REBECCA - CHAPTER SEVEN

It would be the best moment, before the full flush of summer, and in the valley the azealas

would be prodigal os scent, and the blood-red rhododondrons in bloom

Now the moment was upon me I wished it delayed.

I wanted to draw up at some wayside inn and stay there, in a cofffee-room, by an impersonal fire. I wanted to be a travellor on the road, a bride in love with her husband

Maxim could lean over a cottage gate in the evenings, smoking a pipe

proud of a very tall hollyhock he had grown himself

I was like a child brought to her first school, or a little untrained maid

who has never left home before, seeking a situation

but when she took my hand hers was limp and heavy, deathly cold,

and it lay in mine like a lifeless thing

spoken in a voice as cold and

lifeless as her hand had been

I guessed at once she considered

me ill-bred

I could see that black-figure standing out alone, individual and apart

and for all her silence I knew her eye to be upon me

I was sitting in Rebecca’s chair, I was 

leaning against Rebecca’s cushion

having assumef his way of living,

the master of the house

I was not the first one to lounge there in

possession of the chair

Yes there it was, the Manderley i had expected,

the Mnderley of my picture postcard long ago

I was speaking the truth or not, for to me a rhodododeren was a homely,

domestic thing, strictly coventional, mauve or pink in colour

no twig, nothing but the slaughterous

red, luscious and fantastic

no house, no field, no broad and friendly garden

nothing but the silence and deep woods

I became aware that this was not the drive

I had imagined would be Manderley’s

making an archway for us,

like the roof of a church

There was notepaper also in the drawer, thick white sheets, for rough writing

and the notepaper with the house, with the crest, and the addredd and visiting crads, ivory white in little boxes

not content with forming their little theatre

on the lawn outside the window

There were flowers in the didnig room, flowers in the library,

but orderly and trim, rather in the background, not like this, not in profusion

someone who had chosen every particle of furniture with great care,

so that each chair, each vase, each small inifitesimal things should be in harmony

sniffed the air for a moment and found I was not the one she sought,

she turned her head away

blood red and 

luscious

great bushes of them, massed beneath the open window, encroaching

on to the sweep of the drive itself

and in the centre of this, the

tiny statue of a naked faun, his pipes to his lips