Rebecca's Tale

by Sally Beauman

  Was this a life? My heart ached. I owed my father more than this sad collection of scraps, especially now, when the hospital and death were intent on erasing his identity. I was very angry with myself—and no doubt angry and accusatory with Mr. Latimer when he finally came in to speak to me.

  Mr. Latimer is newly arrived from some grand London teaching hospital and is younger than I’d expected, about forty. He’s a tall man—not quite as tall as Tom Galbraith, but over six foot, I’d say—and some women might find him good-looking. He has dark hair, an unsettling, steady gray-eyed gaze, and a watchful demeanor. I was prejudiced against him, perhaps. I resented the way he’d overruled my father, and insisted he remain here. The Sister had sung his praises, needless to say, rhapsodizing about what a fine surgeon he was, how distinguished, with such a reputation in medical circles, but I’d watched the nurses flutter and coo and kowtow to him the previous day, and I’d decided he was arrogant.

  I’ve since revised that opinion. He’s a clever man and may have sensed my antagonism; it’s even possible that he set out to defuse it. Certainly he spent far longer with me that day than I’d expected, explaining patiently what these tests and this period of observation might achieve. He refused to rule out surgery yet—which made me afraid—but he was quiet and understanding, even optimistic in a measured way, though there were many “ifs,” as there always are when doctors make an analysis. To my surprise, he wanted to know some of my personal details—my age and so on. And he asked me many close and searching questions about our life at The Pines—far more questions than seemed necessary.

  “We live quietly,” I told him. “We don’t go out very much any more, and my father dislikes visitors. I try to keep to a routine: meals at regular times, a short walk every afternoon. My father tends to dwell on the past, and that can upset him. So, I try to divert him. We play cards sometimes, or I read to him.”

  Latimer had been watching me intently. I knew how dull this sounded; it occurred to me that he must think me dull, too—not that that mattered. I colored. “Who chooses the books when you read to him?” he asked, with a half smile. I could see sympathy, perhaps even concern, in his steady gray gaze, so I lied. “I do,” I replied. I will not be pitied.

  It’s strange, what good interrogators doctors can make. I’m sure it’s because we invest them with special powers, like priests; because we long to believe in their wisdom and insight. I found I was telling Latimer things I’ve never discussed before—I even told him about the months of broken nights, the cries in the dark, and my father’s recurrent nightmares.

  “I see,” Latimer said, and made a small note on the clipboard he was carrying. Later he quietly asked me if my father had anything “preying on his mind”—that phrase struck me, though for some reason I can’t remember exactly how I replied to him.

  From now on, Latimer decreed, there was to be a regime of rest—and I was banished from the precincts except for the strictly observed single visiting hour in the afternoon. So I drove back to The Pines, still in sheeting rain, and, for the rest of those seven days, the rain continued. It was an interval in my life, a period unlike any other: I felt marooned—and that was the state I was in when, that first afternoon, a white-faced Tom Galbraith turned up at the door, with Rebecca’s little black coffin book tucked inside his soaked mackintosh.

  He wanted me to read it, but first he had to explain who he truly was and what his own connection was to the events Rebecca described. It was painfully hard for him. Maybe it’s the legacy of his orphanage years that has left him so fearful of trust, friendship, or intimacy, but he always behaves as if he’s reluctant to risk closeness because, if he did, it would be instantly snatched away. For this reason, perhaps, or other reasons of which I know nothing, he seems to fear the idea of being “known,” as if knowledge might give someone power over him.

  He found it indescribably difficult to tell me the truth as to why he came here in the first place; when he came to the contents of the notebook, and what he had learned about his parentage and his birth, he spoke very fast, in a cold dismissive way. I imagine he felt this was his best protection.

  I was astonished by what he told me, and very happy for him, but we were at odds with each other, I can see that now. I thought that for someone brought up as he had been, with years in a children’s home and lasting uncertainties as to his parentage, this notebook must have been a precious gift. I still think that, if I’d been in his position, if I’d known nothing about my mother, I’d have been overjoyed to find her in Isolda, with her beautiful hair, headstrong and courageous, dancing barefoot by the waves. I thought it must gladden his heart to learn that he was related to Rebecca, if not in the way he’d imagined. That must give him a sense of belonging and identity, I felt; he had a family now, and a history. Surely that must reassure him, when he’d spent so long seeking it.

  “Why, it means you’re related to Elinor and Jocelyn,” I said. “You’re cousins, Tom—how extraordinary! They’ll be overjoyed. You’ll be the child they never had. When are you going to tell them? Have you told them already?”

  “No. I haven’t told them—I don’t know if I will. Not for a while, certainly. There’s a great deal I need to think about.”

  I checked myself. I still hadn’t read the notebook, of course, so I wasn’t to know how troubling a document it was, especially for him. There are darknesses in it—it’s shot through with darkness, and I began to sense that as I looked at his face. I realized that I was trespassing, that I couldn’t begin to understand how he felt. I came from such a normal world, he from such an abnormal one. My mind was filled with death, his with birth. How could I reach across these divisions?

  It had been a strange dreamlike conversation. It took place in the kitchen, but I wasn’t really sure where we were, or what year it was. I felt we’d both been sucked into some vortex of the past, that we were spinning about in the decades. Looking at his troubled face, I felt heavyhearted and light-headed, sober yet dizzy, as if I were standing on the edge of a cliff and might fall over into an abyss at any minute. All I could think, in a muddled way, was that he needed love—that love was the only possible short-circuiting device here. I almost told him how I felt about him, that’s how ill balanced and frantic I was; but, thank God, I stayed silent.

  I swallowed the sentence down, which made me feel even more choked up with impotent urgency. Tom pushed back his chair and stood up. I stood up, too. The rain rattled, Barker’s paws twitched as he dreamed. I was in such a muddle of distress, afraid for my father, afraid for Tom, angry with myself for being normal and inadequate. I think he saw some of these conflicts in my face, and was as concerned for me as I was for him; in a gentle way he put his arms around me. The next thing I knew, I’d begun kissing him. It was the only way I could think of to reach him. I’d kissed him once before, when I delivered the notebook—God knows why—but that was a very hasty casual sort of kiss. This wasn’t.

  I don’t have great experience of kisses, but I can taste desperation. This time he kissed me back, and the kiss continued for a long time. Then it ended. He broke away from me in an odd, ashamed, abrupt way, and left shortly afterward. Since then, we’ve met often, and he’s brought me up to date with everything that he’s discovered, but the barriers were back in place the next time I saw him.

  At first I thought he was distancing himself because he felt stigmatized by his illegitimacy—which doesn’t matter a jot to me, but does to him. Then I realized there was a more obvious barrier between us. I finally understood: He loved someone else, that was why he’d reacted so guiltily. He began to hint that this was the case, but he never spoke of the woman directly, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of questioning him, so it was several weeks before he told me her name. Meanwhile, he did seem to trust me more than he had, and began to treat me like a reliable friend, which was progress of a kind. That kiss was not repeated, of course. From his point of view, I suppose, it was an aberration.

  I began reading Rebecca
’s notebook as soon as he left, and I was still reading it, approaching its disjointed end, late that night in my bedroom. Rebecca’s words flew straight off the page and into my heart. This winged girl gave me wings, I felt—but, as I discovered subsequently, that was not the reaction of others who read her story.

  So, perhaps my own state of mind was to blame for my response. If dry, clever, skeptical Rose were to ask me to describe that state of mind now, what should I say? I felt as if death and birth pressed me in on either side, like bookends. Rebecca was writing about giving birth when actually she was dying. Births, deaths, love, hate, the many guises that murder can take. Those forces swirled up at me from Rebecca’s pages and my own uncertainties, hopes, and ambitions spiraled to meet them. It was a maelstrom—and, in the midst of a maelstrom, as I shall tell Rose, should she ever bother to ask, no one’s objective.

  MY NEXT TASK—UNDERTAKEN AT TOM GALBRAITH’S SUGgestion—was to make a copy of Rebecca’s notebook. Tom insisted that it had been sent by that anonymous donor to my father, and was therefore his property. When he was stronger, he should be allowed to read it—I agreed with that, up to a point—but Tom also needed to be able to refer to it at will; there were a number of things, he said, that he wanted to check. It was during this conversation that, for the first time, he used the word verify.

  I didn’t like that word—it sounded chilly to me. But I could see how much Tom wanted to keep this story close to him, and I could see other advantages, too, so I agreed to help. Apart from anything else, it kept me occupied.

  I spent the rest of that rainy hospital week copying out Rebecca’s words. I could have used my old portable Hermes typewriter, but my typing abilities are not what they were. Apart from the WRAC wartime typing pool, I’d had a period of part-time secretarial drudgery in a lawyer’s office near here before my father’s health worsened. As a result, I associate typewriters with servitude.

  I decided to use pen and ink. Handwriting is as distinct as a person’s voice, so Rebecca’s tale looked very different in my neat legible hand. It looked mistranslated somehow, and its oddities were more noticeable. I’m a careful reader (Rose has trained me), so I’d noticed the gaps in Rebecca’s story, but they hadn’t worried me at all. I accepted them as part of the timbre of her tale. Now, altered by my own handwriting, those gaps yawned; what had seemed artless to me before now seemed artful and deliberate. I noticed the several references to evading truth, to dealing from the bottom of the pack. That concerned me, but I was convinced that a third notebook must exist, and I told myself that most of my questions would be answered there, in her final entry.

  I was a faithful amanuensis. I made only one change. I’d already decided that it would be this copy of her tale that would be given to my father (Tom could whisk the original away). This meant that I could make one small adjustment. When Rebecca wrote that if she were to die or disappear suddenly, she could rely on her “good friend Arthur Julyan” to insist on a full investigation, I edited. I sliced that sentence out. My father already feels guilty enough in this regard; I was determined to protect him from a remark I knew would pain him. I censored, in other words.

  By the time I’d completed my task, a week had gone by, and I believed we were due for our next installment. Rebecca’s diamond ring, Tom said, had been sent to Jack Favell on the same day the first notebook had been sent to my father. There had then been a seven-day interval before the second notebook arrived. This anonymous sender was oddly methodical! I was convinced that a third notebook would turn up by the first post that Wednesday morning. Barker and I hung about in the hall, waiting for the postman. He delivered a communication from the Inland Revenue and a grocery bill. We waited for the second post: nothing.

  I was disappointed and frustrated. I itched to know more. Tom Galbraith was busying himself with his dreary tasks of verification; he’d returned to London in search of backup secondary sources. I was impatient with that. I wanted to tap straight into the primary source, I wanted to hear Rebecca’s voice again. Transcribing is a strange process; she’d become my friend and confidante by then, and it’s possible that I was especially vulnerable to her seductions: I was lonely at The Pines without my father, and I knew that worse lonelinesses inevitably lay in wait for me. I wished I could learn how to grab life by the scruff of its neck as fearlessly as Rebecca had.

  When no further installment arrived I gave in to temptation. I went into my father’s study and looked at the folders he’d laid tidily on his desk before he left for the hospital. Inside them were the fruits of those searches he’d been making these past weeks. He’d not forbidden me to open those folders, but he hadn’t encouraged me to do so, either.

  I circled his desk. I looked at the ramparts of books. I slid open and slid shut the specimen drawers with their butterflies. With a grumbling arthritic sound, Barker lay down on the hearthrug, and looked at me expectantly. I battled briefly with my conscience, then gave in. I opened the folders and box files. Poor Daddy.

  No wonder he’d been so defensive of this “archive,” as he likes to call it. No wonder he’d delayed showing it to Tom or to me: His pride would have been badly wounded by such an inspection, for the contents here were pitiful. What did my father’s much-vaunted special information consist of? His own account of his “quest” which I’d read another time, if he permitted; invitation cards to Manderley parties; a few scrawled notes from Rebecca concerning local charitable events; the annual programs for the Kerrith regattas in which she always took part; some Manderley recipes that my mother requested.

  I felt I was trespassing, but I went on with my search. Initially, the only evidence of interest I found was a photograph of four women in elaborate dresses taking tea in the gardens at Manderley; they were identified on the back, in my father’s handwriting, as the three beautiful Grenville sisters and Max’s grandmother, the “old beast” of Rebecca’s tale.

  The grandmother looked magisterial; Evangeline’s features were obscured by a huge hat; poor Virginia had averted her face; beautiful Isolda was here aged about sixteen; she was sitting on the grass at Virginia’s feet, her lovely hair unbound, and tumbling across her shoulders. I fetched my father’s magnifying glass: Isolda’s sepia expression was irritable; she was frowning at the camera, her lips slightly parted. In all photographs, there’s a secret force, a missing person—the cameraman. Who had taken this picture? Lionel de Winter?

  Apart from this photograph, the only other item of interest was a batch of letters from Maxim de Winter; at first these, too, proved dry and disappointing. Then, at the bottom of the pile, I found the last of them, sent to Singapore, written in a small close slanting hand on thin air-mail writing paper:

  My dear Julyan,

  It was good to hear from you—it’s excellent news that you and your family will shortly be returning to Kerrith. Don’t worry about being “underemployed” as you put it. Once you’re here, you’ll quickly find that every damn committee of do-gooders will be trying to co-opt you. A vacancy on the Bench is coming up, I hear, so, if taking on the burden of J.P. and magistrate interests you, just say so and I’ll put in a word. You may regard your appointment as a certainty.

  Now, I write with important news. I’m about to be married, so will be confounding all those confounded bores who’d made up their minds that I was turning into a crusty confirmed bachelor. I’ve finally met the only woman I could ever make my wife. Her name is Rebecca—her father, now dead, was an expat who made a fortune through mining investments in South Africa. We have acquaintances in common, and move in circles that overlap, though Rebecca moves with a faster and more fashionable crowd than I care for. I first glimpsed her last summer at various London parties, but couldn’t contrive to be introduced to her. She’s the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen. I was bowled over the instant I set eyes on her.

  Beyond this, I won’t attempt to describe her. By the time you return, we’ll already be married—we plan to marry in some style in France, where Rebecca h
as relations, and may honeymoon at a chateau they own there before traveling on to Monte Carlo in search of sun. We’ll return in the spring, when Manderley is at its loveliest. So, in due course, you’ll be able to see for yourself how extraordinary Rebecca is, and how lucky I am to have carried off this prize—in the face of some cutthroat competition, I may say! I think Beatrice wasn’t quite sure what to make of her—you know what a stick in the mud Bee is—but my grandmother has been utterly won over by her. If I’d had any doubts (which I didn’t, of course), Gran would have scotched them!

  I brought Rebecca to Manderley for the first time last week—very nervous, as you may imagine—and she fell in love with the place the instant she saw it, which was a tremendous relief. Stupidly, I’d been afraid that she might find it too remote, or not up to her smart metropolitan standards; Manderley isn’t to everyone’s taste, and some women might find it daunting—but, as I’m discovering, nothing daunts Rebecca.

  God knows, the old place is looking rundown. Since the war, I’ve had my work cut out getting the estate back into good order, and even with Crawley’s help it’s been an uphill task. When it came to the house, I didn’t know where to begin—it’s scarcely been touched since my father died—but that doesn’t dismay Rebecca; she can see its potential, as I can, and says she can’t wait to get her hands on it.

  I can’t describe the turmoil of these last few months, and the alteration Rebecca’s made in my life, Arthur. I remember your once saying to me that marriage was like entering safe harbor. I can’t say that it