Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  There is no law against libeling the dead; there was never a trial, so no advocate ever spoke for Rebecca. She’s been condemned to silence for twenty years. She can’t defend herself or correct the lies or explain; she has never been able to tell her story, or say No, it wasn’t like that. That’s the terrible thing about being dead, as I realize now I’m old. People can jump up and down on your grave, and you can’t do a thing about it. You’re gagged. You can’t answer back…. Not unless someone comes to your assistance; not unless some good, wise, indefatigable person ferrets around and comes up with the truth on your behalf.

  Could I perform that service for Rebecca? Last night, by moonlight, I’d believed I could. I’d thought I could make amends for my past failures, but now I felt very unsure. A seventy-two-year-old bungler with a dicky heart? A moral fumbler who couldn’t even write a truthful account of Rebecca’s death, let alone her life? I wasn’t exactly Sir Lancelot, was I? Much help to her I’d be, I thought.

  BY THIS TIME—I MAY AS WELL ADMIT IT—I WAS IN A BAD way. Introspection is invariably painful, and examining my crimes and misdemeanors in hideous close-up was not how I’d meant to start the day. My eyes were watering, my heart was thumping and bumping in the way it does now—no doubt my blood pressure was soaring as well. Barker gave a low whine, rose, and rubbed his gray muzzle against my leg. Trying to calm myself, and failing, I reexamined my foolish “witness” list, then tore it up. So much for my potential informants. The dead, the damnable, and the downright unreliable. If I was to find Rebecca, it would not be by this route.

  My vision had blurred. Forgetting my call to Terence Gray, forgetting the parcel whose contents would later prove to be so extraordinary, I rose unsteadily to my feet. I blundered my way past my desk to the French windows. Outside, it was a cloudless April day on this, the anniversary of Rebecca’s death.

  I opened the glass doors, fumbled my way down the steps into the garden, and set off down the path. Barker, my loyal shadow, immediately followed me. I made my way between the dog-eared palm tree and the lugubrious monkey puzzle, past my viciously pruned roses, to the crazy-paving terrace at the far end. From there, the ground drops away sharply to that inhospitable cove already mentioned, some eighty feet below; I have shored up this boundary of mine with a low, now-crumbling wall, and on this wall I sat down. I looked down at the sea, azure at its edges, inky farther out by the Manderley headland, then looked back at The Pines, a folly of a house, my childhood home.

  Dry your tears, Arthur, I heard my grandfather say, in his gentle voice—and it didn’t surprise me greatly to hear that voice, though he’s been dead for fifty years. The dead often talk to me now; it’s one of age’s side effects. Before I was aware of what was happening, I’d surrendered to his tone and I was allowing my past back, letting its currents take me where they wanted—and they took me, as they often do, to the Manderley I knew as a boy.

  There, some of the dead witnesses on my list were waiting to speak to me: not Rebecca herself, of course, not yet; the Manderley I was watching existed long before she arrived on the scene. But even so, I knew I’d discover something, if I watched these de Winters closely enough. I’ve always believed that you cannot understand Rebecca and what she became, unless you understand the family she married into; I’ve always felt that if I were searching for clues to Rebecca, Manderley was the first place to look.

  FOUR

  I FIRST CAME TO THE PINES WHEN I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD, accompanied by my mother and my new nurse, Tilly. It was the late 1880s (that’s how ancient I am). We were to stay with my grandfather, a widower, in his house by the sea in what was then, and still is to an extent, a remote part of England—a country about which I had many fantastical notions, but in which I had never set foot. I wasn’t clear at the time why we had left India, or why my father had remained there, except that he could not obtain leave from his regiment for another few months, and meanwhile my mother needed respite from the Indian climate. As I now know, but didn’t then (such matters were not mentioned, especially in front of a child), she was expecting her second baby, my sister Rose.

  At first I missed India; I missed my pet mongoose, and my ayah, whose lilting bedtime songs drift back to me out of the past, even now. The Pines seemed strange after the bungalows in which we had previously lived. I was cold all the time; I’d shiver when I woke to the raucous cry of gulls, and looked out of my bedroom window to the Manderley headland opposite.

  I’d soon feel I belonged here, my grandfather said, in his comforting way, for my own father had grown up here and there had been Julyans for generations in this part of the world. There were many ancient families in this region, he explained; because it was remote, tucked away down at the foot of England, families and their houses endured; there were the Grenvilles, for instance, and the Raleghs, but the oldest of all was the de Winter family, who could boast direct descent from father to son for eight hundred years. “Can’t all families do that, Grandpapa?” I asked. No, he said. For that you needed sons; without sons, families died out.

  Seeing I didn’t understand, he gave me my first lesson in genealogy. We came from a junior branch of the Julyan family, he explained, but I should be proud of my ancestors, whose blood ran in my veins. He fetched out the family tree he had drawn up, and showed me a bewildering forest of connections: the marriage to a Grenville heiress in 1642; an alliance to a de Winter sister in 1820; the Julyan men who had served their church, their country, or the laws of their country—and there, right at the end of all those forking branches of landowners, judges, soldiers, and clergymen, was a tiny twig—and that, he said, was me.

  My grandfather, Henry Lucas Julyan, was rector of the parishes of Kerrith and Manderley; he became my friend from the day I arrived, and he was one of the very few truly good men I’ve ever known, kindhearted, learned, and astute. Before taking up Holy Orders, he had been a distinguished classical scholar at Cambridge, where he first met Darwin, who became his friend. He lived a simple life, dining on plain food, taking long walks, reading, writing, and abhorring any form of show or ostentation. He was an unworldly man—and it may be due in part to his influence that I am unworldly, antique, and unrealistic, too.

  He was an amateur botanist of some distinction, and it was he who first introduced me to the pleasures of collecting and cataloging. Before my first summer at The Pines was out, I was already learning about fossils and wildflowers; I began my study of butterflies and moths, and my grandfather taught me how to kill them painlessly and quickly with chloroform. Red Admirals, Swallowtails, Painted Ladies…I still have our collection; it is in my study, packed away in specimen drawers. I find I can’t bear to look at it now.

  My grandfather took me on expeditions along the coast; we explored the beaches, the dark little creeks, the moors inland, and the woods, which were often the best butterfly hunting ground, especially the woods surrounding Manderley. The de Winters had lived at Manderley since the time of the Conquest, my grandfather explained, though the house itself had been altered and rebuilt many times since then; their unusual name was a corruption from Norman-French, and was possibly derived from the word “ventre,” meaning stomach, or womb. Lionel de Winter, the present head of the family, was my own father’s exact contemporary. They had been friends and schoolfellows, although the friendship, he added vaguely, had lapsed in recent years—probably because my father had been away in India so long.

  I was taken to Manderley that first summer in England. There, I met Lionel de Winter, and his wife Virginia; she was one of three famously beautiful Grenville sisters, known as “The Three Graces,” my grandfather explained. The eldest, Evangeline, had recently married a shipping magnate, Sir Joshua Briggs; the youngest, Isolda, was still unmarried—she was very pretty and charming and I would meet her some time. The middle sister, Virginia, now married to Lionel, was my grandfather’s favorite. I would like her, he told me; her health was not strong, but she was sweet natured and kind.

  Virginia—always referred
to by my mother as “poor Virginia”—was a gentle, soft-spoken semi-invalid; she seemed to spend even more time lying down than my mother did, and no one explained why. Poor Virginia always seemed to me like a guest at Manderley; each time I went there, I half expected to hear that she’d packed her bags and gone away. She seemed to have nothing to do with the running of her home; all the decisions were taken by her mother-in-law, Mrs. de Winter the elder, who had been born a Ralegh, and was a terrifying personage. The first time I was introduced to her, she looked at my hair keenly and announced it was too long—I looked like a girl. I must have passed muster, or been judged useful at any rate, for she summoned me to Manderley again. I was to play with Lionel and Virginia’s only child, their daughter Beatrice, a plump, bossy little girl whose chief interest in life was horses; I grew to like Beatrice well enough, but she and I had nothing in common at all.

  As time went on, I was summoned more frequently, but I was never sure how much I liked going to Manderley. I liked those woodland expeditions with my grandfather, but I found the house oppressive and strange. It was very large, very dark, and very old, crouching along its high-ground position, hidden away by its encircling trees; inside, the huge dark-paneled rooms seemed perilous. They were crowded with furniture, so much of it you could scarcely move; I lived in mortal terror of backing away into some little table and sending its many fiddly ornaments crashing to the ground. Everywhere you looked there were dangers of this kind: staring portraits that spied on your every mistake; tapestries that might conceal some hidden watcher; and—according to Beatrice—at least one ghost, a beautiful ancestress of hers, who crept up behind you in corridors, and who, if you so much as glimpsed her, struck you instantly blind.

  I thought it very ugly, and I thought it very airless, in fact the question of the air at Manderley obsessed me. My years in India had made me a connoisseur of air. My mother and the other officers’ wives never ceased discussing it; there was bad air, and good air, as I knew, and every summer we would retreat north to the hill-stations to escape the “bad air” that brought with it all kinds of ailments and hidden disease.

  So, when my nurse, Tilly, informed me, with a wink, that the de Winters needed an heir, I thought I understood her. The need for air at Manderley was all too obvious to me: Despite the size of the windows, despite the proximity of the sea, I’d never been in a house that felt so stifling. No wonder poor Virginia was an invalid: The air in the house, clammy, thick, reverberant, as if weighted down with centuries of secrets, was enough to make anyone ill. It was a bad, disease-ridden poxy sort of atmosphere; whenever I was there I’d try to persuade Beatrice to go down to the sea, down to the bay where, all those years later, Rebecca died.

  Indeed, the house needed an “air,” as Tilly said—and a good air, a special air, too, beautiful as the zephyrs my grandfather had shown me pictures of in his books. I used to imagine a zephyr like that whenever I was trapped and hemmed in in that awful drawing room, being teased by the boisterous bullying Lionel, who would ruffle my hair, or—worse—being interrogated by that mother of his, the “Termagant” as Tilly had nicknamed her.

  Lionel de Winter, fortunately, was often away. He was given to moods, and sulks, and, when I did encounter him, would often complain of how boring his life was here. “Backward, stick-in-the-mud sort of place,” he’d say. “Don’t you find that? Nothing to do; rains all the time. I’m off to London next week—lots of plays, parties, good food and wine. Get away from the old girl’s apron strings, if you follow my meaning…. I expect you know how that feels, eh, boy?”

  And here he might wink, or slap me on the shoulder, man-to-man, and I would say, “Yes, sir,” but I didn’t follow his meaning at all. Who was the “old girl”? His mother, or poor Virginia? Neither of them wore aprons. I thought Lionel, with his flushed face, his sulks, and silk waistcoats, was an idiot and a popinjay. I didn’t like the tone he used when addressing his wife—it was very domineering and rude; my own father would never have dreamed of speaking to my mother in that way. And I was first hurt, then angered, that he never once asked after my father, his former friend. He was obviously not in the least interested in his welfare—but then he showed no interest in anyone’s welfare except his own.

  The Termagant was another matter. She was a great deal more intelligent than her son—I think I realized that by instinct, and very quickly, as children do. She ruled the roost, and had no intention of taking herself off to the dower house, Tilly maintained. She felt for poor Mrs. Lionel, she really did, Tilly said; stuck with a husband and a mother-in-law like that—she wouldn’t be in her shoes, not for all the tea in China, Tilly declared.

  The Termagant was very tall, and her voice was very loud. Everyone, including her son, was terrified of her. She seemed to me to know only two forms of conversation: either she was barking orders or firing questions at you: How old are you? Why doesn’t that mother of yours have your hair cut? Do you ride? You read? A boy your age? Lionel never bothered with books—what’s the matter with you? You should run around more. Tell me about India—do you miss India? Why? When’s that father of yours coming back? Is he ill? Everyone in India gets ill sooner or later. He isn’t? Then he’s a lucky man….

  And then would follow a diatribe, for she seemed to hate the very idea of India—for no very good reason, I think, beyond the fact that it was outside her circle of influence. She was fiercely dismissive of what she called, with a wave of the hand, “abroad.” One memorable day, when Virginia’s sisters came to tea in the Manderley gardens, and Evangeline spoke of her recent honeymoon in France, and pretty, charming Isolda sighed and said wistfully that she would love to travel, Lionel’s mother called them fools. “What fools you are,” she said, gesturing across the lawns toward the sea: “You’ll see nothing lovelier than this, however far you travel. Much better to stay here.”

  Evangeline gave her a cool look and raised her eyebrows; poor Virginia sighed; pretty Isolda made a face the instant her back was turned. When the elder Mrs. de Winter was called back to the house shortly afterward, the three sisters laughed.

  “What an old beast she is—how can you put up with her, Virginia?” Isolda said, tossing back her curls.

  “You should make a stand, darling—she’s a monster,” said Evangeline crossly.

  “Hush,” said poor Virginia, glancing at me and Beatrice: “Pas devant les enfants. Little pitchers have big ears….”

  I agreed with Isolda: Mrs. de Winter was an old beast—and that first summer, how she harped on the subject of India! I think she knew I resented it and that drove her on: dirt, disease, dishonesty (she was especially fierce on disease, looking at me as if I might be carrying half a continent’s germs on my clothes). I would slowly inch away from her height, and her cold blue eyes, while all my precious memories of India shattered one by one under her terrible fusillade. That’s when I would long for my zephyr, pray for my zephyr. That’s when I would hang my head and screw up my eyes and conjure her out of the air. My zephyr (I can see now) bore more than a passing resemblance to Virginia’s sister Isolda, with whom I was fiercely in love from the age of seven to nine: She was a glorious creature with long flowing hair; she swept into the stuffy room, shaking the heavy curtains with their fringing and frogging, fluttering the tapestries, rattling the doors. This was a zephyr powerful enough, and merciless enough, to topple the Termagant, and silence her forever more.

  My grandfather used to say that I shouldn’t mind, that Mrs. de Winter meant well, that her bark was worse than her bite, and so on—but my grandfather was a saintly man, and one of the limitations of saintliness is a tendency to excuse or underestimate such people. I thought Tilly was much nearer the mark when she declared the woman was a Tyrant and a Tartar; when she added that the Tartar’s son, apple of her eye, wasn’t no better than a Tomcat, I found it very interesting, indeed. I had noticed the tomcat sniffing around.

  “I’ve heard tales about him,” Tilly would say, rolling her eyes at our housekeeper, Mrs.
Trevelyan (the source of quite a few of those tales, I suspect, Tilly’s being from London and Mrs. Trevelyan’s being local). I longed to hear those tales, needless to say, and that longing increased as time passed, but no one ever enlightened me. All I ever gleaned (and this was much later, when, desperate for information on this and any other adult subject, I took up a brief and unsuccessful career as an eavesdropper) was that blankets were mysteriously involved—especially the wrong side of them. What did tomcats have to do with blankets? Did a blanket have a wrong side?

  As to the Termagant’s interrogations, I used to believe at the time that my stammered answers were of little account. No matter my reply, the same questions would be asked again on my next visit. I now think that I was being assessed, and that Mrs. de Winter the elder wanted to get the measure of me, even then. She pushed simply to see how far she could push before I rebelled.

  I never did—politeness and a fear of being rude to any adult were so deeply ingrained in me, so soaked into my very soul, that even when she made me cry, I did so in secret. I think she did this partly from habit—she spoke to everyone in this way—and partly because she gained knowledge by it, which she then stored up until such a time as it might be useful to her. And in my case, many years later, it was—but that particular episode (it was during the first war, in 1915, and it still shames me) I will return to another time.

  Meanwhile, she was better informed than I had realized, and accurate in some of her suggestions, as I learned. My father was indeed ill, though that knowledge was carefully concealed from me. He contracted an enteric fever in Kashmir, recovered in a military hospital in Delhi, relapsed a few weeks later, and died one month before my sister Rose was born.