Men loathe that sort of thing.'
I said nothing. There seemed no possible reply. 'Oh, come, don't sulk,' she laughed, and shrugged her shoulders; 'after all, I am responsible for your behaviour here, and surely you can accept advice from a woman old enough to be your mother. Eh bien, Blaize.je viens…' and humming a tune she went into the bedroom where the dressmaker was waiting for her.
I knelt on the window-seat and looked out upon the afternoon. The sun shone very brightly still, and there was a gay high wind. In half an hour we should be sitting to our bridge, the windows tightly closed, the central heating turned to the full. I thought of the ashtrays I would have to clear, and how the squashed stubs, stained with lipstick, would sprawl in company with discarded chocolate creams. Bridge does not come easily to a mind brought up on Snap and Happy Families; besides, it bored her friends to play with me.
I felt my youthful presence put a curb upon their conversation, much as a parlour-maid does until the arrival of dessert, and they could not fling themselves so easily into the melting-pot of scandal and insinuation. Her men- friends would assume a sort of forced heartiness and ask me jocular questions about history or painting, guessing I had not long left school and that this would be my only form of conversation.
I sighed, and turned away from the window. The sun was so full of promise, and the sea was whipped white with a merry wind. I thought of that corner of Monaco which I had passed a day or two ago, and where a crooked house leant to a cobbled square. High up in the tumbled roof there was a window, narrow as a slit. It might have held a presence mediaeval; and, reaching to the desk for pencil and paper, I sketched in fancy with an absent mind a profile, pale and aquiline. A sombre eye, a high-bridged nose, a scornful upper lip. And I added a pointed beard and lace at the throat, as the painter had done, long ago in a different time.
Someone knocked at the door, and the lift-boy came in with a note in his hand. 'Madame is in the bedroom,' I told him but he shook his head and said it was for me. I opened it, and found a single sheet of note-paper inside, with a few words written in an unfamiliar hand.
'Forgive me. I was very rude this afternoon.' That was all. No signature, and no beginning. But my name was on the envelope, and spelt correctly, an unusual thing.
'Is there an answer?' asked the boy.
I looked up from the scrawled words. 'No,' I said. 'No, there isn't any answer.'
When he had gone I put the note away in my pocket, and turned once more to my pencil drawing, but for no known reason it did not please me any more; the face was stiff and lifeless, and the lace collar and the beard were like props in a charade.
Chapter four
The morning after the bridge party Mrs Van Hopper woke with a sore throat and a temperature of a hundred and two. I rang up her doctor, who came round at once and diagnosed the usual influenza. 'You are to stay in bed until I allow you to get up,' he told her; 'I don't like the sound of that heart of yours, and it won't get better unless you keep perfectly quiet and still. I should prefer', he went on, turning to me, 'that Mrs Van Hopper had a trained nurse. You can't possibly lift her. It will only be for a fortnight or so.'
I thought this rather absurd, and protested, but to my surprise she agreed with him. I think she enjoyed the fuss it would create, the sympathy of people, the visits and messages from friends, and the arrival of flowers. Monte Carlo had begun to bore her, and this little illness would make a distraction.
The nurse would give her injections, and a light massage, and she would have a diet. I left her quite happy after the arrival of the nurse, propped up on pillows with a falling temperature, her best bed-jacket round her shoulders and be-ribboned boudoir cap upon her head. Rather ashamed of my light heart, I telephoned her friends, putting off the small party she had arranged for the evening, and went down to the restaurant for lunch, a good half hour before our usual time. I expected the room to be empty — nobody lunched generally before one o'clock. It was empty, except for the table next to ours. This was a contingency for which I was unprepared. I thought he had gone to Sospel. No doubt he was lunching early because he hoped to avoid us at one o'clock. I was already half-way across the room and could not go back. I had not seen him since we disappeared in the lift the day before, for wisely he had avoided dinner in the restaurant, possibly for the same reason that he lunched early now.
It was a situation for which I was ill-trained. I wished I was older, different. I went to our table, looking straight before me, and immediately paid the penalty of gaucherie by knocking over the vase of stiff anemones as I unfolded my napkin. The water soaked the cloth, and ran down on to my lap. The waiter was at the other end of the room, nor had he seen. In a second though my neighbour was by my side, dry napkin in hand.
'You can't sit at a wet tablecloth,' he said brusquely; 'it will put you off your food. Get out of the way.'
He began to mop the cloth, while the waiter, seeing the disturbance, came swiftly to the rescue.
'I don't mind,' I said, 'it doesn't matter a bit. I'm all alone.'
He said nothing, and then the waiter arrived and whipped away the vase and the sprawling flowers.
'Leave that,' he said suddenly, 'and lay another place at my table. Mademoiselle will have luncheon with me.'
I looked up in confusion. 'Oh, no,' I said, 'I couldn't possibly.'
'Why not?' he said.
I tried to think of an excuse. I knew he did not want to lunch with me. It was his form of courtesy. I should ruin his meal. I determined to be bold and speak the truth.
'Please,' I begged, 'don't be polite. It's very kind of you but I shall be quite all right if the waiter just wipes the cloth.'
'But I'm not being polite,' he insisted. 'I would like you to have luncheon with me. Even if you had not knocked over that vase so clumsily I should have asked you.' I suppose my face told him my doubt, for he smiled. 'You don't believe me,' he said; 'never mind, come and sit down. We needn't talk to each other unless we feel like it.'
We sat down, and he gave me the menu, leaving me to choose, and went on with his hors d'oeuvre as though nothing had happened.
His quality of detachment was peculiar to himself, and I knew that we might continue thus, without speaking, throughout the meal and it would not matter. There would be no sense of strain. He would not ask me questions on history.
'What's happened to your friend?' he said. I told him about the influenza. 'I'm so sorry,' he said, and then, after pausing a moment, 'you got my note, I suppose. I felt very much ashamed of myself. My manners were atrocious. The only excuse I can make is that I've become boorish through living alone. That's why it's so kind of you to lunch with me today.'
'You weren't rude,' I said, 'at least, not the sort of rudeness she would understand. That curiosity of hers — she does not mean to be offensive, but she does it to everyone. That is, everyone of importance.'
'I ought to be flattered then,' he said; 'why should she consider me of any importance?'
I hesitated a moment before replying. 'I think because of Manderley,' I said. He did not answer, and I was aware again of that feeling of discomfort, as though I had trespassed on forbidden ground. I wondered why it was that this home of his, known to so many people by hearsay, even to me, should so inevitably silence him, making as it were a barrier between him and others.
We ate for a while without talking, and I thought of a picture postcard I had bought once at a village shop, when on holiday as a child in the west country. It was the painting of a house, crudely done of course and highly coloured, but even those faults could not destroy the symmetry of the building, the wide stone steps before the terrace, the green lawns stretching to the sea. I paid twopence for the painting — half my weekly pocket money — and then asked the wrinkled shop woman what it was meant to be. She looked astonished at my ignorance.
'That's Manderley,' she said, and I remember coming out of the shop feeling rebuffed, yet hardly wiser than before.
Perhaps it was the memory of this postcard, lost long ago in some forgotten book, that made me sympathise with his defensive attitude. He resented Mrs Van Hopper and her like with their intruding questions. Maybe there was something inviolate about Manderley that made it a place apart; it would not bear discussion. I could imagine her tramping through the rooms, perhaps paying sixpence for admission, ripping the quietude with her sharp,
