"Where is she tonight? She's not been on the terrace once."
"I can't say, I'm sure. I've not seen her."
"Mrs. de Winter used to be here, there, and everywhere."
"Aye, that's right."
And the woman would turn to her neighbors nodding mysteriously.
"They say she's not appearing tonight at all."
"Go on."
"That's right. One of the servants from the house told me Mrs. de Winter hasn't come down from her room all evening."
"What's wrong with the maid, is she bad?"
"No, sulky I reckon. They say her dress didn't please her."
A squeal of laughter and a murmur from the little crowd.
"Did you ever hear of such a thing? It's a shame for Mr. de Winter."
"I wouldn't stand for it, not from a chit like her."
"Maybe it's not true at all."
"It's true all right. They're full of it up at the house." One to the other. This one to the next. A smile, a wink, a shrug of the shoulder. One group, and then another group. And then spreading to the guests who walked on the terrace and strolled across the lawns. The couple who in three hours' time would sit in those chairs beneath me in the rose garden.
"Do you suppose it's true what I heard?"
"What did you hear?"
"Why, that there's nothing wrong with her at all, they've had a colossal row, and she won't appear!"
"I say!" A lift of the eyebrows, a long whistle.
"I know. Well, it does look rather odd, don't you think? What I mean is, people don't suddenly for no reason have violent headaches. I call the whole thing jolly fishy."
"I thought he looked a bit grim."
"So did I."
"Of course I have heard before the marriage is not a wild success."
"Oh, really?"
"H'm. Several people have said so. They say he's beginning to realize he's made a big mistake. She's nothing to look at, you know."
"No, I've heard there's nothing much to her. Who was she?"
"Oh, no one at all. Some pick-up in the south of France, a nursery gov., or something."
"Good Lord!"
"I know. And when you think of Rebecca..."
I went on staring at the empty chairs. The salmon sky had turned to gray. Above my head was the evening star. In the woods beyond the rose garden the birds were making their last little rustling noises before nightfall. A lone gull flew across the sky. I went away from the window, back to the bed again. I picked up the white dress I had left on the floor and put it back in the box with the tissue paper. I put the wig back in its box too. Then I looked in one of my cupboards for the little portable iron I used to have in Monte Carlo for Mrs. Van Hopper's dresses. It was lying at the back of a shelf with some woolen jumpers I had not worn for a long time. The iron was one of those universal kinds that go on any voltage and I fitted it to the plug in the wall. I began to iron the blue dress that Beatrice had taken from the wardrobe, slowly, methodically, as I used to iron Mrs. Van Hopper's dresses in Monte Carlo.
When I had finished I laid the dress ready on the bed. Then I cleaned the make-up off my face that I had put on for the fancy dress. I combed my hair, and washed my hands. I put on the blue dress and the shoes that went with it. I might have been my old self again, going down to the lounge of the hotel with Mrs. Van Hopper. I opened the door of my room and went along the corridor. Everything was still and silent. There might not have been a party at all. I tiptoed to the end of the passage and turned the corner. The door to the west wing was closed. There was no sound of anything at all. When I came to the archway by the gallery and the staircase I heard the murmur and hum of conversation coming from the dining room. They were still having dinner. The great hall was deserted. There was nobody in the gallery either. The band must be having their dinner too. I did not know what arrangements had been made for them. Frank had done it--Frank or Mrs. Danvers.
From where I stood I could see the picture of Caroline de Winter facing me in the gallery. I could see the curls framing her face, and I could see the smile on her lips. I remembered the bishop's wife who had said to me that day I called, "I shall never forget her, dressed all in white, with that cloud of dark hair." I ought to have remembered that, I ought to have known. How queer the instruments looked in the gallery, the little stands for the music, the big drum. One of the men had left his handkerchief on a chair. I leaned over the rail and looked down at the hall below. Soon it would be filled with people, like the bishop's wife had said, and Maxim would stand at the bottom of the stairs shaking hands with them as they came into the hall. The sound of their voices would echo to the ceiling, and then the band would play from the gallery where I was leaning now, the man with the violin smiling, swaying to the music.
It would not be quiet like this anymore. A board creaked in the gallery. I swung round, looking at the gallery behind me. There was nobody there. The gallery was empty, just as it had been before. A current of air blew in my face though, somebody must have left a window open in one of the passages. The hum of voices continued in the dining room. I wondered why the board creaked when I had not moved at all. The warmth of the night perhaps, a swelling somewhere in the old wood. The draft still blew in my face though. A piece of music on one of the stands fluttered to the floor. I looked towards the archway above the stairs. The draft was coming from there. I went beneath the arch again, and when I came out onto the long corridor I saw that the door to the west wing had blown open and swung back against the wall. It was dark in the west passage, none of the lights had been turned on. I could feel the wind blowing on my face from an open window. I fumbled for a switch on the wall and could not find one. I could see the window in an angle of the passage, the curtain blowing softly, backwards and forwards. The gray evening light cast queer shadows on the floor. The sound of the sea came to me through the open window, the soft hissing sound of the ebb tide leaving the shingle.
I did not go and shut the window. I stood there shivering a moment in my thin dress, listening to the sea as it sighed and left the shore. Then I turned quickly and shut the door of the west wing behind me, and came out again through the archway by the stairs.
The murmur of voices had swollen now and was louder than before. The door of the dining room was open. They were coming out of dinner. I could see Robert standing by the open door, and there was a scraping of chairs, a babble of conversation, and laughter.
I walked slowly down the stairs to meet them.
When I look back at my first party at Manderley, my first and my last, I can remember little isolated things standing alone out of the vast blank canvas of the evening. The background was hazy, a sea of dim faces none of whom I knew, and there was the slow drone of the band harping out a waltz that never finished, that went on and on. The same couples swung by in rotation, with the same fixed smiles, and to me, standing with Maxim at the bottom of the stairs to welcome the latecomers, these dancing couples seemed like marionettes twisting and turning on a piece of string, held by some invisible hand.
There was a woman, I never knew her name, never saw her again, but she wore a salmon-colored gown hooped in crinoline form, a vague gesture to some past century but whether seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth I could not tell, and every time she passed me it coincided with a sweeping bar of the waltz to which she dipped and swayed, smiling as she did so in my direction. It happened again and again until it became automatic, a matter of routine, like those promenades on board ship when we meet the same people bent on exercise like ourselves, and know with deadly certainty that we will pass them by the bridge.
I can see her now, the prominent teeth, the gay spot of rouge placed high upon her cheek-bones, and her smile, vacant, happy, enjoying her evening. Later I saw her by the supper table, her keen eyes searching the food, and she heaped a plate high with salmon and lobster mayonnaise and went off into a corner. There was Lady Crowan too, monstrous in purple, disguised as I know not what romantic figure of the past,
it might have been Marie Antoinette or Nell Gwynne for all I knew, or a strange erotic combination of the two, and she kept exclaiming in excited high-pitch tones, a little higher than usual because of the champagne she had consumed, "You all have me to thank for this, not the de Winters at all."
I remember Robert dropping a tray of ices, and the expression of Frith's face when he saw Robert was the culprit and not one of the minions hired for the occasion. I wanted to go to Robert and stand beside him and say "I know how you feel. I understand. I've done worse than you tonight." I can feel now the stiff, set smile on my face that did not match the misery in my eyes. I can see Beatrice, dear friendly tactless Beatrice, watching me from her partner's arms, nodding encouragement, the bangles jangling on her wrists, the veil slipping continually from her overheated forehead. I can picture myself once more whirled round the room in a desperate dance with Giles, who with dog-like sympathy and kind heart would take no refusal, but must steer me through the stamping crowd as he would one of his own horses at a meet. "That's a jolly pretty dress you're wearing," I can hear him say, "it makes all these people look damn silly," and I blessed him for his pathetic simple gesture of understanding and sincerity, thinking, dear Giles, that I was disappointed in my dress, that I was worrying about my appearance, that I cared.
It was Frank who brought me a plate of chicken and ham that I could not eat, and Frank who stood by my elbow with a glass of champagne I would not drink.
"I wish you would," he said quietly, "I think you need it," and I took three sips of it to please him. The black patch over his eye gave him a pale odd appearance, it made him look older, different. There seemed to be lines on his face I had not seen before.
He moved among the guests like another host, seeing to their comfort, that they were supplied with drink, and food, and cigarettes, and he danced too in solemn painstaking fashion, walking his partners round the room with a set face. He did not wear his pirate costume with abandon, and there was something rather tragic about the side-whiskers he had fluffed under the scarlet handkerchief on his head. I thought of him standing before the looking glass in his bare bachelor bedroom curling them round his fingers. Poor Frank. Dear Frank. I never asked, I never knew, how much he hated the last fancy dress ball given at Manderley.
The band played on, and the swaying couples twisted like bobbing marionettes, to and fro, to and fro, across the great hall and back again, and it was not I who watched them at all, not someone with feelings, made of flesh and blood, but a dummy-stick of a person in my stead, a prop who wore a smile screwed to its face. The figure who stood beside it was wooden too. His face was a mask, his smile was not his own. The eyes were not the eyes of the man I loved, the man I knew. They looked through me and beyond me, cold, expressionless, to some place of pain and torture I could not enter, to some private, inward hell I could not share.
He never spoke to me. He never touched me. We stood beside one another, the host and the hostess, and we were not together. I watched his courtesy to his guests. He flung a word to one, a jest to another, a smile to a third, a call over his shoulder to a fourth, and no one but myself could know that every utterance he made, every movement, was automatic and the work of a machine. We were like two performers in a play, but we were divided, we were not acting with one another. We had to endure it alone, we had to put up this show, this miserable, sham performance, for the sake of all these people I did not know and did not want to see again.
"I hear your wife's frock never turned up in time," said someone with a mottled face and a sailor's pigtail, and he laughed, and dug Maxim in the ribs. "Damn shame, what? I should sue the shop for fraud. Same thing happened to my wife's cousin once."
"Yes, it was unfortunate," said Maxim.
"I tell you what," said the sailor, turning to me, "you ought to say you are a forget-me-not. They're blue aren't they? Jolly little flowers, forget-me-nots. That's right, isn't it, de Winter? Tell your wife she must call herself a 'forget-me-not.' " He swept away, roaring with laughter, his partner in his arms. "Pretty good idea, what? A forget-me-not." Then Frank again hovering just behind me, another glass in his hand, lemonade this time. "No, Frank, I'm not thirsty."
"Why don't you dance? Or come and sit down a moment; there's a corner in the terrace."
"No, I'm better standing. I don't want to sit down."
"Can't I get you something, a sandwich, a peach?"
"No, I don't want anything."
There was the salmon lady again; she forgot to smile at me this time. She was flushed after her supper. She kept looking up into her partner's face. He was very tall, very thin, he had a chin like a fiddle.
The Destiny waltz, the Blue Danube, the Merry Widow, one-two-three, one-two-three, round-and-round, one-two-three, one-two-three, round-and-round. The salmon lady, a green lady, Beatrice again, her veil pushed back off her forehead; Giles, his face streaming with perspiration, and that sailor once more, with another partner; they stopped beside me, I did not know her; she was dressed as a Tudor woman, any Tudor woman; she wore a ruffle round her throat and a black velvet dress.
"When are you coming to see us?" she said, as though we were old friends, and I answered, "Soon of course; we were talking about it the other day," wondering why I found it so easy to lie suddenly, no effort at all. "Such a delightful party; I do congratulate you," she said, and "Thank you very much," I said. "It's fun, isn't it?"
"I hear they sent you the wrong dress?"
"Yes; absurd, wasn't it?"
"These shops are all the same. No depending on them. But you look delightfully fresh in that pale blue. Much more comfortable than this hot velvet. Don't forget, you must both come and dine at the Palace soon."
"We should love to."
What did she mean, where, what palace? Were we entertaining royalty? She swept onto the Blue Danube in the arms of the sailor, her velvet frock brushing the ground like a carpet-sweeper, and it was not until long afterwards, in the middle of some night, when I could not sleep, that I remembered the Tudor woman was the bishop's wife who liked walking in the Pennines.
What was the time? I did not know. The evening dragged on, hour after hour, the same faces and the same tunes. Now and again the bridge people crept out of the library like hermits to watch the dancers, and then returned again. Beatrice, her draperies trailing behind her, whispered in my ear.
"Why don't you sit down? You look like death."
"I'm all right."
Giles, the make-up running on his face, poor fellow, and stifling in his Arab blanket, came up to me and said, "Come and watch the fireworks on the terrace."
I remember standing on the terrace and staring up at the sky as the foolish rockets burst and fell. There was little Clarice in a corner with some boy off the estate; she was smiling happily, squealing with delight as a squib spluttered at her feet. She had forgotten her tears.
"Hullo, this will be a big 'un." Giles, his large face upturned, his mouth open. "Here she comes. Bravo, jolly fine show."
The slow hiss of the rocket as it sped into the air, the burst of the explosion, the stream of little emerald stars. A murmur of approval from the crowd, cries of delight, and a clapping of hands.
The salmon lady well to the front, her face eager with expectation, a remark for every star that fell. "Oh, what a beauty... look at that one now; I say, how pretty... Oh, that one didn't burst... take care, it's coming our way... what are those men doing over there?"... Even the hermits left their lair and came to join the dancers on the terrace. The lawns were black with people. The bursting stars shone on their upturned faces.
Again and again the rockets sped into the air like arrows, and the sky became crimson and gold. Manderley stood out like an enchanted house, every window aflame, the gray walls colored by the falling stars. A house bewitched, carved out of the dark woods. And when the last rocket burst and the cheering died away, the night that had been fine before seemed dull and heavy in contrast, the sky became a pall. The little groups on the law
ns and in the drive broke up and scattered. The guests crowded the long windows in the terrace back to the drawing room again. It was anti-climax, the aftermath had come. We stood about with blank faces. Someone gave me a glass of champagne. I heard the sound of cars starting up in the drive.
"They're beginning to go," I thought. "Thank God, they're beginning to go." The salmon lady was having some more supper. It would take time yet to clear the hall. I saw Frank make a signal to the band. I stood in the doorway between the drawing room and the hall beside a man I did not know.
"What a wonderful party it's been," he said.
"Yes," I said.
"I've enjoyed every minute of it," he said.
"I'm so glad," I said.
"Molly was wild with fury at missing it," he said.
"Was she?" I said.
The band began to play Auld Lang Syne. The man seized my hand and started swinging it up and down. "Here," he said, "come on, some of you." Somebody else swung my other hand, and more people joined us. We stood in a great circle singing at the top of our voices. The man who had enjoyed his evening and said Molly would be wild at missing it was dressed as a Chinese mandarin, and his false nails got caught up in his sleeve as we swung our hands up and down. He roared with laughter. We all laughed. "Should auld acquaintance be forgot," we sang.
The hilarious gaiety changed swiftly at the closing bars, and the drummer rattled his sticks in the inevitable prelude to God Save the King. The smiles left our faces as though wiped clean by a sponge. The Mandarin sprang to attention, his hands stiff to his sides. I remember wondering vaguely if he was in the Army. How queer he looked with his long poker face, and his drooping Mandarin mustache. I caught the salmon lady's eye. God Save the King had taken her unawares, she was still holding a plate heaped with chicken in aspic. She held it stiffly out in front of her like a church collection. All animation had gone from her face. As the last note of God Save the King died away she relaxed again, and attacked her chicken in a sort of frenzy, chattering over her shoulder to her partner. Somebody came and wrung me by the hand.