chapter twenty

  It was very quiet in the library. The only sound was that of Jasper licking his foot. He must have caught a thorn in his pads, for he kept biting and sucking at the skin. Then I heard the watch on Maxim's wrist ticking close to my ear. The little normal sounds of every day. And for no reason the stupid proverb of my schooldays ran through my mind, 'Time and Tide wait for no man.' The words repeated themselves over and over again. 'Time and Tide wait for no man.' These were the only sounds then, the ticking of Maxim's watch and Jasper licking his foot on the floor beside me.

  When people suffer a great shock, like death, or the loss of a limb, I believe they don't feel it just at first. If your hand is taken from you you don't know, for a few minutes, that your hand is gone. You go on feeling the fingers. You stretch and beat them on the air, one by one, and all the time there is nothing there, no hand, no fingers. I knelt there by Maxim's side, my body against his body, my hands upon his shoulders, and I was aware of no feeling at all, no pain and no fear, there was no horror in my heart. I thought how I must take the thorn out of Jasper's foot and I wondered if Robert would come in and clear the tea things. It seemed strange to me that I should think of these things, Jasper's foot, Maxim's watch, Robert and the tea things. I was shocked at my lack of emotion and this queer cold absence of distress. Little by little the feeling will

  come back to me, I said to myself, little by little I shall understand.

  What he has told me and all that has happened will tumble into place like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. They will fit themselves into a pattern. At the moment I am nothing, I have no heart, and no mind, and no senses, I am just a wooden thing in Maxim's arms. Then he began to kiss me. He had not kissed me like this before. I put my hands behind his head and shut my eyes.

  'I love you so much,' he whispered. 'So much.' This is what I have wanted him to say every day and every night, I thought, and now he is saying it at last. This is what I imagined in Monte Carlo, in Italy, here in Manderley. He is saying it now. I opened my eyes and looked at a little patch of curtain above his head. He went on kissing me, hungry, desperate, murmuring my name. I kept on looking at the patch of curtain, and saw where the sun had faded it, making it lighter than the piece above. 'How calm I am,' I thought. 'How cool. Here I am looking at the piece of curtain, and Maxim is kissing me. For the first time he is telling me he loves me.'

  Then he stopped suddenly, he pushed me away from him, and got up from the window-seat. 'You see, I was right,' he said. 'It's too late. You don't love me now. Why should you?' He went and stood over by the mantelpiece. 'We'll forget that,' he said, 'it won't happen again.'

  Realization flooded me at once, and my heart jumped in quick and sudden panic. 'It's not too late,' I said swiftly, getting up from the floor and going to him, putting my arms about him; 'you're not to say that, you don't understand. I love you more than anything in the world. But when you kissed me just now I felt stunned and shaken. I could not feel anything. I could not grasp anything. It was just as though I had no more feeling left in me at all.'

  'You don't love me,' he said, 'that's why you did not feel anything. I know. I understand. It's come too late for you, hasn't it?'

  'No,' I said.

  "This ought to have happened four months ago,' he said. 'I should have known. Women are not like men.'

  'I want you to kiss me again," I said; 'please, Maxim.'

  'No,' he said, 'it's no use now.'

  'We can't lose each other now,' I said. 'We've got to be together always, with no secrets, no shadows. Please, darling, please.'

  "There's no time,' he said. 'We may only have a few hours, a few days.

  How can we be together now that this has happened? I've told you they've found the boat. They've found Rebecca.'

  I stared at him stupidly, not understanding. 'What will they do?' I said.

  "They'll identify her body,' he said, 'there's everything to tell them, there in the cabin. The clothes she had, the shoes, the rings on her fingers.

  They'll identify her body; and then they will remember the other one, the woman buried up there, in the crypt.'

  'What are you going to do?' I whispered.

  'I don't know,' he said. 'I don't know.'

  The feeling was coming back to me, little by little, as I knew it would.

  My hands were cold no longer. They were clammy, warm. I felt a wave of colour come into my face, my throat. My cheeks were burning hot. I thought of Captain Searle, the diver, the Lloyd's agent, all those men on the stranded ship leaning against the side, staring down into the water. I thought of the shopkeepers in Kerrith, of errand boys whistling in the street, of the vicar walking out of church, of Lady Crowan cutting roses in her garden, of the woman in the pink dress and her little boy on the cliffs. Soon they would know. In a few hours. By breakfast time tomorrow.

  'They've found Mrs de Winter's boat, and they say there is a body in the cabin.' A body in the cabin. Rebecca was lying there on the cabin floor.

  She was not in the crypt at all. Some other woman was lying in the crypt.

  Maxim had killed Rebecca. Rebecca had not been drowned at all. Maxim had killed her. He had shot her in the cottage in the woods. He had carried her body to the boat, and sunk the boat there in the bay. That grey, silent cottage, with the rain pattering on the roof. The jig-saw pieces came tumbling thick and fast upon me. Disjointed pictures flashed one by one through my bewildered mind. Maxim sitting in the car beside me in the south of France. 'Something happened nearly a year ago that altered my whole life. I had to begin living all over

  again ...' Maxim's silence, Maxim's moods. The way he never talked about Rebecca. The way he never mentioned her name. Maxim's dislike of the cove, the stone cottage. 'If you had my memories you would not go there either.'

  The way he climbed the path through the woods not looking behind him.

  Maxim pacing up and down the library after Rebecca died. Up and down.

  Up and down. 'I came away in rather a hurry,' he said to Mrs Van Hopper, a line, thin as gossamer, between his brows. 'They say he can't get over his wife's death.' The fancy dress dance last night, and I coming down to the head of the stairs, in Rebecca's dress. 'I killed Rebecca,' Maxim had said. 'I shot Rebecca in the cottage in the woods.' And the diver had found her lying there, on the cabin floor ...

  'What are we going to do?' I said. 'What are we going to say?'

  Maxim did not answer. He stood there by the mantelpiece, his eyes wide and staring, looking in front of him, not seeing anything.

  'Does anyone know?' I said, 'anyone at all?' He shook his head. 'No,'

  he said. 'No one but you and me?' I asked. 'No one but you and me,' he said.

  'Frank,' I said suddenly, 'are you sure Frank does not know?'

  'How could he?' said Maxim. "There was nobody there but myself. It was dark.. .' He stopped. He sat down on a chair, he put his hand up to his forehead. I went and knelt beside him. He sat very still a moment. I took his hands away from his face and looked into his eyes. 'I love you,' I whispered, 'I love you. Will you believe me now?' He kissed my face and my hands. He held my hands very tightly like a child who would gain confidence.

  'I thought I should go mad,' he said, 'sitting here, day after day, waiting for something to happen. Sitting down at the desk there, answering those terrible letters of sympathy. The notices in the papers, the interviews, all the little aftermath of death. Eating and drinking, trying to be normal, trying to be sane. Frith, the servants, Mrs Danvers. Mrs Danvers, who I had not the courage to turn away, because with her knowledge of Rebecca she might have suspected, she might have guessed... Frank, always by my side, discreet, sympathetic. "Why don't you get away?" he used to say, "I can manage here. You ought to get away." And Giles, and Bee, poor dear tactless Bee. "You're looking frightfully ill, can't you go and see a doctor?" I had to face them all, these people, knowing every word I uttered was a lie.'

  I went on holding his hands very tight. I leant close to him, quite close.

  'I nearly told you, once,' he said, 'that day Jasper ran to the cove, and you went to the cottage for some string. We were sitting here, like this, and then Frith and Robert came in with the tea.'

  'Yes,' I said. 'I remember. Why didn't you tell me? The time we've wasted when we might have been together. All these weeks and days.'

  'You were so aloof,' he said, 'always wandering into the garden with Jasper, going off on your own. You never came to me like this.'

  'Why didn't you tell me?' I whispered. 'Why didn't you tell me?'

  T thought you were unhappy, bored,' he said. 'I'm so much older than you.

  You seemed to have more to say to Frank than you ever had to me. You were funny with me, awkward, shy.' 'How could I come to you when I knew you were thinking about Rebecca?' I said. 'How could I ask you to love me when I knew you loved Rebecca still?' He pulled me close to him and searched my eyes. 'What are you talking about? What do you mean?' he said. I knelt up straight beside him. 'Whenever you touched me I thought you were comparing me to Rebecca,' I said. 'Whenever you spoke to me or looked at me, walked with me in the garden, sat down to dinner, I felt you were saying to yourself, "This I did with Rebecca, and this, and this." ' He stared at me bewildered as though he did not understand. 'It was true, wasn't it?' I said.

  'Oh, my God,' he said. He pushed me away, he got up and began walking up and down the room, clasping his hands. 'What is it? What's the matter?'

  I said. He whipped round and looked at me as I sat there huddled on the floor. 'You thought I loved Rebecca?' he said. 'You thought I killed her, loving her? I hated her, I tell you. Our marriage was a farce from the very first. She was vicious, damnable, rotten through and through.

  We never loved each other, never had one moment of happiness together.

  Rebecca was incapable of love, of tenderness, of decency. She was not even normal.'

  I sat on the floor, clasping my knees, staring at him. 'She was clever of course,' he said. 'Damnably clever. No one would guess meeting her that she was not the kindest, most generous, most gifted person in the world. She knew exactly what to say to different people, how to match her mood to theirs. Had she met you, she would have walked off into the garden with you, arm-in-arm, calling to Jasper, chatting about flowers, music, painting, whatever she knew to be your particular hobby; and you would have been taken in, like the rest. You would have sat at her feet and worshipped her.'

  Up and down he walked, up and down across the library floor.

  'When I married her I was told I was the luckiest man in the world,' he said. 'She was so lovely, so accomplished, so amusing. Even Gran, the most difficult person to please in those days, adored her from the first.

  "She's got the three things that matter in a wife," she told me: "breeding, brains, and beauty." And I believed her, or forced myself to believe her.

  But all the time I had a seed of doubt at the back of my mind. There was something about her eyes ..."

  The jig-saw pieces came together piece by piece, the real Rebecca took shape and form before me, stepping from her shadow world like a living figure from a picture frame. Rebecca slashing at her horse; Rebecca seizing life with her two hands; Rebecca, triumphant, leaning down from the minstrels' gallery with a smile on her lips.

  Once more I saw myself standing on the beach beside poor startled Ben.

  'You're kind,' he said, 'not like the other one. You won't put me to the asylum, will you?' There was someone who walked through the woods by night, someone tall and slim. She gave you the feeling of a snake ... Maxim was talking though. Maxim was walking up and

  down the library floor. 'I found her out at once,' he was saying, 'five days after we were married. You remember that time I drove you in the car, to the hills above Monte Carlo? I wanted to stand there again, to remember. She sat there, laughing, her black hair blowing in the wind; she told me about herself, told me things I shall never repeat to a living soul. I knew then what I had done, what I had married. Beauty, brains, and breeding. Oh, my God!'

  He broke off abruptly. He went and stood by the window, looking out upon the lawns. He began to laugh. He stood there laughing. I could not bear it, it made me frightened, ill. I could not stand it.

  'Maxim!' I cried. 'Maxim!'

  He lit a cigarette, and stood there smoking, not saying anything. Then he turned away again, and paced up and down the room once more. 'I nearly killed her then,' he said. 'It would have been so easy. One false step, one slip. You remember the precipice. I frightened you, didn't I? You thought I was mad. Perhaps I was. Perhaps I am. It doesn't make for sanity, does it, living with the devil.'

  I sat there watching him, up and down, up and down.

  'She made a bargain with me up there, on the side of the precipice,' he said.' "I'll run your house for you," she told me, "I'll look after your precious Manderley for you, make it the most famous show-place in all the country, if you like. And people will visit us, and envy us, and talk about us; they'll say we are the luckiest, happiest, handsomest couple in all England. What a leg-pull, Max!" she said, "what a God-damn triumph!"

  She sat there on the hillside, laughing, tearing a flower to bits in her hands.'

  Maxim threw his cigarette away, a quarter smoked, into the empty grate.

  'I did not kill her,' he said. 'I watched her, I said nothing, I let her laugh. We got into the car together and drove away. And she knew I would do as she suggested: come here to Manderley, throw the place open, entertain, have our marriage spoken of as the success of the century.

  She knew I would sacrifice pride, honour, personal feelings, every damned quality on earth, rather than stand before our little world after a week of

  marriage and have them know the things about her that she had told me then. She knew I would never stand in a divorce court and give her away, have fingers pointing at us, mud flung at us in the newspapers, all the people who belong down here whispering when my name was mentioned, all the trippers from Kerrith trooping to the lodge gates, peering into the grounds and saying, "That's where he lives, in there. That's Manderley.

  That's the place that belongs to the chap who had that divorce case we read about. Do you remember what the judge said about his wife ...?" '

  He came and stood before me. He held out his hands. 'You despise me, don't you?' he said. 'You can't understand my shame, and loathing and disgust?'

  I did not say anything. I held his hands against my heart. I did not care about his shame. None of the things that he had told me mattered to me at all. I clung to one thing only, and repeated it to myself, over and over again. Maxim did not love Rebecca. He had never loved her, never, never. They had never known one moment's happiness together. Maxim was talking and I listened to him, but his words meant nothing to me. I did not really care. 'I thought about Manderley too much,' he said. 'I put Manderley first, before anything else. And it does not prosper, that sort of love. They don't preach about it in the churches. Christ said nothing about stones, and bricks, and walls, the love that a man can bear for his plot of earth, his soil, his little kingdom. It does not come into the Christian creed.'

  'My darling,' I said, 'my Maxim, my love.' I laid his hands against my face, I put my lips against them.

  'Do you understand?' he said, 'do you, do you?'

  'Yes,' I said, 'my sweet, my love.' But I looked away from him so he should not see my face. What did it matter whether I understood him or not? My heart was light like a feather floating in the air. He had never loved Rebecca.

  'I don't want to look back on those years,' he said slowly. 'I don't want even to tell you about them. The shame and the degradation. The lie we lived, she and I. The shabby, sordid farce we played together. Before friends, before relations, even before the servants, before faithful, trusting creatures like old Frith. They all believed in her down here, they all admired her,

  they never knew how she laughed at them behind their backs, jeered at them, mimicked them. I can remember days when the place was full for some show or other, a garden party, a pageant, and she walked about with a smile like an angel on her face, her arm through mine, giving prizes afterwards to a little troop of children; and then the day afterwards she would be up at dawn driving to London, streaking to that flat of hers by the river like an animal to its hole in the ditch, coming back here at the end of the week, after five unspeakable days. Oh, I kept to my side of the bargain all right. I never gave her away. Her blasted taste made Manderley the thing it is today. The gardens, the shrubs, even the azaleas in the Happy Valley; do you think they existed when my father was alive? God, the place was a wilderness; lovely, yes, wild and lonely with a beauty of its own, yes, but crying out for skill and care and the money that he would never give to it, that I would not have thought of giving to it - but for Rebecca. Half the stuff you see here in the rooms was never here originally. The drawing-room as it is today, the morning-room - that's all Rebecca. Those chairs that Frith points out so proudly to the visitors on the public day, and that panel of tapestry

  - Rebecca again. Oh, some of the things were here admittedly, stored away in back rooms - my father knew nothing about furniture or pictures -but the majority was bought by Rebecca. The beauty of Manderley that you see today, the Manderley that people talk about and photograph and paint, it's all due to her, to Rebecca.' I did not say anything. I held him close.

  I wanted him to go on talking like this, that his bitterness might loosen and come away, carrying with it all the pent-up hatred and disgust and muck of the lost years.

  'And so we lived,' he said, 'month after month, year after year. I accepted everything - because of Manderley. What she did in London did not touch me - because it did not hurt Manderley. And she was careful those first years; there was never a murmur about her, never a whisper. Then little by little she began to grow careless. You know how a man starts drinking?

  He goes easy at first, just a little at a time, a bad bout perhaps every five months or so. And then the period between grows less and less. Soon it's every month, every fortnight,