Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  I thought of the boathouse as he’d described it to me, with its red rug, its bright driftwood fire, its little carved boats, its atmosphere of childlike refuge and seclusion. I thought of the way in which Rebecca had intervened in my life, altering it forever: I’ve never doubted what would have become of me, had she not rescued me from the ignorance and anguish of my childhood.

  I could hear the sound of the sea rattling on the shingle. With a troubled mind, I opened the black cover and began reading.

  3

  Rebecca

  APRIL 1931

  TWENTY-ONE

  SUCH A COLD, FIERCE, GLITTERING DAY—A MAGNIFICENT sea, green as glass bottles, surf grinding shells to powder on the beach, a high blue bare sky. Such exhilaration. I thought of you today, I thought of you all day, my darling.

  Max was away—the cat was away—so I was free, and early this morning I escaped from them all. Breakfast in the mausoleum first, mirrored eggs, and kidneys seeping blood in silver dishes, Frith creaking his way in and out—I can’t keep food down in the mornings. Just a little coffee and dry toast, then I went to the usual room, sat at my usual desk, and arranged my life: lists, letters, menus, appointments. I’m efficient, dearest—my future’s an alphabet, I file it in pigeonholes. By ten, Jasper and I were walking in the woods; the first azaleas were coming out; we had only the gulls for company.

  We came down to the shore. I threw sticks for Jasper; he chased them into the waves, then came back and shook himself, and out from of his fur flew richness—a spray of diamonds as big as hailstones, bright as the ones on my wedding finger. I’ll bring you here one day, my love: I’ll show you the secrets of this bay, the rock with the blue-mauve mussels, like mermaids’ fingernails; the place where I gather my driftwood; the ledge where the white fulmar lays its one white egg every April, and the pools that are deep enough to drown in.

  I looked in the pools today, and saw your reflection. The seaweed was your hair, your tight-shut eyes were cockleshells; your hand, opening, closing, was a starfish. The tide rocked you, the sea sang to you, your bones grew as strong as coral; you were as quick as a fish, as perfect as the ripples in the sand. Move, my dearest. Hurry up and be born. I want to hold you in my arms, and show you Manderley. All this will be yours, one day.

  I’VE NEVER KNOWN SUCH A PLACE FOR GHOSTS AS THIS. Could you sense them today? I could. I think ghosts have an affinity for the sea; maybe it’s the sound it makes, the sighings and washings and whisperings, the tides of departures and returnings. Today, my mother was here, dancing in bare feet at the edge of the water, tossing back her hair, which truly was gold, a deep dark gold, rippling down to her waist when she unpinned it. And my father was here, too. He was out there by the rocks, watching and brooding, so tall and dark in his black clothes, with his eyes shadowed. They’re both in my blood, the fair and the dark—and they’re in yours, too, my dear one.

  We can be our own ghosts, too, we can haunt ourselves—did you know that? So some of the other Rebeccas were here, too. The imperious one never comes down to the shore—she stays up there, wrapped in her silks and her furs. She was born one day at a house called St. Agnes, and I’ve nourished her ever since. I can call her up when I need her. But sometimes she springs up of her own free will—and then she alarms me. You have to be careful with her, and you wouldn’t want to cross her, for all her charms. She’s got knives in her eyes, fire at her fingertips, serpentine ways, and an unquenchable thirst for blood—Madame Medea, I call her.

  She was up there today, dreaming revenge I expect, revenge being meat and drink to her. And that girl was with her, the girl who used to be me, the girl who looked at Manderley and knew she’d come home at last.

  I looked at that drab girl, and I remembered how it was that time I first came here: I ran out of the house in search of the sea. It was a glaring bright day; the sea was lucid and implacable. I thought, This place is mine by right. Whatever it takes—I shall have it. I was so small then, it was before I taught myself to grow; I was small and thin, and I bit my nails; I was thirteen, nearly fourteen, but I looked about ten—not attractive! My mother was somewhere else, and she was dying—getting ready to die—though no one had told me. My father was just a name then—he hadn’t sailed into my life yet—so I was all alone, neither pretty nor clever nor powerful, just a drab child with a headful of plays, standing up there by the path on a hot autumn day, wanting something so hard it hurt my heart and took my breath away.

  Then Max came up the path from this cove. I’d heard of him, but it was the first time I’d seen him. He was off to the trenches, off to fight in the war; he was leaving that day and he was wearing his uniform. His father was dying in the tower room back there; the house was at sixes and sevens, the maids scurrying about, Max’s grandmother firing orders and questions in all directions. “There’ll be a shortage of men,” she said. “How am I supposed to run a house without menservants?” The sun glinted on Max’s buttons and buckles; his boots shone like chestnuts. A revolver in a holster. Brown eyes and a handsome face. The son and heir. The sun and air. I looked at him, and I thought, Aha!

  My love, I have so much to tell you.

  THOSE GHOSTS ANGERED ME A LITTLE, ESPECIALLY THAT girl, because I know what became of her. Also, in truth, I’d begun to feel desperately tired and sick—I do sometimes now. It takes great energy to grow a baby—all those nerves and sinews and bones rooting inside me. So I came in here to my sea house, and I’ve been lying here, watching the light fade, willing you to stretch, or flex your starfish fingers or kick; I wish you would. It’s four months, and you’re so still it makes me anxious.

  I tried to eat a little because I can see I’m too thin, and that can’t be good for you. I must feed you! I managed not to be sick; I kept down some tea, and a dry biscuit, and I felt better then. I lit the fire, and now the driftwood is burning brightly; the salt makes the flames spurt blue and green and sulphur yellow. It’s high tide, and the spray from the sea is licking against the west window. I’ve drawn the curtains and lit the lamp, and it’s cozy and warm here for you. There’s a red rag rug on the floor, and some boats I’ve made for you; my guardian, Jasper, is asleep by the fire. The walls are four feet thick. We could be in the eye of a storm here, and survive safely. I feel better now, alone and content. Everything I can possibly need is inside this room—or inside me, my darling one.

  I shall go and see a doctor in London in a few days. I should have gone before, but I was superstitious. I kept telling myself it was too good to be true; if I arranged to see a doctor, I’d start bleeding again. So I waited out the months, and now I don’t need any doctor to confirm your existence, I can sense you under my heart—but I want to be sure you grow well and strongly. This afternoon a strange blue melancholia came seeping up from the sea; it crept into my bones, and I kept thinking of my own mother, who died giving birth to that little half-brother of mine. I met him once in the church here—a nervous boy, eyes the twin of mine, and a way of holding his head and tilting his chin that was exactly my mother’s. She never knew her baby, and he never knew her. I felt suddenly cold. Suppose that happened to us?

  I’m strong and healthy—I’ve never known what it was to feel ill until these last few months—but even so, mothers aren’t immortal. The gods—and sometimes the husbands—can be jealous of their joy, so they snuff them out on a whim. They silence us. No point in lying—it happens all the time, my dearest.

  I don’t want you to grow up without me to protect you. I won’t let you be told lies about me by people who neither loved nor understood me. I want you to know who I am; I want you to know where to find me. I promise you this: I’m as tenacious as Old Hamlet’s ghost, with his whispers of revenge. If you should ever need me, you’ll find me at Manderley, and I’ll ignore cock crows—I shan’t be confined to the hours between midnight and dawn, I assure you!

  I swear: Walk by the sea and you’ll feel me. Stand at the windows and you’ll see me. Listen in the corridors, at the turn of the
stairs, and it’s my heartbeat you’ll hear. My blood and bones put the beauty back in that house. I made it for my mother, for me, and for you. Whenever you’re there, I’ll be close. Meanwhile, just in case those jealous gods do get up to their tricks, this is who I am, my love: This is your inheritance, and this is our story.

  I WAS BORN IN A HOUSE BY THE SEA, NOT A GREAT PALACE of a place like Manderley, but a gray foursquare house set down by a rocky shore so close to the sea that you could hear it singing all day and all night, a Lorelei’s lullaby.

  The first thing I remember is lamplight in a square room, and my mother Isolda holding me, rocking me back and forth, while the sea sang to me. The second thing I remember is escaping from my mother, and crawling across the sand toward the water—it was alive, and I wanted to be inside it. I reached out to a green glassy wave, and just as it broke over my head, my mother caught me by the heels and pulled me clear of it.

  She taught me the words la mer and ma mère, and to my ears they sounded identical. So for a long time I believed I had two mothers, Maman and the sea. Both mothers were beautiful and powerful and both would always watch over me. Do I still believe this? Maybe.

  Our house was in Brittany. It was near the church and half a mile from the crumbling chateau where my mother’s third cousins lived. The village was called St. Croigne Dulac; it was a tiny fishing village, but there were many romantic tales about it, and some people said it was the village where Sir Lancelot’s father had had his palace—Lancelot’s father, you know, was a king in Brittany. Maman used to say we were in a far countrey—but Brittany isn’t remote, or not from here, anyway. When my boat, Je Reviens, was brought here from St. Croigne, it was only two days’ sail. Stand and look southwest from the cliffs by Manderley, and you can see my birthplace. You have to look the other side of the horizon, but that’s easy enough, I have the technique—I’ll teach you, one day.

  We lived there in seclusion, my mother and I, until I was seven years old. I loved our house and St. Croigne with a passion—that place lodged in my heart, and I dream of it constantly. When I do, it’s always summer, and the dawn light wakes me, and I feel nothing but joy and expectation at the long day ahead of me. I’m free to do whatever I like. My mother preferred to rest and dream her days away; she’d write letters or read books; sometimes she would give me lessons—she taught me to read, we read poems together—and sometimes she would play the piano—we had a piano that Maman had shipped over from England. It was too big for our salon, and it suffered from the damp sea air and once it made her cry, because it needed tuning, and there was no one for miles around who knew how to cure it.

  All summer long, I went without shoes. I’d have a bowl of café au lait and bread in the kitchen with my friend Marie-Hélène, who cooked for us, and then I’d run out of the house and straight onto the shore. I could swim like a fish; I could catch shrimp in the rock pools; I could play with the village children. On Sundays I went to Mass; I knew the Stations of the Cross, and Maman gave me a rosary made of coral, but I didn’t believe in God any more than Maman did, and, once, when I went to visit the priest, an old man who was a good friend of mine, he laughed when I said I wanted to make my first communion so I could have a bride’s veil and a frilly white dress, as the older girls did. He shook his head and smiled and said I was une vraie petite païenne—a true little pagan.

  I used to watch the fishermen bring in their catch, great baskets of violet mackerel, huge crabs with watchful black eyes, and mysterious sea-blue lobsters with trembling antennas. Marie-Hélène taught me how to scale a fish and gut it—we fed the guts to the gulls, great long loops of fishy intestines. She taught me how to plunge the lobsters into a vat of boiling water; we bearded mussels; we cooked cockles and razor clams, which you prepare just by pouring the boiling water over them; you kill them by scalding them—and I learned that food was a pleasure and an art, but it necessitated death and it was violent. Some of the recipes Marie-Hélène taught me we still use at Manderley, and Max’s English friends say, Oh, Rebecca, how delicious, how original, where did you find such a brilliant cook? And I smile and say, Oh, Mrs. Danvers oversees all that, she supervises the kitchens—which she does, but it was I who taught her, years ago, when we were living at a place I’ll tell you about, called Greenways. And sometimes, if I want to tease Max—because he’s always afraid I’ll confess my past, and it amuses me to keep him on tenterhooks—I say, Oh, I have friends in France, or cousins in France, and it’s one of their family recipes….

  We did have those cousins of Maman’s after all, and once a week we paid them a duty visit. They owned the house we lived in, and Maman used to say, with a toss of her gold hair and a wicked blue glint in her eyes, that we must never forget we were beholden to them. They had taken her in when she left England, and it was thanks to them we had a roof over our heads: “Best behavior now, Becka,” she would say. “No fidgeting when Luc-Gerard starts on his stories.”

  What a bore cousin Luc was! I suppose he wasn’t that old—forty-five, maybe—but to me he was ancient and desiccated, living in that decaying house with five dogs and his mother, the Countess, who always wore black, and was deeply religious. Six courses for lunch, old Sèvres plates, and, whenever a roast chicken was served, they brought in its poor brain, white, the size of a pea, on a special saucer because that was a special delicacy, reserved for the master of the household; cousin Luc would swallow the cerebellum down and smack his lips and start on those tedious stories, while his mother patronized mine and dispensed her charity like very thin soup, and explained to Maman for the millionth time how sad and difficult Maman’s situation was, and how she had discussed it with the priest and how she prayed constantly for Maman’s deliverance and welfare.

  What a hypocrite she was. We only had one problem that I could see, and that was lack of money. And that delighted the old Countess. Our being hard up kept her going all week; half her pep and verve came from thinking up new ways in which her “chère Isolde” could practice little economies. “No more silk dresses for me,” Maman would say when we left. “What an old beast she is. No more dresses, no more ribbons, no more books, and I’d better stop curling my hair, don’t you think, Becka? I’m going to have to be as plain and dull and sour as she is, if I ever want to get to heaven.”

  But she wasn’t always so defiant. Sometimes, when the check from England didn’t arrive (and I never understood who sent those checks; Maman said it was her eldest sister, Evangeline, but I wasn’t always sure I believed her), there would be a crisis. Maman would come into the kitchen and sigh. She’d tell Marie-Hélène there must be cutbacks: “Perhaps if we didn’t always have a soup,” she would say in a vague way, in her halting French. “Or fruit. Must we always have fruit, Marie-Hélène? I’m sure it’s very expensive.”

  Marie-Hélène would raise her eyes to the heavens—and ignore her, of course. If Maman had but known it, the fruit was a gift from Marie-Hélène’s father, and not to have a soup course would have been a grave affront to Marie-Hélène’s ideas of proper household economy. So the soup would continue to be served, and the melons would arrive, and the cream and the black cherries and the brown farm eggs and the barnacled lobsters that sang as they died in their vat…and the color would mount in Maman’s cheeks, and she would make a face, and forget about the cutbacks until the next check arrived and saved us.

  The next check—or the next present, for we received presents, too, and quite regularly. Someone knew that Maman loved pretty things, that she had a fatal weakness for what she called “frivolities.” That someone knew Maman’s taste very well. A tiny pair of gloves of mauve suede would arrive, or silk ribbons embroidered with roses; once a pair of gray kid boots with pearl buttons was sent—so pretty and charming, and fitting Maman exactly.

  They sent a paisley shawl, and an embroidered petticoat; they sent a handkerchief, such a tiny exquisite scrap of a thing, almost all lace, with the word “Isolda” stitched in white across its corner. They sent silk flowers
to trim a hat; they sent a cunning gold locket with a secret fastening, and a lock of hair craftily coiled and plaited inside it—and they sent letters, too, with an English stamp, which Maman kept locked away in her little traveling desk, and which she sighed over sometimes. Once, just once, they sent a photograph of a great gaunt gray beautiful house, and Maman showed me that, and said it was called Manderley. I loved that house from the first second I saw it. All those secretive windows; it was my palace of dreams. I made up stories about it and filled it with heroines. The photograph made my mother sad; she would take it out and look at it. Her other sister, Virginia, had once been the mistress of that house—but poor Virginia was dead now. “We’re exiles, Becka, you and me,” Maman would say. “I’ve been banished, darling. That’s the plain truth of it.”

  I took no notice. I knew the mood would pass—and if we were exiles, so what? We’d been exiled to heaven, in my opinion. A female heaven, too, with no tedious self-important men like cousin Luc to interfere. Just myself, and my beautiful mother, and Marie-Hélène, and Marie-Hélène’s cousin and daughter, who came to clean, and to wash and scrub and iron, who hung the sheets on the line to bleach in the sun, and who stared, awestruck, at the lace and embroidery and the monogram “I.D.” stitched on Maman’s nightdresses and underwear.

  We women worshipped the House—I learned that very early. The house was a home, certainly, but it was also a temple. How I loved all its rituals! They were strictly observed: Marie-Hélène was a religieuse in this respect; she had the highest standards, and she’d tolerate no deviations. Certain days were sacrosanct: Thursday for the market; Friday for the fish; Monday for the washing; Sunday for the Mass. Incense and butter churns, hymns and quilting, psalms and pastry making. Down on our knees: Whether we were scrubbing or praying, it was holy. Nous sommes dévotes, Marie-Hélène would say, polishing and panting, proud of our industry: Tu comprends, ma petite, il faut le faire pieusement….