Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  Interesting? There’s a message for you, a message in a bottle. Cast it into the sea and watch where that comes ashore, Daddy.

  I WON’T WRITE ABOUT HIM ANYMORE. HE’S TOO BIG FOR my pen. My page won’t encompass him. He wasn’t always a mountebank; people don’t stay still in that way. Just as Frank McKendrick showed me, they can be Prospero one morning, Mark Antony the next; they can start the day as Miranda, and, hey presto, they’re Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra come the evening. Everything’s in flux, always. My Devlin father had the heart of a lion; he fought to the bitter end, and no matter what anyone else may ever tell you, my darling, it was the hidden debts and the creditors that killed him.

  He couldn’t face me with the truth; he couldn’t face the shame—that’s why he took himself off to the attics, locked the door, slung a rope over a roof beam, and broke his own neck. It was the day the debts were finally being called in, you see.

  It was also the day of my twenty-first birthday, as I told you; it was the day I came of age. I’ve never celebrated my birthday since. I won’t. I won’t. I’m wild with grief the instant I wake. They aren’t birthdays for me, they’re deathdays.

  NO MORE O’ THAT, MY DEAREST. ENOUGH, ENOUGH. I’M on the very last page of my little black notebook. I didn’t mean to end it on such a dark chord; I cut all those cords, long ago.

  Let’s forget ghosts; future tense from now on. I want you to know—I want you to know—

  How dear you are to me. How much I love you. What joy it’s given me these last months to feel you grow, to think of you and plan for you.

  When you’re born, my little one, it will be late summer, and that’s a beautful season here; there are often long warm benign weeks before the westerlies that herald autumn. You’ll be born in my Manderley room overlooking the sea. You’ll be able to hear the sea. La mer, ma mère. I’ll nurse you, and care for you and I’ll always watch over you.

  All that’s bad in me I shall cut out. I want to be the best of mothers, so you grow up in a certainty of love. I’m sure that once Max sees you, he’ll come to love you too. He’ll come to look on you as his changeling child, just as I do—I’m willing it, it’s inevitable. Who knows what might happen with time? Reconcilement? Peace? Anything, anything. Think of all the decades ahead of us.

  It’s two o’clock. Five hours from now, we’ll be on the road to London. As soon as I return here, I’ll start a new page in a new notebook and I’ll fill in the gaps in my story. I’ll tell you more of my father’s tale and Max’s; I’ll translate the braille of my marriage—and of course I’ll tell you everything that happens to us in the city, what the grave doctor says, and so on.

  How tired I am suddenly! Jasper’s restless and unsettled; he’s looking at me with such mournful eyes. I think he knows I’m going away; he can always sense it.

  I’ve opened the curtains so the first light will wake me. The alarm clock is set. Can you hear it ticking? I’m going to lie down now, and sleep for a while, my dearest one.

  4

  Ellie

  MAY 1951

  TWENTY-FIVE

  IT’S A HEAT WAVE, MY DARLING, I THOUGHT TODAY. I WAS sitting in the garden, between our palm and our monkey puzzle.

  I was writing a letter to Tom Galbraith and it was proving very difficult. I couldn’t make the words lie down on the page in the way I wanted. I knew I had to tell him what happened yesterday, and I suppose there were other things I might have liked to say, too. I’m not good at concealing my feelings. I still think of him as “Mr. Gray”; after an hour’s pen chewing, all I’d written was “Dear Tom,” followed by one pedestrian paragraph.

  I had reread sections of Rebecca’s notebook this morning, and, when I couldn’t think what to say next in my letter, her words sprang into my head. I didn’t write them down, obviously. It is a heat wave—we’ve had five weeks of unrelenting sun—but I couldn’t use the word “darling,” unfortunately, and, anyway, Tom would recognize the quotation. He knows that little black coffin book of Rebecca’s by heart, just as I do.

  I’d brought a table out into the garden to write. I was sitting exactly where the young Rebecca took tea in 1914 with my father, with twenty-five-year-old Elinor, and with my gentle grandmother (whom I never knew; she died before I was born). On either side of me, those famous Grenville roses were in full bloom. Daddy hacks them back and stunts them, but even his punitive pruning techniques can’t quell their inbred exuberance. I’ve been secretly watering and feeding them. They’ve responded to these weeks of sun, and now there were great billowing banks of them on either side of me, weighed down with glorious crumpled blooms, every shade from the softest blush pink to wine crimson and lavender. The scent was intense. I was in a bower of roses—and I kept telling myself that a bower of roses was no place to be miserable.

  I caught this melancholy from Rebecca. It’s contagious. Up it came from those pages of hers, the first time I read them. Six weeks later, despite everything that has happened, it still refuses to be exorcised; I drive it out it for an hour or so, then in it comes on the next tide. I think and think about what she wrote—and in this way she’s come to haunt me, just as she’s always haunted my father. I ask myself all these questions, some of them serious and some, I know, trivial. I think, Did Rebecca ever suspect that it was death, and not a child, that she was carrying inside her?

  This morning, examining the stillborn paragraph I’d written so far, other questions sprang into my mind and refused to be dislodged. I looked at my handwriting, which is neat and a great deal more legible than Rebecca’s. I hated its neatness. I hated its legibility. If I actually finished writing this letter and sent it, Tom Galbraith would scan it in a cursory way. He’d be interested in only one section: He’d want to hear about the visit to London I’m about to make, because it concerns Rebecca. No doubt he’d read my account of the latest news from Tite Street with the very closest attention—but beyond that my letter would be only too forgettable. Unremarkable pages from an unremarkable woman, the colonel’s daughter, the dull dutiful girl on the periphery of the story. How sick I was of being the good daughter, the invisible inaudible woman!

  I screwed my letter into a ball. I took it into the kitchen, stuffed it inside the range and burned it. I thought, How do you make yourself memorable?

  Rebecca had done just that, or so she claimed. In 1914, when she met Maxim for the first time on that visit to Manderley she had been invisible, instantly forgettable; by the time she remet him on board that ocean liner she had transformed herself. Unfortunately, she gave no handy tips as to how she pulled off that particular conjuring trick. I slammed the range door shut. The kitchen was insufferably hot. Presumably that kind of transformation is easier if you’re beautiful.

  How silent The Pines was! My father was upstairs, having his prescribed afternoon rest. He’s been put on new medication by the heart specialist and surgeon, Mr. Latimer, to whom he was referred when he went to Lanyon for those exhaustive tests. My aunt Rose, who arrived from Cambridge for an indefinite stay at Easter, was sitting by the open French windows in Daddy’s study, correcting the proofs of her forthcoming book, a weighty analysis of Jacobean tragedies. Today she was working calmly away on the Eroticism of Death section in her Webster and Tourneur chapter. Rose takes killings in her stride—over our breakfast boiled eggs this morning, we’d been amiably discussing incestuous passion, smothering with diamonds, and a fatal kiss bestowed on a poisoned skull—but then the texts Rose teaches are so stuffed with the pyrotechnics of death that virtually nothing shocks or astonishes her. All the time I’d been writing my sad abortive letter, Rose had been covering pages with spidery hieroglyphs, and changing commas to semicolons.

  I couldn’t bear to be kicking my heels in the house any longer, and I’d already decided where I needed to go, so I walked over to the French windows. I stood three feet away from Rose, and, after about five minutes, she noticed me.

  “Rose, I’m going to take Barker for a walk,” I said. “He needs a walk
, he’s getting fat and lazy. I’ll be back in time for Daddy’s tea.”

  “You’re going to Manderley, in other words,” Rose said without looking up. “Don’t worry, I shan’t tell Arthur where you’ve gone. What are you writing, Ellie? That’s the fifth page you’ve burned this afternoon. If you continue at this rate, Mr. Galbraith will be back from Brittany before you’ve completed your outpourings. Then you’ll have no excuse to write, which seems a wasted opportunity.”

  “Not true,” I said. “If I don’t write to him in Brittany, I can write to him in Cambridge. Once he gets back from France, he’s going back to King’s, he’s not staying in Kerrith. I told you, he’s given up his cottage. And they’re not outpourings.”

  “So you did,” said Rose, who remembered all this perfectly well, I knew. “And a very good thing, too. He can’t continue with this quest of his indefinitely. He should draw a firm black line under it and get on with his life. As should you, Ellie.”

  “Thanks, Rose.”

  “Now, now,” said my aunt, looking up from her pages for the first time. “I appreciate your circumstances are difficult. But worrying about your father will not help, and pining for Mr. Galbraith, or indeed any man, is positively counterproductive.”

  “I’m not bloody well pining.”

  “Aren’t you? Well, something’s the matter. You are not your usual self. You’re in a most peculiar state of mind. Now, go for your walk, for heaven’s sake. I can’t concentrate with you sighing and staring at the sea. You’re palely loitering, Ellie, and it’s unsettling.”

  I whistled to Barker, helped him into the car, and set off. I didn’t bother to reply to Rose; my aunt’s frighteningly clever, and would probably demolish all my arguments in seconds, but donnish Rose is better at analyzing texts than she is real-life situations. Rose has never married, never had children, and as far as I know has never been in love. These are limitations.

  Rose used to be my mentor, but I had a new mentor now, I told myself, as I urged the car fast round the blind bend near Tom Galbraith’s former cottage. Walk by the sea and you’ll feel me, I thought, accelerating toward the woods of Manderley. I parked by the Four Turnings entrance, and set off with Barker down the drive and into the cool blue shade of the trees. We approached the dark redoubt of the ruined house, but in the past weeks the undergrowth had sprung up, and our way was now barred by stinging nettles and thick arching brambles. I could hear Rebecca’s heartbeat in the ruins even so, just as she promised her imaginary child. Feeling as if I were that child, as if I were the girl-boy to whom her tale had been addressed (and I’d felt that, ever since I’d first read her notebook), I turned toward the place where I knew I’d find her.

  I could sense her even before I saw the shore and her boathouse. I knew she was there as soon as I heard the murmur of the sea. I think I’d begun to cry at some point on our walk; Barker sensed the distress welling up in me and came to press his damp muzzle against my legs. That dumb, gentle concern was weakening. A huge choking tide of misery washed up through me then. All my fears for my father and for a future without him rose up; I was frightened of spinsterhood, too, and despised myself for that. I put my arms around Barker and kissed him on the nose. I fought my demons down, wiped my eyes and caught my breath. I walked on past the gorse; it was still in bloom, and thick with butterflies. I reached the top of the path, looked at a lapis lazuli sea, and began to run down to the water. In my way, which is not my father’s way or Tom Galbraith’s, I was looking for Rebecca—and I felt that, if I could find her, all the knots of my past and my future would undo themselves.

  REBECCA WAS RIGHT ABOUT GHOSTS: THEY DO HAVE AN affinity for the sea. Barker and I sat for a while on the rocks, and I knew he could sense them, just as I could. I could see the ghosts Rebecca had conjured up for me, but I could also see my own. I’m now the age Rebecca was when she died, but somewhere up there on the headland was an Ellie I used to be: twenty years old, fearless, innocent, and gullible—a dangerous cocktail.

  I’d nursed my mother, my mother had died—and now it was wartime. My father was away, working on codes and ciphers in some secret establishment—“hauled back into harness,” he likes to say, but I think the truth was that he was taken on with reluctance, after endless string pulling and badgering, and then worked in some fairly humdrum capacity. The brilliant men who made the real breakthroughs at that establishment were for the most part a great deal younger, and less rusty than he was.

  I had three years of liberty; they ended in 1945 when my father returned to Kerrith, suddenly aged, his health broken by the death of my mother, and, then, late in the war, the death of his favorite child, my brother Jonathan. I knew I couldn’t leave him; it never occurred to him that I might. The decision was made in an instant, and I’ve never regretted it. People in Kerrith talk on and on about how dutiful I am, and what sacrifices I’ve made. “Sacrifice” can indeed be a shivery word, as Rebecca says, and it’s very stupid on their part to use it. I love my father; no sacrifice is—or ever was—involved, though people never believe that, no matter how often I tell them.

  As for my three years of freedom, how did I use that precious commodity? Hungrily, probably—or so I thought this afternoon. I tried to summon up that time, to remember it in detail, but the details skidded past. I joined the WRAC. I wore a uniform. I had a woman’s war: I was taught to type and salute. I drove officers in jeeps. I drilled. And I fell in love—with an American naval officer, stationed at Plymouth. I made love for the first time, with him, up there where my ghost lingers by the gorse on the headland.

  He came from the blue hills of Virginia, which was as exotic to me as Timbuktu or Islamabad. He gave me nylon stockings, his heart (or so he said), and a pretty ring that I wore on a string around my neck; he thought it best to be discreet, and to keep the engagement unofficial. “It’s unofficially official, honey,” he said—and just as well, really. He had a wife and two children back in those blue hills of Virginia, but they had somehow slipped his mind in the heat of the moment. He wrote a letter to me at the end of the war, and explained. He said he really had meant all those things he’d said to me; meant them from the bottom of his heart. He hoped I wouldn’t think badly of him.

  And I don’t. I never have. Why would I? I’m glad it happened. I’d felt utterly alive for six whole months, and that’s a fine gift by anyone’s standards.

  Barker and I buried his ring in the Manderley woods some years ago. I’d decided on a ritual purging. We made a fire of his letters too, a small fire—there weren’t that many of them, I realized, so perhaps I should have seen the warning signals; perhaps I’d been naive. Cross out and carry on, I said to myself then, and I resolved to be more choosy the next time temptation came my way. Temptation then waited five long years, which I felt was unduly dilatory. When it finally manifested itself, it was in the shape of a tall, alarmingly handsome, taciturn Scot. A man with an alias; a man who was not what he claimed to be. A man to whom I’m air: invisible Ellie. How do you make yourself memorable? I said to the sea and the rock pools this afternoon. But Rebecca proved as contrary in death as she’d been in life, and no answer was given me.

  I rose and clambered back over the rocks to the shingle. With Barker at my heels, I began to walk toward the boathouse—my chief object in coming here. I was feeling much steadier now. The air was still, with not the least breath of wind; the sea was flat calm, as calm as I’ve ever seen it. Out by the sandbank, where Rebecca sensed those sirens, the water was translucent; above us, gulls wheeled. It was on the northern side of this beach that, as Rebecca mentions, Ben Carminowe’s little sister, Lucy, was drowned in one of the rock pools.

  I paused to look at the pools, shading my eyes from the sun, and trying to work out where it had happened. Tom Galbraith, as I now know, pursued the sad little ghost of Lucy Carminowe in the course of his investigations; apparently, he spent days trying to discover whether she was alive or dead, and what might have become of her…. What a waste of time, I th
ought now, feeling a familiar rankle of frustration and impatience.

  If he’d asked any of the tenant farmers or the fishermen, anyone could have told him Lucy Carminowe’s story, though, to be fair to Tom, people in this neighborhood are close, and they don’t take kindly to intrusive questions from strangers. He was viewed with a certain suspicion from the moment of his arrival, I know. What I didn’t know was that there was a great deal of gossip in Kerrith about his habit of taking walks after dark, and the frequency of his visits to Manderley. I learned that this week, when I was waylaid by the appalling Marjorie Lane, who couldn’t wait to be spiteful about Tom’s leaving Kerrith. “How sad for you, Ellie, when we’d all hoped…Are you devastated?”

  She claimed the Manack brothers, those descendents of generations of honest smugglers, kept a very close eye on his activities, and that either they or their sister’s husband, Robert Lane, started the rumor that Tom Galbraith was working undercover for Customs and Excise. So this explains, in part, why he encountered a wall of silence from local people—but I think there were other problems, too, problems of his own making. If you want people to warm to you and open up to you, it helps if you’re similarly accessible. He’s such a mollusk of a man! When they’re questioned by someone as wary and defensive as he is, people clam up. Why can’t he see that?