I could not forget the white, lost look in Maxim’s eyes when we came up the path through the woods, and I could not forget his words. “Oh, God, what a fool I was to come back.” It was all my fault, because I had gone down into the bay. I had opened up a road into the past again. And although Maxim had recovered, and was himself again, and we lived our lives together, sleeping, eating, walking, writing letters, driving to the village, working hour by hour through our day, I knew there was a barrier between us because of it.
He walked alone, on the other side, and I must not come to him. And I became nervous and fearful that some heedless word, some turn in a careless conversation should bring that expression back to his eyes again. I began to dread any mention of the sea, for the sea might lead to boats, to accidents, to drowning… Even Frank Crawley, who came to lunch one day, put me in a little fever of fear when he said something about the sailing races in Kerrith harbor, three miles away. I looked steadily at my plate, a stab of sickness in my heart at once, but Maxim went on talking quite naturally, he did not seem to mind, while I sat in a sweat of uncertainty wondering what would happen and where the conversation would lead us.
It was during cheese, Frith had left the room, and I remember getting up and going to the sideboard, and taking some more cheese, not wanting it, so as not to be at the table with them, listening; humming a little tune to myself so I could not hear. I was wrong of course, morbid, stupid; this was the hypersensitive behavior of a neurotic, not the normal happy self I knew myself to be. But I could not help it. I did not know what to do. My shyness and gaucherie became worse, too, making me stolid and dumb when people came to the house. For we were called upon, I remember, during those first weeks, by people who lived near us in the county, and the receiving of them, and the shaking hands, and the spinning out of the formal half hour became a worse ordeal than I first anticipated, because of this new fear of mine that they would talk about something that must not be discussed. The agony of those wheels on the drive, of that pealing bell, of my own first wild rush for flight to my own room. The scrambled dab of powder on my nose, the hasty comb through my hair, and then the inevitable knock on the door and the entrance of the cards on a silver salver.
“All right. I’ll be down immediately.” The clap of my heels on the stairs and across the hall, the opening of the library door or, worse still, that long, cold, lifeless drawing room, and the strange woman waiting there, or two of them perhaps, or a husband and a wife.
“How do you do? I’m sorry; Maxim is in the garden somewhere, Frith has gone to find him.”
“We felt we must come and pay our respects to the bride.”
A little laughter, a little flurry of chat, a pause, a glance round the room.
“Manderley is looking as charming as ever. Don’t you love it?”
“Oh, yes, rather…” And in my shyness and anxiety to please, those schoolgirls’ phrases would escape from me again, those words I never used except in moments like these, “Oh, ripping”; and “Oh, topping”; and “absolutely”; and “priceless”; even, I think, to one dowager who had carried a lorgnette “cheerio.” My relief at Maxim’s arrival would be tempered by the fear they might say something indiscreet, and I became dumb at once, a set smile on my lips, my hands in my lap. They would turn to Maxim then, talking of people and places I had not met or did not know, and now and again I would find their eyes upon me, doubtful, rather bewildered.
I could picture them saying to one another as they drove away, “My dear, what a dull girl. She scarcely opened her mouth,” and then the sentence I had first heard upon Beatrice’s lips, haunting me ever since, a sentence I read in every eye, on every tongue—“She’s so different from Rebecca.”
Sometimes I would glean little snatches of information to add to my secret store. A word dropped here at random, a question, a passing phrase. And, if Maxim was not with me, the hearing of them would be a furtive, rather painful pleasure, guilty knowledge learned in the dark.
I would return a call perhaps, for Maxim was punctilious in these matters and would not spare me, and if he did not come with me I must brave the formality alone, and there would be a pause in the conversation while I searched for something to say. “Will you be entertaining much at Manderley, Mrs. de Winter?” they would say, and my answer would come, “I don’t know, Maxim has not said much about it up to the present.” “No, of course not, it’s early yet. I believe the house was generally full of people in the old days.” Another pause. “People from London, you know. There used to be tremendous parties.” “Yes,” I would say. “Yes, so I have heard.” A further pause, and then the lowered voice that is always used about the dead or in a place of worship, “She was so tremendously popular, you know. Such a personality.” “Yes,” I would say. “Yes, of course.” And after a moment or so I would glance at my watch under cover of my glove, and say, “I’m afraid I ought to be going; it must be after four.”