‘And now look,’ Maxim said, after a moment.
I followed his glance. Above the line of the city, above the colours of the sunset, the night sky began, miraculously dark, and against it, a crescent moon was set, the thinnest, most brilliant paring of silver.
If I close my eyes I can see it now, it comes back to me at moments with absolute clarity, a comfort as well as pain, and I rest on it and feed from it, and I hear Maxim’s voice, again, the next words he spoke.
‘Here,’ he said. I saw that he was holding out an envelope. ‘You had better read this now,’ and then he turned his back and walked away to the other side of the ship.
The envelope might be between my fingers now, I can feel it, smooth, but torn at the top where it had been opened. I stood holding it, looking at the sky, but the sun had gone and the last stain of bright colour faded, the domes had been absorbed back into the darkness. Only the moon remained, the pure, bright wire.
My heart was beating too hard. I did not know what the envelope might contain, what words I would have to read. I did not want to, I wanted to stay unknowing, poised in this time when all was still safe and contained and I had nothing to be afraid of. But I was afraid.
Everything will change, I said. This will in some way put an end to things as they are. And so it did.
I sat down on an uncomfortable, slatted bench in the shelter of the bridge. There was a storm lantern with just enough light to read by, it threw a grubby orange glow down on to the paper. I wondered why Maxim had left me alone, what he feared. It must be some dreadful thing in this envelope, something he could not put into words, it could not be simple, ordinary, bad news, some death or illness or disaster, or surely, surely, he would have stayed with me, told me, we would have been together. But we were far apart. I could feel tears stinging at the back of my eyes, small, hard tears of some bitter substance, not tears that would spill easily and so be in some way a release and a comfort.
One of the crew went by, the band of his cap bone white against the darkness. He glanced at me curiously, but did not stop. From where I sat I could not see the moon, only a few distant, pricking lights from the shore. I smelled the oil from the engines, heard the noise they made, throbbing away at my back.
Please, I said, though I did not know for what I was so desperately asking. Please. A cry for help.
And then, I took the single sheet of paper out of the envelope, and held it to the light.
Inveralloch. Wednesday.
My dear Maxim,
In haste to let you know the final outcome. I am sending this by express, poste restante to Venice, in the hope that it will reach you before you leave.
I have this morning heard that my bid on your behalf for the freehold purchase of Cobbett’s Brake has been successful. As soon as you receive this, will you please telegraph final confirmation so that I may see Archie Nicholson in London next week and have him draw up the deeds and covenants ready for you to sign as soon as you return.
I will be glad to know a final date. There are some details to be gone over but once the documents have been completed, the house will be yours to move into as soon as you find convenient after returning to England. I am as delighted by this as I hope you will both be,
Yours ever,
Frank
My hand trembled, I had to clutch the paper, for fear that it would fall from between my fingers and blow away.
I looked up. Maxim had come back. ‘We’re almost there,’ he said.
And so we went to stand at the rail of the steamer, and rode slowly in, to where the old, mysterious city held out its arms to greet us.
Part Three
Twelve
We came home to Cobbett’s Brake in May, just as we had to Manderley. But how different it was, how different in every way. A new beginning. And whenever I recall it, even though it is in the light of what happened, it is the light, there are no shadows, and my memories of that time are perfect and joyful, I do not regret anything, I would not have had it any other way.
Remembering Manderley, which I still do, I remember how inadequate I was, how out of place, I remember the awkwardnesses and the way the house overpowered me. I was tremulous with a nervous, disbelieving happiness when I first went there, and it changed, almost at once, merging into mere anxiety. But I came to Cobbett’s Brake on a great surge of confidence and release, of rekindled, intense love for Maxim, who had done this thing, with optimism and sureness of purpose. I felt that I had been waiting for years for life properly to begin, that everything else had been a preparation, but also something I had looked on at, a play in which everyone else had real parts, but I had been only pushed dumbly about the stage, not speaking, never belonging, never making any move to rush the action along. Everyone had stared at me, there had been peculiar, menacing silences sometimes when I had appeared under the lights, and yet I had been of no consequence. Now, it was not a play, it was life, and I plunged into the midst of it and was carried by it, with such eagerness.
All the time that had remained to us abroad we had lived on two planes. Letters and telegrams had flown in both directions between Frank Crawley, Maxim, the land agents and solicitors, Giles, the people at the farm. Maxim had spent hours on the end of a bad telephone line, shouting instructions, trying to discover whether this or that would be done, and all the time, we were plunged into the mysterious, exotic hubbub of life in Istanbul, and the countryside of Turkey, and I loved it; it did not frighten me at all, I adored everything about it and felt and saw and heard and remembered it with a piercing intensity because I knew I was leaving and these were the last days of our exile – only now, it was not exile, it was simply pleasure, and after it, we were going home, and life was about to begin. We wandered about the streets, choked with people and animals, buyers and sellers, beggars and babies, went into mosques full of bells and chanting voices, smelled heady, overpowering scents, cloying, odd, unpleasant, always unlike any I would ever smell again, so that now, they are locked away in a box somewhere forever and I have no key. If I had, if the box were to break open, that place, that time, those memories, that are packed so tightly together with the scents, would overwhelm me. There were tastes, too, sweet, spiced, smoky tastes always in our mouths, and sometimes, I have caught a faint trace of those, eating some piece of meat, or a pastry, and after a bewildered moment, been catapulted back to those days and nights.
There were no misunderstandings or silences between us, there was only love and resolution, and exquisite happiness, in time and place, so that I wept to leave, the beauty of Istanbul was more than physical, it was personal and poignant, imbued with a sense of fragility and impermanence. When we left, and the glittering, painted city was finally out of sight, I believed that it might indeed have simply dissolved, and ceased to exist at all because we could no longer see it.
We travelled back in quite a leisurely way across Europe, paying out the time gently, making it last. Frank had seen to the final details of the purchase, but we would not know until we arrived back and could finally go over the house, how much work might have to be done, whether we would want to keep any of the furnishings that had been sold with it. The old couple had not wanted to go back, and their son, newly demobbed from the army, had only cleared out all the personal effects and things of value, much of the furniture remained, but Frank had had no time to take an inventory and seemed to think little of it would be of use. He had rented a small house for us nearby where we could stay for a shorter or longer time – though I knew that even if we were forced to clear the whole of Cobbett’s Brake, and work upon it, I wanted to be there, I would not mind confining ourselves to a few temporarily furnished rooms. We belonged there, not in another place, discomfort and inconvenience would be of no consequence.
It was the warmest May for years, people said, it didn’t really do to be as warm as this so early, no one knew what the weather was coming to; but ‘let’s make the most of it, we should enjoy it while we can.’
And we di
d, oh, we did. England smelled of spring and the flowers and the grass, the bluebells were almost over, but here and there, we passed a small wood or a quiet copse, and saw a flash of that incomparable blue, deep down below the first, fresh leaves, and stopped twice on the way, to climb over a fence. There was a latticework of sky between the branches over our heads, and at our feet the flowers were damp and cool. I bent down and plunged my arms into them, closed my eyes and let the smell overpower me.
‘No use taking them,’ Maxim said. ‘They’ll be dead within the hour.’
And I remembered then, armfuls of the pale, yellow-green, etiolated stalks flopping over in the basket of my bicycle, when I had not been able to resist picking them as a girl, and giving them to my mother to put in jars, certain that in some magic way she would have power to revive them.
‘But she did not, of course,’ I said, standing up now.
‘And you learned your lesson.’
‘Perhaps.’
I saw then, as he stood looking at me, how his face had changed, softened and lightened, how he seemed suddenly younger – years younger even than when I had met him – but of course, he had seemed gravely old, then, that had been part of the point.
The daffodils and the apple blossom were over, but the lilac was out, a tree of it in every cottage garden, white and pallid mauve, and the hedgerows on either side of us were ribbons of dusty white – hawthorn in full flower, whenever we stepped out of the car, we smelled its curious, bitter scent, baked in the heat of the afternoon sun and that, too, was another smell of childhood, I remembered vividly how I had sat beneath a great bush of it in some old woman’s garden when I was five or six, picking off twigs of the little clumps of blossom and playing with them, spreading them on the earth, making patterns. It was as though my childhood, those happiest of early years that had been snapped off so sharply with my father’s death, were being given back to me now, they were clearer and closer than they had ever been; the years between, the time before Maxim and then, of Maxim and Manderley and after, all of them until now, receded, blurred and shadowy. This time was linked across them like a strong bridge, with that time further back.
As we drove deeper into the heart of the country, I realised that everything was white; there were white lambs, and the high creamy white heads of the cow parsley springing up from every ditch, and lily of the valley in the shady corners of gardens, over low stone walls. I felt like a bride again, as I had been on our way home to Manderley, but glancing at Maxim across the car, I did not say it, I did not want any mention or reminder of that time to throw the faintest shadow over this day. We did not hurry, there was no reason to hurry. We lingered over every sight, every detail, having a slow, pleasant late lunch, then stopping a little later to visit a cathedral, where we wandered and gazed up at the windows and the roof, the glorious stone arches, like visitors who had never seen such things before. When we came out, the light had changed, it was pale lemon coloured against the buildings, the day had slipped down a little towards late afternoon.
For the last few miles I made Maxim go very slowly, I was committing everything to memory, learning the lanes by heart. We had made arrangements for the house to be opened by Mrs Peck from the farm. We would look round briefly now, and come back first thing the next morning to begin the process of deciding, planning, making arrangements. But there would be no one waiting, no rows of uniformed staff on the steps and in the drive, no staring, curious, eyes following me – no Mrs Danvers. This was mine only, mine and Maxim’s.
We reached the lane in which we had first stopped, beneath the old wooden signpost.
‘Stop here,’ I said. I opened the door, and in the faint ticking silence after the engine had died, I heard the low coo of wood pigeons, high in the trees above our heads. The air was balmy, and damp smelling. ‘You take the car.’ I climbed out. ‘I’d like to walk.’
I did not want to arrive, grandly, down the drive to the front door. I wanted to approach it by degrees, by accident almost, to see it again from the grassy bowl in which it lay and then slip quietly and alone down the slopes and in at some small side door. And quite suddenly, fiercely, I did not want to share that even with Maxim, the rush of desire for the house to be absolutely mine, for a short time, was intense within me.
He understood. He smiled, turned the car and let it slip away, back down the lane, and then I was alone. I stood, with my eyes closed, feeling my own heart beat, hearing the branches of the trees stir as some bird flew among them. And then I began to walk, clambering down the narrow track that was overgrown now with wild garlic and tall nettles, grass, and low overhanging branches which I had to push aside. The light was an undersea green, but there was nothing sinister here, everything was fresh and newly grown and innocent; there were no blood red rhododendrons towering over my head, nothing rare or strange, all was familiar and right. A rabbit ran across the path and into a hidden hole, I caught a glimpse of a single, startled, translucent eye as it glanced at me.
The last time I had come here, the light had sifted through the almost bare branches so that I had had a sight of the open space ahead, but now, the growth of the trees was so full and high that I was enclosed in my green tunnel until, abruptly, I shoved aside a last, sweeping branch, and was out into the evening sunlight. And there it lay, Cobbett’s Brake, calm and quiet and beautiful.
I saw it and could look down on it all of a piece, it was not too big to contain within a single focus. I seemed to hold it still, the gates, the drive, the walls and chimneys, the windows and gables, the gardens surrounding it. It was like meeting someone with whom one has fallen in love after an absence and the doubt and anxiety which that has brought have been swept away by the first, new sight of them, and there is only certainty.
I began to climb carefully, half slipping, balancing with my hand outstretched, down the slope between the grazing sheep, to where I saw Maxim, at the entrance to the house.
There was a jug of country flowers in the hall, and a second, smaller one in the middle of the kitchen table, beside eggs and milk, and a fruit cake; fires had been laid, though not lit, the boiler was stoked. It was a strange house, we had never set foot inside it, the furnishings that had been left were old and unfamiliar, and yet it was home, and ours at once, we were not intruders.
‘I could stay here,’ I said, ‘live here now, we’ve no need to go anywhere else.’
We went quietly from room to room. It had been cleaned, polished, and tidied, but there was more than that; it had been loved and cared for, for years past, I thought, even though some of the rooms were clearly long unused. There was nothing too formal or cold about them, nothing I did not like. I looked round and saw that a chair needed recovering, a door rehanging, some pictures chosen to fill blank pale spaces on a few of the walls, but nothing had to be done urgently, and there was nothing I greatly disliked.
‘We will make it ours,’ I said. ‘There isn’t any hurry.’
We had nothing, after all, the fire had burned our possessions; we would begin again. I was happy about that. Those beautiful, precious things, the china and portraits, the silver and rare furniture, had not been mine, I had never felt at home among them. They had belonged to Maxim’s family – and to Rebecca. These things that furnished Cobbett’s Brake were not mine either but I did not feel the same about them, I felt even now that we had not so much bought as inherited them, they were part of the fabric of the house and we were to look after them in the same way.
We went up into the attic rooms, dusty and empty now, with bare white walls, but I furnished them in my mind, for the children, and put linen in the cupboards and china and glass in the cabinets.
I turned and looked at Maxim, filled with my new found delight and pleasure. I said, ‘Now I am happy. Do you understand?’
But then at once regretted the words and would have taken them back, for perhaps he was not so sure, perhaps he had done this only for me and would never settle here – it was not Manderley.
‘
Come outside,’ Maxim said.
It was still warm but the air smelled of evening now; a thrush was singing madly from a lilac bush. We began to walk through the garden, beneath an old pergola that ran along the south side. Roses and clematis had scrambled rampantly up and over, and cascaded down like wild, tangled, unkempt hair. They needed to be restrained, shaped and cut back, and yet for now, they were right, the starry white clematis flowers already out, the roses fatly in bud.
All around us, flowerbeds, shrubs, climbers, had been left to riot, but I was happy to see it like this and planned to bring it gradually, gently, to order. I did not want a neat, clipped, sterile garden, organised by a team of men I scarcely dared speak to for fear I would offend them, or reveal my own ignorance. I was ignorant, but my father had had a garden, and I remembered it still. I would learn quickly, I knew, it was in my blood.
‘I thought,’ Maxim said now, ‘that this would be a place that you wanted, but it is what I want now. When I saw it again today and went inside the house – I realised that it would be mine too.’
He stopped, and looked slowly around – at the grassy slopes and the sheep grazing on them, the trees beyond. ‘I never thought that I would be able to lay the ghost of Manderley – but I will. It will happen here. That is over and past. Manderley is dead to me.’ He looked at me. ‘It has taken over ten years. I’m sorry it has been so long.’
I went to him, but as I did so, a voice inside me said, ‘But not only the house, not only the house.’ I did not speak, we simply went on, walking, looking around us, and Maxim began to talk of buying more of the surrounding land, a farm perhaps.