Rebecca's Tale (41 page)

Truth and lies are twins. Death and desire live back to back—I’ve always known that, but for Max the discovery was agony. I looked at his white face, I measured the anguish in his eyes, and I knew that there’d be no way back from this edge.
Push me over
, I thought—and he was tempted, my darling.

What a mystery men’s minds are. How does their logic work? Why do they invert everything? Why do they start off with some crazed impossible idea, and then rail because the world—or, in my case, the woman—fails to fit it?

I’m sure I was circumspect in the answers I gave Max. I told him about some of the lovers—I was twenty-five, after all, and my sins in that respect didn’t seem too heinous. Max wasn’t a virgin, so why should I be? But I didn’t explain who Maman was. I always called her “Isabel”; I gave her her death-certificate name. I was very careful indeed on the father question (no point in overturning the boat, and, although there are question marks, I think black-haired Devlin certainly was my father, anyway). I censored my stories of Greenways and cousin Jack severely. I was angry, of course, so a few revelations may have slipped past my guard—but nothing important, I’m almost certain. In any case, I might just as well not have bothered, I can see that now. I made my mistake earlier, when I told him about that boy on the beach.
That
was the coup de grâce, definitely. I think our fight to the death began then, my dearest.

Max has never been able to forget that boy, and time has translated him. He’s not an enemy or an animal anymore, he’s my husband’s closest companion, he’s his double. When Max speaks of him now—and that boy’s still thrown in my face whenever we quarrel—he says he pities him.

Max says it wasn’t the boy’s fault, it was mine. He says I have bad blood and bad ways, and I led the boy on, I must have done.

I don’t deny it now, where’s the point? Let Max think what he likes. His accusations make me incandescent. One flick of
that
switch and the high voltage sizzles. But I won’t stoop to argue with him. I’d
never change his mind anyway, it’s made up; as far as my husband’s concerned, that poor dead boy is a fellow sufferer. It was my wicked toils he was caught up in, not a fishing net. Even as a child, you see, I was wicked and oversexed and unnatural. The English gentleman agrees with those French peasants: I
do
have the evil eye—and God help any man who comes my way because, in the gospel according to Max, I’m a destroyer. I’m his very own Delilah, and (it goes without saying) his Jezebel.

That boy was the first of my victims, Max says, and my dear husband intends to be the last. Or so I think sometimes, when I see an Othello glint in his eye—and I’ve been seeing
that
more and more, recently.

A week ago, I caught him oiling his service revolver. Put the mad bitch down, and he’d be doing everyone a favor. I
think
that’s what he thinks. He’d like to
silence
me—but if he believes a bullet would achieve that, he’s much mistaken.

Whatever Max does, he’ll
never
silence me. I’ll talk on and on in his head and his heart and his guts, forever and ever. Anyway, he can’t kill me now, however much he might yearn to. I’m pregnant.

Pregnant women escape the hangman, no matter how serious their crime, did you know that? They are spared—and Max will spare me. He needs an heir, after all, he’s desperate for an heir. So desperate in so many different ways that just occasionally he’s tempted out of that monk’s bed in his dressing room. He brushes my long black hair; we cling to each other; we think how different it might have been and how different it once was. I do not always hate him and he does not always hate me; we watch that recognition spark in each other’s eyes, and when that fire catches, what dry kindling we are, how we burn then, hotter than any furnace, or—

The last time that happened was a year ago. Now my hair is cropped. I have nun’s hair now. I lose track of time, sometimes. I think it’s because I feel so weary. Or it’s that blue melancholy that comes in on the tide, maybe.

I wonder: If I gave Max his heir, if—by hook or by crook—I gave him his heir, what would happen then? Would the knot of our past undo itself?

Probably not. Probably not. Oh, my love, how tired I feel. I’m dizzy and sick with fatigue. I don’t want to be silenced, I won’t be
silenced. I want to talk, and I want the dead to talk through me, but it takes so much willpower.

M
AYBE
I’
LL SLEEP FOR A WHILE, THEN GO ON
. I
T’S RAIN
ing. Wait—did I hear something?

I’ll have to pause. I’ll continue with my story in a while, my sweet. I’ll tell you how I learned to act, how I came to be at Manderley, and how I first met Max, the son and heir, in his army uniform.

But just for now, I’m going to close up my little black notebook and hide it away. I’m being spied on again. Someone’s coming. Jasper’s growling, and I can hear footsteps on the shingle.

T
WENTY-TWO

M
Y VISITOR HAS LEFT.
W
HEN
I
HEARD THE FOOTSTEPS
, I thought it might be husband Max, returning early and hoping to catch me unawares—he’s convinced that one of these days his prayers will come true, and he’ll catch me in flagrante. Then I thought it might be mad Ben Carminowe, who haunts this beach; Max says he’s looking for his little sister, who drowned in one of the rock pools here. Whatever the reason, he will not be driven away, and he stares through the windows at me. I told him, if he spies on me again, I’ll have him put in an asylum. He reminds me of the Breton boy on that Breton beach, and I hate him.

It was neither of these: It was Arthur Julyan, my dear Colonel, who comes to my fancy-dress balls as Cromwell, my Lord Protector. He was fighting his conscience on a long coastal walk, and calling in, he said, because he’d seen the light in the window. He is my one true friend in this place—and I was as careful with him as I always am. Today I knew: One tiny gesture, one remark, and he might tip over the edge and confess what he feels for me. I like him too much to risk that—we would both regret a confession of that sort—so I was scrupulous. Despite that bad blood of mine, I have never encouraged him—not one jot, please note! I remain fond of him; he is honorable, lonely, antique, and astute. I regret the pain his feelings cause him.

I suspect that, apart from Max’s grandmother, he is the only person in this neighborhood who knows who I am. No one else has made any connection between a thin drab child who visited the area once in 1914 and Max’s wife. I’ve reinvented and transformed myself, so why should they? But I’m almost sure Arthur Julyan recognized me. As a girl, I was introduced to him briefly; over a decade later we remet. He’d just returned from Singapore; I was a bride, three months married. I came running in from the gardens and found him waiting to pay his respects in the shadows of the drawing room at Manderley. I was wearing a white dress and the little blue butterfly brooch Maman gave me. We shook hands. I saw him look at that brooch, and I’m sure, almost sure, that he knew me. If he didn’t recognize me, he recognised my talisman.

If so, he has said nothing, to me or to anyone else—and I admire that. I’ve kept so many secrets to myself for so long, and I’ve learned that unshakable discretion is the rarest of gifts. One of these days, I’ll thank Arthur Julyan for it.

He didn’t stay long today, and he didn’t miss much. Once he’d gone, I slept for a while, and now I feel stronger. I’ve locked the door on the wind and the rain, and I’ll continue. Here’s the rest of your inheritance, my darling.

F
OR THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS OF MY LIFE, AS
I’
VE TOLD
you, I never moved from the same place; for the next seven, I never stopped traveling. Those were the years I learned to act—and very useful
those
lessons have been. Up and down the spine of England we went, prop baskets and trains, nine performances a week, then pack up, wave good-bye, and on to the next city on Sundays. “We’re no better than gypsies, Becka,” Maman would say, and she laughed off her sister Evangeline’s shock and disapproval. “I will
not
live on charity,” she said. “We need to eat. I told Evangeline, it’s
Shakespeare
. I’m not strutting about in some music hall.”

Can you imagine, darling, living with those words, those plays, six nights a week, and three matinees—a crash course in murder, adultery, and usurpation, in doubles and doomed love, in witchcraft, white magic, and weddings? We were never in Halifax or Hull; our travels took us way beyond those boundaries. Illyria on Monday;
Tuesday, a wood near Athens; Wednesday, a battlefield; Thursday, a blasted heath; Friday, deaths in Venice; and, on Saturday, my best-beloved place, Caliban’s enchanted island, the domain of his mother Sycorax—what an education that was, better than any school or governess, my dearest!

Some nights I’d be on stage myself, because the leader of our company, Sir Frank McKendrick, roped me in to play boys’ parts from the beginning. Other nights I’d crouch in the prompt corner, listening to those winged words, learning those winged words. I know tracts of them by heart, yet; they still light up my mind. I hear the meanings behind the meanings under the meanings—what an echo chamber! Max always wants words to be shackled, so “love” means this and “hate” means that. Lock them up in a poor prison of sense and slam the door on them. I don’t agree. Words should take you on journeys—and the journey that taught me that began and ended in the same place: Plymouth, in a street called Marine Parade, in a house called St. Agnes.

When we arrived in England for the very first time, Maman’s courage faltered. She had been so full of plans and excitement on the journey. “Farewell to my youth,” she said when we locked up our foursquare gray house. She looked at the rocky shore, her eyes blazing defiance; but once we’d left St. Malo, something went wrong. Problems, from the instant we crossed the Channel. No one was there to meet us off the boat; we went to the Portsmouth hotel Maman had written to, just as planned, but the letters she’d been expecting weren’t there waiting for us.

I’m still not sure who it was she hoped would come to claim us. It might have been her sister, or that admirer who had been so remiss, lately, with the checks and the pretty presents. Whoever it was, we were left in the lurch, and Maman tried to make light of it. “We’re like an unclaimed parcel, Becka,” she said, looking around the grim little room they’d given us. “But we shan’t be downhearted. I shall tell them, we need a fire, and I want supper sent up, and maybe a little wine. It will be cozy in no time, you’ll see, darling.”

Maman had great charm and style and determination—just as well, in view of what lay in store over the next seven years—so the fire was lit, and the food arrived, and Maman drank two glasses of red wine to give her strength and I drank one glass of wine and water. Then we
emptied our purses and counted up our worldly goods—total: seven days, if we economized. “A whole week, Becka—why, we’re rich, darling,” Maman cried. She put me to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. Maman stayed up half the night, pacing the room and fetching out her little traveling desk, reading, and writing letters. We took them to the post in the morning, and waited to be rescued.

It took five days for that rescue to be effected—and when it finally was, our rescuer was not, I think, the person Maman had hoped for. It was eleven in the morning when the visitor arrived, announced by one of the slatternly hotel maids. Maman was asleep—she’d been up half the night again, writing and pacing—so I went down to discover our benefactor. Would it be sister Evangeline, or would it be the admirer? By then, I had a very clear image of
him
: tall, dark, rich, and resolute—maybe with a moustache.

It wasn’t the sister, and it wasn’t the hero of the suede gloves, either. It was a tall, thin young woman, dressed in black from head to foot, with a black hat jammed on her black hair, and eyes as sharp as the jet on her jacket.

She was waiting in the hall downstairs, standing as still as death. When I approached, and she looked down at me, I thought she was very curious indeed. She was so still and so pale complexioned, but I could feel she was humming with energy, a strange whirring energy, as if her heart ran on clockwork, and the mechanism was rusty or wound up too tightly.

She looked at me, and I looked at her. She was yellow-white as a waxwork, and equally inanimate, but as we examined each other, a change came over her. Faint color beat up from her thin throat to her thin face; she flexed her fingers in her thin cheap gloves; I could just see her ankles under her long narrow skirt, and I saw one of her black stockings had a perfect, meticulous darn in it. The gloves and that darn said: I’m poor. The tight mouth said, I’m proud. And the eyes—what did they say? They had a yearning look, I thought. I could feel tentacles of neediness, reaching out to me, suckering onto me.

When she spoke, her voice was so odd! I didn’t understand the messages of English accents then; it was only later that I could see her accent was West Country, painfully and painstakingly overlaid with gentility. She spoke in a flat inharmonious tone, the way the
deaf do. What a strange, grating voice. It negotiated a sentence like a minefield. Emotion avoided, but lurking under every word and liable to blow up at any minute. How I longed to mimic it! “Rebecca Devlin. Rebecca Devlin,” she said, clasping my hand too tight. “Let me look at you. You poor child. How dark your hair is—I came at once. Will you tell your mama I’m here? Tell her Millicent sent me the instant her letter arrived. Tell her—”

“Who are you?” I said in a haughty way. I didn’t like being called a “poor child”—not by anyone.

She might have taken offense at my haughtiness—people did. But her reaction was just the opposite. She gave me a worshipping look, as if she liked to be put in her place. In her black eyes I could see an oil of obsequiousness, a match flare of admiration. Something smoul-dered in her, then ignited. I’ve seen that fanatic look a million times since. I loathe it, but I’ve learned to live with it.