Free Mrs De Winter by Susan Hill

picture came into my mind, a picture so clear I might have been there, of Rebecca, whom I had never seen in my life, tall, slender, black-haired Rebecca, spectacularly beautiful, standing at the top of the great staircase at Manderley, a hand resting on the rail, her lips curled in a faint, sardonic smile, looking directly at me, summing me up, scornful, amused, wearing the peach satin robe that now lay crumpled in Giles’s fat, stubby hands.
    I ran out, and down the corridor, almost tripping over and banging my shoulder painfully against the corner of the wall as I saved myself, and found our room, and burst into it, trembling now, terrified because she had come back to me, she was haunting me again, when I had believed that she was quite, quite forgotten. But in our room, in the first, thin light of day, seeping through the worn old cotton curtains, I saw that Maxim was sound asleep, still huddled in the same position as when I had left him, he had not stirred at all, and I stopped dead, and then closed the door with infinite care, for I must not wake him, and could not speak, nor ever tell him anything of this. I must deal with it myself, lay the ghost, send the beast back to its lair, entirely on my own. Maxim
     
    65
    must not be troubled or disturbed by it, Maxim must never know.
    I did not get into bed, I sat on the dressing stool by the window, looking out through a chink in the curtains at the shapes of the garden, the orchard and the paddock beyond, everything turning from night into grey pre-dawn, colourless, insubstantial, and it was beautiful as ever to me, the sight of it filled me again with longing, and then I was not frightened, I was angry, angry with memory, angry with myself, angry with the past, for its power to spoil and sour this for me, but most of all, angry, in a hard, cold, bitter way with her, for what she had been and done to us that could never be undone, the way she could reach out to us over so many years, as strongly in death as in life. Rebecca.
    But as the light strengthened, and I saw the trees and shrubs and then the horses take on distinction and shape, and then the pale, pearly mist of dawn began to rise and weave about them like silk being spun out by some invisible hand, and draped in and out restlessly, silently, a strange exultation began to well up in me, a joy and a glory in the morning, the new day, with this place, home, England, the life ahead of us, so that I wanted to fling open the window and shout across the countryside, all those miles, to where she lay in that dark, silent crypt alone.
    ‘I am alive!’ I wanted to shout. ‘Do you hear? I am alive and so is he, and we are together. And you are dead, and will never harm us again. You are dead, Rebecca.’
     
    66

CHAPTER
    Five
     
    We breakfasted by ourselves in the dining room. Giles slept in, and I had seen Roger go up to the horses when I was dressing, plodding slowly and heavily, from behind the same shape as his father, the same thick neck set low down on to broad shoulders, so ordinary a man, rising thirty, dull, pleasant, his head full of little other than horses and dogs. I scarcely knew him, he had never impinged much upon our lives.
    But he had flown and fought in the war with nerve, with distinction, earned a DFC and finally, been shot down and burned almost beyond recognition, so that if he had turned round now, I should have seen not the old, round and fresh, open faced Roger, but a hideous mask of stretched, shining, flaking skin, alternately white and with vivid staining, and eyes narrowed, looking out of scarred, lashless lids, so that I had to brace myself each time not to flinch, not to look in revulsion too quickly away. The damage to the rest of his body was unimaginable.
    Roger, calling softly and waiting, as the grey and then
     
    67
    the chestnut horse came trotting down, his future irreparable. The picture of him came to me again now as I sat, sipping my coffee, watching Maxim peel an apple, and