Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  “I think it suits you,” she said. “It’s a handsome name. And for Sunday-best, you can always be ‘Thomas.’”

  I turned this over in my mind; I think I smiled, because she responded, and her face lit in the most extraordinary way. She leaned forward, and touched my face with her fingertips, and such was the spell she’d begun to cast over me that I didn’t flinch or shy away, but let her hand rest there while she looked at me.

  “Do you live here?” I asked when she finally drew back.

  She laughed. “What, here in the church? No. Not yet, anyway.”

  She made a face. I saw her gaze fall to my hands. My nails were chewed, and the cuticles were torn where I gnawed at them. I made a fist of my hands, so she couldn’t see them, and the blood rushed up my neck and into my face.

  “I used to bite my nails,” she said in a practical tone. “My hands looked horrible—much much worse than that. My mother said I was a little cannibal. She went to the chemist and bought something called bitter aloes. It was supposed to taste so vile that you gave up biting them. Well, that didn’t work! I was so angry, I chewed them all the more.”

  I looked down at her hands. She had long thin tanned hands, with perfect unblemished nails, cut short. On her left hand she was wearing two rings, one of which glittered like sunlight on water.

  “I’ll tell you what to do,” she went on, in a conversational way, as if we were exactly the same age, and had known one another forever. “If you want to go on biting them, do—and the hell with what anyone thinks. But if you don’t, and you want to stop, just use your willpower. If you will something strongly enough, you can move mountains. You can do anything.”

  I looked at her carefully. I was impressed by the word “hell,” especially in a church. No one had ever mentioned willpower to me before; at the orphanage it was faith that was supposed to move mountains, and the emphasis was on prayer. I’d spent a lot of time praying. I’d prayed to be adopted for at least seven years—but maybe I hadn’t been praying after all; maybe I’d been willing.

  “Anything at all?” I asked warily.

  “Absolutely anything,” she said. “For instance: I was very small as a child, I never seemed to grow and I wanted to be tall, so I willed it. And I grew six inches in six months. Just like a plant in a pot. It was easy.”

  “Could you will yourself to read better, if you wanted? For instance?”

  “Simple. Just snap your fingers, and do it.”

  I frowned; this was encouraging, but I felt there was something missing here, possibly God. I glanced over my shoulder at the blue and gold altar table. I looked at Gilles and his little dog. I looked at her, and I saw that she wasn’t as confident as she sounded; maybe she’d believed that once, but perhaps the willpower wasn’t working too well for her now. There were doubts, way back in her eyes—a tide of doubt and sadness was welling up in them. I scowled at her and made a sneering face, and gestured at Gilles de Winter.

  “What about him? I’ll bet you can’t will him back. He’s dead, he is.”

  “No, no, you’re wrong.” She gave a sigh, and ignored my rudeness. “You can will the dead back. But you have to be careful, Tom. They don’t always manifest themselves in quite the way you expected. So on the whole it’s better to let them rest…or whatever it is that they do down there.”

  She spoke seriously, her sea-colored eyes fixed on my face. It suddenly felt very cold in that church, and I shivered. I thought of all the dead down there under our feet; I think she thought of them, too, for her face contracted. Then the church clock chimed the hour, and the spell was broken, and May’s strange friend sprang to her feet. She held out her hand to me for the second time.

  “I’m very glad to have met you, Tom,” she said. “Tell May to bring you to see me one day. I live at Manderley—May knows where it is. It’s just near here. We could go out in my boat. It’s the prettiest boat, very strong and safe—would you like that?”

  I would have liked that, and I passed on this invitation to May almost immediately. But May, who seemed pleased to “run into” her former friend, as she put it, was vague about the suggestion. We stood in the sunlight in the graveyard, watching a gleaming car disappearing fast up the lane; I stole out my hand, and took May’s. I’d decided I didn’t want to hurt her. I’d decided to will her to love me—and it seemed to work, for her face took on a soft, crumpled look, and she put her arms around me and hugged me. “When can we go and see your friend and go out in her boat?” I asked on the way home, and I kept on asking. “Oh, one of these days,” May would answer—but then she always seemed to forget, though I often reminded her.

  Somehow there was never time, or we were doing something else—and I could sense that wasn’t the truth. I discovered a little. I found out that the woman with sea-colored eyes was newly married to someone called Maxim de Winter, a descendent of the very same Gilles whose effigy I’d copied; that May had first met her as a girl, when May was twenty and she was fifteen and they lived near one another in Berkshire.

  Beyond this, May would not be drawn; one day Edwin took me aside and explained that my questions made May anxious; they made her feel I preferred her friend, he said, and that hurt May. “Give her time, Tom,” he said. “We’re still getting to know one another, and May wants to make you happy.”

  I cared for May, so after that I dropped the subject. Our holiday ended, we returned home to Scotland; we never visited Pelynt or Kerrith again, and I never again met, or heard from, Rebecca. For a long while, though, her fascination endured, and I often thought of her. I discovered May’s strange friend had been right in her advice: I was able to stop biting my nails; I was able to read better; I was able to be less stupid. But there are limits to willpower, of course. One day, there Rebecca’s picture was, on the front page of a newspaper. That boat of hers had not been so safe after all; it had disappeared at sea; it was gone, and she was gone with it.

  Time passed. When her body was finally found, and I read the newspaper reports of her inquest, I saw the verdict was suicide. A last act of will, and the end of the story, I decided. Now I would never know who she was and why she had wanted to meet me that day—and by then I was very sure that encounter was willed, that May had been coerced, and Rebecca determined to meet me.

  I put the matter out of my mind, and for years thought of the episode only rarely; but the story was not yet over, nor was my own involvement in it. Edwin Galbraith, a good and kind man, died when I was still at school. May, to whom I owe so much, died two years ago, of a heart attack. When her house in Scotland was finally sold last year I had to go through all her belongings. I found among her papers a letter that she might have destroyed had she not died suddenly and unexpectedly. I’ve been carrying it about with me ever since; sitting in the garden in London this morning, I opened it again, and re-read it. The address was 12C Tite Street, London SW3; the date was 1926, and—as I now know—the letter must have been written shortly after Rebecca’s marriage, and some months before that one occasion on which she met me.

  She wrote:

  My dear May,

  I was glad to see you yesterday—and very sad to hear of your predicament. Not to be able to bear a child is such a hard fate for a woman. But you can still have a child and look after him and love him. You must adopt one—I’m sure Edwin will agree if you ask him.

  As it happens, I know of a little boy who needs a family. He is in an orphanage near London at present, and a very barbaric place it is. He was moved on there from some foundlings’ home—in the country, I believe. According to when the children were placed there, they christened them. This little boy was part of the “T” contingent, so they called him “Terence.” His intake all had surnames taken from colors; there was a “Brown” and a “Black” and a “White” and a “Green”; Terence’s surname is “Gray.” I think Galbraith would suit him much better.

  I think you should go there and rescue him. I would rescue him myself, but Max might not welcome the idea, and you
would certainly make a much wiser and better parent than I would.

  I knew his mother once, poor woman—she is dead now—and I’ve only recently discovered that her son is alive. She would bless you, I know, and so would I, if you took care of him. You will make him a good mother, and I’m sure Edwin will make the best of fathers.

  Telephone me as soon as you receive this, and I will tell you where to find him.

  Rebecca

  Every time I’ve read this letter, I’ve put a different interpretation on it. When I first read it, I felt a painful certainty that I had found my mother at last. Later, I told myself that I had at best found my mother’s friend—and that was no help to me, for the friend was dead now. Then I discovered that, in this predicament, I can believe everything and anything—and, such is my need, I can believe in any number of opposing ideas simultaneously. So my mother is Rebecca and is not Rebecca. She is her friend; she is that woman failed by the gin and the knitting needle; she has a hundred faces—and I cannot rest until I find the one face that is hers, and the one name that fits her.

  But, today, sitting under that tree, with the petals falling on the page as I read that letter, I saw another face looking over my mother’s shoulder—the features were indistinct but I knew it was the face of my father. I was born in 1915, and my birthdate is approximate; it was calculated by the orphanage authorities, or so I was always told. But it cannot be more than a few weeks out at most; that means that if I were Rebecca’s child, she would have still been a child herself when she had me—she would have been only fourteen, living at a house called Greenways, with a cousin I’d detested on sight, and a father who had doted on her.

  So did I want to go on? Was I sure I wanted to go on?

  I folded up the note and replaced it in my pocket. I heard the traffic of the city for the first time that morning. I had to go on, I knew that in my heart. There were numerous arguments against that course of action; I could see that this Pandora’s box might be better left unopened. Even so, I had to discover the truth—and, besides, how could I give up now, when I knew that, at last, I was getting closer?

  NINETEEN

  REACHING THIS DECISION GAVE ME A NEW SENSE OF PURpose. I went back into the house to decide on my route for the remaining hours I had in London. I was booked on the evening train, which would get me to Lanyon just after midnight, but I had the rest of the day to follow up my new leads. I tried calling Favell, but received no answer from either number. Presumably he was lying low, nursing a hangover.

  I sat down in Sir Archie’s study and borrowed his desk, with its view out over Regent’s Park. Nicky’s father is retired now, but he was a distinguished civil servant, a man of neat habits, with an orderly mind—and his desk was exceptionally neat. Its only adornment was a wedding photograph of Nicky and Julia, with myself as best man, standing just off to the side, and looking away from the camera. I didn’t want to be reminded of Julia’s beauty or Nicky’s happiness that day, and I certainly didn’t want to be reminded of my own feelings on that occasion. I turned the photograph away from me, and spread out my journals, notebooks, and newspaper cuttings.

  The person I most wanted to speak to now was Mrs. Danvers, the woman whose knowledge of Rebecca went further back than Jack Favell’s, the woman who had remained close to her throughout her marriage; I’d been banking on Favell’s knowing her whereabouts. Since he couldn’t help, and on the whole I believed him when he claimed he’d lost touch with her, I still had no way of finding her—though it wasn’t for want of trying. Thinking she might still be employed as a housekeeper, or as a companion perhaps, I’d approached every single one of the large domestic service agencies, and most of the smaller ones. I’d tried questioning all the former Manderley servants still living in the Kerrith area, and I’d obtained no clues as to her whereabouts.

  A concretion of myths and stories had attached themselves to her, as they had to the de Winters and Rebecca: A number of those who had worked under her or alongside her, including Frith, felt she was in some way connected to the fire that destroyed Manderley. They stopped short of accusations of arson, but they felt she was involved; on one point, they all agreed—no one had laid eyes on her, or heard of her, since the night of the fire. She had packed up her belongings that day, they said, announced she was leaving for good—and vanished.

  As I unpicked this story piece by piece, I came across Mrs. Danvers again and again. Mrs. Danvers was the obvious route back into Rebecca’s childhood. If any links did exist between Rebecca and Manderley before her marriage, then Mrs. Danvers would be the person who knew of them. If Favell could be believed, Mrs. Danvers had been involved in the key transition period of Rebecca’s life, when her mother died and she went to live with her father at Greenways. Might she not therefore have information about me, too? Someone had deposited me as a baby at an orphanage in 1915, and had done so, if Rebecca’s letter to May was to be believed, without Rebecca’s knowledge.

  Failing Mrs. Danvers, who was there to consult? I would have to go back to my only other strong lead, to Sir Frank McKendrick and that touring company of his. There was a strong possibility that the “old ham” Favell had spoken of last night was McKendrick, and that the photograph of her mother as Desdemona that Rebecca had placed on her “shrine” featured a McKendrick touring production. Find the mother and find the child, I told myself.

  I called the information desk at the St. James’s Library, one of the best libraries in London, and my favourite workplace in the city. I was in luck. McKendrick had written an autobiography. It wasn’t out on loan, I would find it in the stacks, and its title, the librarian said, sounding amused, was appropriately Shakespearean: Taken at the Flood.

  It took me a moment to place the quotation. Brutus to Cassius, in Julius Caesar. I was by no means sure that there was a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune—but I felt encouraged. I tried calling Favell again, without success, then called The Pines to check on Colonel Julyan’s welfare. Ellie answered, and I spoke to her for some while before I left for the library.

  In passing, I asked her about that mysterious call I’d received last night. Ellie confirmed that, as I’d expected, she had given this number to no one.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Someone called yesterday, and didn’t leave a message….”

  I hesitated. Ellie had been addressing me by Gray’s name, and that made me feel shabby. There were deceptions here, and I knew I couldn’t let them continue much longer. There was a moment when I almost confessed. I just stopped myself in time. If any confession were to be made, it had to be made face-to-face, and not on the telephone.

  Ellie said that her father had been feeling tired the previous day, but seemed stronger this morning. Tomorrow, at the doctor’s suggestion, he was going over to the county hospital for some tests—but they were routine, she assured me. She would be with him at the hospital for most of the day, but would call me at my cottage tomorrow evening. Meanwhile, her father would be glad to hear I was coming back tonight; he was missing me, she said with some emphasis.

  I thought this unlikely; I hesitated, then replied that I was missing him, too. This seemed to please Ellie; I heard the sudden lift in her voice—and her mood affected mine. I left for the library feeling purposeful, and considerably happier.

  BY 10:15, I WAS GOING THROUGH THE CARD CATALOG IN search of Sir Frank’s autobiography, and by 10:20 I was in the stacks, searching the shelves for it.

  The St. James’s Library is an old building, and its geography is confusing. The theatrical history section proved to be in a remote wing, on one of the upper stories, reached by a whole series of staircases, anterooms, and narrow passageways. Like certain other parts of the library, this section was ill-lit, cramped, and somewhat sinister. I was hemmed in by the stacks, which were only a few feet apart, and which ran in serried ranks across the width of the area. There were no windows; both the ceiling and the floor were constructed of iron gratings
, so I could sense other searchers in the sections below and above me.

  I moved between the narrow stacks, pulling the light cords, illuminating first this, then that section of shelves. Sir Frank McKendrick’s autobiography was not in its assigned place, and I assumed that the book had been put back on the wrong shelf by another browser; sometimes this happened. I began checking; along the books, spine by spine. I drew out a couple of general histories of the Edwardian stage, and Shakespearean touring companies, but their references to McKendrick told me little more than Francis Browne had already indicated. No mention of his Othello, and no details about other actors in his company. I felt a sense of angry frustration. That book must be here. A shifting sighing sound came up through the grating on the floor. Footsteps tapped on a metal staircase around the corner. Someone unseen moved between the stacks farther up the room. A door closed in a distant part of the building.

  I went back along the relevent shelves three times. The book wasn’t there. I was about to return to the main hall and consult the librarian; I turned back toward the stairs and passed a dark corner where there was a small reading desk, little more than a shelf, really, to be used for reference rather than serious reading. I’d passed that little desk earlier, and was almost sure it had been bare; now there was a book on it. Picking it up, I found it was the missing autobiography.

  It fell open at one particular place, and a sweet familiar scent rose up from the page. I started, and almost dropped it. Pressed between the leaves of the book was a sprig of azalea—the same azalea I had seen woven into a garland at Rebecca’s boathouse. It was browned and crumpled, but the perfume was still strong. This was not an old specimen, pressed and dried; it could not have been in the book very long. I swung round and looked back along the stacks. Someone had been there earlier, I’d heard movement. The stacks were now empty.