Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  I turned, and we clambered back to the shore. We climbed the path, passed the gorse at its crest, and walked back through the blue woods, reaching the gates as the heat of the afternoon began cooling. Tom and Nicholas Osmond drove me back to Kerrith, dropping me, at my request, by the Briggs sisters. They went in to say good-bye to Elinor and Jocelyn. Glad to be alone, I walked back through the town, and up the hill toward The Pines. I had no premonition, no sense of what was going to happen next, though I’d imagined this moment many times, and always believed that I would have.

  I was looking at the honeysuckle and the dog roses entwined in the hedgerows; I was letting the events of the afternoon lie down in my mind, and an ache was settling about my heart. I could relinquish Tom, I realized, but it was hard, very hard, to relinquish Rebecca. Below me, in the mouth of the harbor, little boats were tacking back and forth; a future I’d allowed myself to imagine was eddying away, but I knew there must be another, over the edge of the horizon. I looked out toward the shimmer of the ocean; then I realized someone was calling my name. I looked up the hill and saw Rose standing at the gate of The Pines, her face a white blur of fear and anxiety. “Ellie, Ellie,” she cried. “Oh, thank God. Come quickly…”

  I began to run. I ran up the hill, past Rose, who could scarcely speak, and then down through our gardens. I ran past the Grenville roses, between the palm and the monkey puzzle, toward a shape, a huddle, at the end of our garden. Francis Latimer was kneeling by our boundary wall, holding my father in his arms; my father was lying on the ground, half slumped against the wall, and his face…ah, his face was terribly altered.

  I couldn’t speak or cry out—but I wasn’t turned to stone, and I could move. I knelt down, and put my arms around my father. His eyes were still open, and he was still breathing, though very shallowly. I think he knew I was there, and I think he did sense my touch, though I could see from his face that he was traveling very fast to a place where I couldn’t reach him. His eyes were watching this place approach, and the journey there seemed to be taking all his energy and all his attention. He didn’t turn to look at me, but even so I’m sure he knew I was there, and my presence seemed to ease his passage a little. Some tension left his face; his hand jerked, then rested on mine. He said what I think was my name, though the syllables gave him difficulty.

  Then he gave a sigh and rested in my arms. I waited for him to speak again, because I knew he must speak now, that it was of the utmost importance and urgency that he did so. The flood of love in my heart was so full, I knew it must revive him, so I held him tight and tried to instill it into him. I began to see he was asleep, and I couldn’t understand why he would sleep with his eyes open. Then Francis Latimer quietly put his hand on my arm and said, “It’s over. He’s gone, Ellie.”

  “No,” I said. “No—you’re wrong.” But of course, he wasn’t. It had happened so stealthily that I still don’t know when exactly my father stepped through that door and it closed in my face. He left me, without words, between one quiet breath and the next, while I was holding him. Gone forever. I didn’t understand, or wouldn’t understand until, from the house where Rose had shut him in, my father’s shadow, his silent loyal companion, began barking.

  THAT WAS THREE MONTHS AGO, AS I WRITE. NOW I CAN smell autumn in the air in the early mornings. The weather is warm; we’ve had weeks of long balmy days; we’re in the midst of an Indian summer. It’s the time of year when Rebecca believed she’d give birth to her girl-boy.

  I am learning to live alone, to think of my father but pass my days without him. There were no further revelations after his death; there was no hidden cache of letters, no document that answered my questions and removed my uncertainties. I was glad of that. I was grieving, and I’d come to believe that uncertainties, not answers, were truthful. With the loss of my father, Rebecca’s story, for me, was over—but her influence was not.

  In the time that’s gone by there has been a funeral, and many people have written letters to me about my father; sometimes I recognize the man they describe, more often I don’t, but I was prepared for that by the months I’d spent trying to rescue Rebecca from people’s stories and memories. The Pines has been sold to Francis Latimer, to whom I’ve grown close since my father’s death. He is a man who encounters grief on a daily basis at the hospital, and he understands that its processes are slow and labyrinthine.

  During the summer, I spent many hours in his company. He told me the story of his life and his marriage; the hours I spent with him and with his two young sons—walking, picnicking, and sailing—were healing ones. In practical terms, too, Francis was the greatest possible help to me. My father had always protected me, as he had my mother, from the day-to-day realities of life. He had always flatly refused to involve me in, for instance, his financial affairs, claiming this was not a matter for women. So I was woefully ignorant, and ill prepared to deal with that great tangle of affairs, investments, probate, tax, and so on that inevitably attend a death. Suddenly I had to deal with a battery of supercilious lawyers, bankers, and executors, whose faintly impatient politesse did not disguise the fact that they expected me to do as they said, sign on the dotted line, and not bother “my pretty little head” (as one of them actually said to me) about the details of these male mysteries.

  Here, Francis was invaluable. He explained, and, when I didn’t understand, explained again; he was endlessly patient, and if I wished he hadn’t seemed amused sometimes, as if this were just a temporary game we were engaged in, I put that thought out of my mind. It seemed ungrateful. “Don’t humor me, Francis,” I said to him once. “This is serious—I have to understand it.”

  “Of course you do,” he said, giving me a thoughtful glance. “It’s unusual, that’s all, Ellie. Most women are content to leave that sort of thing to…” And he paused. “Well, to their fathers. Or their husbands.”

  “Maybe I’m not like most women, then,” I replied, perhaps a little sharply.

  “Now, that I agree with,” he said in a quiet way, and took my hand. He then kissed my hand—and there I was at once, pushed right to some edge, still raw with grief, longing for the protectiveness I knew he was offering, and at the same time fearing it.

  Francis is intelligent, and he is subtle. He knows, I think, the dangers of overt opposition; he knows how that can make a person entrench, and I suspect—he mentioned it once in a teasing way—that my father had told him I could be obstinate. So, when I explained my plans to join Rose in Cambridge (she returned there late that summer), he always listened quietly and with sympathy—and he always found a way of changing the subject. The last time we discussed it, we were in my father’s study, packing up his books, some of which I was to keep and most of which—there were so many of them—would have to go to a saleroom.

  I was kneeling on the floor, stacking Aquinas and Homer in packing chests; poor bereaved Barker was half asleep in front of a swept empty fireplace; Francis, who had been helping me, was due back at the hospital shortly; now he was pacing back and forth, only half listening to me—or so I believed. I should have realized that this pacing, and his slight air of edginess signaled something more than anxiety about time, but the task I was engaged on was a painful one. I can see now that it made me slow to understand a state that would have been obvious to most women.

  I was explaining the plans I’d nursed for so long; I explained I could sit the entrance examination this autumn, taking up my place—if I was awarded the scholarship I hoped for—the following year. I’d tried before, on other occasions, to make Francis see these plans as I did. I’d tried to tell him about that time I’d visited Rose, and the great ache of longing for a future I’d had to abandon that I’d experienced walking by the Cam, looking at the lights of the colleges. I’d sensed a faint male impatience then, so this time I kept the details dry, quick, and specific. I’d study; I’d actually use my brain at last, before it conked out completely like some rusty disused car; in three years, I’d have my degree, and I could—
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  “Do what, Ellie?” he said, and he stopped pacing.

  “I don’t know yet,” I replied, looking up to meet that alert, intelligent gray gaze, still not seeing, even then, what was about to happen. I felt a sudden jab of emotion, right to the heart. “That’s the whole point, don’t you see, Francis? Anything could happen. I’d have a choice. For the first time in my whole life, I’d have a choice. I’ve never had that luxury. Can you understand that?”

  “You have a choice now,” he said, in an odd abrupt way, with a sudden roughness of tone that startled me. Then he moved swiftly toward me, and knelt beside me. He knocked over a pile of books—Austens and Brontës, I think, not that it matters; I dropped a fat leather-bound complete Shakespeare; Barker growled. I’d seen the expression in Francis’s eyes by then, and, inexperienced as I am, there was no mistaking it. I knew what was about to happen.

  He pulled me toward him and, with none of his customary gentleness, he kissed me. I’m not used to desire; I’d forgotten how sharply, and how swiftly, it digs in its claws. Ten minutes later, when we were both in its grip, standing in an empty dusty room, in a sea of books, the sunlight striping the walls, the sound of waves moving, moving in the distance, Francis asked me to marry him. We looked at each other, white-faced. “Marry me, Ellie,” he said. I was shaking; his hands were unsteady. It was the week before I was due to move out of my father’s house and he was due to move into it.

  WHEN YOU’RE IN THAT STATE, YOU CAN’T THINK—AND Francis knew that. He took advantage of it with a ruthlessness I’d never have expected of him. “Every time you use the word ‘think,’ Ellie,” he said to me, “I shall kiss you. I don’t want you to think. You don’t need to think. I love you. If you haven’t realized you love me yet, you will. I’ll make you. I’ve waited months for this. I’ve been patient and forbearing and understanding, and I’m sick to death of it. Can you understand that?”

  “I think I can,” I replied—with an inevitable result. Such games are seductive—but it was more than a game, and I knew that, so I wouldn’t give in, and I wouldn’t let him rush me. When I was with Francis, I wanted only one thing; when I was apart from him (I didn’t tell him this) I wanted something else. It was hazy this thing that beckoned to me. I used to ask myself what Rebecca would have called it—freedom, liberty? For want of a better word, I called it independence. How Francis disliked that term! If I used it, he could become irritable. He’d push it to one side; he’d tell me how he wanted to protect me and take care of me…. And into my head would come Rebecca’s voice, reacting to Maxim’s very same promises. “I’ve been taken care of all my life, Francis,” I said to him. “I can take care of myself, you know.”

  And then he played his trump card—how I wished he hadn’t! “This is what your father wanted, Ellie,” he said. “Darling, he knew I could make you happy. He and I talked about this—we talked about it often.”

  That touched me—and it frightened me. Day by day, hour by hour, I bought myself time. It was finally agreed that I’d give Francis my answer on the day The Pines was due to be handed over. I bought a one-way ticket to Cambridge that I could use that same morning—or not. Before I made up my mind, there was something I had to do, an act Francis would not have understood. I had to make one last visit to Manderley.

  I’D SET MY ALARM CLOCK, BUT EXPECTATION WOKE ME; AS dawn was breaking, Barker and I were walking through the quiet of the Manderley woods. My trousers were soaked with the dew from the long sweet grass; the brambles barring the approach to Manderley itself were weighted down with black fruit. Through the trees, we watched the skimmed milk sky warm to rose on the eastern horizon; the sun was rising behind the dark shape of the house. Emerging from the woods, we walked toward the sea; the shore below was still in shadow, and the water in the bay was restless, its color metallic.

  The wind was freshening; I sat down in the shelter of the gorse, and watched the many ghosts that inhabit this place, Rebecca’s, my father’s, and my own. I touched her blue butterfly brooch, which I’d pinned to my collar, and, instead of looking to the past, as I had so often here, I waited to see my way through the future. I looked at two fair prospects: on my left hand, love; on my right hand, liberty.

  I tried to look at the options in a dry unemotional way. I could become Francis’s wife—was I ready to be a wife? That possibility brought with it everything I’d been taught a woman should aspire to, including children; I should like to have children. I could take my beloved university route, as I’d always hoped and planned. I could go to London, find a job—share a flat with Selina perhaps; after my father’s death, she’d written urging me to do that. With the money from the sale of The Pines, I could do almost anything and I could go almost anywhere. I could blow the lot if so inclined; I could sail to America or Africa, and see what happened. I stared at the sea, my arm around Barker’s neck. When you’re not used to freedom of choice, I was discovering, it’s bewildering.

  I knew which course of action my father would have advised, and I was tempted by it because he would have approved it. Even though he was gone—because he was gone—I still sought to please him. I looked out at the reef and the sandbank where Tom had thrown that glittering ring that day. I was washed this way and that on a tide of indecision.

  Impatient with myself, knowing I needed guidance, I stood up, and turned back toward the house. I walked as close as I could, looking up at the broken crenellations of the walls, the dark empty windows almost invisible now behind the fingerings of ivy. I picked a handful of brambles; the dark fruits were cold with dew; they tasted sharply sweet; they stained my hands with their juices. I thought of the promise Rebecca had made to her child. I stood very still, as close to the walls of Manderley as I could get, and I listened, listened, listened for that voice, for that heartbeat.

  WHEN I HEARD IT, AND HEARD IT FOR SURE, I RETURNED home. I was methodical. I packed up the very last of my belongings, including the faded snapshot of Rebecca and the creased photograph of my mother that I had found folded together in my father’s wallet. I packed Rebecca’s childhood notebook last. Before I did so, I looked at its blank pages, which told a story only she could read, she’d said. I felt they also told my own. I traced the faint outline of that winged girl’s wings, then I closed the notebook, and fastened my suitcase.

  I went downstairs to empty rooms. I stood in my father’s study, where the shelves had been emptied of books. I waited there for Francis Latimer, and when he joined me, I refused his proposal.

  It was very difficult to do that. He’s a good man, an attractive man, and an honorable one; I am not without feelings for him, either—if I had been, the decision would have been a simple one. He took it harder than I had expected; it was the first time I’d ever seen him lose his composure—and that pained me deeply.

  “It’s too soon—is that it?” he said. “Ellie, please tell me it’s that. Should I have waited longer before I asked you? Dear God, I wish I hadn’t waited one minute now. I should have asked you the day we first talked at the hospital. I wanted to. Didn’t you realize that?”

  I stared at him. I hadn’t realized. It had never crossed my mind. I said, “Francis, please try to understand. This is very hard for me. I’m not ready to be a wife. I’m thirty-one years old—and I’ve only just stopped being a daughter.”

  “I’m not asking you to be a wife, I’m asking you to be my wife,” he said in a harsh way, and I saw I’d hurt him. “Darling—come here. Look at me. Don’t do this. I love you. Darling, please, listen to me.”

  I listened. I listened to Francis, the man my father had chosen for me, and I listened to the other voices that had spoken to me so often these past months: to the second Mrs. de Winter, whose one object in life had been to make her husband happy; and to Rebecca, who warned of men who came bearing gifts, and extracted a price for them. The more I listened to all these voices arguing away, the more muddled and distressed I became. It went on and on—what a cacophony! But I’d made a decision, and it seem
ed feeble and wrong to go back on it, so when Francis was calmer, and I was much less calm, I refused him a second time.

  There was a long silence. Francis moved away from me; my vision was blurry, and my mind a mess of indecision and inconsequentiality. I thought: It’s 1951—what will happen to me, where will I go, what will I become in the second half of this century?

  Time ticked; Francis gave me a long, slow, measuring look. “Very well,” he said finally. He might have been amused; he might have been angry. “In that case, I’ll wait. And then I’ll ask you again, Ellie.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “You mustn’t do that. I might weaken.”

  “That was the idea,” he replied in a dry way, and he then took me out to see his sons, who were waiting in the car. He knows how fond of them I am, so I thought this was a little devious of him.

  The two boys greeted me, then ran into the house. I heard a sound I hadn’t heard in twenty years at The Pines: the sound of children. I heard their footsteps run up the uncarpeted stairs; I heard their shouts from the bedrooms. They opened one of the windows, and leaned out to look at the sea. I looked at the sea, too, one last, long, painful look while I made up my mind. Then I fastened Barker’s lead, kissed Francis good-bye, and turned my back on my home and my childhood.

  I left for the station and my new life; for work, and the room of my own in Cambridge. Barker sat at my feet in the back of the taxi; we swooped down the hill into Kerrith; we passed through familiar streets, but my tears obscured them. The cottages, the harbor, the stations of my childhood. I could walk here blindfolded. I wound down the window and let the fresh salt air flood the car; at once I began to feel stronger. As we mounted the hill toward the Manderley headland, I found my tears had dried, and something had begun to creep along my veins, something new and alive that felt like exhilaration. Its energy was very rich. It was as intoxicating as wine, as shocking and powerful as freedom.