Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  Once he’d said to me, “That’s just how she was, old Mrs. de Winter. The old Termagant, that’s what my nurse, Tilly, used to call her. Though my grandfather always did say her bark was worse than her bite. Tilly came from London, you know. She was good to me when my father died. How it all comes back to me!”

  Another time, a part of the story—I’m not sure which—had made him tearful, but he never explained why, and he brightened again soon afterward. “I always thought she was the butterfly girl,” he’d said to me. “I remembered her mother Isolda from my boyhood, you see. I’m glad Rebecca kept that Meadow Blue I gave her, Ellie—kept it for a time, anyway.”

  No sign of shock or anger; I was mystified. Many of Rebecca’s actions flagrantly contravened my father’s creed; she had no patience with conventions and beliefs that have shaped his whole life, yet he seemed unaware of that, or indifferent. That evening, as we sat looking at the sea, the cooling air fragrant with roses, the little boats tacking back and forth, and the light dimming almost imperceptibly, he finally began to speak, in the musing way he does now. He even asked me questions: What did I think of this passage? How did I interpret that one?

  “Poor child,” he said. “That time she came here to tea, Elinor took me to one side, you know, and said we mustn’t mention her mother under any circumstances. Such an embattled little girl! And she became a brave woman. Taking on the de Winters and Manderley—that damned house wasn’t kindly disposed to anyone, I always felt, but she tamed it. How I hated that place as a child, Ellie! How I loathed Lionel de Winter. I’d heard the rumors about Lionel and Isolda, you know, and there was a time when I feared…”

  “Feared what, Daddy?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.” He hesitated, and looked away. “I remember his final illness, that’s all. How he looked when he died. I was a witness to that last will of his. Not an incident I’m proud of. Can’t undo it now, of course.” He gave a sigh and patted my hand; below us, the waves whispered.

  He continued to speak for a while, winding down the avenues of the past. Sometimes he referred back to events Rebecca described in her tale, but I could see they were already inexact in his mind; they were transforming even as he spoke; they were entering a twilight where they merged inextricably with his own complementary, confirmatory, or contradictory memories.

  “I don’t think Rebecca quite says that, Daddy,” I said gently at one point, and he gave a smile and a shake of the head.

  “Doesn’t she?” he said, in his new, quiet way. “Ah, well, I expect I’m getting muddled. Losing my marbles, damn it. Never mind. Let it be. It’s done my heart good to hear her voice after all these years of silence. But I shan’t look at it again. It’s all over and gone now. I’m old. It was a long time ago. I’ve more urgent things to think about now—tell me what you’ve been up to, Ellie.”

  SO DISTANT TO MY FATHER, AND SO CLOSE TO ME. WE ATE our early supper—early suppers being part of the new regime—then I left my father playing cards with Rose. I rushed upstairs and changed into a newish dress, crept out the back way so no one would see me in the embarrassing finery of an unfamiliar frock, took the car, and drove to Tom Galbraith’s cottage.

  He suggested we drive over to Manderley church, and walk by the river. We did this, and, while we were there, he told me several surprising and significant things, among them what he’d discovered when he went to Greenways.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  REBECCA’S FATHER DIDN’T COMMIT SUICIDE, ELLIE,” Tom said as we walked between the grassy hummocks of the graveyard toward the winding of the river.

  We walked side by side; Tom didn’t look at me, but at the water ahead of us. It was low tide, so the river had thinned to a narrow channel; birds were feeding on the mud banks—my father could have identified them, but I couldn’t. As we approached, the flock rose, twisting and glinting in the low angle of the light, black and silver, a sudden sparkle in the air like diamonds. We sat down on a bank thick with buttercups; I wound a wiry stem of sweet grass round my finger. After a pause, Tom continued.

  “I’ve known that for some time,” he went on. “I checked his death certificate at once, obviously. Quite apart from anything else, Rebecca’s version of his death didn’t tally with the one Jack Favell had given me. I wanted to be sure of all the details, and now I am. There’s no doubt, Ellie.”

  How thorough he’d been! He’d double- and triple-checked everything. He had all his beloved evidence, all the documents. He had the death certificate; the obituary report in the local Berkshire newspaper; the records of the inquest. He’d written to the couple who purchased Greenways when it was sold after Jack Devlin’s death, a couple who were elderly now, but still living there. He’d been shown around the house and stables. He’d spoken to people in the village who could recall the events surrounding Devlin’s death, and he’d visited the small country graveyard at Hampton Ferrars where both Jack Devlin and Isabel-Isolda, side by side, lay buried.

  “Was it a black marble tomb?” I asked, looking out across the silvery mudflats. I knew it wasn’t the most pertinent question, in view of what he’d just told me, but for some reason, for me, it was the most urgent one. I wanted that detail, which had mattered to Rebecca and must matter to him, to be accurate.

  “What? The tombstone? Yes, it was. Black marble with gilded lettering. Devlin’s taste, presumably.” He gave a frown. “Have you been listening to what I’ve said, Ellie?”

  “And which name was on it—Isabel or Isolda?”

  “Isabel. Ellie—I knew this would upset you. I know you set great store by what Rebecca wrote, but you must see: I had to check. This matters to me too much to leave room for any uncertainties.”

  “Tell me again,” I said, though I could remember what he’d already said perfectly well. I wound that grass stem around my finger. I wanted to give myself time to think, as much as anything.

  So he told me again and, indeed, there was no possibility of mistake. Jack Devlin had been deeply in debt and close to bankruptcy, and he had died on Rebecca’s twenty-first birthday, that was all true; but he had not hanged himself at Greenways, and his death had been accident, not suicide. He’d gone for a ride on the Downs behind the house early that morning, accompanied by Rebecca and by one of the stable boys. A mile or so from the house, on a high, isolated area of the Downs, Devlin’s mount had bolted.

  The weather was clear and bright, but the ground was hard after frost, not ideal riding conditions. Devlin was thrown, his neck was broken. There was nothing the other two riders could do; he was already dead when they reached him. Rebecca had been too ill to attend the ensuing inquest, but the stable boy, whose name was Richard Slade, had given evidence. The coroner’s direction was clear, the jury members did not bother to retire, and accidental death was their verdict.

  “Let me tell you about Richard Slade,” Tom continued. “He was twenty, a local boy. He’d worked for Devlin for four years, and was well regarded. Though there seems no reason why he should have done so, he appears to have blamed himself for the accident—certainly his behavior altered after it happened. He began drinking heavily. He was taken on by the new owners of Greenways, but became a liability. After nine months he was dismissed. A year after the accident to the day, he hanged himself from a roof beam in the stables there.”

  “There’s no question of that, either?” I asked, though I knew what the answer would be: It would have been triple-checked by the man sitting beside me.

  “None at all. I’ve seen all the official records. Two of Slade’s brothers are still living in Hampton Ferrars and I also spoke to them. I asked them about the accident. Jack Devlin was an experienced horseman, and I wanted to know if he was riding a difficult horse that day, as Favell had suggested to me. Apparently he wasn’t. I also wanted to know why his horse might have bolted. Richard Slade hadn’t been able to account for that at the inquest; not surprisingly, neither could his brothers.”

  “There’s scores of reasons why a horse can bolt, Tom.” I t
hought of Rebecca’s words: Daddy tried to saddle me; bit, curb, and bridle. I said. “Accidents like that happen all the time, even to experienced riders. I don’t understand. What are you implying?”

  “Nothing.”

  He kept his face turned away from me, resting his gaze on the band of water beyond us. The tide had turned, and the water was flowing upriver again; almost imperceptibly the channel was widening. We sat there in silence for some time, until Tom spoke. “Why would Rebecca do that?” he asked. “Why merge those two deaths in that way? Why conflate her father’s story and Slade’s? I can’t understand it. In the notebook, that passage sounds—” He seemed to check himself, and glanced at me. “Well, it begs a number of questions, but it sounds heartfelt—at least I thought so.”

  “She was ill, Tom,” I said. “She had a breakdown after her father died—she tried to kill herself. Writing about her father was difficult for her, and you can see that very clearly in the notebook. Maybe the only way she could deal with her father’s death was to alter the details. Maybe she felt the accident was willed, that it was a form of suicide—in the circumstances, that’s possible. If so, she told the truth obliquely. She often does that, or I think so, anyway.”

  “That’s one possibility. The other is simpler. She’s a liar.”

  That word shocked me. It angered me, too. I’d been remembering Rebecca’s remarks about “debts being called in,” and for some reason they made me uneasy. “You don’t believe that,” I said sharply. “What other lies have you caught her in? Next you’ll be telling me her father and that stable boy were Rebecca’s victims. You’re starting to take sides, Tom, do you realize that?”

  “Aren’t you?” he replied, equally sharply.

  Was I? I didn’t feel as if I was taking sides; sooner or later, people do; I’ve watched the process at work in Kerrith for years. All black or all white. People line up to defend the husband or the wife, and they always vindicate one at the expense of the other. The authorized version supports Maxim, and paints him an innocent: He probably didn’t kill her, and, even if he did, he had just cause, and she drove him to it. I’ve never understood why it should be morally acceptable to kill a woman because she’s promiscuous, but apparently it is—at least according to the gospel of the males of this parish. They’ve never silenced the opposition though, I notice, and I wouldn’t let Tom Galbraith silence it now.

  “I’m not taking sides, and I’m not passing judgment, either,” I retorted. “All I’m doing is trying to listen to Rebecca.”

  “And I’m not?”

  “Not at the moment, no. You’re allowing prejudices to influence you.”

  “I’m allowing my own past to influence me, actually,” he replied, in a stiff way. “And if you must know, I’m being influenced by my adopted mother. May Galbraith was very careful to keep me at arm’s length from Rebecca, I can see that now. She permitted that one meeting, and, after that, nothing. Why? It’s always puzzled me. May wasn’t a possessive woman, or a jealous one. I used to think she was insecure, perhaps, but now I wonder. Maybe she kept me away from Rebecca to protect me.”

  “Protect you? Why would you think that?”

  “Because men associated with Rebecca seem to suffer fatalities with astonishing regularity,” he replied. “A boy in Brittany, who may or may not have died in a storm at sea—and maybe I’ll discover the truth about that once I go there, though I doubt it. Maxim de Winter. Her father. A twenty-year-old stable boy. Even my adopted mother’s brothers—you remember Rebecca’s brief reference to May’s three brothers? They all died young, Ellie: one in the first war, one in a so-called climbing accident. The third killed himself not long after May adopted me—in other words, not long after Rebecca’s marriage. I’m not saying she had the evil eye, obviously, but she seems to have been a femme fatale, and she certainly had a death wish.”

  “Tom, you can’t blame Rebecca for a man’s getting killed in the first war—millions of men died in that war. I can’t believe you’re thinking in this way.”

  “Neither can I,” he replied, with something approaching a smile. He rose to his feet. “Let’s not talk about it any more, Ellie. I’ve decided, I’m going to Brittany, then that’s it. I shan’t pursue this any further. There are a hundred questions here that are never going to be answered, by me or anyone else. I wrote out a two-page list the other night. For instance: Was Jack Devlin Rebecca’s father? Why did he walk out on his wife? Did Maxim de Winter ever discover the truth about Rebecca’s parentage—and the question marks surrounding it? If he did, given Lionel de Winter’s past and the nature of his death—”

  “Tom, the answers are there, insofar as she knew them,” I said, interrupting him. “I’m sure Devlin was her father—almost sure, anyway. I think Devlin found out that Lionel de Winter had been Isolda’s lover—he could have seen those letters from Lionel. Maybe he believed the child his wife was expecting wasn’t his, so he broke with her.”

  “That’s one reading. There are others.” He glanced at me, and again I sensed he checked himself. He hesitated, as if about to say more, then his tone altered. “I’m sorry,” he said in a resigned way. “I look for certainties, I know, and I also know that if we had Rebecca and her husband standing here right now, and we interrogated both of them, my questions still wouldn’t be resolved. Shall we walk back via the church? I’d like to do that.”

  I could see he wanted the subject closed—a wise decision. We were close to quarreling, and I didn’t want an argument to mar the last evening I was likely to spend with him. I didn’t want Rebecca to drive a wedge between us when there was so little time left.

  Tom held out a hand to me and pulled me to my feet. I think he, too, regretted the disagreement between us; certainly it was from that moment that his manner began to change, or so I think, looking back. I followed him toward the church, lingering by the gravestones as we walked. It was such a calm, still evening, and I wanted to spin it out like the finest gold thread, so it lasted for as long as possible. The clasp of his hand had disarranged my defenses; I couldn’t look at him without experiencing that painful sensation for which I think the word is “yearning,” and that made me edgy. I was as capable of reticence as Tom was. I didn’t want to weaken and confess my feelings—that would wreck the evening every bit as effectively as any quarrel.

  We wandered back between the tombs in the still twilit air, the river winding silver below us; the church clock struck the hour, and I tried to change the subject. I asked Tom Galbraith about his return to Cambridge and his work there; to my surprise, he actually answered.

  As he began describing it to me, I tried to see the bookish monastic room in the first court at King’s, where he said he had his rooms on the first floor on the first staircase. I tried to see him in the libraries where, in a wry way, he said he spent too much of his time searching for truth in the small print. If, in the future, I couldn’t meet him, I wanted to envisage him.

  His images of Cambridge mixed with those already in my own mind, and I saw it as it was one winter when I was visiting Rose, its pinnacles rising up out of the pale mist of the Fens, snow lying on the beautiful banks of the Cam, the air bitterly cold in an east wind, the lights of the colleges shining and promising. He lived and worked there; for me it had been a mirage. I did not say that.

  We went into the church, and bent over the brass memorial to Gilles de Winter. I gripped the sides of an oak pew, thinking of Tom Galbraith as a small boy, thinking of Rebecca’s sea-colored eyes, and her presence in the crypt beneath us. Both Tom and I, I knew, were aware of lost opportunities, and how haunting they are. I could sense their sad insubstantial presences all around us.

  We walked out past the font, in which, I used to believe, my children would one day be christened; I touched it superstitiously as we passed. We went back outside to the soft light of the chuchyard. All the words I would have liked to say to Tom Galbraith rose up in my heart, but I checked them.

  For the first time, he began telling
me about the man who was to join him in Brittany, Nicholas Osmond, a fellow don at King’s, his closest friend, whom he’d known since they were undergraduates. Osmond, whose special area of interest was medieval French literature and the Romance tradition, had been giving a series of guest lectures at the Sorbonne. He was recently widowed; his wife had died of leukemia a year ago.

  Tom came to a halt; we were just outside the church porch; the gold of the evening light was now fading. I tensed. I could sense something unspoken beneath his words; I could hear the undertone of emotion.

  “How terrible,” I heard myself say in the usual way one makes such inadequate statements. “How sad for him, and for you. Was she your friend, too, Tom?”

  “Yes. I knew her well. We were all three very close. The illness…well, it was very brief, and very sudden.”

  “What was her name?” I asked, keeping my tone neutral, keeping my gaze on tombs.

  “Julia,” he replied, and that one word answer told me everything. I could hear the strength of feeling banked behind it, and, for a second, before he could disguise it, I glimpsed it in his face. I knew then for certain that if I was invisible for him, it was not solely because of my own inadequacies.

  I’ll confess: There was an instinct, mercifully brief, to question him. I wanted to know all the usual stupid things one can’t bear to know, yet can’t resist asking: Was she beautiful? Did she return his love, this wife of his best friend? Had anything happened, or had nothing happened? Then I regained control. I had no right to ask; he wouldn’t tell me if I did—and it was better not to know. If I’ve learned anything these past months, I’ve learned it’s useless to fight against the claims of the dead. The dead are unchanging and therefore too powerful.

  I said nothing more, though I felt much. Taking his arm, then letting go of it, I led him between the larger tombs and the smaller, tilted headstones toward the high ground of the churchyard. From there the sea was visible in the far distance. “I’ll show you Lucy Carminowe’s grave before we leave,” I said. “You remember you couldn’t find it? It’s just over here, Tom.”