“Yes,” he said. “It’s all right, I’m here.”
“I had a dream,” I said. “A dream.”
“What was it?” he said.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Back again into the moving unquiet depths. I was writing letters in the morning room. I was sending out invitations. I wrote them all myself with a thick black pen. But when I looked down to see what I had written it was not my small square handwriting at all, it was long, and slanting, with curious pointed strokes. I pushed the cards away from the blotter and hid them. I got up and went to the looking glass. A face stared back at me that was not my own. It was very pale, very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark hair. The eyes narrowed and smiled. The lips parted. The face in the glass stared back at me and laughed. And I saw then that she was sitting on a chair before the dressing table in her bedroom, and Maxim was brushing her hair. He held her hair in his hands, and as he brushed it he wound it slowly into a thick rope. It twisted like a snake, and he took hold of it with both hands and smiled at Rebecca and put it round his neck.
“No,” I screamed. “No, no. We must go to Switzerland. Colonel Julyan said we must go to Switzerland.”
I felt Maxim’s hand upon my face. “What is it?” he said. “What’s the matter?”
I sat up and pushed my hair away from my face.
“I can’t sleep,” I said. “It’s no use.”
“You’ve been sleeping,” he said. “You’ve slept for two hours. It’s quarter past two. We’re four miles the other side of Lanyon.”
It was even colder than before. I shuddered in the darkness of the car.
“I’ll come beside you,” I said. “We shall be back by three.”
I climbed over and sat beside him, staring in front of me through the windscreen. I put my hand on his knee. My teeth were chattering.
“You’re cold,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
The hills rose in front of us, and dipped, and rose again. It was quite dark. The stars had gone.
“What time did you say it was?” I asked.
“Twenty past two,” he said.
“It’s funny,” I said. “It looks almost as though the dawn was breaking over there, beyond those hills. It can’t be though, it’s too early.”
“It’s the wrong direction,” he said, “you’re looking west.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s funny, isn’t it?”
He did not answer and I went on watching the sky. It seemed to get lighter even as I stared. Like the first red streak of sunrise. Little by little it spread across the sky.
“It’s in winter you see the northern lights, isn’t it?” I said. “Not in summer?”
“That’s not the northern lights,” he said. “That’s Manderley.”
I glanced at him and saw his face. I saw his eyes.
“Maxim,” I said. “Maxim, what is it?”
He drove faster, much faster. We topped the hill before us and saw Lanyon lying in a hollow at our feet. There to the left of us was the silver streak of the river, widening to the estuary at Kerrith six miles away. The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.
Afterword
Rebecca, first published in 1938, was Daphne du Maurier’s fifth novel. It was to become the most famous of her many books; over sixty years later, it continues to haunt, fascinate and perplex a new generation of readers. Yet its enduring popularity has not been matched by critical acclaim: Rebecca, from the time of first publication, has been woefully and willfully underestimated. It has been dismissed as a gothic romance, as “women’s fiction”—with such prejudicial terms, of course, giving clues as to why the novel has been so unthinkingly misinterpreted. Re-examination of this strange, angry and prescient novel is long overdue. A re-appraisal of it should begin, perhaps, with the circumstances under which it was written.
Du Maurier began planning it at a difficult point in her life: only a few years had passed since the death of her adored but dominating father, the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier. She was pregnant with her second child when at the planning stage of the book, and, by the time she actually began writing, at the age of thirty, she was in Egypt, where her husband, Frederick Browning, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, had been posted with his battalion. What many would regard as the quintessential Cornish novel was therefore begun, and much of it written, not in Cornwall, not even in England, but in the fierce heat of an Egyptian summer, in a city du Maurier came to loathe: Alexandria.