Mrs De Winter by Susan Hill Read Free Book Online Page A

to get it over with, looked us straight in the eye, wrung our hands and at once turned back to the table and busied themselves over the sherry and whisky and sandwiches and cold pie, cramming their mouths full so that they might be excused from speaking.
    It did not matter, I did not care, I felt cocooned from them. I went around the room with a plate, offering savouries, and all the time speaking of Beatrice, remembering her, agreeing that her illness and death had been so hard, so unfair, and missing her, too, needing her there to help me, longing to hear her make some booming remark that would set everybody laughing. I could not believe that at any moment she would not come in through the door.
    They were all so very kind. It was only when I turned my back on this or that one, that I felt my face had been scalded by the things thought and left unsaid, to hover in the air. I met their eyes and saw questions, questions, questions. As often as I could I went to Maxim and stood close to him, touched his hand or his arm to reassure him while he had to listen to someone else reminisce about his sister or else drone on interminably about how it had been here during the war. He rarely spoke himself, but only smiled thinly and moved on every few minutes, afraid to stay too long with anyone in case, in case … Once, I heard the word ‘Manderley5 drop like the tolling of a bell into a sudden silence at the heart of the room, and spun round, panic stricken, almost dropping a dish, knowing that I must reach him, protect him, that it must not be said again. But then the voices rose and closed over it and the word was drowned, and when I next caught
     
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    sight of him, he had moved on again, I saw his stiff back on the far side of the room.
    Not long afterwards I found myself standing beside the french windows looking out on to the garden and the countryside beyond, and then I could shut the people out, pretend they were none of them here at all, I could gaze and gaze, at the light and the trees, the brown and the green and the blazing of the berries that studded the holly.
    Tm sure it would be quite all right for you to go outside. I think you could do with a break couldn’t you?’
    Frank Crawley, dear, reliable, predictable, thoughtful Frank, the same Frank, full of concern, as sensitive as he had always been, to how I felt. I glanced quickly over my shoulder, back into the room. He said, ‘Maxim is fine. I’ve just been with him. Lady Tredint is boring him about evacuees. The war has been over for almost four years but you’ll find it is still the main topic of conversation down here. Not the wider aspects, of course, but things like who under declared the number of eggs their hens laid so as to keep more back for themselves - a matter not easily forgiven or forgotten.’
    We began to walk slowly up the garden away from the house and as we did so, I felt the strain and worry of it all slip from my shoulders, I could turn my face to the sun.
    I said, ‘I’m afraid we knew so little of what was going on here. Letters went astray. We only heard the worst news, about the bombings, and what was happening in other countries.’ I stopped. ‘I suppose we ran away from those things, too. Is that what people say?’
    ‘I think,’ he replied carefully, ‘that people became very
     
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    inward-looking and preoccupied with their own affairs.’
    ‘Oh, Frank, thank you. How good you are. You even put me in my place in the nicest possible way. You mean, out of sight, out of mind. We were really far too unimportant to be thought of or gossiped about at all. People just forgot us.’
    Frank shrugged his shoulders non-committally, always polite.
    ‘You see, we have lost our sense of perspective, Maxim and I. In … in the old days … we were, or rather Manderley was at the centre of things down here, you know that, everyone was interested, everyone talked … but the world has moved on, hasn’t it? It has had much greater concerns.