes, they had not failed her. I should let her set me an example, I should not dread the worst, not brood, as she told me, not brood. More than ever, she reminded me of Beatrice, she gave me a little of what Beatrice had given. I welcomed and was grateful for it.
And gradually, over the next few weeks, as the summer drew out, I relaxed, and my fears lost their edge. We took a few days away, to walk in the Welsh Marches. Maxim and Frank bought a second farm, and a large tract of old woodland which needed rescue and restoration. We went to a drinks party at the Butterleys’, though Maxim was reluctant. ‘Someone will know,’ he said that morning. ‘Something will be said – or they will look in that way I can’t bear.’
But they did not. Our name seemed to mean nothing at all to any of them, we felt welcomed, we were of interest because we were new. No more.
There was only one moment of terror, so unexpected and violent that I felt the room begin to sp
in crazily. I could not focus. I do not know when it came. No one said anything, no one looked. It sprang from within me, I caused it.
Maxim was beside the window, talking to someone I did not know, and for a moment, I was alone in a space at the other side of the room, in one of those sudden, odd islands of stillness that appear in the noisy, swirling sea at a party. It was as though I were immured, I could see out, but not reach or speak to anyone, and all the surrounding talk was meaningless, the chatter of a foreign language.
I looked towards Maxim. ‘He is a murderer,’ I thought. ‘He shot Rebecca. That is the man who killed his wife.’ And he was a complete stranger to me, I seemed not to know him or have anything to do with him. But then I remembered Favell. ‘He told you, didn’t he? That makes you a guilty party too. You’re an accomplice.’
I believed it, at that moment. I carried guilty knowledge. I felt complete panic rise up in me, at the full realisation of this truth. I did not know what would happen because I did not feel strong enough to bear it in secret, to spend the rest of my life saying nothing, doing nothing, but knowing, knowing. ‘That man is a murderer.’
But now, he turned, looked up and saw me. He smiled, the murderer, and made the faintest gesture, which meant he wanted me to go over to him, rescue him from some bore, perhaps. I did so, edging between the broad backs and gesticulating arms and booming voices. I was dutiful, and when I reached his side, I behaved quite normally, I spoke and acted as I always had; but I was afraid, standing there. I looked at him for reassurance, that the nightmare would recede, and the words, the truthful words that rang in my head would be silenced. He had not changed, and in one way, nor had anything. We stood together, here in this drawing room full of photographs and flowers and little, irritating tables, Mr and Mrs de Winter, of Cobbett’s Brake. All that was still true. I loved him. I was his wife. We would have our children. We had bought a new farm and a wood, the garden would grow, the sheep grazed on the slopes around the house and the morning was cool and bright. I ran through it all, as the man with the wart at the side of his nose talked on and on, and it was fine, it was all true, nothing altered any of it. There was only this other fact, of the words in my head, and the seed of fear that had been sown, and taken root deep down inside me. Some days I would scarcely be aware of it, everything else would matter more, on others it would stab alarmingly like an unanticipated pain. But it would never go completely, never not have been, and the future was altered and shadowed because of it.
*
A few days later, a letter arrived by the afternoon post – Dora brought it out to me where I was cutting the overgrown edges of one of the borders. The envelope was a cheap brown one, addressed in an ugly, scrawling hand I did not recognise.
‘Mrs de Winter’ – no Christian name or initial.
I took off my gardening gloves and went and sat on the bench. It was cool still, the sun fitful – not July weather, but it had helped the last of the roses to linger, though the grass beneath them was thick every morning with fallen petals.
There was a tray of tea beside me. Dora had left it there. I remember I poured myself a cup, before I slit open the letter – I suppose, much later, someone must have found it, cold and stagnant as a pond, and taken it back into the house – I had not drunk a sip of it.
There was nothing in the envelope except an old clipping from a newspaper, yellow at the edges, but oddly flat, with precise creases, as if it had been pressed like a flower within the pages of a book.
There was a photograph, I recognised it as the one from which the old picture postcard I once bought had been made.
DISASTROUS FIRE AT MANDERLEY, the headline ran, and below that, DE WINTER FAMILY HOME GUTTED.
I did not read any more, only sat, holding the piece of newspaper. I had known, really, that it was just a matter of time. I had been waiting for the next thing to happen, and now it had, I was oddly calm, in a cold, numb way. I was not afraid.
I sat on and on, not thinking, leaden inside, but at last, growing too cold, I went back into the house. I should have destroyed the newspaper cutting, stuffed it inside the range and burned it then, at once. Instead, I folded it, took it upstairs and put it into the old brown writing case I had had as a schoolgirl, and now never used.
Maxim would not find it there.
Seventeen
The next one came a week later. Maxim passed it to me across the table at breakfast, but I did not need to look at it, I knew as soon as I saw the blotted handwriting across the brown envelope.
He had not taken any notice. I had two other letters, and slipped it between those, but he was preoccupied with reading what Frank Crawley had to say.
I went upstairs.
This time it was longer, an account from the local newspaper of the inquest into Rebecca’s death.
SUICIDE VERDICT.
INQUEST INTO THE DEATH OF MRS MAXIM DE WINTER.
It is strange, I thought. That is my name, it has been my name for more than ten years, and yet when I see it like this, it is her name only. Rebecca was Mrs de Winter, I do not think of myself in connection with it at all.
I wondered wildly if Favell’s suitcase were crammed full of cuttings, and if he planned to send them to me one by one, for years and years. But sooner or later, surely, he must write and ask for money, he would not be satisfied with trying to torment me at such a distance, never seeing the effect he was having.
I seemed to be living my days and nights as two people, one secret, hidden person, who received the terrible envelopes and scurried to put them away out of sight, and waited for the next, dreading that it would be something I did not yet know about, some awful revelation: that person ran along a single groove of thought, about Rebecca and Manderley, Favell and the cuttings, what he wanted, how to get rid of him, how to conceal all of it from Maxim; but the other continued in the old way, doing the garden, talking to Dora and Ned, going around the new land with Maxim, having Bunty Butterley to lunch, and sometimes, very early in the morning, or at the quiet end of the day, alone outside, saw the children, heard their voices calling in the distance, caught sudden glimpses of their fresh, bright faces.
I was very good at it, I thought. Maxim had no suspicions, never once looked at me closely, did not ask any questions; he himself was the same, full of his new life, energetic, making decisions about the estate. He was usually out now for most of the day but every evening we sat together in the way I used to imagine, during our years abroad. We read books, sometimes we listened to the wireless, I made notes for the garden. I had begun to keep a diary of my plans for it and filled that in, sitting at the small desk in the corner of the room, beside the French windows. I thought ahead to next spring, which steadied me. Bulb catalogues arrived, and I ordered by the hundred, as if in a fever to see the lawns and beds and all the grassy slopes clotted thick with flowers, narcissi and daffodils yellow as the sun, and crocuses and scillas of a deep, heavenly blue that would run like rivers across the grass. But not white. I did not want any white flowers.
We played cards or backgammon, too, and each did a crossword, and the darkness drew in a little earlier; it rained softly in the night, releasing all the sweetness from the earth up through the open windows.
I had what I wanted. It was here, now, this present.
Beware of wanting something too badly, my father had once said, for you may get it. I had wanted this quite desperately, and now it was dust and ashes, I felt detached, and leaden; I had what I wanted and no power to enjoy it, it had been given and taken away at the same time.
A photograph came, a crumpled snapshot of a boat in the little cove. I did not mind that, but what made my heart stop, was Jasper, good, strong, eager, faithful Jasper, a puppy, standing on the sand beside it, looking so excitedly, devotedly up. I cried then, and tormented myself with the picture, taking it out and staring at it several times, as if willing Jasper alive.
I wanted to burn that too, but I could not.
‘We must have a puppy,
’ I said to Maxim, going into the study where he was fingering some map.
‘That old footpath has been completely buried – ploughed over, then left, it’s all overgrown. We must get it back –’ He turned, smiling. ‘A puppy will scrabble up your garden.’
‘I don’t mind, it won’t be for long – I shall train it.’
I had meant to wait until the children were here, but now, I wanted it for myself.
‘There’s bound to be a litter somewhere or other – ask the Pecks. A good labrador or else a sharp little terrier. Whatever you want.’
Jasper, I thought. I want Jasper.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll keep my ears open. Come here and look at this.’
Maxim was pointing at the map, showing me the line of the old path, and as I went to stand beside him, I looked down at his hand, the forefinger outstretched. I had always loved his hands, they were long and beautifully shaped, the nails carefully trimmed. But now, I could only see them as the hands which had held a gun and shot Rebecca dead, and moved her body into the boat, wrenched open the seacocks, manoeuvred the whole thing out into open water so that it would sink. I had not read the newspaper cutting about the inquest and yet the words seemed to have permeated my consciousness and overlaid my brain. I knew what they said because I had been there, I could see the description, the record of the evidence, Maxim’s words, and now, I looked at him all the time in this new and dreadful way. I was frightened of myself, I seemed to have no control over my thoughts and feelings, it was like a sort of madness, and I reached out to him to comfort me, I put my hand on his and stroked the fingers, so that he glanced at me, smiling, but questioningly.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You’ve been very strained – you seem tired.’
‘It’s the weather – the summer seems to be slipping away and we’ve had no warmth and sunshine – I find it a bit dispiriting, that’s all.’