Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  You’ve seen the twin rocks christened Scylla and Charybdis, centuries ago, when Max was a child. You’ve navigated between them, ventured out into the open sea, and felt the swell of the ocean for the first time. Isn’t that intoxicating—feeling that pulse, riding that power? But be warned. Tonight, conditions were calm for this coast; those waves aren’t always so obedient, and if the wind alters direction, their mood can change very swiftly.

  Such a night! A world made monochrome; a mercury sea, a high full merciless moon; water of such transparency you could see the upper ridges of the sandbar out by the reef—a treacherous underwater bank, so pale and bone colored. Whenever I see that, I think of the nights in the wings when I listened to Oberon; I know a bank…and, although I understand I must steer away from it, it entices me. If there are sirens in this bay—and I know better than most that there are—it’s there that they lie in wait and sing their songs for me.

  Tonight, I could hear their voices clearly. In the moonlight, they were sweet, plangent, and powerful. Perhaps I was tiring; suddenly I longed to lie down there and sleep. I felt such a yearning for oblivion. I wanted to rest in peace on that bone-white bank, nestle under the rocks beyond it. I thought, No more striving; O, wind a chain about my wrists, pay me out, and lower me down there….

  You should know—I don’t mind your knowing—I’ve had that temptation before, I’ve been beckoned down that route for years. When I was a child, I heard those sirens. They whispered to me once on the Brittany waves, but sirens are great survivors, and can adapt to all manner of habitations if need be. They’re ingenious, I’ve found.

  The sea, of course. They like best to be there. But they’ll take up residence almost anywhere: on the deck of an ocean liner, or the top floor of a high building; inside razors and gas jets and guns; they fit snugly into a handful of pills; they’ll breed like germs on the broken neck of a bottle. They sang out from razors after Maman died—and, in my twenty-first year, when my Devlin father had his neck broken, they were everywhere, the whole house swarmed, it stank of them. I gave in then: I uncorked a bottle I knew was full of them, and I sucked it dry in a locked room at Greenways. I swallowed a milky pint of their poisonous promises then, and I was sure that would satisfy them—but I was foiled. Guardian Danny had the door broken down; I was pumped out in some hospital, and in due course I was glad. I began planning how to marry Max not long afterward. As I said, the ways of death are infinite.

  Last year, once last year, just after I’d cut my hair, I went out in Je Reviens, and I nearly succumbed to those sirens again. But that was the last temptation, and it was before your advent, so don’t be anxious; I know how deathly cold that water is, never fear. I’ve stopped my ears to those voices, like Odysseus; I’ve blinded my eyes to those beckoning hands. I won’t be joining my sisters by the reef, I promise you—not now I have such precious cargo aboard, my darling.

  NOW WE’RE IN HARBOR, AND ALL IS WELL. JE REVIENS rides at anchor on the buoy by the breakwater; I had her made by Marie-Hélène’s eldest boy, and he named her for me. A lucky name for a lucky boat: For all those who sail in her, safe passage home is assured. Her tender’s tied fast at the jetty; her spare sails are stowed, wound as tight as winding sheets; all her brass gleams like gold; her decks are smooth as skin, she’s been cleaned and caulked and rigged by expert hands; she’s seaworthy, ready for embarkation—why, in this boat, we could go anywhere, we could sail to Newfoundland.

  And I’m ready, too. Danny’s packed my case for me, I’ve set an alarm clock on my table here, in case I should oversleep. I leave for London at six. I’ll have my hair done when I get there because I want to look my best tomorrow; then I’ll have lunch at my club. My grave doctor is so in demand that he can’t see me until two. Frustrating! I’d like us to see him at dawn. I may set off even earlier—it’s such a long drive. I’m impatient to be there, and above all I don’t want to encounter Max when I’m leaving; he’s furious that I’m going back to London.

  I want to continue with our story, but first I must tell you what happened when I informed Max of my plans, which I did over dinner last night. I’d expected trouble, but what happened was very strange, my darling. I’d finished writing, as you know, then I hid my notebooks away. Our boathouse cottage is damp, and the best place to hide things is somewhere ordinary or everyday, so I’ve been keeping them in an old biscuit tin; then I locked the door and set off up the path. It was about 6:30; the light was pearl, the sky rose-colored, with streaks of garnet. When I reached the top of the path, the scent of the azaleas was heavy and sweet from the evening dew. Manderley lay before me, in all its beauty. In such lights, it looks welcoming and harmonious, but it’s a house of many moods, some of them dark, and they can change as swiftly as the weather here. I exult in that—but not everyone, not even Max, agrees with me.

  Last night, the windows were lit up by the sun’s sinking rays; the long western facade was aflame. I kicked off my shoes and walked barefoot across the cool damp grass toward my home. The thrush that’s nesting in the lilacs was singing; a blackbird saluted the beauty of the evening from the yew. I was at the still point of the turning universe, suspended in time, with no yesterday to perplex me and no tomorrow to fear. I could feel your weight in my womb. I could hear the sea moving behind me. I felt the greatest possible joy, my darling.

  I went into the house, and it was as perfect as the evening. The branches of white lilac that’s forced on every year were blooming in the right vase on the right table; the flames of the fires burned steady; lilac and woodsmoke scented the air. Manderley was so still, so utterly lovely. All the fervor of my old Religion of the House rose up in me. What a hermetic place this was when I first came here—a barracks would have been more welcoming; you couldn’t breathe, the air was so old. Now my house has become itself; it’s a sanctuary. I crossed into the hall where the cool flagstones caressed my feet, and the thick ancient walls were as pale as alabaster. The oak stair treads were smooth; the bannister fitted my hand. I knew that my work was well done, and Marie-Hélène would have approved of me.

  I went upstairs to my bedroom. Danny drew a bath for me, and I washed in the soft fragrant water; she brushed my hair. I put on a sea-green silk dress; I wound some pearls round my neck; I put scent on my wrists, and on my right hand some ancestor emerald Max gave me on our honeymoon. I’d eaten very little today, but I’d only been sick twice, and that was encouraging. I felt cleansed and anointed and calm. I went along the gallery, past all those portraits. I saluted the women of this house: Caroline de Winter, the most tormented of them all, and those three graces, the Grenville sisters, Evangeline, Virginia, and Isolda.

  I decided I’d tell Max over dinner that I’d be going to London tomorrow; I’d do it when the servants were there. I fill the house with people for days at a time, you see, dearest, but sooner or later there comes an evening when we have to be alone together. I know Max dreads such evenings—we sit there acting out our rituals for our spectral spectator servants, two castaways, surrounded by wrack, wreckage, and ruin.

  God, that dining room’s cold when there’s just the two of us! I take precautions, insofar as I can. I ensure the fire’s been built up with the best oak logs, with heartwood—and the room always seems warm enough when we first enter. The wines are always good; the food is superb. Then I look down that long mahogany table at Max, past the bulwarks of flowers and silver; I look at his stiff white shirt and I look at his eyes; I listen to the conversation we make for the servants’ sake and my blood starts to congeal. The pack ice closes in. Icicles form in my lungs. I’d be warmer in Siberia.

  Last night, my blue-green dress shimmered in the candlelight; the emerald ring was now loose on my finger. I could see my pale double, and Max’s, moving on the polished mahogany. There was a pyramid of dark fruits between us. I was so strung up. My eyes shone. I’m too thin, but I know I looked beautiful, sitting there, dying of cold, and I’m almost sure Max had noticed that.

  “So soon?”
Max said. “It’s less than a week since you last went to London.”

  “It will be exactly a week,” I replied. I thought, Am I without powers now?

  “And will you be staying overnight?” he asked, for the benefit of Frith and Co., who were standing to attention in the shadows. He gave me a wintry glance. He wasn’t calm, but how calm he sounded!

  “I don’t like the thought of your doing that drive twice in one day, darling,” he said. “It’s too far. You’ll be exhausted. That’s how accidents happen.”

  “I haven’t driven off the road yet,” I said.

  “There’s always a first time,” he answered.

  Terms of endearment for the sake of servants’ ears—that always enrages me, and Max knows it. When we were finally alone, and God knows that’s hard enough at Manderley, I told him, If he’d like to exile me to my flat, not just overnight but for a week, a month—or evermore, if possible—then he should have the guts to say so in front of Frith. He says it to me often enough; why not let the servants in on the secret? Why not broadcast it to the world, Max?

  No answer, but I could feel a groundswell of rage and misery. We were in the library, his cavern of books. It smells male: leather, dogs, cigarettes, old newspapers, old brandy, and old feuds. Max was barricaded behind a newspaper, a new technique of his. I have to goad him a great deal now to get him to react; he’s afraid to retaliate the way he once did. If he can, he avoids the blows and bloodletting and we both know why. Anger opens a wide, wide door, and even now sex lies in wait on the other side of that portal.

  I sat there in the leather chair opposite him. I smoked a cigarette. I smoked one more. All my own anger was leaching away; I had that weakening bleeding sensation again, the one I had yesterday when I stood outside the estate office. I was tired, bone tired—and I was feeling so sick. I’d scarcely been able to eat any dinner, and that was making me desperate. My thoughts went round and round on a torturer’s wheel. First breakfast, then lunch, then tea, now dinner. No one ever told me you could have morning sickness twenty-four hours a day.

  I don’t want to starve you. The clock ticked; the newspaper pages rustled. I had the strangest sensation that I’d died; I didn’t exist; was Rebecca invisible now?

  I looked around that room, the dog-fox’s den, his refuge: shelves of bloodstock bibles, equine and human. Shelves of other authorities. Precious few females, a tonage of male authors. Christ, there’s thousands of them. How they clamor! I haven’t touched this room. I left it as Max likes it: plain, shabby. I tried to read the patterns on the dark Turkish rug; what did they tell me? Was there a message in the curtains, in Great-grandpapa’s furniture? What did the air here say?

  I have a very good critical eye, and I knew: unchanged since the day of creation! Poor Virginia will have sat in this chair; Max’s grandmother sat here before I persuaded her to depart to the dower house. Maybe Max’s great-grandmother alighted here once, and another mother before her. All those de Winter wives; the line stretched back to the crack of doom—and, just as I was thinking that, the strangest thing happened. There was a new ghost, I realized, she’d come in out of the blue night air, and she was skulking over there by the blue curtains.

  Such a stealthy presence, very subdued—but insistent, determined; there’s a strength in passivity, and I could sense it now, sidling up to my chair. Max seemed unaware of her presence; I leaned forward to take a good look at her. Such a secretive, bloodless mouse squeak of a ghost! Sweet as sugar, innocent as a schoolgirl, not a scrap of makeup, wearing no scent, lank hair—sly eyes, I thought, but I expect I was biased. I could smell emulation and rivalry; I didn’t take to her, not at all, my darling.

  She was stroking my dog; she had my handkerchief in her pocket. A tweed skirt and a twinset, an air of docile desperation; no fire, no chic, no nerve. I thought, Who in God’s name is she? How dare she come here?

  Did she have a name? She put a finger to her lips; no name, apparently. I decided it was Max who was conjuring up this anonymity, this airy nothing; perhaps this hallucination was his notion of an ideal wife, the woman of eternal subservience who might have made the perfect Mrs. de Winter.

  That angered me. How could that be? Was I so wrong, so ill suited from the very beginning? I gave Max the gift of tumult once. I put lightning in his hand. Such gifts are rare. Had he forgotten that? If so, he was betraying himself; he was a lesser man than I’d thought him; he was paltry.

  I felt the blood rush up to my head; I felt dizzy and murderous. Not possible, I said to myself; not possible. I know what happened between us; nothing and no one will unwrite that; those words are carved too deep in us. Time started to bend and the room started to move. I stood up. I felt sick, white with anger and contempt; I could hear a noise like cards shuffling; they were being shuffled by a huge and expert hand, packs and packs of them.

  I may have made a sound of protest, because Max also rose; he started to move toward me. And then the astonishing thing happened. It wasn’t Max who put his arms around me, it was that quiet ghost girl with her wide seeking eyes. She stepped in between me and Max; she held on to me for strength; I saw it was I who’d summoned her up, and I saw she could be my ally. I kissed her on the cheek, like an accomplice, and then on the mouth, like a lover. Blood rushed up into her bloodless cheeks. It was such a deep shocking kiss that we both shuddered. She gave a sigh and vanished into the air. She left as swiftly as she came—and my blind husband noticed nothing.

  How do you explain that? Who do you think she was, this revenant? Even by Manderley standards, rousing a ghost that equivocal was unusual.

  I’ve been thinking about this vision since, and I’ve decided it was due to your influence. You’re so rooted in me now that you’ve altered my eyesight forever. I could always see around corners, and over the lip of the horizon, but now I’m perfected. My new powers are extraordinary. I can see to infinity and way beyond; I can see all the patterns in my past that I never saw when it was happening.

  So, pregnant with my new powers, I’ll continue our story. I must tell you how I came to Manderley, first as a girl, then as a bride, my darling.

  IT WAS NOVEMBER 5, 1914; THAT WAS THE DAY I FIRST came to Manderley. It was the week of my birthday and it was Guy Fawkes Night. I’d hoped I might be allowed a birthday visit to Maman, but I wasn’t. On our way to Manderley, we passed a great mountain of wood that had been piled up on the outskirts of Kerrith; they were going to burn the transgressor in effigy that evening. The little outing had been announced the previous day, without warning, by Evangeline, and I’d been very surprised. True, Evangeline had taken me out on my leash once or twice recently, but to Manderley? That seemed very incendiary.

  The preparations took an hour. I was stripped, scrubbed, and disciplined. My rebel hair was flattened and curbed; it was bound up into plaits and coiled on the back of my neck like a dead snake, stabbed with hairpins. A hat was jammed on top of it; my nails were inspected, and the bitten stumps sighed over; my fingers were forced into tight gloves. I was laced into layers of modesty: camisoles and bodices and scratchy starched petticoats. My feet were buttoned up into little boots I’d outgrown, and, as a final insult—none of my own dresses passing muster—I was dolled up in an old frock of Jocelyn’s the color of dried blood, surmounted by a cape affair. What a triumph; I looked hideous!

  When the maid had completed this assignment, I was led downstairs for Evangeline’s inspection. She seemed to approve the effect until she came to my face. She took my chin in her hand, and tilted it up toward her. She looked intently, very intently, first at my mouth, then at my eyes. She sighed, frowned, and shook her head, and I could see these features of mine disturbed her. What was wrong with my mouth? Hothead Orlando had once said, in a teasing way to Maman, that it was kissable, which had put Maman in a temper all day. Were kissable mouths not permitted? And what was wrong with my eyes? “What’s wrong with my eyes?” I said as Evangeline continued her inspection. “I can’t help them. They’re the eyes I wa
s born with.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with your eyes, child,” Evangeline said, in a defeated way. “It’s just…I think it’s the expression, dear. You always look so bold. And the effect—your eyes are an unusual color, you know, and your lashes are very long and thick—I’m sure you’re not aware of it, Rebecca, but it’s slightly immodest somehow. A young lady does not stare, my dear, and if she feels scornful, she disguises it.”

  “Shall I stare at my boots?” I said. “I’ll stare at them if you prefer it.”

  Evangeline told me not to be impertinent, and we left with her uniformed driver in her motor car. Up hill and down dale, through tall iron gates, and into the endless drive of my imagination. The Indian summer was continuing. It was hot and thunderous. The leaves on the trees in the Manderley woods had shriveled; great golden heaps were being raked up and burned by gardeners. The gravel hissed and crunched; the air smelled of smoke; when we slowed at a bend I could hear the sea. Ghosts greeted me. Sweet aunt Virginia came out to welcome me. When Evangeline was looking the other way, I fished out my blue butterfly brooch, secreted in my pocket, and pinned it right on the front of my dress. My blazon, where no one could miss seeing it.

  We entered the great tomb of the north entrance portal where, returning as Max’s bride a decade or so later, I would drop one of my gloves and force Frith to stoop and pick it up—my private revenge on him for those mauve suede gloves he’d packed up to placate my poor Maman, that present from a scoundrel. Frith wasn’t butler on this first visit; some other watchdog, some other Cerberus came out to greet us. And in we went to the house of the dead: dark, dark, the air wet with the sweat of centuries of secrets. Welcome to Hades!

  A drawing room, dearest: not my drawing room, not my lovely creation, but the place it used to be; the windows fastened shut, the light made wintry by these thick ugly barbarous curtains, all festooned and frogged and looped back with silky hangmen’s nooses. A miserable little heap of wood expiring in the fireplace; the paneling obscured by great dark mothy tapestries; abominable fat chairs in funereal colors set crabwise across the corners; a thousand little traps and fortifications, baby tables on stilted legs, stunted stools. Trying to find a passageway across that room was like negotiating no-man’s-land. One little flick with my preposterous skirt, and I could cause a catastrophe. What a crashing of china knickknackery then, what a tinkling of photograph frames as they fell to the floor. There were ancestral images on every available surface; I knew one of them had to be Lionel—ah, the pleasure in smashing his image!