Mrs De Winter Read Online Free PDF

and then said, very loudly and slowly, as if I might not have heard or understood, was deaf, or a small child. ‘I am ringing to tell Maxim that his sister is dead.’
     
    He had opened the balcony windows and was standing
     
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    there, staring out into the dark garden. Only one lamp, beside the bed, was lit. He said nothing when I told him, nothing at all, he did not move, or look at me.
    I said, ‘I didn’t know what to say. I felt awful. He cried. Giles was crying.’
    I remembered the sound of his voice again, as it had come to me over the bad line, the great sobs and the heaving of his breath as he tried to control them and could not, and then I realised that all the time I had been standing there, in the hotel manager’s stuffy office, clutching the receiver so tightly, I had had in my mind a terrible picture not of Giles sitting somewhere on a chair in their house, perhaps, in his study, or the hall, but of him dressed as an Arab Sheikh, flowing white robes covering his huge frame and some sort of teacloth tied around his head, as he had been on the dreadful night of the Manderley fancy dress ball. I had imagined the tears coursing down his spaniel’s cheeks, staining rivulets in the brown make up he had taken such trouble over. But the tears that night had not been his, he had been awkward and embarrassed; the tears, of shock and bewilderment and shame, had only been mine.
    I wished I did not think of it so much now, I wanted that time wiped clean from my memory, but instead, it only seemed to grow more vivid and I had no power to hold back the memories, the pictures that came quite unbidden, at all sorts of odd times, into my mind.
    A cold breeze blew in through the open window.
    Then Maxim said, ‘Poor Beatrice,’ and again, after a moment, ‘poor Beatrice,’ but in an oddly dead, toneless voice, as if he had no feeling about her at all. I knew
     
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    that he did, must. Beatrice, more than three years older, and very different, had been loved when nobody else at all had been able to arouse any feeling within him. They had spent little time together since childhood, but she had supported him, sided with him unquestioningly, loved him naturally and loyally, for all her bluff, undemonstrative manner, and Maxim, forever impatient and peremptory with her, he had loved her, and relied.upon her and been dumbly grateful to her, too, so many times in the past.
    I moved away from the window and began to go restlessly about the room, opening drawers and looking into them, wondering about packing, unable to clear my mind or to focus, tired but too tense, I knew, to sleep.
    At last, Maxim came inside, and latched the windows.
    I said, ‘It will be far too late tonight to find out anything about tickets — which will be the best way to go. We don’t even know what day the funeral is, I didn’t ask. How stupid, I should have asked, I’ll try and telephone Giles tomorrow, and make the arrangements then.’
    I glanced across at him, a confusion of thoughts and questions and half plans bubbling about inside my head. ‘Maxim?’ He was staring at me, his face appalled, disbelieving. ‘Maxim, of course we shall have to go. You see that, surely. However could we not go to Beatrice’s funeral?’
    He was white as paper, his lips bloodless. ‘You go. I can’t.’
    ‘Maxim, you must.”
    I went to him then, held him without speaking more than murmured reassurances, and we clung to one another as it began to creep over us both, the terrible realisation. We had said that we could never go back, and now we must. What
     
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    else could possibly have made us? We did not dare begin to speak of what it meant, the enormity of what was to happen lay between us, and there was nothing, nothing to be said.
    In the end we went to bed, though we did not sleep and I knew that we would not. At two o’clock, three, four, we heard the chimes of the bell tower from the square.
    We had fled from England more than ten years ago, had