Rebecca's Tale (62 page)

When she’d first come to Manderley, I knew, she’d been very young, a twenty-one-year-old with the demeanor of a schoolgirl, according to the Kerrith gossips. Nearly two decades after her brief sojourn here, they still spoke of her gauche manners, of her relentless questions about Rebecca, of the fact that she’d been half her husband’s age, young enough to be his daughter.

This woman was no longer the slip of a girl described by the tittle-tattlers of Kerrith. With age had come a thickening of the waistline made more noticeable by her matronly dress. Her pale face was lined, but she had fine eyes, sweet eyes. Lying on the table next to her was a pair of summer gloves, and under them, a familiar black shape: I knew that it had to be the last of Rebecca’s notebooks.

“Let me introduce you, my dear,” my father said. I could hear a note of warning in his voice. “Mrs. de Winter, this is my daughter Ellie. Ellie, you’ve heard me speak of Maxim’s wife: This is Mrs. de Winter.”

A
S SOON AS WE SHOOK HANDS
, I
SENSED THAT
M
AXIM’S
widow was anxious to escape. Whatever the nature of the conversa
tion she’d been having with my father, she was clearly reluctant to continue it in my presence. I could see she was looking for an excuse to extricate herself, but she seemed to lack this elementary social skill; instead, in a shy flustered way, she snatched at the first remark that came into her head. It was not a fortunate one.

“Ellie. How do you do?” she said in a bright tone. “Of course. Of course. We never met—but I remember your father spoke of you. You play golf, don’t you? That was it, golf. You loved the game. You were awfully good at it.”

“That was my elder sister, Mrs. de Winter,” I replied, with a glance at my father. Lily had never been any good at golf, and had taken it up out of boredom, in the hope of meeting men. I couldn’t think why Mrs. de Winter would suppose Lily had been expert. She seemed unaware that Lily was dead. She frowned, shook her head as if puzzled, then brightened again.

“Oh, yes—that’s right, I remember now. There were two daughters. And a son. I remember your talking about him, Colonel Julyan. He wrote poetry, didn’t he? I think you were rather concerned about that.”

“He wrote poetry for a while when he was a boy,” I said quickly. Seeing the expression on my father’s face, I knew I had to stop her before her remarks caused further damage. “He was killed in the war, Mrs. de Winter.”

There was a silence. Mrs. de Winter gave me a most peculiar look, as if she doubted the truth of what I’d just told her. Then she blushed. “I’m so sorry. If I’d known I would never have said that—please forgive me.” She turned back to my father with a pleading childlike expression. “I forget sometimes how long I’ve been away, Colonel Julyan. I behave as if nothing’s changed—when, of course, everything’s changed. And I’d always imagined your daughter on the golf course, and your son, writing his poems—I could see it so clearly!”

“Perfectly understandable,” said my father in a tone that I knew meant the very opposite. He bent forward to fondle Barker, thus concealing his expression. “I don’t recall mentioning my children to you,” he added, in a gruff tone.

“Oh, but you did!” Her color deepened. “It was the day you came to Manderley for lunch. We talked about the Far East, and your chil
dren.” She glanced at me. “It’s a dreadful habit of mine. I seize on a little fact someone tells me, and I go off into a dream, and before I know it, I’ve made up an entire life story. I even do it with complete strangers, sometimes. People in cafés, other guests at an hotel—I imagine their histories, and they’re probably all wrong, just silly fictions, but they feel so right at the time. Maxim used to tease me about it—”

She came to an awkward abrupt halt, her hands twisting nervously in her lap. “What a dear sweet dog,” she went on, her tone so relentlessly bright I almost pitied her. “I miss having dogs. They’re such loyal companions, aren’t they? They never have moods, they never reproach you and they’re always glad to see you…. Goodness, is that the time? I really must leave. I’m returning to London tomorrow, then flying back to Canada, so I have to pack—and I’m afraid I’m a bit disorganized about packing. I mislay things. It used to infuriate Maxim….”

She gave me a flustered sidelong glance, fumbled for her gloves and handbag, and rose to her feet. My father also rose; I could see his face was gray with strain and exhaustion. As Mrs. de Winter, in a flurry of nervousness, dropped her glove and bent to retrieve it, my father’s eyes met mine, and a silent message passed between us. “Mrs. de Winter came over here by bus,” he said in a firm way. “She’s staying at an hotel just along the coast—The Rose, Ellie, you know it. Ellie will be delighted to run you back, Mrs. de Winter.”

As I moved toward the door Mrs. de Winter began on some polite protest, but I ignored that; I knew she’d have to consent to being driven by me, and to being alone with me—my father may have been ill, but, when necessary, his will remained formidable.

O
NCE WE WERE IN THE CAR, WITH THE WINDOWS DOWN
, and the warm sweet evening air flooding in, we drove for some way in silence. I waited until we had left Kerrith behind before speaking. I was very aware that our route would take us past the Four Turnings entrance to Manderley.

“Mrs. de Winter,” I said finally, as we crested the hill behind Kerrith, “I’ve read the notebooks of Rebecca that you sent to my father. I knew there must be a third. Have you left it with him?”

“Yes. Yes, I have. Oh, I can imagine what you must think of me,” she replied, speaking with sudden rapidity. “Sending them anonymously like that—it seems so underhand, rather hateful, I realize that now. I did think of enclosing a letter, and then I couldn’t work out what to say. I wasn’t even sure if your father would remember me. People don’t. I’m afraid I always was a rather anonymous person—not like Rebecca!”

She gave me a little sidelong glance, as if she expected me to demur; then frowned. “I didn’t want to keep the notebooks myself, you see, and Rebecca refers to your father as her only real friend, so I thought he would be pleased to receive them. Then I heard he’d had a stroke recently—someone was discussing his health in one of the Kerrith shops the other day—and I felt dreadfully guilty. I decided I must make amends. I don’t expect I have. All those stupid remarks about your brother. I’ve made things worse, probably.”

I decided to accept this explanation, though I wasn’t at all sure I believed it. “I’m sure he understood—you weren’t to know,” I said, and accelerated; we were approaching the gates of Manderley. The “accident” in which Maxim had been killed occurred on this stretch of the road. I glanced at Mrs. de Winter; she was looking at the blue shadows of the woods, her face pale and set.

“Are you in a great hurry, Miss Julyan?” she asked suddenly. “Would you mind if I walked in the woods for a short while? I shan’t come back here again, you see. I dream about this place so often. That’s how I’ve spent half my life, I think sometimes. Dreaming and daydreaming.”

I stopped the car. I could hear the tears in her voice before I saw them in her eyes. Mrs. de Winter climbed out. She stood by the gates, her face averted, the breeze ruffling her straight gray hair. She was twisting her wedding ring—the only jewelry she was wearing—round and round on her finger.

I waited for a few minutes; she had produced a key but seemed unwilling to open the gates. I went to help her. I was shocked by the desolation in her face as I reached her. She looked like a bewildered child—and the signs of age on her face made the childlike nature of her grief all the more poignant.

“I must tell you about those notebooks,” she said, leaning against the gates, and looking through at the trees. “I meant to tell your
father, but then we began talking of other things. Perhaps you would explain to him? I found them after Maxim died—that is, I found the metal deed box they were in. It was in a locked drawer in Maxim’s desk at the house we’d bought in England. Such a lovely house—as far from the sea as it’s possible to be in this country, and quite large—I hoped for children, you see….” She checked herself. “Did you know we moved back to England after the war, Miss Julyan?”

“Yes, I did, Mrs. de Winter.”

“I took that deed box with me to Canada,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, her eyes fixed on the drive ahead of us. “I still hadn’t opened it—it was locked, and the key was lost. But I wanted to keep everything of Maxim’s, so I kept that, too, thinking the key would turn up eventually. Then one day, last year, I opened it. I had to break the lock with a screwdriver, and I cut my hand. I was missing Maxim so much—it comes in waves, you know, grief. Some days, I manage quite well, and other days…I wake up and I feel so dreadfully bereft.

“I had no idea what I was going to find,” she continued. “I was sure it would be something that would remind me of my husband. Old photographs, records of his boyhood, perhaps. It never crossed my mind that I’d find anything connected with Rebecca. Maxim’s first marriage was deeply unhappy, you see—it came very close to destroying him. So the last thing I expected to find was any belongings of hers. It was a dreadful shock to me.”

She pushed back the gate I’d unlocked for her, and walked through; I hesitated, then followed her. Ahead of us, the trees met in an arch creating a tunnel of shadow; I thought of my father’s dream, of that tiny coffin. Mrs. de Winter walked in silence along the drive, looking around her with a dazed expression. Coming to a fallen tree trunk, she sat down, and I went to sit beside her. We had reached the bend in the drive where my father always likes to pause, where the sea is audible in the distance. Mrs. de Winter appeared not to hear it. After a while, her pale tired face still averted, she began speaking again.

“There were five things in the box,” she went on. “The three notebooks, a tiny diamond ring—far too small for any of my fingers—and a blue butterfly brooch. I didn’t understand the significance of the ring and the brooch, not until I’d read the second notebook. I’m
afraid I read that notebook again and again. I could recite it by heart. I always wanted to know what Rebecca was really like, you see. Well, I know now.”

“Mrs. de Winter, you don’t need to talk about this—not unless you want to. I can see this is painful for you.”

“Oh, it
was
painful at first,” she said in an earnest way. “I was desperately upset to begin with. I couldn’t understand why Maxim would have kept her things. He hated to be reminded of Rebecca. So, why would he have kept them? I was bewildered and miserable. I was sleeping badly; I began to have hateful dreams about Rebecca, just as I did when I first came to Manderley. That’s when I decided to come back. I had to confront my past. That’s what Rebecca would have done, I decided. And if she could, I could. I didn’t want to be cowardly.”

In a disingenuous way, still keeping her gaze fixed on the trees, she then told me about her visit to England. At first, she said, she’d been intent on finding out more about Rebecca—for all she knew then the entire story Rebecca told could have been one long fiction. So she had visited libraries, found the McKendrick autobiography, and checked what details she could. But she began to realize: This was not curing her unhappiness, it was deepening it.

She resolved to rid herself of the belongings of Rebecca’s that she’d been carrying around for weeks; she felt she couldn’t destroy them, so she decided to send them to appropriate recipients. The notebooks went to my father. The ring went to Jack Favell—who’d been easy to trace—because it was his uncle who’d brought it back from South Africa. The brooch went to Mrs. Danvers, who would remember Rebecca’s mother—but it had taken a long time to find her. She had seen her one day, she said, completely by accident, when she happened to be standing outside Rebecca’s flat in Tite Street, and Mrs. Danvers came out of the house. Though she was greatly aged, she had recognized her. “I found the address in one of Maxim’s old diaries. I would have known Mrs. Danvers anywhere,” she said. “I could never forget her. She made my life at Manderley a misery. I’m sure I’d have managed so much better if she hadn’t been there.”

I thought this explanation concealed as much as it revealed and I wondered just how often Mrs. de Winter had revisited Tite Street, to stand outside Rebecca’s London apartment. I noted that the more
obviously obsessional details of this search went unmentioned. Nothing was said of azalea wreaths…. Just as I thought that, as if she could read my mind, Mrs. de Winter raised that very subject. She had left a garland in remembrance of Rebecca at her boathouse cottage, she said, and later she’d left shells at the grave of the little girl Rebecca had seen. The reasons she gave for doing so surprised me.

“I think they were alike in some ways, you see,” she said in a hesitant way, with a little glance at me. “Rebecca and Lucy Carminowe. Neither of them could
grow
, neither of them ever grew up. I pitied that child, and it was when I saw the similarities between them that I first began to sympathize with Rebecca. It’s very sad, to be as filled with certainty as she is, and to be so
deluded
—don’t you agree, Miss Julyan?”

“Deluded, Mrs. de Winter?”

“Oh, yes.” Her face brightened. “Rebecca sets such store by her willpower, she never stops boasting about it. But she couldn’t will Maxim to love her, could she? It was me Maxim loved, not Rebecca. She claims she made herself so memorable, but once Maxim and I left this place, he very rarely thought of her. I realized finally:
That’s
why Maxim kept those belongings of hers—he felt sorry for her in the end, just as I do. Her father’s ring, and her mother’s brooch: Rebecca was childish, that’s what I’ve decided. She may like to think she made herself tall, but she never really grew up, not emotionally. She even writes in a childish way, don’t you think?” She looked at me eagerly.

“I wouldn’t say ‘childish,’” I replied. “She writes in an odd way, certainly.”

“Oh, I think it’s
very
childish. It’s just like some silly fairy tale, with curses and ogres. I was surprised by that. I’d expected her to be sophisticated.”