Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  I sat down at the desk, switched on the reading light, removed the azalea sprig carefully, and looked at the page it had served to mark. On the right, there was a photograph of Sir Frank McKendrick, wearing an exotic costume. His face was blacked up, and he was bending over a bed; on the bed, her long fair hair tumbling over the pillow that would be used to stifle her, was a pretty young woman, mouth rounded in an O of pleading despair. The caption read: Theatre Royal, Plymouth, September 1914. My three hundredth appearance as the Moor. My Desdemona was Miss Isabel Devlin. “A fine histrionic display in which Sir Frank surpassed himself,” was the verdict of the Plymouth Courier.

  Looking at the paragraphs opposite, I saw that someone had marked them with a faint pencil line. I began reading at the top of the page:

  My hopes ran high for our regular three-week season in Plymouth, where we have always enjoyed lively and loyal audiences. We were to present our repertoire of nine plays, with my three hundredth performance as Othello being given on the first Saturday evening. As my dear wife was indisposed, the part of Desdemona was undertaken by a younger actress, Miss Isabel Devlin, who had been an adornment to our company for years and whose elevation to more testing roles was a well-deserved one. Miss Devlin was always of an original cast of mind, and she contributed some intriguing notions to our rehearsals, most of which I was, alas, forced to overrule; with Shakespeare’s plays, as I have always maintained, the tried-and-true traditions are ignored at one’s peril.

  Miss Devlin looked charming, and sang the “Willow Song” with the sweetest of voices; her scenes with myself, and with Cassio (played by Mr. Orlando Stephens on this occasion; he was shortly to leave our company), were most tender and affecting. On the first night, I remember, I felt her Desdemona’s death stuggles were too desperate, and this caused some consternation, the more so as my wig fixings were unreliable. I had a discreet word with her about this afterward, and advised her against this tendency to “milk” the moment. I persuaded her that her belief that Desdemona might “fight back” was mistaken. Desdemona is a gentle and passive creature, and the attention of the audience as the terrible murder occurs must, I reminded her, be fixed upon the husband.

  Miss Devlin took my advice to heart, and her performance improved thereafter. The critics were kind, though, as my wife had cause to point out, Miss Devlin’s voice lacked strength, and she had perhaps not mastered the art of projection inborn in the greatest thespians. Despite these birth pangs, and teething troubles, however, the production was little short of a triumph. My own performance was greeted with many plaudits, and the traditional presentation of wreaths from my admirers. Had it not been for the recent advent of war, I feel sure more seats would have been sold, and our takings would have been more remunerative.

  As a postscript, and by way of tribute, I should add that, sadly, Desdemona was Miss Devlin’s last role with our company—indeed her last on any stage. My wife, whose opinion of her abilities had always been lower than my own, had concerns as to Miss Devlin’s health, which had never been strong. When her condition did not improve, it was felt we should dispense with her services. Not long afterward, we heard that she had died, in the most tragic of circumstances. She was in her prime of beauty, with the prettiest golden hair; “April was in her eyes,” if I may misquote; she was a “lass unparallel’d,” and a lady to her fingertips, with great delicacy of mind and demeanor. My wife and I could not attend her funeral, but I grieved for her.

  I should add that Miss Devlin’s daughter was also at this time a member of our little “band of brothers” and showed a precocious ability for the Bard. She was a most unusual and wicked Puck to my Oberon at a very early age, and was of great use to us in boys’ roles. I remember her as a swaggering but subtle young princeling to my Richard III, and her pitiful death as Macduff’s son in the Scottish play brought tears to many an eye. She might have had a future on the boards, I always felt, though my wife doubted she had the necessary discipline and temperament; but we heard no more of her after her dear mother died.

  Once our triumphant season in Plymouth was over, we moved on to Bristol, but the financial difficulties I have mentioned earlier continued to cause us problems, so we feared we might have to disband. I stared defeat in the face on several occasions, but soldiered on. My wife and I…

  I skipped to the end of the page, then flicked back and forward through the chapters. I checked the very unscholarly and erratic index and found a list of company members. This was the only reference to Isabel Devlin, and her daughter was not identified by name. Even so, there was no doubt in my mind that I had found Rebecca—and so had someone else, of course.

  I looked at the sprig of azalea blossom; I turned to the front page of the book, where the dates when it had been on loan were recorded. There was clearly little demand for Sir Frank’s windy reminiscences. Taken at the Flood had languished on the shelves. Someone had consulted it, and recently too, but for the last three years no one had borrowed it.

  I sat at the small desk, with my head in my hands, trying to puzzle this out. Someone had sent a notebook of Rebecca’s to Colonel Julyan; on the same day, someone had sent Jack Favell her ring; someone had been at her boathouse—and perhaps at Manderley, too, I realized, thinking of that boarded-up window that had been broken into. Someone had left that azalea garland by the shore; someone had consulted this book—and recently someone had been looking through Francis Browne’s postcards of Manderley, too, I now remembered.

  Whoever this person was, he or she seemed intent on leaving a trail. Who could have had access to Rebecca’s belongings? Who might now be in the grip of some unbalanced, half-demented obsession…apart from myself, of course, I thought ruefully. It had to be someone who had been very close to Rebecca, surely, someone who had known her as a child. I could now see that Ellie had been right, and the likeliest candidate was a woman. It seemed that, yet again, I was up against Mrs. Danvers, the elusive, unfindable Mrs. Danvers. If she had sent that first notebook, and if there was at least one other, as the Colonel believed, then the likelihood was that she was in possession of it. But was she unfindable? This was a trail, and trails are meant to be followed.

  Where, then, did the trail lead? Where should I go next? Greenways? I would have liked to go there, though I doubted I’d find anything more interesting than a house long since occupied by others. If not Greenways, where else? What other place had associations with Rebecca?

  I sat there puzzling over this for another five minutes, before the answer came to me—yet it was obvious, it had been staring me in the face all morning. I drew out the letter Rebecca had written to May all those years before, the letter that had altered the whole course of my life. 12C Tite Street—the flat Rebecca had kept in London, by the river. I had been there before, several times, on previous visits; although there was at least one other occupied flat in the building, no one was ever in. Maybe now was the time to return there.

  I FOUND A TAXI IN ST. JAMES’S SQUARE, AND ON MY WAY to Chelsea re-read Sir Frank’s account of Rebecca and her mother; some of his wording struck me as odd—but at least I had now narrowed down the dates, and they corresponded closely, I noticed, to the dates Francis Browne had given me for the Manderley postcard.

  In September 1914, Rebecca and her mother had been in Plymouth, which happens to be the nearest large city to Kerrith and Manderley, and, nowadays, by car, about an hour or so away from it. Sometime “early in 1915” (or so he claimed; I had not been able to pin it down more precisely than that) Jack Favell arrived in England from Kenya, and Rebecca had been in mourning. Therefore, in the space of one winter, of some six or at most seven months, there had been great change: Rebecca’s mother had died, Mrs. Danvers had taken charge of her, and Rebecca herself had gone to live with her father at Greenways.

  What had caused her mother’s death, I wondered. Sir Frank’s account suggested a legacy of ill health; perhaps Isabel Devlin had died of some then-lethal wasting disease, tuberculosis, for instance. It should
be easy enough to establish the precise date and cause of death; provided “Devlin” was the only name Rebecca’s mother used, I should now be able to find her death certificate in the records at Somerset House quite quickly. If I didn’t have time to do it myself today, I could always get a friend like Simon Lang to do it for me.

  Meanwhile, given the timing, I felt sure that Isabel’s state of health did explain the return of Jack Devlin from Africa. I wondered if Favell was correct, and it was Mrs. Danvers who had traced Devlin. Certainly Mrs. Danvers was involved somehow in these events, but it was not necessarily she who had contacted him. If Devlin had never divorced his wife, perhaps they had remained in touch with each other after they parted. And as to why they had parted—well, there I had no evidence beyond Favell’s insinuations, and the suggestive “six months” he claimed they had lived together. Were they merely incompatible, or had Devlin discovered something so unacceptable about his wife that he walked out on her? That she was having an affair with another man, or that she was expecting another man’s child when he married her, for instance?

  The taxi had come to a halt on the corner of Tite Street and the Embankment. I paid it off, and walked slowly up the street toward the tall resplendent redbrick Dutch-gabled house where Rebecca had had an apartment. It was at the southern end of the road, not far from where Whistler had once had his studios. When they were first built, many of these houses had been lived in by artists, and, like several of the others, Rebecca’s house had, on its upper floors, a huge arched studio window. I looked up at it now, from the pavement on the opposite side.

  The sun glanced against the glass; from that window it would have been possible to see the Thames. Rebecca had chosen to live less than two minutes’ walk from the river, I noted; and it occurred to me, thinking of Favell’s strange accusations the previous night, that if she had decided to end her life after being told the nature of her illness, she had no need to drive all the way back to Manderley. The means of death lay at the end of her street; she would have been able to see the dangerous waters of the Thames from her own window.

  I crossed the road to the house, and examined the doorbells for the flats, as I had done before. Twelve A was the basement; it was shuttered up, and appeared uninhabited. Twelve B seemed to be the ground floor, and 12C the upper floors. None of the bells had names on them.

  Without any great hope of reply, I pressed the bell for 12C and waited. I had asked Ellie about this flat when she drove me to Lanyon station—and that was yesterday morning, I realized, though it felt like a month ago. She was sure that Rebecca had had the flat for some years before her marriage, and that she used it only occasionally after her wedding, though Colonel Julyan said Rebecca was there more often in the last six months of her life.

  I pressed the bell again. I had asked Ellie what happened to the flat after Rebecca died. She said her sister Lily had continued to live close by for years, and she couldn’t recall any mention of the flat’s being relet. “Maybe Rebecca passed the lease on to someone else,” she said. “Someone else must have moved in. Someone must have packed up Rebecca’s things.” Who would have done that? I asked, though I knew the answer before she spoke the name: Mrs. Danvers.

  Always Mrs. Danvers. I pressed the bell again, and this time I kept my finger on it. It jangled in the depths of the house—and suddenly, at last, I heard a response. A door banged; footsteps approached; I tensed. The front door was flung back to reveal a young woman of about twenty-five. She was dressed in artistic black from head to foot—and she was not in a good temper.

  “Look, do you mind,” she said. “What a racket! You can stand there ringing that bell all day, and you won’t get an answer….”

  She paused, and looked at me closely. A curious change came over her; she smiled, blushed, apologized for “biting my head off,” explained she lived in 12B, on the ground floor and proceeded to take a warm interest in my predicament. When she discovered I wanted to know about Flat 12C and its occupant, the flirtatiousness diminished, and her manner became nervous.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Do you know anything about her? You’d better come in. It’s quite a story. Would you like some coffee?”

  She drew me into a large hall, with a black-and-white flagstoned floor; a wide, curving handsome staircase led up from it. She looked at the stairs, raised her finger to her lips, and led me into her flat. Maybe I have an honest face; maybe she was trusting; maybe she was glad of male protection (that possibility did cross my mind, certainly when she began on her tale). Whatever her motives, two minutes later I was in her sitting room.

  Her name was Selina Fox-Hamilton, I discovered. She had lived in the ground-floor flat for just over a year and intended to move out at the first opportunity. She worked in an art gallery in Cork Street, and was only at home that day because she had a hangover. She sat me down on a sagging sofa, introduced me to her three cats, and started talking. She explained that she wasn’t of a nervous disposition, and didn’t believe in ghosts, never had, but she’d changed her mind since moving into this house. I wanted to know about the flat upstairs? Was it empty? Not exactly, she replied, with a small shiver. The flat was let—but its tenant was peculiar. Very.

  “Okay,” she said, sitting down opposite me and lighting a cigarette. “This is how it is. First of all, I move in, and I’m really pleased, because the rent’s rock-bottom low, and it’s a lovely house and a nice flat, and the cats like it. The agents told me the basement flat was empty, and they said there was a woman living upstairs, but she was rarely there, so she wouldn’t bother me. That was fine by me—and then I began to notice…just little things at first, but they were odd. There’d be lights on when I came home late from a party—but I’d never hear anyone, and I never saw anyone go in or out. And whoever lived there, or stayed there—she never got any mail. Not once. I’ve never seen a single letter for that flat, and you’ve got to admit that’s pretty peculiar.

  “So, I started asking around,” she went on. “There’s some artists just up the street who’ve lived here forever, and they told me the whole story. The flat upstairs used to belong to this woman, and she was very beautiful and very young when she died. She died in mysterious circumstances about twenty years ago. She drowned—and some people said she killed herself, and some people said she was murdered by her husband. She lived in this beautiful house, in the West Country, and the house burned down on the day after her funeral.

  “Anyway, they told me this story, and then they said, Have you seen her? Well, you can imagine, that made me nervous. I hadn’t seen her, I hadn’t seen anyone—but they had. Or they claimed they had, and recently, too. One of them said he saw her, standing by the river and looking down at the water, just at the end of this street. Another one had seen her coming out of the front door one evening. And one of the women said, Have you heard her moving the furniture yet? Because, apparently, that’s what happens, in the middle of the night—and that’s why the agents can’t get anyone to stay in this flat very long, and that’s why the rent’s so exceptionally low. It’s been going on ever since her funeral, ever since the night of the fire, they said. That’s twenty years! I’m the seventh person to live here since the war, they told me.”

  Selina looked at me, round-eyed. I asked her if she’d believed these stories.

  “Well, I couldn’t see why they’d make them up. But I never saw anyone, and I never heard anything, so, after a while—I’d been here about three months then—I put it out of my mind. Then, I began to notice…my cats started behaving strangely. They hide—sometimes they won’t come out into the hall, and nothing will persuade them to go anywhere near that staircase. Then, one night, it started. The noises. And it was just the way they’d described—horrible dragging noises, as if something heavy were being lugged across the floor. It went on and on. And always very late—two, maybe three, or four in the morning.”

  “Can you remember when this started?”

  “I know when it started. On April twelft
h last year—I wrote it down in my diary.”

  April twelfth was the anniversary of Rebecca’s death. I thought it was better not to tell Selina that. She lit another cigarette and continued with her story. The noises had continued for over a week, then they had stopped. Months of silence ensued; Selina told herself the “hauntings” were over. Then, on one occasion, and only one, there was an encounter: It was last November and she had returned home in the afternoon earlier than she normally did. It was approaching winter, so it was already dark, and there was a thick fog, a clammy pea-souper of a fog that had been hanging over London all week. She let herself into the house, reached for the light switch in the hall, and then saw a figure on the stairway.

  “I could only just see her,” she said. “The porch light was on, and I had the door wide open, and the fog was drifting in, but there was a little light, a band of light shining across that staircase. I saw her move through it. She sort of glided through it. I was so startled, I made this gasping noise. Then I found the light switch, and the hall light came on, and she’d gone.” She paused. “I don’t think it was a ghost—not really. But at the time I was very frightened. I said, ‘Who is that?’ or ‘What are you doing?’ or something. She didn’t answer. Then I heard the door close. That was it. I’ve never seen her since. And I don’t want to, either.”

  This was not, however, Selina’s final encounter with the female tenant upstairs. There were two more, both indirect and both peculiar.

  Some months after the vision on the stairs, the furniture-moving noises began again. This time, they were so frequent, and so prolonged, that Selina decided to take action. One morning, very early, when she’d had virtually no sleep, she braved the stairs and knocked on the door of 12C. She was certain the woman was in the flat; the noises had finally ceased only a few minutes before, and no one had left the house during that time. She was determined to complain, but her knockings and callings produced no response. The door to 12C remained closed—and Selina remained absolutely certain the woman had been there, just the other side of the door. She could hear her breathing.