Rebecca -- the feelings of old people

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

Just finished reading the classic Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. Normally I don’t like reading a book AFTER I’ve seen the movie, this was certainly the exception. Although there wasn’t a lot different it was enjoyable reading. Although, at times the author used the word “questing” too much (the first time I loved, but then it became too common, it lost the luster of a rare word being perfectly used), visual descriptions, language, and concepts were artfully explored.

One section I really liked was when Rebecca visits Maxim’s grandmother with his sister Beatrice.

Maxim’s grandmother suffered her in patience… I knew how she must have looked when she was young, tall and handsome, going round to the stables at Manderley with sugar in her pockets…

I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe. I was a child yesterday. I had not forgotten. But Maxim’s grandmother, sitting there in her shawl wit her poor blind eyes, what did she feel what was she thinking?…

I wished that I could lay my hands upon her face and take the years away. I wished I could see her young, as she was once, with colour in her cheeks and chestnut hair, alert and active as Beatrice by her side, talking as she did about hunting, hounds, and horses, Not sitting there with her eyes closed while the nurse thumped the pillows behind her head….

…said Norah in a special voice, bright and cheerful like the Nurse. I wondered if Maxim’s grandmother realized that people spoke to her in this way. I wondered when they had done so for the first time, and if she had noticed then. Perhaps she had said to herself, “They think I’m getting old, how very ridiculous,” and then little by little she had become accustomed to it, and now it was as though they had always done so, it was part of her background. But the young woman with the chestnut hair and the narrow waist who gave sugar to the horses, where was she?