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did not fall, but looked directly up and into the concerned, unassuming, wonderfully familiar face of Frank Crawley.
    Long afterwards, I was to recall how his presence there changed everything for us, changed the rest of the day and how we managed to get through it, gave us support and reassurance and strength, and remember all over again how much it had always done so, how very much we owed to him. He had been Maxim’s agent, hardworking, loyal, efficient, and
     
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    his staunchest, truest friend, he had suffered with him in so many ways, almost as much a victim of Rebecca as Maxim had been. He had known the truth of things and remained silent.
    But to me he had been more, a rock when I had believed that all around me was swirling, raging sea and I about to drown in it. He had been there from my first day as a young bride at Manderley, sensitive, unobtrusive, anticipating my anxieties, smoothing my path, relieved that I was as I was, young, gauche, inexperienced, nervous, plain, and seeing through it all to the real person underneath. I would probably never know exactly how great a debt I owed to Frank Crawley, in how many thousands of small, vital ways he had come to my aid, but I had many times thought of him during our years abroad, and with affection, and had given thanks for him too, on those odd moments I had spent briefly kneeling at the back of some foreign church. I thought that I had perhaps only known two people in my life who were so wholly, unconditionally good. Frank, and Beatrice. And today, they were both here; only Frank was alive and little changed and Beatrice was dead, and the past came flooding back to me, like a river overflowing the bare, dry land of the present.
    When the funeral was over, and we were standing on the path beyond the graveyard, formally, stiffly, shaking hands with so many people, most of whom we did not know, and when we had finally turned away and walked back towards the black, waiting cars behind Giles and Roger, at that moment Maxim would have run away if it had been possible, I knew, without his need to speak, that it was what
     
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    he wanted. He would simply have got into one of the cars and ordered them to take us, we would not even have said goodbye, we would have sped fast and far, to the trains and the boat, and our exile again. We had come, done our duty. Beatrice was dead and properly buried. There was nothing to keep us here.
    But of course, we were obliged to stay and no mention was made of an alternative.
     
    ‘It was so good to see Frank,’ I said. The funeral car was lumbering out of the gateway, turning into the lane. ‘He looks so much the same, though his hair has gone grey but then, he is older.’
    ‘Yes.’
    We all are. I expect we looked quite changed to everyone. Older, I mean.’
    Tes.’
    ‘It is more than ten years.’
    Why did I say it? Why did I go on talking in that way, when I knew that it would only make us think of the past? It was in shadow, unacknowledged for all that it lay between us. Why did I drag it forwards into the full, glaring light, so that we were forced to look at it?
    Maxim turned. ‘For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you, do you think I don’t know how long? Do you think there is anything else at all in my mind? Do you not know that it’s all I have been able to think of for three days? What are you trying to do?’
     
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    ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean … it was only something to say …’
    ‘Why must you say anything? Do we need small talk?’
    ‘No, no. I’m sorry … Maxim, I didn’t mean …’
    ‘You didn’t think:
    Tm sorry.’
    ‘Or perhaps you did.’
    ‘Maxim, please … it was foolish of me, stupid, a stupid remark. We mustn’t quarrel. Not now. Not at all. We never quarrel.’
    It was true. We had not quarrelled since the day of the inquest into Rebecca’s death and the nightmare journey with Colonel Julyan to London to see her doctor, since the night of the fire. We had had too close a