I wished I had not come.
Down the twisting road we went without a check, without a word, a great ridge of cloud stretched above the setting sun, and the air was cold and clean.
Suddenly he began to talk about Manderley.
He said nothing of his life there, no word about himself, but he told me how the sun set there, on a spring afternoon, leaving a glow upon the headland.
The sea would look like slate, cold still from the long winter, and from the terrace you could hear the ripple of the coming tide washing in the little bay.
The daffodils were in bloom, stirring in the evening breeze, golden heads cupped upon lean stalks, and however many you might pick there would be no thinning of the ranks, they were massed like an army, shoulder to shoulder.
On a bank below the lawns, crocuses were planted, golden, pink, and mauve, but by this time they would be past their best, dropping and fading, like pallid snowdrops.
The primrose was more vulgar, a homely pleasant creature who appeared in every cranny like a weed.
Too early yet for bluebells, their heads were still hidden beneath last year's leaves, but when they came, dwarfing the more humble violet, they choked the very bracken in the woods, and with their colour made a challenge to the sky.
He never would have them in the house, he said.
Thrust into vases they became dank and listless, and to see them at their best you must walk in the woods in the morning, about twelve o'clock, when the sun was overhead.
They had a smoky, rather bitter smell, as though a wild sap ran in their stalks, pungent and juicy.
People who plucked bluebells from the woods were vandals; he had forbidden it at Manderley.
Sometimes, driving in the country, he had seen bicyclists with huge bunches strapped before them on the handles, the bloom already fading from the dying heads, the ravaged stalks straggling naked and unclean.
The primrose did not mind it quite so much; although a creature of the wilds it had a leaning towards civilization, and preened and smiled in a jam-jar in some cottage window without resentment, living quite a week if given water.
No wild flowers came in the house at Manderley.
He had special cultivated flowers, grown for the house alone, in the walled garden.
A rose was one of the few flowers, he said, that looked better picked than growing.
'A bowl of roses in a drawing-room had a depth of colour and scent they had not possessed in the open.
There was something rather blousy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair.
In the house they became mysterious and subtle.
He had roses in the house at Manderley for eight months in the year.
Did I like syringa, he asked me?
There was a tree on the edge of the lawn he could smell from his bedroom window.
His sister, who was a hard, rather practical person, used to complain that there were too many scents at Manderley, they made her drunk.
Perhaps she was right.
He did not care.
It was the only form of intoxication that appealed to him.
His earliest recollection was of great branches of lilac, standing in white jars, and they filled the house with a wistful, poignant smell.
The little pathway down the valley to the bay had clumps of azalea and rhododendron planted to the left of it, and if you wandered down it on a May evening after dinner it was just as though the shrubs had sweated in the air.
You could stoop down and pick a fallen petal, crush it between your fingers, and you had there, in the hollow of your hand, the essence of a thousand scents, unbearable and sweet.
All from a curled and crumpled petal.
And you came out of the valley, heady and rather dazed, to the hard white shingle of the beach and the still water.
A curious, perhaps too sudden contrast…
As he spoke the car became one of many once again, dusk had fallen without my noticing it, and we were in the midst of light and sound in the streets of Monte Carlo.
The clatter jagged on my nerves, and the lights were far too brilliant, far too yellow.
It was a swift, unwelcome anticlimax.
Soon we would come to the hotel, and I felt for my gloves in the pocket of the car.
I found them, and my fingers closed upon a book as well, whose slim covers told of poetry.
I peered to read the title as the car slowed down before the door of the hotel.
'You can take it and read it if you like,' he said, his voice casual and indifferent now that the drive was over, and we were back again, and Manderley was many hundreds of miles distant.
I was glad, and held it tightly with my gloves.
I felt I wanted some possession of his, now that the day was finished.
'Hop out,' he said.
'I must go and put the car away.
I shan't see you in the restaurant this evening as I'm dining out.
But thank you for today.'
I went up the hotel steps alone, with all the despondency of a child whose treat is over.
My afternoon had spoilt me for the hours that still remained, and I thought how long they would seem until my bed-time, how empty too my supper all alone.
Somehow I could not face the bright enquiries of the nurse upstairs, or the possibilities of Mrs Van Hopper's husky interrogation, so I sat down in the corner of the lounge behind a pillar and ordered tea.