The beauty of Manderley that you see today, the Manderley that people talk about and photograph and paint, it's all due to her, to Rebecca.'
I did not say anything.
I held him close.
I wanted him to go on talking like this, that his bitterness might loosen and come away, carrying with it all the pent-up hatred and disgust and muck of the lost years.
'And so we lived,' he said, 'month after month, year after year.
I accepted everything — because of Manderley.
What she did in London did not touch me — because it did not hurt Manderley.
And she was careful those first years; there was never a murmur about her, never a whisper.
Then little by little she began to grow careless.
You know how a man starts drinking?
He goes easy at first, just a little at a time, a bad bout perhaps every five months or so.
And then the period between grows less and less. Soon it's every month, every fortnight, every few days.
There's no margin of safety left and all his secret cunning goes.
It was like that with Rebecca.
She began to ask her friends down here.
She would have one or two of them and mix them up at a weekend party so that at first I was not quite sure, not quite certain.
She would have picnics down at her cottage in the cove.
I came back once, having been away shooting in Scotland, and found her there, with half a dozen of them; people I had never seen before.
I warned her, and she shrugged her shoulders.
"What the hell's it got to do with you?" she said.
I told her she could see her friends in London, but Manderley was mine.
She must stick to that part of the bargain.
She smiled, she did not say anything.
Then she started on Frank, poor shy faithful Frank.
He came to me one day and said he wanted to leave Manderley and take another job.
We argued for two hours, here in the library, and then I understood.
He broke down and told me.
She never left him alone, he said, she was always going down to his house, trying to get him to the cottage.
Dear, wretched Frank, who had not understood, who had always thought we were the normal happy married couple we pretended to be.
'I accused Rebecca of this, and she flared up at once, cursing me, using every filthy word in her particular vocabulary.
We had a sickening, loathsome scene. She went up to London after that and stayed there for a month.
When she came back again she was quiet at first; I thought she had learnt her lesson.
Bee and Giles came for a weekend, and I realised then what I had sometimes suspected before, that Bee did not like Rebecca.
I believe, in her funny abrupt, downright way she saw through her, guessed something was wrong.
It was a tricky, nervy sort of weekend.
Giles went out sailing with Rebecca, Bee and I lazed on the lawn.
And when they came back I could tell by Giles's rather hearty jovial manner and by a look in Rebecca's eye that she had started on him, as she had done on Frank.
I saw Bee watching Giles at dinner, who laughed louder than usual, talked a little too much.
And all the while Rebecca sitting there at the head of the table, looking like an angel.'
They were all fitting into place, the jig-saw pieces.
The odd strained shapes that I had tried to piece together with my fumbling fingers and they had never fitted.
Frank's odd manner when I spoke about Rebecca.
Beatrice, and her rather diffident negative attitude.
The silence that I had always taken for sympathy and regret was a silence born of shame and embarrassment.
It seemed incredible to me now that I had never understood.
I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.
This was what I had done.
I had built up false pictures in my mind and sat before them.
I had never had the courage to demand the truth.
Had I made one step forward out of my own shyness, Maxim would have told me these things four months, five months ago.