The Other Rebecca

by Maureen Freely

  There was a general gasp, a single guffaw, and then a dead silence as I opened my book and unfolded the page I had hidden inside it. ‘I have here in my hand a page that ought to have come immediately after what has come to be one of the most famous lines in modern fiction. I am referring to the end of The Marriage Hearse. It will take on a very different meaning once you’ve heard what was meant to follow before parties unknown saw fit to excise it.

  ‘“My name is Rebecca and I stand before you in the wrong dress … I’m an invention of an author, but like so many figures of fiction, I’m also real. I’m the truth no one dares to look in the face. I’m not the cause, I’m the symptom …”’

  I looked up to face the audience. I looked into the back row. The goddess gave me an encouraging nod. I looked down at the paper but now the text was swimming before my eyes. I looked up again. The goddess in the back row was trying to send me a message. I could read her lips. ‘Go on,’ she was saying. ‘Go on. This is your only chance!’ I looked down at the page. The blur began to form into words again, but before I could find my place again, Max had snatched the sheet of paper out of my hands.

  He was out of breath and trembling, and his nostrils were distended. First he looked at me, then he looked at the page, then he crumpled it up in his fist. ‘Who put you up to this?’ He was speaking softly, but when I didn’t answer, he raised his voice. ‘You fool! Tell me. This is not a game! Who put you up to this?’

  I stepped back from the microphone. He took hold of it. ‘Who put her up to this?’ he cried but the outrage was gone. Now there was fear in his voice. He looked down at the sea of faces, as if in search of someone. I looked down too, but all the faces looked alike – the ones I knew, the ones I didn’t know. All blank. I looked at the door, just in time to see the last of a long, white coat.

  Chapter Thirty

  When Max jumped off the stage and pushed his way towards the door, he did not move like someone trying to escape. I could tell from the quiet, angry and efficient way he cleared a path for himself that he was pursuing someone. Whom? The question erased all other thoughts from my mind. I looked at the hard, bright sea of eyes. Where was I?

  Danny came up to me. ‘All is not lost,’ she whispered into my ear. ‘I have another copy.’

  She was just handing it to me when I felt Crawley’s heavy hand on my shoulder. ‘Before you continue, love, would you kindly tell me what the hell is going on here.’

  ‘We’re seeing to an injustice,’ Danny said. ‘We’re—’

  Crawley put up his hand to silence her. There was some tittering from the audience. ‘We all know what you think, Danny. What I’m trying to find out is what you’ve told our friend here.’

  ‘I haven’t told her anything she hasn’t the right to know.’

  ‘You’ve enlisted her to your cause, then, I take it.’

  ‘The facts speak for themselves!’ Danny cried.

  ‘Oh, don’t they ever!’ Crawley looked into my eyes. ‘He’s quite a bastard, isn’t he, this husband of yours? But I’ll tell you one thing. The people he’s up against right now are even bigger bastards.’ He paused for effect. ‘Have you given any thought to Danny girl’s motives in all this?’

  ‘They’re the same as mine, I’m sure,’ I said. My voice came out thin.

  ‘Oh, it’s all love and beauty, is it? She’s even convinced you of that, has she?’

  ‘If only it were, Crawley,’ Danny now said. ‘If only it were! If only brilliant women were allowed to give their views on love and beauty without being censored, then we should not be standing here having this conversation. And you would not be withholding the evidence, which I now ask that you return to me.’

  She lunged for it. He pushed her back. She grabbed for it again, this time succeeding in tearing off a corner. ‘You bastard!’ she shrieked. ‘You’re destroying a national treasure!’ At which he stuffed the rest of the page into his mouth, and – to the delight of the audience – ate it.

  Danny went wild. In the end, they had to call the police.

  After they had escorted her out of the building, and the party-goers had dispersed, I found myself sitting with Giles in the foyer of the Groucho Club. Our car was not due back for another half an hour. Crawley was out scouring the streets of Soho, looking for Max. The women behind the reception desk were stiff from the effort of pretending we weren’t really there. The strangers who came through the revolving doors in twos and threes would freeze momentarily at the sight of us. From time to time, someone sitting at the bar in the lounge area would look very carefully over his shoulder and pretend to be looking at something on the wall above me. But Giles had still not dropped his genial mask, and I did not know what to make of it.

  ‘Are you all right, dear girl?’ he asked, as he took my hand. ‘You poor thing, you must be exhausted. I feel we’ve rather let you down. We ought to have been able to predict this. I do love Danny, she’s a harmless old thing, really, but she’s been rather naughty about this. If she knew about this missing chapter, she ought to have come straight to me. I can’t think why she didn’t. Clearly the pressures of the trial have unbalanced her – that and also, I’m afraid, your presence. She has a soft heart, you know. She would never dream of wishing you ill, and so it all gets rather twisted around. That said, she is right to be angry. Don’t tell Crawley I said that, whatever you do, but I am feeling rather a fool, you know. I ought to have known there was a chapter missing. I’ve always thought that the book as it stands now ends too abruptly. I hope you don’t think less of me for it, but I’ve never really understood the significance of a woman standing in front of an audience wearing the wrong dress. Is there some secret meaning it in that only a woman can hope to detect?’

  Crawley’s reappearance through the revolving doors saved me from having to give an answer. The rain had started again. There seemed to be steam rising from his jacket. He refused to look me in the eye, answered Giles’s questions with terse monosyllables and, once we were in the car, settled into a menacing silence that I found strangely comforting after Giles’s kindness.

  ‘Pleasant evening, sir?’ the driver asked as he turned into Old Compton Street.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Giles with a smile. ‘Very.’

  When we got back to Beckfield, it was to a press encampment. Crawley got out of the car to get them to move so that he could open the gate. Giles and I stayed in the car.

  ‘My advice based on previous experience,’ Giles said to me when the cameras started flashing outside the windows, ‘is to look neither very happy nor very sad. Do you think you can manage that for a minute or so? It’s such a bore, isn’t it? Happily, there’s a back way through Home Farm which we’ll get sorted out tomorrow morning when it’s light. What I shall do is rent a car or two, and we’ll be able to come and go without their knowing. Unless – goodness, it hadn’t occurred to me! – unless one of those men out there can read lips.’

  How could Giles even look at me after what I had done? Why was he taking it so calmly? So keen to return my public attack on his family and his business with concern for my wellbeing? Was it genuine or was it a show, and if it was a show, what were his motives?

  My first inkling of the extent of the trouble came with an early-morning phone call from Mimi. ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ she asked, in a strangled whisper that indicated she was not. Before I had had a chance to say I was, she blurted out, ‘I blame myself. I ought to have been there for you. And I was fully intending to! The babysitter was there, but the baby was so very ill I couldn’t leave her, and I feel so very sorry now, because had I been there, I could have prevented it!’ Before I had a chance to ask her what she meant, there was the sound of a child screaming in the background. ‘Oh goodness. Goodness! I have to go. Ring me later, darling. I shall be at work by ten.’

  I got up out of bed and went to find the papers. It was immediately clear why the press had come to camp. We were on the front pages of all the tabloids and all but one of the qualities. I
n court the previous afternoon, Max’s father had made a garbled speech that had been interpreted as a call to have Rebecca’s body exhumed.

  Max’s barrister had made the mistake of using the expression ‘bare bones of the story’. Max’s father had responded by saying that anyone who wanted to know the truth of the story should try to find those bones. ‘It’s all in the bones, my boy,’ he was reported as saying. ‘But the bones are not where they should be.’ When Jack’s barrister asked him later if he could clarify what he meant, he laughed and said, ‘So you want to tell me how to do your job?’ Pressed to clarify again, he had said, ‘I meant that if you open that grave, you’re in for quite a shock. Where are they? Answer that question, young fellow-me-lad, and you have the answer to all your prayers. I wanted to sketch her, you see, you can tell anything from bones, you see, you don’t need the flesh, any painter worth his salt could tell you that, the bones will tell you anything, as the saying goes, you know it in your bones, but before you get these bones to tell you anything, you old blackguard you, you’ll have to find them, won’t you?’ When asked to name the person whose bones he was alluding to, he had laughed and said, ‘What’s in a name?’

  None of the articles made an explicit connection between the events in court and the scene at my party, but all took pleasure in describing the dramatics. ‘Chip off the old block,’ said one headline. ‘Mad Max strikes again!’ said a second. A third, which featured a picture of Max racing down Dean Street after a shapeless blur, asked, ‘Who is the Woman in White?’ But all the others carried pictures of me, and the headline ‘She speaks from the grave’.

  I read that headline and remembered how my audience had gasped when I had used those words in my speech. How could I ever explain to them or anyone that I had had no idea of what had gone on in court that day? That if I had known about Max’s father’s bone speech, I would never have dared say I was helping Rebecca speak from the grave? Why hadn’t anyone told me? Why had they let me make a fool of myself, too?

  Why were they compelled to diminish anyone who stood up to them? Destroy them if nothing else would do? No wonder Giles had been able to be so kind to me the night before. He didn’t need to do the dirty work. He could afford to be generous, because I had volunteered to destroy myself.

  I was still shaking with anger and shame when Bea came breezing into the house without bothering to knock at a quarter to eight. ‘I do hope you don’t mind my intruding, my dear,’ she said. ‘I do realise your appointment at the clinic isn’t until ten, but it would be rather easier if we all left together this morning. You may be happy to hear that the school have agreed to have the children board until this nonsense is over. That should cut down on the toing and froing. Hermione! William! Could you both be darlings and pack up your spare uniforms and some comfy clothes for the weekend and all your school books and have them ready for me to inspect in, let’s see, ten minutes’ time?’

  She made driving through the press pack feel like a trip to the carnival. ‘Oh, goodness! Not old rubber lips again! William, Hermione, do you remember him from last time?’

  ‘He gets uglier and uglier,’ Hermione said. ‘It must be the stress. And there’s that woman who was always offering us ice lollies.’

  ‘What a vulgar way to make a living,’ said Bea. ‘Standing in the rain, chasing after cars, it’s a wonder they don’t just lie down in the road and kill themselves. William, could you be a darling? There are three cars following us at the moment. One is red and the other two are blue. Can you see them?’

  ‘The blue one has an A registration and the red ones are both B.’

  ‘That’s brilliant detective work, darling. It would be even better if you could write down the full number plate. What I’m planning to do, children, is drive us around Oxford until we’ve lost all three of them. Then I’m taking you to your friend Edward’s house, because Park Town is just a hop, skip and a jump away from school, and what’s more, you’ll be able to use the back entrance, where they’ll have someone waiting for you. Edward’s mum will walk you there. Does that sound too impossibly tricky?’

  ‘I’ll pull my hat down so no one can recognise me,’ said Hermione.

  William said, ‘I’ll turn my coat inside out even though it’s against the rules, because this time they shan’t dare say anything.’

  They were so caught up in their disguises that they forgot to say goodbye.

  ‘We still have an hour,’ said Bea when she had returned to the car. ‘Just enough time for breakfast. Will the Dome do?’

  When they brought Bea her orange juice, she topped it up with a small bottle of vodka she brought out of her handbag, and finished it in four gulps as if completing an assignment. Then she lit up a cigarette. As she exhaled, she looked me in the eye. ‘Are you bearing up all right?’

  I was too angry even to shake my head.

  She took another long drag from her cigarette. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself. You mustn’t. It’s just not on. If we’re going to be accurate about all this, I’m the one who got it wrong. I ought to have been paying better attention. I read the signals wrong, I’m afraid. I hadn’t realised Danny had been putting so much time into you – if it ever happens again, dear, do think of telling me. It’s really not very nice of her, you know, not with Max acting so dreadful, too. I really am rather cross with him about this woman in white. He ought to know better. As I said to Giles when he told me, you showed great restraint. I’ve done far worse, far worse!’

  ‘It’s easy to show restraint when you hardly care any more,’ I said. But she waved my words away.

  ‘Of course you care. You poor dear! But you must put all thoughts of Max to one side for the time being, and think about yourself. Are you feeling very, very unhappy? I know a very good man, you know, if you need someone to talk to. He has offices up here as well as on Harley Street. When I was having my own troubles, he was a lifesaver.’

  ‘I didn’t do it to get back at anyone,’ I said again. ‘And Danny didn’t tell me what to say. Everything I said, I said myself. I’m just angry no one told me what happened in court. If I’d known about what was going on in court, I wouldn’t have said I was speaking from the grave. I might as well have smashed a pie in my face. I’m so embarrassed.’

  ‘Of course you are, my dear. You don’t need to tell me. My heart was with you, my dear, when Giles told me about it. What men don’t realise is how it feels for a woman to be shamed in front of her peers.’

  ‘But that’s not what I’m most upset about. What I’m most upset about is that you and every one else for that matter, everyone except for Danny, refuses even to acknowledge the central point I was trying to make.’

  ‘And what is this central point, dare I ask?’

  ‘There are two ways of killing someone. The first is the normal way, and that’s what the trial is about. The second is to keep her from expressing herself, and that’s what I was talking about.’

  This made Bea laugh. ‘Goodness, what nonsense you young people spout! Can you possibly mean it? Do you honestly think I or anyone has ever, ever been able to keep that bloody woman from expressing herself? If I ever met anyone who could, I’d nominate them for the Nobel Peace Prize! Honestly, I’ve never heard such rot! I can’t go through a day without Rebecca and her bloody words somehow making themselves felt. Do you honestly believe that you’re telling the truth simply by opening your mouth and letting any old drivel come out? And do you honestly think Rebecca was fighting for womankind, and didn’t love being famous, every last minute of it? I’m willing to concede, she had painted herself into a corner, but it was her own snobbery that got her there, that and her unflinching desire for anything that might happen to belong to someone else.’

  She took a drag from her cigarette and let the smoke come out through her nostrils. ‘There was no reason for her to go after Max’s father like that, you know. It was just playing games. Everything was all right in her book because everything was experience. What rot! As for the idea of anyone
managing to kill her, what a pipe dream! No, my dear, she was the one who chose to go. And if I’d had my wits about me, if I had been able to predict the thousand and one ways in which she would speak to me daily from the grave, I shouldn’t have helped her.’

  Here she stopped, aghast at her own words. Then she looked me straight in the eyes and gave me a sweet smile.

  ‘I don’t need to point out, do I, that I was speaking metaphorically.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The harder she tried to put things right, the worse they became. ‘It’s all become such a terrible bore, don’t you agree?’ she declaimed in a voice big enough to fill the Royal Albert Hall, as she whipped too fast up the road to the hospital. ‘One can’t make the most innocent comment without someone somewhere assuming one’s the villain of the piece. I do hope you haven’t jumped to any conclusions, my dear. But in any event I can count on you, I take it, not to repeat our little conversation to anyone?’

  I nodded, too emphatically. I couldn’t get anything right either.

  ‘I didn’t kill her, you know,’ as cheerfully as if she were talking about her holiday plans. ‘Neither did I help her kill herself. I give you my word.’

  ‘Who did kill her, then?’

  ‘One day, my dear, I shall tell you the whole story. I can give you my word on that, too. But for the moment, you’re better off not knowing. You must think of yourself,’ she said as she pulled into the drive in front of the maternity hospital. ‘And you must think of the baby. Last but not least, you must get in touch with Janet and have her stay with you. I don’t know how long these wretched barristers are going to keep me in London, and I don’t like the idea of your being alone in the cottage with all those hacks around.’

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t know how tenacious they can be. They’ll be furious I gave them the slip. Are you quite sure you can handle them? They’re a tricky lot, you know. They’ll be willing to do just about anything to get you to talk. They know that the quickest way to dismantle a character is to isolate her.’