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

We’re of no importance now.’
    ‘Of course you are remembered, of course … it’s only…’
    ‘Frank, don’t mind, don’t be sorry… God knows, it is what I’ve wanted for us both, to be small and insignificant, part of the past, and all but forgotten. You must know that.’
    Yes indeed.’
    We had reached the old orchard, from where we could look back to the sturdy, white house, or up, to the horses in the meadow.
    ‘Poor things,’ I said, seeing them eye us and lift their heads and begin to move. ‘Shall we take them some apples?’
    We began to pick up a few windfalls from the grass and then make our way slowly towards the fence, and the horses saw us and came trotting down, sleek and handsome, the chestnut and the grey.
    “Who will ride them now? Does Giles still ride? Or Roger? I don’t know what has been happening - what will happen.’
     
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    ‘And I’m afraid nor do I. I’ve only kept in touch very irregularly these past few years.’
    I knew that Frank had gone to live in Scotland, where he managed a huge estate, knew that as soon as the war was over, he had married and had two sons straight away, and I knew too, looking at him now, that he was entirely happy, settled, and almost completely detached from the past, and I felt a strange pang, I did not know precisely of what grief? Loss? He was the only other person who had cared for Manderley almost as much as Maxim, our last link with it. Now, like Beatrice, though in a different way, I felt that Maxim knew Frank had gone.
    We were standing beside the fence, the horses were munching the apples, picking them gently from the palms of our hands, their lips curled back. I stroked the warm mossy muzzle of the grey. Then I said, ‘Frank, I want to stay in England so much, I wish I could tell you how I have longed to come home. How I have dreamed about it. I never speak of it to Maxim — how can I? I wasn’t sure how it would be. But never mind about the people, never mind what they think or whether they care at all. It isn’t the people.’
    ‘I understand.’
    ‘It’s the places - this place, here, these fields … the sky… the countryside. I know Maxim feels it too, I’m absolutely certain, only he daren’t acknowledge it. He has been as homesick as I have, but with him…’ My voice tailed off. There was only the sound of the horses quietly chomping, and of a lark somewhere, spiralling up into the clear sky. The word Manderley lay between us, unspoken, we felt it, everything it had been and meant charged the air
     
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    like electricity. At last I said, ‘I feel so disloyal. It is wrong for me to be saying any of this.’
    ‘I don’t see that,’ Frank said carefully. He had taken his pipe out of his pocket and was beginning to pack the bowl with tobacco from the old leather pouch I remembered that he had always used, and the sight of it brought back another scene like this, when I had poured out my anxieties to him and received sound support and reassurance. ‘It’s perfectly natural, surely. You are English. Very English. This is home, for all the years you have spent living abroad. As you say, it is the same for Maxim and I’m sure he knows it.’
    ‘Could we come back? Would … ‘ I hesitated, choosing my words. ‘Frank, would there be … anything at all to prevent us?’
    He pulled on his pipe for several minutes and I watched the first, thin blue smoke plume up into the air. I was stroking and stroking the horse, rubbing its muzzle, my heart pounding, and the horse, delighted at this rush of attention and affection after perhaps too much neglect, pawed at the ground and pushed hard into my hand.
    ‘You mean to do with … what happened?’
    ‘Yes.’
    And then the inquest and the verdict were there with us, too, taking their ghostly places beside the spirit of Manderley, and we did not refer to them, either.
    ‘I really don’t see why there should be anything to prevent your coming back if you both want to,’ Frank