The Other Rebecca

by Maureen Freely

  ‘Oh, this is priceless,’ said Jack. ‘Priceless.’

  Max got up and walked over to Jack. ‘You’ve got to stop this nonsense. It’s one thing to taunt me; it’s another to do so in front of the children; and it is terribly cruel to play games like this with my father. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’

  ‘Oh yes, I do,’ said his father. ‘But I never was very good at riddles. However, Max was always very, very good at riddles. Perhaps you should ask him why he hates you. I think that would be more sensible.’

  ‘Oh, Max knows why he hates me. He just won’t tell anyone else. And neither will I – will I, Max? I gave my word, didn’t I? No one is ever going to find out what he did to Rebecca, and what was eating his heart out when he did. Can I ask you a question?’ Jack said, turning to me. ‘Whatever your name is. I keep forgetting. Probably a Freudian slip, or whatever the opposite of a Freudian slip is, since we’re not talking about saying the wrong thing, we’re talking about drawing a total blank. Has this wonderful person you just married ever told you what ruined his first marriage? Has he ever told you what happened? What happened here, no less?’ He knocked back the last of his drink and tipped back his chair. ‘Let me guess. Let me guess that he hasn’t told you what happened in this very bar. Or on the beach later that same evening.’

  That was when Max hit him. Jack was aiming to hit him back when a few of the larger Buddhists jumped up and held him back. A few others held Max back and forced him into a chair.

  ‘He went too far, didn’t he?’ Max’s father said as he watched Jack being escorted out of the hotel. He said the same thing again to Max when the Buddhists allowed him to rejoin us.

  Max said nothing in reply. With a glare, as if it had all been my doing, he said to me, ‘Make sure you don’t let the children out of your sight.’ With that he went to the bar and ordered a shot of tequila. He drank it down, ordered another. Drank that one, too.

  ‘Are you coming back?’ his father called out to him. ‘I wish you would! I’ve remembered the joke now.’

  ‘He doesn’t look like he’s in the mood for jokes,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, well, then. I’ll just have to make do with you then.’

  ‘I’m sure the children would like to hear the joke,’ I said inanely.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure you’re right.’ He turned to the children, who were pensively stirring their Coca-Colas with their forefingers. ‘Why are there walls around graveyards?’ their grandfather asked.

  Silence.

  ‘Come on, now. Have a go. Why are there walls around graveyards?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Hermione. And it was the old Hermione, the sullen, unhelpful Hermione of the previous summer.

  ‘Then I shall tell you why there are walls around graveyards. Because people are dying to get in!’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ‘You are so lucky that your parents are dead,’ Max told me as we sat waiting for our flight that evening. ‘You have no idea what it’s like to see them rot before your eyes. Their stinking bigotry doesn’t even hold together any more. Everything they say is absurd! It could have been written by Ionesco. Everything about them is a stinking, moth-eaten joke. Dishonourable to the core. I can’t even feel protective of them any more. I might look like I’m doing the right thing, but actually I’m trying to hide them. This is what people call a grand old family! I wish I’d never met them. I wish I’d been given up for adoption at birth. Then perhaps I might have had a chance, although you never know, I might be genetically doomed in any environment. Genetically doomed to become a senile bigot, the last colonial still slouching towards the millennium. I wish I could get into a car and drive us to Newfoundland and settle us in a log cabin and never ever read another stinking newspaper again, and only have visitors who like us.

  ‘We should never have come here,’ he said over and over again. ‘We should never have come here. I should never have let them put us through that stinking, stinking masquerade of a wedding. How many of them were fooled by that pathetic effort? Couldn’t Bea find another altar in front of which to debase herself? Dead ritual to bury the memory of a dead woman, that’s all it was. A dead challenger. We had our chance but nothing is ever going to be right again. You’ll see. I ought to have taken the chance when I first saw it. I ought never to have taken you into that stinking, rotten fold. I ought to have taken the children, and taken you, and run. Now we’ll never get away. You wait and see.’

  I listened and tried to reason with him until he stopped making sense. When we got on the plane in Curaçao, I tried to settle him on a stretch of seats where he could fall asleep, while I sat in the seats behind with the children. The ploy didn’t work. As he drank his way across the Atlantic, trying to engage the man across the aisle and a string of reluctant stewardesses in drunken conversation, I did my best to keep the children out of range. I failed.

  The trouble began when he picked up a satsuma I had packed in the children’s game bag and decided to use it for a game of catch with his son. But because his judgement was gone, he threw it too hard and too fast for William to catch it. When it hit the back of the seat, Max asked William why he was so uncoordinated. When it hit him in the face and he cried, Max dismissed him as a crybaby. He said he wasn’t going to speak to William again until he apologised. He threw the satsuma to Hermione. When she was successful in catching it, he invited her to sit on his lap.

  She went willingly, and in the beginning seemed pleased at the affectionate words he began to pour over her. But they soon became too much. She was the real thing, he told her, over and over. She was the most important woman in his life. He knew he didn’t spend enough time with her, but it was important for her to know that he was willing to die for her, and would certainly die of a broken heart if he lost her. Every time she tried to look away from him, he would put his hands on her head and force her to look into his eyes. She began to protest. He responded by shouting at her. She burst into tears. He hugged her tight and burst into tears with her. I asked him to let Hermione go. When he told me to piss off, and not to come between him and the most important woman in his life, a man in a neighbouring aisle tried to intervene, and when that led to more threats and insults, I called for the flight attendant. When she was unable to get Max to release Hermione, who was wailing by now, the good Samaritan in the neighbouring aisle went for more help and came back with the first-class steward, who was able to talk him into letting Hermione go.

  ‘They’re going to kill him, aren’t they?’ William said, almost proudly, when they walked him up to the front of the plane.

  Aware that all the eyes of economy class were on us, I reassured him, but Hermione contradicted me.

  ‘They’re going to try at least,’ she sobbed. ‘Unless he kills them first.’

  ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say about your father. Why do you think he wants to kill them?’

  ‘Well, it’s rather obvious, don’t you think? He just said so.’

  ‘What people say when they’re drunk is not necessarily what they end up doing, or what they mean. You’ve got to close your ears and wait until the next morning. And ask them again.’

  ‘If they wake up,’ said Hermione coldly, watching him stagger into the aisle and fall over.

  After they had helped him to his feet again, I reassured Hermione that his life was not at risk.

  ‘How do you know?’ she asked.

  I told her it was a lifetime of experience.

  ‘You had an unhappy childhood, didn’t you?’ Hermione said. Then, with her sourest fake-adult grimace, she added, ‘Well, that’s one thing we had in common.’

  ‘How can you say that, when your childhood is only half over?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Because absolutely everyone says so. Ask them and they’ll tell you. It’s just one trauma after another. Some people actually think I’ll never recover.’

  ‘Oh yes, you will, you will!’ I protested. ‘You will if I have anything to do with it!�
��

  She gave me a withering look. ‘Oh, you’ll try,’ she said. ‘I’ll grant you that. You’ll try and get it right. Just like my mother.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Bea had her chauffeur waiting for us outside customs the next morning. An hour later we were home. The beds were turned down and complete with hot-water bottles. There were fires going in both the sitting room and our bedroom. I fell asleep before my head hit the pillow.

  Bea woke us up with tea and biscuits just as the sky was turning dark. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘But I was rather hoping you might help me out with some people I’m having to supper.’

  They turned out to be two poets who had first met Giles as students in Kampala and owed their international reputations to Giles having featured them in his first Africa series. They had just been to see a controversial new production of Hamlet in Stratford and spent most of supper describing in spirited detail how it had brought out the play’s universalities. Crawley objected when one claimed that Hamlet was twentieth-century man. That honour had to go to Lear, he insisted. The other guest said no, it was Yeats who best expressed the spirit of the age. He then recited half of ‘The Second Coming’. Crawley finished it off for him. This led to more competitive reciting, which led eventually to singing.

  First it was opera, then operetta, then half the songs from South Pacific. At about midnight, Bea remembered the CD her guests had brought with them. It featured a new female singer from Zaïre that another former student of Giles was trying to launch in Europe. When Jasper the dog tried to howl along with it, one of the guests took him by the front paws and began to dance around the room with him. I remember looking at Max’s stony face untouched by the laughing and the clapping around him and asking myself, how could he of all people call this house dead, these people doomed, their rituals fake and meaningless? He must have read my mind, because by the time we got home, he had already recanted.

  ‘You’re a saint, I don’t deserve you,’ he told me, taking my hand. There was still something wrong with his voice. Its tone was so flat he sounded as if he were reciting lines. ‘You deserve to be with someone who never touches a drop. Who never has cause to touch a drop. I know it doesn’t make any difference that I hate myself today for what I put you through, and put the children through. But I do. I do hate myself. I hate myself so much that I can’t for the life of me understand why you put up with me.’

  This last sentence he said with conviction. I lost my distance and reached for his hand. ‘You were upset,’ I assured him. ‘It wasn’t that you wandered over the edge. You were pushed,’ I said.

  His face darkened. ‘That’s the point. That’s what makes it so bad.’

  ‘But you’ve got to expect it,’ I said. ‘You can’t have something to lose without also having enemies. Jack Scully hates you because you’re trying to make something of your life again. He hates you because you’re surrounded by people who love you.’

  Max lowered his head. He said nothing.

  ‘He hates you because I love you,’ I said.

  That made him laugh. ‘Hard to fault him on that, though, as I hate myself for the same reason!’

  I wanted to ask him why. I wanted to know why Jack hated him, why he hated Jack, why he hated himself. What had happened between them at this unspecified time in the past in St John the Baptist. Why these undescribed events had ruined his marriage, what he had gone on to do to Rebecca afterwards. When he had done so. Why.

  Why? I wanted to know but I couldn’t voice the question. Instead I said, ‘The children deserve an explanation. You frightened them. I did my best to keep their spirits up, but that’s not enough. Something has to come from you.’

  ‘I’ve already talked to them,’ he said, squeezing my hand.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘The right things. Although they may not be as frightened as you seem to think. They’ve seen worse, and not just from me. But don’t worry. I apologised and I reassured them.’ Taking me into his arms, he said, ‘Now I have to reassure you.’

  ‘Actually, you don’t, as I’ve seen worse too.’

  ‘Oh, you have, have you? Famous last words. You have no idea how bad I can be. But I promise to keep the devil inside me harnessed,’ he said, laughing in such a way that it was impossible to tell whether he was being serious or mocking himself, or both. ‘I promise to be a good husband to you, and a good father to the children, and a good editor, and I even promise to be a good poet, the kind who sometimes dares to put pen to paper.’

  ‘Promise you’ll finish The Last Supper,’ I said. ‘Promise you’ll keep taking yourself seriously.’

  ‘I’ll be a model citizen in every way,’ he said. ‘If you promise to keep lying to yourself about what I’m worth.’

  And, for the next three weeks, he was as good as his word. Then something happened. Or rather, several things happened.

  The first was an abrupt change of mood that he refused to explain to me. After a few days, I was able to trace it to an item in Private Eye about the run-in with Jack in St John the Baptist. It was in code, describing Jack as tired and emotional, Max’s father as Ben ‘Brainy’ Winterton, and Max driven to violence after his attention was drawn to resemblances of a Ugandan nature. No one told me about it. I happened on it when I was browsing in W. H. Smith. I went to Crawley for an explanation of the innuendo. I remember that when I asked him what all this was about Uganda, his eyes went dead.

  ‘I shouldn’t think that would be too hard for you to figure out,’ he said. ‘Knowing what you know about Rebecca. But since the object of this exercise seems to be to get me to say it out loud, yes, Jack and Rebecca were indeed kissing cousins. If they were cousins at all. For all his talk about the family chin, I’ve had my doubts about that from the beginning.’

  ‘What happened between them in St John the Baptist?’

  Crawley looked uncomfortable. ‘The only person who knows that, I would say, is the patron saint himself. The rest of them are only guessing because they can’t remember a thing, not even which substance it was they happened to be abusing at the time. One thing you’ll have to get used to, girl, is that we are not looking at competing versions of the truth here, but a snake pit of desperate inventions. And corporate weakness. Which may just be another way of saying that they deserve each other. Best to look the other way. Concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. If you manage that, you’ll be the first in four generations of Midwinters.’

  Putting one foot in front of the other was easier said than done. I was a painfully slow writer in those days. Even when I knew what I wanted to say, it took me a week to write an eight-hundred-word review. And with this book, this Tamara Nestor Graham book that I had finally managed to plough through, I did not know what I wanted to say. I didn’t even know what I thought. Despite its hackneyed subject – the spiritual and sexual rebirth of a downtrodden woman – it had some of the most beautiful passages I had ever read. But it was also unwieldy. Too imbued with noble purpose. Turning the page felt like moving a boulder. And there was something dishonest about it, something underneath its churchlike solemnity that made me feel as if the author were having a joke at my expense. Something that made me feel as if she got her strength from secrets she would never disclose. It was all about the power of secrets, this book. In the last line, she even went so far as to describe herself as impregnated with secrets she would never bring to term.

  That line left a bad taste in my mouth, but I could not understand why. If I did not understand my own response, how could I base my opinion on it? In my first finished version, I tried to describe my uneasiness, but when I looked at it again the next day, it seemed to me that I had deliberately avoided taking a position. I was being wishy-washy because I didn’t want to commit myself. So I wrote a second version in which I gave her the benefit of the doubt. I avoided discussing my real response and talking myself into agreeing with the ecstatic American quotes that decorated the British edition. I su
pported these with quotes from the best passages in the book. I faxed it to the office and waited for Max to ring with his comments.

  In the past he had done this within the hour. But today he didn’t ring at all. When he came home he sounded preoccupied. When he did not mention the review, I thought it was this that was troubling him. He had brought a bottle of gin home with him. He worked his way through it as if it were a chore. Had the review been so bad that he had to be drunk before he found the courage to discuss it with me? I tried to make it easier for him. I sat down next to him and said, ‘If there’s something you want to talk to me about, just do it.’

  ‘What could I possibly want to discuss with you?’

  I didn’t respond to the insult. Instead I said, ‘I was thinking about that review I sent in today. It seems to have upset you.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘It didn’t upset me in the least.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you ring and tell me what you thought of it?’

  ‘You really are going to have to get a little bit tougher, my dear. And quite quickly, too. You must start seeing that there is more than your lovely little career at stake. Did I tell you they’ve set a date for the trial and that it falls in the same week as your book coming out? They’ll not be able to discuss me or the trial, but it’ll be open season on you, I’m afraid. Like it or not, you’ll find yourself the object of an inquisition. You must prepare yourself.’

  ‘Why don’t I tell my publishers to delay publication?’

  ‘That would only tell the inquisitors that their tactics so far have been successful.’

  ‘But that’s only putting off the day of reckoning. My work can’t stand up to that kind of scrutiny.’

  ‘That’s exactly the type of thing you’re going to have to learn to stop saying if you’re to survive.’