The Other Rebecca

by Maureen Freely

‘I don’t need anyone to tell me,’ Crawley said. ‘I know the boy too well. This outrageous way he’s carrying on out there. If you look carefully you’ll see that there’s no connection, no connection at all. He wants you to know he doesn’t need you but it’s so terribly obvious that his problem is the opposite. He needs you too much. He’s doing this for you, my dear. I’d like you to take note of my emphasis. For you. As intolerable as this might be for you, my girl, the significant part of it for me is that it’s the first time in memory that he hasn’t done it for Rebecca.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind if I put off going out there to thank him.’

  Crawley sighed. ‘What else could you expect, dearie, what else would you expect?’ He took my hand and patted it. ‘I imagine I would be condescending to you if I lectured you on suicide. And yes, I do think it was a suicide, by the way. Even if she didn’t plan to die on that particular day, she was gambling with death and it doesn’t really matter from our point of view whether what did happen counted as a win or a loss. What happened to Max is that he lost half of his imagination when she went off on that boat. Or rather, the other half of his imagination became a ghost. He’s spent the last three years playing to that ghost. It’s a good sign that he’s not doing it now. But he’s terrified. You share your mind with someone else as he did with her, you lose her and your mind, and you never want it to happen again. But he’s lucky to have found you because you understand that, don’t you? Because it’s happened to you.’

  ‘How can you be so sure of that?’

  ‘Don’t insult my inquisitorial intelligence. I didn’t have to ask anyone, if that’s what you were asking. You have death and disaster coming out of your pores. I don’t think you two walking corpses fell in love. The way I would put it? You interlocked. He’s only half here. You’re only half here. You each hope that the two halves will make a whole, when in fact it’s never quite that simple, is it? The whole always being so much less than the sum of its parts, eh?’

  We watched Madame Blackberry rip a page out of a notebook and hand it to Max. He folded it carefully and put it into his back pocket, then glanced over his shoulders to reassure himself that no one was taking notice.

  Crawley chuckled. ‘What an operator! Pity it makes him hate himself even more.’

  ‘Is he really going to meet with her?’ I asked without thinking.

  ‘If he does, it won’t give him any pleasure. No, I’m afraid your problem is quite the opposite. Not losing him, but getting more of him than you bargained for. You’re engaged to a sick man, my girl. He also happens to be an extraordinary man, a gifted man, a one-off. He’s the only real friend I have in the world and I would fall off the edge of the earth if he asked me to. But he’s also … Do you know what they were doing to each other by the end? Has he ever told you the story about the Morocco poems?’

  I admitted he hadn’t.

  ‘Well, it began with their taking a trip there en famille, and writing poems that contained the same metaphor. Can’t remember which. It had something to do with a samovar. They had a huge row about who owned the metaphor. Neither would sacrifice it, and so the feud amplified and before long they were actively stealing from one another, writing poems that made nonsense out of whatever the other had written. I’m surprised you hadn’t picked this up, but then you don’t really know Max’s work, do you? In its way, even The Marriage Hearse was an appropriation. Which is why,’ Crawley said, gesturing over at his stern and intelligently frowning wife, ‘which is why every night before I go to bed, I thank my stars I did not marry a writer.

  ‘That’s not quite fair,’ he then added. ‘Because of course Marie Lourdes does write inside her field. But although her spoken English is just as good as her French, her written English is not. And her imagination, if you can call it that, well, it’s a purely Cartesian affair. Her great flair is to take the mystery out of archaeology. You’ve got to hand it to her, it’s no mean feat. Why else do I love her?’ He tapped his head. ‘Because she can’t get in here.’

  Chapter Twenty

  That night, he began to make love to me before I had even taken off my clothes. We fell asleep embracing one another. The next morning, it was as if nothing bad had happened between us. The calm lasted until Friday evening and ended abruptly, rather in the way that the ground under your feet gives way when a dream turns into a nightmare.

  Max had taken the day off to attend an orientation meeting at the children’s school. William was entering what they called E-block, the first year in which pupils were streamed according to ability. When he came home, he told me that he was going to be in the lowest class but one, ‘because it seems I’m rather thick’.

  I objected – not, to be honest, from any deep conviction about his abilities but because I couldn’t bear to hear a child that age placing himself so low. I told him his problem was probably that he was too intelligent. Max seemed to balk at this but chose not to explain why. Instead, he furrowed his brow and left the room, returning with a sewing machine which he proceeded to set up on the dining table. Turning to Hermione, he said, ‘Now go to the airing cupboard and dig out that bag from the used-uniform sale, and while she’s doing that, William, I’d like you to have a look in the bedroom to see if you can find that Shepherd and Woodward bag that has all the name tapes.’

  After they left the room, he tested out the machine, only to find that there was something wrong with the thread. I asked him if he would like me to see if I could fix it, and that was when he turned on me.

  He told me I had no right to ask. The fact that I had asked indicated that I had no feelings. ‘You can flirt with mine, but I am not going to permit you to do the same with the children’s. You have no idea, do you, what it looks like to them? They’ve been hurt enough already, God damn you! Give me back my thread!’

  I was still standing there, holding the thread, when the children returned. When I told him I didn’t know what I had done to deserve the outburst, he hissed, ‘Pas devant les enfants.’ So I waited until after they were asleep, but still he wouldn’t speak to me. ‘I’ve a book to read’ was his first excuse. Then it was, ‘I really haven’t anything new to say.’ I pleaded with him. His response was, ‘If you can’t see the problem for yourself, then there is not a chance in hell I can make you see it.’

  When I tried to put my arms around him in bed, and he pushed me away, anger overtook me. It was the second time that I had shouted at him, and the first time my intent was to hurt. I accused him of using the children as pawns. Of hating women. Of envying their powers. Of wanting their mothers dead.

  This last accusation stunned him into silence. When Max finally spoke, it was in the soft, chilled tone of measured hatred. ‘What the hell do you mean to say by that?’

  ‘That I’m not going to fall for it. That I’m wise to your tricks! I’m not going to let you destroy me!’

  ‘You’re implying, then, that I have destroyed others before you?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m implying. I’m just speaking from my heart.’

  ‘Well, in that case, I suggest that we stop here and postpone this talk until a time when you’re feeling more reasonable.’

  I spent that night in my study, ruefully remembering Bea’s prediction that I would need the protection of a lockable door.

  The next morning, I woke to the sound of a car reversing and reached my window in time to see Max and the children speeding off in the Volvo in the direction of Oxford.

  I went downstairs to see if he had left a note. I couldn’t find one. I made myself a cup of coffee and returned to my new desk. I consulted my list of people to supply with my new address. I looked queasily at the names already checked off. If I left, would I have to contact them again? If I did, how would I explain myself? I consulted my other list, of bread-and-butter letters. I wrote an unnecessarily long and transparently insincere note to Max’s mother. It was, I noted, full of exclamation marks.

  I sealed it, found a first-class stamp and put the letter
on the sideboard next to the front door. I sat down at the dining table to make a shopping list, only to remember that I already had everything I needed. I went back upstairs and got out a new stenographer’s notebook. At the top of the first page, I wrote, ‘What am I afraid of?’ Halfway down I wrote, ‘What do you want?’ My mind went blank. I got up to make myself another cup of coffee. On my way down, I heard Danny in Rebecca’s study, laughing on the phone, telling someone called Anita that she was a chump.

  When I got back to my study with my fresh cup of coffee, I locked the door. For the first time since my arrival, I took out Happily Ever After, the slim volume that had earned me the right to call myself a writer. I settled myself down on my sofa, drawing my new travelling blanket over my legs despite the warmth of the morning. I began at page one and read it through to the end. I looked into my soul to find it stripped of furniture.

  These interconnected shards of ice had nothing to do with my life. And yet someone had died for it. If I hadn’t thrown myself into this book the way I had, Sasha would still be alive. I had let Sasha die because I stopped taking care of him, because I had cared more for my freedom than I had cared for him.

  I closed the book. Staring at the caricature of the altar on the cover, I asked myself why it had once been so important to me, why it was that even a mediocre and timid book that had acquired a small number of immemorable reviews should take precedence over a human being. Why I still shied away from human beings, still had to lock myself up in a room, even though I had no writing to show for it, nothing of worth to say. What was I afraid of?

  I opened my desk drawer, took out my notebook and read through my seventeen attempts at an opening chapter. Each seemed thinner and more tentative than the one before. It was as if I were afraid of my subject, to the point of being unable even to say what the subject was.

  What was I afraid of? I stared at the wall, willing it to spell out the answer, but the wall stared blankly back. I had no words for it – that was what scared me. I had no words for my life. I had no words for my life because Rebecca had already written the book about my life. I had no words of my own for my life because I had read that book and believed every word of it. Never imagining it foretold my future, I had not read it carefully – or at least not carefully enough. But now I was afraid to look at it, even think of it. The only way to break this fear, I now told myself, was to read it.

  And so I walked down the corridor to Rebecca’s study, tried the door and, finding it open, walked in. I locked the door behind me. There were seven English editions of The Marriage Hearse on the bookshelves as well as twenty translations.

  All of them had the same author’s photo, the one of Rebecca smiling warmly, knowingly, triumphantly in the so-called wrong dress. Just the sight of this photograph made me want to run away. So I tightened my resolution. I would not just read The Marriage Hearse – I would read it in there. I would read it sitting on the same chaise longue where Rebecca had written it.

  I would read it, I told myself, but I did not have to succumb to it. The point of reading it would be to know for sure that she had not foretold my life. To know where her words ended and my eyes began, so I could see for myself again. And for the first few pages I was able to maintain my detachment. Because it was clear to me, now that I was here in Beckfield, that the village where The Marriage Hearse took place was not Beckfield, that the family was not the Midwinter family, even if it shared some of its attributes, and that the heroine was a character in her own right in spite of being an American writer like myself, and as overwhelmed by her new lover’s family as I was.

  For a few pages I could empathise with her without confusing myself with her. But the writing was too strong for me. The prose was so brave, especially when it described weakness, and so clear about the right and the good even as it described the bad and the wrong. There was a sense of wide spaces even in descriptions of cramped rooms full of affected people. It was unapologetically American, it never forgot where it came from, never accommodated. And so it was impossible for me to resist. After a few pages Rebecca had me in her hands just as she had her heroine in her hands. It soon did not matter that the village and the family she was describing were not our village or our family, because the details meant nothing. It was the core that mattered. And the core was the same.

  Her heroine had not done exactly the same things that I had done – she was not replacing a dead first wife, and she did not have to face the prospect of stepchildren – but she had ended up suffering the same way I did, and for the same reasons. By page 140, she had found herself sitting in a replica of this very study, hiding from her lover and his interfering aunt, and trying to write, but unable to find a single word that she could call her own. I read her description and then I looked around the study, trying to see something, something that was not the same to me as it had been to her, but I couldn’t find a single thing. There was the broken cupid, different in parts, same in essence. There were the slippers and the Cycladic statues and the piles of books on the desk, even the ashtrays that the children had made for her. Once again I wanted to run from the room. Although I struggled to remind myself that I was not reading my future, that the story she was writing was not my story even if her heroine felt all the things I felt, it was an even greater struggle to turn the page, because I expected it to contain my death warrant. But it was on the very next page that the heroine picked up her water glass and smashed it against the windowsill and dragged the jagged edge against her wrist and cut herself.

  And I thought, no. That’s not me. I would never do that. Suddenly I was not inside the story any more. I was looking at the heroine instead of struggling inside her head. I could feel sorry for her and for the woman who had invented her. I continued reading not in awe but in sadness. This was no longer the story of a woman who was crushed by a powerful family. It was the story of a woman with a tragic flaw that made it impossible for her to stand up to them. I could see that everything that happened to her in the second half of the novel – the disastrous honeymoon, the pregnancy that turned her into a captive, the husband’s abandonment of her, and her descent into drugged insanity – had its seed in her own weakness. Even the triumphant ending seemed like an admission of weakness to me. It did not seem a victory to me to stagger out of her sickbed in a dress that was a replica of a family joke and tell an unsympathetic audience that her name was Rebecca. This was not an indication that the heroine would define her own life from now on, because it defined nothing. It was a sign of uncertainty that the book had stopped here – yet another proof that Rebecca had depleted and eventually destroyed herself by putting too much faith in words and memorable performances.

  I closed the book full of sadness for Rebecca and her heroine, but calm and clear and determined not to make the same mistake myself. I wandered over to the window. The sun had gone, the clouds were turning grey. Crawley and a man I had never seen before were standing at either side of the net on the tennis court, discussing something of great interest to them both: it was the first time I had seen the court inhabited. I wandered back to the chaise longue and picked up the book. When I replaced it, I noticed a plaque balanced on the shelf above it. It said:

  Sometimes I go about pitying myself

  And all the while I am being carried across the sky

  By beautiful clouds.

  As I left the study, I could hear Max and the children in the sitting room below. I went down to find the preparations for school continuing. Two lists, both crumpled, lay on the table. Hermione stood guard over the piles of uniform on one sofa, William over the piles on the other. Max was just finishing the hem on a navy-blue duffel coat. Next to him was an ironing board. The iron propped on it was steaming.

  He was smoking a joint as he sewed. On the side table was a hip flask of whisky and an almost empty glass. ‘Next,’ he said. William picked up a rugby shirt and moved towards him. Max took the shirt and flattened it on the ironing board. It was clear from his movements that he was
used to doing this. He didn’t need me.

  It was clear also that I could go or I could leave and either way they would manage. Max would get to and from work. The children would go back to school in labelled, ironed, mended uniforms. They were not deprived. They had a father who preferred them to all adults, and they had Bea, and they had Danny. Their days were full, the minutiae of their routine so engrossing that even now they hardly seemed to notice me.

  And yet, as I stood there, finally restored to the selfless clarity of a ghost, I knew it was all wrong, this scene I was watching, and that if I were there, with them, instead of standing at the door unnoticed, I would make it different. I would make it better for these children. I would stop them looking back at the accidents they had inexplicably survived. There was no need to be so military. No need for William to call himself thick. No need either for Hermione’s best friend to be a battery-operated plastic flower. Room in her room for things that were not dead. Time for their illnesses to stop going overtime. Time for them to stop telling me why they were weak.

  I didn’t love them. If they hadn’t been there, I would never have missed them. But I couldn’t leave them at the mercy of mourners. I was damned if Rebecca was going to have her way. She had made her choice. Now I was making mine.

  I willed myself to walk across the forbidden line and take the kilt that was in Max’s hands, and say, ‘I’ll do this one. There’s a trick to it that’s easier to do than to explain.’

  To my surprise and elation, he sighed and said, ‘So show me then.’ He handed me the iron and stepped aside to make room.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Another memory I keep for sustenance: that night, when I told him I wanted to marry him. We were sitting in front of the television. It was a commercial break. His response was to sigh and pat me on the leg, and then sigh again.

  ‘Unless you don’t want to,’ I said.