Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  I walked to the foot of the stairs, hesitated, then slowly began to mount them. I knew that Tom Galbraith had failed to get any response from the occupant above, and that I would fail, too, unless I could think of the right words. What would be the “open sesame” here? I thought Rebecca’s notebook might have given me the answer.

  My footsteps on the red carpeted stairs made no sound. They were silent on the carpeted landing. I stood outside the black painted door at last; there was a faint scent of burning. I felt watched—and had to tell myself that no one could be watching, that no one could see through wooden door panels, that there were no spy holes or crannies through which someone could squint at me.

  I counted to ten, then tapped lightly on the panels. I said: “Danny, are you there? Please let me in. I must talk to you.”

  There was silence. The air felt clammy against my skin. It may have been my imagination but the smell of burning seemed to intensify. I forced myself to tap on the panels once more. I said in a sharper, more authoritative voice: “Danny, open the door at once, please. I don’t intend to stand here on the landing all day. Open it immediately.”

  There was a pause, then I heard that noise Tom described, like the soft brush of material against a skirting board. There was a sliding and a turning sound; bolts were being drawn, and locks unfastened. Slowly, the door swung open. The hall beyond was bathed in a bright glaring light from a window at its far end which faced directly into the afternoon sun. The sudden glare after the dimness of the stairwell and the fear and excitement I felt dazzled me. Then I began to see, to read, the figure in front of me.

  Standing silhouetted in the light was a woman with white hair; I’d only ever seen her with dark hair dragged back into a tight bun, but this thin white hair was loose on her shoulders, giving her a shocking girlishness. She was as still as death, with a waxwork pallor; but, just as Rebecca described, I could sense the peculiar energy that emanated from her. She was attempting to speak. Her pale lips moved soundlessly. Even in my childhood, this woman had dressed in the style of dead era; she was wearing similar clothes now, as if her clock had stopped in 1918. Her long black skirt just cleared her ankles. In my dismay and shock, I found myself looking for the little meticulous darn in her stocking that seven-year-old Rebecca had seen. These stockings had holes in them. She was painfully emaciated, but I knew this was Mrs. Danvers.

  She appeared to be staring over my shoulder; she’d begun to tremble violently. For a moment or so, she remained still, then she did a terrible thing. She leaned toward me, very, very close. I thought, Dear God, she’s trying to smell me.

  I could smell her—as soon as she moved a sour sickly grave smell came off her clothes and her breath; I recoiled. Could she see me? I wasn’t sure. Her eyes were milky white, they looked as if the skin had grown across the irises, and I had to tell myself it was cataracts. “Your hand, give me your hand,” she said, in a dry grating voice, atonal and very low, as if she were unused to speaking.

  I was afraid, but I did so. She clasped it very tight, making a broken crooning sound in her throat. She began to stroke it, and I saw her face change. My hands are narrow, though not nearly as long and narrow as Rebecca’s were, but I suppose her desire was great, and the wait had been very long, so the mistake she then made was understandable.

  She made a choking sound, and to my horror, went to kiss my fingers. I snatched my hand back; at once, in front of my eyes, a transformation took place. I could sense the mechanisms of her willpower grind. She crushed her emotion, and shaking with the effort, tried to turn herself back into a servant.

  “At last, at last,” she said in that harsh disused voice. “I knew you’d come. I knew you’d never fail me. Everything’s ready for you, just the way you liked it. Your favorite flowers, all your lovely furniture and pictures and books. You remember that special tea you liked? I have it here, all ready. All I have to do is boil the water—come in, come in—how was your journey, madam?”

  She led me down the corridor before I could say a word; we went up a short flight of steps; she stood back, and I passed through an archway into a huge and appalling room. I felt as if I were sleepwalking. It was the room with the great arched studio window that’s visible from the street below, and I’m not sure I can describe it. I was overcome with confusion, with dismay, and pity for her—and with fear, too, because it’s frightening to be that close, face-to-face with the unmistakable evidence of a mind gone awry long ago, and a willpower so intense that I could feel it scorching the air around me.

  “You’ve let your hair grow long again,” she said, leading me toward a chair. “I’m glad. I always preferred it long. Do you remember how I used to brush it for you? ‘Hair drill, Danny,’ you’d say. ‘You maid me better than anyone, Danny,’ you said. I’ve looked after everything; when I left Manderley, I couldn’t bring very much, but I brought your favorite dresses, the sea-green silk, you remember that? And that sealskin coat—it wasn’t costly, not like some of the others, but I knew that was the one you’d want, and it’s here. But I couldn’t find your ring, your little diamond ring—I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.” She began crying.

  “Mrs. Danvers,” I said, as gently and quietly as I could. “Mrs. Danvers—please. You’re ill. Won’t you sit down for a moment?”

  “I’ll fetch the tea,” she said, regaining control. I’m not sure whether she failed to hear me, or refused to hear me. “I’ll fetch the tea, now. You sit there. I won’t be a moment, madam. Then I’ve something to show you—a surprise for you….”

  Before I could prevent her, she turned and left me. I heard her footsteps go softly down that short flight of stairs. A door closed. The heat in the room was stifling. The chair I’d been led toward was crawling with moths. I backed away and looked around me.

  The studio room was double height, opened right up into the roof beams; it must have been beautiful and would once have been white, but now the walls were yellowish and scabrous. It was crammed with an insanity of things, but they must have been rearranged so often during those long night rituals that any purpose they’d had was inverted. Tables were upended; cushions hung from hooks on the wall; pictures were stacked with their faces to the skirting; books had been made into barricades, sectioning the room into quarters. I thought of Rebecca’s Religion of the House. Was this what that worship led to? I edged between the book barricades, toward the far corner, where there was a piano.

  Something scuttled out from under it as I approached; I nerved myself to go nearer, though the smell in that part of the room was fetid and turned my stomach. The piano had been gutted: its lid was propped open, so I could see into its entrails. The strings had been sliced; it looked as if someone had taken a knife to them, then caught hold of them, and attempted to pull them out. The result was a writhing tangle of wires and loops, like metal intestines. Something—a rat, a mouse—had got trapped in there long ago; I could see a dusty mummified darkness in the depths of the wires. I could smell old decay from three feet away.

  I stepped back, feeling hot and sick. Who had done this? Mrs. Danvers?

  “Don’t you fret about that, madam,” said a voice behind me. “Now you’ve come, we can get that piano mended. I would have done it before for you, but I don’t like men coming here—and I wasn’t sure, maybe you preferred it that way. When I first came here—after you left—everything was so lovely, just as it always was, except for that. I knew you must have done it after you saw that doctor, madam. Shall I get it mended, I thought? Then I decided to wait, until you gave me instructions. Oh, look, oh, look—” She made a choking sound. I turned to her and saw her face contract. “I’ve brought the tea, madam—and I don’t have lemons. I should have bought lemons….”

  Her distress was very great. When I called her “Mrs. Danvers” it seemed to distress her more, so, in the end, pitying her deeply, unsure what to do, I called her “Danny” again, and told her the tea was delicious as it was. I lifted the dusty cup to my lips
and pretended to sip. The tea had been made with cold water.

  “Will you be needing a fire, madam?” She said, looking around the room in an anxious way; the temperature there, at the top of the building, under the roof, with the windows fast shut and the sun blazing in, must have been well into the eighties. I told her I wouldn’t be needing a fire, and turned to look at the fireplace. She had been burning books, I saw—perhaps they were her only fuel in the winter months. There was a great mound of ashes in the grate, and the singed remains of half-burned pages and calf bindings. On the chimneypiece shelf above, an exquisite china figure in a bocage of flowers stood next to a stopped clock. The looking glass behind them had been sheeted.

  “Oh, madam, how it burned!” Mrs. Danvers said, gazing over my shoulder. “All that paneling, such dry tinder, and up it went in a sheet of flame, just the way I knew you wanted. You could see the flames from ten miles away, like a great beacon. You could hear them, too—a noise like roaring. It raced from one end of the house to the other, so fast; I couldn’t believe how fast it was. I said to myself, That’s my darling, she’s done for them. Miss Rebecca never would let anyone get the better of her—then I came here. You take care of the flat, Mrs. Danvers, he’d said, You make the arrangements…. He never cared what happened to this place and all your lovely things. Too busy trying to forget you. I knew he never would. He could marry a hundred women, but he’d never replace you. You marked him for life—I could see that when I looked in his eyes—even if she couldn’t. It was killing him—being without you. Shall I show you your surprise? It came just the other day, or the other week, I forget. First the azalea, then this. I knew they were harbingers, I knew you were coming. I can’t tell you the joy. I knew I hadn’t much longer to wait. Look, madam.”

  She reached across to me and laid her thin fingers on my arm; she began to tug at me, and although she had almost no physical strength, the force of her will was mesmeric. I followed her, then halted. Of all the evidence of the past that I might have found in that terrible place, the last thing I would have wanted to see was this, yet there it was, laid out on the only table in the room that was upright.

  Two smart boxes, once white, now yellowed, their lids removed, and the tissue paper folded back for my inspection. Inside, carefully folded, baby’s clothes just as described: tiny matinee jackets, nightgowns, bonnets, and booties, a gossamer shawl, fine enough to pass through a wedding ring. The smallest pearl buttons, faded threads of ribbon, exquisite hand stitching, knitted of the finest wool, on the thinnest needles: a wardrobe for a child never born. It was recognizable, but pitilessly moth eaten. Lying on the remains of the shawl was a blue enameled butterfly brooch, and next to it, carelessly tossed aside, the brown envelope it had arrived in, addressed to “Mrs. Danvers.”

  I stared at the baby clothes and the brooch; I couldn’t bring myself to touch them. I suppose I’d known from the instant she opened the door to me that there was no possibility Mrs. Danvers could have sent those notebooks or that ring of Rebecca’s to anyone. She was too frail to break out of her obsession in that particular way; someone else must have sent them, and sent this, too, I thought, looking at the brooch that had been Rebecca’s talisman, her blazon. I felt jerky, sick, and trapped. I no longer cared who had sent these things or why—all I wanted to do was escape from this woman and this place and breathe air again.

  But I couldn’t leave her. I couldn’t just walk away and do nothing. It repelled me to look at her, but I made myself do so. I could see she was desperately ill, physically as well as mentally; the emaciation was very advanced. How long had she been shut away here? How did she eat? How did she exist? “Danny,” I said quietly, “how do you manage here? Do you go out to the shops? What do you do for food?”

  She looked at me as if I were the insane one. “Tins,” she said, making me jump. “Cupboards full of tins. I went on working until last year, madam. People always need housekeepers and companions. I always left a message here for you, so you’d know how to reach me. I looked ahead; I was careful with my money and, when I was stronger than I am now, I laid in the stores—I never knew when you might come back, you see, madam. And I still go out even now—sometimes, not so much recently.” She gave a little grimace. “During the day—when she’s out, that spy downstairs. I wait till she’s gone, I’m in and out—I don’t like her to see me. I don’t like anyone to see me. It’s more difficult now. The pain’s been bad these last weeks. And my eyes aren’t what they were—I expect you can see that, madam.” She turned her milky gaze in my direction. “I can see you, though—oh, yes, I can see you. I remember that dress. Your daddy bought you that dress, one day at Greenways.”

  “Danny, do you have a doctor?” I asked. “Is there a doctor you see? Someone who might help if you fell ill…” I hesitated. “Or, say, if I did?”

  If I hadn’t added that last suggestion, I’d have met with a blank dismissal, I knew—but putting it that way seemed to convince her.

  “Oh, yes, oh, yes,” she said, looking around her. “I was ill last year, madam. Sick, so sick. I couldn’t seem to eat, and the pain was terrible. I saw a doctor then—well, I had to. And I was in hospital for months; until this January. I had the very finest treatment—I have a card somewhere, madam. Let me see, where did I put it?”

  I thought of the periods of activity Selina had described, and the periods of silence. Did this hospital stay explain that?

  Mrs. Danvers finally found the card. It was inside a vase filled with shells on the same table as the baby clothes. She picked up the butterfly brooch as she passed it, and to my dismay and shame, pinned it on my dress. She gave the doctor’s card to me in a childlike trusting way, and I saw that the only way to proceed was to tell her firmly what to do; the sad instincts of feudalism remained with her still. The instant I gave orders, she seemed much less uneasy.

  In this way, I persuaded her back downstairs. Even then, she insisted I see “my room,” which she’d kept as I’d always liked it. She opened a door, and I looked into a large square chamber, dominated by a four-poster bed. The blinds were down; the light in the room was thick and shadowy. The disorder upstairs was not repeated here. Apart from the thick silvering of dust on every surface, this bedroom must have been just as Rebecca left it.

  There were silver hair brushes on the dressing table; on a chest was a small triptych of photographs in a blackened silver frame. I moved hesitantly toward it. Under a veil of dust were the photographs of Rebecca’s mother that Jack Favell had described to Tom; here was Isabel-Isolda as eternal understudy, as lady-in-waiting and as Desdemona; here was the final resting place of that shrine to her mother that Rebecca had erected at Greenways. “So beautiful and so gifted,” said that low voice behind me. “When she died, it made my blood run cold. I’ll never forget it. It’s branded on my memory.”

  Was she thinking of Isabel’s actual death, or Desdemona’s—or Rebecca’s? I couldn’t tell. I was beginning to feel dizzy and light-headed; the room felt hallucinatory. I turned to look at the bed. What I had taken for thin muslin hangings were spiders’ webs; the bed was sheeted with cobwebs.

  I closed the door on that room, and persuaded Mrs. Danvers that she must lie down and rest. I could see that the very last of her energy had been exhausted. She leaned on my arm, and I helped her into a little dark cupboard of a room nearby; I assumed she had used it when she left Manderley, but its importance to her went back further than that, I discovered.

  “Do you remember when we came here after your daddy died?” she said, staring at air as I folded back the coverlet. “I had my savings, you sold those bracelets, and you said to me, ‘There you are, Danny, that will buy us a refuge.’ I found this place and I took out the lease and I brought you here. How ill you were—I was beside myself with worry. Night after night, those terrible dreams—how he haunted you, your daddy. But I was always here. I sat up with you night after night. You were like a daughter to me, my own little girl—you knew I’d never leave you. ‘Now I’m
going to mend myself, Danny,’ you said. ‘One piece at a time. You’re going to help me, and we’re going to make all the joins invisible.’ And you did, too. I loved your mother, but she was nothing to you. I’ve never known anyone with a quarter your courage and willpower.”

  Tears had come to her eyes. Taking her hand, I told her she must rest. She was fretful and bewildered at first, but I managed to make her lie down on a narrow bed, and drew the musty coverlet over her. I tried to open the window to let some air into the place, but it wouldn’t budge an inch. I went in search of a telephone, but there wasn’t one. I found my way to the kitchen, and fetched her a glass of water. I opened one of the cupboard doors and there were battalions of tins, some prewar I think, just as she claimed; I wanted to weep when I saw them. When I returned with the water, her eyes were shut. I stood, afraid, in the doorway, then I saw the slow rise and fall of her chest, and knew she was breathing.

  I know some people find it very hard to be close to illness, or close to the old and the infirm—they can’t deal with the smell of sickness apart from anything else; I was like that once, but I’m not now. Nursing my mother and looking after my father has cured me of that kind of fastidiousness. So I went back to that bedside, and took Mrs. Danvers’s hand in mine. I explained that I was going out briefly, but would return, and I was taking the key to this flat with me.

  I don’t think she heard or understood any of this; but I’m glad that I took her hand, in view of what happened afterward. She clasped it tight in hers with surprising strength. Her milky eyes flickered open, and fixed on a vacancy behind me. I think the last of her energy and the last of her will had been used up in admitting me, talking to me, and fetching that stone-cold tea. Now, her lips moved, shaping words, but no words were spoken. A ghost of some gladness came into her face, then her eyes flickered shut, and I saw that she was sleeping.