Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  feels that way for me now—more like heading out for the open sea. Conditions there are unpredictable—I’m pulled this way and that by the most powerful currents. To love and to believe that one’s loved in return, to feel great joy, but be assailed by a lover’s doubts and fears…Well, I’m being paid back for years of romantic skepticism, I expect. I’m discovering at last all the agonies I used to scorn; as a result, I cannot write sensibly—or, I see, legibly. Forgive me.

  Come and see us as soon as you return, but be ready for some surprises: Rebecca is unlike any woman I’ve ever known. There is a brilliancy about her, she’s as fearless as any man, and she’s not, thank God, the kind of conventional woman people expected me to marry. You’ll find her manner astonishingly direct—and it may well cause some raised eyebrows here. But, knowing me better than most people as you do, I’m sure you’ll understand why I didn’t hesitate when I finally met her at last—utterly by chance, on board ship recently, when I was returning from that visit to America. In confidence, entirely between the two of us, and so you’re prepared, I’d like you to know that

  I turned to the next page. There was no next page. I began shuffling the pieces of paper in the file, but, no, the continuation of Maxim’s letter was missing. I was not to learn, it seemed, what Maxim had wanted to tell my father in confidence.

  Several weeks later, when I confessed to my father, and admitted I’d looked at these files, I questioned him about this missing page; he claimed it was lost long ago, and merely revealed that Rebecca’s mother had been an actress. I’m sure my father wouldn’t lie to me, but that day I was suspicious. Could he have censored for any reason, as I had? Could he have destroyed other documents besides this, and might that explain the paucity of this collection?

  I looked at the mound of ashes in the grate, but it told me nothing. We’d had fires there every evening until my father went into hospital.

  ONCE MY FATHER RETURNED TO THE PINES, AND ROSE arrived to stay, I had to put these issues to one side for a while, until I was sure my father felt settled. Mr. Latimer had ruled out surgery; a multitude of pills had been prescribed, half of which seemed designed to counter the side effects of the others. There was also a rigid regime: light meals at regular intervals, plenty of rest, moderate exercise, no anxiety or excitement. I still had a superstitious fear that my father’s illness was partly caused by his guilt about the past, so I let Rose into the secret of the anonymous parcels, but I made both her and Tom Galbraith promise that neither Rebecca nor her notebook would be mentioned.

  This was easier than I had expected, partly because Tom Galbraith was frequently away in London on his verification visits, and partly because my father had acquired a new favorite, as I rapidly discovered. Daddy has a suspicion of all doctors, and a deep contempt for medicine; but he’d taken a great shine to Mr. Latimer. Not only did my father swallow down without protest all the pills he prescribed, not only did he invite him to The Pines on several occasions, he also sang his praises at every opportunity. Francis Latimer was a brilliant doctor and a delightful man; he was astute and well-read; his politics were a little radical, but he was stimulating company and “an asset to the neighborhood.” What Latimer didn’t know about the workings of the human heart wasn’t worth knowing; he was solely responsible for my father’s much-improved state of health, and above all he “spoke his mind” and “got on with things” and didn’t “shilly-shally about”—unlike certain people my father could mention.

  Latimer was making a new start after some unspecified difficulties in his life, and was temporarily renting a house close to the hospital, while looking for a permanent residence nearer the sea. He had two young sons, Michael and Christopher. He was also divorced, it emerged, and, given this information, I was even more astonished that he and my father had struck up such a friendship. My father believes marriage is indissoluble; he is inimically opposed to divorce and will usually avoid those he regards as tainted by it. The final rift with my sister, Lily, was caused by her long affair with a married man, and I’d never seen the least indication that Daddy’s antique views had modified, despite the anguish that the breach with my dead sister caused, and continues to cause him.

  In due course, Francis Latimer was to influence my own actions. Initially, I was somewhat suspicious of him. He visited us at least twice a week in the guise of a guest, but I could see there were deceptions here. I was sure the doctor’s motives were professional as well as social. My father’s motives were not as altruistic as he liked to pretend. Latimer was keeping an eye on a patient; my father, I saw to my astonishment, was lining Latimer up as a prospective purchaser of The Pines.

  Every time he came, my father would take him on guided tours. He’d extol the view; he’d point out the palm and the monkey puzzle. He’d shuffle into the kitchen and sing the praises of the range, which broke down every other week, though that wasn’t mentioned. In an airy way, he’d pass over the leaking roof, the rusted guttering, the rotten window frames: “You can see the sea, Latimer,” he’d say. “And you can see it from damn near every window.”

  Francis Latimer, who misses very little, was well aware of the dilapidations, I think; he was amused by my father’s boasts, but hid this behind poker-faced solemnity. Once, as we stood at the end of our garden by its crumbling boundary wall, he caught my eye as my father praised the vista behind me; I saw the flicker of amusement in Latimer’s intelligent face when he agreed that, yes, indeed, the view was beautiful—unforgettable.

  I was puzzled by this new impulse to “get shot of The Pines,” as my father put it, when hymning the virtues of snug low-maintenance bungalows. When my father dies—and he’s always made this clear to me—The Pines will have to be sold. There is little capital left, so this rickety house is our only serious asset. It’s the money from the sale of The Pines that must provide for me in the future, my father says. I shall provide for myself, in fact; I agree with all of Rebecca’s remarks concerning women’s employment, so I’ve planned it all out. I shall go to university as I meant to do all those years ago; I’ll get a degree and then I shall work—but I’ve never told my father this. It would hurt his pride dreadfully.

  It had never occurred to me that my father might consider selling the house before his death; the only way he’d ever leave it would be feet first, he’d always told me. I couldn’t understand why he would change his views now—unless Latimer had planted the idea in his head. And I knew how fatally stupid an idea it was. I could no more imagine my father living in a bungalow than I could imagine him in one of those Manhattan skyscrapers. This house is as important to him as Manderley was to Maxim. To leave here would kill him.

  I told Francis Latimer that in due course; it would have been on his third or fourth visit. I didn’t want him to get his hopes up—he did seem actually to like the house, despite its disadvantages and eccentricities—and this new idée fixe of my father’s was now worrying me seriously. I was beginning to see that the stay in hospital had produced many changes in him; he seemed stronger and in better health, but his irascibility and vigor were much reduced, he was occasionally forgetful, and he passed many hours in a gentle, musing, contemplative state that bewildered me. I was glad he seemed tranquil, but this wasn’t the father I knew. I suspected that among that myriad of pills was one that calmed his moods as effectively as others controlled his blood pressure.

  Francis Latimer’s reply interested me. His words marked a turning point, I can see now. He said that he knew it would be disastrous for my father to leave The Pines. He said that nothing he’d prescribed could account for my father’s altered state, which he, too, had noticed during the long conversations he and my father had had at the hospital. It was the first I’d heard of these conversations. I began to wonder if Latimer knew more about my father’s state of mind than I did, if my father might have made some confession to him of which I remained ignorant. Francis Latimer denied this, too, though doctors resemble priests when it comes to the sanctity of the con
fessional, so I’m not entirely sure I believed him.

  He added, looking at me in an intent way, that I must expect alterations. “People change, Ellie,” he said, speaking with a sudden vehemence that surprised me. We were sitting on that boundary wall of ours, overlooking the water, and Latimer, unusually for him, seemed restive and preoccupied. I think it was the first occasion that I saw him as a man, rather than as a doctor; I could sense something was troubling him.

  “Don’t you find yourself changing, Ellie?” he went on. “Dear God, I certainly do. Two years ago, at the time of my divorce…” He checked himself, and then, to my great surprise, took my hand. “Never make the mistake of believing that anyone is in stasis, Ellie—especially the old,” he said gently. “People your father’s age, in his state of health, change at great speed. They advance into territories unimaginable to someone your age or mine. Your father’s a remarkable man, and a courageous one. He has a whole lifetime to come to terms with. If he does so calmly, or more calmly than he once did, it’s a blessing, believe me.”

  I liked Francis Latimer after that, though it saddened me to see how swiftly Tom Galbraith had been displaced by him in Daddy’s favors; that seemed fickle. And I was influenced by what Latimer said. I can be overprotective. I saw I had no right to hide Rebecca’s Tale from my father. It was his property.

  I asked Tom’s advice, then Rose’s. With their agreement, I finally gave my father my copy of Rebecca’s tale about three and a half weeks after he returned from the hospital. The night before I did so, I stayed awake worrying for hours, looking back through the notebook, searching for any passages that might hurt my father. In the end, I decided to make one further slash with my censor’s scissors. Radical surgery: I removed from Rebecca’s story the entire section concerning her life with her father at Greenways.

  I’d always found that section perturbing, in any case. I found it curiously ambivalent and hard to understand. Why, for instance, did Rebecca write so violently, and at such length, about mines? Rebecca accuses her father of imprisoning her, of stealing her liberty—and that made me anxious, for people in Kerrith have made similar charges against my father, in the past. They’ve claimed he’s curtailed my freedom, that he’s denied me my chances and so on. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, but although there’s no cause, I know those accusations have wounded him. There is no comparison between Rebecca’s situation and my own—none. But if my father read this, in his present weakened state, I thought it possible he might imagine one.

  I glanced one last time at the section I’d censored, hesitated, then hid it away in my desk drawer. All those comments about being locked up in a tower! What an ogre of a father! Sometimes Rebecca gets carried away, and overstates her case, I feel. Her tale read better without those fanciful pages anyway, I decided.

  MY FATHER’S LIFE IS ROUNDED WITH A LITTLE SLEEP NOW, and it took him such a long slow time to read those pages I’d copied out for him. Nearly two weeks went by, and he still hadn’t finished them. Rose whisked them out of his hands one day, as he sat dozing in the sun, and read them in the space of an afternoon—but Rose is a voracious professional reader, and she wasn’t caught in the web of these events to the degree that my father was. “Very female,” was her comment, and she’d be drawn no further.

  “What was Maxim like, Rose?” I asked her one evening in the kitchen, thinking of that legendary time just before the first war when Rose was young and lovely, and rumored to be the object of Maxim’s affections. Rose, after all, had known most of the characters in Rebecca’s story.

  “Which Maxim?” Rose replied, tossing salad leaves for supper in the kitchen. “My Maxim? Rebecca’s? His second wife’s? Your father’s? There are umpteen to choose from.”

  “Yours,” I said. “Stop splitting hairs, Rose.”

  “Afflicted by ancestors, but I liked him well enough. Anchored at Manderley, but always dreaming of voyages. I wasn’t in love with him, or he with me, though he may have imagined he was. Does that answer your question?”

  “Have you ever been in love, Rose?” I asked, in a moody way, staring out at the sea in the distance. Tom Galbraith had returned that day from another verification visit, this time to the house Jack Devlin had owned in Berkshire, Greenways. He was preparing to leave Kerrith, and due to depart tomorrow for Brittany. I’d agreed to meet him later that evening, to wish him well on his journey. He’d said he would remain in touch, and would certainly visit us again, but I knew that to all intents and purposes we would be saying good-bye to each other.

  “Of course,” Rose replied. “I was deeply in love with a fellow undergraduate at Girton, Helen, her name was; she’s dead now. And later I loved a woman called Jane Turner for years—she used to share my London house in the old days, before I began letting rooms to students. You met her once or twice when you were younger—do you remember her?”

  I turned to stare at Rose; I fumbled with a memory. An afternoon at Rose’s house in St. John’s Wood; a quiet scholarly woman in tweeds pouring tea and asking me about my academic ambitions. I was about to take the Cambridge entrance examination; she gave me a book she’d written on the Brontës, which I still have somewhere. Love? How blind I’d been.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ellie,” Rose said in a brisk way. “Do you imagine I’ve lived the life of a nun? How very galling. There’s nothing remarkable about it, you know. Sexuality is a matter of taste. Some people like oranges, some people like apples, and some like both. You surely don’t believe that morality is involved in that choice? Your father would, obviously, but I expect better from you. Am I to be denied apples because he likes oranges? Is it wicked to like one fruit, and virtuous to like the other? I don’t think so. Use your mind, Ellie dear, and peel those potatoes, would you?”

  I did as she said. As the skin of the potatoes uncurled, I wondered about Rebecca. Which fruit had she liked? She mentioned no liaisons with women in her story, but then there were all those gaps and elisions, and she had believed that men were the enemy. I’d already thought of a way in which the most glaring of those gaps might be filled in, and, if it could, I might have the answer to my question. Meanwhile, I put it to Rose, but Rose—who can be infuriating—only considered it briefly. It seemed not to interest her.

  “Both? None? I haven’t the least idea. Though I did notice she was careful not to tell me. Very difficult to know whom she loved, I thought—apart from Manderley, obviously.”

  How obtuse Rose can be! “What nonsense, Rose,” I said, tipping the peeled potatoes into their saucepan. “She loved her mother. She loved her father. I think she loved Maxim, too, though she hated to admit it—”

  “What an innocent you are!” Rose said, giving me a sharp glance. She dropped a kiss on my brow. “We must have a little seminar, you and I, one of these days. Your critical powers are getting rusty.” She pushed me toward the door.

  “Now, tell your father that supper will be ready in twenty minutes. He’s wandering about the garden again with Barker.”

  I WENT OUTSIDE INTO THE LIQUID LIGHT OF A BEAUTIFUL evening. After the heat of the day, the air was just beginning to cool; there was a salt breeze from the sea; little boats, their bright pennants fluttering, were tacking back and forth in the harbor-mouth below, and the calls of the sailors echoed across the water. The sky was rose colored, milky, and mauve at the horizon. My father had taken up his customary station, sitting on our low boundary wall, his loyal shadow Barker at his feet. He was leaning on his cane, a quiet stooped figure, looking out toward the ocean.

  He had finally come to the end of Rebecca’s tale, as I could tell immediately. His eyes were moist, and his expression was one of sadness and resignation. Although he’d turned to look at me, it was some while, I think, before he registered my presence. I held out my hand to him; he clasped it tightly, and drew me down beside him. We sat in the still of the evening, looking at the wash of the waves. I said nothing, but I marveled at his tranquility.

  Were his hau
ntings over? I’d been so afraid that Rebecca’s notebook would reawake all the demons of his past, but there was no sign of that. For weeks now, ever since his return from the hospital, he had slept through to morning without waking once, his rest uninterrupted by nightmares.

  Yet this last year, those nightmares of his had been terrible. There was one particular dream he had, which recurred several times, and which haunted him afterward: In a snowstorm, he was driving in a black car up that endless twisting approach to Manderley. Although he sat at the wheel, the car propelled itself, and seemed to steer itself, its gears meshing soundlessly. Beside him, on the passenger seat, was a tiny coffin, which it was his task, he knew, to deliver safely.

  Somewhere on that drive, that little coffin would begin to move, and a child’s plaintive voice would rise up from it. Let me out, oh, let me out now, it would wail. Let me out at once, it would demand, becoming peremptory, and my father, recognizing Rebecca’s voice, would try to stop the inexorable car, and try to unfasten the butterfly screws that held down the lid of the coffin. But the car would continue on through the blizzard, and the bright brass butterfly screws would refuse to budge. The cryings out at this confinement and the pleas for release would mount, becoming more and more frantic, and my father in a paroxysm of fear would finally wake, sometimes calling out my name and sometimes Rebecca’s.

  My father has forgotten he ever told me this dream, which I’ve never recounted to anyone; these past weeks, I’d begun to see that the dream itself had been forgotten, too. All the time he’d been reading Rebecca’s tale, I’d been waiting for signs that those old anxieties would resurface, but they never had. My father had dozed, read, drifted off into a dreaming musing state; sometimes I thought he was watching some film of his own, and comparing its images with those on the page; at other times, he’d shake his head, as if in disagreement. For the most part, he responded to the words of a woman he’d loved as if they came from the far distance, from an imagined world, like a novel.