Mrs De Winter Read Free Page B

shadow, featureless, oddly melancholy. Some small dark haired children were playing in a bowl of mud they had made among the cobbles, stirring it with sticks, fetching more dust in little wooden ice cream scoops, their voices, bright as birds, chattered across towards me. I always did watch them, always listened and smiled. I tried not to let children upset me.
     
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    The waiter passed by and half glanced at my empty cup but I shook my head. I would wait for Maxim. Then, the church bell began to sound the hour, a thin, high, tinny note, and the sun came flooding out again, sharpening the edges of the long shadows, warming me, lifting my mood. The small boys all clapped and let out a cheer at something that delighted them, in their mud. Then, I looked up and saw him coming towards me, his shoulders hunched, his face the mask behind which he always, automatically, tried to hide any distress. He was holding a letter, and as he sat down in the flimsy, metal cafe chair he threw it on to the table, before swinging round and snapping his fingers to the waiter in a way he so rarely did now, the old, arrogant way.
    I did not recognise the handwriting at all. But I saw the postmark and put out my hand to cover his.
    It was from Giles. Maxim did not look at me as I read quickly through it. ‘… found her on the floor in the bedroom … heard a heavy thump … managed to get her up … Maidment came … some movement back in the left side almost at once … speech poor but clearing a bit … she knows me all right… nursing home and medical people don’t say much … awful… live in hope …’ I glanced back at the envelope. It was dated three weeks before. Our mail took so wretchedly long sometimes, communications seem to have deteriorated since the end of the war.
    I said, ‘She’s sure to be much better, Maxim. Perhaps even recovered completely. We would have heard by now otherwise.’
    He shrugged, lit a cigarette. ‘Poor Bea. She won’t be able to bray across four counties. No hunting for her.’
     
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    Well if they make her give it up altogether that will be nothing but a good thing. I never think it can be sensible for a woman turned sixty.’
    ‘She has held everything together. I’ve been no use to her. She doesn’t deserve this.’ He got up abruptly. ‘Come on,’ took out some coins and dropped them on the table, and began to walk away across the square. I looked back to smile apologetically at the waiter, but he was inside, talking to someone, his back to us. I don’t know why it had seemed to matter, to make some slight contact with him. I stumbled, almost slipping over on the cobbles, to catch Maxim up. In their huddle, squatting, the little boys bent their heads close together and were quiet.
    He was walking out towards the path that ran around the lake.
    ‘Maxim…’ I reached him, touched his arm. The wind blew, rippling the water. ‘She will be all right now … fine… I’m sure of it. We can try and telephone Giles this evening can’t we? But we would have heard … he wanted to let you know, and it’s wretched that the letter was so delayed … he might even have written again, though you know he isn’t one for letters, they neither of them are.’
    It was true. For all these years, we had received occasional, short, dutiful letters in Beatrice’s enormous, girl like hand, telling us very little, mentioning neighbours sometimes, trips to London, the war, the blackout, the evacuees, the shortages, the hens, the horses, and carefully, tactfully, nothing of very personal importance, family matters, the past. We might have been distant cousins, long out of touch. Because we had moved about, and then come here, after the war, the
     
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    letters had often been addressed to a poste restante, and for a long time had come only once or twice a year and been hopelessly delayed. I was the one who replied, in the same, cautious, stilted fashion, my own handwriting as unformed as Beatrice’s, ashamed