Mrs De Winter Read Online Free Page A

the comfortable bubble in which we were co cooned. How smug it seems that we were, how self-centred and unfeeling, deliberately persuading ourselves, because it suited us to do so, that Beatrice’s stroke must have been slight and that by now, surely, she would be up and about and fully herself again.
    I did a little shopping in the afternoon and even bought some cologne, of a kind that was new to me, and a precious packet of bitter chocolate which was once again occasionally available; it was as though I were one of the rich, bored, frivolous women we had so often observed, passing her time in buying this and that, indulging herself. It was not
     
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    like me, and I do not know why I behaved in such a way that day. We had tea and then dinner, and after dinner we walked again, as we usually did, beside the lake and went to drink our coffee in one of the last of the hotels to have its terrace still open in the evening and tables out under the awnings. The fairy lights were lit above our heads, shining midnight blue and crimson and an ugly orange on to the tables and our hands and arms as we stretched them out to our cups. It was milder again, the wind had dropped. One or two other couples were about, strolling past us, coming in for drinks and coffee and the tiny, cherry and frangipane tarts that were a speciality. If Maxim was sometimes unable to prevent himself from thinking of things that were far away from here, he concealed it very well from me and lounged back in his chair, smoking, the same figure, only a little more lined and grey haired, that I had sat beside in the open car driving up the mountain roads at Monte, a lifetime ago, the same man who had ordered me, gauche and red with embarrassment, to his own table, when I had been lunching alone and knocked over my glass of water. ‘You can’t sit at a wet tablecloth, it will put you off your food. Get out of the way,’ and to the waiter, ‘Leave that and lay another place at my table. Mademoiselle will have luncheon with me.’
    He was rarely so imperious now, or so impulsive, and his temper was generally so much more even, he was more accepting of things, and of tedium most of all. He had changed. Yet as I looked across at him now, it was the old Maxim that I saw, the one I had first known. It should have been like so many other evenings as I sat beside him, talking of little, knowing that he needed only the reassurance of my
     
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    presence to be content, and quite used by now to being strong, to have him dependent upon me. And if, at the very back of my mind, today as on a few other days during the past year or two, I was conscious of some faint restlessness within myself, a faint struggling, new voice, something that I could not have explained or defined but was only like ‘a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand’ I was as careful as ever to turn myself away and refuse to face or to acknowledge it.
    They brought more coffee, thick and black, in tiny, glazed cups, and Maxim ordered cognac.
    I said, There goes the chemist,’ and caught Maxim’s eye as always in gentle, mutual amusement, as we both turned slightly to look at the man walking past us along the waterfront, a peculiarly erect and thin man, who was the local pharmacist and spent all day immaculate as a priest in a long white coat, and each evening, punctually at this time, walked the length of the lake path and back, wearing a long, black coat, and holding a small, fat, wheezing pug dog on the far end of a lead. He made us laugh, he was so solemn, so humourless, everything about him, the cut of his clothes and of his hair, the set of his head, the way he wore his collar carefully turned up, even the type of lead the dog had, was unmistakably foreign. Such small, regular sights, such harmless shared amusement, marked our days.
    I remember we began to talk of him to speculate about his status — for we had never seen him with a wife, or indeed, with any other person at all, and to match make for