Mrs De Winter

by Susan Hill

  I could not run, I must not, it was a feeble, childish, cowardly thing. What are you afraid of? I began to ask myself over and over again, what can happen, what can she do?

  Nothing, I said. Nothing. Nothing.

  And I realised that when the car came for me, I would go, because I must confront her, there were things I would say, questions I wanted to ask. I must show her that I was different now, and quite in command, and I would tell her never to come to Cobbett’s Brake again, that it would anger and upset Maxim.

  I practised the sentences, mouthing them to myself as I went about the house and garden, I heard my voice sounding calm and reasonable, cool but not unfriendly. I would act, pretend, and the pretence would become real.

  I dressed with a great deal of care that afternoon, choosing a smarter frock and jacket than I would normally bother to wear in the country, brushing my hair so that it hung well. She had known that I had no clothes sense, dressed timidly in the wrong cuts and colours for my age, compared me, whenever she looked me up and down, with Rebecca, who had such taste and style.

  I was pleased, looking in the mirror, the blue I had chosen suited me, I felt confident.

  ‘Oh, London clothes, London clothes, Mummy,’ the boys would say, dancing gleefully around me; but the little one would turn away quietly, not wanting me to go.

  The car came slowly over the gravel, scarcely making a sound. I was waiting, so that as soon as I heard it I opened the front door, and of course that was not correct, I should have been a few moments in coming, I could see that he knew it. He was a dour, thickset, silent man.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, as he opened the car door, and bit back some friendly remark I almost made about the hot weather, for he would tell her, I was sure, they were two of a kind, Purviss and Mrs Danvers.

  As we slipped up the drive and through the gates, I looked back to where the house rested, in the sun, all of a piece and contained within its green slopes, beautiful. But I thought that it had somehow become impervious to us, and to our doings there, it simply existed as it had always done and we came and went about it like ants on the surface of some ancient hill, scarcely making any mark with our presence.

  It will be all right, I said fiercely, it will be as it was, I shall not feel like this after today, it is only the shock and the effect her coming has had upon the house. It will not be like this for very long.

  Must not.

  If I had not been so tense, anxiously rehearsing what I must say, I suppose I would have found my situation that afternoon quite funny. That Mrs Danvers should have the use of a car with a chauffeur to take her out when she chose, and that she should so grandly have ordered it to come for me, was bizarre, laughable, and yet I could not laugh. I was struggling too hard not to feel powerless and inferior to her again, she had such effortless, sinister control over not only my actions but over almost every corner of my consciousness, the nooks and crannies of my feeling and thinking. I tried to fix my mind on the return home after it was all over, and on Maxim’s coming back but all there seemed to be was a cloud of concealment and deceit, through which I could not penetrate.

  We did not drive very far – four or five miles perhaps, going east to a village I had not seen before. It was dull, a long straggle of uninteresting houses along the main street, and the fields around were flat. We turned up a lane beside the church, which had a spire not a tower, as was usual here, and seemed oddly out of keeping, in a rather suburban way, with grey slates and an ugly brown painted lychgate. To one side was the rectory, and beyond it, a single further house, not country looking but like some Victorian villa taken from a town. It was quite large, with tall narrow windows. The curtains seemed to be half drawn.

  I did not want to be here, I would have given anything not to have to get out, this was a strange place, it might have been in another country, I wanted to go back home.

  He had opened the car door and was waiting and when I looked up, I saw that she was waiting too, standing on the top step, her hands folded in front of her black dress, it was the same as it had been that first day, nothing had changed, nothing would. And though I stepped out of the car and across the path towards her boldly enough, she was not fooled, I could see that perfectly.

  ‘Good afternoon, madam.’

  I had gone very cold.

  ‘Do please come in.’

  No, I wanted to say, no. Let me stay out here, in the light, in the outside world, whatever it is we have to say can be said here, and then I can go. We need not meet again. She had taken a step inside and paused, waiting for me. The car had slid away, the drive was quite empty.

  I turned and followed her into the house.

  It was not pleasant, it was dark and stuffy and over-furnished. When the front door closed I wanted to run out and down the drive, and as far away as I could.

  Doors opened on to dim rooms with heavy, half drawn curtains, tables and chairs covered in plush, huge, sombre portraits in gilded frames, cases of butterflies and stuffed fish and dead birds. The countryside might not have been outside, I thought, no one ever opened a window here, no fresh, sweet smelling air ever drifted into these dreadful, oppressive rooms.

  But we were not lingering, I was following Mrs Danvers as she climbed up and up the turkey red carpet, to the next floor, and around again, and up. Here, the doors were all closed. There was no sound except our footsteps. No one else might have been in the house at all.

  Her dress swished softly. She did not glance round to see if I was behind her. She had no need.

  ‘Please come in, madam. These are my own rooms, overlooking the garden.’

  She held open a door at the end of a corridor and stood back in it, so that I was forced to pass close to her as I went inside.

  ‘I am very fortunate, my employer has made over quite a good portion of this top floor to me. I have a sitting room and bedroom – and then another room at my disposal.’

  I was filled with relief; it was a plainly, comfortably furnished room with two tall windows that let in plenty of light, slightly anonymous but not unattractive, not threatening. There seemed nothing at all of Mrs Danvers impressed upon it, it was a neat, ordinary room that might have belonged to anyone or no one, a room in some private hotel.

  ‘Do sit down, madam. I will ring for tea in a while.’ She stood over me, smiling in an open, perfectly pleasant way, but the irony of her invitation, and her sense of position here was not lost on me.

  ‘How long have you been here, Mrs Danvers?’

  ‘Not very long, madam, a few months. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Oh – it seems – it seems such an extraordinary coincidence.’

  She said nothing at all, and when I looked at her, she was still half smiling but in an odd, expressionless way.

  ‘I mean – that you should be so near to us.’

  She walked to the window and stood looking out.

  ‘It is very quiet here, very peaceful and there are few visitors.’

  ‘Your – your employer is rather old?’

  ‘Oh yes … I often stand here for a long time, looking out at the fields. I miss the sea, of course. Do you ever miss the sea, madam? The sound of it drawing up the shingle so softly, and the crash of the waves when it was stormy, I often lie awake and think I hear it. Don’t you?’

  I felt my lips go dry. Her voice was low and monotonous. ‘Mrs Danvers –’

  ‘Please sit down, madam.’

  ‘No – no thank you.’

  There was a silence. She had her back to the light and she did not move, only looked steadily, expressionlessly at me. I realised that I did not know exactly where I was – I had not noticed the name of the house – and that the car and driver, my only means of getting home, had disappeared.

  She was waiting and so as not to appear harried or in any way alarmed by her, I did sit down then and placed my handbag on the floor beside me.

  ‘This is such a pleasant room,’ I said. ‘You must be very comfortable here.’

&n
bsp; ‘Oh, yes, and I have such light duties. I am not young now, I would not feel up to the challenge of running a great house again.’

  She did not sit herself. ‘Have you ever thought of it?’

  I did not answer.

  ‘I think of it all the time. Every day. Surely you must too. Have you been back?’

  ‘No,’ I said. My voice came oddly out of my dry throat. ‘No.’

  ‘No. It is better not to go back. I went, once only. I had to see it. It was terrible. Quite terrible. And yet in a way right, don’t you think? Manderley was never happy after she had gone. You know that, of course. You felt it too. Fire is such a cleansing thing. There was no other way.’

  I stared at her, and her eyes bored back, two bright pinpoints, and I saw a flicker of triumph and excitement there. She was telling me now, and yet she had said nothing. If anyone accused her she would be easily able to deny it.

  ‘I found another place, in the north. I did not want to stay anywhere near, and then during the war, I was a governess and a nurse companion. Nothing was ever the same, of course. Nothing ever will be, but I never expected that. And it did not matter.’

  ‘I’m sure – I know we would like to think that you had – had settled happily.’

  ‘Did you, madam? Did you speak of it?’

  ‘Well – no, no – we – Mr de Winter did not want to talk of that time.’

  ‘Of course. Yet he could never forget it, could he? However would he be able to do so?’

  ‘Time – helps things to fade.’

  ‘Does it? I have not found so.’

  ‘We are very happy now.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I burst out angrily, and I heard the tears rise into my voice and was powerless to control them.

  ‘Yes – we love Cobbett’s Brake, it is all we ever wanted. It is beautiful and we will make it even more so.’

  ‘But it is not Manderley.’

  ‘That is why we love it,’ I whispered.

  I could not look at her, but I was dreadfully conscious of her dark presence, silhouetted against the window. I struggled to summon up all my courage and self possession, my fingers gripping the edge of the chair.

  ‘Mrs Danvers, there is something I must say.’

  She did not reply.

  ‘I find it – I find it such a strange coincidence that you should be here – so near to us. And of course, it has been very pleasant to find you – well, and so – so comfortably settled, but Mr de Winter must never be reminded of – of the past. I very much hope that you will not come to the house again – in case he should see you and –’ I paused, and then I stood and confronted her, my courage strengthening as I spoke. Why should I fear her, why? What could she possibly do to me? I was contemptuous of my own feebleness. ‘Mrs Danvers, have you been – been writing to me? Sending me – things?’

  Her face remained quite blank.

  ‘Certainly not, madam. I have never addressed you at your house.’

  ‘Then it must have been Mr Favell. I met him in London. He – he has been sending things through the post – newspaper cuttings and – other things. He has been trying to blackmail me. But you knew that, didn’t you? You have been in touch with him. You found out our address because he told you.’

  I waited. Surely I was right. I must be right, and why would she bother to deny it?

  She went on standing, without moving, without speaking, her eyes on my face. It was all she had to do, she knew that. My hands were trembling.

  And then she stepped forward, and walked past me to a door at the far side of the room. She opened it wide, and then turned to me.

  ‘I told you that I had something to show you,’ she said. ‘Come in here.’

  She did not ask me pleasantly, I heard a note in her voice I could not disobey. I went slowly across the room and through the door she was holding open. ‘I’ve tried to make it a pretty room,’ she said softly.

  Oh, it was … it was. There were delicately printed curtains and drapes to the bed and the dressing table, a rose patterned needlepoint rug, beautifully stitched. For a split second, I thought it was surprising that Mrs Danvers should have such an airy, light room to sleep in, with the things so immaculately placed and chosen with such care. But almost before I had thought it, I looked at the dressing table top, at the brushes that were set out there, their silver backs gleaming.

  ‘Yes, of course, you recognise them. You touched them once, do you remember? You picked them up, thinking that you were alone and that no one in the house knew where you were. I had so few things of my own and they did not matter, they were of no account at all – easily replaceable. All I packed and took with me that day were her things – everything I could carry. I’ve had them with me all these years. I have never been parted from them. I was waiting, you see, for a home where I could place them as I wished – as perhaps she would have wished. Of course it is not the same – it could never come up to her standards of taste and luxury. She would not like the house. It is an ugly house, so dark and unappealing. I’m sure you agree with me. But that does not matter at all, because it suits me so well – I have been able to do exactly as I wish – I have been given a free hand to decorate and furnish as I choose, my employer takes no interest in it but she is glad that I want to stay. She had difficulty finding anyone prepared to stay, but the moment I was shown up here to these rooms and told that I was welcome to use any of them, I knew I had found what I wanted.’

  I thought that she must be mad. Yet her voice did not sound so, it was soft and monotonous as always but quite reasonable, quite plausible. Her face was pure white, the eyes burning. Was that a sign of madness? I remembered Jack Favell’s wild, bloodshot eyes. They had seemed mad.

  ‘Look,’ she said. She was holding open the wardrobe door. I did not want to look, I knew what would be there well enough.

  ‘I could not bring dresses and furs and so on. I left almost everything. It did not matter. Only this one dress. It was always her favourite and so naturally it was mine. Look at it.’

  And so I must. It was green, a slim, silken sheath of dark emerald, with a single halter strap to be worn around her neck. I remembered the magazine photograph, it was before me now in every detail, the head thrown back, the arrogant gaze, hand outstretched to the rail, the beauty. I thought this had been the dress she wore then.

  ‘She had such light, delicate things, they were so easy to pack into my cases.’ She was opening drawers now, as she had done that other time, pulling out underwear, nightdresses, stockings, a fur trimmed wrap, a pair of gold slippers. The dressing case embroidered with her initials. R. de W. ‘Look,’ she said, and her voice was greedy, ‘such beautiful, lovely things for my lady.’

  You are mad, I wanted to cry out, you are quite insane, you are obsessed, and she drove you to it. I was terrified, fascinated.

  Now, she had closed the cupboard and the drawers. ‘Come and look out of the window,’ she said. I did not move.

  ‘Don’t be afraid.’

  ‘No.’ I swallowed. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t harm you now. I don’t want you to harm yourself either. I used to hate you. You are not my concern now. You are of no account at all. Less than none.’

  ‘What are you trying to say to me? What is the point of all this? What do you want, Mrs Danvers? Is it money? Are you in league with Jack Favell?’

  She gave a hiss of derision, but as I had spoken, I knew that I was wildly wrong.

  ‘He had a use,’ she said, ‘and I used him.’

  ‘He told you where we were.’

  ‘Let him beg for money, stupid fool. Let him get what he can. Why shouldn’t he? It has nothing to do with me – why should money mean anything?’

  ‘Then what do you want? What use is all this?’ I sat down suddenly on the satin quilt covering the bed, my legs would no longer hold me. I felt that I might cry, I was like a child who is a victim, I was in a trap and knew of no way out. I did not understand and I felt
helpless, but she was not a monster, she was a human being, why could she not have some spark of feeling for me, and sympathy. I felt snivelling and pathetic before her. ‘Mrs Danvers, please tell me what you want and why you have brought me here. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I know you hated me for marrying Maxim.’

  ‘Oh, no, I never cared a jot about that. Let him marry whoever he wanted. It was no interest to me. I only despised you for daring to try and take her place at Manderley.’

  ‘I’m sorry – but that is over, over long, long ago. Can’t you forget it? Can’t you let the past lie buried?’

  ‘The past is all I have, all I have ever had or will have. The past is everything to me.’

  ‘Surely that need not be – you should make another life for yourself. As we have done.’

  ‘Have you? Do you really believe that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I almost shouted. ‘Yes, if you will only let us. If you will leave us alone.’

  ‘Never.’

  I looked up, startled by the venom that spat out of her mouth in the single word. There were two small blazing scarlet patches, hardly more than spots, on her cheekbones, and her eyes were horribly bright.

  ‘How does it feel to be married to a murderer? That is what he is and you know it and I know it and he knows it, and I wonder how many others know it? He killed her. He shot her. Suicide? Kill herself? My lady? Never. No matter what was wrong, what that doctor had found. She was the bravest one that ever lived. She would never have taken the coward’s way. Would she? Would she?’

  ‘I – I don’t know. I never knew her. And there was the verdict – the inquest. You were there.’

  ‘Fools!’

  ‘You heard the evidence.’

  ‘But not the truth. Never mind. It will come out, one way or other … It’s what I live for, you understand that, don’t you? It is what I have been living for for more than ten years, biding my time, quite sure it would come right. She is guiding me, you see. She is with me, leading me, telling me. She knows. My lady never leaves me. She never did. Of all the people in this world who claimed to love her, thought they loved her, from her own mother and father on, she knew only one who truly did. She knew I worshipped her and would have died for her, any time she crooked her little finger. She still knows it. Revenge, Danny, she says. Every night she comes to me. I wake and she is there, smiling, whispering to me. Make him pay, Danny, only you can. Make the truth come out. Don’t let me down. But she is teasing me. Let her down? Does she need to ask me?’