I remember watching that foot of hers in its striped sandal swinging backwards and forwards, and my eyes and brain began to burn in a strange quick way.
' "We could make you look very foolish, Danny and I," she said softly.
"We could make you look so foolish that no one would believe you, Max, nobody at all."
Still that foot of hers, swinging to and fro, that damned foot in its blue and white striped sandal.
'Suddenly she slipped off the table and stood in front of me, smiling still, her hands in her pockets.
' "If I had a child, Max," she said, "neither you, nor anyone in the world, would ever prove that it was not yours.
It would grow up here in Manderley, bearing your name.
There would be nothing you could do.
And when you died Manderley would be his.
You could not prevent it.
The property' s entailed.
You would like an heir, wouldn't you, for your beloved Manderley?
You would enjoy it, wouldn't you, seeing my son lying in his pram under the chestnut tree, playing leap-frog on the lawn, catching butterflies in the Happy Valley?
It would give you the biggest thrill of your life, wouldn't it, Max, to watch my son grow bigger day by day, and to know that when you died, all this would be his?"
'She waited a minute, rocking on her heels, and then she lit a cigarette and went and stood by the window.
She began to laugh.
She went on laughing. I thought she would never stop.
"God, how funny," she said, "how supremely, wonderfully funny!
Well, you heard me say I was going to turn over a new leaf, didn't you?
Now you know the reason.
They'll be happy, won't they, all these smug locals, all your blasted tenants? 'It's what we've always hoped for, Mrs de Winter,* they will say.
I'll be the perfect mother, Max, like I've been the perfect wife.
And none of them will ever guess, none of them will ever know."
'She turned round and faced me, smiling, one hand in her pocket, the other holding her cigarette.
When I killed her she was smiling still.
I fired at her heart.
The bullet passed right through.
She did not fall at once.
She stood there, looking at me, that slow smile on her face, her eyes wide open…'
Maxim's voice had sunk low, so low that it was like a whisper.
The hand that I held between my own was cold. I did not look at him.
I watched Jasper's sleeping body on the carpet beside me, the little thump of his tail, now and then, upon the floor.
'I'd forgotten,' said Maxim, and his voice was slow now, tired, without expression, 'that when you shot a person there was so much blood.'
There was a hole there on the carpet beneath Jasper's tail.
The burnt hole from a cigarette.
I wondered how long it had been there.
Some people said ash was good for the carpets.
'I had to get water from the cove,' said Maxim.
'I had to keep going backwards and forwards to the cove for water.
Even by the fireplace, where she had not been, there was a stain.
It was all round where she lay on the floor.
It began to blow too.
There was no catch on the window.
The window kept banging backwards and forwards, while I knelt there on the floor with that dishcloth, and the bucket beside me.'
And the rain on the roof, I thought, he does not remember the rain on the roof.
It pattered thin and light and very fast.
'I carried her out to the boat,' he said; 'it must have been half past eleven by then, nearly twelve.
It was quite dark.
There was no moon.
The wind was squally, from the west.