I knew – we all knew – that we were watching the real thing. The real thing ahead of her time: a woman who could fly out of the cage, and who would continue to do so, no matter what the cost. She spoke to our generation as Sylvia Plath had to the generation before – over her shoulder, saying, ‘Follow me.’ Still I felt proud, almost responsible, when her name started appearing in the highbrow places. My copy of Vices and Follies was dog-eared long before it became a collector’s item. My dream, when I set out to become a writer, was that one day I would write something the calibre of The Toy of Man or The Rich Are Like Women. When I read Shoestrings for the first time, I was so impressed, and so depressed by the gulf between my talent and hers, that I almost gave up writing for good. Or perhaps I should put it differently, because there was an affinity between her writing and mine, or at least I saw one – and still do. Rebecca is the writer I could have become if I had taken myself seriously.
So I was a founder member of the cult. That’s what makes it all so odd. What people forget is that she wasn’t a household name in those days, at least not in America. Even in London, she was still known mainly for being the only woman poet in the group known as the Hertford Five. All I knew about her life was what I read in her author’s notes. Born into a family that ran a roadhouse somewhere between Austin and San Antonio, put herself through college and graduated from the University of Texas by the age of nineteen, fetched up in Oxford knowing no one but armed with an Irish passport, got herself coached for the exam, and after the second try got in to do a second degree. Married to the poet and novelist Max Midwinter, with whom she had two children, and well known in London as a literary critic. It was The Marriage Hearse that turned her into a Cause, and that didn’t come out until after her death. Like everyone else, I read this book as disguised autobiography. And so I believed that, like the heroine, who was also Irish-American, and the only woman in a group of experimental Oxford poets, and also published by her husband’s uncle, and so sensitive as to be almost skinless, she had been driven to the edge by her husband and his powerful family.
In the book, of course, the heroine rallies. But for me as for most readers, its strangely abrupt but still hopeful ending made Rebecca’s own death seem even more tragic. We wanted to know what had happened between the time she finished the book and the time she died. Most particularly, we wanted to know what had happened during her last week on the Caribbean island of St John the Baptist. We were outraged to read, in Max’s preface to the first volume of her journals, that he had lost the penultimate notebook and destroyed the last for the sake of the children. We were not satisfied with the statements released by her husband’s family, not inclined to believe them either. We were ready to believe the Oswald exposé before it was even written. And when we bought it, we took one look at the now famous photograph of the then oh-so-happy literary god and goddess on their marriage day, one look at this slender, patrician aesthete guiding his bedazzled new wife down the church steps, and thought, No doubt about it, this man is guilty.
The lack of any up-to-date photograph only served to fuel our fantasy. He was, after all, the perfect illustration of our fears. We couldn’t blame Rebecca for succumbing to him or for wanting to become part of his family. We admired her for daring to be herself amid all their pomp and circumstance, for daring to live out the highest form of romance, as we had redefined it, were all in our different ways attempting. And her death gave us the perfect excuse not to try so hard to do the same, or to stop trying altogether. We could look at Rebecca and say, See? The marriage of true and equal minds is not possible. There is no such thing as equality. The marriage of the minds is a con. Lay yourself open to a man and he’ll destroy you the way Max destroyed Rebecca.
Now I had met, and failed to recognise, the object of my hatred. No, it was worse than that. I had met the enemy without the armour of prejudice, and everything I had seen of him said to me that he was a good man.
And if that was so …
I spent the next two days in hiding in Mrs Van Hopper’s villa. I did not dare go down to the cola. I got Marco to do the shopping by claiming to have pulled a tendon in my knee. During the long, hot hours between breakfast and lunch, lunch and dinner, I pretended to be working: I sat with my pen and my pad at the marble table under the grape arbour at the far corner of Mrs Van Hopper’s garden, but I didn’t even try to put down the thoughts in my head. Instead I went back over – and over and over – my three meetings with Max, first looking for the clues I had missed, and then trying to figure out why it was that I had failed to make the connection.
It was, I decided, because there was no connection between Max and the husband in The Marriage Hearse. The only points of similarity were of circumstance. The man and the character had similar backgrounds, families, interests, habits. But I could not imagine Max being consumed by jealousy, nor wanting to destroy anyone, let alone a wife. And if there was anyone who was an expert on that kind of marriage, it was I.
I added up the points against my new and already lost friend. He drove too fast. He drank, he smoked. He appropriated other people’s belongings when he needed them, was not predisposed to explanations or apologies, did not follow any rules except his own. But his own rules were honourable. He had stood up for me, looked after me, treated me like a human being. Since I couldn’t see what he could possibly gain from it, I could only assume he treated other unimportant people as equals, too. He could not be a snob in that case. He could not, like the husband in The Marriage Hearse, be so obsessed with questions of hierarchy that he couldn’t see himself as thriving unless his wife was wasting away. It followed from there that Rebecca had drawn her villain from her imagination and not from her life – except for the external details that would convince everyone that she was writing about her husband. It followed that Rebecca had deliberately fooled her audience as an act of revenge. It followed that she had set out to destroy him, instead of the other way around.
How could she have done such a thing? Our idol, how could she?
And Max! Poor Max!
I knew what it was like to be blamed for things you hadn’t done, or rather, I had had a small taste one day the previous winter of the reception Max probably got every time he walked into a room.
My first and, I hope, only encounter with pure hatred was at Sasha’s cremation. It was in the eyes of each member of his family, our family, as they took turns to see me sitting at the back of the chapel. They wouldn’t have looked at me that way if they had known what I had been through. But to subject them to the full story would have been worse than spitting on the coffin.
Especially since … especially since … Now, as I sat in the accusing shade of Mrs Van Hopper’s arbour, I gave up that last protecting lie and admitted it to myself: I had failed him. I had failed to give him what he needed, I had failed to give him even what I had promised. I had failed to look after him, I had failed to see the signs. The army of ifs came back, the thousands upon thousands of things I could have done to save him. It wasn’t good enough to say you can’t save people, that the best you can do is help them save themselves. Anyone who spouted that kind of pap had never had a death. There was no evading the accusing finger, no consolation, no edifying lesson to retrieve from the ashes.
I had learned nothing – nothing! – from Sasha’s death. After all, how long had it taken me to find another tyrant? Now, only six months later, I had Mrs Van Hopper as my foil, Mrs Van Hopper to make me look good by being bad. And while she gave me exactly what I needed, she was paying my way around the world! For the foreseeable future, I would never have to stay in any one place long enough for my sympathisers to find out who I really was.
A stronger woman – a normal woman – would not have put up with Mrs Van Hopper, nor, for that matter, would she have let matters get out of hand the way I had done that first night at the Forbidden Villa. And even if she had read the signals wrong the way I had done, this stronger, normal woman would have had the presence of mind to find
out who this man was who had stood up for her, and taken the small measures to save him from Mrs Van Hopper’s virulent curiosity.
That’s what I told myself, but at the same time, I could not tame my own. The more I tried to think honourably, the more questions crowded into my fevered mind – about Max, about Rebecca. What had gone wrong between them, and when and why? What had gone wrong in her head? And why, when she went wrong in her head, had she still been able to write the book we all thought of as her masterpiece?
If I had thought of that book as her masterpiece, what did that say about me?
The same thing, I decided, as it said about anyone who called a new book a masterpiece: that I was inclined to admire works that dignified my prejudices. I had used – we all had used – Max as a scapegoat. That was the shameful conclusion my soul-searching brought me – but, typically, I did not have the courage to come out and say this when I found myself presented as Exhibit A at a dinner party I went to with Mrs Van Hopper in the Clot two nights later.
What was Max like? the hostess asked me after my employer had served her piece of juicy gossip.
A perfectly normal person, I replied. He was a bit prickly perhaps. ‘But who wouldn’t be with the public so prejudiced against him?’
‘Is that what he told you? That the public has misjudged him?’
‘No, he didn’t,’ I said. ‘That’s the conclusion I’ve drawn myself. If anything, he gives too little thought to what other people think. He doesn’t protect himself. He lays himself open to criticism.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, for example, you should have heard the things Lydia said to him.’
‘Oh, it’s “Lydia” now, is it?’ Mrs Van Hopper said. ‘Goodness, how have the meek risen!’
Everyone laughed. I could feel myself flushing.
‘As for not caring what people say,’ Mrs Van Hopper continued, ‘he certainly cared about what I said.’
‘That’s because you mentioned Rebecca.’
‘Nonsense, my girl! It’s because I dared to suggest there was a part of his life that was not the private property of the old-boy network. They’re all alike, these public-school types. They think they own the world. More precisely, they think they can get away with murder.’
This served as a lead-in to a more general discussion about the effect he must have had on Rebecca, and wild surmises on the struggle of wills that had culminated in his victory and, it followed, her suicide. It was a conversation that I would have joined in eagerly only a few days earlier, but now it angered me to hear them blame Max without bothering to base their suspicions on the known facts, and then complain about the other facts he was unjustifiably concealing. What sloppy reasoning! I thought but did not say. What hypocrisy! I was glad when Mrs Van Hopper sent me up to the café for cigarettes.
As I climbed the hill past other candle-lit dinner parties discussing other scandals in other languages, I decided I would apologise to him. If I ever saw him again. If he was still here. He had never said how long he was intending to stay in Deia. For the first time it occurred to me that he might be back in England already. I could see no reason why this possibility should make the slightest difference to me – after all, wouldn’t it make life easier if he had left, if there was no longer anyone to worry about bumping into or embarrassing? Yet the thought that he might have left made me gasp out loud, made me feel as if I had walked through a door into a room without a floor. It was only after I had decided that I would write a letter of apology (to what address? was my first panicked thought) care of his publisher that my pulse slowed down.
As I made the final climb to the café, I began to compose the letter. I was into my third imaginary draft when I reached the bar – and there he was, sitting with a large group at the table in the corner. He had a deeper tan than when I last had seen him. He looked relaxed, carefree, even happy. At any rate, he appeared to be enjoying whatever the woman sitting next to him was saying.
It ought not to have mattered that he was talking to a woman, but it did. I felt old because she looked younger than I. Ugly because she was pretty. Fat and clumsy because she was thin, badly dressed because her clothes became her. Every time she smiled, every time she made Max smile, I felt older, fatter, clumsier. As I stood at the bar waiting to catch the bartender’s attention, I fought a war with myself. Here was my chance to apologise in person, to prove to myself that I was not the coward I had so far shown myself to be. Here was my chance also to thank him for his kindness. Or: here was another chance for me to make a fool of myself. He was talking to a woman, a woman he appeared to like. Would he want me to barge in and remind him of an episode that was probably nothing to him, nothing but a typical annoyance, the type of annoyance he had to endure twenty times a day? He had probably forgotten all about it by now. By apologising, I might do nothing but embarrass and annoy him again. The best way to repay his kindness might be to leave him alone with this woman.
I bought Mrs Van Hopper her cigarettes. I was on my way out when I heard Max call out my name.
He was right behind me. He had an anxious smile I could not account for. ‘Did you get my message?’ he asked.
‘What message?’
‘The one I left for you at the post office.’
‘I haven’t been to the post office in days,’ I said.
‘Oh, well, then. That explains it.’
‘I’m glad I’ve found you,’ I said, ‘because I wanted to apologise.’
‘Oh, there’s no need for that. I’m only sorry you felt responsible. Also sorry that you have to work for her. She’s horrible. You’re a saint. I would have killed her by now. Let me buy you a drink.’
I explained why I couldn’t stay.
‘Let me drive you,’ Max said. Then perhaps you can make your excuses and I can drive you back up again.’
First I said no. Then, pressed, I agreed.
‘Whose car is it this time?’ I asked as he unlocked the door to a Citroën with French plates.
‘Don’t even ask,’ he said. He was about to turn the key in the ignition when he stopped, turned to me and said, ‘Actually, if you don’t mind, what I’d really like to do is take you out to eat. Outside town.’
‘What about your friends?’
‘They’re not my friends,’ he said darkly. ‘You have no idea how happy I was to see you. Now direct me to your dinner party.’
We drove down the narrow lane in silence. When he pulled to a stop outside the designated house, he turned around and stared at me. ‘Go on then,’ he said. He sounded so unfriendly that I almost asked him if he had changed his mind about supper. ‘I’ll be at the fork in the road if I have to move for someone,’ he added.
He was still there when I returned. He coasted down to the fork in the road without turning on the engine. There he stopped and turned to stare at me again. Without warning, he pulled me towards him and gave me a hungry and desperate kiss. ‘I was afraid I’d never see you again,’ he kept saying in a strangled whisper. ‘I was afraid you were avoiding me. I was about to go looking for you. I was sure you weren’t coming back.’ Then it was over, as abruptly as it had begun.
We drove back into town. Just before we reached the café, he stopped the car, apparently to make way for a group of young Spaniards. But we had stopped at a distance, as if he did not wish the party to see him. We waited until the road was empty again. Then he broke the uncomfortable silence by saying, in a loud, seemingly casual voice, ‘I can’t tell you the whole story right now, but I’m going to have to pretend I haven’t seen someone. I’ll keep my eye on the road. You keep me posted.’
And so it began, in the same spirit as it would continue.
Chapter Five
We went to a restaurant in the hills outside Soller. Although he drank too much – we went through a bottle before we even got to the main course – he remained tense. He kept looking at me as if I were an apparition that might disappear at any moment. From time to time he would put his hand on my ha
nd, as if to reassure himself that he hadn’t invented it. It had been a long time since anyone had cared whether my hand was real or not. His concern elated me, and his solicitous questions put me off my guard. What a novelty it was to say, ‘I’d like red wine,’ and then have it in front of me faster than if I had waved a wand; to say, ‘Would you mind if we moved to another table? I’m getting height fright,’ and find myself instantly with a choice of four other tables. To have him ask for permission before lighting up his after-dinner cigarette, to have him encourage me to finish his crème caramel after I had finished mine … The other day I asked him, hadn’t he been in agony? He can’t drink red wine without inviting a migraine, he has no patience for people with minor phobias, he thinks eating off other people’s plates is vulgar, and is not in the habit of asking anyone permission for anything. He gave it more thought than usual and then said no, he hadn’t been in agony – ‘as strange as that may seem’.
We did not go back to his hotel after supper. We went back to Mrs Van Hopper’s – I through the front door and Max (despite the fact that my employer’s car was nowhere to be seen) through my bedroom window. This did not strike me as odd, for I thought I knew why he needed privacy. I kept him hidden in my room all night and for the better part of the next day.
Mrs Van Hopper woke up feeling ill and full of self-pity. She had never been considerate of my feelings, so I didn’t feel guilty about the fun Max and I had at her expense. She was in the habit of exaggerating her health problems, but she must have been very ill indeed not to notice my barely suppressed smirk, my monosyllabic replies to her questions, the eagerness with which I kept rushing back to my room. I now wonder if it was my inattention that broke the normal rhythm of our conversations, because by late afternoon she had abandoned her usual half-joking abuse and had decided to confide in me. She began telling me about her father, whom she had met only once … her mother, who had abandoned her to an aunt who had abandoned her … her husband, a good-for-nothing who had died in a car crash … her daughter, a disappointment … her son, a disgrace … her only love affair (with a Presbyterian minister) that didn’t last long enough and ended badly. Another day I might have been moved. We might have made friends or at least become allies. But I could hardly sit still. All I could think, as I sat there simulating attention, was how much Max could hear and what he made of it. Did her admissions of weakness make her sound even more vulgar, I wondered? I suppose it was love that did this to me. As he himself is so fond of saying, love means slumming inside someone else’s head.
The Other Rebecca Page 4