Rebecca's Tale (18 page)

In front of the boathouse door was a small paved area of thick Cornish granite. Lying in the center of these flagstones was a wreath—at least, I think it was intended as a wreath, but it was of a curious kind, not the monstrosity associated with funerals; more the garland once used to bind the brows of poets, heroes, or generals. It was not a wreath of bay, however. It had been fashioned from the branches of those azaleas once planted in such abundance in the Happy Valley.

These azaleas, as the Briggs sisters, both impassioned gardeners, had explained to me, were remarkable for the delicacy of their habit and their fragrance. According to the sisters, Rebecca had always worn a particular scent, which smelled very like those flowers; they associated it with her to such a degree, Elinor said, that they could not pass one of these shrubs without thinking of her. I’d noticed this perfuming of the air when I brushed past the few surviving plants in the Happy Valley. The flowers, small and of a pale yellow color
indeed had a scent that was fresh and sweet. It was the scent of these flowers that first stopped me in my tracks. I smelled them a second before I saw them.

The thin branches had been carefully wound together to form the garland. I crouched down to touch the flowers; as soon as they were moved, the scent intensified. The branches had been laid in shade; there was no sign of wilting, but by midday these flagstones would be in full sun. Had the garland been placed here yesterday it would be shrivelled by now. So, someone had laid it here much more recently, at the earliest the previous evening, or during the night—or even this very morning.

It was now seven—I’d been sitting staring at that ridge for longer than I’d realized. For the past hour this cove had been in full view; I’d seen no one. Who would come here, to this particular place, with that particular token of remembrance? Someone who had loved her, surely. Someone who still thought of her when she’d been dead twenty years. Who could that be?

I felt a prickling unease. Straightening up, that unease at once intensified. I saw that the lock on the boathouse door—a flimsy affair of hasp and padlock—had been broken. The door had swollen with damp, but two pulls and it was open.

Someone had been in here, too. Peering into the gloom inside, letting my eyes grow accustomed to the half-light, I saw that there were footmarks on the dust of the floor, and the two windows had been screened off with sacking. I crossed to the landward window and pulled the material aside. So the Colonel hadn’t been hallucinating after all. Someone
had
been here, perhaps on the very day we’d come to Manderley. Had I been seen, approaching the cove? Had someone heard my footsteps on the shingle? On both windows, the sacking was dry and new. Like the strange wreath outside, it had been placed there recently.

I looked around me with growing astonishment. I’d expected the place to be empty, but now there was more light, I could see that the furniture Colonel Julyan had described was still here; it had been stacked either side, as if to give clear passage down the center of the space, but several items were recognizable. I could see the deal table and the sofa bed he had spoken of, its metal frame flaking with rust. On top of it was a pile of moldering boxes; the whole place stank of
damp, and the walls were green with it, but—unbelievably, after twenty years—some of Rebecca’s belongings were still in situ.

I felt a sudden excitement. I thought,
No one ever cleared this place out
. It wasn’t cleared after Rebecca’s death, or even after the fire at Manderley. It was left untouched. Maxim de Winter just walked away, went abroad; the servants left—no one thought of this place, and no one touched it.

Was that possible? I knew that it
was
possible. The abrupt manner of de Winter’s departure from Manderley was the one aspect of this story on which everyone I consulted was unanimous. When the fire that would destroy the house started, he and his second wife were returning from London, where they’d seen the doctor who provided the evidence of Rebecca’s final illness. They drove through the night, and first saw the blaze from six miles away in the early hours of the following morning. It lit up the western horizon. By then the fire, fanned by the wind from the sea, had spread from the west wing to engulf the entire building, and the roar of the flames was audible, according to newspaper accounts, from as far away as Kerrith. By the time the de Winters reached Manderley itself, the house was beyond saving.

I could imagine how devastating a blow that must have been. De Winter’s ancestors had lived here since the Conquest; generations of his family had altered the house, added to the house, demolished parts of it, rebuilt it, been born, married, and died in it. Now it was gone—and de Winter seems to have found that insupportable. He stayed for just two days, dealing only with the most essential formalities. Then he and his wife left for Europe, where they remained for many years; his estate manager, Frank Crawley, was left to make all the other final arrangements. Then he, too, departed, and the land agents took over.

“So I never paid my last respects to Mr. de Winter,” Frith had said to me. “After all those years I’d been with the family. That came hard, that did. Fourteen years old, I was, when I first came to Manderley. I remember the day Mr. de Winter was born, I remember his mother and his father—and I thought he’d come to see me before he left. Not thanks—I didn’t expect thanks, not when I’d only been doing my duties. But I thought he’d say good-bye. He was punctilious, Mr. de Winter. Of course, he was very distressed. I have to
remember that, and he was generous—I had no complaints there, I was well provided for, all the servants were. After I heard he’d left—it was Mr. Crawley told me—I thought maybe he’d write. But he never did. Broke his heart to lose Manderley. Couldn’t bear to be reminded of the old place…. I expect it was that—don’t you think, sir?”

What did I think? I thought Frith’s explanation was partly true. I also thought that, as the Colonel had hinted, there might be other reasons for Maxim’s long and punitive self-exile. But that wasn’t my concern now. The point was, he had left in haste; the handover to those land agents had been made in haste. I had read the details in the estate papers. Frank Crawley’s letters had survived. All his arrangements for the paying off of staff, the future maintenance of the tenant farms, and so on, had been meticulous. But meticulous Frank Crawley had made one oversight: He had forgotten this place, forgotten Rebecca’s boathouse.

I could feel my excitement rising. I knew it was absurd, but I couldn’t prevent it. At one time, the notebook the Colonel described to me had been here,
and Rebecca had been writing in it
. What if Rebecca kept it here those last months—and what if it were
still
here, amidst all this damp moldering rubbish?

I looked. Of course I looked. I went through every damn thing in that place. I went through the boxes. I checked every last container and cupboard. I checked under and in and behind and above. I looked everywhere once, and when I still wasn’t satisfied, I looked everywhere again. Behind this room, I discovered there was a further, smaller, area, where sailing equipment must have been stored. I blundered around in there, too, lifting up rotting canvas, shoving a broken oar to one side, rooting around in old coils of wet rotting rope, and scrabbling through thick clinging cobwebs. Nothing. I found nothing.

Well, that’s not strictly true. I found evidence of past use, just as the Colonel described. There was a scrap of an old plaid rug, a filthy pillow spilling feathers. There were some grimy cups and glasses. There was a collection of books, stuck together and stained brown with damp. There were some torn, near illegible marine charts. I found two of the model boats intact, and the fragments of others. In a tin, I found some tea that had formed a thick hard black cake. I
found a broken pen, and, plunging my hand into one of the boxes, a pink pulpy substance that I finally realized might once have been a blotting pad. I found a rusty biscuit tin; it was heavy and my heart leaped—a perfect storage place, I thought, in a damp boathouse. I cut my hand forcing it open, and all it contained was more old books, one of them that history of Manderley and Kerrith written by the Colonel’s grandfather. I stood there, sucking the blood on my hand, breathing hard, and I gradually came to my senses.

I was ashamed at the greed of my search. I was a fool. It wasn’t here; the notebook was not here—and, for all I knew, the damn thing never had been. I only had the Colonel’s word that it had ever existed.

Meanwhile, I wasn’t using my brain. I wasn’t thinking clearly. This boathouse wasn’t some time capsule, untouched since Rebecca’s lifetime. According to Colonel Julyan, poor simpleminded Ben Carminowe had haunted this beach when she was alive, and after her death continued to return here, sometimes dossing down in the storage area behind me. More recently, anyone could have used it who had a mind to do so; the building wasn’t secure, but it was hidden away, it was private. I wondered, did lovers use it now? Was it a convenient and private trysting place? Possibly, though if so it was a very damp and uninviting one. Yet someone had undoubtedly been here, and recently, too. Someone had left that wreath. Someone had been inside this building, and had bothered to screen the windows. Could they have been searching for something, as I was? Why? Who?

I was no more likely to discover the answer to those questions, I realized, than I was to discover that notebook. I tidied up. I put back into the boxes all the objects I’d taken out. I pushed the furniture back into place. I went outside into the sun and the fresh air, and pushed the swollen door shut again. I left the wreath where it was, and, filthy from head to foot, furious with myself for pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp in that stupid undisciplined way, I made for the cliff path.

Unbelievably, I’d been in that boathouse for over two hours. It was now well past nine o’clock. It would take me nearly an hour to walk back, and, once on the coast path, I’d be in full view of any watcher in Kerrith. I had to clean myself up, change my clothes, and turn myself back into Terence Gray again.

“Nice Mr. Gray” was expected at The Pines, and then at the Briggs
sisters’ cottage for Sunday lunch. I hated nice Mr. Gray in that moment; the last thing I wanted to do was change myself back into him. Mr. Gray had further interrogations in mind—and, irrationally, I blamed him for my own behavior in the boathouse. I’d behaved like some tomb robber. I was heartily sick of Mr. Gray, and myself; I couldn’t wait to get out of Kerrith, and go back to King’s—or London.

I could give all this up, I thought to myself as I mounted the steep path. I don’t have to do this. I do it of my own free will. I can stop; I can abandon the entire search any time I want. I’m never likely to discover the truth about Rebecca—and what is the truth, anyway? Not a fixed thing, in my experience—never a fixed thing. The truth fluctuates, it shifts; look at it from this window and it takes one shape; look at it from another, and it’s altered.
Who are you, Rebecca?
What a hopeless question that was. Colonel Julyan had known her well for five years, so had the Briggs sisters, so had Frith—and if they couldn’t answer it, what chance did I have?

I paused at the top of the path. The sun shone down hotly on my head. I looked down at the cove, and then back toward the cool of the woods. I wouldn’t give up. I couldn’t give up. It mattered too much to me.

I turned toward the trees, and, as I did so, there was a flash, a little burst of light on the periphery of my vision. I stopped, and looked out across the water. In the mouth of the bay, the fishing boat I’d seen earlier was at anchor. I moved back into the shelter of the trees, and then raised my glasses. But whatever I’d seen, it had not been the flash of binoculars, I was almost sure. There was no one on the boat deck, and as before the skipper was in the wheelhouse, with his back to me, and his eyes—I assumed—on the far horizon.

I walked home, cleaned myself up, and, before I left for The Pines, completed the letter I’ve postponed writing to Nicky. I suggested he might like to make a quick foray to Brittany, and do some research there for me. A simple task for someone of his abilities; my French is reasonably good, but Nicky is bilingual. I worded the letter carefully—I didn’t want him to suspect my real reason for writing. He doesn’t know what I’m up to, and would find this quest of mine worrying if he did know—but then his background and circumstances are so very different from my own that he’s never understood this side of my character.

“You know who you are,” I said to him once—it was at Cambridge, in my room at King’s, I think. Or we may have been walking on the Backs. Not that it matters. “You know who you are, Nicky, and I don’t. That’s the difference between us.”

“One of the differences,” he replied quietly. “But not the main one.”

I posted the letter on my way to The Pines. It wouldn’t be collected until the following day, but I didn’t want to risk changing my mind and not sending it. I don’t have time to go trailing around Brittany. I need Nicky’s help. I never find it easy to ask anyone for help, but on this occasion I felt the better for doing so.

T
WELVE

I
SET OFF FOR
T
HE
P
INES FEELING DISPIRITED; MY LACK OF
success at the boathouse made me acutely aware of the obstacles I’m encountering in my search for Rebecca. I had to remind myself that I
had
made advances, even if they weren’t the kind of rapid advances I’d hoped for.

Walking up the hill to the Colonel’s house, I told myself that I must learn to break this slavish dependence I have on
facts
—I’ve spent too many years in libraries, too many years working from documents, and I’m still too hedged in by my own disciplines and training. My instinct is still to approach these inquiries as if they were part of my academic work, or a chapter in my next book. But the historian’s approach doesn’t entirely work here. It may be appropriate when I’m writing about people that have been dead and buried for over four centuries, but it can be counterproductive now I’m dealing with more recent events and living witnesses—knowing how to handle
them
can be very tricky indeed. I may know how to read documents, but I’m less good at reading people, I’ve realized.