Rebecca's Tale (50 page)

And so, to come full circle, the bride was approved, and three
months after we met onboard ship, Max and I crossed the Channel to my village birthplace in Brittany. We stood by a February sea, the sky wept salt rain, Max stroked my sealskin coat and kissed my eyes. We made our morning journey to the
mairie
; we exulted in each other. I dreamed of my house every night, like a secret lover.

When I came back to claim Manderley, it was spring, just as it is now; there was bridal blossom on the trees; the lilacs were in bud; the earth was waking after winter; the woods smelled rich and fertile. Despite the difficulties of our honeymoon, I took possession of my house on a spring tide of optimism. I made them force open all the windows, one by one. It was the first thing I did.

In gushed the air from the sea. I was certain I must be carrying our child, my dearest, but I proved to be mistaken.

M
Y DEAR LOVE, MY SWEET LOVE—HOW LATE IT IS.
I
FEEL
so restless tonight, but I must sleep soon, for both our sakes. In the space of half a page, between the paragraph above and this one, a great wash of despondency came in on the tide; I started to have doubts and fears. In the morning, they’ll vanish again. It’s always these hours after midnight that are the dangerous ones.

I went out to breathe the cool night air; it’s so still, so still. The moon has risen and declined; she’s obscured behind the great dark bulk of the house above, but I could see by starlight. The stars tonight are ice bright in a cloudless sky; some giant god has scattered their cold seeds across the heavens; they’re profligate.

How close my father is tonight. Even the waves were mourning him. I’ve scarcely written about him, I know—it’s hard to fit a life in a notebook, I’ve found, much harder than I’d expected. But you can see him circling around in my story, I hope, prowling on its periphery: hungry old wolf, baying at the moon. I’d made such a mythology of him; he was a giant in my mind and the flash of his lighthouse beam lit my childhood—but what was he really?

He came back to England and bought a stockbroker’s house—not imaginative! He never explained his quarrel with Maman or his departure to South Africa. He told me he’d always stayed in touch with her and always cared for her in his way; he said he’d taken her in the instant he heard she was ill—but how true was that? I never saw
any letters from him, and Maman hadn’t been ill, she’d been pregnant, though it was ten years before I discovered that.

I was so hedged in with lies!
Everyone
lied to me. Maman always told me my father was dead; Danny told me Maman died of a fever; they whisked that little half-brother of mine away, and I still don’t know for sure whether it was my father who made Danny banish my mother’s newborn son, or whether she did it of her own volition. Danny finally confessed the truth to me, years later, not long after my marriage, not long after I came to Manderley. Was it when I realized I wasn’t carrying a child? It might have been. I know I was sad about something; I think I might have been weeping. I forget. Anyway, she told me about my little lost brother, my mother’s baby.

She claimed the foundling home was all her idea, but I don’t believe that. I think it was the Devlin’s hand at work. I think that baby was still in a far room of that hideous house the day I came to Greenways and Maman died; I’m still certain it was that baby I heard cry as I sat by her bed—

Danny was wrong; it wasn’t me crying, I couldn’t cry—I was in a trance. For weeks afterward I was sleepwalking.

The Devlin was a hard man. He wanted to check the little bitch for mongrel blood. He’d have banished me like my brother, I expect—and wouldn’t have thought twice about it—had it not been for the fact that I was the living spit of him, his Devlin daughter, with his eyes and his black hair. I went down the stairs from Maman’s room, and there he was, back from the dead. His eyes locked on mine, and I thought, He’s
air
—I’ll be able to walk straight through him. I sleepwalked up to him, and he held me at arm’s length, looking at my face. Vain, vain, all he was interested in was his own reflection, a little chip off the old block, that’s what he wanted to see; and once he did, how his expression changed! He locked his arms around me. He put his ring on my finger.

Oh, my darling—I won’t write about him; I won’t. I worshipped him for a while, and he worshipped me in return. What an idolatry
that
was! A ring on my wedding finger, bells on my toes. “I’ll make such a fine lady of you, Becka,” he’d say. The hell with him! I’ve never allowed anyone to make me into anything. Not him, not Max, none of them. My daddy tried to saddle me: bit, curb, and bridle—bring in the governesses, wear this dress, dance to this tune. Never trust men when they come bearing gifts, dearest, because, believe
me, there’s always a price for them, and it’s always the same price, too—it’s liberty.

I was jealously guarded at Greenways, and that’s all you need to know. I was my daddy’s princess, the widower’s queen; he kept me in his tower, and he was so sweet, so sweet, that it was
years
before I realized he’d taken the key, and he’d never give it back to me. First my cousin Jack was banished—not that I cared too much about that. He’s a sleek, weak apology for a man, as I pretty soon realized; a spy, a tittle-tattler with the mind of a vulgarian—and those weaknesses will be the end of him one of these days, you’ll see.

Cousin Jack was the child of my daddy’s favorite sister, and he was taken in at Greenways for a while—until he looked at me in a particular way once too often. A kiss in a cupboard under the stairs; caresses that made me murderous. I scratched his face, and when my father saw the claw marks, that was cousin Jack, done for. I was glad to see the back of him—though you never really rid yourself of a succubus like that; he’s taken to turning up at Manderley, and, not having a forgiving nature, still blaming me for the failures of his life, which in truth are all of his making; he tells Max lies about me, lies that fester.

I’ll punish him for that, one of these days;
his
card’s marked. He’s been stoking Max’s anguish nicely for months now, and I’ll repay him in kind. He’s always after money, so I’ll deal him a promissory note with my right hand, and with the left I’ll deal him some retribution. My daddy would approve; he banished him from Greenways without a second thought—but then, all males in the vicinity were banished sooner or later. “I won’t have them here,” my father would shout. “I won’t have them sniffing around—you understand me, Becka?”

I had a friend named May, such a gentle girl, clever, and with no airs and graces. May lived in the manor house close by, and I was allowed to see her, but my friend May had brothers, three of them, and my daddy took agin
them
. May showed me endless kindness—and I was able to repay her for that one day, years later, as I’ll explain another time, my dearest. My father liked May, but if her brothers were home on leave, if I walked with them, or talked with them, or rode with them, how he watched! And then he’d brood and sulk, and drink. “Tell me you love your old father, Becka,” he’d say—and no matter what I said or did to show my love, it never contented him, it never satisfied him.

Old Lear; tawdry old mountebank. He hung a revolver over his desk; there were trophies on the wall that he’d brought back from the bush: the head of a gazelle; the head of a lioness.

“Damn that taxidermist,” he said to me once, when I reached up to stroke their powerful heads. “Kaffir. Look what a lousy job he did, Becka.” I looked. My daddy was a good shot, famous for it, he said. The great white hunter, the wild colonial boy. So it was a very clean kill; a tiny hole just visible where the bullet went in—but it wasn’t well stitched; it was leaking. Where the fatal wound was, the sawdust packing was leaching.

What did I do, the seven years I lived with him? Nothing you need know about, my dearest. He taught me to gamble at cards. I’m a demon at card games to this day; never play poker with me! I’ll strip you of your winnings; I’ll have the shirt off your back. I can palm aces; I can deal from the bottom of the pack: I have to win, and will cheat every which way.

He told me about mines—and I’ll tell you something interesting about mines that I never knew till my daddy revealed it: They have a hidden danger. It’s not just that the men have to work in the depths of the earth, down, down, in a tiny seam, so tight and narrow they have to lie on their bellies and they can’t stand up; it’s not just that the dynamite is unstable, and the roof props might collapse; it’s that, down there in the depths of the mine, it isn’t cold, as I’d always imagined, it’s
hot
, fiendishly hot, so germs breed. Those gold seams swarm with bacteria. They swim into the mouth on saliva. They thrive in the secretions of the throat; they get gulped down into the stomach bag. They worm their way into the lungs, they wriggle right into the cavities of the heart and spawn in the aorta. If you cut yourself down there, the wound infects; it can fester away for months, Daddy said,
years
even. Sometimes it never heals properly, however careful you are with hygiene, however often you change the dressings and swallow, swallow the medicine—

Interesting? There’s a message for you, a message in a bottle. Cast it into the sea and watch where
that
comes ashore, Daddy.

I
WON’T WRITE ABOUT HIM ANYMORE.
H
E’S TOO BIG FOR
my pen. My page won’t encompass him. He wasn’t always a mounte
bank; people don’t stay still in that way. Just as Frank McKendrick showed me, they can be Prospero one morning, Mark Antony the next; they can start the day as Miranda, and, hey presto, they’re Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra come the evening. Everything’s in flux, always. My Devlin father had the heart of a lion; he fought to the bitter end, and no matter what anyone else may ever tell you, my darling, it was the hidden debts and the creditors that killed him.

He couldn’t face me with the truth; he couldn’t face the shame—that’s why he took himself off to the attics, locked the door, slung a rope over a roof beam, and broke his own neck. It was the day the debts were finally being called in, you see.

It was also the day of my twenty-first birthday, as I told you; it was the day I came of age. I’ve never celebrated my birthday since. I won’t. I won’t. I’m wild with grief the instant I wake. They aren’t birthdays for me, they’re deathdays.

N
O MORE O’ THAT, MY DEAREST
. E
NOUGH, ENOUGH
. I’
M
on the very last page of my little black notebook. I didn’t mean to end it on such a dark chord; I cut all those cords, long ago.

Let’s forget ghosts;
future tense
from now on. I want you to know—I want you to know—

How dear you are to me. How much I love you. What joy it’s given me these last months to feel you grow, to think of you and plan for you.

When you’re born, my little one, it will be late summer, and that’s a beautful season here; there are often long warm benign weeks before the westerlies that herald autumn. You’ll be born in my Manderley room overlooking the sea. You’ll be able to hear the sea.
La mer, ma mère
. I’ll nurse you, and care for you and I’ll always watch over you.

All that’s bad in me I shall cut out. I want to be the best of mothers, so you grow up in a certainty of love. I’m sure that once Max sees you, he’ll come to love you too. He’ll come to look on you as his changeling child, just as I do—I’m willing it, it’s inevitable. Who knows what might happen with time? Reconcilement? Peace? Anything, anything. Think of all the decades ahead of us.

It’s two o’clock. Five hours from now, we’ll be on the road to Lon
don. As soon as I return here, I’ll start a new page in a new notebook and I’ll fill in the gaps in my story. I’ll tell you more of my father’s tale and Max’s; I’ll translate the braille of my marriage—and of course I’ll tell you everything that happens to us in the city, what the grave doctor says, and so on.

How tired I am suddenly! Jasper’s restless and unsettled; he’s looking at me with such mournful eyes. I think he knows I’m going away; he can always sense it.

I’ve opened the curtains so the first light will wake me. The alarm clock is set. Can you hear it ticking? I’m going to lie down now, and sleep for a while, my dearest one.

4

Ellie

M
AY
1951

T
WENTY-FIVE

I
T’S A HEAT WAVE, MY DARLING,
I
THOUGHT TODAY.
I
WAS
sitting in the garden, between our palm and our monkey puzzle.

I was writing a letter to Tom Galbraith and it was proving very difficult. I couldn’t make the words lie down on the page in the way I wanted. I knew I had to tell him what happened yesterday, and I suppose there were other things I might have liked to say, too. I’m not good at concealing my feelings. I still think of him as “Mr. Gray”; after an hour’s pen chewing, all I’d written was “Dear Tom,” followed by one pedestrian paragraph.

I had reread sections of Rebecca’s notebook this morning, and, when I couldn’t think what to say next in my letter, her words sprang into my head. I didn’t write them down, obviously. It
is
a heat wave—we’ve had five weeks of unrelenting sun—but I couldn’t use the word “darling,” unfortunately, and, anyway, Tom would recognize the quotation. He knows that little black coffin book of Rebecca’s by heart, just as I do.

I’d brought a table out into the garden to write. I was sitting exactly where the young Rebecca took tea in 1914 with my father, with twenty-five-year-old Elinor, and with my gentle grandmother (whom I never knew; she died before I was born). On either side of me, those famous Grenville roses were in full bloom. Daddy hacks
them back and stunts them, but even his punitive pruning techniques can’t quell their inbred exuberance. I’ve been secretly watering and feeding them. They’ve responded to these weeks of sun, and now there were great billowing banks of them on either side of me, weighed down with glorious crumpled blooms, every shade from the softest blush pink to wine crimson and lavender. The scent was intense. I was in a bower of roses—and I kept telling myself that a bower of roses was no place to be miserable.