“You weren’t rude,” I said, “at least, not the sort of rudeness she would understand. That curiosity of hers—she does not mean to be offensive, but she does it to everyone. That is, everyone of importance.”
“I ought to be flattered then,” he said; “why should she consider me of any importance?”
I hesitated a moment before replying.
“I think because of Manderley,” I said.
He did not answer, and I was aware again of that feeling of discomfort, as though I had trespassed on forbidden ground. I wondered why it was that this home of his, known to so many people by hearsay, even to me, should so inevitably silence him, making as it were a barrier between him and others.
We ate for a while without talking, and I thought of a picture postcard I had bought once at a village shop, when on holiday as a child in the west country. It was the painting of a house, crudely done of course and highly colored, but even those faults could not destroy the symmetry of the building, the wide stone steps before the terrace, the green lawns stretching to the sea. I paid twopence for the painting—half my weekly pocket money—and then asked the wrinkled shop woman what it was meant to be. She looked astonished at my ignorance.
“That’s Manderley,” she said, and I remember coming out of the shop feeling rebuffed, yet hardly wiser than before.
Perhaps it was the memory of this postcard, lost long ago in some forgotten book, that made me sympathize with his defensive attitude. He resented Mrs. Van Hopper and her like with their intruding questions. Maybe there was something inviolate about Manderley that made it a place apart; it would not bear discussion. I could imagine her tramping through the rooms, perhaps paying sixpence for admission, ripping the quietude with her sharp, staccato laugh. Our minds must have run in the same channel, for he began to talk about her.
“Your friend,” he began, “she is very much older than you. Is she a relation? Have you known her long?” I saw he was still puzzled by us.
“She’s not really a friend,” I told him, “she’s an employer. She’s training me to be a thing called a companion, and she pays me ninety pounds a year.”
“I did not know one could buy companionship,” he said; “it sounds a primitive idea. Rather like the Eastern slave market.”
“I looked up the word ‘companion’ once in the dictionary,” I admitted, “and it said ‘a companion is a friend of the bosom.’ ”
“You haven’t much in common with her,” he said.
He laughed, looking quite different, younger somehow and less detached. “What do you do it for?” he asked me.
“Ninety pounds is a lot of money to me,” I said.
“Haven’t you any family?”
“No—they’re dead.”
“You have a very lovely and unusual name.”
“My father was a lovely and unusual person.”
“Tell me about him,” he said.
I looked at him over my glass of citronade. It was not easy to explain my father and usually I never talked about him. He was my secret property. Preserved for me alone, much as Manderley was preserved for my neighbor. I had no wish to introduce him casually over a table in a Monte Carlo restaurant.
There was a strange air of unreality about that luncheon, and looking back upon it now it is invested for me with a curious glamour. There was I, so much of a schoolgirl still, who only the day before had sat with Mrs. Van Hopper, prim, silent, and subdued, and twenty-four hours afterwards my family history was mine no longer, I shared it with a man I did not know. For some reason I felt impelled to speak, because his eyes followed me in sympathy like the Gentleman Unknown.
My shyness fell away from me, loosening as it did so my reluctant tongue, and out they all came, the little secrets of childhood, the pleasures and the pains. It seemed to me as though he understood, from my poor description, something of the vibrant personality that had been my father’s, and something too of the love my mother had for him, making it a vital, living force, with a spark of divinity about it, so much that when he died that desperate winter, struck down by pneumonia, she lingered behind him for five short weeks and stayed no more. I remember pausing, a little breathless, a little dazed. The restaurant was filled now with people who chatted and laughed to an orchestral background and a clatter of plates, and glancing at the clock above the door I saw that it was two o’clock. We had been sitting there an hour and a half, and the conversation had been mine alone.