Rebecca's Tale (12 page)

Gray was unusually silent, even for him; Ellie was concentrating on double declutching, and I was drifting about on the seas of the past, as usual. At 3:15, we reached the crossroads where, as I’d explained in my history society talk, a gibbet had once stood, and public executions had provided a cheap form of popular entertainment. We parked outside the now shuttered and deserted lodge at this Four Turnings entrance to Manderley, and I began on my habitual ritual: searching for the key to the tall gates, which might be in any one of fifteen tweedy pockets, and which unfailingly turns out to be in the last one.

I keep quiet about this key in local circles, and have sworn Gray to secrecy concerning it. It was originally my grandfather’s, given to him by the Termagant, I think, so he could have access to the woods for his butterfly expeditions. In those days, we rarely used it, for the lodge-keeper was usually there to let us in; I think I may have used it on later occasions, once or twice—Rebecca, knowing my love for these woods, more or less told me to come and go as I pleased. After the fire, when Manderley was abandoned, I expected the locks on the gates to be changed, but they never were, so I can use my key still whenever Ellie, Barker, and I want to walk in a place where we can be sure of meeting no one—a major consideration in the summer months, when even Kerrith is now becoming infested with tourists, and we have to go farther afield to find the lovely isolation that has delighted me from my boyhood.

Where was that infernal key? I started the familiar process of patting my pockets. Ellie sighed. Gray wandered over to the gates, and looked through them to the wilderness, the beautiful Eden, beyond. Not in my overcoat, not in my jacket, not in my trouser pockets…Gray was inspecting the large notice that hangs drunkenly by the gates, and has done these twenty years. It was put up by the land agents who have been responsible for these woods, and for what is now left of Manderley itself, ever since that disastrous fire.

Originally, they answered to Maxim, during the years of his self-exile abroad; now, since both Maxim’s marriages were childless, they answer to the remote branch of the de Winters that inherited all this
after his death. Whoever these heirs are—they are domiciled in some vast heap in Yorkshire, I believe, but are said to prefer the several villas they own in the South of France, or their castle in the Scottish Highlands—they take no interest whatsoever in Manderley, and as far as I know have never set foot here. Presumably they’re content to receive the income from the tenant farms (still flourishing) and refuse to bother themselves about a ruin. The land agents, I suspect, take a similar view, since they seem to do damn all. Maybe they inspect the place once a year or so, but no effort has been made to manage these woods, or protect the once-beautiful gardens, or indeed to shore up the house itself, although the last of the roof has now fallen in, and the site—as I often say to Ellie—is positively dangerous.

The notice Gray was inspecting, the sole evidence that the land agents have ever bestirred themselves, was battered; its paint was peeling. The words could still just be read:
PRIVATE—NO TRESPASSING
.

I looked at it with a scornful eye. Such warnings do not apply to me, I have always felt. As an old friend of the family, I am entitled to come here. Maxim would have wished it; Rebecca would have wished it; and the indolent land agents can go hang themselves. With which thought, my hand finally closed over the missing key, buried under a quantity of farthings and fluff in my overcoat pocket. As I drew it out with an exclamation of triumph, I saw Gray give a frown. He turned the iron handle on the tall iron gates; they creaked and—lo and behold—they opened.

Gray seemed less surprised by this phenomenon than I might have expected. I was considerably startled. “Good grief,” I said. “Well, I’m jiggered. Ellie—you don’t think that we—?”

“Definitely not. We were last here a week ago. I remember, because it was the day Mr. Gray went up to London. And we locked the gates when we left, I know we did. Don’t you remember, Daddy? The lock was stiff, and I had to help you….”

Her voice trailed away. She looked through the open gate and along the winding drive, her expression apprehensive. I must admit, I felt a certain apprehension, too. My first thought was that one of the land agents had decided to put in an appearance on this fine April afternoon—and, if so, I wasn’t anxious to encounter him. While I felt certain as to my rights here, I wasn’t anxious to explain them to some
bumptious tweed-suited twerp who would no doubt be young enough to be my grandson. He might not understand; he might not know who I was, or appreciate my claims…. I hesitated, suddenly doubtful of our expedition. The sun passed behind a cloud, the landscape momentarily darkened, and I felt the fingering touch of those superstitious fears that now come to me without warning. Looking at the winding drive, my dream came back to me: I saw the tiny coffin and heard again the small and insistent voice that rose up from it:
Let me out. I can’t sleep…. I can’t rest. Lift the lid—I must talk to you
.

I shivered; beside me, Barker made a low whining sound, and I saw that his hackles had risen. It was the anniversary of Rebecca’s death, and I was suddenly afraid. There were worse encounters to be made in these woods than with some anonymous, unimportant land agent. They were filled with ghosts, as I already knew. Among these trees, in the past, I often glimpsed my grandfather and my mother, and if these quiet figures were just projections of my thoughts, I was the sadder, for I wanted to encounter them. These were the kindly ones—that is how I thought of them; today, looking along that driveway, narrowed now by the undergrowth on either side, its center marked by a spine of grass, I felt that I had been lucky in the past. Today, the presences I could half sense beckoning from the shadows were less kindly, and more threatening.

I was about to suggest we go home and postpone this visit when Gray, having pushed the gate wide, walked through. “Someone’s driven this way recently,” he said. “Look, you can see the tire marks.”

He indicated a muddy patch a few yards inside the gates, where the gravel, once raked daily by a battalion of gardeners, had thinned. Ellie went to inspect them.

“Someone could be here now,” she said in a hesitant way. “Perhaps we should do this another day. It’s odd. No one ever comes here. We never meet a soul….”

She paused. I forbore to contradict her.

“We don’t want a scene….” She lowered her voice, though I could still hear her. “Technically, we are trespassing, I suppose—and if anyone were to challenge us…It would upset Daddy. He tends to get very fractious and difficult when we come here anyway, but I can’t stop him. He
will
come. He always comes here on the anniversary of Rebecca’s death…. And he was so anxious to show it to you.”

“I don’t think we should worry.” Gray glanced over his shoulder at me. “These tracks are probably days old—and if they aren’t, and we meet someone, I’m sure I can talk our way out of it. We’re not doing any harm, after all. I’ll take responsibility. My only worry is the distance. How far is it to the house from this entrance?”

“A long way. It’s endless, this drive. We haven’t been as far as the house for ages.” She hesitated. “We just walk a little way. There’s a place my father likes, where you hear the sea for the first time. You can see the house from there in the winter. And last year we brought the car in and walked from the house to the Happy Valley—the place where Rebecca had those wild azaleas planted. It leads down to the sea—but that was before, when Daddy was stronger.”

“That’s what we should do now,” Gray said. “Drive as far as the house—walk, if your father feels strong enough, and then come back.” He lowered his voice, and, leaning down to her, said something further that I couldn’t quite catch; whatever it was, it seemed to convince her. Ellie turned back to me, her face bright with purpose—that meant she expected me to make difficulties.

I made no difficulties. The word “fractious” lingered in my mind; I wasn’t sure if I was pleased or displeased to see Ellie and Gray exchanging these confidences and “ganging up” on me. In any case, I was determined to see the house, though, now I was here, I knew I’d never be able to walk to it.

Gray opened the gates for us, closed them, then rejoined us. Ellie eased the car forward and we entered the cool tunnel of trees, arching up from deep banks that were bright with emerald mosses, harts’ tongue ferns, and primroses. My fears, and my ghosts, receded. My past came back to me as we drove in, the way it does now that age has given me the strange option of binocular vision. All I have to do is adjust my invisible lenses, and the distance and the decades disappear; then I can see the past close-up, right in front of my eyes. It’s there all the time, of course, on the far horizon of the present—and I sometimes feel sorry for people like Gray and Ellie, who are too young and still too shortsighted to see it.

So I watched myself, in a blue serge sailor suit, run through the trees, the butterfly I was pursuing just out of reach. I watched my mother, stately, dreamy, and gentle, in the mourning she never left off, stoop by one of these banks to examine a wild orchid, its leaves
freckled, its petals the startling magenta of methylated spirits. “Look, Arthur,” she said, and then straightened, and turned through eighteen years to greet my sister, who came along the drive, lovely in a rose-colored dress, swinging a parcel of books on a strap, and laughing over her shoulder at Maxim. “People ask me why I married Max,” Rebecca said to me as more years sped past in the slipstream of her car, low-slung, fast, with its spread silver wings on its long expensive bonnet. She braked hard, and stopped, here on this drive, at this very bend, or the next one. She turned to look at me, her hair tousled from the wind, her skin glowing, and her eyes, lit by the sun, then shadowed as the branches moved above our heads, were exultant, then secretive, as unpredictable as April.

“I tell such lies when they ask me—I despise them for asking me. I say I married him on a whim one rainy weekend, or for money—how they like it when I say that, it keeps them in gossip an entire winter. But you never ask, so I’ll tell you the truth. I married him for
this
. Listen. You can hear the sea from here. Walk through those trees, and you can see it. How many flowers can you see? How many birds can you identify? There’s a thrush that nests just there, it has six eggs the color of the sky. I saw a sparrow hawk here once.
This
is why I married him. It belongs to me and I belong to it. I knew that the first time I saw it.”

“You were already engaged to him when you first saw it,” I replied, clinging to the prosaic, as always on the defensive, afraid to meet her gaze because if I did all the rules of my life might fail me. “You were already engaged. Maxim told me. So something else must have influenced your decision. You exaggerate.”

“You’re wrong. I’ve known this place all my life. I’ve seen it and imagined it. And now it’s mine—”

“Courtesy of Maxim.”

“If you choose to think so. What a literal tiresome man you are today. Here.” She stretched out a bare brown arm, reached across, and opened the passenger door. “You shall walk the rest of the way. When you’ve stopped being an actuary,
if
you stop, we’ll still give you tea. No, I mean it. Out you get. I don’t allow actuaries in my car, and I don’t allow them at Manderley.”

“Rebecca,” I said, and Ellie, reaching across, patted my hand. “You dozed off,” she said. “Look, we’re almost there.”

I rubbed at my eyes; behind me, Barker made a low, whimpering sound; Gray tensed; the gravel crunched, the trees thinned, and across a wilderness of arching brambles, lit by an April sun, lying crouched along the side of the rising ground, were the broken walls and the bare ribbed beams of Manderley. I wound down my window and leaned out eagerly. In the distance, light glanced on the sea; I could taste salt on the air; a blackbird sang from a bush, and, behind and through its song, I could hear the tide approaching, approaching.

W
E PARKED ON THE GRAVEL SWEEP, NOW MUCH SHRUNKEN
and weed infested, where the carriages of my early boyhood, and later the motorcars, used to draw up on the north side of the house, by its heavy ornamented portico. Here, once upon a time, Frith would descend the steps in state to greet guests. Here Rebecca, returning from her honeymoon and arriving at Manderley for the first time as a wife, had been received by Frith with full Manderley majesty: all the outdoor servants, from head gardener down to the lowliest stable boy, clutching their hats, lined up on the gravel; and in the vast hall beyond, every indoor servant in ranked lines and full livery, jackets brushed, aprons starched, eyes lowered, awaiting their new chatelaine.

“I think Frith
may
have hoped to intimidate me,” Rebecca said, giving me a small sidelong glance of secret amusement. “There he was, guarding the ancestral lair. He was longing for me to make a mistake. I nearly did, just for the pleasure of watching his reaction. But I’d promised Max—no tricks! And I kept my word. It was a faultless performance—I wish you’d been there to see it.”

“
I
hear you dropped your gloves, so Frith had to stoop and pick them up,” I said. “That wouldn’t have been deliberate, by any chance, would it?”

“Certainly not. Those gloves were the first present Max ever gave me. They were beautiful gloves, the softest suede—my mother had some like them once. I wouldn’t have spoiled them for the world—not even to annoy Frith. I only dropped one, anyway, on the steps outside, when I saw that great tomb of a portico rearing up. It was an accident—truly.”

I looked up at the portico now. Its pediment was deeply cracked
and sprouting a rich growth of ivy and infant willow herb; one of its supporting pillars, blackened from the fire, still stood upright; the other leaned dangerously. I bent to release Barker from his lead; he at once trotted off in the direction Gray and Ellie had taken, and I followed more slowly.