The Other Rebecca
Page 6
And so did I, but as I lay there next to him in the early hours of the morning, watching him sleep (how innocent he looked! how beautiful! how gentle!), I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear his not being the man I wanted him to be. I couldn’t bear his cruel truthfulness. I couldn’t bear the thought of other women’s hands on him, and even less could I bear the thought of his hands on them, but most of all, I couldn’t bear not being able to bear it. I didn’t want to need someone. I didn’t want to go through life with one half of my mind wondering where its other half was. To feel lonely when I was alone, to feel incomplete unless I was touched, held, accompanied, protected … I didn’t want to be in a cage. I didn’t want to be in love.
And so I extricated myself, without much difficulty. When I removed myself from his embrace, he reached out for the pillow and, mistaking it for me, drew it closer. I put on my clothes, did a makeshift repair on my blouse, and set out for the point and Mrs Van Hopper’s villa. When I got there – I don’t know if it was out of habit or to cancel out the memory – I went in through my bedroom window. I put on my robe, went into the bathroom, drew myself a hot bath and sat in it until the water was almost cold.
My bags were packed and next to the door by the time Mrs Van Hopper’s alarm went off. Marco arrived at seven and closed the shutters while I washed and dried the breakfast dishes. We were on our way to the airport by half past. When we drove past La Residencia, I looked the other way.
Our plane was due to take off at eleven in the morning. We went through to the transit lounge just after ten. I left Marco and Mrs Van Hopper in the bar and went to buy a Herald Tribune. I returned to find them pulling up a chair for Max.
They were in shock. Pleasantly so, but still in shock. ‘Oh no, of course not,’ Mrs Van Hopper was saying to him. ‘Please, don’t apologise. We understand completely. No, it doesn’t sound at all insane. It sounds romantic!’
‘And here she is!’ Marco now cried. He and Mrs Van Hopper looked up and beamed at me.
‘Goodness, you silly thing!’ said Mrs Van Hopper. ‘You might have told me. At the very least, you might have given me a little hint.’
Max turned to me. ‘I’m sorry about this, but under the circumstances, I didn’t see what else I could do. I’ve explained to them that I came out here to propose to you.’ He gave me a cold stare. ‘I know it’s abrupt, but I don’t believe that vacillating has ever done me or anyone else much good in such circumstances. All I can say is that if you come to London with me this morning, and then change your mind later, I’ll still look after you.’ Then, in a gentler voice, he added, ‘I’ll … make sure you’re all right.’
‘But I can’t go to London with you this morning. I’m flying to Milan. And so is my luggage.’
‘Don’t worry about details,’ said Max. ‘If you want to come with me, then I can arrange it.’
And so he did. Half an hour later Max and I were waiting for takeoff, sitting in first class even though we had economy tickets. ‘I didn’t ask for them, and I didn’t tell any lies,’ Max insisted. ‘I just told them that I work for a newspaper and have very long legs.’
We were not going straight to London, as it turned out, but stopping off for a night in Paris. It was, he explained in a matter-of-fact voice, the best he could do at such short notice in the way of a honeymoon. ‘We’ll do the real thing after the real marriage.’ He might as well have been discussing a trip to the supermarket. But when the plane taxied down the runway, he reached for my hand and squeezed it tight. When we took off, he took in a deep breath and did not exhale until the no-smoking light went off. He took out a cigarette and his lighter but his hands were so shaky he couldn’t light it. That was when he caved in.
‘I’m sorry,’ he sobbed, as he accepted my tissue, ‘but that was hard. It’s not the way I planned it, and neither is this – but there you are.’ He pulled his briefcase out from underneath the seat, rummaged in it, brought out a box and offered it to me. It contained a diamond ring. ‘It was my mother’s,’ he explained. ‘I picked it up when I went home last Wednesday. You don’t have to wear it.’
But I did, even though it was tight on my finger. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get it fixed in Oxford.’ As he began to talk plans – where we would go for the night in Paris, why we had to leave so early for London the next day – his voice began to steady. He brought out the map to show me where he lived, where we would live. I looked at the names of villages – Stanton St John, Islip, Marston, Kidlington, Wolvercote, Beckfield – and that was when it hit me. I was going to Beckfield. I was going to be living there, not as some shadowy retainer but as Max’s fiancée and eventually as his wife. Max had rescued me from limbo. The army of ifs had evaporated. My road was mapped, my future waiting at the end of it.
I could see the road. I could see the emerald trees hanging over the curve in the half distance, I could see the stone houses that came into view as I hurtled round it. I could smell the warm rain. I was in a car full of children – his children and our children. I could hear them chattering behind me in the back seat. I could feel the warmth of the home standing ready for us. All I had to do was close my eyes and I could see it, down to the smallest detail. Not once during the next twenty-four hours did it occur to me why.
I had never felt safer or more certain than I did during that flying visit to Paris. When Max directed the taxi to stop in front of a nondescript green door, I knew even before I pushed it open that our hotel would be a mansion in a garden, and that our room would be in the back, giving out into the garden through French doors. I recognised the restaurant where he took me to eat, even though I had never been to it before. I could taste the food before we had picked up the menus. And when we got back to our room, before we had taken off our clothes, I could feel the sheets tangled and twisted around us. When the morning came, the sun didn’t rise, it unfolded. Breakfast, porter, taxi, airport, plane, they all arrived on silent runners. It was only later, when we were coming in for landing at Heathrow, coasting over the green fields west of Windsor, that Mrs Van Hopper’s last words came back to me.
It was after all the arrangements had been made. We still had time to kill before flying off to our separate destinations. I had offered, as a last act of apology, to take her and her wheelchair through the duty-free shop. As we were waiting at the till with her two bottles of Poire William, she looked up at me and said, ‘Well, well, well. Who would have thought how very, very much stranger life is than fiction? And who would have thought it, that I would be the instrument by which Max Midwinter found a replacement for his Rebecca? I can’t wait to tell my friends. Well, my dear, I hope you find it interesting, to borrow a concept from the Chinese, because you certainly won’t find any happiness. Not with that lot. No, my dear. You’re just not special enough. You’ll never live her down, even if you kill yourself trying.’
II
Chattering Classes
Chapter Seven
We parted company outside passport control, he to pass quickly through the EC channel, and I to wait to go through the one marked ‘Other’ with a long queue of prospective immigrants. When my turn came about, I almost made the mistake of saying that I had come to England to get married. But then, just in time, when I saw the customs officer’s appraising eyes, I realised the trouble the truth would cause, and so I lied and said the purpose of my visit was pleasure.
Max was waiting for me on the other side of the barrier. His smile was strained – as mine would have been, I’m sure, had I known what lay ahead. ‘Your luggage has arrived from Milan and is waiting for us at the desk,’ he told me. He put his arm around me and led me to the escalator. ‘You look tired,’ he said. Try and get some sleep before we get to Oxford. You’ll need it.’
A tidy, grey-haired man was waiting for us outside customs. Although it was August, he was wearing a coat. He called me ‘miss’ and Max ‘sir’, made the usual enquiries about the flight, and appeared to be delighted that it had been smooth.
‘I hope you
don’t mind, sir, but I’ve left the car in the short-term car park.’
‘You didn’t have to go to all that trouble. We could have found you outside,’ Max said.
‘Well, sir, under normal circumstances I would have done so. But …’ He let the sentence hang portentously and gave Max a meaningful stare. Max responded with a blank one. ‘It won’t take me five minutes, sir. Five minutes and I shall be waiting under the Courtesy Limousine sign.’
‘That’s fine,’ Max said briskly. ‘That will give me time to cash a cheque.’
‘At Thomas Cook’s, sir?’
‘Yes, if it’s open,’ Max said.
‘I hope you don’t mind my intruding, sir, but under the circumstances I would advise waiting. What I mean to say, sir, is that you’ll want to give W. H. Smith a wide berth.’
‘Aha,’ said Max. ‘Yes, I follow you. Thanks.’ He pulled out his wallet and counted his cash. ‘I suppose I can wait until tomorrow anyway.’
‘Right-o, then,’ said the man, and he hurried off.
‘I’m awfully sorry about this,’ Max said as we headed towards the door. ‘This was my aunt Bea’s idea. If it had been up to me, we would have taken the bus. But she wanted us there in time for lunch. You see, it’s my uncle’s birthday.’
‘Is this their chauffeur?’ I asked.
‘No, it’s a company. Bea uses it for airports and dinner parties in London. There are three drivers, and we all rather dread getting this one because he was at Cambridge with my uncle.’
‘What’s so bad about that?’
‘It’s rather obvious, isn’t it?’
As we went through the doors, we were hit by a blast of cold, damp air. ‘Any opportunity to put the knife in, he’ll take it,’ Max continued. ‘He specialises in the Significant Look, as you may have noticed. That heavy hint about W. H. Smith, for example. That means there’s something about me on the front page of one of the papers. He’s pretending to be shocked and disapproving, but he’s dying to talk to me about it. In front of you, if at all possible.’
‘What could it be about?’
‘I’m quite sure I know. This is not the right time to talk about it. Best, in any case, to let me handle it for the time being. You have enough on your plate today already.’
He took my hand. It was shaking. ‘Don’t be nervous,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to perform for them. All you have to do is be yourself.’
‘I’m not nervous, I’m cold.’
‘There’s bound to be a travel rug in the back seat. Why don’t you stretch out and shut your eyes? I’ll keep the old bugger happy by sitting in the front.’
I fell asleep before we reached the motorway. When I awoke, I had no idea where I was, how I had come to be in this limousine, or who the two men were conferring sotto voce on the other side of the partition. My first thought, probably due to the conspiratorial tone they took in order to conceal their mutual contempt, was that they were abducting me, and the suspicion remained even after I had recovered my bearings. This was the man I had agreed to marry. I had agreed to marry a man I could not recognise by the back of his head.
I could not recognise him by the back of his head, but I recognised his cottage the moment we pulled up in front of it. There it was, a long stone thatched cottage running perpendicular to the road, with a walled garden on the far side, a wooden fence on the near side joining it with another thatched cottage covered with ivy. There was the communal lawn. There, beyond the lawn, was the tennis court, and beyond the tennis court, the wall, and in the wall, the green gate leading to the manor house where his aunt lived. I recognised it and I was afraid of it, but I couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t until Max led me down the path through the emerald lawn towards the tall grey manor, and up past the bronze lions that stood to either side of the front door, that I realised what the problem was. I was afraid of my new life because of the way Rebecca had described it.
I was walking into the first scene of The Marriage Hearse. The gothic scene where the heroine makes her first disastrous visit to her husband’s family – making scores of faux pas no one has the mercy to correct. There was the grand piano that they lured her to, there were the peacock feathers with ‘pedigree’, there, on the side table, was the guest book that contained the inscription that had become the family joke, and there in the alcove, above the fireplace, was the mantelpiece covered with large, gilt-lettered invitations that she had picked up to examine with such unguarded enthusiasm. And there, standing under the arch and exclaiming, ‘Oh, how wonderful, you’ve made it!’ was the charming, two-faced aunt.
She looked exactly as Rebecca had described her: a pretty face that acted as a foil for her sharp, mischievous grey eyes; a rounded but trim figure, wearing a shift made from African material; straight shoulder-length white hair that looked too good to be true and gave her the air of a girl playing an adult in a school play. As she made her way across the room, her rich, loud but beautifully modulated voice preceded her. ‘It’s so nice to meet you. I am sorry to have dragged you back from Paris. It was frightfully selfish of me, but I did want to be the first to meet you.’
She kissed me on one cheek and then she stood back to survey me like a painting. ‘Oh, well done, Max. Well done.’
I knew better than to believe her.
She took me by the hand, grasping it rather more tightly than was necessary, and led me into the sitting room to a row of curious eyes and anxious smiles that ought to have been new to me. Except that I knew them – not from photographs but from Rebecca’s fictitious versions of them in The Marriage Hearse. There was Giles, who was Max’s uncle and Bea’s second husband and the saviour of the family name and fortunes. He was leaning on his cane and containing the pain that he was too well brought up to express. There, huddled next to him, with their hands in supplicating poses and their heads half bowed as if to ward off adult attention, were William and Hermione, Max’s children. And there, sitting next to them, was a narrow-shouldered, wiry, ginger-haired woman with large cornflower eyes. This was Danny, who was distantly related to both sides of Max’s family. She was the woman who had first introduced him to Rebecca, and who now looked after her papers as well as her children. It became apparent, from the way she jumped up and threw her arms around Max, that this was not all she had been looking after.
Or trying to look after. He did not return her effusive greeting but moved on to his children, who pulled him down on the settee and crowded onto his lap. Unfazed, she sat down next to them and put her arm around him. ‘Don’t be such a selfish sausage, I’m a human being too,’ she said. Then she fixed her large cornflower eyes on me and smiled and said, ‘Welcome to Manderley.’
Chapter Eight
I wasn’t going to let Rebecca do my thinking for me. She had been wrong about Max. She was probably wrong about everything else. She had twisted things to fit her script, but now she was dead. This was not her life I was entering. It was mine.
This was not the first scene in The Marriage Hearse. And the Danny who was now bringing the children over to me was not the crazed, possessive fiend I had read about. Her smile was kind; her effort to make me feel at home genuine. It was the children who would not cooperate – the boy by refusing to look me in the eye even when we were shaking hands, the girl by fixing me with a stare worthy of Medusa. Danny talked over their silence and passed them back to their father’s care when I failed to come up with a way to engage them.
I caught Max’s eye, tried to indicate to him that I had run into trouble, tried to indicate to him also that I had taken it in my stride. He returned my meaningful look with a blank one, as if to say, not now when there are so many people watching. This brought me up short – it was just the type of thing the husband in the book would do. But I would not let my mind travel any further in that direction. I was not Rebecca. Nor was I the heroine of her book. I might be American, but I had lived in England before. Not for long, and never in such high places, but I knew better than to play ‘Chopsticks’ on
the piano for strangers, or lecture dinner guests on the gender issues of peahens, or pick up someone else’s invitations and marvel over the number and variety of titles. Yes, I was on display now, but that was natural, that would happen anywhere, to any woman being introduced at such short notice into her new family. I had got off to a bad start, but at least I knew it.
It would have been better if I had known not to sit on a wig stand. But as I said to Bea, that was the problem: I wasn’t thinking. I was flustered, meeting so many new people at the same time.
‘It doesn’t matter, darling,’ Bea insisted. Truly it doesn’t. It was just a silly old wig stand. I’m sure it can be fixed.’
I wasn’t convinced, but I didn’t press it. I needed her loud, cheerful voice to shelter me from Max and his children. I needed her to fill in the gaps of my faltering conversations with the loose collection of carelessly beautiful and, to me, interchangeable daughters and cousins and cousins’ friends and spouses who had filtered into the room after us, all holding their empty fluted champagne glasses as gingerly as if they were filled to the brim. They didn’t seem to know how to treat me. The questions they would have liked to ask – Who are you? What are you doing here? What could Max be thinking by bringing you here? – were so large as to make small talk impossible.
So I was grateful for the better-than-life version she served up for them. ‘You don’t mind if I tell them, darling, do you? It’s too romantic. Truly it is. It could only happen to our Max. He’d gone down to Mallorca for Gregory’s birthday party, which was the usual disaster, with all the most boring people you can think of, lots of academics from Nebraska and boring TV personalities with toupés and false teeth sipping low-alcohol sangria, and Lydia’s version of nouvelle cuisine – pork crackling wrapped up in violets, and those empty vols-au-vents she does, decorated with strands of saffron around the edges so that they look like sea anemones, and those horrid pastry things you expect to be pigs in blankets only to find grapes inside instead of sausages … Great chef that she is, she always makes sure that you get them piping hot. There was poor old Max, with the roof of his mouth lacerated from one of Lydia’s cochons en croute, so when he heard a cry coming from one of the upper windows, his first thought was that someone else had sustained a third-degree burn from the hors d’oeuvres … He decided to check upstairs just in case, as the sound appeared to be coming from Gregory’s room – and he walked in to find the wicked old wolf about to put his fangs into his lovely young nurse! Naturally, he threw Gregory aside and picked up the nurse in his arms, and just as naturally – don’t you think? – the nurse fainted, and so he rushed off downstairs with her, and when her eyes fluttered open, they took one look at each other and fell madly in love. And I think it’s rather wonderful, don’t you, that she turned out not to be a nurse in distress at all, but a writer in distress. A rather good writer in distress – there’s her latest collection of stories over there, propped up against Queen Mary. They’re a bit above me, I’m afraid. They do all sorts of things like interconnect.’