“They may not be able to raise the boat,” I said.
“No.” he said.
“They couldn’t do anything then about the body, could they?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
He glanced out of the window. The sky was white and overcast as it had been when I came away from the cliffs. There was no wind though. It was still and quiet.
“I thought it might blow from the southwest about an hour ago but the wind has died away again,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“It will be a flat calm tomorrow for the diver,” he said.
The telephone began ringing again from the little room. There was something sickening about the shrill urgent summons of the bell. Maxim and I looked at one another. Then he went into the room to answer it, shutting the door behind him as he had done before. The queer nagging pain had not left me yet. It returned again in greater force with the ringing of the bell. The feel of it took me back across the years to my childhood. This was the pain I had known when I was very small and the maroons had sounded in the streets of London, and I had sat, shivering, not understanding, under a little cupboard beneath the stairs. It was the same feeling, the same pain.
Maxim came back into the library. “It’s begun,” he said slowly.
“What do you mean? What’s happened?” I said, grown suddenly cold.
“It was a reporter,” he said, “the fellow from the County Chronicle. Was it true, he said, that the boat belonging to the late Mrs. de Winter had been found.”
“What did you say?”
“I said yes, a boat had been found, but that was all we know. It might not be her boat at all.”
“Was that all he said?”
“No. He asked if I could confirm the rumor that a body had been found in the cabin.”
“No!”
“Yes. Someone must have been talking. Not Searle, I know that. The diver, one of his friends. You can’t stop these people. The whole story will be all over Kerrith by breakfast time tomorrow.”
“What did you say, about the body?”
“I said I did not know. I had no statement to make. And I should be obliged if he did not ring me up again.”
“You will irritate them. You will have them against you.”
“I can’t help that. I don’t make statements to newspapers. I won’t have those fellows ringing up and asking questions.”
“We might want them on our side,” I said.
“If it comes to fighting, I’ll fight alone,” he said. “I don’t want a newspaper behind me.”
“The reporter will ring up someone else,” I said. “He will get onto Colonel Julyan or Captain Searle.”
“He won’t get much change out of them,” said Maxim.
“If only we could do something,” I said, “all these hours ahead of us, and we sit here, idle, waiting for tomorrow morning.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” said Maxim.
We went on sitting in the library. Maxim picked up a book but I know he did not read. Now and again I saw him lift his head and listen, as though he heard the telephone again. But it did not ring again. No one disturbed us. We dressed for dinner as usual. It seemed incredible to me that this time last night I had been putting on my white dress, sitting before the mirror at my dressing table, arranging the curled wig. It was like an old forgotten nightmare, something remembered months afterwards with doubt and disbelief. We had dinner. Frith served us, returned from his afternoon. His face was solemn, expressionless. I wondered if he had been in Kerrith, if he had heard anything.
After dinner we went back again to the library. We did not talk much. I sat on the floor at Maxim’s feet, my head against his knees. He ran his fingers through my hair. Different from his old abstracted way. It was not like stroking Jasper anymore. I felt his finger tips on the scalp of my head. Sometimes he kissed me. Sometimes he said things to me. There were no shadows between us anymore, and when we were silent it was because the silence came to us of our own asking. I wondered how it was I could be so happy when our little world about us was so black. It was a strange sort of happiness. Not what I had dreamed about or expected. It was not the sort of happiness I had imagined in the lonely hours. There was nothing feverish or urgent about this. It was a quiet, still happiness. The library windows were open wide, and when we did not talk or touch one another we looked out at the dark dull sky.
It must have rained in the night, for when I woke the next morning, just after seven, and got up, and looked out of the window, I saw the roses in the garden below were folded and drooping, and the grass banks leading to the woods were wet and silver. There was a little smell in the air of mist and damp, the smell that comes with the first fall of the leaf. I wondered if autumn would come upon us two months before her time. Maxim had not woken me when he got up at five. He must have crept from his bed and gone through the bathroom to his dressing-room without a sound. He would be down there now, in the bay, with Colonel Julyan, and Captain Searle, and the men from the lighter. The lighter would be there, the crane and the chain, and Rebecca’s boat coming to the surface. I thought about it calmly, coolly, without feeling. I pictured them all down there in the bay, and the little dark hull of the boat rising slowly to the surface, sodden, dripping, the grass-green seaweed and shells clinging to her sides. When they lifted her onto the lighter the water would stream from her sides, back into the sea again. The wood of the little boat would look soft and gray, pulpy in places. She would smell of mud and rust, and that dark weed that grows deep beneath the sea beside rocks that are never uncovered. Perhaps the name-board still hung upon her stern. Je Reviens. The lettering green and faded. The nails rusted through. And Rebecca herself was there, lying on the cabin floor.