Perhaps she was being sincere at last, but I did not want that sort of honesty.
I did not say anything.
I looked sullen, perhaps, for she shrugged her shoulders and wandered to the looking-glass, straightening her little mushroom hat.
I was glad she was going, glad I should not see her again.
I grudged the months I had spent with her, employed by her, taking her money, trotting in her wake like a shadow, drab and dumb. Of course I was inexperienced, of course I was idiotic, shy, and young.
I knew all that. She did not have to tell me.
I suppose her attitude was deliberate, and for some odd feminine reason she resented this marriage; her scale of values had received a shock.
Well, I would not care, I would forget her and her barbed words.
A new confidence had been born in me when I burnt that page and scattered the fragments.
The past would not exist for either of us; we were starting afresh, he and I.
The past had blown away like the ashes in the waste-paper basket.
I was going to be Mrs de Winter.
I was going to live at Manderley.
Soon she would be gone, rattling alone in the waggon-lit without me, and he and I would be together in the dining-room of the hotel, lunching at the same table, planning the future.
The brink of a big adventure.
Perhaps, once she had gone, he would talk to me at last, about loving me, about being happy.
Up to now there had been no time, and anyway those things are not easily said, they must wait their moment.
I looked up, and caught her reflection in the looking-glass.
She was watching me, a little tolerant smile on her lips.
I thought she was going to be generous after all, hold out her hand and wish me luck, give me encouragement and tell me that everything was going to be all right.
But she went on smiling, twisting a stray hair into place beneath her hat.
'Of course,' she said, 'you know why he is marrying you, don't you?
You haven't flattered yourself he's in love with you?
The fact is that empty house got on his nerves to such an extent he nearly went off his head.
He admitted as much before you came into the room.
He just can't go on living there alone…'
Chapter seven
We came to Manderley in early May, arriving, so Maxim said, with the first swallows and the bluebells.
It would be the best moment, before the full flush of summer, and in the valley the azaleas would be prodigal of scent, and the blood-red rhododendrons in bloom.
We motored, I remember, leaving London in the morning in a heavy shower of rain, coming to Manderley about five o'clock, in time for tea.
I can see myself now, unsuitably dressed as usual, although a bride of seven weeks, in a tan-coloured stockinette frock, a small fur known as a stone marten round my neck, and over all a shapeless mackintosh, far too big for me and dragging to my ankles. It was, I thought, a gesture to the weather, and the length added inches to my height.
I clutched a pair of gauntlet gloves in my hands, and carried a large leather handbag.
'This is London rain,' said Maxim when we left, 'you wait, the sun will be shining for you when we come to Manderley'; and he was right, for the clouds left us at Exeter, they rolled away behind us, leaving a great blue sky above our heads and a white road in front of us.
I was glad to see the sun, for in superstitious fashion I looked upon rain as an omen of ill-will, and the leaden skies of London had made me silent.
'Feeling better?' said Maxim, and I smiled at him, taking his hand, thinking how easy it was for him, going to his own home, wandering into the hall, picking up letters, ringing a bell for tea, and I wondered how much he guessed of my nervousness, and whether his question
'Feeling better?' meant that he understood.
'Never mind, we'll soon be there.
I expect you want your tea,' he said, and he let go my hand because we had reached a bend in the road, and must slow down.
I knew then that he had mistaken my silence for fatigue, and it had not occurred to him I dreaded this arrival at Manderley as much as I had longed for it in theory.
Now the moment was upon me I wished it delayed.
I wanted to draw up at some wayside inn and stay there, in a coffee-room, by an impersonal fire.
I wanted to be a traveller on the road, a bride in love with her husband. Not myself coming to Manderley for the first time, the wife of Maxim de Winter.
We passed many friendly villages where the cottage windows had a kindly air.
A woman, holding a baby in her arms, smiled at me from a doorway, while a man clanked across a road to a well, carrying a pail.
I wished we could have been one with them, perhaps their neighbours, and that Maxim could lean over a cottage gate in the evenings, smoking a pipe, proud of a very tall hollyhock he had grown himself, while I bustled in my kitchen, clean as a pin, laying the table for supper.
There would be an alarm clock on the dresser ticking loudly, and a row of shining plates, while after supper Maxim would read his paper, boots on the fender, and I reach for a great pile of mending in the dresser drawer.
Surely it would be peaceful and steady, that way of living, and easier, too, demanding no set standard?
'Only two miles further,' said Maxim; 'you see that great belt of trees on the brow of the hill there, sloping to the valley, with a scrap of sea beyond?
That's Manderley, in there. Those are the woods.'
I forced a smile, and did not answer him, aware now of a stab of panic, an uneasy sickness that could not be controlled.