It was Frank who brought me a plate of chicken and ham that I could not eat, and Frank who stood by my elbow with a glass of champagne I would not drink.
“I wish you would,” he said quietly, “I think you need it,” and I took three sips of it to please him. The black patch over his eye gave him a pale odd appearance, it made him look older, different. There seemed to be lines on his face I had not seen before.
He moved among the guests like another host, seeing to their comfort, that they were supplied with drink, and food, and cigarettes, and he danced too in solemn painstaking fashion, walking his partners round the room with a set face. He did not wear his pirate costume with abandon, and there was something rather tragic about the side-whiskers he had fluffed under the scarlet handkerchief on his head. I thought of him standing before the looking glass in his bare bachelor bedroom curling them round his fingers. Poor Frank. Dear Frank. I never asked, I never knew, how much he hated the last fancy dress ball given at Manderley.
The band played on, and the swaying couples twisted like bobbing marionettes, to and fro, to and fro, across the great hall and back again, and it was not I who watched them at all, not someone with feelings, made of flesh and blood, but a dummy-stick of a person in my stead, a prop who wore a smile screwed to its face. The figure who stood beside it was wooden too. His face was a mask, his smile was not his own. The eyes were not the eyes of the man I loved, the man I knew. They looked through me and beyond me, cold, expressionless, to some place of pain and torture I could not enter, to some private, inward hell I could not share.
He never spoke to me. He never touched me. We stood beside one another, the host and the hostess, and we were not together. I watched his courtesy to his guests. He flung a word to one, a jest to another, a smile to a third, a call over his shoulder to a fourth, and no one but myself could know that every utterance he made, every movement, was automatic and the work of a machine. We were like two performers in a play, but we were divided, we were not acting with one another. We had to endure it alone, we had to put up this show, this miserable, sham performance, for the sake of all these people I did not know and did not want to see again.
“I hear your wife’s frock never turned up in time,” said someone with a mottled face and a sailor’s pigtail, and he laughed, and dug Maxim in the ribs. “Damn shame, what? I should sue the shop for fraud. Same thing happened to my wife’s cousin once.”
“Yes, it was unfortunate,” said Maxim.
“I tell you what,” said the sailor, turning to me, “you ought to say you are a forget-me-not. They’re blue aren’t they? Jolly little flowers, forget-me-nots. That’s right, isn’t it, de Winter? Tell your wife she must call herself a ‘forget-me-not.’ ” He swept away, roaring with laughter, his partner in his arms. “Pretty good idea, what? A forget-me-not.” Then Frank again hovering just behind me, another glass in his hand, lemonade this time. “No, Frank, I’m not thirsty.”
“Why don’t you dance? Or come and sit down a moment; there’s a corner in the terrace.”
“No, I’m better standing. I don’t want to sit down.”
“Can’t I get you something, a sandwich, a peach?”
“No, I don’t want anything.”
There was the salmon lady again; she forgot to smile at me this time. She was flushed after her supper. She kept looking up into her partner’s face. He was very tall, very thin, he had a chin like a fiddle.
The Destiny waltz, the Blue Danube, the Merry Widow, one-two-three, one-two-three, round-and-round, one-two-three, one-two-three, round-and-round. The salmon lady, a green lady, Beatrice again, her veil pushed back off her forehead; Giles, his face streaming with perspiration, and that sailor once more, with another partner; they stopped beside me, I did not know her; she was dressed as a Tudor woman, any Tudor woman; she wore a ruffle round her throat and a black velvet dress.
“When are you coming to see us?” she said, as though we were old friends, and I answered, “Soon of course; we were talking about it the other day,” wondering why I found it so easy to lie suddenly, no effort at all. “Such a delightful party; I do congratulate you,” she said, and “Thank you very much,” I said. “It’s fun, isn’t it?”
“I hear they sent you the wrong dress?”
“Yes; absurd, wasn’t it?”
“These shops are all the same. No depending on them. But you look delightfully fresh in that pale blue. Much more comfortable than this hot velvet. Don’t forget, you must both come and dine at the Palace soon.”