Rebecca

'We can't lose each other now,' I said. 'We've got to be together always, with no secrets, no shadows. Please, darling, please.'

'There's no time,' he said. 'We may only have a few hours, a few days. How can we be together now that this has happened? I've told you they've found the boat. They've found Rebecca.'

I stared at him stupidly, not understanding. 'What will they do?' I said.

'They'll identify her body,' he said, 'there's everything to tell them, there in the cabin. The clothes she had, the shoes, the rings on her fingers. They'll identify her body; and then they will remember the other one, the woman buried up there, in the crypt.'

'What are you going to do?' I whispered.

'I don't know,' he said. 'I don't know.'

The feeling was coming back to me, little by little, as I knew it would. My hands were cold no longer. They were clammy, warm. I felt a wave of colour come into my face, my throat. My cheeks were burning hot. I thought of Captain Searle, the diver, the Lloyd's agent, all those men on the stranded ship leaning against the side, staring down into the water. I thought of the shopkeepers in Kerrith, of errand boys whistling in the street, of the vicar walking out of church, of Lady Crowan cutting roses in her garden, of the woman in the pink dress and her little boy on the cliffs. Soon they would know. In a few hours. By breakfast time tomorrow. 'They've found Mrs de Winter's boat, and they say there is a body in the cabin.' A body in the cabin. Rebecca was lying there on the cabin floor. She was not in the crypt at all. Some other woman was lying in the crypt. Maxim had killed Rebecca. Rebecca had not been drowned at all. Maxim had killed her. He had shot her in the cottage in the woods. He had carried her body to the boat, and sunk the boat there in the bay. That grey, silent cottage, with the rain pattering on the roof. The jig- saw pieces came tumbling thick and fast upon me. Disjointed pictures flashed one by one through my bewildered mind. Maxim sitting in the car beside me in the south of France. 'Something happened nearly a year ago that altered my whole life. I had to begin living all over again…' Maxim's silence, Maxim's moods. The way he never talked about Rebecca. The way he never mentioned her name. Maxim's dislike of the cove, the stone cottage. 'If you had my memories you would not go there either.' The way he climbed the path through the woods not looking behind him. Maxim pacing up and down the library after Rebecca died. Up and down. Up and down. 'I came away in rather a hurry,' he said to Mrs Van Hopper, a line, thin as gossamer, between his brows. 'They say he can't get over his wife's death.' The fancy dress dance last night, and I coming down to the head of the stairs, in Rebecca's dress. 'I killed Rebecca,' Maxim had said. 'I shot Rebecca in the cottage in the woods.' And the diver had found her lying there, on the cabin floor…

'What are we going to do?' I said. 'What are we going to say?'

Maxim did not answer. He stood there by the mantelpiece, his eyes wide and staring, looking in front of him, not seeing anything.

'Does anyone know?' I said, 'anyone at all?' He shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'No one but you and me?' I asked. 'No one but you and me,' he said.

'Frank,' I said suddenly, 'are you sure Frank does not know?'

'How could he?' said Maxim. 'There was nobody there but myself. It was dark…' He stopped. He sat down on a chair, he put his hand up to his forehead. I went and knelt beside him. He sat very still a moment. I took his hands away from his face and looked into his eyes. 'I love you,' I whispered, 'I love you. Will you believe me now?' He kissed my face and my hands. He held my hands very tightly like a child who would gain confidence.

'I thought I should go mad,' he said, 'sitting here, day after day, waiting for something to happen. Sitting down at the desk there, answering those terrible letters of sympathy. The notices in the papers, the interviews, all the little aftermath of death. Eating and drinking, trying to be normal, trying to be sane. Frith, the servants, Mrs Danvers. Mrs Danvers, who I had not the courage to turn away, because with her knowledge of Rebecca she might have suspected, she might have guessed… Frank, always by my side, discreet, sympathetic. 'Why don't you get away?' he used to say, 'I can manage here. You ought to get away.' And Giles, and Bee, poor dear tactless Bee. 'You're looking frightfully ill, can't you go and see a doctor?' I had to face them all, these people, knowing every word I uttered was a lie.'

I went on holding his hands very tight. I leant close to him, quite close. 'I nearly told you, once,' he said, 'that day Jasper ran to the cove, and you went to the cottage for some string. We were sitting here, like this, and then Frith and Robert came in with the tea.'

'Yes,' I said. 'I remember. Why didn't you tell me? The time we've wasted when we might have been together. All these weeks and days.'

'You were so aloof,' he said, 'always wandering into the garden with Jasper, going off on your own. You never came to me like this.'

'Why didn't you tell me?' I whispered. 'Why didn't you tell me?'

T thought you were unhappy, bored,' he said. 'I'm so much older than you. You seemed to have more to say to Frank than you ever had to me. You were funny with me, awkward, shy.'

'How could I come to you when I knew you were thinking about Rebecca?' I said. 'How could I ask you to love me when I knew you loved Rebecca still?' He pulled me close to him and searched my eyes. 'What are you talking about? What do you mean?' he said. I knelt up straight beside him. 'Whenever you touched me I thought you were comparing me to Rebecca,' I said. 'Whenever you spoke to me or looked at me, walked with me in the garden, sat down to dinner, I felt you were saying to yourself, 'This I did with Rebecca, and this, and this.' ' He stared at me bewildered as though he did not understand. 'It was true, wasn't it?' I said.

'Oh, my God,' he said. He pushed me away, he got up and began walking up and down the room, clasping his hands. 'What is it? What's the matter?' I said. He whipped round and looked at me as I sat there huddled on the floor. 'You thought I loved Rebecca?' he said. 'You thought I killed her, loving her? I hated her, I tell you. Our marriage was a farce from the very first. She was vicious, damnable, rotten through and through. We never loved each other, never had one moment of happiness together. Rebecca was incapable of love, of tenderness, of decency. She was not even normal.'

I sat on the floor, clasping my knees, staring at him. 'She was clever of course,' he said. 'Damnably clever. No one would guess meeting her that she was not the kindest, most generous, most gifted person in the world. She knew exactly what to say to different people, how to match her mood to theirs. Had she met you, she would have walked off into the garden with you, arm-in-arm, calling to Jasper, chatting about flowers, music, painting, whatever she knew to be your particular hobby; and you would have been taken in, like the rest. You would have sat at her feet and worshipped her.'

Up and down he walked, up and down across the library floor.

'When I married her I was told I was the luckiest man in the world,' he said. 'She was so lovely, so accomplished, so amusing. Even Gran, the most difficult person to please in those days, adored her from the first. 'She's got the three things that matter in a wife,' she told me: 'breeding, brains, and beauty.' And I believed her, or forced myself to believe her. But all the time I had a seed of doubt at the back of my mind. There was something about her eyes…'

The jig-saw pieces came together piece by piece, the real Rebecca took shape and form before me, stepping from her shadow world like a living figure from a picture frame. Rebecca slashing at her horse; Rebecca seizing life with her two hands; Rebecca, triumphant, leaning down from the minstrels' gallery with a smile on her lips.

Once more I saw myself standing on the beach beside poor startled Ben. 'You're kind,' he said, 'not like the other one. You won't put me to the asylum, will you?' There was someone who walked through the woods by night, someone tall and slim. She gave you the feeling of a snake… Maxim was talking though. Maxim was walking up and down the library floor. 'I found her out at once,' he was saying, 'five days after we were married. You remember that time I drove you in the car, to the hills above Monte Carlo? I wanted to stand there again, to remember. She sat there, laughing, her black hair blowing in the wind; she told me about herself, told me things I shall never repeat to a living soul. I knew then what I had done, what I had married. Beauty, brains, and breeding. Oh, my God!'

He broke off abruptly. He went and stood by the window, looking out upon the lawns. He began to laugh. He stood there laughing. I could not bear it, it made me frightened, ill. I could not stand it.

'Maxim!' I cried. 'Maxim!'

He lit a cigarette, and stood there smoking, not saying anything. Then he turned away again, and paced up and down the room once more. 'I nearly killed her then,' he said. 'It would have been so easy. One false step, one slip. You remember the precipice. I frightened you, didn't I? You thought I was mad. Perhaps I was. Perhaps I am.