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"You must not blame yourself. There was nothing you could have done. It was bound to happen, sooner or later.... Yes, thought Shelagh, but why not later rather than sooner, because when one's father dies there is so much that has been left unsaid. Had I known, that last hour sitting there, talking and laughing about trivial things, that there was a clot forming like a time-bomb close to his heart, ready to explode, I would surely have behaved differently, held on to him, at least thanked him for all my nineteen years of happiness and love. Not flipped over the photographs in the album, mocking bygone fashions, nor yawned halfway through, so that, sensing boredom, he let the album drop to the floor and murmured, 'Don't bother about me, pet, I'll have a kip.'
It's always the same when you come face to face with death, the nurse told her, you feel you could have done more. It used to worry me a lot when I was training. And of course with a close relative it's worse. You've had a great shock, you must try and pull yourself together for your mother's sake.... My mother's sake? My mother would not mind if I walked out of the house this moment, Shelagh was on the point of saying, because then she would have all the attention, all the sympathy, people would say how wonderfully she was bearing up, whereas with me in the house sympathy will be divided. Even Doctor Dray, when he finally arrived in the wake of his partner, patted her on the shoulder before her mother and said, 'He was very proud of you, my dear, he was always telling me so.' So death, Shelagh decided, was a moment for compliments, for everyone saying polite things about everybody else which they would not dream of saying at another time. Let me run upstairs for you ... Let me answer the telephone ... Shall I put on the kettle? An excess of courtesy, like mandarins in kimonos bowing, and at the same time an attempt at self-justification for not having been there when the explosion happened."

I should re-read Du Maurier's short fiction. I remember loving her sometimes rather strange but poignant voice.