Rebecca: Chapters 6–10

I went down to the lounge about half-past nine on the pretext of getting luggage labels and he was not there.

“I’m being rather a brute to you, aren’t I?” he said; “this isn’t your idea of a proposal. We ought to be in a conservatory, you in a white frock with a rose in your hand, and a violin playing a waltz in the distance..."

“I think I had better deal with this alone,” he said; “tell me something — do you mind how soon you marry me? You don’t want a trousseau, do you, or any of that nonsense? Because the whole thing can be so easily arranged in a few days. Over a desk, with a license, and then off in the car to Venice or anywhere you fancy.”

“You haven’t the experience,” she continued, “you don’t know that milieu. You can scarcely string two sentences together at my bridge teas, what are you going to say to all his friends? The Manderley parties were famous when she was alive. Of course he’s told you all about them?”

I was glad to see the sun, for in superstitious fashion I looked upon rain as an omen of ill-will, and the leaden skies of London had made me silent.

This drive twisted and turned as a serpent, scarce wider in places than a path, and above our heads was a great colonnade of trees, whose branches nodded and intermingled with one another, making an archway for us, like the roof of a church.

They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I had seen before.

Once more I glanced up at her, and once more I met her eyes, dark and sombre, in that white face of hers, instilling into me, I knew not why, a strange feeling of disquiet, of foreboding.

I did not know why she must speak with such an undercurrent of resentment, implying as she did at the same time that this room, where I found myself to be installed, was something inferior, not up to Manderley standard, a second-rate room, as it were, for a second-rate person.

Then I saw a shadow flit across her face, and she drew back against the wall, effacing herself, as a step sounded outside and Maxim came into the room.

“I mean, it must be much easier for a housekeeper to look after a man alone,” I said, “I dare say she had got into the way of doing it and perhaps she was afraid I should be very overbearing.”

They were the only flowers in the room, and I wondered if there was some purpose in it, whether the room had been arranged originally with this one end in view, for nowhere else in the house did the rhododendrons obtrude.

My faux-pas was so palpably obvious, so idiotic and unpardonable, that to ignore it would show me to be an even greater fool if possible, than I was already.

We had cheese, and coffee, and I wondered whether I was supposed to make a move, I kept looking at Maxim, but he gave no sign, and then Giles embarked upon a story, rather difficult to follow, about digging a car out of a snow-drift — what had started the train of thought I could not tell — and I listened to him politely, nodding my head now and again and smiling, aware of Maxim becoming restive at his end of the table.

There I was an interloper, wandering in rooms that did not know me, sitting at a desk and in a chair that was not mine. Here it was different. The Happy Valley knew no trespassers.