Rebecca's Tale (14 page)

Not true, not true, I kept saying to myself, but the words wouldn’t stay still, others intruded, little jabs from the past: “No fool like an old fool, eh, Colonel Julyan?” And my wife, turning her pale drawn face to the wall, closing her ears to my pleas, excuses, and protestations: “Please don’t say any more, Arthur. I’m dying. And I’m no longer interested.”

I tried to shut these voices out. They were not the voices I wanted to hear—even, God forgive me, that of my wife, who, in all the long years of our marriage, never said anything to me, even in anger, that was unjust or inaccurate. “
Go away
,” I shouted at poor Barker, who kept circling around me, and getting under my feet, and on I pressed,
scarcely knowing where I was, my pace faltering and my chest heaving, until I rounded a thick outcrop of gorse, in flower, and saw that the flowers were
moving
.

I came to an abrupt halt, panting, and passed my hand over my wet face. I looked again, and saw the moving flowers were butterflies, deep in nectar, newly hatched, unwisely hatched—too early. I took another step forward, then stopped, suddenly giddy. Below me, the ground shelved away sharply. I had not taken the right route; the path to the cove below—if it still existed—was somewhere away to my left. But I could see the shingle of the cove, a horseshoe of white below me, and the rocks that guarded the entrance to the bay, the rocks that Maxim and I, in our youth, christened Scylla and Charybdis.

The water was choppy; the tide was coming in fast. There was no sign of Gray, whom I had almost forgotten, but there below me was the small jetty where Maxim and I used to moor our dinghy, and Rebecca later moored the tender for
Je Reviens
. And there, away over to the right of the cove, still sound after twenty winters, was the boathouse where she sometimes slept if she had gone sailing alone at night, as she liked to do; the boathouse she had kitted out as a simple cottage. At high tide, the sea washed right up to its walls, and in storms the spray lashed its seaward window; on the landward side, the trees crept down close to the shore, and from the window that side, where the ground shelved upwards, Manderley was invisible.

In the last six months of her life, Rebecca spent much of her time there. Sometimes she made brief restive expeditions to London, where she kept that flat by the river, but when she returned from one of these forays, she was almost always to be found here, and only rarely at Manderley itself. Whatever other people say—and on the subject of that boathouse and its uses they are scurrilous—I believe it was the only place where Rebecca could be at peace. It was her refuge.

My heart turned over as I looked at it. I made some croaking noise in my throat that brought an anxious Barker to my side. I leaned on my stick, and fought for breath; when the ground beneath my feet began to shift and the sea began moving, so it was close one second and distant the next, I closed my eyes, the giddying ceased, and I was able to focus. There was the boathouse, foursquare, built to withstand storms, with its four-foot-thick stone walls, its low sheltering roof, its small deep-set windows. Smoke drifted from its newly added chimney—if
it was not too dark, if there was moonlight, or starlight, you could see it from a distance. In the windows, light burned, making them shine gold; sometimes, if I walked the coast paths at night, as I liked to do then, I would stop at some vantage point, and look at them, and know Rebecca was there, as she had been almost every night that last winter.

I would ask myself why, when her home was no more than twenty minutes walk away—less—she chose to be here. Up there on the higher ground was a thirty-bedroom house, with an army of servants, and every luxury and convenience—a house
she
had transformed and made beautiful. Soft chairs, log fires, exquisite food, scented baths, linen sheets; up there was a house widely admired, copied, and envied, every aspect of which from the paintings and furniture down to the tiniest detail—the trimming on a cushion, the arrangement of the flowers, the placing of the smallest objects—was her creation.

For five years she had organized the machine that was Manderley with a careless grace that concealed a military precision. She overlooked nothing: the invitations, the collection of the troops of guests from the station, the menus, the table settings, the design of each room, the layout of the gardens. She kept meticulous records, so no one would ever be served the same dishes twice, even if a year or more passed between their visits. She remembered which guests liked which rooms; she made sure that the flowers in those rooms, and the books in those rooms, reflected the tastes and interests of the guests concerned. She did all this and more, much more, with a compulsive care—yet so well and discreetly was it done that some visitors never realized that her hand was involved, and assumed that she and Maxim were merely fortunate in having such exemplary servants.

And yet now she avoided this lovely place she had made. She appeared on formal, arranged occasions, as she had always done, but when they were over, or when her time was free, she came here, to a tiny single-storey stone building on the edge of the sea. I wanted to know why; I
had
to know why, and one evening in early April, a week or so before she died, I walked along the cliffs as dusk fell, saw the square gold light in those windows, and went down to ask her.

The last of her dogs—and her favorite—Jasper, was with her. Either he or perhaps Rebecca herself heard my feet crunch on the shingle as I approached. At least I assume that, for my visit seemed neither to surprise nor startle her.

I tapped on the door, and then went in. And that afternoon, standing by the gorse, leaning on my stick, with my eyes tight shut, I went in again, and again and again—watching closely, closely, so I knew no detail escaped me. The small whitewashed space was warm; it smelled of wood smoke and faintly of the Turkish cigarettes Rebecca now smoked constantly. There was a red rag rug on the floor, of the simple homemade kind one often used to see in cottages hereabouts; on the small bed to my left, which served as a sofa, Jasper was curled up on a plaid blanket. There was a shelf, with a row of little model boats, crudely made, but charming. There was another shelf with books, cups, and plates, and a small Primus stove beneath it. Next to the bright fire, on which driftwood was burning, stood a small armchair with a worn cover, a chair that looked as if it might once have done service in some maid’s bedroom at Manderley.

On the other side of the fire, opposite the sofa-bed, was a deal table, at which Rebecca was sitting. It was piled with books and inks and pens; there was a bright pink blotting pad and an ashtray, in which one of her distinctive oval cigarettes was burning. An oil lamp stood here, its brass brightly polished; it created a warm circle of light in the quiet room, and gave it an atmosphere of pleasant serenity. I looked, and looked again, and looked again. Even now, twenty years later, I still saw what I first saw then: a simple place, that had been made delightful simply. Something, perhaps the bright colors or the little model boats or the small scale of the furniture, made me think of a child’s room. It had a comforting ambience that, rightly or wrongly, I associate with that refuge, that palace of play, that had once, at The Pines, been Rose’s and my nursery.

Rebecca was sitting at her improvised desk, her face and hair lit by the circle of lamplight. She was wearing her sailing clothes, and they were old but comfortable: trousers, a thick Guernsey sweater. Her hair, which had once been long, she had recently cut short, as was the fashion then. This altered her appearance radically—in fact, I still wasn’t used to it, so, each time I saw her, it still took me by surprise. It made her look disturbingly androgynous, boyish yet intensely female; if possible, it increased her beauty.

She looked up as I came in, but neither smiled nor spoke a greeting. I looked at her hands, in the pool of lamplight. They were thin, long fingered, tanned from the previous summer’s sailing; she was
still, but her hands moved restlessly across the table, moving the blotter an inch, picking up then setting down a pen. They were fine and capable hands. Rebecca never wore gloves when she gardened or rode or sailed; she would have despised the idea of “lady’s” hands, I think. I looked at her hands, again and again, down a tunnel twenty years long I looked at them.

On her left hand, she wore two rings on her wedding finger—as she always did, I never saw her without them: a narrow gold wedding band and a thin circlet of diamonds, of the kind called an eternity ring. Her right hand was bare, and its first two fingers were inky.

I could sense Rebecca was preoccupied, and that my visit was unwelcome; I didn’t stay long, ten or fifteen minutes at most—and I suppose that I stayed there even less time that afternoon as I stood above the cove. In my mind, I seemed to be there, warmed by the fire, looking, looking, for a long time; in fact, the vision, or visitation, lasted only a minute or so. I now think that, giddy and distressed as I was, I
knew
I was looking for something, and had known all day at the back of my mind that, if I concentrated, I could find it.

So I looked and looked: at the plaid rug, and the books, and the bright fire, at Rebecca’s face and her restless hands; then Barker gave a whine—and at last I saw it. Next to the pink blotter, under her left hand: a square black-covered exercise book, in which she had been writing just before I entered, which she quickly blotted and closed
as
I entered, and which she laced up, tying its leather fastenings in a neat bow on its spine, and pushed out of sight before rising….

“I’ve interrupted you. You were writing. What were you writing, Rebecca?”

“What sharp eyes you have, Grandmama! A letter, I expect.”

“You write letters in notebooks?”

“Oh, very well. My life story. I felt autobiographical today. I wrote pages! Tomorrow, I’ll tear it up, I expect. Or maybe I’ll keep it. For my grandchildren. For my own children. They can read it one rainy day—it will while away an hour or two, don’t you think? I’d like them to know me.”

“Rebecca, they’ll know you anyway.”

“I suppose so. Maybe.”

I opened my eyes again; I stared at the sea and the cove, which were steady. The giddiness had gone. My heart still ached, but my mind was clear—and I want to stress that point, in view of what happened next. I stood there, certain that I had remembered this conver
sation accurately, that I remembered the interior of the boathouse, the tone of Rebecca’s voice. I was absolutely certain about the notebook, too. The one now lying on my desk at The Pines was identical, and that was why—when I first saw it that morning—it had seemed familiar and made me uneasy. Identical, yet different in one crucial respect: The notebook sent to me was empty. The one I remembered had been written in.

Where was that now? Lost in the Manderley fire? Or saved, and preserved all these years? My mind began to race; an idea came to me.

Someone was calling to me. I looked over my shoulder and saw Ellie running toward me from my left; I looked down at the cove, and saw Gray walking toward the boathouse; I saw him stop, look up at Ellie and me, then turn and begin running toward the path across the shingle.

I looked at the boathouse itself. I had a clear view of the landward window. I have good vision, despite my age (I also want to stress this), and am, if anything, longsighted now, wearing spectacles only for close work or reading. So I could see that window perfectly; it wasn’t in the least blurred or hazy. I saw someone move behind the glass. I saw someone raise a hand, catch hold of something, and then drag it across the window. It could have been a remnant of curtain; it could have been a piece of old sacking or canvas, anything. But someone was in there, and someone didn’t want to be seen—and I still insist on that, despite the skepticism of Gray and Ellie.

That is what I saw—and I might have had a better chance of persuading my companions had I then behaved less foolishly. Such a great mad hope leaped up in my heart. I thought, She isn’t dead. We buried the wrong woman. She’s alive. And now at last she’s come back…. I heard again that voice in my dream:
Let me out, I must talk to you
….

“Rebecca,” I said as Ellie reached my side; and then something curious happened, I’m not sure what, but I found myself on the ground. I was lying full length, with Gray’s jacket under my head; my collar had been loosened and my scarf unwound and my coat unbuttoned. Gray was kneeling beside me, and bending over me, and Ellie was holding my wrist and saying “It’s very faint and unsteady.”

“Now, Ellie,” I heard myself say in a very odd reedy voice. “Don’t
start
—I’ll be fine in a jiffy.”

“Oh, God, oh, God,” said Ellie, and started weeping.

They got me back to the car.
How
they got me back isn’t important. It took a long time, and it was awkward and difficult, and we’d never have managed it without Terence Gray. He behaved—and I will say this without equivocation—magnificently. Women are always hopeless in a crisis of this kind, and will flap about being emotional and foolish. Gray remained calm; he allowed me to direct operations, and the fact that he is extremely fit and strong proved invaluable. They settled me down on the backseat, finally, and by then I had warmed to Gray to such a degree that I was glad when he seated himself next to me. I thanked him. I may even have said, “Thank you, Terry.”

Back at The Pines, the doctor was summoned. Ellie was being so exceptionally stern that I didn’t dare argue, and I hadn’t the energy anyway. Fortunately, for once, the good doctor wasn’t an alarmist. He examined me; he went into the next room to have a brief talk with Ellie and Gray, and then returned to me with the verdict. A faint. As simple as that. I had overdone it, and then I had fainted.

“I could have told you that,” I said, and my voice was improving.

There was a good deal more, of course. I was confined to barracks again, inevitably. I scarcely listened to all that rigmarole about rest and diet and horse pills and a total ban on all agitation and excitement. The point was: It was an ordinary common or garden
faint
. Not another heart attack,
not
a stroke—nothing, in any way, that could have affected, or is likely to affect, my faculties. Just a faint, brought on by temper, by my own inexcusable behavior to Ellie, by distress, by overexertion—and by seeing someone at that boathouse window.