Mrs De Winter Read Online Free PDF Page B

begun our flight on the night of the fire. Maxim had simply turned the car and driven away from the flames of Manderley, and from the past and all its ghosts. We had taken almost nothing with us, made no plans, left no explanations, though in the end, we had sent an address. I had written to Beatrice, and there had been a formal letter and two sets of legal documents, from Frank Crawley and the solicitor and then from the bank in London. Maxim had not read them, scarcely even glanced at the paper, had scrawled his signature and pushed them back to me as if they, too, were burning. I had dealt with everything else, what little came to us, after that, and then there had been our fragile year or so of peace, before the war had sent us in search of another place, and then another, and after the war, at last, we had come to this country, and finally, this little lakeside resort, and found relief again, become settled, resumed our precious, dull, uneventful life, completely closed in upon ourselves, needing and wanting no one; and if I had begun recently to be restless, to remember again, and known that it had been there, the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, I had never spoken of it to him, and would have cut out my tongue before doing so.
    I think that I was not only too tense to sleep that night, I was afraid too, in case I had nightmares, images I
     
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    could not bear and could not control, of things I wanted to forget forever. But instead, when I did fall into a half sleep, a little before dawn, the images that slid before my eyes were entirely tranquil and happy ones, of places we had visited and loved together, views of the blue mediterranean, the lagoon in Venice with the churches rising and floating out of a pearly mist in the early morning, so that when I came awake again I was quite calm and rested, and lay quietly beside Maxim in the darkness, willing for him to catch my mood.
    I had not yet fully faced what else was with me in the dream, the curious excitement and joy that were fluttering there. I had been too ashamed of them. But now, I admitted them quite calmly.
    Beatrice was dead. I was very sorry. I had loved her dearly and I think that she had loved me. In time, I knew that I would weep for her, and miss her and feel very great distress. And I must face Maxim’s anguish, too, not only at her loss but at what it meant we had to do.
    We had to go back. And lying there in our hotel bedroom in that foreign town beside the lake, I allowed myself to feel, secretly, guiltily, a wonderful anticipation, although it was mingled with dread — for I could not imagine what we would find, how things would look to us, and above all, how Maxim would be and what anguish our return would cause him.
    It was clear in the morning that it was very great but that he had instinctively begun to deal with it in the old way, by shutting things out and refusing to think or feel, concealing everything behind a mask and acting like an automaton, going through movements in the detached, mechanical way he had mastered long ago. He scarcely spoke, except of
     
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    trivial things to do with the preparations, but stood at the window or on the balcony staring out at the garden, silent, pale, distant. It was I who made the arrangements, organised our travel, telephoned, telegraphed, booked tickets, worked out connections, I who packed for us both, as I usually did now, and it was when I stood looking at the row of clothes in the wardrobe that I felt the old feeling of inadequacy creeping back. For I was still not a smart woman, I still did not care to waste much time in choosing clothes, though goodness knows I had enough time to pass. I had gone from being a gauche, badly dressed girl, to being an uninterestingly, dully dressed married woman, and indeed, looking at them now, I saw that my clothes were those of someone entirely middle aged, in unadventurous background colours, and it suddenly struck me that in this way too, I had