Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  EVANS: It was murder, wasn’t it?

  COL. J.: (after a pause) I think you’ll find the inquest verdict was “suicide.”

  EVANS: The husband did it. Any fool can see that.

  COL. J.: (calm) Are you familiar with the libel laws in this country, Mr. Evans?

  EVANS: Who was Rebecca’s lover? Did de Winter catch them in flagrante?

  COL. J.: (less calm) I thought you said you worked for the Telegraph?

  EVANS: There’s been a cover-up. You fixed things for your friend de Winter. I won’t be silenced! It’s a bloody disgrace!

  (Exit Evans, pursued by a dog.)

  Well, no doubt I exaggerate (why shouldn’t I indulge in a few fictions? Everyone else has), but it went something like that. And Evans was indeed not silenced. He was indefatigable, if lunatic. Over the years he published no less than sixteen articles on the de Winter case; he wrote a book, The Lady Vanishes: A Solution to the Manderley Mystery, which became a huge best-seller. He became the bane of my life, and before finally dying in the war when his bedsit was hit by a doodlebug (yes, there is a God), he created an industry. It was he, single-handed, who did the most enduring mischief. Sex and death are combustible components: Evans lit their fuse without hesitation. The result? Pyrotechnics. He turned Rebecca into a legend and her death into a myth.

  In my file, I examined one of his earliest efforts. It originally appeared in 1937, a few months after our meeting. In the interim, someone—I suspect Jack Favell—had been bending Evans’s ear. Despite its blatant prejudice, its mind-bending vulgarity, its manipulations, unwarranted slurs, gross inaccuracies, and truly colossal stupidity, it had an enduring effect. This was the article that doomed Rebecca, Maxim, and me to a curious twilit afterlife in which characters that vaguely resemble us eternally perform gestures that vaguely reflect things we actually did or said. It’s a dumbshow; it’s a fairground mirror, and I—the last of us left alive—am still trapped in front of it, gesticulating away. I don’t recognize the people in the mirror, but who cares what I think?

  If I were to tell the truth, what a Herculean task lay ahead of me, I thought, rereading Evans’s regrettable prose. The trouble was (and I had to admit this), some of Evans’s questions were pertinent; he was not without certain primitive skills, and at least his methods made the background a damn sight clearer than mine did. O tempora, O mores, I said to myself. My predicament can’t be understood without quoting Evans, so I will. For better or worse, this was the article that launched the Rebecca industry; it has been much plagiarized since:

  On the night of April 12, 1931, one of the most intriguing unsolved mysteries of recent times took place. The events of that night, and the drama of the months that followed, present the investigator with one of the classic conundrums of crime: Who was the lovely Rebecca de Winter, celebrated beauty and hostess, chatelaine of the legendary West Country mansion, Manderley? What were the events that led up to her tragic disappearance that fine April evening, and who was responsible for her death?

  At the time of her mysterious disappearance, Rebecca de Winter had been married for some five years. Her husband, Maximilian (known as Maxim), came from an ancient West Country family. He could trace his ancestors back to the eleventh century. Manderley, his legendary family home, overlooking a wild and remote stretch of coastline, had been given a new lease of life, thanks to the taste and energy of his young wife: There were constant parties, entertainments, and fancy-dress balls. Invitations there were much sought after, and the eclectic guest list included many famous—and some infamous—names.

  Mrs. de Winter, famous for her beauty, wit, charm, and elegance, featured regularly in society periodicals. She sailed (winning many cups at local regattas); her knowledge of gardening was extensive, and the Manderley gardens, redesigned and replanted during her years there, became renowned. She was much loved locally, especially by the de Winter tenants, but some of the old-guard families in this conservative part of the world had reservations. They found her direct manner of speech regrettable, and disliked her often unconventional views. Some expressed surprise that Maxim de Winter (ten years her senior and a traditionalist, it’s claimed) had married her. They regarded her as an outsider—and it is true that her background was mysterious. Who were her parents? Where did she grow up? Virtually nothing is known.

  Despite the differences between husband and wife in background, interests, and age, the de Winters’ marriage appeared successful, although, after her disappearance, tongues began to wag. The seeds of tragedy, it was hinted, had been sown long ago. Rumor proliferated, but it was to be over a year before, in the wake of a series of shocking and terrible events, the truth began to emerge. Scandal ensued. Yet it is evident that further details remain to be discovered about the events of April 12, 1931, and the tangle of intrigue that led up to them: Manderley protects the secrets of the de Winter family…even now.

  Let us examine the events of April 12 and the questions surrounding them. That night, Mrs. de Winter returned from a brief visit to London, the purpose of which has never been adequately explained. Had she gone there to see a lover, as some claim? Why, when she had a flat in London where she frequently stayed overnight, did she make such an arduous journey—six hours there and six hours back by road—on the same day? Why, on her arrival home, in a state of turmoil and distress, as was noted by several of the maids, did she immediately set off for the beach below the house, leaving on foot at approximately ten P.M.? Was she meeting someone at the boathouse cottage she kept there (there were rumors it was used for clandestine assignations), or did she simply intend, as her husband claimed at the subsequent inquest, to go sailing—at night and alone?

  Whatever the answers to these questions, one fact is incontrovertible: Beautiful Rebecca de Winter, then age thirty, never returned from that final fatal sail, and it was to be fifteen months before her sailboat—a converted Breton fishing vessel with the prophetic name Je Reviens—was recovered. When it was brought up from the bay below Manderley, where it had lain hidden for over a year, two terrible discoveries were made. The boat had been deliberately scuttled…and trapped in its cabin was the body of a woman. It was hideously disfigured and heavily decomposed. The precise cause of death was never to be determined, and, in the absence of firm evidence to the contrary, drowning was assumed. Astonishingly, when brought ashore, the body was at once identifiable. Everyone present on that macabre occasion knew immediately who this was: On her wedding finger, the dead woman was still wearing the two rings that, during her lifetime, had never left her hand….

  Rebecca de Winter had been found at last. What followed was more tragedy—and a travesty of justice to boot. An inquest was hastily convened, and the jury—composed in the main of tenants of the de Winter estates only too willing to tug their forelocks to the deceased woman’s husband—brought in a verdict of suicide. Maximilian de Winter, then forty-one, was let off lightly in the witness box by the elderly coroner. The then magistrate for the district, Colonel A. L. Julyan, a lifelong friend of Rebecca’s husband, alleged by locals to be a “snob who liked to keep in with the bigwigs,” declined to pursue inquiries any further. As he insisted then, and still insists, the matter was resolved.

  Yet, consider the following seven facts, any one of which should surely have prompted further investigation, given the unusual nature of this “suicide”:

  Not long after his wife’s disappearance, Mr. de Winter had identified the body of a dead woman washed ashore miles up-coast as that of Rebecca: He made this identification, which later proved to be “mistaken,” alone.

  Less than a year after his first wife’s death, Mr. de Winter married again, his new wife, whom he met on a jaunt to Monte Carlo, being half his age.

  His movements on the night of his late wife’s death could not be accounted for in full. He dined with his estate manager, Mr. Frank Crawley, who lived nearby, but he could be said to lack an alibi for the key hours—from ten P.M. on.

  There had been persist
ent rumors, in neighboring Kerrith and beyond, that his marriage to Rebecca, which was childless, had been a stormy one.

  The de Winters did not share a bed at Manderley, and Mrs. de Winter frequently spent the night either at her flat in London or at her boathouse cottage, a situation her husband appeared to condone.

  On April 12, Mrs. de Winter’s devoted housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, who also acted as her personal maid, was enjoying a rare evening off duty. Who in that household knew that Mrs. Danvers—the person who first raised the alarm the next morning—would be absent from Manderley then? Does this absence explain why it was that particular night that Mrs. de Winter disappeared?

  On the afternoon prior to her disappearance, Mrs. de Winter saw a consultant gynecologist, Dr. Baker, at his Bloomsbury consulting rooms. It was her second appointment. What happened at the first? (Dr. Baker, who diagnosed an inoperable cancer, has since “moved abroad.”)

  These questions, and numerous others, remain unanswered to this day. And Rebecca de Winter did not rest in peace—or so locals claim. After the inquest, she was buried in the de Winter crypt, next to her husband’s ancestors. Within hours of that hasty and secretive interment, Manderley was burned to the ground…. Accident? Or were more sinister forces at work? Had Rebecca, a victim of injustice, apparently unmourned by her husband, returned from the dead to take her revenge? Had she risen from the grave, as she’d risen from the sea? Remember that boat’s name…. Je Reviens.

  In pursuit of answers to these questions, and others, I set off last month to Kerrith, the nearest small town to Manderley. In the public houses and humble cottages of that picturesque and remote place were many who had loved and respected Rebecca de Winter. Outraged by these events, they were all too ready to talk to me, I found.

  Within a day, armed with new and sensational evidence, I was in no doubt that there had been a concerted conspiracy to cover up the truth about Rebecca de Winter’s death. Standing at last on the storm-swept headland by the ruins of Manderley, I looked out over the dark sea where she had met her end. And I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Mrs. de Winter had not died at her own hand. I knew the name of her murderer, and the method he’d used. Only one question remained: Why had Rebecca been killed? Might the answer to that question lie in her mysterious past? Turning my back on the haunted ruins of Manderley, I embarked on a quest for the truth about her origins….

  He never completed it, I’m glad to say. That doodlebug got him first. By then the damage was done, of course.

  I sank my head in my hands. In the fairground mirror in front of which I’m eternally trapped, two ghosts and one clown were gesturing away. That unreliable heart of mine was playing up again. I was feeling distinctly unwell.

  THREE

  I CLOSED THE FILE OF PRESS CUTTINGS, AND STARED through the window at my mournful monkey puzzle tree. Barker was twitching his legs as he dreamed, and my own dream of the night before had returned. Up it came, like a nasty gas from the marsh of my unconscious. Once again, I saw myself trapped at the wheel of that sinister black car, which seemed to steer and propel itself without my aid. Once again, I was traveling up that endless drive to Manderley; I was driving through a snowstorm; when I applied the brakes, they failed to respond; beside me, incongruous on the passenger seat, that tiny coffin was beginning to move.

  I rose from my chair, walked around my room a couple of times, and inspected my books (the room is barricaded with books). I forced that dream out of my mind. I had sat down at my desk feeling energetic and purposeful; now, as had happened so often before, I felt old, seedy, and inadequate, blinded by a blizzard of misinformation that went back twenty years and more.

  Eric Evans might claim that he had discovered “new and sensational evidence,” but what did it amount to? Precious little. Like the newshounds who’d come after him, he’d raided the pungent rubbish heap of Kerrith gossip; former Manderley staff and suchlike had tossed him a few smelly old bones. But he and his successors had never unearthed any proof as to what happened to Rebecca on the last night of her life. They had discovered virtually nothing about her pre-Manderley past. Even Terence Gray, an historian, not a journalist, but a sharp operator all the same, has got precisely nowhere with such inquiries—at least, not as far as I knew. That didn’t surprise me. I was Rebecca’s friend. I knew, better than anyone, how well Rebecca had covered her tracks, how secretive she’d been.

  Would I be embarking on this task of mine, I asked myself, returning to my desk, were it not for the influence of Terence Gray, that strange young man, recently arrived in Kerrith—a young man who, for reasons unexplained, has been taking such a persistent interest in the circumstances of Rebecca de Winter’s mysterious life, and death?

  Possibly not. My dreams had certainly taken a turn for the worse since he arrived and launched his interrogations. I drew the telephone toward me: Time to speak to the man and propose our afternoon visit to Manderley—a visit long postponed, which I was beginning to regard as a test. How would Gray respond when he finally saw a house that seems to obsess him? (And why does it obsess him, for that matter?)

  I picked up the receiver, then replaced it. It was still only ten o’clock (I rise early; Ellie and I breakfast early); the invitation could wait. Mr. Gray is formidable. He’s young and energetic, and aspects of the man worry me (not least his motivation, which remains opaque). I was beginning to admit that Gray could be useful to me, but before I spoke to him I needed to think. I picked up the parcel that had arrived that morning, weighed it in my hand, decided it could wait until later, and turned my attention to the second of my appointed tasks—my “witness” list.

  Unlike the newshounds and Mr. Gray, I told myself, I did not really need the testimony of others if I were to write the truth about Rebecca. I was her friend (possibly her closest friend, or so I flattered myself); I’d known Maxim for most of my life. I’d been familiar with Manderley from my early childhood, and the de Winter family had very few secrets from me. I am, as Mr. Gray keeps telling me, a prime source—the prime source, since Maxim’s death. Even so, as my conversations with Gray had shown me, there were one or two gaps in my knowledge—nothing of any great significance, but irritating nonetheless. I’ve always had a taste for crime fiction—Sherlock, Her-cule, and the rest; a bit of digging around, a bit of sleuthing might not come amiss: so—my witnesses. Who might know something that I did not?

  Concentrate, concentrate, I said to myself. The injunction was necessary. I am never dilatory, thanks to my self-discipline and my military training, as I said, but I have noticed recently a certain tendency to be distracted. I am seventy-two, which may be a contributing factor. I’ve noticed the tendency worsens when, as then, I feel forlorn/irritable/uncertain/suspicious/upset—take your pick. Recovering instantly, and at lightning speed, I wrote the following list:

  Rebecca

  Maxim de Winter

  Beatrice (his sister)

  The elder Mrs. de Winter (his grandmother, who brought him up)

  Mrs. Danvers (housekeeper at Manderley in Rebecca’s time)

  Jack Favell (Rebecca’s ne’er-do-well cousin; her sole known relative)

  Former staff (Manderley maids, footmen, etc.; many still living hereabouts)

  Frith (former butler at Manderley; ancient retainer from the year dot)

  Not a long list. The fact that the first four candidates on it were all dead might have discouraged some people, but not me. I have letters from them, and I have my memories. In such ways, the dead can speak.

  Even so, just to write their names distressed me. I knew Beatrice, who died at the end of the last war, from her childhood. Maxim, who was some ten years younger than I was, I’d known from the day of his birth. That terror of a grandmother of his I could remember only too vividly from my boyhood. She had still been alive during his marriage to Rebecca, whom she’d adored; if anyone had been privy to Rebecca’s many secrets, it was she, I suspected—indeed, I’d often thought she knew more about Maxim’s wife than Max
im did. I could be wrong, of course.

  There were ghosts in the corners of the room. Writing their names had conjured them up. Barker lifted his great head; his hackles rose and fell. He gave me a soulful and comforting look. We both thought of my former friend Maxim, dead these five years, killed in a car accident he certainly willed, which occurred at the Four Turnings entrance to the Manderley gates. Only months after his long years of exile abroad with that second wife of his had finally ended; only a very short time after he and she had returned to England to live.

  I know something about being pursued by the Furies, and I’ve never doubted they pursued Maxim with their customary efficiency once he left Manderley, though he ceased communicating with me then, and never answered my letters, so I have no way of confirming this. I was not invited to his funeral; that slight hurt me at the time, and still does. I’ve been loyal to my old friend Maxim—too loyal, perhaps.

  The second wife—“the sad little phantom,” as my friends the Briggs sisters refer to her—scattered his ashes in the bay below Manderley, I heard. Did she find the idea of his lying in the de Winter crypt alongside Rebecca unbearable? It wouldn’t surprise me. Possessive women remain possessive after death. She has now spirited herself off to Canada, or so I’m told. I considered, then rejected, the idea of adding her name to my witness list.