All I remember is the feel of the leather seats, the texture of the map upon my knee, its frayed edges, its worn seams, and how one day, looking at the clock, I thought to myself, “This moment now, at twenty past eleven, this must never be lost,” and I shut my eyes to make the experience more lasting. When I opened my eyes we were by a bend in the road, and a peasant girl in a black shawl waved to us; I can see her now, her dusty skirt, her gleaming, friendly smile, and in a second we had passed the bend and could see her no more. Already she belonged to the past, she was only a memory.
I wanted to go back again, to recapture the moment that had gone, and then it came to me that if we did it would not be the same, even the sun would be changed in the sky, casting another shadow, and the peasant girl would trudge past us along the road in a different way, not waving this time, perhaps not even seeing us. There was something chilling in the thought, something a little melancholy, and looking at the clock I saw that five more minutes had gone by. Soon we would have reached our time limit, and must return to the hotel.
“If only there could be an invention,” I said impulsively, “that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.” I looked up at him, to see what he would say. He did not turn to me, he went on watching the road ahead.
“What particular moments in your young life do you wish uncorked?” he said. I could not tell from his voice whether he was teasing me or not. “I’m not sure,” I began, and then blundered on, rather foolishly, not thinking of my words, “I’d like to keep this moment and never forget it.”
“Is that meant to be a compliment to the day, or to my driving?” he said, and as he laughed, like a mocking brother, I became silent, overwhelmed suddenly by the great gulf between us, and how his very kindness to me widened it.
I knew then that I would never tell Mrs. Van Hopper about these morning expeditions, for her smile would hurt me as his laugh had done. She would not be angry, nor would she be shocked; she would raise her eyebrows very faintly as though she did not altogether believe my story, and then with a tolerant shrug of the shoulder she would say, “My dear child, it’s extremely sweet and kind of him to take you driving; the only thing is—are you sure it does not bore him dreadfully?” And then she would send me out to buy Taxol, patting me on the shoulder. What degradation lay in being young, I thought, and fell to tearing my nails.
“I wish,” I said savagely, still mindful of his laugh and throwing discretion to the wind, “I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.”
“You would not be in this car with me if you were,” he said; “and stop biting those nails, they are ugly enough already.”
“You’ll think me impertinent and rude I dare say,” I went on, “but I would like to know why you ask me to come out in the car, day after day. You are being kind, that’s obvious, but why do you choose me for your charity?”
I sat up stiff and straight in my seat and with all the poor pomposity of youth.
“I ask you,” he said gravely, “because you are not dressed in black satin, with a string of pearls, nor are you thirty-six.” His face was without expression, I could not tell whether he laughed inwardly or not.
“It’s all very well,” I said; “you know everything there is to know about me. There’s not much, I admit, because I have not been alive for very long, and nothing much has happened to me, except people dying, but you—I know nothing more about you than I did the first day we met.”
“And what did you know then?” he asked.
“Why, that you lived at Manderley and—and that you had lost your wife.” There, I had said it at last, the word that had hovered on my tongue for days. Your wife. It came out with ease, without reluctance, as though the mere mention of her must be the most casual thing in all the world. Your wife. The word lingered in the air once I had uttered it, dancing before me, and because he received it silently, making no comment, the word magnified itself into something heinous and appalling, a forbidden word, unnatural to the tongue. And I could not call it back, it could never be unsaid. Once again I saw the inscription on the flyleaf of that book of poems, and the curious slanting R. I felt sick at heart and cold. He would never forgive me, and this would be the end of our friendship.
I remember staring straight in front of me at the windscreen, seeing nothing of the flying road, my ears still tingling with that spoken word. The silence became minutes, and the minutes became miles, and everything is over now, I thought, I shall never drive with him again. Tomorrow he will go away. And Mrs. Van Hopper will be up again. She and I will walk along the terrace as we did before. The porter will bring down his trunks, I shall catch a glimpse of them in the luggage lift, with new-plastered labels. The bustle and finality of departure. The sound of the car changing gear as it turned the corner, and then even that sound merging into the common traffic, and being lost, and so absorbed forever.