The Other Rebecca

by Maureen Freely

  Bea obliged. She went upstairs and suggested that she go to the big house to fetch the spare key to Rebecca’s study. While she was gone, Crawley got Max out of the house and into his car.

  When he returned a half an hour later, it was with the news that Max had given him the slip.

  By the time we heard this news, we had too many other problems to give it due importance. Danny was in an apoplectic state after inspecting the damage Max had done to Rebecca’s study. Hermione was screaming about her blue clay bowl, which she couldn’t find anywhere. And Bea had lost her patience. ‘Oh, do stop moaning about the bowl, Hermione. It’s the very least of our worries.’

  ‘You just say that because you don’t need me any more because now you have a new baby to think about!’

  ‘Oh, Hermione, do stop being so melodramatic.’

  ‘You don’t love me because I remind you of my mother!’

  ‘Hermione, my dear, if that is so, it makes you part of a cast of hundreds.’

  ‘I want my daddy!’

  ‘And so do we all, my dear girl. But tears won’t bring him back. We must be practical. We must first and foremost move our battle to another venue. That and the telephone. I hope you don’t mind if I remove this thing from the room altogether. It can’t be doing you or the baby any good.’

  And so it was that I didn’t hear about Mimi until the following morning.

  Max was still missing but the panic had subsided. Bea had already taken the children to school and made me breakfast. Now she was off to London for the day. As she put the phone back into the jack, she said, ‘And when you do have a moment, it might be an idea to speak to Mimi. She was sounding rather hysterical, actually. It had something to do with a piece Max was meant to have written.’

  ‘What should I say to her?’

  ‘Say there’s a family crisis. She won’t ask for details.’

  Mimi was in a state because Max had a big article due that morning on the novelist Naguib Mahfouz. When I said she couldn’t speak to him, she said, ‘That’s just not good enough. Let me speak to him myself.’ I said she couldn’t. She insisted. Finally I burst into tears and told her the truth.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve been so very, very cruel.’ Three hours later, I awoke from a nap to find her sitting next to my bed.

  Taking my hand, Mimi said, ‘You poor, poor dear! How do you feel?’

  ‘Not very well,’ I admitted.

  ‘Is Crawley still out looking for him?’

  ‘Yes, as far as I know.’

  ‘And how are the children?’

  ‘Not well, but at school.’

  ‘And who’s looking after you?’

  ‘Who’s guarding me is more like it. I’ve more or less had orders not to get out of bed.’

  ‘It’s good advice, you know.’

  ‘Under the circumstances, it makes me feel like a cow.’

  ‘Well, to some extent, you are a cow. At least, when I’ve been pregnant, that’s how I’ve felt about it.’

  ‘But you continued to have a life, didn’t you?’

  She squeezed my hand. ‘It’s not just the pregnancy, is it? Tell me what’s bothering you.’

  I blurted out, ‘I may never be able to write again.’

  ‘You know that’s not true, darling. You know that’s not true.’

  ‘Sometimes I think it would be better if I never wrote again, because I just can’t write well enough.’

  ‘According to whom do you not write well enough?’

  ‘According to myself, of course. And I think Max would agree. I think that’s what Max saw in me from the start – my lack of ability.’

  ‘If he did, my dear, he’d be so wrong. Your book of stories was a pure delight!’ I found her smile too bright.

  ‘It’s not the fiction,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s the reviewing. You know how Private Eye are always making fun of it. Well, I think it bothers him more than he’d like to admit. Or perhaps, to be fair, he’s just trying to protect me. That’s why he didn’t want to run the Tamara Nestor Graham piece. Because he knew that to run that piece would be asking for more of the same.’

  ‘But we are running the Tamara Nestor Graham piece. It’s scheduled for this Sunday.’

  ‘Then why did he refuse to discuss it with me?’

  ‘You’ve probably mixed things up. I wouldn’t worry about the review. It was perfectly good and respectable.’

  ‘More respectable than good,’ I admitted.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It was polite instead of honest. I meant, the book was so very worthy and fashionably correct that I couldn’t find the nerve to say what I meant.’

  ‘And what would you have said if you had found the nerve, my dear?’

  ‘That I’m fed up with reading books about posturing feminine explorers saying no to tradition and setting out on savage journeys in which all sorts of amazing things happen to them in motels they describe exquisitely despite their penchant for four-syllable sentences.’

  ‘Good, good. Tell me more,’ she said. I went on in this vein, suddenly able, in the fire of pique, to describe the genre as it was first invented by Anais Nin and eventually stripped down by the female disciples of Raymond Carver. I explained why I thought it was so politically crude to expect that All Women would benefit because a few extraordinarily selfish women happened to come to terms with themselves after twenty or thirty years of stepping over every human being who stood in their way. ‘So much easier than doing what the rest of us do, which is to pick up the pieces.’

  At which point Mimi took my hand again and said, ‘That’s splendid. Now I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to the shops and then I’m coming back to make you some soup. And while I’m busy doing that, you are to write down everything you’ve just told me and—’

  ‘I’m not sure I could. I’m a very slow writer.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Just write notes if you prefer. We have time. Just see what comes out and we can take it from there.’

  Fifteen minutes later I had found my first line: ‘In America at least, all explorations of the female psyche end up in the same place.’ I showed it to Mimi.

  ‘Splendid,’ she said. ‘Now say what you mean by that.’

  Two hours later, when she brought me the soup, I was just finishing. ‘I’m sure it needs work,’ I said.

  But she didn’t agree. ‘It’s honest and direct, and written from the heart, and it sums up a trend no one has identified. And I agree, Rebecca was the exception to the rule – at least, as you say, in her best work. I have some doubts, though, about this sentence here: “I think most American women writers – myself included – have been content to be bad imitations of Rebecca.” Aren’t you being a bit hard on yourself, my dear?’

  ‘I don’t want to criticise a trend and pretend I have nothing to do with it, so I’d prefer to keep that sentence or something like it.’

  ‘Well, that’s very brave of you, my dear. And I’m sure it will be taken as such. I think it’s a splendid piece and just what I needed because I shall now be able to put it on the blank page and hold the Mahfouz piece over until next week. So you’ve saved my life, my dear. Now I’m going to take this away from you and read it to the copy takers, but before I go, you must promise me you won’t give up writing. You can’t let other people’s opinions eat away at you. Other people have a right to their opinions, but that’s not the same as saying their opinions are more important than what you think about yourself. Why do you write at all, my dear?’

  ‘To understand what I believe in.’

  ‘So tell me why anyone should stop you doing that?’

  So long as she was there, looking straight into my eyes, I could not help seeing her point. But that was the crux of the problem, you might say – that it was her point, not mine. Before an hour was out, I had already lost hold of Mimi’s inspiring instructions. It mattered what Max thought of me. It mattered that he couldn’t look me in th
e eye any more. It mattered that I had propelled him into this binge and it mattered that he wouldn’t tell me why.

  ‘It’s not your fault.’ That was what Crawley told me on Wednesday morning and Wednesday night, and on Thursday, and on Friday night when he found Max and brought him home. ‘This is not the man you married. It’s a cocktail with a haircut.’

  ‘It’s just too much going wrong at the same time,’ Bea added. ‘Nothing to do with you, dear. Without you and the baby to look forward to, imagine what he’d have left. We just have to get him to pull himself together.’

  And when Giles, Bea and Crawley brought him down from his study for the polite but awkward confrontation on Saturday morning, he appeared to accept their admonishments. He agreed: he had let drink get the better of him again. He had forgotten his family duties. Yes, it was a question of backbone, in future. Yes, it was important not to allow himself to drink for the wrong reasons. But when I saw him wander over to the window and look out over the hills, I knew, with the kind of conviction I could never have had for myself, that none of us had come close to guessing the true reasons for his withdrawal and defection.

  He was alone. And by writing from the heart, I had increased his isolation. It wasn’t until I saw my article in print on Sunday morning that I realised it was not about literature at all but about my home life. The headline ran, ‘Picking Up the Pieces: why one woman writer is fed up with feminist heroines who are willing to destroy anything for the sake of experience.’

  How had I not seen the autobiographical intent? When Max saw the article, he snorted with disbelief. ‘I go missing one week and this is what happens. So we’re picking up the pieces, are we?’ When he had finished reading it, he looked me in the eye for the first time since returning home. ‘I don’t suppose you have any idea what you’ve just done. Why did you go along with it? Why have you let them use you?’

  ‘Mimi was desperate,’ I said. ‘The Naguib Mahfouz piece was—’

  ‘Mimi ought to have known better. Her motives may have been excellent and her need for copy extreme, and my responsibility for the crisis is beyond dispute. But she ought to have known better than to let you write on this subject. This is truly tempting the devil. This will be the single most likely thing to destroy us. We’ve reached the point of no return. The last door has closed.’

  ‘But why?’ I asked. ‘It’s only about books.’

  ‘My naive little American upstart, nothing is ever just about books.’

  ‘That’s still all I intended.’

  ‘You can go ahead and tell yourself that. No one else will, but I’m afraid I can’t help you there. You’ll simply have to watch and see and, it is to be hoped, eventually learn. It would have been better, though, if you had exercised better judgement in the first instance.’

  ‘Max! What are you talking about?’

  He put his arm around me. ‘What a child you are sometimes! What a peril! I dread the day when I look in your eyes and see something else. But in the meantime you really are becoming your own worst enemy. My dear, don’t you ever think these people you have turned into your confidantes might be using you for their own purposes? Mimi I exclude from this blanket statement. Mimi just gets carried away sometimes – in this respect she has the same problem as you and is just as bad at seeing through people. But, my dear pregnant wife, has it not occurred to you that all Bea really cares for is the heir you might bear? Haven’t you ever noticed how hard it is for her to hold this family together on the pretext of blood ties that do not, for the most part, exist? Her hopes for a genuine heir are well intended, of course, but I’m sure I don’t have to remind you what Camus said about good intentions.’

  ‘I can’t remember what he said.’

  ‘That they were the source of all evil,’ he said with a tired sigh. ‘You really must not overestimate Bea’s good will. You mustn’t really. You’re only as good to her as the child you produce. And as for Crawley – I know you’ve confided in him. I know he has taken it upon himself to explain the world to you. And to explain me. But I very much doubt that he has gone so far as to explain his own very convoluted contribution to the drama. He was in love with Rebecca too, my dear. And so he has his own scores to settle, with me as with others. So in future, my darling child, I should watch what you say to him.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Max was right about one thing. My piece attracted the wrong kind of attention. It got picked up by most of the gossip columns, criticised by well-known feminists in the Independent and the Guardian, featured in Pseuds’ Corner in one issue of Private Eye and got a page-long parody in the next. ‘I admit I’m really not worth much’ was its title. It mimicked my flat style well, using the sentence Mimi had wanted to omit as its leitmotif.

  ‘You’re taking this like a good sport, I hope,’ Mimi said. ‘You do realise, don’t you, my darling, that they’re paying you a compliment? And you mustn’t forget all the good letters we got praising you. I posted another two yesterday – did you receive them? One called you a breath of fresh air. I’ve told you what people here said, but did I mention that the editor took me aside after the Wednesday conference to say how much he enjoyed it? He said we should use you more often.’

  But it was not to be. Max stopped using me at all. He also stopped coming home except at weekends. At first he took the trouble to provide reasons. One day it was because he had to see his solicitors after work. Another day it was because he had to go to a friend’s launch, or fly to Manchester for the night to do an interview. Then one day he rang from the office and said that his second cousin Lucy had given him a key to her flat ‘and so I think it’s best for the time being, don’t you, if we all plan on my being there Monday through Thursday?’

  If he had been consistently cold during his weekend visits, it would have been easier to bear. But he wasn’t. He would arrive looking grey and chilled and unable even to smile at the children. I would wake up on Saturday to find him laying the table for breakfast as grimly as if he were laying out a corpse. He would spend the rest of the day in the sitting room. Only on Sunday would he have recovered enough to take the children out for a walk. They did this whatever the weather and, whatever the weather, returned refreshed. At Sunday lunch, he would even talk – at least to the children. And after he had spent the afternoon and evening playing Uno and Stratego with them, and had put them to bed with the story tapes he himself had recorded, sometimes he would even talk to me.

  Sometimes. Not always. If he kept the television on, the most I could hope for was to put a head against his shoulder while he fell asleep. But if he put on music (and he only did this if the cloud had fully lifted), he would not just embrace me, not just put his head on my stomach and ‘wait for the first kick’; he would apologise for having been ‘so withdrawn and bloody-minded’. He would say he didn’t deserve me. Call me his saving grace. Repeat over and over that I did not deserve what I had coming to me. Promise that one day he would tell me the truth.

  That the truth involved at least one other woman was not hard to figure out. In the bags of laundry he left behind for Janet to wash, I found the occasional piece of women’s underwear, the odd condom wrapper, bits of paper containing names and addresses that never belonged to men. Once, when I found two ticket stubs to Dublin and a hotel bill for one night and two breakfasts, I lost control and tried to reach him at his cousin’s flat, but when a woman who was not his cousin answered, I also lost my nerve and hung up.

  Who was she? What did she have that I didn’t have? What did she look like? What was he doing to her? How did he look at her when she took off her clothes? What did he say to her when he made love to her? What did he tell her about me? I couldn’t bear not knowing any more. I couldn’t bear spending night after night in bed just guessing. I had to force Max and his shadow accomplice out into the open. So I rang Janet and got her to come in to sit with the children and set off to face the truth. The roads were clear and so I was in Ladbroke Grove in just over an hour.
<
br />   I had never met the baby-faced woman who answered the doorbell, but she knew me. Her hair was wet and she was wearing a bathrobe. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I leave you to it,’ she said. ‘I just got in from Hong Kong this morning. Max is in his room, I think. You know which one it is, don’t you?’

  I didn’t, but even before she shut the bathroom door, I could hear his voice coming from the room at the end of the corridor. His voice and a woman’s voice. ‘So you think I shouldn’t,’ she was saying.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of telling you what to do, my dear. At the end of the day, you’re the one who’s going to have to live with him.’ The door was open. Max was sitting on the bed and taking off his shoes. The woman, who had short brown hair, a large, handsome face and looked older than me, was sitting on the windowsill examining her bare feet. Were they lovers? Or were they old friends? I couldn’t tell. ‘Goodness,’ Max said, when he looked up and saw me. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Is it?’ I said. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘You don’t look very happy,’ he said.

  ‘Would you be in my shoes? I feel like I’ve been under house arrest.’

  ‘But you managed to escape,’ he said. ‘For the evening, anyway. Well, that’s good, anyway.’ He patted the bed. ‘Come sit down. You’ve met Tillie before, haven’t you?’

  Before I could answer, Tillie said, ‘Yes, at the wedding.’ Her smile had not an ounce of embarrassment or jealousy. Did that mean there was nothing between them? I couldn’t make my mind up. Neither of them seemed to want me to leave. When I said I couldn’t stay long because I had left the children with Janet, Max said, ‘Nonsense. You’re staying the night. Anything else would be silly.’ While he was on the phone making the arrangements, Tillie heated up some leftovers for me. After I had eaten, all three of us went into the bedroom and sat on the bed to watch the news and the second half of a terrible movie. At the end, Tillie yawned and said, ‘Well, I’d better get to sleep. The car’s coming for me at six.’