Mrs De Winter Read Online Free Page B

him with various ladies in other shops, or else in the hotel lounges and at cafe tables of the little town, eyeing other dog-walkers as likely prospects and later, as it grew chilly again and the fairy
     
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    lights on the terrace were wholly extinguished, walked back hand in hand, beside the dark, silent water, and pretended, though without speaking a word of it, that all was as it had been. We did not mention the letter.
    It is strange that, when we recall the dramas of life, the moments of crisis and tragedy, the times when we have suffered and when dreadful news has come to us, it is not only the event itself that impresses itself forever upon the memory, but even more, the small, inconsequential details. Those may remain clear and fresh, attached to the incident like a permanent marker label, for the rest of our lives, even though it might seem that panic and shock and acute distress have caused our sense of awareness to falter and our minds to go quite blank.
    There are some things that I do not remember at all about that night, but others stand out like scenes of a tableau, vividly illuminated.
    We had come, laughing about something together, into the hotel, and unusually, because he seemed in such a determinedly gay mood, Maxim had suggested that we have a liqueur. Our hotel had no pretensions, but, perhaps years ago, someone had decided to try and attract outsiders and made a bar out of one of the dim little lounges next to the dining room, shading the lamps and adding fringes to them, setting a few stools about here and there. In daylight it was unenticing, dull and shabby, and we saw through it, we would never have dreamed of coming in. But in the evenings, sometimes, you could catch a fleeting mood and pretend it had sophistication, and because we no longer had taste for that, for the sort of smartness as we would
     
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    have found in the bars and restaurants of the grander hotels, we came in here just occasionally, and it pleased us, we had grown quite fond of it, and felt indulgent towards it, as one might to a plain child dressed up in grown up party clothes. Once or twice, a couple of well dressed middle aged women had sat together at the bar gossiping; once, a fat matron and her goose necked daughter had perched side by side on stools, smoking, looking greedily around. We had huddled in the corner, our backs to them, heads bent a little, for we still had a fear that one day we would come upon someone who had known us, or merely recognised our faces, we were forever in unspoken dread of a sudden dawning look, as our story began to come back to them. But we had enjoyed speculating about the women, glancing at their hands, their shoes, their jewellery surreptitiously, trying to place and assess them, wondering about them, as we wondered about the life of the lugubrious pharmacist.
    This evening there was no one else in the room and we took, I remember, not our usual back table but one slightly better lit and nearer to the bar itself. But as we sat down, before the boy could take our order, the manager came in, looking round for us.
    The gentleman has telephoned, but you were out. He says that he will try to speak to you again soon.’
    We sat like dumb things. My heart was pounding very hard, very fast, and when I reached out my hand for Maxim’s it felt strangely heavy to lift, like a dead hand that did not belong to my body. It was then that for some bizarre reason I noticed the green beads that ran round the bottom of the lamp fringes, a horrid, glassy frog green and saw that several
     
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    were missing, leaving gaps, breaking the pattern they had been designed to make with some other, pinkish beads. I think they should have resembled the upturned leaves of tulips. I can see them now, ugly, cheap things that someone had chosen because they thought they were chic. Yet I do not remember much of what we said. Perhaps we did not speak. Our drinks came, two large cognacs, but I scarcely touched mine. The