Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  “I was six.” Ellie plucked at a clump of herbs and began rubbing a leaf between her fingers. “I’d never lived in England. I’d grown up in the Far East—first Malaya, then Singapore.” She gave me a sidelong amused glance. “That won’t interest you, I know. So, as I’m sure you’re wondering, I was six when I first met Rebecca, and eleven when she died. I can’t claim to have known her—I was too young—but I used to see her all the time. She came here, and we went to Manderley often. All that endless entertaining! I went to some of the garden parties—and my mother used to describe the grown-up ones. Troops of people coming down from London all the time—everyone from ambassadors to artists. I think my mother found it intimidating; it made her feel shabby, a bit of a bumpkin—which wasn’t the case. Anyway, I met Rebecca frequently—”

  “And?”

  “And I was a very watchful little girl. I used to watch her all the time. She fascinated me.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “At first, because she was beautiful. People always say that, I know. They all talk about her beauty and her wit and her charm—and they’re such bankrupt words. They’re anodyne and approximate. They don’t give you the least idea what she was like. They make her sound empty-headed and frivolous. The society beauty. The society hostess—that’s another word I hate.” She gave an impatient gesture. “As if Rebecca thought about nothing but parties. That’s so misleading. If I remember her now, she’s where she was happiest—on her boat, or walking in the woods, or with her dogs. Alone, usually, which is odd. I remember her alone….” She hesitated. “But you can’t not mention how she looked. I’d never seen anyone that beautiful before—and I haven’t since. She had the most extraordinary eyes—unforgettable eyes. She was bewitching. She captivated you—that’s how it felt. And I was a little girl. Imagine what it was like for men. They’d stare and stare—and Rebecca would be talking away, and half the time, I don’t think they even heard her. That irritated her. And bored her.”

  “She didn’t like to be admired? Most women do.”

  “Do they?” The dark glasses tilted in my direction. “Well, then, she wasn’t like most women.”

  It was a reprimand, lightly made, but sharp nonetheless: I colored. As I’ve said, Ellie can be disconcerting. “‘At first,’ you said.” I went on. “What did you mean by that?”

  “I meant that her beauty blinded you—for a long time I simply couldn’t see beyond it. When I finally did, I was still fascinated.” She frowned. “Partly because I could see how much my father admired her, and I wanted to understand why. I didn’t want to like her, but I did. She had an unusual way of speaking—very direct. You know how there are things people think, but never say? Well, Rebecca said them, straight out. I don’t think it occurred to her how unconventional that was. But then she never cared tuppence for convention. She could be very funny, very quick—and very ruthless if people were pompous or pretentious. And I thought she was sad. Behind all that gaiety and wit—I thought she was sad. Not unhappy—sad. It’s not quite the same thing, is it?”

  “No. It isn’t.” I opened the gate. “Sadness is a more permanent condition. Unhappiness is somehow temporary.”

  Ellie made no comment on this, though I think she understood. There was a silence between us; the breeze gusted, stirring up the dust of the lane. “Did you ever discover why she might be sad?” I said finally, and regretted the question at once. Perhaps I shouldn’t have harped on Rebecca quite so much. I do tend to use people as conduits for information, and sometimes they resent it. Looking at Ellie then, I had a vague but strong sense of a missed opportunity.

  “No. No, I didn’t.” Ellie looked at her watch. “I told you, I was too young. Lily knew her much better. Lily was in London by then, studying at the Slade. She wanted to be a painter—well, I think she wanted to get away from Kerrith as much as anything. The golf club, the tennis club, the regatta—Lily couldn’t wait to escape. She shared a house with some artists in Chelsea, in Tite Street, by the river, just a few doors away from the flat Rebecca kept in London. They had friends in common—painters, writers, actors. But of course, Lily’s dead now.”

  There was another silence. There were suddenly many questions I wanted to ask Ellie, and not all of them concerned Rebecca. I hesitated. “One thing before I go: Did your father show you that notebook he was sent?”

  “Rebecca’s Tale? Yes, he did.” She closed the gate and latched it. Her tone altered and became brisk. “Look, I really must go back to the house—”

  “Just tell me one thing. You remember the postcard, the one of Manderley? I want to follow that up. There’s someone I know in London who might help with it—it suggests a great many possibilities, that card….”

  “Perhaps.” Her tone was now cool. “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. Anyone could have glued that card in that notebook at any time, including the person that sent it to my father.”

  “I don’t jump to conclusions. And I know that. But the glue marks were old and—Ellie, did you ever hear it suggested that Rebecca might have come from this part of the world? Or that she came here as a child?”

  “As you did, you mean?” The dark glasses tilted. “No. I didn’t.”

  I was now sure that I had offended her in some way. Even so, I pressed on. “Did you ever hear where she did come from? Was anything like that ever discussed, that you remember? Her background? Who her parents were?”

  “Never. And you couldn’t ask. She hated questions, especially personal ones. I expect you can understand that. Now, I have to go. Call in this evening, if you’d like to see Daddy. I know he’d be pleased to see you.”

  She lifted her hand, then turned, and ran back toward the house. I was now sure that I’d upset her. It occurred to me that I’d said nothing of my visit to the boathouse, or the azalea garland, and I regretted that. Ellie had just given me a better description of Rebecca than anyone else had. I might have profited from Ellie’s reactions, I realized.

  I set off in the hot sun down the steep hill to the Briggs’s cottage. I thought about that azalea wreath, and who might have placed it there. I thought of the rumored lovers, of possible male candidates. Then I thought about Ellie, and that book on the kitchen table; then I found I’d walked half a mile without noticing, and I was at the gate to the sisters’ cottage. I walked up to the front door, which was instantly opened. Jocelyn and Elinor Briggs emerged, with little cries of welcome.

  “Dear Mr. Gray—how nice…. Come in, come in. You’ve been at The Pines? You look rather anxious. How was Arthur? And dear Ellie?”

  “We’re just back from church—such a lovely service! And the rector is joining us for lunch…. Rector—this is Mr. Gray, whom we’ve been telling you about…. Yes, our new neighbor, our local historian! Now, if you’ll forgive me, I must just check on something in the kitchen. Jocelyn, dear, look after them!”

  “Of course! Mr. Gray, Rector, let me give you a glass of our bargain sherry.”

  I tensed. The rector, unsuspecting, said a glass of sherry would be delightful. I could see that there was no way of avoiding either the sherry or Terence Gray, so I took the glass, and let Gray’s gray mantle fall upon me.

  THIRTEEN

  THE BRIGGS SISTERS WERE ANXIOUS TO DISCUSS THE church service that morning. The text for the day had been: Cast thy bread upon the waters for thou shalt find it after many days. Both Jocelyn and Elinor were very fond of this text; they thought it was a very deep text, which repaid thought, and they were full of praise for the sermon the rector had preached on it.

  I could remember that text only too well from my childhood; at the orphanage we were dragged off to the chapel three times on a Sunday, and the idea of casting bread anywhere was never too well received. But then we “orphans” were literal minded and always hungry. I said nothing about that, and the rector said nothing about my absence from church, so I knew he’d been primed. Terence Gray, thanks to the influence of “Auntie May,” is a strict Presbyterian—and the nearest Presbyterian
church is a convenient three hundred miles away.

  The rector, who has only recently been appointed and has lived here only a few more months than I have, seemed amiable. He said he’d heard of my interest in churches, and that one of these days I must let him take me around the Manderley church. There were some fine medieval brasses on the de Winter tombs in the nave; there was a remarkable view from the bell tower, and the crypt repaid exploration. It was fascinating from an architectural point of view, and much earlier than the main church building. Terence Gray said politely that he would like that very much.

  At that point there was a crisis in the kitchen (there had been several already, but this was obviously a more major one), and with little cries both the Briggs sisters deserted us. The rector took a sip and his eyes met mine over the rim of his sherry glass. “Good grief,” he said. “What is this?” I explained it was black market, and suggested paraffin. The rector felt Jeyes Fluid was much nearer the mark. “Jeyes Fluid—and syrup,” he added. “Wherever did the good sisters get it?”

  “Dear Colonel Julyan found it for us,” said Elinor, emerging pink and flustered from the kitchen, and catching only the end of his remark. “He bought it from Robert Lane, I believe—Robert used to be a footman at Manderley. He and his wife run a most unsavoury public house over at Tregarron. Mrs. Lane is a Manack by birth—and all the Manacks have been smugglers from time immemorial. We were a little doubtful. It may be illicit, and we didn’t want Customs and Excise knocking on the door—but the Colonel insisted, so we have a whole case to drink up! Let me pour you another glass, Rector.”

  Not quite the version I’d been given by Colonel Julyan, I noted. I managed to evade another glass, and tales of smuggling, as fabled in the past and rumored in the present, kept both Briggs sisters going until we were at table and the difficult business of carving the roast chicken (the rector) and handing vegetables (me) had been completed.

  Finally, the sisters stopped fluttering and agitating, and at last we all sat down in their tiny cottage dining room. The Briggses’ entire cottage would fit into one of the cavernous rooms at The Pines. It’s like a very small and exquisite dollhouse, painted white inside and out, and perched above Kerrith harbor. The sisters moved here about twenty-five years ago, but they grew up at St. Winnow House, a Queen Anne palace of a place now converted into a nursing home for the elderly—the very house where I was due to see Frith later the same afternoon.

  Their father, Sir Joshua Briggs, was a shipping magnate, I believe, and not from this part of the world originally; but their mother, Evangeline, a famous beauty, was born a Grenville and their aunt Virginia was Maxim de Winter’s mother. After their parents’ deaths, unsuspected debts and inheritance taxes took their toll; the sisters found themselves having to live in reduced circumstances.

  This cottage, on which they were granted a long lease by the de Winter estate—thanks to Rebecca’s intervention, apparently—was offered them in the nick of time, at a point when they’d been resigned to leaving the district. Unable to bear parting with all their family belongings when they came here, they brought as much as possible with them—as a result, the dining room, which is ten feet by eight, if that, has to accommodate a Georgian mahogany table and chairs, a huge Georgian sideboard, and a sarcophagus of a wine cooler. There are innumerable pictures, including a full-length portrait in oils of the young Evangeline Grenville, two small pastels of her sisters Virginia and Isolda, and several vast Victorian seascapes, now very dark and discolored, which conceal ships in them somewhere. I am very fond of the cottage and the room and the sisters—but you have to be careful not to bang knees under that table, and it’s necessary to pretend (as it is at The Pines) that there’s an invisible cook, and probably some invisible maids, in the kitchen.

  Neither of the Briggs sisters can cook, of course. They were not brought up to cook, they were brought up to marry. I suspect Elinor, who is the elder, the sharper, and the taller, had her eye on Arthur Julyan when she was about eighteen. Jocelyn, the plumper, prettier, and more naive of the two, had a fiancé killed in the trenches. Now both sisters garden (their garden is as exquisite as their house, no mournful monkey puzzles here) and devote themselves to good works; they have shown me endless kindness. Their memories of Manderley go back as far as the Colonel’s do, and—like his—can be unreliable.

  We stayed on neutral subjects while we ate the chicken and the very overcooked vegetables. The pudding was a curious lumpy affair, with jam in it, and over this lumpy pudding, in which there was an occasional currant, I managed to turn the conversation back to Manderley. We meandered around in the sisters’ memories; they talked at length about Rebecca’s celebrated fancy-dress balls, and the various disguises people chose to wear to them. I was interested in this question of disguises. Apparently, Maxim de Winter always refused to wear costume, and went in evening dress; Colonel Julyan, who was very afraid of being made to look a fool, wore the same costume every year. He always went as Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector. Given his devotion to Rebecca, that struck me as appropriate. Over the years, the sisters’ disguises had included Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba; on one memorable occasion, at the ball held the year before Rebecca’s death, Elinor had gone as Medusa, and Jocelyn as Nell Gwynn, complete with oranges.

  I said I wished I’d seen that—which I certainly did. I asked them if they could remember Rebecca’s costumes. To my surprise—both sisters can be very vague, and untangling their stories is like untangling a yard of knitting—they could.

  “Oh, yes, I remember them very well,” cried Jocelyn. “Let me see—there were four balls altogether. At the first, she came as a French aristocrat on his way to the guillotine; she looked quite astonishing. Then, another year—I think it was the third—she came as an Elizabethan page, well, a young gallant really. She looked just like one of those beautiful young men in a Hilliard miniature. I told her, ‘Rebecca, if Shakespeare were here now, he’d write you a sonnet…’ Then, let me see, at the second, what did she wear at the second, Elinor?”

  “Jocelyn, you’re getting it all wrong. She was supposed to be that girl-boy in Twelfth Night, or was it one of the princes in Richard III? I forget—something Shakespearian anyway. At the second…wasn’t it something Greek? Medea? No. Iphigenia? I can’t remember exactly, but she wore a toga.”

  “A chiton, dear. Togas are Roman.”

  “I stand corrected. A chiton. With a wreath of flowers in her hair.”

  I hadn’t been paying great attention. Suddenly I was. “A wreath of flowers? What kind of flowers, Miss Briggs, can you remember?”

  “Gracious me—yes, I can! She had such glorious hair—this was before she cut it. It was roses, because the balls were always held in June. Her dress was white, and her hair was so dark, almost black, and there were these wine-red roses, with the most heavenly scent.”

  “And then at the last of the balls, the year before she died,” Jocelyn put in, “she came as Caroline de Winter. And we said—didn’t we, Elinor?—she’d never looked lovelier, but she was getting too thin. We didn’t know about her illness then, of course—no one did. We wondered if she’d been dieting.”

  “You wondered, dear. That’s because you were always banting in those days. But Rebecca was as slim as a wand, always.”

  “No hips to speak of. I always envied that. Hips can be a terrible misfortune.”

  “Anyway, dear, you’re right—she was becoming too thin. And we both remarked on it. Even so, the costume was a great success. Quite stunning! She’d had it copied from the famous Raeburn portrait at Manderley. It used to hang in the gallery at the head of the main staircase. Every detail was exact—the likeness was extraordinary. Unfortunately, Maxim wasn’t too pleased by her choice. I’m sure she hadn’t warned him.”

  “Not too pleased! Elinor, dear, he was in a temper all evening. When I remarked to him how lovely Rebecca looked, he snapped my head off. I’m afraid dear Maxim could be a little moody.”

  “Well, Caroline de
Winter was a great beauty, and of course she was an ancestor of Maxim’s, so it was appropriate in many ways. But dear Rebecca did like to shock—and it was a rather daring choice, perhaps.”

  “Daring?” prompted the rector. I didn’t need to prompt; I knew the story of Caroline de Winter. I could already see why this choice of costume was “daring”—and very interesting.

  “Oh, Caroline was notorious, and so was her brother Ralph de Winter,” Jocelyn said eagerly, but with a small glance at her sister. “She went on to make a good match—to some Whig politician, wasn’t it, Elinor? But her brother took his own life, of course, and before Caroline’s marriage there were tremendous scandals, really the most shocking stories about the two of them.”

  “We certainly don’t want to dwell on them,” Elinor put in swiftly. “I can’t remember all the details, and Jocelyn can’t either. The person to ask is Arthur Julyan—he is tremendously good on all those old tales.”

  Indeed he is, and in the early months of our acquaintance the Colonel had told me this racy story: The famous Raeburn portrait had been commissioned by Caroline de Winter’s brother Ralph, a celebrated rake. The white dress his then unmarried sister wore in it had been designed to disguise the scandalous alteration in her figure, for wicked Caroline—so the story went—had been generous with her favours to her brother from an early age. Latterly, she had been equally generous to a handsome young groom at the Manderley stables. “How, sir, shall I paint your sister?” Raeburn is said to have asked. But as to the answer given him, tradition divides: “As the strumpet and whore she is, sir. So let her go down to the yard and be painted with the brood mares,” goes the first version. “As my dearest love and my damnation, sir,” goes the second, more provocative version.

  A surprising choice of costume, then, on Rebecca’s part; it was typical of the Colonel, I noted, to have told me the ancient part of this story, but not its modern corollary. I looked at the Briggs sisters, interested to see how they would extricate themselves, since to have given these details at their table was unthinkable. Jocelyn was less willing to relinquish the story, I saw, than Elinor.