Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  I felt a sudden excitement. I thought, No one ever cleared this place out. It wasn’t cleared after Rebecca’s death, or even after the fire at Manderley. It was left untouched. Maxim de Winter just walked away, went abroad; the servants left—no one thought of this place, and no one touched it.

  Was that possible? I knew that it was possible. The abrupt manner of de Winter’s departure from Manderley was the one aspect of this story on which everyone I consulted was unanimous. When the fire that would destroy the house started, he and his second wife were returning from London, where they’d seen the doctor who provided the evidence of Rebecca’s final illness. They drove through the night, and first saw the blaze from six miles away in the early hours of the following morning. It lit up the western horizon. By then the fire, fanned by the wind from the sea, had spread from the west wing to engulf the entire building, and the roar of the flames was audible, according to newspaper accounts, from as far away as Kerrith. By the time the de Winters reached Manderley itself, the house was beyond saving.

  I could imagine how devastating a blow that must have been. De Winter’s ancestors had lived here since the Conquest; generations of his family had altered the house, added to the house, demolished parts of it, rebuilt it, been born, married, and died in it. Now it was gone—and de Winter seems to have found that insupportable. He stayed for just two days, dealing only with the most essential formalities. Then he and his wife left for Europe, where they remained for many years; his estate manager, Frank Crawley, was left to make all the other final arrangements. Then he, too, departed, and the land agents took over.

  “So I never paid my last respects to Mr. de Winter,” Frith had said to me. “After all those years I’d been with the family. That came hard, that did. Fourteen years old, I was, when I first came to Manderley. I remember the day Mr. de Winter was born, I remember his mother and his father—and I thought he’d come to see me before he left. Not thanks—I didn’t expect thanks, not when I’d only been doing my duties. But I thought he’d say good-bye. He was punctilious, Mr. de Winter. Of course, he was very distressed. I have to remember that, and he was generous—I had no complaints there, I was well provided for, all the servants were. After I heard he’d left—it was Mr. Crawley told me—I thought maybe he’d write. But he never did. Broke his heart to lose Manderley. Couldn’t bear to be reminded of the old place…. I expect it was that—don’t you think, sir?”

  What did I think? I thought Frith’s explanation was partly true. I also thought that, as the Colonel had hinted, there might be other reasons for Maxim’s long and punitive self-exile. But that wasn’t my concern now. The point was, he had left in haste; the handover to those land agents had been made in haste. I had read the details in the estate papers. Frank Crawley’s letters had survived. All his arrangements for the paying off of staff, the future maintenance of the tenant farms, and so on, had been meticulous. But meticulous Frank Crawley had made one oversight: He had forgotten this place, forgotten Rebecca’s boathouse.

  I could feel my excitement rising. I knew it was absurd, but I couldn’t prevent it. At one time, the notebook the Colonel described to me had been here, and Rebecca had been writing in it. What if Rebecca kept it here those last months—and what if it were still here, amidst all this damp moldering rubbish?

  I looked. Of course I looked. I went through every damn thing in that place. I went through the boxes. I checked every last container and cupboard. I checked under and in and behind and above. I looked everywhere once, and when I still wasn’t satisfied, I looked everywhere again. Behind this room, I discovered there was a further, smaller, area, where sailing equipment must have been stored. I blundered around in there, too, lifting up rotting canvas, shoving a broken oar to one side, rooting around in old coils of wet rotting rope, and scrabbling through thick clinging cobwebs. Nothing. I found nothing.

  Well, that’s not strictly true. I found evidence of past use, just as the Colonel described. There was a scrap of an old plaid rug, a filthy pillow spilling feathers. There were some grimy cups and glasses. There was a collection of books, stuck together and stained brown with damp. There were some torn, near illegible marine charts. I found two of the model boats intact, and the fragments of others. In a tin, I found some tea that had formed a thick hard black cake. I found a broken pen, and, plunging my hand into one of the boxes, a pink pulpy substance that I finally realized might once have been a blotting pad. I found a rusty biscuit tin; it was heavy and my heart leaped—a perfect storage place, I thought, in a damp boathouse. I cut my hand forcing it open, and all it contained was more old books, one of them that history of Manderley and Kerrith written by the Colonel’s grandfather. I stood there, sucking the blood on my hand, breathing hard, and I gradually came to my senses.

  I was ashamed at the greed of my search. I was a fool. It wasn’t here; the notebook was not here—and, for all I knew, the damn thing never had been. I only had the Colonel’s word that it had ever existed.

  Meanwhile, I wasn’t using my brain. I wasn’t thinking clearly. This boathouse wasn’t some time capsule, untouched since Rebecca’s lifetime. According to Colonel Julyan, poor simpleminded Ben Carminowe had haunted this beach when she was alive, and after her death continued to return here, sometimes dossing down in the storage area behind me. More recently, anyone could have used it who had a mind to do so; the building wasn’t secure, but it was hidden away, it was private. I wondered, did lovers use it now? Was it a convenient and private trysting place? Possibly, though if so it was a very damp and uninviting one. Yet someone had undoubtedly been here, and recently, too. Someone had left that wreath. Someone had been inside this building, and had bothered to screen the windows. Could they have been searching for something, as I was? Why? Who?

  I was no more likely to discover the answer to those questions, I realized, than I was to discover that notebook. I tidied up. I put back into the boxes all the objects I’d taken out. I pushed the furniture back into place. I went outside into the sun and the fresh air, and pushed the swollen door shut again. I left the wreath where it was, and, filthy from head to foot, furious with myself for pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp in that stupid undisciplined way, I made for the cliff path.

  Unbelievably, I’d been in that boathouse for over two hours. It was now well past nine o’clock. It would take me nearly an hour to walk back, and, once on the coast path, I’d be in full view of any watcher in Kerrith. I had to clean myself up, change my clothes, and turn myself back into Terence Gray again.

  “Nice Mr. Gray” was expected at The Pines, and then at the Briggs sisters’ cottage for Sunday lunch. I hated nice Mr. Gray in that moment; the last thing I wanted to do was change myself back into him. Mr. Gray had further interrogations in mind—and, irrationally, I blamed him for my own behavior in the boathouse. I’d behaved like some tomb robber. I was heartily sick of Mr. Gray, and myself; I couldn’t wait to get out of Kerrith, and go back to King’s—or London.

  I could give all this up, I thought to myself as I mounted the steep path. I don’t have to do this. I do it of my own free will. I can stop; I can abandon the entire search any time I want. I’m never likely to discover the truth about Rebecca—and what is the truth, anyway? Not a fixed thing, in my experience—never a fixed thing. The truth fluctuates, it shifts; look at it from this window and it takes one shape; look at it from another, and it’s altered. Who are you, Rebecca? What a hopeless question that was. Colonel Julyan had known her well for five years, so had the Briggs sisters, so had Frith—and if they couldn’t answer it, what chance did I have?

  I paused at the top of the path. The sun shone down hotly on my head. I looked down at the cove, and then back toward the cool of the woods. I wouldn’t give up. I couldn’t give up. It mattered too much to me.

  I turned toward the trees, and, as I did so, there was a flash, a little burst of light on the periphery of my vision. I stopped, and looked out across the water. In the mouth of the bay, the fishing boat I’d seen e
arlier was at anchor. I moved back into the shelter of the trees, and then raised my glasses. But whatever I’d seen, it had not been the flash of binoculars, I was almost sure. There was no one on the boat deck, and as before the skipper was in the wheelhouse, with his back to me, and his eyes—I assumed—on the far horizon.

  I walked home, cleaned myself up, and, before I left for The Pines, completed the letter I’ve postponed writing to Nicky. I suggested he might like to make a quick foray to Brittany, and do some research there for me. A simple task for someone of his abilities; my French is reasonably good, but Nicky is bilingual. I worded the letter carefully—I didn’t want him to suspect my real reason for writing. He doesn’t know what I’m up to, and would find this quest of mine worrying if he did know—but then his background and circumstances are so very different from my own that he’s never understood this side of my character.

  “You know who you are,” I said to him once—it was at Cambridge, in my room at King’s, I think. Or we may have been walking on the Backs. Not that it matters. “You know who you are, Nicky, and I don’t. That’s the difference between us.”

  “One of the differences,” he replied quietly. “But not the main one.”

  I posted the letter on my way to The Pines. It wouldn’t be collected until the following day, but I didn’t want to risk changing my mind and not sending it. I don’t have time to go trailing around Brittany. I need Nicky’s help. I never find it easy to ask anyone for help, but on this occasion I felt the better for doing so.

  TWELVE

  I SET OFF FOR THE PINES FEELING DISPIRITED; MY LACK OF success at the boathouse made me acutely aware of the obstacles I’m encountering in my search for Rebecca. I had to remind myself that I had made advances, even if they weren’t the kind of rapid advances I’d hoped for.

  Walking up the hill to the Colonel’s house, I told myself that I must learn to break this slavish dependence I have on facts—I’ve spent too many years in libraries, too many years working from documents, and I’m still too hedged in by my own disciplines and training. My instinct is still to approach these inquiries as if they were part of my academic work, or a chapter in my next book. But the historian’s approach doesn’t entirely work here. It may be appropriate when I’m writing about people that have been dead and buried for over four centuries, but it can be counterproductive now I’m dealing with more recent events and living witnesses—knowing how to handle them can be very tricky indeed. I may know how to read documents, but I’m less good at reading people, I’ve realized.

  I’m now learning, I hope, how to look and how to listen. Very often it isn’t what someone told me, but the way they told me that is the most revealing. No doubt I’d be less vulnerable to these bouts of pessimism if I had someone to talk to, someone I could discuss all this with over a drink at the end of the day. If a Cambridge friend were here, or May were still alive, I probably wouldn’t get as downcast as I sometimes do. But they aren’t, and there’s no one in Kerrith I can confide in, so occasionally I feel lonely and cut off here.

  It isn’t that I mind being alone. I learned to value privacy very quickly at the orphanage. If you spend all day every day being herded, if every act is a public one, witnessed and jeered at, if you go to sleep being taunted and wake to more taunts, then solitude is a luxury. It always has been for me; it probably always will be, and if I’m denied it too long I start to crave it. That’s one of the legacies of the orphanage years—Nicky would say one of the scars. I don’t like that term; it’s predictable. Besides, scars indicate healing, and they’re harmless.

  But there’s a vast difference between being alone and being lonely—there’s an ocean between those two states, as I’m discovering. I’m not the child I was, thank God, and I’m no longer the sullen suspicious young man I was when I first went up to King’s. I now need friends, and can even admit that to myself. In fact, I’ve made such progress that Nicky says I’m approaching normality—though there’s still room for improvement, he tells me. He says I can now talk to people as if they were people and not robots, which is an advance. A few more years and, with luck, I’ll be emotionally “housetrained,” as he charmingly puts it.

  I thought of Nicky’s comments as I finally reached The Pines. Maybe I’d have progressed further and faster with Colonel Julyan had I been more open with him—though there was a limit, obviously, to how open I could be. I decided to make an effort today. I’m fond of the old man, and I was looking forward to seeing him. He’d promised to start going through all those boxes and files of his in search of letters he wanted to show me.

  I wasn’t sure whether this “archive” (as the Colonel’s now begun to call it) contained anything of use, or decades of irrelevant rubbish. I was hopeful, though. I’d been given glimpses of its contents, enough to feel that there might well be some gems, especially if the Colonel can locate the folders he claims he’s mislaid, which contain “Notes from Rebecca” and “Letters from Maxim.”

  Even though we’ve made our pact and I am now “co-opted,” I’m not allowed, of course, to search through any of this material myself. The Colonel has to do so, and in conditions of some secrecy—so I suspect he might want to vet the contents of anything he finds before showing it to me. He is beginning to trust me, though, so perhaps today I’d make a breakthrough, I thought. My spirits rose; they were dashed almost as soon as I entered the house. The Colonel was nowhere to be seen, and Ellie met me with the news that he’d worn himself out looking through all his boxes and files the previous day; this morning he’d been very fretful. Taking me through into the kitchen, she told me she’d packed him off to bed, where he was now sleeping peacefully.

  I was concerned, and genuinely sorry to hear he’d been upset by his activities, but my face fell. I wasn’t able to hide my disappointment. Ellie, who misses very little, saw it at once; it may have hurt her, but if so, she covered it up quickly.

  “Don’t look quite so miserable,” she said with a smile. “I know it’s my father you want to see, but it won’t hurt you to talk to me for five minutes. I’ll make some coffee and we can sit outside—it’s such a lovely day. No, please don’t rush off—I haven’t had a chance to speak to you alone since the day we went to Manderley, and there’s something I want to tell you.”

  She made the coffee; I was instructed to fetch cups and a tray. The kitchen at The Pines is a pleasant room; it looks as if it hasn’t been altered in years, and I’m sure hasn’t changed since Ellie was a child. I could imagine a time when Ellie had sat here with her brother and elder sister—and I suppose that made me like the room even more. Never having had one in the usual sense, I’m sentimental about families. On the table was a pile of the Sunday newspapers, and a book that Ellie had evidently been reading before I arrived. I wanted to see what it was, but I couldn’t read the title without moving the papers; I had to wait until she had her back to me. I’m not sure what I was expecting: one of those women’s novels about marriage and domesticity, perhaps; or, given her aunt Rose’s influence, Austen maybe, or the Brontës. It proved to be Camus, The Outsider. I hid it under the newspaper again.

  We went out into the garden, past the palm and the monkey puzzle, and down to the terrace at the far end. The church bells were ringing for morning service; a light breeze from the water made the rigging of the yachts anchored below us reverberate with a strange rhythmic humming. The view over the harbor, with the boats moving lazily at anchor and the ferry churning the water as it departed from the pier, was ceaselessly interesting and calming. In harbors, time stretches; and of all the ones I know well, including the tiny and remote one that May and Edwin’s house overlooked, I like Kerrith the best. I associate it with the first true freedom and happiness of my childhood.

  Ellie stretched like a cat in the sun, then sat down on the wall, hugging her knees, and watching the water. I tried to decide if she’d changed in the months since I first met her, or if I was only now learning how to look at her. For a long time, I think, I could
n’t see beyond the fact that she was the Colonel’s daughter; it certainly took a while for me to notice she’s pretty—in fact very attractive, in a boyish gamine way. She’s very slim; today, her soft brown hair was tied carelessly back from her face; she was wearing a short-sleeved blouse and narrow trousers; she’d kicked off her shoes, and I noticed her feet, like her arms and her face, were tanned gold. The light was dazzling. Ellie pulled out a pair of dark glasses and put them on. At once she looked different again—and I realized how much I depend on reading her eyes. Ellie has remarkable eyes, of a clear hazel. They’re exceptionally candid—and, now they were hidden behind those smoky lenses, I was thrown. I felt I had no idea who she was, or how to go about talking to her.

  She may have sensed this, because she took charge. Trying to put me at my ease, I suspect, she began telling me about her father and his progress. I was thinking how little I knew about her. The Briggs sisters had told me that as a child Ellie was exceptionally clever, that she took after her aunt Rose, that she’d won a scholarship to Cambridge, and would have gone there to study literature at Girton, but her mother became ill, so she gave it up and stayed here to nurse her. Now she was nursing her father. I wondered if she ever fretted, if she regretted sacrificing her life in this way. I thought not. There’s nothing bitter about Ellie. She’s generous, smart, loyal, and observant—with flashes of intelligence that took me by surprise at first. Would I have regarded Ellie differently had she gone to Cambridge and taken a degree? I knew I would—and that made me ashamed. Now I knew her better, I was beginning to see that I might have underestimated Ellie.