Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  Finally, and this was less than a month ago, she could stand the noises no longer. When complaints to the managing agents produced no response, she wrote a note—a polite note, she stressed—and went upstairs, and slid it under the door of 12C. Then, she left for work. When she returned that night there was an envelope on her mat, a blank envelope, with nothing written on it, not even her flat number. Inside it was her own note, torn into hundreds of tiny fragments.

  “Well, that scared me,” she said. “I mean, that’s not normal, is it? Since then, I’ve stayed out of her way, and I can’t wait to move out. I have to find another flat. I don’t want to be alone in a house with a ghost or a madwoman.”

  I asked Selina a few questions. Had she ever learned the tenant’s name? No: The agents had refused to give it to her. Could she describe the woman she’d glimpsed on the stairs? She’d been wearing scent, Selina said, she noticed it at once, this delicate fresh scent, like spring flowers. She was tall, and she’d been wearing black, and her hair was covered…but she’d only glimpsed her for a second. I told Selina that ghosts didn’t tear notes into fragments and leave them on people’s doormats, though I didn’t expect that to console her very much. Then, I asked her if she had an envelope she could let me have, and I went out into the hall. Nothing would persuade Selina to go anywhere near the stairs, so she stayed in her doorway, and I went up alone.

  It was a fine staircase, wide, with ornate balustrading. When I came to the heavy black door on the first landing, I listened intently. There was a strange smell on the landing, a very faint burning smell. I took the envelope Selina had supplied and slipped the azalea sprig I’d found at the library inside it. I sealed it. I wrote “Terence Gray” and my address and telephone number in Kerrith on it. I stared at the door, and thought of what Selina had been told: It’s been going on ever since her funeral, ever since the night of the fire. It was on the night of the Manderley fire that Mrs. Danvers had vanished.

  It was a remote chance, but it seemed to be worth taking. I leaned against the door, and in a low voice I said, “Mrs. Danvers? Are you there? I’d like to speak to you. I’d like to speak to you about Rebecca….”

  No sound came from beyond the door. I knocked lightly on the panels; there was no response. From the hall below, I heard a stifled sigh from Selina. It echoed up the stairwell, oddly amplified by the acoustics.

  “Mrs. Danvers?” I said again—and this time I thought I did hear a sound, a soft slithering noise, as if a piece of material, a long skirt or something similar, brushed against a carpet. I might have imagined it. I pushed the envelope under the door; I waited for several minutes, and when there was no response at all, returned to the hallway. Selina and I exchanged telephone numbers, then I extricated myself, not without difficulty, and escaped to the street again.

  I walked across the road and stationed myself on the pavement, directly opposite Rebecca’s tall studio window. The sun reflected on the glass. If a woman had been standing at the window, I could not have seen her because of the angle of the light; but she could have seen me. I allowed her time to inspect me, always supposing she was there. It was disconcerting, to feel watched, but not to be sure one was watched. It made me deeply uneasy.

  THIS SENSE OF BEING WATCHED WAS ONE I COULD NOT shake off; it clung to me for the rest of the day, and the remainder of my time in London was inconclusive and frustrating. Selina had given me the names of the artists who had told her that ghost story, and the name and telephone number of the managing agents for the Tite Street house. The agents refused to give me any information whatsoever; the artists were not at home. I wasted time knocking on doors in Tite Street, in search of neighbors who might know something of the occupant of Flat 12C, but all were recent arrivals, and knew nothing. I then wasted even more time at Chelsea Town Hall, going through the electoral register. Whoever lived in apartment 12C was unregistered; Selina was listed, but no other occupant.

  By the time I’d completed this dispiriting search, eaten a dispiritingly bad sandwich in a small cafe, and fought my way back down a crowded King’s Road to the tube station in Sloane Square, I had only a few hours left in London, and I was more than ready to escape the heat, the traffic, and the exhaust fumes for the clean air and the calm of Kerrith.

  I took the tube back into the center of London, and set about more practical tasks. I went to Fortnum and Mason, and bought the Briggs sisters their violet creams, as promised. I went into Hatchards, and bought two books as a present for Colonel Julyan. I saw my own book on Walsingham and his Elizabethan spy network on display; on impulse I bought a copy for Ellie. If I confessed my identity to her and her father, I could give her this; it seemed a reasonable idea at first, but, the instant the purchase was made, I regretted it. This was a book aimed primarily at scholars; it was interesting to me, but it was peppered with footnotes, it was dry and specialized. Was that how I wanted to introduce Tom Galbraith to her? She would find him very dull—but maybe she found him so already.

  I had one last task before I could return to Regent’s Park, pack my bag, and make my escape. I had to see Jack Favell, return Rebecca’s ring and—if he was in a fit state—question him. I walked back up Bond Street, and through into Mayfair. The streets were crowded now; the warmth of the weather created a gaiety, a spring fever, that was palpable. A man and a woman strolled past, hand in hand; a uniformed nanny pushed a pram, and two girls stopped to peer under its sunshade and smile at the baby. I paused at the corner. I could sense that promise peculiar to cities in spring, its possibilities were in the air, in the glitter of the pavement, in the song of the traffic. Its allure was all around me. I felt very alone, marked out by my isolation, locked in my searches of the past for too long, a man who had lived out his life looking for truth in the small print; a man imprisoned in libraries.

  The sensation clung, and I fought it off with difficulty. I walked through to the quieter Mayfair street where Favell’s showroom was located, but found to my surprise that it was empty, and locked up. There was a bell, which I rang, but nobody emerged. One of the cars I noticed yesterday, the Bentley, had disappeared; perhaps Favell was out taking a client for a test-drive, I thought. I hung about for half an hour; when there was no sign of his returning, I left. I would call him from Kerrith, and, meanwhile, I would have to keep Rebecca’s ring. As I walked back to Regent’s Park, I turned it over and over in my pocket.

  AT THE OSMONDS’ HOUSE, I USED MY REMAINING TIME TO write letters and make telephone calls. I wrote again to Frank Crawley, though I expected this letter—the third—would be met with the same polite refusals as the first two. I called Simon Lang, and persuaded him to do a little simple research at Somerset House for me. I called some friends and colleagues at King’s, where I’ll be returning this autumn. I called my publisher, spoke to my editor, promised to have lunch with him soon, and explained that my new book on Raleigh was taking longer than expected; he’s a sanguine man, and did not sound too brokenhearted. I packed, said good-bye to Mrs. Henderson (no one had called for me), and left for the station. I was impatient to be back in Kerrith. I wanted to walk by the sea; I wanted to tell Ellie and her father of the progress I’d made, and I was hoping that, if he’d felt strong enough, the Colonel might also have made some discoveries.

  By six, I was at Paddington, and by 6:30 the train was pulling out of London. This time, I had a carriage to myself—the train was not crowded—and I was glad of the solitude. I slung my bag in the rack, scanned the front page of the Evening Standard I’d bought at the station, then tossed it aside. I stared out of the window, and watched the suburbs slip by. I listened to the rhythms of the train, and thought myself back into my search. I went over the events of the last two days, what I’d been told—and what I’d not been told: The omissions and the evasions, of course, being as significant as the information.

  We were well beyond the city and dusk was falling before I picked up Sir Frank’s autobiography again, and in a desultory way, growing increasingly irritated
by the circumlocutions of his style, began to read it. The train was in open country, and it was almost dark outside, before I saw what I had missed this morning. It was there on the previous page to the one on which I’d been concentrating; just a passing mention, easy enough to overlook in the ramble of his memories. It came just before his reference to those regular seasons in Plymouth:

  As has been our habit for many years, my wife and I, and several members of our company, stayed with Millicent Danvers, who keeps the excellent “St. Agnes” boarding house in Marine Parade overlooking the Plymouth sound. She is widowed now and getting on in years and her daughter (formerly of great help to her) is in service, but the standards we had come to expect had not diminished in the slightest. The cleanliness and order of her household are exemplary—would that it were so in all our “diggings”! We talked over “old times” with great pleasure and begged to be reminded to her daughter, but fortunately she is employed close by, and so was able to attend a performance of Othello. Edith Danvers, or “Danny” as we always called her, was always most loyal in her appreciation of our efforts, and had made many friends among our company from her girlhood. She would not have missed our performance for the world, and the killing of Desdemona made her blood run cold, she told us.

  Edith Danvers: She had been here in this book, all along. Now at last I understood where she came from; here, perhaps, lay the origins of her connection with Rebecca—and if Edith Danvers had attended that performance of Othello, then she had been in touch with Rebecca and Isabel Devlin in the months leading up to Isabel’s death, I noted. I took Sir Frank’s autobiography to the dining car, and read through it as I ate; but this was the sole reference to her. She came flickering out of the past toward me, and then returned to it.

  I went back to my carriage and stared out into the night, watching the dark rush past, and my own double, a pale reflection, move against the window. After a while, I closed my eyes; but although I can only have slept an hour or two at most last night, and was twitchy with fatigue, I could not sleep properly now. I fell into awkward and unsettled dozes, states between unconsciousness and waking, in which I half dreamed I was walking up endless stairs, to a black door that was never opened.

  I must have slept in the end, I think, because when I surfaced at last, even more tired than before, we were rattling across the Tamar, and rushing toward the dark wild empty landscape that lies between it and Manderley. In an effort to distract myself, I picked up my newspaper.

  The item was brief, set down low on the second page. Jack Favell, codirector of the Favell Johnston classic car dealership in Mayfair, I read, had been involved in a car accident in the early hours of the morning. It had occurred at a notorious “black spot” blind bend, between Lambourn, Berkshire, and the village of Hampton Ferrars. The Bentley Favell was driving hit a wall and caught fire on impact. Two witnesses, both stable hands out exercising horses, said the car was being driven very fast, and no attempt was made to brake at the corner. Favell had been killed. Police inquiries were continuing.

  The train jerked, slowed, then gathered speed again. I felt shock—and guilt, too. I took out the ring Favell had given me, and looked at it. I thought back over our conversation, and death altered and reshaped it. I heard him describe Greenways again, and walking up onto the downs to watch Rebecca ride there.

  Was this death accidental? Or had Favell intended to die—and in circumstances that seemed so deliberately to mirror the death of Maxim de Winter? When these men crashed their cars, had they been seeking Rebecca, or escaping from her? I tried to imagine the hours Favell must have spent between leaving me and driving off early the next morning. Had he sobered up, or had he continued drinking, still trying to keep his demons at bay? He must have been far more desperate than I had understood, I realized, and I should have listened better, watched more closely. I looked at Rebecca’s ring—that unlucky ring, he had claimed—and I thought of the time I myself had seen it on her hand. I felt death brush past, very close; its sea-colored eyes looked at me. Do you live here? What, here in the church? No. Not yet, anyway.

  The dark rushed past; lights glinted on the horizon; my double moved against the glass. Shortly after midnight, the brakes screeched, and the train slowed; at half past midnight, we pulled into Lanyon station. One taxi was on duty, and I persuaded the driver to take me across the moors and back to my cottage. I stood outside it, watching his lights disappear into the distance. There was no moon, the tide was high and the water black, whispering against the shingle. The wind was strengthening, and it was beginning to rain. I stood for a moment looking out across the sea toward Manderley.

  I let myself into the cottage and lit the oil lamp; the flame guttered. Those ghosts that had felt close all day felt close to me still, as if they had followed me here, and were moving about the room, settling themselves in the corners. I took out Rebecca’s ring and turned it over in my hands, watching it catch the light. I found myself wondering if Favell had been right, and the ring was unlucky. I told myself I did not believe in ill luck of that kind, or ghosts, for that matter. The wind sighed, and that loose shutter at the back of the house rattled.

  Tomorrow I would continue my searches, and follow up those leads I had; but, without further assistance from Favell, and with Mrs. Danvers proving still elusive, I could not see how I could progress much further, unless Colonel Julyan found some new information in that “archive” of his, and that prospect seemed increasingly unlikely. Meanwhile, I could not put my own life and work on hold forever; my temporary job at the county records office ceased, to all intents and purposes, two weeks ago; I was due to collect the last of my things from my office there tomorrow. I didn’t regret that—it meant I had more free hours at my disposal—but it did mean that I no longer had a pretext for being in Kerrith. There would come a time, I recognized, when I might have to abandon this search of mine, and accept that the past had swallowed Rebecca up, that she was now in a region of the lost, in an underworld where I could not reach her.

  I could feel a familiar melancholy creeping up on me, as stealthily as the mist from the sea. I listened to the murmur of the waves on the shore and the rain on the roof. Then, under and behind the wind, I thought I heard something else, first the sound of footsteps on the shingle, then the rattling noise made when the front gate is unlatched. I turned out the lamp, waited until my eyes grew accustomed to the dark again, then moved quietly to the porch outside. The lights of a ship moved on the horizon; the sea sighed and shifted on the shingle.

  I peered out into the darkness; the rain was falling heavily now, and I could see little. The gate swung too and fro in the wind; possibly it was the wind that had unlatched it, though that had never happened before. I walked quietly down the path and refastened it. I looked toward the shore; something pale moved against the rocks, and fear tightened around my heart like a fist. The thought flashed through my mind—she’s come back for her ring.

  Then I regained control. Telling myself it was a trick of the light, I returned to the cottage.

  TWENTY

  April 19—Wednesday

  I CALLED ELLIE THIS MORNING BEFORE SHE LEFT WITH HER father for the hospital and I left for the county library. I was looking forward to speaking to her, but our conversation was brief, with none of the ease of yesterday. Ellie sounded anxious, but insisted there was no cause for concern; if she sounded odd, she said, it was just that she was rushing to get her father ready, he was being difficult (he hates hospitals, apparently), and she had slept badly.

  I had slept badly, too, pursued by Manderley dreams for most of the night. I had no inkling then of the revelations that were to come today; my mood remained despondent. The rain was still pouring down, the sky was overcast, and the wind from the west had strengthened overnight. The sea, so calm for the past week, had an angry swollen look, crashing and booming against the rocks where I had glimpsed, or imagined, that pale shape yesterday.

  Jeremy Bodinnick, the archivist with whom I’ve been
working these past six months, picked me up in his small car as he usually does. He lives in a cottage close to the Briggs sisters, has worked at the county records office for forty years, and is a rotund, kindly, confirmed bachelor. Usually, he’s the most cheerful of men, but this morning, he, too, was melancholy.

  “A sad day, Terence,” he said, as I settled myself in the passenger seat. “A very sad day. I shall miss working with you. The library won’t feel the same without you. All that work cataloging the de Winter estate papers, your help with those exhibitions…invaluable! If only the council could see their way to funding a permanent position—but of course, they won’t. They’re philistines, you know, every last man jack of them. Don’t understand the importance of local records, no interest in history, cut my budgets to the bone, I told them…”

  This was a familiar recitative. For years, Mr. Bodinnick has been fighting a heroic campaign against the funding misers at the county council; he likes to dwell on his cunning ploys to outwit them, his frequent defeats, and occasional victories. Hiring me counted as a victory, I think (he certainly viewed it as such), though the salary for an assistant was forthcoming only because the gift of the de Winter estate papers had been made conditional on their being cataloged.

  I was hired on a six-month contract to help with this cataloging, and to assist Mr. Bodinnick with the exhibitions he planned for the archive, of which there have been two so far, on the traditional local industries of tin mining and china-clay production. Both exhibitions were well researched and well arranged, but since the library is a well-kept secret, they attracted at most a score of visitors. Mr. Bodinnick immediately began planning a third spectacular, this time on the equally traditional and ancient local industries of wrecking and smuggling—and I think believed that by such stealthy means he might be able to prolong my employment indefinitely.