Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  The details of what happened after that don’t matter. The logistics of finding that doctor, persuading him to see me, persuading him that action was necessary, and persuading him, eventually, after endless delays, to come back to the house with me, are just that, logistics. He administered an injection, and then took me aside into that studio room. Its insanities seemed scarcely to bother him; maybe, with a busy London practice, and many poor elderly patients, he saw similar decay and confusion on a daily basis. He certainly made no comment on it. The cancer, he said, had been already advanced when surgery took place last October; it had brought some months of remission; Mrs. Danvers had been first in hospital, then a nursing home until January this year. He was very definite about these dates, to which I paid careful attention. They meant that whoever Selina had seen on the stairs in last November’s fog, it could not have been Mrs. Danvers.

  Consulting his notes, he said he had last seen her in February at his surgery, by which time it was clear to him that the cancer had spread; when no further contact was made, he had assumed she’d died, or left London. He was surprised that she could have survived another three months—but I wasn’t.

  I knew what had kept her alive; I knew who had kept her alive. I knew that the end couldn’t be long delayed, and it would be easier for her now she believed she’d been reunited with Rebecca. Did I feel guilt at the deception on my part? Of course not. I’ve spent the last ten years of my life with the old and the ailing. I know: Truth can damage, and deceptions can be a blessing.

  Mrs. Danvers did not wake from that last sleep of hers; she did not recover consciousness, and I was glad. I thought it merciful. She was taken to a hospital in Chelsea, but when I went there the next day, still wearing that butterfly brooch, I was told she hadn’t made it through the night. She had died at three in the morning, in what Rebecca called the dangerous hours after midnight.

  HOW I WANTED TO LEAVE LONDON THEN. I’D SPENT THE night before at Rose’s St. John’s Wood house, talking to the women students who rent rooms there. I’d said nothing to them about how I’d spent my day, and I must have disguised my feelings, for they seemed to notice nothing. They were friendly and kind; they talked about lectures and examinations, parties and men, and they seemed to believe that this world they conjured up could be mine for the asking. I nodded and smiled, but I could feel that world receding further and further away from me. Its gestures and delights came from the other side of a thick glass pane. I couldn’t join the young women the other side of it, I was over there in another world with the old, the haunted, the sick, and the dying.

  It would have been wicked in me to regret that, I felt—but I went to bed tied up in knots of yearnings, desires, and duties. The following morning, leaving that hospital, all I wanted to do was rush to Paddington, get on a train, and escape home to The Pines and the sea. Once I was there, I felt I might forget that terrible studio room and forget all my disloyal conflicts. But I’d arranged to talk to those artist friends who had shared a house with my sister Lily, and who had told Selina those ghost stories; they still lived in Tite Street. I’d once known them well; they were looking forward to seeing me; I felt I couldn’t cancel the visit.

  They occupied a large bohemian house, a short way along the street from Rebecca’s flat. For as long as I could remember, that house had always been crammed with visiting friends, with mistresses, wives and ex-wives, with tribes of children of confusing parentage, all of whom came and went very amicably. I found it little altered since I last saw it, just before the war, when Lily was leaving London with her married lover to make a new life in Australia. It still had the same rich, gypsyish beauty that had so fascinated me in my teens: There were still the same bright rugs, the vivid blue and scarlet painted rooms were still crammed with pictures. In the kitchen, the still life of an eternal convivial meal lay on the long scrubbed kitchen table; a fat jug spilled dog roses and scarlet poppies; I could hear the sound of a violin from upstairs, and the shouts of children from the garden.

  They led me out into that garden, and it was still an Eden, just as I remembered it, a long country garden in the midst of London, weedy, overgrown, and beautiful, heady with the scent of roses and orange blossom. I was kissed and hugged, introduced to new occupants and reintroduced to old ones. I was led to a rickety wooden table shaded by a scarlet Japanese parasol; there was a large bowl of ripe strawberries on the table. A woman I didn’t recognize from before, with a long rope of auburn Pre-Raphaelite hair, brought the men cigarettes and a jug of red wine. She was heavily pregnant, rapt, and majestical; she was wearing a vivid peasant skirt and a careless silky shawl embroidered with flowers and butterflies. I looked enviously at her from the other side of my pane of glass; she smiled at me, then wandered back to the kitchen. In this household, for all its liberality, I reminded myself, women had always been treated as muses—and servants.

  In the bright sunlight, still behind my pane of mysterious glass, I looked at Lily’s former friends, who had also at one time been Rebecca’s friends: Everything in the house was the same; they were the same; there was only one difference—I remembered them young, now they were in their fifties.

  The three men who had been closest to Lily, who had been the fixtures in the caravansary of this house for thirty years, were known as the “Three Rs”: Their names were Richard, Robert, and Rayner. The first two were painters, Rayner was a sculptor. They sat with me at the table, lit cigarettes, poured wine—and talked. How they talked! They told me tales of Rebecca that I’d heard years ago from Lily, tales that they’d clearly been repeating ever since. Those anecdotes had been altered, embellished, improved, touched up, rubbed down—they were now myths, and, although they were well told, even wittily told, with many interruptions, much laughter, and squabbling about who said exactly what, where, when, and to whom, they were meaningless, meaningless. Somewhere in the forests of those tales, I’d glimpse a brightness I knew was Rebecca, or a patch of cool shadow, and I’d think, yes, that’s her; then she’d slip away unseen again, lost in the undergrowth of digression and detail.

  I had thought they might know about those one-a-month men, and might even be able to identify the poet of Irish extraction Rebecca mentioned. But they couldn’t. Did I mean that fashionable photographer, perhaps—or the rich American she was involved with for a time? There had been a Scottish earl, the Hotspur of the North, they’d called him—but he hadn’t lasted long. There was that witty insolent novelist, what was his name? But a poet? No, they couldn’t remember a poet, or an Irishman—but it could have been anyone, men couldn’t resist Rebecca. “We were all in love with her at one time or another. Everyone was in love with her,” said Robert, a man who’d once been going to have a golden future, but hadn’t, though he didn’t seem bitter about it. “She was a glorious woman, glorious—a law unto herself. Ah, the days of wine and roses,” said Rayner, lifting his glass and smiling.

  Off they went into another anecdote, tumbling with names famous and names forgotten. Richard went indoors, rummaged around, and found a pencil sketch of Rebecca he’d once made; he was a clever portraitist, a protégé of Augustus John. The sketch was delightful, but it looked nothing like her.

  When I’d set off from Kerrith, I’d had a list of specific questions I wanted to ask—I wanted to know what Rebecca had done during the period of roughly four years between the death of her father and her marriage to Maxim. She’d said that she went out and “earned”—but how, exactly? I suppose I also wanted to know about her sexual preferences and whether she had ever been in love, but most of all I just wanted an answer to that eternally unanswerable question: What was she like? What happened to her in the period to which she never referred, the years between Greenways and Manderley?

  Did I get straight answers? No, of course not. Both Richard and Robert had been conscientious objectors in the first war; they’d worked on a farm on Richard’s father’s Sussex estate, then moved here when the war ended. They remembered Rebecca’s arriving at Tite S
treet three years later; both could remember a period of ill health, one claiming it lasted a few months, and the other hotly denying this, and claiming it was a year at least before she recovered, to become feted, courted, envied, and emulated.

  Richard was sure she’d worked at the French Embassy in some social capacity; Robert said she been the brains behind a little couture business run by two fashionable titled women, a business that had been the last word in chic for a brief period. Rayner said a financier friend helped her gamble on the stock exchange and invest in property. They all three agreed that propelled upward by beauty, wit, daring, a droll way of speaking, and charm, she had become, overnight, as it were, a necessary adornment in a long dizzying chain of Jazz Age parties.

  “She was a muse!” cried Rayner, who’d had more wine to drink than anybody else. “I was so young! It was an inspiration just to look at her!” “Ah, those eyes, those dangerous eyes,” said Richard, or perhaps Robert—I forget. And I knew that, fond of them though I was, this was all a gossamer weave of indulgence and fabrication, wefted with truth perhaps, but warped by nostalgia.

  As I rose to leave a group of children, as grubby as gypsies, as plump and hungry as puppies, emerged from the shrubbery at the far end of the garden. They piled into the kitchen in search of food, and in a tranquil unhurried way the lovely, heavily pregnant woman I’d seen earlier began laying bread and fruit on the table. She lifted a pitcher, and poured milk into glasses, the children scrambling around her. As I was about to pass by, she laid a hand on my arm.

  “You’re wearing her brooch,” she said, in a low voice, glancing over her shoulder at the group of men who were still in the garden doorway, arguing over an event that might have happened in 1921 or 1922, or might never have happened at all. She was older than I’d realized, I saw. Something in the way she spoke, or something in her eyes, made me pause.

  “You knew her then?” I said, and I watched her face light.

  “At one time, very well,” she replied. She glanced back at the men, and smiled, a slow smile, of great warmth. “Insofar as anyone knew Rebecca,” she added in a final way, then she turned away to attend to the children, and I left the house shortly after.

  I CAME OUT INTO HOT, AIRLESS TITE STREET. I STILL HAD the keys to Rebecca’s house. I could have let myself in, and looked through the belongings there like some thief; I could have searched for that last notebook—though I was sure I wouldn’t find it. I suppose I could have rescued that little shrine of photographs to her dead mother, but I couldn’t bear to set foot in that death space again. So, rightly or wrongly, I stepped back and distanced myself. Let someone else deal with that flat and its contents; let someone else dispose of the relics. Yesterday I’d seen the sickness an obsession with the past can inflict. I’d met a woman dying of the past. I wanted no more talismans.

  I dropped the keys at the agents for the building, then I left London. Once on the train, I could see my double moving on the glass whenever we passed from sunlight to shadow. I could see the butterfly brooch pinned on my dress. I didn’t feel like myself: I felt other. I tried to think about what I’d seen and learned on this visit, but the details fragmented. Why had Rebecca attacked that piano after her final visit to that London doctor? I thought of the piano at her childhood house in Brittany, with the strings that perhaps needed tuning. The carriage became hotter and hotter as we jolted westward; the strap for fastening the window was broken, and the entire train felt sealed and airless.

  I told myself that Tom Galbraith was right to curtail his searches and I should do so, too. Everything of importance I had to learn of Rebecca I already knew; the rest was detail. I would probably have honored that resolve, but as I was about to discover, the past is capricious. Sometimes you pursue it, sometimes it pursues you—and, when it does, you cannot ignore it.

  “Good news,” said Rose when she met me at the station in our car. “Your Mr. Galbraith telephoned from Brittany yesterday. He’s coming back to England in four days’ time. He and that friend of his are going to call in and see us.”

  “He isn’t ‘my’ Mr. Galbraith, Rose,” I said, winding down the window. “Do stop calling him that. How hot it is.”

  “And Francis Latimer’s coming for supper tonight. I sweet-talked the fishmonger. We’re having sea trout.”

  “Tonight? Oh, Rose, I’m exhausted. I feel as if I’ve been on that train for a week. Whose idea was that? Yours?”

  Rose gave me a pitying look. “Ellie, do you know me at all? No. Your father’s.”

  Rose said nothing more until we’d negotiated the narrow roads inland, winding our way between the banks and hedgerows that are so tall here they make the lanes into rich green tunnels. The scents of summer flooded the car; the despondency of my day began to slip away. I looked at the woodbine and the dog roses twining in the hedges; I thought of Tom Galbraith’s return, and my heart lifted. We reached the brow of the hill behind Kerrith, and the great blue panorama of the ocean opened out for us. The horizon shimmered. Anything’s possible, I said to myself; think of the weeks, months, years ahead of us.

  “Oh, and by the way, we’ve had a visitor,” Rose said. “A woman. She arrived yesterday afternoon, when your father was having his rest. She was somewhat odd. I haven’t mentioned it to him.”

  “A woman? Who was she? What did she want?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t recognize her, and she didn’t leave a name. Her manner was evasive. She said she might call again, or she might not. She’d hoped to see your father.”

  “She didn’t leave a name? How strange. What did she look like?”

  “Not very memorable,” said Rose. “Dowdy. Gray dress. Gray hair. Mousy.”

  Someone from the parish council, I thought, or one of the innumerable do-gooders who are always trying to rope my father onto some committee. I forgot the incident almost at once, and wasn’t to understand its significance for several days. I was slow, but then my mind was elsewhere; I was thinking of Tom Galbraith’s return, and, as that anonymous woman might have told me, such preoccupations can be curiously blinding.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE INFORMATION THAT TOM GALBRAITH WAS RETURNING, albeit briefly, spread around Kerrith with astonishing speed. Within a day of Rose’s giving me the news, I found it was common knowledge. I went into the chemist’s to renew my father’s prescriptions and they smiled at me knowingly. The day before Tom and his friend were due to arrive, when I went into Kerrith to buy food for the lunch Rose was planning, I could see the shopkeepers were measuring me up for a wedding gown; I fled as fast as possible from their assumptions. I didn’t manage to avoid dreadful Marjorie Lane, however. She rushed out of her bijou cottage as I passed, and clasped my hands. Fizzing with suppressed spite, she said she wanted to be the first to congratulate me.

  “I knew he’d be back!” she cried. “Tomorrow, I hear. How thrilling! One or two people here—I’ll mention no names, Ellie—said he wasn’t interested in the first place. Well, my dear, I set them straight. I told them, Ellie wears her heart on her sleeve. Dear Mr. Gray must have known how she felt; why, it was obvious to everyone! He wouldn’t have made a fool of her for the world. You mark my words, I said, he’ll be back! Tell me, Ellie dear, have you made any definite plans yet, the two of you? I can see it must be difficult—a man can only take on so many responsibilities. What will you do about your father?”

  “You’re mistaken,” I said. “These rumors are all nonsense. He’ll be here for a day at most. It’s just a brief visit, to see my father mainly. Excuse me.”

  “Of course, Ellie, if you say so! How is your dear father? I bumped into him the other afternoon with your aunt—did she tell you? Rather crisp, isn’t she? Quite short with me, I felt—I couldn’t hide my shock when I saw your poor father’s state, such a rapid decline! Perhaps she felt I should have hidden my reaction better—but you know me, Ellie, what I think is what I say; I’ve no time for subterfuge! And I’m so fond of your father, with his funny little ways. It quite b
roke my heart, dear, to see him so absentminded—and so thin! It can’t be long now, I said to Jocelyn Briggs, I just hope poor Ellie’s prepared. You’ll be putting The Pines up for sale, I imagine. A little bird told me Mr. Latimer might be interested in it. That’s not all he’s interested in, I said. He’s divorced, of course. But I expect you know that?”

  “Certainly I know that. I also know that if my father’s stronger now, which he is, it’s entirely due to Mr. Latimer. I really must go, Mrs. Lane—”

  “‘Marjorie,’ dear! I don’t stand on ceremony—all my friends call me ‘Marjorie.’”

  “In that case, I’ll continue to call you ‘Mrs. Lane,’” I said, and wished her good morning.

  I FELT THAT REMARK AT LEAST LEVELED THE SCORE, BUT what she’d said hurt me, as she’d certainly intended. I went straight to see the Briggs sisters—I’ve never been in any doubt as to where most of the rumors in Kerrith originate.

  I was fortunate in that I happened to find Elinor alone—it’s always easier to persuade the sisters to listen to you when they’re separated; when they’re together, it’s difficult to get a word in edgeways. Jocelyn was visiting a friend; Elinor was in their exquisite garden, exterminating greenfly. She seemed pleased to see me, and settled me in the shade of their terrace with a cool glass of homemade lemonade. She had the grace to blush when I put my accusations to her.

  “Heavens, where do these rumors start? That Lane woman is an abomination. I’m sure it can be nothing I’ve said. Why, I’m the soul of discretion—I haven’t breathed a word about Tom Galbraith, and who he truly is, for instance—well, he made Jocelyn and me promise that we wouldn’t. No, no, I’m afraid Jocelyn must be the culprit! She’s so fond of Tom—even before we knew who he was, we took to him! Such a thoughtful young man—he brought us chocolates from London, and our favorite violet creams, too; so clever of him! And then we’re devoted to you, Ellie, so of course when we heard Tom was returning to Kerrith, we both hoped…Yes, I feel Jocelyn must have dropped a tiny hint—and then people have jumped to their own conclusions.” She gave me a small glance. “And, who knows, they might be correct, dear.”