She was standing by the window, smoking a cigarette, an odd, dumpy little figure I should not see again, her coat stretched tight over her large breasts, her ridiculous hat perched sideways on her head.
“Well,” she said, her voice dry and hard, not the voice she would have used to him. “I suppose I’ve got to hand it to you for a double-time worker. Still waters certainly run deep in your case. How did you manage it?”
I did not know what to answer. I did not like her smile. “It was a lucky thing for you I had the influenza,” she said. “I realize now how you spent your days, and why you were so forgetful. Tennis lessons my eye. You might have told me, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She looked at me curiously, she ran her eyes over my figure. “And he tells me he wants to marry you in a few days. Lucky again for you that you haven’t a family to ask questions. Well, it’s nothing to do with me anymore, I wash my hands of the whole affair. I rather wonder what his friends will think, but I suppose that’s up to him. You realize he’s years older than you?”
“He’s only forty-two,” I said, “and I’m old for my age.”
She laughed, she dropped cigarette ash on the floor. “You certainly are,” she said. She went on looking at me in a way she had never done before. Appraising me, running her eyes over my points like a judge at a cattle show. There was something inquisitive about her eyes, something unpleasant.
“Tell me,” she said, intimate, a friend to a friend, “have you been doing anything you shouldn’t?”
She was like Blaize, the dressmaker, who had offered me that ten percent.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
She laughed, she shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, well… never mind. But I always said English girls were dark horses, for all their hockey-playing attitude. So I’m supposed to travel to Paris alone, and leave you here while your beau gets a marriage license? I notice he doesn’t ask me to the wedding.”
“I don’t think he wants anyone, and anyway you would have sailed,” I said.
“H’m, h’m,” she said. She took out her vanity case and began powdering her nose. “I suppose you really do know your own mind,” she went on; “after all, the whole thing has been very hurried, hasn’t it? A matter of a few weeks. I don’t suppose he’s too easy, and you’ll have to adapt yourself to his ways. You’ve led an extremely sheltered life up to now, you know, and you can’t say that I’ve run you off your feet. You will have your work cut out as mistress of Manderley. To be perfectly frank, my dear, I simply can’t see you doing it.”
Her words sounded like the echo of my own an hour before.
“You haven’t the experience,” she continued, “you don’t know that milieu. You can scarcely string two sentences together at my bridge teas, what are you going to say to all his friends? The Manderley parties were famous when she was alive. Of course he’s told you all about them?”
I hesitated, but she went on, thank heaven, not waiting for my answer.
“Naturally one wants you to be happy, and I grant you he’s a very attractive creature but—well, I’m sorry; and personally I think you are making a big mistake—one you will bitterly regret.”
She put down the box of powder, and looked at me over her shoulder. Perhaps she was being sincere at last, but I did not want that sort of honesty. I did not say anything. I looked sullen, perhaps, for she shrugged her shoulders and wandered to the looking glass, straightening her little mushroom hat. I was glad she was going, glad I should not see her again. I grudged the months I had spent with her, employed by her, taking her money, trotting in her wake like a shadow, drab and dumb. Of course I was inexperienced, of course I was idiotic, shy, and young. I knew all that. She did not have to tell me. I suppose her attitude was deliberate, and for some odd feminine reason she resented this marriage; her scale of values had received a shock.
Well, I would not care, I would forget her and her barbed words. A new confidence had been born in me when I burned that page and scattered the fragments. The past would not exist for either of us; we were starting afresh, he and I. The past had blown away like the ashes in the wastepaper basket. I was going to be Mrs. de Winter. I was going to live at Manderley.
Soon she would be gone, rattling alone in the wagon-lit without me, and he and I would be together in the dining room of the hotel, lunching at the same table, planning the future. The brink of a big adventure. Perhaps, once she had gone, he would talk to me at last, about loving me, about being happy. Up to now there had been no time, and anyway those things are not easily said, they must wait their moment. I looked up, and caught her reflection in the looking glass. She was watching me, a little tolerant smile on her lips. I thought she was going to be generous after all, hold out her hand and wish me luck, give me encouragement and tell me that everything was going to be all right. But she went on smiling, twisting a stray hair into place beneath her hat.