The Other Rebecca

by Maureen Freely

  This turned out not to be possible. I got more than a few looks. But with my new found confidence, I had no trouble staring back.

  Max’s father was the first in the stand that morning. Now it was Jack Scully’s barrister cross-examining him. Max’s father was quoted in Jack Scully’s book as saying he had heard someone at his hotel bar bragging about having rigged Rebecca’s boat with dynamite. The barrister now did his best to get him to repeat this story. Instead Max’s father decided to tell all assembled that there were two types of natives on his island, the type that was willing to work for an honest living, and the type that did nothing but drink and whore and steal. After several failed attempts to return him to the subject, the barrister gave up.

  Then it was Bea’s turn. I could tell she was not entirely sober from the way she walked to the stand. Her neck was too stiff, her manner too haughty. She was not to know that it was not her disdainful gaze that made our barrister ill at ease, but the task that lay ahead. Max and our solicitor had decided to leave it to our barrister to tackle Bea.

  This, they had thought, would be the most effective way of getting her to tell the truth. But during the early part of the examination, it was, nevertheless, Bea who kept the upper hand. She had a confident, though inappropriate, one-liner for everything. Asked to give her opinion of her former lover, she said, ‘Am I to comment on Ben the young rake or Ben the ageing vegetable?’ Asked to describe Rebecca’s behaviour during the last week of her life, she said, ‘It is important to remember that her mind owed more to a chemistry lab by then than it did to her progenitors.’ Asked to be more specific about Rebecca’s behaviour, she said, ‘Being off her head, Rebecca made the common mistake of confusing quality with propinquity.’

  When our barrister asked her if she had helped Rebecca kill herself, she snapped, ‘Of course not. What a preposterous idea!’ When our barrister asked her if she had at least been instrumental in Rebecca’s decision to take her boat out, she said, ‘It’s clear to me, young man, that you haven’t a clue what Rebecca was like. Boats, books, people – she was never in their service, my boy. It was always the other way round.’

  When the barrister asked her what she would say if he told her there was new evidence to suggest that in this one instance, the person in charge had been Bea herself, and that it might be possible to prove she had, as it were, helped her, Bea went very still. She said nothing for thirty seconds. Then she leaned forward and searched the court with her eyes until she found me.

  ‘You told them that, didn’t you?’ She pointed her finger at me. ‘You did, you stupid girl. Didn’t you?’

  ‘Does everyone in America do things like this?’ Bea wanted to know as she knocked back her fourth negroni. ‘Is discretion an entirely alien concept? Has it never occurred to you or any of your countrymen that the rule of the herd does not lead inexorably to justice?’

  We were back at the Ritz for what was threatening to become a foodless lunch. The friendly but concerned maêtre d’ had seated us at the table next to the bar. Max’s father was smiling beatifically in his wheelchair while devouring the crisps. Occasionally, he would interrupt the argument to say, ‘Shame about the chandeliers, isn’t it, Sally?’ or ‘Who shot the piano player?’ Every time the waiter came past us, he waved at him or gave him the thumbs up and said, ‘Great stuff!’ Meanwhile, Max sat next to him, staring into his water glass as if he wished it contained morphine.

  I was still full of myself. Bea was trying to get me to back down but for once I was not about to apologise. ‘If you did nothing wrong,’ I said to Bea, ‘then you have nothing to hide. And nothing to fear either.’

  ‘Tell me, does absolutely everyone in America talk like a Buddhist?’

  ‘I’m not talking like a Buddhist.’

  ‘I’m a Buddhist,’ Max’s father said.

  ‘Yes, of course you are, my dear.’

  ‘Have you learned your mantra yet?’

  ‘No, not yet, darling, I’ve been rather tied up.’

  ‘Repeat after me. Omi—’

  ‘Oh, do shut up, you tiresome thing,’ Bea said.

  ‘If you’re as tired as you say, my dear, it will help you no end.’

  Bea exhaled through her nostrils and gave me a baleful look.

  ‘I’m not a Buddhist,’ I tried to tell her again. ‘I’m just trying to reason with you. I think the time has come to accept that there’s no course open to you but to tell the truth.’

  ‘You’re trying to tell me about the truth. That’s rich! Well, next time you sit down to do your bloody oms, try and imagine this. Needles, needles everywhere. A party full of bright sparks with rather large habits who never clean up after themselves. Children seeing it all and getting hurt. And then this silly girl whose name no one can remember – Buddhists don’t need names, apparently – chokes on her vomit after an overdose. And all this in a country that throws you into prison and throws away the key if you have so much as an ounce of cannabis. What would you do in this situation, my dear? Are you honestly trying to convince me that you’d tell the truth?’

  ‘You might have had good reason to keep the authorities out,’ Max said to her as he picked up a cashew and held it up to the light. ‘But it was very wrong and cruel, Bea, to keep the truth from me. It was my life.’

  ‘If I’d told you she’d run away, you would have gone after her.’

  ‘You have no idea what I might have done,’ he said. His voice was controlled but his lips were trembling.

  ‘She wanted to go, Max,’ Bea said. ‘If it hadn’t been for my intervention, she would have ended up going with the children. You ought to be thanking me—’

  ‘And what exactly was your intervention?’ Max asked. ‘If it’s not too much to ask.’

  ‘We came to an agreement. I would let her leave using the dead girl’s papers if she—’

  ‘You conned her into thinking she was the one who had killed the girl.’

  ‘Well, it did seem silly not to make use of the body, seeing as it was not about to come back to life. But if we’re all going to be Buddhists from here on, I suppose it’s only right to tell you that it was Rebecca’s idea to take the body out to sea with the boat. Although it caused me no end of trouble. And cost quite a tidy sum, too. You may think it’s easy to sit on an island in the Caribbean waiting for a body to come back to you. Well, I beg to differ! First it refused to appear at all – I had to cancel my trip to Tuscany – and then, when it turned up, wouldn’t it be at the other end of the island, and wouldn’t I have come down with a beastly cold the day before? It was a gruesome job from start to finish, although that ought not to have surprised me, as my role in life is to be there to do the gruesome jobs no one else can be bothered to do. Where were you by then, Max? Do you remember? I had to find two doctors to sign the death certificate. Do you think that was easy? Flying a body in from abroad is an absolute nightmare. Do you have any idea what those undertakers charged me? What we had to go through with the coroner at Heathrow …’

  ‘You ought never to have sent the body back here, Bea.’

  ‘Yes, I do realise that now, Max. It has crossed my mind, but I am grateful to you, nevertheless, for pointing out the obvious. Not to worry, however. I’ve cleaned up that gruesome mess just like I’ve cleaned up all your others. You can always count on your solid old Aunt Bea to be one step ahead of the Buddhists! I dug her up years ago, Max, and stuck her up at Bramble House, or to be precise, in Tatiana’s Middlemarch. If they ever do decide to open the grave in Beckfield cemetery, my dear, they’ll find nothing.’

  Max groaned and dropped his head into his hands. ‘Oh, Bea, oh, Bea, what are we going to do with you?’

  ‘Well, for a start, you can promise to visit me in gaol. And perhaps you can write me a little poem now and again to thank me for my efforts. I didn’t do any of this for myself, I did it for you. As odd as it may sound to a modern-day Buddhist, I did it to protect you. You and the family. I couldn’t bear to see any more of you go the way of
his nibs here.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Max’s father interjected. ‘I want a drink. A drink? Sally, can you catch the eye of that man over there? I’m as thirsty as a nigger on a camel.’

  ‘Of course you are, my dear,’ said Bea. ‘Of course you are.’ She gave him her best nurse’s smile. ‘There was never going to be a sensible divorce, Max. You were never going to have the chance to make a new start so long as you thought she was alive. She had done enough damage. It was time to be shot of her. At the time, it seemed to be the perfect solution.’

  ‘But Bea,’ Max said, his head still in his hands, ‘even then, you must have realised—’

  ‘Well, yes, of course, I ought to have known that Rebecca would insist on speaking from the grave. How could I ever have thought otherwise? Silly me to be a realist! I ought to have known, for example, that you would not suddenly change character and find a suitable wife and live happily ever after. But how could anyone have predicted yet another American Buddhist?’ She laughed a bitter laugh as she lit up a cigarette. ‘Do you know, my dear?’ she said to me. ‘I do wonder sometimes if it wasn’t Rebecca who sent you to us to finish us off. You’re Rebecca’s last laugh.’

  In fact, Rebecca had not had her last laugh yet. When we returned to court, we found her waiting for us at the top of the courtroom steps.

  She was still dressed in the white coat that showed off her tan. She still had her skullcap on but she took it off as soon as she saw us, releasing a mane of platinum hair. She smiled, and as she did, I could just see the faintest trace of the scar on her cheek. She clasped her hands together as if in mock prayer as Bea broke away from us and bounded up the steps.

  ‘Oh, thank God!’ Bea said. ‘Thank God you’re here. And not a moment too soon. Rebecca, I don’t think I’ve ever said this and meant it more – but it was so good of you, so very good of you to come.’

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Three o’clock found Bea back on the witness stand, but not for long. Our barrister announced in a thin, strained voice that she had no further questions. The defence waived its right to cross-examine her. Unable to make sense of this anticlimax, the courtoom burst into excited whispers. The judge requested silence. Bea returned to her seat. Our barrister called our next witness. As she made her way to the stand, a woman in the public gallery screamed.

  There were a few more gasps as she sat down to face the court. She did not look like the Rebecca of popular memory. The bleached hair was tied back with a navy ribbon, and her dress had the aura of a nurse’s uniform. She was wearing gold-rimmed glasses, which she took off after she had taken the oath. She surveyed the court and found Jack Scully.

  ‘I’m sorry, Scalper,’ she said.

  He did not look at her but stared instead at his hands. His careful frown was impossible to read. So was Max’s.

  ‘It’s all for the best, Scalper. I’ve really thought this one through.’ When Rebecca said ‘Scalper’, I could see Max flinch.

  ‘Could you please leave this conversation for later and identify yourself to the court?’

  ‘My legal name or my other name?’

  ‘Your legal name will do.’

  ‘My legal name is Tamara Nestor Graham. But the public will know me as Rebecca Slaughter-Midwinter.’

  Now the rest of the courtroom went wild.

  ‘Order! Order!’

  Rebecca smiled at her audience as graciously as if she were at a poetry reading. Once they were quiet again, she said, ‘Thank you.’ Then she turned to our barrister, who had stood up to interrogate her.

  ‘Could you explain to the court why you’ve decided to come forward?’

  ‘Well, obviously, to prove that this entire trial is based on a false premise. I don’t look dead to you, do I?’

  There was a ripple of nervous laughter.

  ‘I’m also here to hold myself publicly accountable for what I’ve done. Allow me to give the court the bare bones, if you don’t mind the pun –’ the amazing thing is, they didn’t – ‘and then offer an explanation of why I needed to disappear.

  ‘The first point I must make is that it was my decision to run away. If I did not make a free or rational choice, it was because of the state of my mind. I was not hounded out of my life. Neither was I running away from Max per se. Most important, I was not running away from my beloved children. I was not even running away from the life I described accurately enough in The Marriage Hearse. What I was trying to do was run away from my problems. This is what all addicts do. When you’re addicted to something, it affects your mind and your spirit as well as your body, and I had lost my ability to make a rational choice.

  ‘So when a girl nobody knew very well except for me OD’d at that now infamous all-night party at my father-in-law’s hotel on St John the Baptist, I panicked. I knew what the police were like there. I thought I couldn’t take any chances, even though I had no information to suggest that I had played any direct part in her death. I was her connection. I was the one who would go down, or so I thought. That was why I decided to take her out with me when I sank my boat.

  ‘After I had come back to shore in a borrowed dinghy, I used her passport to get into Mexico. Then I entered the US through Brownsville and took buses up to Seattle and got a job as a waitress. After a while I got my name changed legally to Tamara Nestor Graham. Then came the slippery slope. Over the next year or so I truly bottomed out. I could tell you the full story – I have nothing to hide any more – but it’s pretty sordid and probably not relevant to this trial. Better to withhold the details for a Bookmark Special.’ More laughter. ‘Suffice it to say that I ended up in jail, from which I was lucky enough to make my way into a drug-rehabilitation programme that turned me around.

  ‘For the past five years I’ve been living in San Francisco and slowly putting the pieces back together. The key word here is “slowly”. For the first year all I did was clean toilets for the Little Sisters of Mercy. Then I decided to see if I could get myself back on track using solely my own talents. It is not Maxie’s fault that I made my name first time around on his family’s back. That is just the way it goes. The one privilege I have enjoyed as a result of my self-willed misfortunes is this chance to find out what I was made of, what I could achieve on my own. This is a privilege Max Midwinter is never likely to know and so my heart goes out to him.

  ‘If people had read The Marriage Hearse more carefully, they would have seen that this was what it really was about. It was not the condemnation of a particular family but the portrait of a couple that never knew where one began and the other ended, and who were further hampered by being part of a larger family that permitted no one any real degree of autonomy.

  ‘It has been with great and growing distress that I have watched the Midwinter family and Max in particular suffer from the misreadings of this book. I can only hope that the monies accrued from it have gone some way towards making up for that. Despite my surprising success as Tamara Nestor Graham, there has hardly been a day when I haven’t regretted giving myself up for dead. Hardly a day when I haven’t fantasised about going back to Beckfield and peeking through the windows for a glimpse of my little ones. But it hasn’t just been the fear of taking the personal consequences of a resurrection. It was the prospect of what it would do to everyone else. I had done enough damage. That was how I saw things.

  ‘My illusions on this score did not outlive an article written by Max’s new wife around the time of publication of my latest book. Of course the poor creature could not have known that I was Tamara Nestor Graham. But she clearly had a sixth sense about there being something deeply dishonest about my novel. For my part, I sensed there was a real-life story, a very distressing story, hiding just beneath the surface of an essay that purported to be about the feminist heroine in contemporary American fiction.

  ‘I would be lying to you if I told you that I took this article well on first, second, third, fourth or fifth readings. The gist of it, for those of you who aren’t familiar
with it, is that this new crew of feminist heroines like the one in my novel destroy everything around them in the name of experience and then leave lesser beings to pick up the pieces. By people she meant husbands and children, mostly children and, I decided, above all, my children. This is a charge too great for any mother to ignore, and I was no exception. Despite my anger at having been accused of selfishness and neglect, the idea took root of my children living in darkness with a stepmother who didn’t love them as I did and so desperately needing me.

  ‘When my anger had subsided, another picture began to form in my mind, of a well-meaning second wife who wasn’t up to the job I had left to her, and whose life I was ruining, along with so many others.

  ‘And then, when I got word of this trial, my unease turned into something more concrete. I decided I had to do something. And so here I am.

  ‘I don’t know what the repercussions for me will be. I deliberately did not want to consult a lawyer because I didn’t want any sane advice to deter me from doing what I consider to be the only right thing. I have no idea whether I should or could be tried for that poor girl’s death, or, if so, where I could be tried. I don’t know if Max and I are still legally married or what bearing my reappearance will have on the legality of his new marriage. But I have no desire to stand in the way of his happiness. As they say in the fellowship, the beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our image. We are best able to help others when we ourselves have learned the gift of serenity. I’m willing to dissolve our marriage, if it still exists in the eyes of the law, as expeditiously as possible. I would of course give anything to be able to live at least part of the time with my children. But I do accept I have done something unforgivable in abandoning them. So I will have to leave this question for the family to discuss and decide. Thanks to my McArthur Prize, I have no money problems. I’m aware that the Beckfield Press would go under without the proceeds from my so-called estate – but I’m also aware that Giles Midwinter has done everything correctly and in good faith. I’m happy to go into consultation to find out the best way of proceeding so that I can continue to keep this wonderful publishing house going. I would like to extend the same favour to my cousin Jack Scully, who has also acted in good faith. I want to invest in Isis Press. I also intend to cover the costs he has incurred during this trial. In fact, I think that I should be covering costs for both sides if the law will allow me. I say that because whenever I decide to do something that is morally right, I usually find out that it’s legally wrong. Or counterproductive. Or just plain stupid.