These things were permanent, they could not be dissolved.
They were memories that cannot hurt.
All this I resolved in my dream, while the clouds lay across the face of the moon, for like most sleepers I knew that I dreamed.
In reality I lay many hundred miles away in an alien land, and would wake, before many seconds had passed, in the bare little hotel bedroom, comforting in its very lack of atmosphere.
I would sigh a moment, stretch myself and turn, and opening my eyes, be bewildered at that glittering sun, that hard, clean sky, so different from the soft moonlight of my dream.
The day would lie before us both, long no doubt, and uneventful, but fraught with a certain stillness, a dear tranquillity we had not known before.
We would not talk of Manderley, I would not tell my dream.
For Manderley was ours no longer.
Manderley was no more.
Chapter two
We can never go back again, that much is certain.
The past is still too close to us.
The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic — now mercifully stilled, thank God — might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion, as it had been before.
He is wonderfully patient and never complains, not even when he remembers… which happens, I think, rather more often than he would have me know.
I can tell by the way he will look lost and puzzled suddenly, all expression dying away from his dear face as though swept clean by an unseen hand, and in its place a mask will form, a sculptured thing, formal and cold, beautiful still but lifeless.
He will fall to smoking cigarette after cigarette, not bothering to extinguish them, and the glowing stubs will lie around on the ground like petals.
He will talk quickly and eagerly about nothing at all, snatching at any subject as a panacea to pain.
I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, and that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire.
This we have done in full measure, ironic though it seems.
We have both known fear, and. loneliness, and very great distress.
I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial.
We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.
We have conquered ours, or so we believe.
The devil does not ride us any more.
We have come through our crisis, not unscathed of course.
His premonition of disaster was correct from the beginning; and like a ranting actress in an indifferent play, I might say that we have paid for freedom.
But I have had enough melodrama in this life, and would willingly give my five senses if they could ensure us our present peace and security.
Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is § quality of thought, a state of mind.
Of course we have our moments of depression; but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity and, catching his smile, I know we are together, we march in unison, no clash of thought or of opinion makes a barrier between us.
We have no secrets now from one another.
All things are shared.
Granted that our little hotel is dull, and the food indifferent, and that day after day dawns very much the same, yet we would not have it otherwise.
We should meet too many of the people he knows in any of the big hotels.
We both appreciate simplicity, and we are sometimes bored — well, boredom is a pleasing antidote to fear.
We live very much by routine, and I–I have developed a genius for reading aloud.
The only time I have known him show impatience is when the postman lags, for it means we must wait another day before the arrival of our English mail.
We have tried wireless, but the noise is such an irritant, and we prefer to store up our excitement; the result of a cricket match played many days ago means much to us.
Oh, the Test matches that have saved us from ennui, the boxing bouts, even the billiard scores.
Finals of schoolboy sports, dog racing, strange little competitions in the remoter counties, all these are grist to our hungry mill.
Sometimes old copies of the Field come my way, and I am transported from this indifferent island to the realities of an English spring.
I read of chalk streams, of the mayfly, of sorrel growing in green meadows, of rooks circling above the woods as they used to do at Manderley.
The smell of wet earth comes to me from those thumbed and tattered pages, the sour tang of moorland peat, the feel of soggy moss spattered white in places by a heron's droppings.
Once there was an article on wood pigeons, and as I read it aloud it seemed to me that once again I was in the deep woods at Manderley, with pigeons fluttering above my head.
I heard their soft, complacent call, so comfortable and cool on a hot summer's afternoon, and there would be no disturbing of their peace until Jasper came loping through the undergrowth to find me, his damp muzzle questing the ground.
Like old ladies caught at their ablutions, the pigeons would flutter from their hiding-place, shocked into silly agitation, and, making a monstrous to-do with their wings, streak away from us above the tree-tops, and so out of sight and sound.
When they were gone a new silence would come upon the place, and I — uneasy for no known reason — would realise that the sun no longer wove a pattern on the rustling leaves, that the branches had grown darker, the shadows longer; and back at the house there would be fresh raspberries for tea.
I would rise from my bed of bracken then, shaking the feathery dust of last year's leaves from my skirt and whistling to Jasper, set off towards the house, despising myself even as I walked for my hurrying feet, my one swift glance behind.
How strange that an article on wood pigeons could so recall the past and make me falter as I read aloud.
It was the grey look on his face that made me stop abruptly, and turn the pages until I found a paragraph on cricket, very practical and dull — Middlesex batting on a dry wicket at the Oval and piling up interminable dreary runs.
How I blessed those solid, flannelled figures, for in a few minutes his face had settled back into repose, the colour had returned, and he was deriding the Surrey bowling in healthy irritation.