“Did he send one? I can’t remember.”
“Oh, yes, it was quite an excitement. We love anything like that. We keep a scrapbook you know, and paste anything to do with the family inside it. Anything pleasant, that is.”
“How nice,” I said.
I caught snatches of Beatrice’s conversation on the other side. “We had to put old Marksman down,” she was saying. “You remember old Marksman? The best hunter I ever had.”
“Oh, dear, not old Marksman?” said her grandmother.
“Yes, poor old man. Got blind in both eyes, you know.”
“Poor Marksman,” echoed the old lady.
I thought perhaps it was not very tactful to talk about blindness, and I glanced at the nurse. She was still busy clicking her needles.
“Do you hunt, Mrs. de Winter?” she said.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” I said.
“Perhaps you will come to it. We are all very fond of hunting in this part of the world.”
“Yes.”
“Mrs. de Winter is very keen on art,” said Beatrice to the nurse. “I tell her there are heaps of spots in Manderley that would make very jolly pictures.”
“Oh rather,” agreed the nurse, pausing a moment from the fury of knitting. “What a nice hobby. I had a friend who was a wonder with her pencil. We went to Provence together one Easter and she did such pretty sketches.”
“How nice,” I said.
“We’re talking about sketching,” shouted Beatrice to her grandmother, “you did not know we had an artist in the family, did you?”
“Who’s an artist?” said the old lady. “I don’t know any.”
“Your new granddaughter,” said Beatrice: “you ask her what I gave her for a wedding-present.”
I smiled, waiting to be asked. The old lady turned her head in my direction. “What’s Bee talking about?” she said. “I did not know you were an artist. We’ve never had any artists in the family.”
“Beatrice was joking,” I said: “of course I’m not an artist really. I like drawing as a hobby. I’ve never had any lessons. Beatrice gave me some lovely books as a present.”
“Oh,” she said, rather bewildered. “Beatrice gave you some books, did she? Rather like taking coals to Newcastle, wasn’t it? There are so many books in the library at Manderley.” She laughed heartily. We all joined in her joke. I hoped the subject would be left at that, but Beatrice had to harp on it. “You don’t understand, Gran,” she said. “They weren’t ordinary books. They were volumes on art. Four of ’em.”
The nurse leaned forward to add her tribute. “Mrs. Lacy is trying to explain that Mrs. de Winter is very fond of sketching as a hobby. So she gave her four fine volumes all about painting as a wedding-present.”
“What a funny thing to do,” said the grandmother. “I don’t think much of books for a wedding-present. Nobody ever gave me any books when I was married. I should never have read them if they had.”
She laughed again. Beatrice looked rather offended. I smiled at her to show my sympathy. I don’t think she saw. The nurse resumed her knitting.
“I want my tea,” said the old lady querulously, “isn’t it half past four yet? Why doesn’t Norah bring the tea?”
“What? Hungry again after our big lunch?” said the nurse, rising to her feet and smiling brightly at her charge.
I felt rather exhausted, and wondered, rather shocked at my callous thought, why old people were sometimes such a strain. Worse than young children or puppies because one had to be polite. I sat with my hands in my lap ready to agree with what anybody said. The nurse was thumping the pillows and arranging the shawls.
Maxim’s grandmother suffered her in patience. She closed her eyes as though she too were tired. She looked more like Maxim than ever. I knew how she must have looked when she was young, tall, and handsome, going round to the stables at Manderley with sugar in her pockets, holding her trailing skirt out of the mud. I pictured the nipped-in waist, the high collar, I heard her ordering the carriage for two o’clock. That was all finished now for her, all gone. Her husband had been dead for forty years, her son for fifteen. She had to live in this bright, red-gabled house with the nurse until it was time for her to die. I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe. I was a child yesterday. I had not forgotten. But Maxim’s grandmother, sitting there in her shawl with her poor blind eyes, what did she feel, what was she thinking? Did she know that Beatrice was yawning and glancing at her watch? Did she guess that we had come to visit her because we felt it right, it was a duty, so that when she got home afterwards Beatrice would be able to say, “Well, that clears my conscience for three months”？