Rebecca's Tale (55 page)

I told Francis Latimer that in due course; it would have been on his third or fourth visit. I didn’t want him to get his hopes up—he did seem actually to
like
the house, despite its disadvantages and eccentricities—and this new idée fixe of my father’s was now worrying me seriously. I was beginning to see that the stay in hospital had produced many changes in him; he seemed stronger and in better health, but his irascibility and vigor were much reduced, he was occasionally forgetful, and he passed many hours in a gentle, musing, contemplative state that bewildered me. I was glad he seemed tranquil, but this wasn’t the father I knew. I suspected that among that myriad of pills was one that calmed his moods as effectively as others controlled his blood pressure.

Francis Latimer’s reply interested me. His words marked a turning point, I can see now. He said that he knew it would be disastrous for my father to leave The Pines. He said that nothing he’d prescribed could account for my father’s altered state, which he, too, had noticed during the long conversations he and my father had had at the hospital. It was the first I’d heard of these conversations. I began to wonder if Latimer knew more about my father’s state of mind than I did, if my father might have made some confession to him of which I remained ignorant. Francis Latimer denied this, too, though doctors resemble priests when it comes to the sanctity of the confessional, so I’m not entirely sure I believed him.

He added, looking at me in an intent way, that I must expect alterations. “People
change
, Ellie,” he said, speaking with a sudden vehemence that surprised me. We were sitting on that boundary wall of ours, overlooking the water, and Latimer, unusually for him, seemed
restive and preoccupied. I think it was the first occasion that I saw him as a man, rather than as a doctor; I could sense something was troubling him.

“Don’t you find yourself changing, Ellie?” he went on. “Dear God, I certainly do. Two years ago, at the time of my divorce…” He checked himself, and then, to my great surprise, took my hand. “Never make the mistake of believing that anyone is in stasis, Ellie—especially the old,” he said gently. “People your father’s age, in his state of health, change at great speed. They advance into territories unimaginable to someone your age or mine. Your father’s a remarkable man, and a courageous one. He has a whole lifetime to come to terms with. If he does so calmly, or more calmly than he once did, it’s a blessing, believe me.”

I liked Francis Latimer after that, though it saddened me to see how swiftly Tom Galbraith had been displaced by him in Daddy’s favors; that seemed fickle. And I was influenced by what Latimer said. I can be overprotective. I saw I had no right to hide
Rebecca’s Tale
from my father. It was his property.

I asked Tom’s advice, then Rose’s. With their agreement, I finally gave my father my copy of Rebecca’s tale about three and a half weeks after he returned from the hospital. The night before I did so, I stayed awake worrying for hours, looking back through the notebook, searching for any passages that might hurt my father. In the end, I decided to make one further slash with my censor’s scissors. Radical surgery: I removed from Rebecca’s story the entire section concerning her life with her father at Greenways.

I’d always found that section perturbing, in any case. I found it curiously ambivalent and hard to understand. Why, for instance, did Rebecca write so violently, and at such length, about
mines?
Rebecca accuses her father of imprisoning her, of stealing her liberty—and that made me anxious, for people in Kerrith have made similar charges against my father, in the past. They’ve claimed he’s curtailed my freedom, that he’s denied me my chances and so on. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, but although there’s no cause, I know those accusations have wounded him. There is no comparison between Rebecca’s situation and my own—none. But if my father read this, in his present weakened state, I thought it possible he might imagine one.

I glanced one last time at the section I’d censored, hesitated, then hid it away in my desk drawer. All those comments about being locked up in a tower! What an ogre of a father! Sometimes Rebecca gets carried away, and overstates her case, I feel. Her tale read better without those fanciful pages anyway, I decided.

M
Y FATHER’S LIFE IS ROUNDED WITH A LITTLE SLEEP NOW
, and it took him such a long slow time to read those pages I’d copied out for him. Nearly two weeks went by, and he still hadn’t finished them. Rose whisked them out of his hands one day, as he sat dozing in the sun, and read them in the space of an afternoon—but Rose is a voracious professional reader, and she wasn’t caught in the web of these events to the degree that my father was. “Very female,” was her comment, and she’d be drawn no further.

“What was Maxim
like
, Rose?” I asked her one evening in the kitchen, thinking of that legendary time just before the first war when Rose was young and lovely, and rumored to be the object of Maxim’s affections. Rose, after all, had known most of the characters in Rebecca’s story.

“Which Maxim?” Rose replied, tossing salad leaves for supper in the kitchen. “My Maxim? Rebecca’s? His second wife’s? Your father’s? There are umpteen to choose from.”

“Yours,” I said. “Stop splitting hairs, Rose.”

“Afflicted by ancestors, but I liked him well enough. Anchored at Manderley, but always dreaming of voyages. I wasn’t in love with him, or he with me, though he may have imagined he was. Does that answer your question?”

“Have you ever been in love, Rose?” I asked, in a moody way, staring out at the sea in the distance. Tom Galbraith had returned that day from another verification visit, this time to the house Jack Devlin had owned in Berkshire, Greenways. He was preparing to leave Kerrith, and due to depart tomorrow for Brittany. I’d agreed to meet him later that evening, to wish him well on his journey. He’d said he would remain in touch, and would certainly visit us again, but I knew that to all intents and purposes we would be saying good-bye to each other.

“Of course,” Rose replied. “I was deeply in love with a fellow
undergraduate at Girton, Helen, her name was; she’s dead now. And later I loved a woman called Jane Turner for years—she used to share my London house in the old days, before I began letting rooms to students. You met her once or twice when you were younger—do you remember her?”

I turned to stare at Rose; I fumbled with a memory. An afternoon at Rose’s house in St. John’s Wood; a quiet scholarly woman in tweeds pouring tea and asking me about my academic ambitions. I was about to take the Cambridge entrance examination; she gave me a book she’d written on the Brontës, which I still have somewhere. Love? How blind I’d been.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ellie,” Rose said in a brisk way. “Do you imagine I’ve lived the life of a nun? How very galling. There’s nothing remarkable about it, you know. Sexuality is a matter of taste. Some people like oranges, some people like apples, and some like both. You surely don’t believe that morality is involved in that choice? Your father would, obviously, but I expect better from you. Am I to be denied apples because he likes oranges? Is it wicked to like one fruit, and virtuous to like the other? I don’t think so. Use your mind, Ellie dear, and peel those potatoes, would you?”

I did as she said. As the skin of the potatoes uncurled, I wondered about Rebecca. Which fruit had
she
liked? She mentioned no liaisons with women in her story, but then there were all those gaps and elisions, and she
had
believed that men were the enemy. I’d already thought of a way in which the most glaring of those gaps might be filled in, and, if it could, I might have the answer to my question. Meanwhile, I put it to Rose, but Rose—who can be infuriating—only considered it briefly. It seemed not to interest her.

“Both? None? I haven’t the least idea. Though I did notice she was careful not to tell me. Very difficult to know whom she loved, I thought—apart from Manderley, obviously.”

How obtuse Rose can be! “What nonsense, Rose,” I said, tipping the peeled potatoes into their saucepan. “She loved her mother. She loved her father. I think she loved Maxim, too, though she hated to admit it—”

“What an innocent you are!” Rose said, giving me a sharp glance. She dropped a kiss on my brow. “We must have a little seminar, you
and I, one of these days. Your critical powers are getting rusty.” She pushed me toward the door.

“Now, tell your father that supper will be ready in twenty minutes. He’s wandering about the garden again with Barker.”

I
WENT OUTSIDE INTO THE LIQUID LIGHT OF A BEAUTIFUL
evening. After the heat of the day, the air was just beginning to cool; there was a salt breeze from the sea; little boats, their bright pennants fluttering, were tacking back and forth in the harbor-mouth below, and the calls of the sailors echoed across the water. The sky was rose colored, milky, and mauve at the horizon. My father had taken up his customary station, sitting on our low boundary wall, his loyal shadow Barker at his feet. He was leaning on his cane, a quiet stooped figure, looking out toward the ocean.

He had finally come to the end of Rebecca’s tale, as I could tell immediately. His eyes were moist, and his expression was one of sadness and resignation. Although he’d turned to look at me, it was some while, I think, before he registered my presence. I held out my hand to him; he clasped it tightly, and drew me down beside him. We sat in the still of the evening, looking at the wash of the waves. I said nothing, but I marveled at his tranquility.

Were his hauntings over? I’d been so afraid that Rebecca’s notebook would reawake all the demons of his past, but there was no sign of that. For weeks now, ever since his return from the hospital, he had slept through to morning without waking once, his rest uninterrupted by nightmares.

Yet this last year, those nightmares of his had been terrible. There was one particular dream he had, which recurred several times, and which haunted him afterward: In a snowstorm, he was driving in a black car up that endless twisting approach to Manderley. Although he sat at the wheel, the car propelled itself, and seemed to steer itself, its gears meshing soundlessly. Beside him, on the passenger seat, was a tiny coffin, which it was his task, he knew, to deliver safely.

Somewhere on that drive, that little coffin would begin to move, and a child’s plaintive voice would rise up from it.
Let me out, oh, let me out now
, it would wail.
Let me out at once
, it would demand, becoming peremptory, and my father, recognizing Rebecca’s voice, would
try to stop the inexorable car, and try to unfasten the butterfly screws that held down the lid of the coffin. But the car would continue on through the blizzard, and the bright brass butterfly screws would refuse to budge. The cryings out at this confinement and the pleas for release would mount, becoming more and more frantic, and my father in a paroxysm of fear would finally wake, sometimes calling out my name and sometimes Rebecca’s.

My father has forgotten he ever told me this dream, which I’ve never recounted to anyone; these past weeks, I’d begun to see that the dream itself had been forgotten, too. All the time he’d been reading Rebecca’s tale, I’d been waiting for signs that those old anxieties would resurface, but they never had. My father had dozed, read, drifted off into a dreaming musing state; sometimes I thought he was watching some film of his own, and comparing its images with those on the page; at other times, he’d shake his head, as if in disagreement. For the most part, he responded to the words of a woman he’d loved as if they came from the far distance, from an imagined world, like a novel.

Once he’d said to me, “That’s just how she was, old Mrs. de Winter. The old Termagant, that’s what my nurse, Tilly, used to call her. Though my grandfather always did say her bark was worse than her bite. Tilly came from London, you know. She was good to me when my father died. How it all comes back to me!”

Another time, a part of the story—I’m not sure which—had made him tearful, but he never explained why, and he brightened again soon afterward. “I always
thought
she was the butterfly girl,” he’d said to me. “I remembered her mother Isolda from my boyhood, you see. I’m glad Rebecca kept that Meadow Blue I gave her, Ellie—kept it for a time, anyway.”

No sign of shock or anger; I was mystified. Many of Rebecca’s actions flagrantly contravened my father’s creed; she had no patience with conventions and beliefs that have shaped his whole life, yet he seemed unaware of that, or indifferent. That evening, as we sat looking at the sea, the cooling air fragrant with roses, the little boats tacking back and forth, and the light dimming almost imperceptibly, he finally began to speak, in the musing way he does now. He even asked me questions: What did I think of this passage? How did I interpret that one?

“Poor child,” he said. “That time she came here to tea, Elinor took me to one side, you know, and said we mustn’t mention her mother
under any circumstances. Such an embattled little girl! And she became a brave woman. Taking on the de Winters and Manderley—that damned house wasn’t kindly disposed to anyone, I always felt, but she tamed it. How I hated that place as a child, Ellie! How I loathed Lionel de Winter. I’d heard the rumors about Lionel and Isolda, you know, and there was a time when I feared…”

“Feared what, Daddy?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” He hesitated, and looked away. “I remember his final illness, that’s all. How he looked when he died. I was a witness to that last will of his. Not an incident I’m proud of. Can’t undo it now, of course.” He gave a sigh and patted my hand; below us, the waves whispered.

He continued to speak for a while, winding down the avenues of the past. Sometimes he referred back to events Rebecca described in her tale, but I could see they were already inexact in his mind; they were transforming even as he spoke; they were entering a twilight where they merged inextricably with his own complementary, confirmatory, or contradictory memories.