The Other Rebecca

by Maureen Freely

  ‘Yes, now. Well,’ she said when she sat down at the table. Fixing her gently ironic smile on me, she asked, ‘Question number one. Have you a valid driver’s licence?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘British, US or international?’

  ‘US and international but not British.’

  She scribbled down my answer, then looked up. ‘Would you like to apply for a British licence, and if so, will you be needing a lesson first? What we need to know, dear, is whether you’re used to driving on our side of the road.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I assume the only way to learn is to go out there and just drive. Wouldn’t you say?’

  Janet reached into the pocket of her housecoat and pulled out a set of keys. ‘These are for the black Volvo parked outside the big house. You can use it whenever you like, but I’m to buy you a map when I go out later on to do your shopping. We thought I ought to do your shopping until you’ve found your bearings. This brings us to your shopping list. Do you have any preferences for this evening?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What do the children like?’

  ‘I believe they’ll be out for tea today. Danny seems to be taking them off to a birthday party. It’ll be you and Max – pardon me, Mr Midwinter.’

  ‘What does he usually have?’

  ‘Oh, well. He’s rather unpredictable, as I’m sure you know. We thought that unless you had a strong preference, I should make a fisherman’s pie.’

  ‘There’s no need for you to go to all that trouble. I’ll make something myself.’

  We were halfway through our shopping list when the phone rang. It was a woman asking for Mrs Midwinter. Without thinking, I said she was dead.

  ‘Oh!’ said the woman, taken aback. As soon as I put the receiver down, it rang again. This time it was a man whose voice I didn’t recognise. ‘That was my secretary. You’ve practically given her a heart attack. What’s come over you?’

  It was only at this point that I realised it was Max. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m feeling rather disoriented.’

  ‘Are they treating you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, perfectly,’ I said. ‘Your aunt’s left a list of practical questions and we’re about halfway through it.’

  ‘Don’t let them organise you into oblivion. You must tell them when you want them to stop. And you mustn’t rush around tiring yourself out. You have all the time in the world for those practical questions. The important thing is for you to accustom yourself to the house.’

  ‘That’s probably a taller order than a shopping list.’

  ‘I don’t quite follow.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘How are the children?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re not here.’

  ‘They’re not?’ he said, surprised. Then, after a silence, he said, ‘Oh, yes, of course. It’s Art Week. Sorry. Listen, there’s someone just come in to see me. I’ll try to get back ahead of the traffic. By the way, I’ve asked Janet to leave the papers in a folder on the desk in my bedroom. I mean our bedroom. If you have a chance, you should probably read them.’

  Chapter Eleven

  I tried. I started with that day’s tabloids because they mentioned me. ‘Mad Max brings home mystery bride,’ said one headline. Another said, ‘A foreign lamb to the slaughter?’ They had a photograph of us getting into the limousine at the airport. This surprised me, since I hadn’t noticed a photographer.

  The article tied my arrival in with the new biography, itemising its main selling points: that the official story about Rebecca’s last month, and particularly her last night, ‘begged many questions’, that the author, ‘a cousin and very close friend’, had been the last outside the ‘Beckfield Mafia’ to speak to her; that his evidence, although incomplete, allegedly pointed to the conclusion that Rebecca had neither drowned, as the family had always claimed, nor committed suicide, as other biographers had suggested, but had been ‘quite literally blown out of the water by her outraged in-laws’.

  The next thing I read were the excerpts from the biography itself in the Sunday Times. The first instalment carried a photograph of the author – a large, dark and troubled-looking man with a stubble beard and a ring in one ear. He was posing on a log, in his hand an electric chainsaw. According to the blurb, he was the son of a Bermudan millionaire and ‘related to Rebecca through his mother’. At sixteen he had been expelled from a Swiss boarding school for distributing pornography, despite which disgrace he had still managed to get into Oxford Poly. Having left his course after his second year, he had gone on to earn a living first as a male model and then as a mover specialising in pianos, although he had recently used his inheritance to save an ailing quality press.

  The first instalment was a sentimental storm-cloud version of how Max had met Rebecca. Although it went out of its way to show how much more sophisticated Rebecca was than her heroine in The Marriage Hearse, it confirmed her damning fictionalisation of the Midwinters.

  They looked at her and saw that she would do. Yes, she would do very nicely as their appointed court jester. She would make them laugh, she would write well-turned out works that would add lustre to the family name, and last but not least, she would lend her body to the common cause and provide them with an heir. That was the bargain as they saw it. She needed their patronage and they needed a sow. They did not think they needed to spell it out. And so it was that Rebecca walked into the gilded lion’s den without any idea of what was expected of her …

  He then went on to outline the scandalous careers of the other lions. Max’s father, Ben Midwinter, had been

  Swinging London’s most outrageous portrait artist, his main claim to fame being his fondness for painting his friends’ nubile daughters in the nude and then selling the works back to his friends for exorbitant sums.

  He undoubtedly met his match in Max’s mother, Caroline Midwinter, the best-selling mystery writer and outspoken Catholic convert who was, until her recent retirement, fast becoming a national monument – but where did she get her plots and why were all her victims women? Perhaps she was practising literary voodoo on her husband’s many mistresses and illegitimate children. How does she bear the shame, and was it the strain of the constant humiliation that led to her becoming a recluse? The greatest humiliation must have come from the knowledge that her husband’s first and foremost mistress was her very own sister, née Bea Allinson and then Bea Copley, wife of the renowned City fraudster, and now herself a Midwinter, thanks to her propitious eleventh-hour marriage to Ben’s younger brother Giles.

  Giles is known as the family saint. Like most saints, he owes most of his halo to a combination of luck and careful manipulation. He spent the early part of his adult life as headmaster of a boys’ boarding school in Kampala. Having lost his first wife and their three children during one of the seventies massacres, he returned to this country to find that brother Ben was running through the last of the family fortunes. He decided to make a nest egg for his retirement by writing up his misadventures. The result was that masterpiece of understatement, Under Liz, which sold so well that he was able to use the proceeds not just to buy himself Beckfield House, but to set up the press that went on to manufacture that most bogus of literary cliques, the Hertford Five. Since foisting this fiction on an unsuspecting and easily cowed audience, he has become steadily more prosperous. He has devoted much time to grooming nephew Max to take over the family business, which has now taken on an aura of timelessness despite its being less than two decades old. He makes skilful use of a host of family retainers and destitute, if overeducated, relations. At the same time he has been instrumental in keeping other, less respectable family members at arm’s length. It was Giles who arranged for Max’s older brother Jonathan to be disinherited after his drug problems were made public. And it was Giles who banished his difficult and sometimes embarrassingly garrulous brother Ben to spend twelve months a year in St John the Baptist after Ben’s nearly fatal accident in 1981 lef
t him less than compos mentis.

  The second instalment began with an account of the nearly fatal car crash. Its main significance, according to the biographer, was that it ended Rebecca’s honeymoon with the Midwinter family, and began the nightmare that inspired The Marriage Hearse. It had happened on St John the Baptist during the Christmas period. Ben had been in no state to drive, and so the fault lay with him, but Rebecca had been in the car with him.

  This aroused the suspicions of Queen Mistress Bea, who no longer knew lover Ben in biblical terms but was not about to let anyone else know him that way either, and mistakenly assumed that there must have been some sexual reason for Ben and Rebecca being in a car together, and so blamed her for leading Ben into the accident. Rebecca naturally refused to be framed and told Bea that she was wrong. But no one ever tells Bea that she is wrong, and so from that time on she declared war on Rebecca, undermining her in much the same way as her fictitious alter ego undermined the heroine of The Marriage Hearse, with much the same results. Before Rebecca put herself into treatment and pulled herself together to write The Marriage Hearse, she was drinking vodka for breakfast and having heroin with her afternoon tea.

  The instalment concluded with an account of Rebecca’s final visit to Max’s father’s resort on St John the Baptist. It began, ominously, with the official story: she had stayed on after a family holiday, claiming back trouble, and then gone straight out to sea in her little boat after driving Max and the children to the airport. She had been warned not to go out by Bea because the weather looked chancy. But she had insisted, saying, ‘A storm is just what I need.’

  Then it moved on to recapitulate the story as embellished in the Oswald biography: that it had not been back trouble that had kept Rebecca back, but mental illness. She had gone into a decline after finishing The Marriage Hearse and fallen first into alcoholism and then back into her old drug habits. Instead of receiving the kind of help she needed, she had been barred from her children and even her own bank account. She had tried to rehabilitate herself, but during the fateful trip to St John the Baptist, her resolve had weakened. She had gone on a binge along with a number of other black sheep from Max’s extended family, together with a party of defectors from a nearby Buddhist community. When Max left in a huff with the children, there was no one in the remaining group who was sober enough to keep her from getting on her boat to go out and ride the storm.

  But it was not just dysfunction that killed her, as the puritanical Oswald contends. It was fear for the family name, the kind of fear felt most keenly by those whose family names are not quite as old as they might like them to be, by those, in short, whose family names are associated in the public mind not with great wars or lofty government office but with frozen fish and middle-of-the-market meat products. It is often noted that The Marriage Hearse was published three months after Rebecca’s death. What no one bothers to add is that bound proofs of the book would have been circulating well before her death. The responses to these proofs were indeed the substance of my last telephone conversation with Rebecca, made only hours before her ill-fated decision to take out the Eressos.

  ‘They’re out to get me,’ she told me. ‘They’ve read the book and they’ve asked me to withdraw it from publication and I’ve told them over my dead body, and they appear to be taking the invitation seriously.’ Those were among her last words to me. Although there are only ninety minutes between the time of our call and the time she is said to have lifted her anchor, she was not drunk, and records show that the storm that was brewing did not in fact start until early the following morning. In my concluding article next Sunday, I shall put it to you that there are good reasons why (a) Rebecca’s boat was never officially discovered, (b) Rebecca’s body was never subjected to a UK autopsy and (c) the evidence of other key witnesses has been suppressed. Following my account of the cover-up I shall offer new evidence that will, I hope, result in the case being reopened.

  I turned to Max’s paper. Max, it seemed, had written his editorial without having had a chance to read this second instalment. And so it responded only to the hints in the first instalment that the family had wanted Rebecca dead because of its outrage over The Marriage Hearse. This, Max said in his own editorial, was ‘patently ludicrous’.

  If we had wanted to save our name, why didn’t we simply suppress The Marriage Hearse? We may not have welcomed this work or its effect on the public, but we respect it as a work of art. We would like to ask the public to do the same: to accept it as a work of the imagination, and not as a coded suicide note. My wife’s death was a tragic accident. Her children and I will be marked by it for life. I am now intending to remarry and to try and make a new life. I would like to ask that my fiancée and I be left in peace. The author of the new biography may well believe what he has written, but the careful reader will see that the account so far is long on interpretation and short on facts. I have no idea what proof he expects to provide in later instalments, but I would like to suggest that any account that has had the inconsistencies smoothed out of it – that is convincing, that suggests only one possible conclusion – is likely to belong more to the realm of fiction than the realm of fact. The author is a man with a long-standing grudge against my family – not to mention his own family – and all the things he thinks we stand for. So, by all means, read what he has to say, but don’t forget to ask yourself what he has gained by saying it.

  ‘My fiancée and I…’ I counted backwards, recalling the deadline. He had written these words before he had proposed to me. How could he have presumed this, and presumed it so publicly? As I leafed through the rest of the book section, a sour pit grew in my stomach. I put the rest of the papers back into the folder and went out for a walk.

  Janet had now moved across the lawn to Danny’s cottage and was airing it out. Beyond the wall, I could see a man cutting back the ivy on Beckfield House. The sound of his clippers was drowned out by an approaching lawnmower. I opened the wide wooden gate. My first thought was to find a way into the fields across the lane. I was deterred by a sign that said, ‘Beware Minimal Disease Pigs’. I turned left to walk down the lane into what promised to be the centre of the village, but there turned out not to be a centre. Nor was there a pavement. After having to jump up against the wall twice to avoid speeding cars, I turned back and headed to the gaunt church I had noticed at the crest of the hill facing Oxford when we had driven up from the ring road the previous day. It, too, was hard to reach because of the cars careening around the blind curve. Its lawn was overgrown. Most of its tombstones were a century old, if not even older, except for one new marble slab at the far eastern corner. It was only as I made my approach that it occurred to me it might belong to Rebecca. And it was only when I read the words on it that I remembered the controversy. It did not say Rebecca Slaughter-Midwinter, the name we all knew her by. It just said Rebecca Slaughter – as if to tell the world that she was no longer a member of that family.

  A dog jumped on me. I let out a cry before I recognised it was Jasper. ‘Come here, you naughty thing!’ said an imperious voice. It belonged to Danny. She calmed Jasper down, then kneeled down next to me.

  ‘Well,’ she said brightly. ‘That’s one mystery solved.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t quite sure where you fit into the scheme of things. Now I know you’re an aider and abetter.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow you,’ I said.

  This made her laugh. ‘What I meant really is that you’ve started on the best possible footing. Here, I mean. I come here every day, for guidance. And, yes, also the view. Do you know her work well?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘Some of it backwards as well as forwards.’

  ‘Oh, that’s smashing! That will make for a terrific change,’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s been so difficult, spending so much time immersed in her words, and to be able to discuss them with absolutely no one! You probably know, don’t you, that I’m editing her letters?’

&nb
sp; I said I did.

  ‘If you like, I can show some to you. Actually, when I lose my bearings, you might be the perfect person to cast the deciding vote. Although you must say – you must! You must! – if I’m taking away precious time. Max says you’ll be wanting to get back to work at once, and that we’re not to let the little monsters trouble you until you’ve found your feet.’

  She took my hand. ‘Max said I shouldn’t push you into it, but as it turns out you’re one of us, you might welcome the opportunity. I myself found the place quite inspiring. If I were working on a real book, like you, I couldn’t think of a better haven. Here, let me take you to Dragoman’s Lair. That’s what she called it, you know.’

  It wasn’t until she had led me back to Garden Cottage and up the stairs that I realised she was talking about Rebecca’s study.

  Chapter Twelve

  She opened it with a key on her chain, from which dangled a small, plastic, flesh-coloured hand. ‘Goodness,’ Danny said. ‘I must get Janet in here. Pardon the dust!’

  But the first things I noticed about this small, cluttered room were the signs of use. The bookshelves were unevenly arranged. Some books rested face out while others were stacked over the spines. There were invitations propped against the rows of books. One of the filing-cabinet drawers was peeping open. On top of the cabinet lay a shoebox, a cassette, a pile of envelopes. There was crumpled paper in the wastepaper basket, a pair of woolly slippers at the foot of the chaise longue, and on the telephone table next to it was a notepad with doodles on it. Behind the floor lamp was a bulletin board. Half of it was covered by a calendar, and the other half with bills and invoices. On the floor was a rug I first mistook for a Turkish kilim and then recognised as Navajo.