She glanced at me curiously as I opened the door. “What a time you’ve been. You can’t afford to dream this morning, you know, there’s too much to be done.”
He would go back to Manderley, of course, in a few weeks; I felt certain of that. There would be a great pile of letters waiting for him in the hall, and mine among them, scribbled on the boat. A forced letter, trying to amuse, describing my fellow passengers. It would lie about inside his blotter, and he would answer it weeks later, one Sunday morning in a hurry, before lunch, having come across it when he paid some bills. And then no more. Nothing until the final degradation of the Christmas card. Manderley itself perhaps, against a frosted background. The message printed, saying “A happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year from Maximilian de Winter.” Gold lettering. But to be kind he would have run his pen through the printed name and written in ink underneath “from Maxim,” as a sort of sop, and if there was space, a message, “I hope you are enjoying New York.” A lick of the envelope, a stamp, and tossed in a pile of a hundred others.
“It’s too bad you are leaving tomorrow,” said the reception clerk, telephone in hand; “the Ballet starts next week, you know. Does Mrs. Van Hopper know?” I dragged myself back from Christmas at Manderley to the realities of the wagon-lit.
Mrs. Van Hopper lunched in the restaurant for the first time since her influenza, and I had a pain in the pit of my stomach as I followed her into the room. He had gone to Cannes for the day, that much I knew, for he had warned me the day before, but I kept thinking the waiter might commit an indiscretion and say: “Will Mademoiselle be dining with Monsieur tonight as usual?” I felt a little sick whenever he came near the table, but he said nothing.
The day was spent in packing, and in the evening people came to say goodbye. We dined in the sitting room, and she went to bed directly afterwards. Still I had not seen him. I went down to the lounge about half past nine on the pretext of getting luggage labels and he was not there. The odious reception clerk smiled when he saw me. “If you are looking for Mr. de Winter we had a message from Cannes to say he would not be back before midnight.”
“I want a packet of luggage labels,” I said, but I saw by his eye that he was not deceived. So there would be no last evening after all. The hour I had looked forward to all day must be spent by myself alone, in my own bedroom, gazing at my Revelation suitcase and the stout holdall. Perhaps it was just as well, for I should have made a poor companion, and he must have read my face.
I know I cried that night, bitter youthful tears that could not come from me today. That kind of crying, deep into a pillow, does not happen after we are twenty-one. The throbbing head, the swollen eyes, the tight, contracted throat. And the wild anxiety in the morning to hide all traces from the world, sponging with cold water, dabbing eau-de-Cologne, the furtive dash of powder that is significant in itself. The panic, too, that one might cry again, the tears swelling without control, and a fatal trembling of the mouth lead one to disaster. I remember opening wide my window and leaning out, hoping the fresh morning air would blow away the telltale pink under the powder, and the sun had never seemed so bright, nor the day so full of promise. Monte Carlo was suddenly full of kindliness and charm, the one place in the world that held sincerity. I loved it. Affection overwhelmed me. I wanted to live there all my life. And I was leaving it today. This is the last time I brush my hair before the looking glass, the last time I shall clean my teeth into the basin. Never again sleep in that bed. Never more turn off the switch of that electric light. There I was, padding about in a dressing gown, making a slough of sentiment out of a commonplace hotel bedroom.
“You haven’t started a cold, have you?” she said at breakfast.
“No,” I told her, “I don’t think so,” clutching at a straw, for this might serve as an excuse later, if I was over-pink about the eyes.
“I hate hanging about once everything is packed,” she grumbled; “we ought to have decided on the earlier train. We could get it if we made the effort, and then have longer in Paris. Wire Helen not to meet us, but arrange another rendezvous. I wonder”—she glanced at her watch—“I suppose they could change the reservations. Anyway it’s worth trying. Go down to the office and see.”
“Yes,” I said, a dummy to her moods going into my bedroom and flinging off my dressing gown, fastening my inevitable flannel skirt and stretching my homemade jumper over my head. My indifference to her turned to hatred. This was the end then, even my morning must be taken from me. No last half hour on the terrace, not even ten minutes perhaps to say goodbye. Because she had finished breakfast earlier than she expected, because she was bored. Well then, I would fling away restraint and modesty, I would not be proud anymore. I slammed the door of the sitting room and ran along the passage. I did not wait for the lift, I climbed the stairs, three at a time, up to the third floor. I knew the number of his room, 148, and I hammered at the door, very flushed in the face and breathless.