The Other Rebecca

by Maureen Freely

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘I see you’ve managed to make yourself at home.’ This was the first thing Max said to me when I found him with his mother and three stiff-necked priests in the sitting room. It was teatime, and I had just woken up from an unintended nap. After our return from Middlemarch, I had left the children watching television in the nursery while I took a bath. I now heard that they had been taken off to town without permission by Jonathan. Max was not amused and clearly held me responsible.

  ‘You’re such a bore, Max,’ his mother was saying to him. ‘It’s only eight miles, for goodness’ sake. They’ll come to no harm.’

  ‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ Max insisted. He returned to his crossword puzzle. The only time he addressed me was when he wanted help with an anagram. I made the tension between us even worse by asking him to explain the clue.

  Even when the children came running into the sitting room, his face registered no pleasure. He did not deign to greet his brother Jonathan, except to say, when Jonathan emptied five bagloads of Mars Bars on the floor, that he was glad his brother had found a new enthusiasm. Max’s mother tried to civilise matters by telling the children that they were allowed only one Mars Bar each. She made a big deal about where they could and could not put the wrappers, told them to take off their shoes and put them where they belonged, and took note of a hole in one of Hermione’s socks. Max still refused to be drawn from his crossword. It was in desperation that William pulled his bones out of his pocket.

  The ploy worked, but only to annoy Max further. ‘So you’ve been digging, have you?’ he said. ‘And whose idea was that?’

  His explanation won me another accusing look.

  ‘Put them away,’ said his grandmother. They’re dirty. You’ll need to wash them downstairs.’

  Still caught up in our murder game, William said, ‘But that would be tampering with evidence.’

  To my surprise, Max’s mother said, ‘You may be right. If you were digging near Middlemarch, those bones could well belong to that skeleton.’

  She said it in a casual, playful voice, but it made Max put down his newspaper. ‘Mother,’ he said. ‘Mother! I thought we had talked about this.’

  ‘Talked about what, darling?’

  ‘Talked about how important it is not to make up stories until this court case is over.’

  ‘But darling, I’m not making up stories. I’m telling you the truth. The truth is always stranger than fiction, darling. Even Rebecca knew that.’

  Max’s face grew red. ‘Let’s leave Rebecca out of this.’

  ‘I really do think that’s setting your sights rather high, don’t you agree?’

  ‘I want you to stop making up stories about skeletons. We’ve had quite enough of those. If you can’t stop making up stories about skeletons, my advice to you is to put them into a book.’

  ‘Darling, you know that won’t do any more. I’ve retired. I’m not changing my mind. But neither can I rewrite the irrefutable facts. There really was a skeleton.’

  ‘What skeleton?’ he asked, his voice growing more hostile with every word.

  His mother explained that the workmen had found one some months ago.

  Had she notified the police? Max asked.

  Well, said his mother, she had considered it briefly, but in the end it had seemed too much of a bother. ‘Seeing as it wasn’t anyone we know.’

  ‘How could you possibly know that?’ Max asked sarcastically.

  ‘Goodness, Max! It ought to be obvious. We would have noticed.’

  ‘Even in fiction, Mother, skeletons don’t have faces. You would have had to have the skeleton sent in for analysis, and that would have involved informing the police.’

  ‘Well, yes, but that’s assuming there has been foul play. In this case, it could have been anyone. From the Stone Age, even.’

  ‘You still would have had to inform the police.’

  ‘But only if you were reasonably certain it belonged to a human. In this case, the bones do rather look as if they belong to a dog. Don’t you think, darling? But of course you wouldn’t know, because you’ve been too busy shouting at me to stop and look at them.’

  ‘I shall do nothing of the sort. William, I want you to put them into the bin. Now.’

  ‘But we can’t solve the crime without them,’ Hermione protested. ‘And we have to solve the crime, because it might be the most important mystery of the universe!’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Max asked.

  ‘She did.’ Hermione pointed at me.

  Max looked at me without expression, then folded up his paper, put it under his arm and stalked out of the room. I followed him out, to explain to him, but before I could reach them, the lunch bell went. He refused to look at me when it was just the two of us in the dining room, but when the others arrived, he treated me as politely as if I were a stranger.

  After lunch Max announced that we were going to take advantage of a gap in the clouds to take a walk to Butterfly Valley. By the time we got there, it was raining again. Since my anorak was not fully waterproof, I took refuge under a tree. For a while the others used me as a depot for the leaves and flowers they had collected. Then, as soon as the sky cleared, they forgot I was there. The longer I looked at them crouching in the mud, waiting for the small miracles of nature to parade before them, the less I understood.

  It seemed to me that they couldn’t relax unless they were all looking at something small, beautiful and almost rare. Butterflies provided the perfect excuse for communion. There was, first of all, the injunction to silence, followed by a whispered lecture. (‘Look at the colours, and now at the pattern, and you tell me what it reminds you of. Yes, Hermione, you’re spot on. You remember, don’t you, when we saw a rather larger one in Wharfedale? Good memory!’) I was taken aback, almost frightened, by the softness in their eyes and the happy alertness of their muted responses. It would disappear the moment they turned to address each other.

  When they found the wounded bird, it all got too much for me. It was then that it hit me I was living not in a new place to which I would gradually become accustomed, but in country that would always be foreign to me. A country where even the smallest things people did would never make sense to me. Why could Max cradle a bird so lovingly but barely bring himself to touch his daughter on the shoulder? Why didn’t his daughter mind? Why was it so important to find out what kind of bird it was? Why weren’t they content just to look at it? Why couldn’t they ever look at each other and say, ‘I missed you’ or ‘I’m glad you’re here’? Why did their every feeling have to be displaced before it could be labelled?

  They were talking about the wounded bird being far from home, but what about me? What was I doing here, sitting staring at a patch of earth that meant nothing to me? Didn’t they even pause to wonder where the patch of earth was that meant something to me? I sat there watching them until I couldn’t bear it any more. I sat there until it was a question of either leaving or belting out a scream.

  When I got back to our room, I drew myself a bath and soaked in it until the water began to cool. Having failed to lose myself in the novel Max had given me to review, I sat myself down at the desk to work on my own book. This was breaking a rule I had about never working on my novel unless I had just woken up, but there was no reason for this rule other than force of habit. The book that afternoon seemed to me to be the only home I had left.

  I was back to the first chapter again. It began with a description of my childhood home. But when I read it now, I could see it gave only information of the most general kind and so evoked nothing. I crossed it out, opened my notebook to a fresh page and closed my eyes until I could imagine myself back outside my house on a warm summer afternoon, but although I could see it and taste it and smell it, whenever I tried to approach the front door, the whole picture disappeared.

  Where had it gone? Why? Tears fell on my notebook. When I couldn’t see it any longer, I got up and threw myself on the sofa. But I c
ouldn’t stop.

  When Max came back, cleansed of his earlier annoyances by the afternoon of fresh air, and asked me why I looked so upset and why I hadn’t dressed for dinner, I told him I couldn’t come to dinner because I was crying about my life. And he said, ‘Oh, darling, do try and pull yourself together. I know it’s hard. This place is hell for me too. Think of it this way. Tomorrow after breakfast we’ll be heading home.’

  ‘It’s not just me, it’s my book,’ I said. ‘I looked at it this afternoon, and I see now that it’s all wrong.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then you can go back to the beginning and write the right book starting tomorrow. But do wait until we get back to Beckfield, won’t you. The rightest book in the world would look wrong after a day or two in Bramble House.’ He lifted me up, put his arms around me, looked into my eyes and said in an amorous whisper, ‘Name one adult in this house aside from the occupants of this room who isn’t barking.’

  I couldn’t help laughing.

  Still whispering, he said, ‘But you mustn’t condemn them. They’re trying very hard. Don’t think they’re not sitting in their rooms now crying too. What do they have to be happy about, for God’s sake? What do they have to look forward to? I’ll tell you the only thing they look forward to: two stiff drinks before supper and a meal that’s only just good enough to take their mind off things. So here’s what I’m asking you to do. I’m asking you to put this book out of your mind – it’s not going to go anywhere, for God’s sake, so why not leave it be for an evening? And, darling -’ here he took my hand – ‘hasn’t it ever occurred to you that it might be a trifle too soon to be writing a novel about a stepbrother who becomes a lover and then a husband, a competitor and a suicide? Don’t you think it’s doing yourself down to put yourself so close to a wound that cannot possibly have healed yet? I would take a breath if I were you, and ask myself if it wouldn’t be kinder and more productive to try my hand at something more modest. But for the moment, you don’t even need to ask yourself that question. All you need to do is take a bath and get dressed and come downstairs with me and do one last performance of the panto.’

  ‘Everyone will want to know why my eyes are swollen,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but they won’t dare ask. What’s more, they’ll be your friends for life if you do them a favour of not playing the American and offering them an explanation.’

  And he was right. When I appeared in the sitting room and they took in the telltale signs of an afternoon spent crying, at first they froze, as if they were afraid I was going to say something to embarrass them. Then, when enough time had elapsed for them to work out that I was going to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, they relaxed, asked me if I would like a drink, care to see a newspaper, prefer to sit in a more comfortable chair. For the first time since my arrival, I saw some compassion in Max’s mother’s eyes. And when Jonathan Junkie appeared clutching a jug of Coke, I felt some reciprocal compassion for her; admiration, even, for what she endured without complaining. He was distraught, he told us like a cranky eight-year-old, because he couldn’t find his Walkman. His mother did her best to calm him down but her efforts failed. He hadn’t been sitting two minutes before he jumped to his feet, threw his jug of Coke against the wall and screamed, ‘I need a fix!’

  ‘Nonsense, darling, you’re just tired,’ was all she said. She got Luscious Lois to take him away. Having dispensed with him, she then turned to the rest of us and, without missing a beat, told us about the flood that Nostradamus had predicted, which would soon submerge all of Britain except parts of the Scottish Highlands. ‘I’m not quite sure how one goes about preparing for it.’ The only time she showed any emotion that evening was during the parlour games, when she was asked to act out ‘angry’ in the manner of the word, and smashed a Chinese vase.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We left for Oxford right after breakfast the next morning. The Beckfield Press was launching a new poetry imprint that evening. As it was to be the first big party of the literary season, Bea and Giles were expecting a large turnout and counting on Max to be there to help. I knew that I would be on display. I had been dreading the prospect for weeks; after my failures of the weekend, I was dreading it even more.

  But between now and then were eight hours free of judging eyes. St Tatiana had arranged for the children to stay on at Bramble House until the end of the week, so it was just Max, Danny and I in the car. I don’t think I was the only one who was happy to put the house behind me. We were hardly out of the drive when Max removed the Alice in Wonderland tape from the deck and replaced it with Ry Cooder. He turned it up full blast, like an adolescent who was trying to forget that the car he was driving belonged to his parents. Despite his efforts, Alice in Wonderland remained with us in spirit.

  I wanted to draw out the journey as long as we could. But Max did eighty on the country roads and a hundred when we got to the motorway. He got slower cars to move off the fast lane by coming right up behind them and flashing his lights. When we stopped for petrol outside Birmingham, I asked Danny if she could ask to take over the wheel.

  ‘Driving a bit too fast for you, is he?’ she said with a crazy smile.

  ‘Just a bit,’ I said.

  ‘How I wish I could say the same! I’ve loved every minute of it. La vitesse! It’s such a treat to have the old Max back again. Look at his bones!’ She gestured out the window. He was just coming out of the shop. ‘What a lucky woman you are to have found a man with such beautiful bones! You can’t even see them when he’s depressed – his whole face droops as if were entirely boneless.’ She shifted over to the driver’s seat and turned on the engine. This time last year, I’d just about lost hope for him, you know. Will you believe me if I tell you that he went for an entire thirty-six months without reading anything that wasn’t about a Midwestern serial killer?’

  ‘Why aren’t I driving?’ he said when he got back to the car.

  Instead of answering his question, she said, ‘I was just remembering your thriller addiction.’

  ‘It hasn’t ended,’ he said, as if this were an answer to his question and anyone with any sense could understand why. ‘I’m as addicted to thrillers as I ever was, but tragically I’ve run through my supplies. There are very few people who can do them right. If you ask me, it’s the most difficult art of them all.’

  ‘How perverse you poets are!’ she exclaimed with a laugh as she darted back into the traffic without looking where she was going. She barrelled down the motorway even faster than Max had done. The discussion about thrillers continued. As I recognised only about half the names, there were large chunks of it I could not follow. It seemed that Danny thought the exciting new talents were women, whereas Max thought their books were too sedentary to be called exciting. Danny thought the right word was not ‘sedentary’ but ‘atmospheric’, and that the men Max admired so much were incapable of suspense because they tended to kill off their best characters before they had a chance to develop.

  It went on and on. I thought I had died and gone to Radio Four. Radio Four in Wonderland. The more refined the conversation became, the crazier the driving. Danny weaved in and out of the traffic without ever looking over her shoulder and checking her mirrors. She didn’t even bother to flash her lights when she wanted another car to get out of her way. She just leaned on her horn. But nothing she did seemed to distract Max from whatever it was he was going to say. Instead of fearing for his life, he acted as if he were in an overheated, smoke-filled dining room trying to stay awake.

  ‘I like moral ambiguity,’ I remember him saying as she plunged us between two killer lorries without indicating. ‘I don’t like neat endings and packages clearly marked “good” and “evil”. As for this idea that poverty doesn’t allow for moral choices, well …’

  ‘I agree. Orwell ought to have known better. But how can you have moral ambiguity if your macho hero doesn’t even know the meaning of the word “self-aware”? They act without thinking. They seem to be afraid
that if they think, they won’t be able to act.’

  ‘I suppose you’d like them to spend their novels in therapy sessions.’

  ‘Well, it worked for Robertson Davies!’

  ‘If you say so, O wise one.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me you discovered nothing of interest on the couch?’

  ‘Oh, it was interesting, all right,’ Max said with a yawn, ‘but not the sort of interesting one would want to share with someone as sensitive and self-aware as you.’

  ‘You and your dreams,’ Danny said. ‘I’m not sure how useful all that is. Have you ever been in therapy?’ she said, smiling at me via the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Not anything I’d write home about,’ I said.

  Smiling as if I’d told her something really interesting, she said, ‘Well, it might sound unorthodox to you, in that case, but the best therapy I ever had didn’t deal in dreams at all but taught me how to use my eyes again and how to listen. I mean listen to my own stories as well as other people’s stories. What I learned that year was that a boring or repetitive story was of necessity an incomplete story, while a seamless story with clean lines and a beginning, middle and ending was an impoverished fiction. Goodness!’ she said as she slammed on the brakes and darted across the lanes of traffic onto an exit lane. ‘You do know what I mean, don’t you?’

  I made the mistake of saying I didn’t.

  ‘Well, I hope you don’t mind my telling you. It was such a revelation. I was so lucky to have found this man. Such a genius! He changed my life. You don’t mind if I explain, do you, Max? Max has heard it all before.’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind,’ Max said with a larger yawn. ‘So long as you don’t mind if I don’t listen.’ He crawled into the back seat, where he stretched out his legs and put his head on my lap.