Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  For a week, no one told me. I knew something was wrong: Something happened to the air at The Pines that reminded me of Manderley. It was full of whispers, and conversations broken off; doors slammed, feet ran back and forth along the corridors, Tilly’s eyes were red, my grandfather’s face was grave, and I wasn’t allowed to see my mother—I could hear her weeping, but they said she was ill and locked her away.

  Finally, my grandfather took me by the hand, led me down here to this terrace above the sea, and explained. He had lost his only son; then, in the childish egotism of my grief, it didn’t occur to me that he, too, had lost someone irreplaceable. Now, when I’m older than he was then, and have had tribulations of my own, I know how much it must have cost him to remain so quiet and so calm. When his explanation was over and my tears were done, he took my hand in his and asked me very gently if I thought I should like to live here now, with my mother, and the little brother or sister who would be shortly arriving, and whether I would let him look after me now that my dear father was gone.

  I said yes, which brought on another storm of tears—and that is how I came to live here; that is how my bond with this part of the world was forged. I knew the place both before Rebecca and after her advent. I knew Maxim from birth; I remember seeing him as a baby, being pushed in his pram by poor, doting, proud Virginia. I remember the disbelief that greeted the announcement of his name—Maximilian!—and Tilly’s prediction: “That old Termagant named him,” she cried. “And she means to get her hands on him. Poor Mrs. Lionel won’t get a look in, you mark my words!”

  Tilly’s prophecy proved correct. Poor Virginia had had innumerable miscarriages, as I know now, but, having produced an heir at last, she did not survive him long. She seemed to wither away, growing sadder and quieter day by day, her thin face lighting up only when her beloved son was brought to her. She died when Maxim was three, and I think (my sister Rose confirms) that Maxim clung tenaciously to the few sad half-memories he had of her.

  He resembled his mother to a striking degree. Beatrice might have the de Winter looks, but in Maxim’s narrow face and dark, intelligent, watchful eyes, Virginia and his Grenville ancestors lived on. He inherited aspects of her character, too; as a small child, he was quiet, dreamy, and shy, clearly fearful of his father, and in awe of his formidable grandmother. I remember him well as a boy, when my grandfather helped to tutor him in the summer holidays. Despite his obvious intelligence, he was backward at his lessons, perhaps because his grandmother held education in utter contempt, and was forever telling him that books were a waste of time. At Manderley, there was a splendid library, well stocked by some of Maxim’s more enlightened ancestors, but the only books she ever consulted were those that detailed bloodstock—human and equine.

  The elder Mrs. de Winter liked to imply that books, universities, and so on, were all very well for the likes of me: I had no land or estates, and would have to earn my living in some way. But Maxim would have all this, she would say, gesturing around that terrible drawing room of hers: This house, these fields, these farms, that sea were his destiny. All that mattered meanwhile was to get him into the same school every male de Winter had attended since time immemorial; once that small matter was out of the way, Maxim would return home and learn the only lesson that mattered: how to run Manderley.

  Maxim was brainwashed in this way, day in, day out. I think that, thanks to my grandfather’s influence—and, to a much lesser extent, mine—he did see that there was another world, a world elsewhere. But I always felt he looked at that world somewhat wistfully, as if he might like to investigate it, even yearned to investigate it, but already accepted that it was beyond his Manderley palisade. One summer, when I was at home for the university vacation, I took pity on him. He emerged white-faced from my grandfather’s study and his struggles with Latin verbs, and when I asked him where he was off to, he replied he supposed he was going home. He looked lost and dejected, so I took him out in my dinghy and taught him to sail—and that was the first of the many trips we made across the bay to Manderley.

  We’d always known each other, but it was that summer that we overcame the disparity in our ages, and became friends. Maxim would then have been about ten or eleven; I suppose that in some ways he looked up to me, and I grew attached to him, recommending books and generally taking him under my wing. My grandfather encouraged the friendship, believing that Maxim was lonely. I think that was true, certainly by the time he reached his midteens.

  His father’s illness first began to manifest itself then. It took an unpredictable—and unpleasant—form; until Lionel de Winter was finally persuaded to confine himself to his sickroom, visitors to Manderley were not encouraged, and when Maxim returned from school in the holidays, he spent long periods alone. By then, I had left the area, and was in the Army; my sister, Rose, closer to Maxim in age than I was, became his confidante in my stead, and for a brief period just before the first war became closer to him in other ways; Rose used to say—and still maintains—that Maxim was always lonelier than we knew.

  How very near those years seem to me now! The lives of the de Winters have always overlapped and interlocked with my own; my study is filled with the evidence of that closeness, with letters, with photographs, invitation cards, all the flotsam and jetsam that, assembled, might tell their story. Thinking of that, sitting on my boundary wall this morning, I told myself that, if there were gaps in that story, they could be filled, so long as my memory did not let me down.

  Somewhere there, if I could find her, was Rebecca. If she was to be understood, it was in the context of that family and that house. “Who are you?” I said to her once, not that long before her death, as it happens. “Who are you, Rebecca?”

  “I’m the mistress of Manderley,” she replied, with an enigmatic sidelong glance very characteristic of her. It was wintertime; we were walking one of the coast paths; Rebecca had paused close to the cliff edge; she was always careful with words. “Just like one of those Gothic romances,” she went on, with a smile. “Don’t you think that suits me? I do. Tell Max I want it on my gravestone—HERE LIES REBECCA, MISTRESS OF MANDERLEY. Or, REBECCA, LATE OF MANDERLEY, that would do. I want a plain stone, Cornish granite, with good, clear, simple lettering. I want to be in the churchyard, with a view of the sea—don’t let them hide me away in that de Winter crypt, will you?”

  “Anything else?” I said—and I expected more, for Rebecca was a perfectionist in everything. I was not taking this conversation seriously, though I should have been, I see now. Rebecca liked to tease me—I always found it hard to know when she was serious—and she was so young, just thirty. I was twenty years older. If anyone’s funeral were on the agenda, it was likelier to be my own. “Flowers?” I went on. “Type of coffin? Hymns? Should I be a pallbearer?”

  “Yes, I’d like that. As to the rest”—she looked away and frowned—“I don’t care, not really. But I mind about the stone, and I mind about the churchyard. So don’t forget, and don’t back down when Max makes a face and says it’s vulgar and unsuitable….”

  “And if I do?” I replied, with a smile.

  “You’ll regret it. I hate that crypt, and I hate the people in it. I’ll come back and haunt you. I’ll never rest there.”

  What could she have meant by that remark? Why would she hate the occupants of that crypt? She had known none of them. Even its most recent arrivals, Maxim’s parents, had been there years before her marriage, years before Rebecca first came to Manderley. Did I ask her? If so, I was given no reply.

  Five months later, she was dead. The following year, when her body was finally brought up from the sea, she was buried in the de Winter crypt in the little gray Saxon church one mile from Manderley. That terrible interment I’ve already described: the vicar stammering a hasty prayer; no hymns, no flowers; one so-called mourner, Frank Crawley, waiting by the car, and only Maxim and myself attending the coffin. We buried her in the evening, in the midst of a summer storm. The sky was overcast, with a livid hue on
the horizon. She wasn’t even laid in what might have seemed her rightful place, next to Maxim’s parents, next to Lionel and poor Virginia. Maxim had other ideas. So she was secreted away in the darkest and most remote corner of that unhappy place, a section as yet unoccupied by other coffins, divided from the other ancestral husbands and wives by a thick pillar and a sagging masonry arch.

  I hadn’t forgotten my undertaking, but in the face of Maxim’s anger, I had backed down. It was the first of my betrayals, maybe. And Rebecca did indeed come back to haunt me, but then—in my experience—she was always true to her word.

  FIVE

  I SAT THERE ON MY WALL ABOVE THE SEA WATCHING THIS past of mine for a half hour that lasted decades; I’d known that if I listened to the dead well enough, they’d point me in the right direction. I felt restored, ready to tackle the next items on my tasklist—it was beginning to get chilly on my wall anyway. We may enjoy the benefits of a Gulf Stream climate here in Kerrith, but spring breezes off the water play havoc with the joints, and April is a cruel month as far as my rheumatism is concerned. I levered myself to my feet. Time to open my parcel, I thought—and I must telephone Gray, too. Barker stretched and yawned (he really is a most indolent dog); together we set off down the path to the house. Delicious cooking smells were wafting from the kitchen: Ellie was making bread.

  I inspected my nicely stumped roses for any signs of greenfly (one can never start spraying too soon) and congratulated myself on how neat they looked since I took charge of them. They are so-called old roses of the kind garden snobs approve, and were originally planted by my mother—in 1900, to celebrate the new century. They were scions of the famous Grenville rose collection, from the gardens of their house, St. Winnow’s, farther up river from here; the cuttings were made by their gardener, and presented to my mother by one of those three Grenville sisters: not Maxim’s mother, poor Virginia, who was dead by then, and not pretty little Isolda who broke my nine-year-old heart, for she had left the area and married—disastrously, people said—so it must have been Evangeline.

  Both my mother and my late wife loved and cherished these roses, not least for their “romantic” names, many of them French—in fact, I believe some of the roses had originally come from France, where the Grenvilles had relatives. Honorine de Brabant, Duchesse d’An-goulême, Cuisses de Nymphe…names that do not sound quite so fine in translation: “Nymph’s Thighs.” Preposterous, I used to think. Despite my protests, the womenfolk gave the roses free rein. They grew into vast fecund bushes that threatened to take over the entire garden; I’d snip bits off when I thought no one was looking—they were viciously thorned and in my view needed hacking back hard.

  In June, when they were at their best (the only time they were at their best; they looked at their worst for the other eleven months of the year), people made pilgrimages here to admire them. Rebecca, burying her face in one of the flowers—a deep crimson one, I forget its name—once told me that she didn’t expect ever to go to heaven, but if she did, it would smell like this. Heaven scent, she said; its color, she added, was precisely that of a Pomerol wine. I looked at her coldly. “Oh really? Which?” I said.

  My tone was short. I didn’t know her at all well in those days—this incident took place shortly after I’d taken early retirement, and returned to The Pines with my family from my last posting in Singapore. It must have been June, so Rebecca would have been married to my friend Maxim for only three or four months; I’d met her maybe twice. I was suspicious of her, for no very good reason. I was suspicious of most young women, especially charming ones. I remember thinking these raptures were either an affectation on her part or a tease (and if you didn’t realize when she was teasing you, she could make you look a complete fool, so you had to keep your wits about you, as I’ve said).

  She and Maxim had arrived at The Pines in the early evening, on that occasion. I think my wife, who liked Rebecca, had suggested she might want to see the garden, and they dropped in en route to some party. I was deputed to show Rebecca the roses; Maxim, who’d seen them a thousand times, remained indoors talking to my wife. I wasn’t pleased at this suggestion. I was not in a gallant mood that night. So in the cool of the scented evening air, with the sea whispering in the distance, I marched mutinously up and down the paths, murdering the romantic names with an accent that was anything but French. Maxim’s young wife, for some reason, made me self-conscious and stiff. I found her exotic and strange. As I was already discovering, she seemed to have no idea whatsoever of conventional social niceties, and you never knew what odd and unexpected thing she might say next.

  As she paused to bend over the roses, every shade from the deepest crimson through soft mauves to flesh pink, I stole covert glances at her. I know nothing about women’s clothes, and care less, but even I could see that the dress she was wearing was an exquisite thing; later, with a sigh, my wife would inform me that it was Chanel, purchased in Paris, and the last word in chic. It was made of some heavy slubby material that I suppose was silk, and it was very, very plain—Understated, Arthur, dear, my wife patiently said. Above its boat-shaped neckline, I could see the bluish hollows below Rebecca’s collarbone; she was wearing a famous de Winter necklace, of pinkish pearls, around her delicate throat, and the dress also was pink—but not any pink I’d ever seen before. It was the softest, palest blush pink, almost the colour of skin; I found I was looking at it hard, trying to find a word for the color, when the right term, exactly the right term, suddenly rose up in my head unbidden: Cuisses de Nymphe…

  I reddened, moved off a few paces, and attempted to speed up this rose inspection; I looked at my watch. But Rebecca was not to be hurried. She continued to walk between the roses in a slow intent way, bending over them, inspecting the formation of their petals, and inhaling their scent. She looked serious, intent, and impossibly young. It struck me that for all the sophistication of her dress, and despite her height—she was tall and exceptionally slender—she looked like a child, a very beautiful grave child plucked from some foreign place, and set down here in a country where no one knew her customs or spoke her language or understood her race.

  I felt a sudden pulse of protectiveness toward her, which disconcerted me. She turned to look at me, inspecting my face; I had the unpleasant sensation that she could read my mind, that she perhaps found me dull or deeply absurd—she’d given no indication of this, but I felt an obscure need to retaliate. Wishing to snub her, bristling and on edge, I became increasingly curt. She made her remark about roses and wine, and I made my snide reply. It was meant to put her in her place, and of course she knew that. She straightened up from the rose and frowned slightly; her extraordinary and unreadable eyes rested on my face. She told me the name of the wine she’d meant (her French accent, unlike mine, was perfectly correct). She said she knew it well because it was one of her father’s favorite wines. Then she left.

  That was the only occasion, ever, when she mentioned her father to me, but I wasn’t to know then how unusual a remark it was. When she’d gone, I was irritable—and curious. I went down to my cellar (well-stocked), found I had a bottle of the particular wine she’d named, and fetched it up. I poured out a glass, and held it against the rose. It was indeed the same color, and Rebecca had been entirely accurate. Very few women are accurate, in my experience, and even fewer of them know the least thing about wine. For these reasons, I paid greater attention to her than I had done after that.

  “Did you check? Was I right?” she said to me the next time I saw her. The occasion was some Manderley garden party. It was several weeks later. It was very hot. Rebecca was wearing another exquisite garment, this time the color of milk; her face, arms, and throat were lightly tanned, which shocked me deeply. Women avoided the sun in those days and prized white skin. It was the mark of a lady, people said. This fashion was about to change, but Rebecca cared little for fashionable dictates—she simply did as she liked. She was not wearing gloves or a hat—and I found this nakedness shocking, too.

/>   “Yes I did. And yes, you were,” I said.

  I could have pretended I didn’t understand her reference—there was no prompting or preamble prior to the sudden question—but I felt obscurely that I was being tested, and I was suddenly very anxious to pass that test.

  “Good.” She gave a small approving nod, leaving me to decide whether she was pleased at this confirmation of her accuracy or pleased that I’d bothered to check. She slipped her arm through mine—the dress was short sleeved, and her arm was bare. “You thought I was pretentious,” she went on. “Don’t bother denying it. You had a perfect right to think that—you don’t know me yet.”

  I made some fatuous reply. I can’t remember, and don’t want to remember, what it was, but it was complimentary and patronizing, and prefixed with a “My dear” that made me sound, and was designed to make me sound, like a pompous old stick. I was just forty-six at the time, not that much older than Rebecca’s husband, but for some reason found it safer to pretend I was sixty-six. It was a disguise I’d been perfecting for a decade at least.

  “I’m glad I was right, though,” she continued, ignoring my remark—she knew she had me on the run, I expect. “If I’d been wrong, you’d have dismissed me out of hand. Crossed me off your list. Then we’d never have made friends—and that would have been a sad waste. I want friends. And look—apart from you, there isn’t a single candidate.”

  With a mischievous glance, she gestured toward a group of other guests, standing on the terrace. Maxim and his sister Beatrice were there; I spotted Frank Crawley, Maxim’s friend from the first war, now his estate manager; there were several spinsters of the parish, including my cronies, Elinor and Jocelyn Briggs, daughters of the former Evangeline Grenville. There was a clutch of the usual county families; the bishop was present…and there were all too many dull old coves wearing panama hats and suits exactly like mine; there was a positive invasion of Colonel Julyan doppelgängers, which depressed me a bit.