Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  Daddy could have told him Lucy’s story, if he’d asked, and so could I; it’s brief enough in all conscience. Like her brother, she was rumored to be Lionel de Winter’s illegitimate child, though I don’t know if that’s true. If one credited all the rumors about him, half Kerrith would be his descendents. From infancy, there was some mysterious ailment: Lucy scarcely grew, she failed to thrive. When she was about seven, she was sent to live with an aunt with a farm inland, but she kept running away, and returning here in search of her brother. She drowned in a pool out there when she was nine years old—only a few months after the glimpse of her that Rebecca records in her notebook.

  When she slipped and fell she had been trespassing with her brother, and gathering shells. She had a passion for shells. Apart from her diminutive stature, that’s virtually all anyone now remembers of her, poor child. But she is buried in the Manderley churchyard. Her stone is lichened and worn, the inscription’s almost unreadable; I took Tom Galbraith to it, eventually, but I could have taken him there much earlier if he’d asked. I could have helped him with this part of his puzzle—and with other parts of it, too. The fact that he rarely asked me anything didn’t help him, I feel. I still don’t understand why he kept me at arm’s length in that way. Was it so hard to trust me? What’s wrong with my testimony?

  I blame my gender. It’s my sex that’s at fault, I think. Tom Galbraith finds it difficult to talk to women; he seems to find them irrational and intuitive, and for him intuition’s invalid. He didn’t listen to me, and he didn’t listen to Elinor and Jocelyn as closely as he might have done, either. I’m not even sure that he’s listened—truly listened—to Rebecca. I felt a wave of retrospective rancor at this blind male arrogance. In this respect, for all his scholarship, Tom Galbraith was a fool. He just couldn’t see an obvious truth: Women are the gossips, the seers, the storytellers. One of these days I’ll tell him, Pay attention, Tom dear, because it’s women who are the keepers of secrets.

  I’d reached the boathouse by then. There were signs of a recent bonfire on the shingle nearby; someone had been burning bits of wood and old rotten material. I poked at the still-warm ashes with my foot; the air smelled singed. Barker flopped down gratefully in the shade by the boathouse walls. I pushed the door open. Sacking had been pulled over the windows; inside, it was dark after the dazzle of the sunlight, and deliciously cool. I knew I was going to make a discovery; I could sense an imminence, just as I could yesterday when I answered that telephone call from Tite Street.

  Tom had told me about the search he made of this place, weeks ago now. There have been changes since then. The Manack brothers shipped in one too many cases of undrinkable sherry, I think; so far, they’ve been too wily to get caught, but Customs and Excise has been making searches of any likely illicit storage premises in the vicinity of Kerrith, including this boathouse. Nothing was found, I gather—any evidence there might have been had been spirited away—but Elinor and Jocelyn told me yesterday that complaints were made to the land agents responsible for Manderley; they were asked to make Rebecca’s boathouse “secure.” So my visit was timely. Some preparatory clearance work was in progress, as I could see once my eyes adjusted to the light, but—as I’d hoped—it had not been completed. Some of Rebecca’s belongings were still here.

  The semirotten furniture Tom Galbraith described to me had already gone—it had been burned on that bonfire, presumably. The door into the storage area at the far end had been wrenched off its hinges, and beyond it there was now no sign of the ropes and sails Tom had seen, the sails Rebecca had described as wound tight like winding sheets. I peered into that dark space, wishing I’d brought a flashlight with me; thick cobwebs brushed at my face like hands.

  I stepped back into the area where Rebecca had sat writing in her notebook. There was a pile of ashes and soot in the fireplace and a burned smell to the clammy air; my heart was beating painfully fast. I was certain I was standing in the place where Rebecca had been killed. I’m certain I now know what happened to her that night in the boathouse.

  Rebecca made Maxim kill her, murder was her chosen method of suicide—I’m sure of that, as sure as if she’d taken me by the hand and told me. In her notebook she claims that she could make him murder, and I believe her. She has a wicked tongue, and I could half imagine how she might have done it, with rage and desire as her twin weapons. Did he kiss her before he killed her? Did she persuade him that death was the ultimate way to possess her? Cover her face,/Mine eyes dazzle. I shouldn’t have discussed those blood-soaked plays with Rose this morning, perhaps. It’s as dangerous for me to have a headful of plays as it was for Rebecca, but they’re educative, particularly if your own experience is as limited as mine is. I closed my eyes, and shimmying up out of the bonfire-scented air came a dark and final embrace. It thrilled me a little.

  She’d have meant Maxim to die, too, I was sure of that. She’d never have permitted him to escape into a future without her. Would she have tolerated for one second the idea of his living on, remarrying, producing an heir to Manderley by another woman—a woman who wasn’t barren? Never. She’d have meant Maxim to hang for the crime, or kill himself, or die of remorse; she’d have meant to drag him down to her underworld—and, of course, she did. No one can inherit Manderley now—it’s a burned-out shell, a roofless ruin. Maxim never had a child, and he did take his own life, after years of exile with the second wife. His death was no more an accident than Rebecca’s. Did she haunt and hound him to death—or did he smash his car by the Manderley gates because she still lured him after all those years, and he had to be reunited with her?

  I opened my eyes. I don’t have the unnatural vision Rebecca claims she had—I can’t see around corners or over the horizon—but, even so, her notebook’s altered my eyesight. How did Maxim kill her? Did he stifle, strangle, or stab—or use that service revolver she’d once eyed so covetously? And how did she bring him to that pitch? Did she whisper secrets about her lovers, or tell him she was pregnant with another man’s child? For the owner of Manderley, descendant of the direct male line, that would have been the ultimate transgression. But could Maxim have killed her believing she was carrying a child? That truly would have been a sin. Rebecca’s right—if any action could damn a man, that would.

  The sea washed against the boathouse wall. I could sense some wickedness in the air, and it stifled me. The belief that I was inches away from answers was already fading. I couldn’t arrive at answers, I told myself. At best I have theories, and I’ve been careful not to confide those theories to anyone. They would distress my father, who seems to see Rebecca as the victim in this story—perhaps because he can then defend actions of hers that he would otherwise find indefensible. They would no doubt irritate Tom Galbraith, who’d scoff at them.

  Tom believes Rebecca killed herself, and with Maxim’s service revolver. He believes she made it look like murder intending to incriminate Maxim; that she lured Jack Favell to the boathouse in the hope he’d find her body and call the police. But Favell never turned up and it was Maxim who found her, panicked, and tried to dispose of her body at sea, sinking the boat too close in to shore. An unsatisfactory theory: Either Tom doesn’t listen to Rebecca when he reads, as I said, or he’s perverse. All Tom talks about now is the need for “verification” of the notebook; he’s begun to mention “discrepancies.” It’s discrepancies, real or imagined, that have taken him and his Cambridge friend off to Brittany.

  I stood in the center of that shadowy room; I pushed Galbraith and my father out of my mind; I refused to consider their misreadings. What do men understand of tending houses or growing babies? It was not the outer truth, but the inner truth of Rebecca’s actions that concerned me. I could hear her voice so clearly that it felt as if it were inside me, struggling to be voiced. If I opened my lips, I felt she would speak through me. She would acknowledge me—and I wanted that intensely. I wanted Rebecca to know that she wasn’t without heirs after all. The same women’s voices she had heard now s
poke to me. I, Ellie, was her heiress—and today there was something of the utmost importance she had to tell me.

  Where was the last of her notebooks? I knew it must exist; I’d felt certain of its existence for weeks, ever since I’d read that promise of hers on the final page of the notebook we already have. I knew that Rebecca would never have left her tale incomplete; she would not have been silenced, not then, when she was facing death. Somehow, I had to find the third notebook, with her last words, her final entry.

  I’m still hoping I may find it when I go to London, but it could be elsewhere—it could even be secreted here. Supposing it had remained hidden away all these years? That could explain why the anonymous, still unidentified person who sent the first two notebooks had sent nothing further. I looked about the boathouse. I knew Tom Galbraith had searched it exhaustively, but I’ve seen how blinkered Tom’s searches can be; and today I felt a strengthening conviction that he might have looked in the wrong way, in the wrong places. I felt it could have been right under the man’s nose and he still might have missed it.

  He does not believe there is another installment. He says Rebecca had reached the end of her story, and that the fragmentary disjointed nature of the last pages of the existing notebook indicate that she had reached, for her, a conclusion. Tom Galbraith says that once Rebecca had seen that doctor in London she had only one task left: to die. And she achieved that within hours of seeing him.

  He’s wrong. I know he’s wrong with every instinct in my body. I looked and looked at the chipped, abandoned, broken belongings that had been left behind in the recent clearance. The shelves Tom described were still there, piled with some dirty crockery. A cracked mirror hung on a nail, reflecting my own splintered face back at me. Tossed down on the floor was one of the little wooden boats Rebecca had made; the others, presumably, had been fuel for the bonfire. I picked it up and cradled it.

  In the corner of the room was a rusty paraffin heater and a kettle without a lid. There was a cardboard carton, sodden with damp, filled with scraps of material too wet to burn. I reached in my hand, and felt about in the mildewed contents. An empty ink bottle; part of a broken pen; I felt indescribably sad. All that spirit, all that endeavor, reduced to these fragments.

  But something was lodged behind the carton; wedged between it and the wall was a square metal shape, upended, with scraps of bright paint still adhering to its rusty surface. I stared at it, and I could hear Rebecca’s voice spelling out my instructions: The best place to hide something is always somewhere ordinary or everyday.

  Barker had roused himself and followed me inside; he gave a low whine from the doorway. I picked up the ordinary everyday biscuit tin, which was heavy. I opened it without difficulty. Inside it were four books: a broken-backed edition of Tennyson’s Complete Works; two tiny editions of Shakespeare plays, one Othello, and the other Richard III; and a familiar topographical work, written by my great-grandfather: A History of the Parishes of Manderley and Kerrith, with Walks.

  I stole them, and the little wooden boat—and I did so without the least pang of conscience. I knew I was rescuing them from the bonfire. I carried them back to The Pines with me, and they’re beside me now on my desk in my bedroom as I write. I’ve been examining them for hours; I feel I was guided to them. Now I, too, have my talismans.

  The two small red morocco Shakespeares must date from the McKendrick days; they’re covered in pencil notes marking cuts, moves, entrances, and exits.

  The Tennyson has a faded copperplate inscription on the flyleaf:

  For J.S.D., my beloved husband—July 25th, 1900, from his Isolda.

  Devlin must have left his present behind when he walked out and sailed for South Africa.

  My great-grandfather’s History also has an inscription on the flyleaf, in my father’s handwriting:

  Rebecca, hoping this will interest you. With good wishes for your birthday, November 7, 1929, from “Cromwell,” alias Arthur Julyan!

  That jaunty exclamation mark, and all that it’s designed to conceal, breaks my heart. Poor Daddy. The book has not been read, I think; it’s damp-spotted and foxed but its spine is uncreased. Folded into its pages, I discovered in great excitement, was a thin sheet of paper with the engraved Manderley heading. Written on it, in two columns in Rebecca’s hand, is a list of Christian names: boys’ names on the left, girls’ names on the right. I’ve found that list she wrote at her London flat, when she returned there after that sad orgy of baby-clothes buying.

  The lists, as I would have expected, are in alphabetical order—My future’s an alphabet. I file it in pigeonholes. And among the twelve selected names on the female side, I see, is my own name—Ellen.

  It’s late at night, I can hear the sea sighing away in the distance. Rebecca’s ways of thinking are infectious, so I’m going to take this writing down of my name as a sign. I shall regard it as the acknowledgment I was hoping for. I’m not going to wrack my brain writing letters to Tom Galbraith any more—where’s the point in that, when the letter’s bound to be evasive, inhibited, and unnatural?

  No. My father wrote his account of the beginning of these events, and I’m going to write my version of their conclusion.

  What shall I call it? It’s tempting to call it Ellie’s Tale, of course—but I won’t. That would feel impious.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I’LL BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING—AND I’LL BEGIN WITH THE rain. Rose always maintains that when you read, there’s a chemical reaction between the words on the page (which are never inert) and the state of mind of the reader (which can be, unfortunately). Much depends on that state of mind, Rose says, and the state I was in when I read Rebecca’s notebook for the first time was a receptive one.

  I’d delivered it unread into Tom Galbraith’s hands in a downpour; I drove back in a downpour to the hospital with my father’s pyjamas and shaving kit. When the consultant, Mr. Latimer, had finished examining him, he announced that he was going to keep him in, not just overnight as had previously been said, but for an entire week of tests and observation. I drove home, still in a downpour. I was agitated and afraid. I had the headlights on, and the wipers were set at their fastest speed, but the windscreen kept misting up; I peered at the road ahead, but all I could see was ten feet of tarmac, and beyond that a haze of watery reflections and dazzle.

  I couldn’t drive straight and I couldn’t think straight: Seven days—what did that mean? Did that mean grave Mr. Latimer was going to take me quietly aside and explain my father’s condition was terminal? I knew it was terminal. It’s terminal for all of us from the day of our birth. The question is, how terminal? Did my father have a year or so, a month or so, weeks, hours, minutes? I let myself into The Pines, and the house echoed its emptiness. The rain rattled on the roof; it was sluicing down the hill outside; it sheeted the windows, and made the sea invisible.

  Barker and I sat by the range in the kitchen willing the telephone not to ring. Rose always says she stays awake on long flights in order to keep the plane in the air. I’ve never been on an airplane, but I now know exactly what she means: By staying awake all of that night, I prevented the hospital from calling. I’d forgotten all about Tom Galbraith and the notebook. Early the next morning, I left in heavy unremitting rain for the hospital.

  “Has anything happened? Is my father all right?” I said to the starchy ward sister. She said my father was fine, that nothing had happened—but she was wrong. Institutions change people, especially the elderly, with frightening speed, and when I saw what had happened to my father in the space of a night, I felt sick with anger and pity. They’d put him in a hospital gown that was too small for him. They’d somehow contrived to make him smaller, too. The man to whom I’d always looked up, the pillar of my childhood, had been reduced to this: a frail patient with an errant heart, differing from all the other frail men in the ward only in the nature of his symptoms. The terrible anonymity of hospitals was trying to claim him.

  They’d wired him up to an alien machine
that recorded a graph of his heartbeats. A drip was inserted in his arm, and a colorless fluid fed into his vein. He was the world to me, and his scope was now a metal bed in a narrow cubicle surrounded by floral curtains. For a second, before my father could conceal it, I saw the fear and eddying regret in his eyes; then his gaze steadied and held mine and everything that needed to be said by us was said, as we looked at each other in silence. He rested his hand on mine: “Ah, Ellie,” he said. “My dearest Ellie.”

  I spent a vile morning at that hospital before they finally lost patience and turfed me out. I was exiled to a visitors’ room lit by a cold blue fluorescent light, and, while tests were performed, I kept a grim impotent vigil. There was a yellow table piled high with tattered magazines filled with female industry—homely recipes and knitting patterns, how to make a dress or jam, how to help baby through teething problems—they might just as well have been in Sanskrit for all the sense they made to me. I tried to summon up my father’s past; that seemed the only way I could be sure of never losing him. But that past refused to take any orderly or sequential shape. Everything became tangled up in the rush of decades, so the trivial and the significant were equal.

  I saw the marriedness of my parents, the striped wallpaper of a house we rented in Singapore, the medals Daddy hides away in his desk drawer; I saw my mother young and strong, my mother dying. I saw my brother declaiming poetry, and Daddy telling him poetry was for pansies. I saw myself fly down the hill to Kerrith on the joy of my first bicycle, and my sister, Lily, dancing in the kitchen at The Pines to some bluesy tune played defiantly loud on her windup gramophone. I saw Barker as a fat puppy chewing a pair of shoes; Rebecca’s car roaring up the hill to The Pines. I heard bitter voices behind closed doors, saw my father’s face when the telegram came announcing Jonathan’s death, and saw—every link distinct—the chain stitch on a tobacco pouch I lovingly made, aged eight, for Daddy’s birthday.