There was an ashtray full of the stubs of their cigarettes.
The aftermath of the party.
I went along the corridor to my room.
It was getting lighter every moment, and the birds had started singing.
I did not have to turn on the light to undress.
A little chill wind blew in from the open window.
It was rather cold.
Many people must have used the rose-garden during the evening, for all the chairs were moved, and dragged from their places.
There was a tray of empty glasses on one of the tables.
Someone had left a bag behind on a chair.
I pulled the curtain to darken the room, but the grey morning light found its way through the gaps at the side.
I got into bed, my legs very weary, a niggling pain in the small of my back.
I lay back and closed my eyes, thankful for the cool white comfort of clean sheets.
I wished my mind would rest like my body, relax, and pass to sleep.
Not hum round in the way it did, jigging to music, whirling in a sea of faces.
I pressed my hands over my eyes but they would not go.
I wondered how long Maxim would be.
The bed beside me looked stark and cold.
Soon there would be no shadows in the room at all, the walls and the ceiling and the floor would be white with the morning.
The birds would sing their songs, louder, gayer, less subdued.
The sun would make a yellow pattern on the curtain.
My little bedside clock ticked out the minutes one by one.
The hand moved round the dial.
I lay on my side watching it.
It came to the hour and passed it again.
It started afresh on its journey.
But Maxim did not come.
Chapter eighteen
I think I fell asleep a little after seven.
It was broad daylight, I remember, there was no longer any pretence that the drawn curtains hid the sun.
The light streamed in at the open window and made patterns on the wall.
I heard the men below in the rose-garden clearing away the tables and the chairs, and taking down the chain of fairy lights.
Maxim's bed was still bare and empty.
I lay across my bed, my arms over my eyes, a strange, mad position and the least likely to bring sleep, but I drifted to the borderline of the unconscious and slipped over it at last.
When I awoke it was past eleven, and Clarice must have come in and brought me my tea without my hearing her, for there was a tray by my side, and a stone-cold teapot, and my clothes had been tidied, my blue frock put away in the wardrobe.
I drank my cold tea, still blurred and stupid from my short heavy sleep, and stared at the blank wall in front of me.
Maxim's empty bed brought me to realisation with a queer shock to my heart, and the full anguish of the night before was upon me once again.
He had not come to bed at all.
His pyjamas lay folded on the turned-down sheet untouched.
I wondered what Clarice had thought when she came into the room with my tea.
Had she noticed?
Would she have gone out and told the other servants, and would they all discuss it over their breakfast?
I wondered why I minded that, and why the thought of the servants talking about it in the kitchen should cause me such distress.
It must be that I had a small mean mind, a conventional, petty hatred of gossip.
That was why I had come down last night in my blue dress and had not stayed hidden in my room.
There was nothing brave or fine about it, it was a wretched tribute to convention.
I had not come down for Maxim's sake, for Beatrice's, for the sake of Manderley.
I had come down because I did not want the people at the ball to think I had quarrelled with Maxim.
I didn't want them to go home and say,
'Of course you know they don't get on.