Rebecca's Tale (53 page)

Barker and I sat by the range in the kitchen willing the telephone not to ring. Rose always says she stays awake on long flights in order to keep the plane in the air. I’ve never been on an airplane, but I now know exactly what she means: By staying awake all of that night, I prevented the hospital from calling. I’d forgotten all about Tom Galbraith and the notebook. Early the next morning, I left in heavy unremitting rain for the hospital.

“Has anything happened? Is my father all right?” I said to the starchy ward sister. She said my father was fine, that nothing had happened—but she was wrong. Institutions change people, especially the elderly, with frightening speed, and when I saw what had happened to my father in the space of a night, I felt sick with anger and pity. They’d put him in a hospital gown that was too small for him. They’d somehow contrived to make him smaller, too. The man to whom I’d always looked up, the pillar of my childhood, had been reduced to this: a frail patient with an errant heart, differing from all the other frail men in the ward only in the nature of his symptoms. The terrible anonymity of hospitals was trying to claim him.

They’d wired him up to an alien machine that recorded a graph of his heartbeats. A drip was inserted in his arm, and a colorless fluid fed into his vein. He was the world to me, and his scope was now a metal bed in a narrow cubicle surrounded by floral curtains. For a second, before my father could conceal it, I saw the fear and eddying regret in his eyes; then his gaze steadied and held mine and everything that needed to be said by us was said, as we looked at each other in silence. He rested his hand on mine: “Ah, Ellie,” he said. “My dearest Ellie.”

I spent a vile morning at that hospital before they finally lost patience and turfed me out. I was exiled to a visitors’ room lit by a cold blue fluorescent light, and, while tests were performed, I kept a grim impotent vigil. There was a yellow table piled high with tattered magazines filled with female industry—homely recipes and knitting patterns, how to make a dress or jam, how to help baby through teething problems—they might just as well have been in
Sanskrit for all the sense they made to me. I tried to summon up my father’s past; that seemed the only way I could be sure of never losing him. But that past refused to take any orderly or sequential shape. Everything became tangled up in the rush of decades, so the trivial and the significant were equal.

I saw the marriedness of my parents, the striped wallpaper of a house we rented in Singapore, the medals Daddy hides away in his desk drawer; I saw my mother young and strong, my mother dying. I saw my brother declaiming poetry, and Daddy telling him poetry was for pansies. I saw myself fly down the hill to Kerrith on the joy of my first bicycle, and my sister, Lily, dancing in the kitchen at The Pines to some bluesy tune played defiantly loud on her windup gramophone. I saw Barker as a fat puppy chewing a pair of shoes; Rebecca’s car roaring up the hill to The Pines. I heard bitter voices behind closed doors, saw my father’s face when the telegram came announcing Jonathan’s death, and saw—every link distinct—the chain stitch on a tobacco pouch I lovingly made, aged eight, for Daddy’s birthday.

Was this a life? My heart ached. I owed my father more than this sad collection of scraps, especially now, when the hospital and death were intent on erasing his identity. I was very angry with myself—and no doubt angry and accusatory with Mr. Latimer when he finally came in to speak to me.

Mr. Latimer is newly arrived from some grand London teaching hospital and is younger than I’d expected, about forty. He’s a tall man—not quite as tall as Tom Galbraith, but over six foot, I’d say—and some women might find him good-looking. He has dark hair, an unsettling, steady gray-eyed gaze, and a watchful demeanor. I was prejudiced against him, perhaps. I resented the way he’d overruled my father, and insisted he remain here. The Sister had sung his praises, needless to say, rhapsodizing about what a fine surgeon he was, how distinguished, with such a reputation in medical circles, but I’d watched the nurses flutter and coo and kowtow to him the previous day, and I’d decided he was arrogant.

I’ve since revised that opinion. He’s a clever man and may have sensed my antagonism; it’s even possible that he set out to defuse it. Certainly he spent far longer with me that day than I’d expected, explaining patiently what these tests and this period of observation might achieve. He refused to rule out surgery yet—which made me
afraid—but he was quiet and understanding, even optimistic in a measured way, though there were many “ifs,” as there always are when doctors make an analysis. To my surprise, he wanted to know some of my personal details—my age and so on. And he asked me many close and searching questions about our life at The Pines—far more questions than seemed necessary.

“We live quietly,” I told him. “We don’t go out very much any more, and my father dislikes visitors. I try to keep to a routine: meals at regular times, a short walk every afternoon. My father tends to dwell on the past, and that can upset him. So, I try to divert him. We play cards sometimes, or I read to him.”

Latimer had been watching me intently. I knew how dull this sounded; it occurred to me that he must think me dull, too—not that that mattered. I colored. “Who chooses the books when you read to him?” he asked, with a half smile. I could see sympathy, perhaps even concern, in his steady gray gaze, so I lied. “I do,” I replied. I will not be pitied.

It’s strange, what good interrogators doctors can make. I’m sure it’s because we invest them with special powers, like priests; because we long to believe in their wisdom and insight. I found I was telling Latimer things I’ve never discussed before—I even told him about the months of broken nights, the cries in the dark, and my father’s recurrent nightmares.

“I see,” Latimer said, and made a small note on the clipboard he was carrying. Later he quietly asked me if my father had anything “preying on his mind”—that phrase struck me, though for some reason I can’t remember exactly how I replied to him.

From now on, Latimer decreed, there was to be a regime of rest—and I was banished from the precincts except for the strictly observed single visiting hour in the afternoon. So I drove back to The Pines, still in sheeting rain, and, for the rest of those seven days, the rain continued. It was an interval in my life, a period unlike any other: I felt
marooned
—and that was the state I was in when, that first afternoon, a white-faced Tom Galbraith turned up at the door, with Rebecca’s little black coffin book tucked inside his soaked mackintosh.

He wanted me to read it, but first he had to explain who he truly was and what his own connection was to the events Rebecca
described. It was painfully hard for him. Maybe it’s the legacy of his orphanage years that has left him so fearful of trust, friendship, or intimacy, but he always behaves as if he’s reluctant to risk closeness because, if he did, it would be instantly snatched away. For this reason, perhaps, or other reasons of which I know nothing, he seems to fear the idea of being “known,” as if knowledge might give someone power over him.

He found it indescribably difficult to tell me the truth as to why he came here in the first place; when he came to the contents of the notebook, and what he had learned about his parentage and his birth, he spoke very fast, in a cold dismissive way. I imagine he felt this was his best protection.

I was astonished by what he told me, and very happy for him, but we were at odds with each other, I can see that now. I thought that for someone brought up as he had been, with years in a children’s home and lasting uncertainties as to his parentage, this notebook must have been a precious gift. I still think that, if I’d been in his position, if I’d known nothing about my mother, I’d have been overjoyed to find her in Isolda, with her beautiful hair, headstrong and courageous, dancing barefoot by the waves. I thought it must gladden his heart to learn that he
was
related to Rebecca, if not in the way he’d imagined. That must give him a sense of belonging and identity, I felt; he had a family now, and a history. Surely that must reassure him, when he’d spent so long seeking it.

“Why, it means you’re related to Elinor and Jocelyn,” I said. “You’re cousins, Tom—how extraordinary! They’ll be overjoyed. You’ll be the child they never had. When are you going to tell them? Have you told them already?”

“No. I haven’t told them—I don’t know if I will. Not for a while, certainly. There’s a great deal I need to think about.”

I checked myself. I still hadn’t read the notebook, of course, so I wasn’t to know how troubling a document it was, especially for him. There are darknesses in it—it’s shot through with darkness, and I began to sense that as I looked at his face. I realized that I was trespassing, that I couldn’t begin to understand how he felt. I came from such a normal world, he from such an abnormal one. My mind was filled with death, his with birth. How could I reach across these divisions?

It had been a strange dreamlike conversation. It took place in the kitchen, but I wasn’t really sure where we were, or what year it was. I felt we’d both been sucked into some vortex of the past, that we were spinning about in the decades. Looking at his troubled face, I felt heavyhearted and light-headed, sober yet dizzy, as if I were standing on the edge of a cliff and might fall over into an abyss at any minute. All I could think, in a muddled way, was that he needed love—that love was the only possible short-circuiting device here. I almost told him how I felt about him,
that’s
how ill balanced and frantic I was; but, thank God, I stayed silent.

I swallowed the sentence down, which made me feel even more choked up with impotent urgency. Tom pushed back his chair and stood up. I stood up, too. The rain rattled, Barker’s paws twitched as he dreamed. I was in such a muddle of distress, afraid for my father, afraid for Tom, angry with myself for being normal and inadequate. I think he saw some of these conflicts in my face, and was as concerned for me as I was for him; in a gentle way he put his arms around me. The next thing I knew, I’d begun kissing him. It was the only way I could think of to reach him. I’d kissed him once before, when I delivered the notebook—God knows why—but that was a very hasty casual sort of kiss. This wasn’t.

I don’t have great experience of kisses, but I can taste desperation. This time he kissed me back, and the kiss continued for a long time. Then it ended. He broke away from me in an odd, ashamed, abrupt way, and left shortly afterward. Since then, we’ve met often, and he’s brought me up to date with everything that he’s discovered, but the barriers were back in place the next time I saw him.

At first I thought he was distancing himself because he felt stigmatized by his illegitimacy—which doesn’t matter a jot to me, but does to him. Then I realized there was a more obvious barrier between us. I finally understood: He loved someone else, that was why he’d reacted so guiltily. He began to hint that this was the case, but he never spoke of the woman directly, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of questioning him, so it was several weeks before he told me her name. Meanwhile, he did seem to trust me more than he had, and began to treat me like a reliable friend, which was progress of a kind. That kiss was not repeated, of course. From his point of view, I suppose, it was an aberration.

I began reading Rebecca’s notebook as soon as he left, and I was still reading it, approaching its disjointed end, late that night in my bedroom. Rebecca’s words flew straight off the page and into my heart. This winged girl gave
me
wings, I felt—but, as I discovered subsequently, that was not the reaction of others who read her story.

So, perhaps my own state of mind was to blame for my response. If dry, clever, skeptical Rose were to ask me to describe that state of mind now, what should I say? I felt as if death and birth pressed me in on either side, like bookends. Rebecca was writing about giving birth when actually she was dying. Births, deaths, love, hate, the many guises that murder can take. Those forces swirled up at me from Rebecca’s pages and my own uncertainties, hopes, and ambitions spiraled to meet them. It was a maelstrom—and, in the midst of a maelstrom, as I shall tell Rose, should she ever bother to ask,
no one’s
objective.

M
Y NEXT TASK—UNDERTAKEN AT
T
OM
G
ALBRAITH’S SUG
gestion—was to make a copy of Rebecca’s notebook. Tom insisted that it had been sent by that anonymous donor to my father, and was therefore his property. When he was stronger, he should be allowed to read it—I agreed with that, up to a point—but Tom also needed to be able to refer to it at will; there were a number of things, he said, that he wanted to check. It was during this conversation that, for the first time, he used the word
verify
.

I didn’t like that word—it sounded chilly to me. But I could see how much Tom wanted to keep this story close to him, and I could see other advantages, too, so I agreed to help. Apart from anything else, it kept me occupied.

I spent the rest of that rainy hospital week copying out Rebecca’s words. I could have used my old portable Hermes typewriter, but my typing abilities are not what they were. Apart from the WRAC wartime typing pool, I’d had a period of part-time secretarial drudgery in a lawyer’s office near here before my father’s health worsened. As a result, I associate typewriters with servitude.

I decided to use pen and ink. Handwriting is as distinct as a person’s voice, so Rebecca’s tale looked very different in my neat legible hand. It looked mistranslated somehow, and its oddities were more
noticeable. I’m a careful reader (Rose has trained me), so I’d noticed the gaps in Rebecca’s story, but they hadn’t worried me at all. I accepted them as part of the timbre of her tale. Now, altered by my own handwriting, those gaps yawned; what had seemed artless to me before now seemed artful and deliberate. I noticed the several references to evading truth, to dealing from the bottom of the pack. That concerned me, but I was convinced that a third notebook must exist, and I told myself that most of my questions would be answered there, in her final entry.