I went on holding his hands very tight. I leaned 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?”
“I 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 jigsaw 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 minstrel’s 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.