Rebecca's Tale (46 page)

No sign of the wife—too far gone to be presentable, I think now. But Captain Julyan was a
very
handsome man: tall, thoughtful, and
lean, with clever blue eyes—I liked him instantly. We took tea in a garden between a palm and a monkey puzzle. Elinor was brusque, but I scented a tendresse; if Elinor had once had expectations that had not been fulfilled, however, she hid them. How perfectly I behaved; scarcely spoke, didn’t swing my legs, made myself invisible.

My identity was being smudged again. No one mentioned Maman. I looked at the great billowing banks of roses by the house. They had bloodred heps, big as a baby’s fist. Old Mrs. Julyan said they were scions of the famous Grenville roses. Elinor changed the subject immediately.

Captain Julyan was gallant. He looked at me intently. He admired my blue butterfly brooch—and I wouldn’t be silenced then. I said Maman had given it to me.

As we left, Captain Julyan took me into his grandfather’s study: such a room—books, books, it was barricaded with books, all four walls, floor to ceiling. He showed me the collection of butterflies he’d made as a boy, and there was one just like my brooch. He’d caught it in the Manderley woods, when he was seven; it was a Meadow Blue, not as rare or showy as a Painted Lady or a Swallowtail, but intensely blue, and one of his favorites. Poor
papillons!
They were finished off with chloroform, then pinned through the furry heart; there were thousands in those specimen drawers, as many butterflies as books, my darling.

He packed the Meadow Blue up in a small box, and gave it to me—and I treasured it, but it was lost in the rush and confusion some months later, when Danny summoned me, and I had to go to my mother’s bedside at Greenways. Or maybe I took a dislike to it and destroyed it. I forget now.

“You’re a good girl, Rebecca,” Elinor said, striding back down the hill again. “You can behave so nicely when you want, my dear.”

“I can act,” I said scornfully, tossing my head. “Of course I can act. I’ve been doing Shakespeare for seven years. Tea at The Pines isn’t difficult.”

“I would imagine not,” she replied calmly. She was not a fool, Elinor, I realized. How old was she, I wondered. Twenty? Twenty-four or-five, maybe.

“Everyone acts, in any case,” she went on. “You’re not unique in that respect. Nurses have to act, for instance, as I’m learning at the
hospital. Nurses have to be
great
concealers of the truth…” She frowned, slowed, sighed, then picked up pace. “Still, never mind that. Let’s go home, dear. Don’t scuff your feet now.”

My first outing. My first sniff at this new world. A repetition wasn’t risked, not for weeks. Elinor returned to her hospital; younger sister Jocelyn used to talk to me sometimes, but plump pretty Jocelyn was in love, sighing for a subaltern fiancé somewhere in France. She wrote letters to him every day, and sometimes I’d walk with her to the box. Before she posted them she’d kiss the envelope flaps for luck. She was sweet natured but moony and not much use to me. My nosings scared her: “Do you remember my maman?” I said. “Did you meet her when you were little, Jocelyn?”

Jocelyn crimsoned, and looked at me with round blue eyes. She said she couldn’t remember my mama, that she wasn’t allowed to discuss my mama, her father wouldn’t have her name spoken in the house. “Why not?” I cried, stamping my foot. “Why not? She’s a Grenville. The Grenvilles go back to kingdom come. Your father’s family’s nothing to write home about.”

“Papa didn’t approve of her marriage,” Jocelyn blurted. “And you mustn’t speak of Papa in that way. It’s very rude and wrong when Mama’s been so good to you.”

“
That
for your mother,” I shouted, snapping my fingers in her face. “Damn your father! I hope his ships sink! He’s food for worms, he is!”

Jocelyn ran away. She was packed off to stay with friends before the week was out, and it was back to the kennel for me: Obedience lessons with Aunt Evangeline every morning—it didn’t do to challenge the authority of the master of the house, you see, and as for swearing…No beatings, don’t imagine that. Evangeline was not a bad woman or a stupid one; she tried the reasonable approach. We’d sit side by side on the verandah if the autumn day was warm enough. Evangeline would work on her embroideries and tapestries; I would sort the wools and line up the rainbow silks. Vermilion and violet. Down below us, the river Kerr wound; I’d watch its windings, I’d hear Maman’s voice reading Tennyson, and imagine the river was winding all the way to Camelot.

“I try to help,” Evangeline said, her needle moving deftly back and forth, little flashes of silver, always work in the same direction and keep the tension even, she told me. “But Isolda always was so head
strong! She will not listen to reason. She will rush in where angels fear to tread, you see, Rebecca.”

Had angels feared to tread at Manderley, I wondered? Why was Maman banished to France? I asked Evangeline.

“Heavens, she wasn’t banished! What a word! It was just felt…well, that it would do Isolda good to spend some time abroad. Your mother’s very sensitive, and she’s easily influenced, and she was terribly distressed by our sister Virginia’s death. It made her quite ill. She wasn’t herself for a long while afterward. So she went to France, and then she married in France, of course—pass me the mauve silk, would you, dear? I’m going to do this flower next. I must change color.”

I passed the silk. “Is Maman going to die?” I said.

“No, no, no,” said Evangeline, rising quickly and putting her arms around me. “You mustn’t think that. In another few months she’ll be quite well again—”

“How many months?”

“In the new year, by February at the very latest, for sure. Now, that isn’t long to wait, my dear, is it?”

Not long? It was an eternity. Three more months in the cage. By February, I’d have dwindled to nothing—and I didn’t believe Evangeline, in any case. Danny had written to say that I still couldn’t visit; all being well, Maman would be moving to a convalescent home in Berkshire shortly—and I knew what that meant. Once they ferried her there, once those gates clanged shut on her, I’d never see her again. She’d go down to join my dead Devlin father in his underworld; he’d reclaim his bride. He’d wind her in his arms, as he sometimes did in my dreams, and there’d be no escaping
that
long embrace.
My father, my father
. Somewhere around that time, I began to fear him.

Did Evangeline see those thoughts in my face? Perhaps, for she tried harder and harder to divert me after that. She fetched out Jocelyn’s old dolls; she played the piano for me (a great Steinway: these strings needed no tuning). She gave me silly girls’ books to read, when I hungered for the meat and wine of Shakespeare. She produced jigsaws and scrapbooks; she taught me bezique and bridge, and one day, when inspiration was nearing its end, she brought me a pile of fat black notebooks, with strings that tied on their spines. My
mother had had some very similar as a child, she said. I was such an odd little girl, imaginative, just as my mother had been; maybe it would amuse me to keep a diary, or write stories?

T
HOSE LITTLE COFFIN BOOKS DREW ME.
T
HAT AFTERNOON
, while Evangeline was at home to her visitors downstairs, I sat in the old schoolroom. I took up a steel-nibbed pen and dipped it in black ink. I thought, I’ll write Maman’s story and mine. I’ll write our history, and, when she’s well again, I’ll present it to her.

I didn’t get very far, my darling. I stuck in a picture of myself with
Midsummer’s Night’s Dream
wings—I’d been proud of that picture once, Maman had it taken specially. I stuck in a postcard picture of Manderley I’d bought that hot day Elinor took me out on the leash. I wrote the words “Rebecca’s Tale,” and curled the tail of the letter “e” all the way down the page like a fleshy serpent. It was potent; it was a python, an anaconda.

What else? I wanted to give Maman our past; our idyll by the sea, and all the glories of my childhood—they would make her well again. I wanted to write about Brittany and our foursquare house; the sound of the waves and the sin in a speck of dust. I felt certain that, if I wrote accurately enough, Maman would survive. She’d live then, for sure—but something was choking me. My head felt hot; my mouth was dry; the pages blurred. I missed Maman, I feared for her, and not a word would come to me.

In the end, I left the pages blank, telling a tale only I could read. I closed up the black covers, tied the strings on the spine, and hid it away. Maybe my failure caused Maman’s death, I thought afterward; maybe I was responsible.

I have that little book still, and it’s on the table here now. I took it out this afternoon to look at it. Such a change! Then I couldn’t write; now I can’t stop. I feel such an itch and an urgency; there’s so much I want you to know, my dearest. The memories come at me pell-mell. I can’t write fast enough—my story’s eating into me.

Has my mother come back from the dead for you? I hope so. I want you to know her. Can you hear her voice? I can, so clearly. Now there are other ghosts to resurrect, and other twists in the tale to tell you. Not so very many pages left in this book, but enough. I’ll tell
you how I first came to Manderley, how my Devlin father came back from the dead—and how I won myself a husband. Now there’s a fairy tale, and a Grimm one! Meanwhile, my love, it’s late; the sea’s silvery.

I’ll have to go back to the house for dinner; I must put in appearances occasionally. I’ll continue tomorrow, my sweet—husband permitting. I’ll have to leave for my London appointment very early the next day, but I’ll take you out in my boat, and then finish my tale before I leave, I promise you.

T
WENTY-FOUR

B
ACK FROM YOUR FIRST SAIL; CONDITIONS WERE PERFECT
. You’ve seen this bay, the blue diamond in your Manderley crown, my dearest.

You’ve seen the twin rocks christened Scylla and Charybdis, centuries ago, when Max was a child. You’ve navigated between them, ventured out into the open sea, and felt the swell of the ocean for the first time. Isn’t that intoxicating—feeling that pulse, riding that power? But be warned. Tonight, conditions were calm for this coast; those waves aren’t always so obedient, and if the wind alters direction, their mood can change very swiftly.

Such a night! A world made monochrome; a mercury sea, a high full merciless moon; water of such transparency you could see the upper ridges of the sandbar out by the reef—a treacherous underwater bank, so pale and bone colored. Whenever I see that, I think of the nights in the wings when I listened to Oberon;
I know a bank
…and, although I understand I must steer away from it, it entices me. If there are sirens in this bay—and I know better than most that there are—it’s there that they lie in wait and sing their songs for me.

Tonight, I could hear their voices clearly. In the moonlight, they were sweet, plangent, and powerful. Perhaps I was tiring; suddenly I longed to lie down there and sleep. I felt such a yearning for
oblivion
.
I wanted to rest in peace on that bone-white bank, nestle under the rocks beyond it. I thought, No more striving; O, wind a chain about my wrists, pay me out, and lower me down there….

You should know—I don’t mind your knowing—I’ve had that temptation before, I’ve been beckoned down
that
route for years. When I was a child, I heard those sirens. They whispered to me once on the Brittany waves, but sirens are great survivors, and can adapt to all manner of habitations if need be. They’re ingenious, I’ve found.

The sea, of course. They like best to be there. But they’ll take up residence almost anywhere: on the deck of an ocean liner, or the top floor of a high building; inside razors and gas jets and guns; they fit snugly into a handful of pills; they’ll breed like germs on the broken neck of a bottle. They sang out from razors after Maman died—and, in my twenty-first year, when my Devlin father had his neck broken, they were everywhere, the whole house swarmed, it stank of them. I gave in then: I uncorked a bottle I knew was full of them, and I sucked it dry in a locked room at Greenways. I swallowed a milky pint of their poisonous promises then, and I was sure that would satisfy them—but I was foiled. Guardian Danny had the door broken down; I was pumped out in some hospital, and in due course I was glad. I began planning how to marry Max not long afterward. As I said, the ways of death are infinite.

Last year, once last year, just after I’d cut my hair, I went out in
Je Reviens
, and I nearly succumbed to those sirens again. But that was the last temptation, and it was before your advent, so don’t be anxious; I know how deathly cold that water is, never fear. I’ve stopped my ears to those voices, like Odysseus; I’ve blinded my eyes to those beckoning hands. I won’t be joining my sisters by the reef, I promise you—not now I have such precious cargo aboard, my darling.

N
OW WE’RE IN HARBOR, AND ALL IS WELL.
J
E
R
EVIENS
rides at anchor on the buoy by the breakwater; I had her made by Marie-Hélène’s eldest boy, and he named her for me. A lucky name for a lucky boat: For all those who sail in her, safe passage home is assured. Her tender’s tied fast at the jetty; her spare sails are stowed, wound as tight as winding sheets; all her brass gleams like gold; her decks are smooth as skin, she’s been cleaned and caulked and rigged
by expert hands; she’s seaworthy, ready for embarkation—why, in this boat, we could go anywhere, we could sail to Newfoundland.

And I’m ready, too. Danny’s packed my case for me, I’ve set an alarm clock on my table here, in case I should oversleep. I leave for London at six. I’ll have my hair done when I get there because I want to look my best tomorrow; then I’ll have lunch at my club. My grave doctor is so in demand that he can’t see me until two. Frustrating! I’d like us to see him at dawn. I may set off even earlier—it’s such a long drive. I’m impatient to be there, and above all I don’t want to encounter Max when I’m leaving; he’s furious that I’m going back to London.