If I rang him up again at the office now I should find that he had gone.
The clerk would say,
'Mr Crawley has just gone out, Mrs de Winter', and I could see Frank, hatless, climbing into his small, shabby Morris, driving off in search of Maxim.
I went and stared out of the window at the little clearing where the satyr played his pipes.
The rhododendrons were all over now.
They would not bloom again for another year.
The tall shrubs looked dark and drab now that the colour had gone.
A fog was rolling up from the sea, and I could not see the woods beyond the bank.
It was very hot, very oppressive.
I could imagine our guests of last night saying to one another,
'What a good thing this fog kept off for yesterday, we should never have seen the fireworks.'
I went out of the morning-room and through the drawing-room to the terrace.
The sun had gone in now behind a wall of mist.
It was as though a blight had fallen upon Manderley taking the sky away and the light of the day.
One of the gardeners passed me with a barrow full of bits of paper, and litter, and the skins of fruit left on the lawns by the people last night.
'Good morning,' I said.
'Good morning, Madam.'
'I'm afraid the ball last night has made a lot of work for you,' I said.
"That's all right, Madam,' he said.
'I think everyone enjoyed themselves good and hearty, and that's the main thing, isn't it?'
'Yes, I suppose so,' I said.
He looked across the lawns to the clearing in the woods where the valley sloped to the sea.
The dark trees loomed thin and indistinct.
'It's coming up very thick,' he said.
'Yes,' I said.
'A good thing it wasn't like this last night,' he said.
'Yes,' I said.
He waited a moment, and then he touched his cap and went off trundling his barrow.
I went across the lawns to the edge of the woods.
The mist in the trees had turned to moisture and dripped upon my bare head like a thin rain.
Jasper stood by my feet dejected, his tail downcast, his pink tongue hanging from his mouth.
The clammy oppression of the day made him listless and heavy.
I could hear the sea from where I stood, sullen and slow, as it broke in the coves below the woods.
The white fog rolled on past me towards the house smelling of damp salt and seaweed.
I put my hand on Jasper's coat.
It was wringing wet.
When I looked back at the house I could not see the chimneys or the contour of the walls, I could only see the vague substance of the house, the windows in the west wing, and the flower tubs on the terrace.
The shutter had been pulled aside from the window of the large bedroom in the west wing, and someone was standing there, looking down upon the lawns.
The figure was shadowy and indistinct and for one moment of shock and fear I believed it to be Maxim.
Then the figure moved, I saw the arm reach up to fold the shutter, and I knew it was Mrs Danvers.
She had been watching me as I stood at the edge of the woods bathed in that white wall of fog.
She had seen me walk slowly from the terrace to the lawns.
She may have listened to my conversation with Frank on the telephone from the connecting line in her own room.
She would know that Maxim had not been with me last night.
She would have heard my voice, known about my tears.
She knew the part I had played through the long hours, standing by Maxim's side in my blue dress at the bottom of the stairs, and that he had not looked at me nor spoken to me.
She knew because she had meant it to happen.
This was her triumph, hers and Rebecca's.
I thought of her as I had seen her last night, watching me through the open door to the west wing, and that diabolical smile on her white skull's face, and I remembered that she was a living breathing woman like myself, she was made of flesh and blood.
She was not dead, like Rebecca.