We had been too busy to read it at breakfast.
'Well?' he said, 'what about it?'
'Of course,' I answered,
'I was thinking for the moment we would be married at home.
Naturally I don't expect a church, or people, or anything like that.'
And I smiled at him.
I made a cheerful face.
'Won't it be fun?' I said.
He had turned to the door though, and opened it, and we were inside the suite in the little entrance passage.
'Is that you?' called Mrs Van Hopper from the sitting-room.
'What in the name of Mike have you been doing?
I've rung the office three times and they said they hadn't seen you.'
I was seized with a sudden desire to laugh, to cry, to do both, and I had a pain, too, at the pit of my stomach.
I wished, for one wild moment, that none of this had happened, that I was alone somewhere going for a walk, and whistling.
'I'm afraid it's all my fault,' he said, going into the sitting-room, shutting the door behind him, and I heard her exclamation of surprise.
Then I went into my bedroom and sat down by the open window.
It was like waiting in the ante-room at a doctor's.
I ought to turn over the pages of a magazine, look at photographs that did not matter and read articles I should never remember, until the nurse came, bright and efficient, all humanity washed away by years of disinfectant:
'It's all right, the operation was quite successful.
There is no need to worry at all.
I should go home and have some sleep.'
The walls of the suite were thick, I could hear no hum of voices.
I wondered what he was saying to her, how he phrased his words.
Perhaps he said,
'I fell in love with her, you know, the very first time we met. We've been seeing one another every day.'
And she in answer,
'Why, Mr de Winter, it's quite the most romantic thing I've ever heard.'
Romantic, that was the word I had tried to remember coming up in the lift.
Yes, of course.
Romantic.
That was what people would say.
It was all very sudden and romantic.
They suddenly decided to get married and there it was. Such an adventure.
I smiled to myself as I hugged my knees on the window seat, thinking how wonderful it was, how happy I was going to be.
I was to marry the man I loved.
I was to be Mrs de Winter.
It was foolish to go on having that pain in the pit of my stomach when I was so happy.
Nerves of course.
Waiting like this; the doctor's ante- room.
It would have been better, after all, more natural surely to have gone into the sitting-room hand in hand, laughing, smiling at one another and for him to say
'We're going to be married, we're very much in love.'
In love.
He had not said anything yet about being in love.
No time perhaps.
It was all so hurried at the breakfast table.
Marmalade, and coffee, and that tangerine.
No time.
The tangerine was very bitter.
No, he had not said anything about being in love.
Just that we would be married.