Last Night I Dreamt I Went to Manderley Again Extract

Read an extract from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Working as a lady'south companion, the orphaned heroine ofRebecca learns her place.  Life begins to wait very bleak until, on a trip to the Southward of French republic, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. Whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to his brooding estate, Manderley, on the Cornish Coast, the new Mrs de Wintertime finds Max a inverse man.  And the retentiveness of his dead married woman Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers . . .

Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the Other Woman. An international bestseller that has never gone out of print,Rebecca is the haunting story of a immature girl consumed by love and the struggle to find her identity.

1

Concluding night I dreamt I went to Manderley over again. It seemed to me I stood past the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the mode was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I chosen in my dream to the guild-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited.

No smoke came from the chimney, and the niggling lattice windows gaped forlorn. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed similar a spirit through the barrier before me. The bulldoze wound away in forepart of me, twisting and turning as information technology had ever done, but as I advanced I was aware that a change had come upon it; it was narrow and unkept, not the drive that nosotros had known. At first I was puzzled and did not understand, and it was but when I bent my head to avoid the low swinging branch of a tree that I realized what had happened. Nature had come into her ain over again and, picayune past piddling, in her stealthy, insidious style had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers. The woods, e'er a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end. They crowded, dark and uncontrolled, to the borders of the bulldoze. The beeches with white, naked limbs leant shut to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange encompass, making a vault above my head like the entrance of a church. And there were other trees equally well, trees that I did not recognize, squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek past jowl with the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet world, along with monster shrubs and plants, none of which I remembered.

The drive was a ribbon now, a thread of its former self, with gravel surface gone, and high-strung with grass and moss. The trees had thrown out depression branches, making an impediment to progress; the gnarled roots looked like skeleton claws. Scattered here and again amongst this jungle growth I would recognize shrubs that had been landmarks in our time, things of culture and grace, hydrangeas whose blue heads had been famous. No hand had checked their progress, and they had gone native now, rearing to monster height without a bloom, black and ugly as the proper name-less parasites that grew beside them.

On and on, now eastward now westward, wound the poor thread that in one case had been our drive. Sometimes I thought information technology lost, but it appeared again, below a fallen tree perhaps, or struggling on the other side of a muddied ditch created by the winter rains. I had non thought the way and then long. Surely the miles had multiplied, even as the copse had done, and this path led but to a labyrinth, some high-strung wilderness, and not to the house at all. I came upon it suddenly; the approach masked by the unnatural growth of a vast shrub that spread in all directions, and I stood, my heart thumping in my breast, the strange prick of tears backside my optics.

There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent every bit it had always been, the gray rock shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the light-green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a gem in the hollow of a hand.

The terrace sloped to the lawns, and the lawns stretched to the sea, and turning I could run into the sheet of silver placid under the moon, like a lake undisturbed by wind or storm. No waves would come up to ruffle this dream water, and no bulk of cloud, wind-driven from the w, obscure the clarity of this pale sky. I turned again to the house, and though it stood inviolate, untouched, as though nosotros ourselves had left but yesterday, I saw that the garden had obeyed the jungle law, even as the woods had done. The rhododendrons stood fifty feet high, twisted and entwined with bracken, and they had entered into alien spousal relationship with a host of nameless shrubs, poor, bastard things that clung about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origin. A lilac had mated with a copper beech, and to demark them yet more closely to ane another the malevolent ivy, always an enemy to grace, had thrown her tendrils about the pair and made them prisoners. Ivy held prior identify in this lost garden, the long strands crept across the lawns, and before long would encroach upon the business firm itself. There was another plant besides, some half-breed from the woods, whose seed had been scattered long ago below the trees so forgotten, and now, marching in unison with the ivy, thrust its ugly course like a giant rhubarb towards the soft grass where the daffodils had blown.

Nettles were everywhere, the vanguard of the regular army. They choked the terrace, they sprawled about the paths, they leant, vulgar and lanky, against the very windows of the firm. They made indifferent sentinels, for in many places their ranks had been broken past the rhubarb plant, and they lay with crumpled heads and listless stems, making a pathway for the rabbits. I left the bulldoze and went on to the terrace, for the nettles were no barrier to me, a dreamer. I walked enchanted, and naught held me back.

Moonlight tin can play odd tricks upon the fancy, even upon a dreamer's fancy. As I stood in that location, hushed and still, I could swear that the business firm was not an empty shell but lived and breathed as it had lived earlier.

Lite came from the windows, the curtains blew softly in the night air, and there, in the library, the door would stand half open every bit we had left it, with my handkerchief on the table beside the bowl of autumn roses.

The room would bear witness to our presence.The little heap of library books marked ready to return, and the discarded copy of The Times. Ash-trays, with the stub of a cigarette; cushions, with the imprint of our heads upon them, lolling in the chairs; the charred embers of our log burn down nevertheless smouldering against the morn. And Jasper, beloved Jasper, with his soulful eyes and great, sagging jowl, would be stretched upon the floor, his tail a-thump when he heard his master's footsteps.

A cloud, hitherto unseen, came upon the moon, and hovered an instant like a dark mitt earlier a face.The illusion went with it, and the lights in the windows were extinguished. I looked upon a desolate beat, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls.

The house was a sepulchre, our fear and suffering lay cached in the ruins. There would be no resurrection. When I thought of Manderley in my waking hours I would non be biting. I should think of it as it might accept been, could I have lived in that location without fearfulness. I should call up the rose-garden in summertime, and the birds that sang at dawn.Tea under the chestnut tree, and the murmur of the sea coming upward to u.s. from the lawns below.

I would call up of the blown lilac, and the Happy Valley.These things were permanent, they could non be dissolved. They were memories that cannot injure. All this I resolved in my dream, while the clouds lay across the face of the moon, for like most sleepers I knew that I dreamed. In reality I lay many hundred miles away in an alien country, and would wake, before many seconds had passed, in the bare little hotel bedroom, comforting in its very lack of atmosphere. I would sigh a moment, stretch myself and plough, and opening my eyes, exist bewildered at that glittering dominicus, that hard, clean sky, then different from the soft moonlight of my dream. The day would lie before us both, long no doubt, and uneventful, merely fraught with a certain stillness, a dear tranquility we had non known before. We would not talk of Manderley, I would not tell my dream. For Manderley was ours no longer. Manderley was no more.

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Source: https://www.virago.co.uk/virago-news/2020/05/12/rebecca-by-daphne-du-maurier/

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