Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  I can see and hear it still, I can tell it like the beads of a rosary. The irons set to warm on the range for the ruchings on Maman’s blouses, the blue bags of starch, the crack of sheets in the wind, the scouring of the kitchen table, the wax melted down with turpentine to polish the furniture, the windows rubbed with scrim until they glinted, the necessity for airing the feather mattresses, the huge square pillows, and the counterpanes. The wood that needed to be stacked and stored; the floors that needed to be scrubbed; the sin in a speck of dust—this was Marie-Hélène’s religion and I learned it at her knee. Even now, my darling, it rules me.

  I never saw that there was a missing element, a prop that should have been there, but wasn’t; not until I was nearly seven, and at the beach one day, one of the older village boys, a tall thin boy who used to follow me and stare, a boy who didn’t know that Maman was la veuve jeune et tragique, threw a stone at me, and jeered and said, Where’s your father, little girl, where’s your father?

  I told him my father was dead. I told him what Maman had told me, that my father’s ship went down on the way to South Africa. I said my father was lying on the seabed by the Cape, being washed by the green-glass waves of the Atlantic. His eyes were pearl and his bones were coral, I told him, for Maman read me Shakespeare, even then, before I ever acted, before we turned into gypsies and joined Sir Frank McKendrick’s company.

  How the boy laughed at that. He pulled my hair and kissed me on the mouth, and tore my dress. He said I was wicked and proud and my eyes tormented him; he said I’d go to hell where there was a special pit they kept for bastards. I bit his hand so the blood flowed. He hit me then, right across the face, so hard I saw stars. I fell down on the sand. He lay on top of me on my black dress; he put a hand on my neck so I couldn’t breathe, then he fumbled and wriggled.

  When it was over, he wept, and told me I was sinful, and begged my forgiveness. It was the first time I learned what fools men are, so tempted and so abject. I hated that boy, with his stares and his sighs and his hand on my neck, trying to subdue me. If I’d been strong enough, I’d have struck him down there and then—but he was twice my age and twice my size, so I scratched his face and I cursed him. Another Rebecca sprang to life in me. I told him he was damned for sure, and my dead father would rise up one of these days from the seabed and claim him.

  He slunk away, and avoided me after that, and three months later he drowned in his father’s fishing boat. He fell overboard in a storm, and died entangled in a fishing net. I gave thanks to my dead Devlin father, who gave me my black hair my mother said, and who’d been so quick to avenge me. But there was talk in the village, I think, trouble at any rate; they were very superstitious, and some people told Marie-Hélène I had the evil eye. Cousin Luc raved and reproached, the Countess despaired of us, and Maman grew sad and preoccupied.

  Not long after that, we came back to England. It might have been because of the boy and the gossip; it might have been because the checks and the pretty presents had stopped arriving. There was a crisis, certainly—and Maman wouldn’t explain. She was proud, and she hated to be questioned. “What do we care, Becka?” she said to me, hugging me hard, two bright flags of color in her cheeks. “We’ll manage. I still have friends. I won’t be hidden away any longer, it’s insulting. We’ll go back and I’ll show you England—you’ll see, we’ll conquer, my darling!”

  I TOLD MAX THIS STORY ONCE—OR SOME OF IT. MAX HAD predictable ideas about weddings, but I meant to be married in my place, so I made him come back with me to St. Croigne Dulac. I thought, we’ll be married in the small gray church by the sea. The old priest who called me a little pagan will marry us. Marie-Hélène can cook the wedding feast; tedious cousin Luc can propose a toast—and it’s one in the eye for that harridan of a mother of his, the Countess.

  These scenes were so clear in my mind, but I hadn’t learned how to plan then. Two seconds in the place—what a fool I’d been—it all started unraveling. The priest was dead; the Countess was dead; Marie-Hélène was widowed and had moved away; cousin Luc was a mad ranting recluse; and officialdom made all these stupid difficulties—I wasn’t a proper Catholic, Max was a dreary Protestant, the church was out of the question, it was the mairie or nothing.

  I was angry, of course—but I didn’t really care. All ceremonies are meaningless. I’d have had a voodoo wedding, and it wouldn’t have worried me one scrap, but Max—ah, Max was very different. He dared a little, but not enough—and at St. Croigne Dulac he began doubting.

  I took him to the village; I introduced him to the fishermen, and to Marie-Hélène’s family. I think they’d forgotten about the evil eye, for they opened their hearts to us—and what did Max do? He flinched, he drew back; he was feline and finicky and fastidious. Max can speak German; I speak French: There’s the difference between us in a nutshell, my dearest. A terrible Aryan Englishness settled upon him like a cloak, and all those gentlemen ancestors of his rose up to reprimand him. What was he doing here, was he being rash, was he making a mistake he’d come to regret—was there time to get out of it?

  Max loves wildness, you see; it tempts him—but if it comes too close, it terrifies him. Back to the cricket scores, then, and tea at 4:30, rules and regulations, worship at the altar of convention—I’ve no patience with it, it suffocates me. But there was a risk here, and I could see that. We made the arrangements at the mairie, but Max did so reluctantly. Darling, what will people think? he said. Darling, why don’t we go back to England? We could have the wedding at Manderley. No one need find that odd, your parents are dead, after all. My grandmother will arrange everything. Wouldn’t you prefer a church, and a beautiful dress? Darling, don’t be rash, think a little—you know my position, you know what’s expected of me. Such concern in his eyes! I suddenly saw the truth: Any delay and he might panic, walk away from the whole thing, and jilt me; he might desert me, the way my mother did, my father did. Well, I couldn’t have that; he’d sworn he loved me—and I know he did. I loved Manderley with all my heart, so I had to act quickly.

  I took Max down to the beach one dusky afternoon; it was the day before our appointment at the mairie, and Max was still objecting. I decided I’d show him who I was, I was quite desperate to show him who I was—wedding nerves, maybe. So I showed him my world, that dangerous sea, the looking-glass pools, the bone-white sand, my avenging father, my golden-haired mother who danced by the waves, the mauve gloves, the locket, the Religion of the House, and the piano that wouldn’t play a Mozart sonata because its strings needed tuning.

  I think he understood. I think he did. He said I was his dearest love—I’m sure he said that. He looked at me with those sad dark eyes of his; he forgot the February cold; he called me his Lady from the Sea, and when the sea mist drifted in, he caught me close, stroked the sealskin fur I was wrapped in, and kissed me. We’d go to the mairie tomorrow just as I wanted, he said. We were already man and wife in every important sense, and he understood now why I wanted to be married here, why it mattered to me. Whatever you ask of me, I will do, he said. That is true now, darling, and it always will be until the day I die. Take my hand—Rebecca, I swear it to you.

  I took his hand, the waves washed the shore, and then—oh, what a mistake!—up came the memory. I told him about that boy. I explained how he jeered, and the wicked things he said; I told Max how I bit his hand; I showed him the place where I saw stars and the boy knocked me down; I told him about the stains on my skirt and the fish-stink smell and how the boy prayed, panted, and wriggled.

  I tried to make him understand—but he didn’t. His expression began to change. First I saw doubts, then that hideous fastidious distaste, and then—right at the very back of his eyes—a reluctant excitement, slowly deepening. You know what? His expression was the very same as that boy’s—it was identical! That shocked me to the heart—and I will never, ever, forgive him.

  He rallied, of course. He drew on those gentlemanly reserves of his, and he came riding to my rescue years too late,
when I didn’t need rescuing anyway. All the wormy conventions of his class came wriggling to the surface. He said it was a terrible thing to happen to a child; it was disgusting, repellent, and he so admired me for having the courage to tell him. I despised him for such banalities. I think he thought I was ashamed—which was quite wrong. Why should I be ashamed? But I let that pass. He put his arms around me, and said I’d always be safe from now on, because he’d be there to protect me. Well, that was wrong, too—I’m a thousand times tougher than Max is, and I can protect myself perfectly well. Watch out if you cross me; that boy died, didn’t he?

  I told him that—but he didn’t believe me, of course. He kissed my eyes, then my mouth; if it hadn’t been so cold, I think he’d have lain down there on the sand with me. He took me back to our little hotel instead, and came into my room, and pushed me back on the bed; he was trembling. Again and again: I could see that boy haunting him. He was desperate to exorcise him—but he also wanted, very strange this, to be him.

  Such pleasure; we were drunk with it. All Max’s courage returned; we rolled out of damp sheets, and pulled on our clothes, and went to the mairie with two witnesses off the street; we were married by ten in the morning. My underclothes were soaked with the seepings of our lovemaking; the white hothouse roses in my bouquet had sharp thorns and they cut my hand; Max licked off the blood, then we drank red wine at the hotel, and went back to bed and the sea pounded all night, and Max wasn’t so fastidious then—not by any means. No one need ever know, Max said, exultant, the next morning. If they ask about the wedding, we’ll lie. It will be our secret, my darling.

  Yes, it will, I replied. I was exultant, too. I wrapped the damp sheet around me, and tossed back my hair. I said, This is my wedding dress. It had a twenty-foot train. We had six bridesmaids, and two pageboys. The choir sang like angels. The reception at the chateau was held by candlelight. When we cut our white cake, the knife glinted. My cousin proposed the toast, and Max made an elegant speech, in perfect French. He said—

  I stopped. Max had become very still; he was watching me intently. You said the wedding would be our secret—you said we should lie, I began, and leaned forward to kiss him. I was wearing two rings, my new wedding band and my eternity diamonds—that may have angered him. Max turned aside. I know—but I hadn’t realized just how well you can lie, he replied and he gave me a strange pale look. None of that happened, yet you make me see it.

  Trouble: I could smell it at once. I suppose I knew that questions were inevitable now the doubts had been sown. Had I told him the whole truth? Had I told him everything? Who else, apart from the boy at the beach? When, where, and how often…? Believe me, dearest, such questions are a terrible error in a marriage or a love affair. It’s a bad idea to ask them—and it’s a very bad idea indeed to answer them, let alone truthfully. Intense jealousy is not a sane state of mind; after the questions come the accusations—and, in Max’s case, I didn’t have to wait very long, just three days and a long journey into our honeymoon. An interrogation on a cliff top somewhere near Monte Carlo, a wedding-cake white hotel, a suicidal grand corniche, questions that had been brewing, fermenting—and, three hundred feet down, a sea even this rich coast couldn’t tame, churning.

  Truth and lies are twins. Death and desire live back to back—I’ve always known that, but for Max the discovery was agony. I looked at his white face, I measured the anguish in his eyes, and I knew that there’d be no way back from this edge. Push me over, I thought—and he was tempted, my darling.

  What a mystery men’s minds are. How does their logic work? Why do they invert everything? Why do they start off with some crazed impossible idea, and then rail because the world—or, in my case, the woman—fails to fit it?

  I’m sure I was circumspect in the answers I gave Max. I told him about some of the lovers—I was twenty-five, after all, and my sins in that respect didn’t seem too heinous. Max wasn’t a virgin, so why should I be? But I didn’t explain who Maman was. I always called her “Isabel”; I gave her her death-certificate name. I was very careful indeed on the father question (no point in overturning the boat, and, although there are question marks, I think black-haired Devlin certainly was my father, anyway). I censored my stories of Greenways and cousin Jack severely. I was angry, of course, so a few revelations may have slipped past my guard—but nothing important, I’m almost certain. In any case, I might just as well not have bothered, I can see that now. I made my mistake earlier, when I told him about that boy on the beach. That was the coup de grâce, definitely. I think our fight to the death began then, my dearest.

  Max has never been able to forget that boy, and time has translated him. He’s not an enemy or an animal anymore, he’s my husband’s closest companion, he’s his double. When Max speaks of him now—and that boy’s still thrown in my face whenever we quarrel—he says he pities him.

  Max says it wasn’t the boy’s fault, it was mine. He says I have bad blood and bad ways, and I led the boy on, I must have done.

  I don’t deny it now, where’s the point? Let Max think what he likes. His accusations make me incandescent. One flick of that switch and the high voltage sizzles. But I won’t stoop to argue with him. I’d never change his mind anyway, it’s made up; as far as my husband’s concerned, that poor dead boy is a fellow sufferer. It was my wicked toils he was caught up in, not a fishing net. Even as a child, you see, I was wicked and oversexed and unnatural. The English gentleman agrees with those French peasants: I do have the evil eye—and God help any man who comes my way because, in the gospel according to Max, I’m a destroyer. I’m his very own Delilah, and (it goes without saying) his Jezebel.

  That boy was the first of my victims, Max says, and my dear husband intends to be the last. Or so I think sometimes, when I see an Othello glint in his eye—and I’ve been seeing that more and more, recently.

  A week ago, I caught him oiling his service revolver. Put the mad bitch down, and he’d be doing everyone a favor. I think that’s what he thinks. He’d like to silence me—but if he believes a bullet would achieve that, he’s much mistaken.

  Whatever Max does, he’ll never silence me. I’ll talk on and on in his head and his heart and his guts, forever and ever. Anyway, he can’t kill me now, however much he might yearn to. I’m pregnant.

  Pregnant women escape the hangman, no matter how serious their crime, did you know that? They are spared—and Max will spare me. He needs an heir, after all, he’s desperate for an heir. So desperate in so many different ways that just occasionally he’s tempted out of that monk’s bed in his dressing room. He brushes my long black hair; we cling to each other; we think how different it might have been and how different it once was. I do not always hate him and he does not always hate me; we watch that recognition spark in each other’s eyes, and when that fire catches, what dry kindling we are, how we burn then, hotter than any furnace, or—

  The last time that happened was a year ago. Now my hair is cropped. I have nun’s hair now. I lose track of time, sometimes. I think it’s because I feel so weary. Or it’s that blue melancholy that comes in on the tide, maybe.

  I wonder: If I gave Max his heir, if—by hook or by crook—I gave him his heir, what would happen then? Would the knot of our past undo itself?

  Probably not. Probably not. Oh, my love, how tired I feel. I’m dizzy and sick with fatigue. I don’t want to be silenced, I won’t be silenced. I want to talk, and I want the dead to talk through me, but it takes so much willpower.

  MAYBE I’LL SLEEP FOR A WHILE, THEN GO ON. IT’S RAINing. Wait—did I hear something?

  I’ll have to pause. I’ll continue with my story in a while, my sweet. I’ll tell you how I learned to act, how I came to be at Manderley, and how I first met Max, the son and heir, in his army uniform.

  But just for now, I’m going to close up my little black notebook and hide it away. I’m being spied on again. Someone’s coming. Jasper’s growling, and I can hear footsteps on the shingle.

  TWENTY-TW
O

  MY VISITOR HAS LEFT. WHEN I HEARD THE FOOTSTEPS, I thought it might be husband Max, returning early and hoping to catch me unawares—he’s convinced that one of these days his prayers will come true, and he’ll catch me in flagrante. Then I thought it might be mad Ben Carminowe, who haunts this beach; Max says he’s looking for his little sister, who drowned in one of the rock pools here. Whatever the reason, he will not be driven away, and he stares through the windows at me. I told him, if he spies on me again, I’ll have him put in an asylum. He reminds me of the Breton boy on that Breton beach, and I hate him.

  It was neither of these: It was Arthur Julyan, my dear Colonel, who comes to my fancy-dress balls as Cromwell, my Lord Protector. He was fighting his conscience on a long coastal walk, and calling in, he said, because he’d seen the light in the window. He is my one true friend in this place—and I was as careful with him as I always am. Today I knew: One tiny gesture, one remark, and he might tip over the edge and confess what he feels for me. I like him too much to risk that—we would both regret a confession of that sort—so I was scrupulous. Despite that bad blood of mine, I have never encouraged him—not one jot, please note! I remain fond of him; he is honorable, lonely, antique, and astute. I regret the pain his feelings cause him.

  I suspect that, apart from Max’s grandmother, he is the only person in this neighborhood who knows who I am. No one else has made any connection between a thin drab child who visited the area once in 1914 and Max’s wife. I’ve reinvented and transformed myself, so why should they? But I’m almost sure Arthur Julyan recognized me. As a girl, I was introduced to him briefly; over a decade later we remet. He’d just returned from Singapore; I was a bride, three months married. I came running in from the gardens and found him waiting to pay his respects in the shadows of the drawing room at Manderley. I was wearing a white dress and the little blue butterfly brooch Maman gave me. We shook hands. I saw him look at that brooch, and I’m sure, almost sure, that he knew me. If he didn’t recognize me, he recognised my talisman.