The Other Rebecca

by Maureen Freely

  ‘Where are you off to next?’ Max asked.

  ‘We’re shooting in some godforsaken corner of Shropshire for three days and then it’s back to Dublin.’

  ‘Hard life,’ Max said.

  ‘I’ll take your room, shall I?’ Tillie said as she got off the bed. ‘I can’t see the two of you being very comfortable in a single bed.’

  ‘Are you sure, Til?’

  ‘Absolutely. I’ll just take what I need now.’

  She went to the chest of drawers and began pulling out socks and underwear. So this was her room, I thought, but then why were Max’s books and shaving things on the bedside table? If Max had been sleeping in here, with Tillie, how could Tillie be so casual about moving to another bedroom? Was this proof that she was just a good friend, or was she just another very good actor? Why, when the light was out, did Max sigh and draw me close to his chest, and whisper ‘I love you’? Because he meant it? Or because he was trying to make me believe that he wasn’t having an affair with Tillie?

  Or was it all in my imagination? Was I losing my mind? The next morning, I took a wrong turning on my way back to Oxford and ended up spending forty-five minutes going up and down the Harrow Road, trying to find a way up onto the A40. Twice I did and missed it anyway, having got myself into the wrong lane. Then, when I finally did manage it, I forgot I needed petrol until I was past the last petrol station. When I got off the M40 in Beaconsfield, and got lost again, I panicked.

  I couldn’t live like this, never knowing what was real and what wasn’t. I needed someone to tell me what was wrong, what to do. I ran through the list of people who might understand, but each name had a string attached to it. I couldn’t impose on Mimi because she was Max’s employee. I couldn’t trust Crawley to keep a secret. My only hope, I thought, was Bea, and so, when I got home, I went straight over to the big house to find her.

  I thought that because of her own unhappy earlier marriage, she would understand what it was like to be at home and pregnant when you knew but could not prove that your husband was having an affair. Even if it was true what Max had said about Bea, at least she would know how I felt. But although she was all empathy at the start, this softness disappeared the moment I let slip I was thinking of leaving.

  ‘You’re virtually separated now. Why on earth do you think you stand to gain anything by living alone in less comfortable surroundings? What an impractical idea! If you’re worried about this other woman he might be seeing, you must stop at once. They’re all like that, you know. But it’s only temporary. They always come back. It’s the baby that counts in the end, you know. They always come back to claim it. In the meantime, you must look after yourself. Or I shall never forgive you!’

  As I lay in bed afterwards, looking at the leafless branches outside my window, I asked myself why I had never realised in the early days that Bea was not one for figures of speech – she meant precisely what she said.

  Now that I know my limits, I make sure to stay in regular contact with people outside the house. Even if I can’t bring myself to tell them everything. Especially if staying in touch becomes an almost superhuman effort. I know what can happen if I leave myself at the mercy of my thoughts, I no longer worry about whether it is the work that makes so many writers unstable, or whether I was always going to be unstable, whatever work I did. Nor do I ask myself why my imagination refuses to work to order. Instead I feed and pamper the monster so that it will do what I want it to do – or at least the best it can do. I’ve given up on its ever producing a miracle.

  I’ve learned to make peace with myself. Now that I expect less, I am pleased if I manage anything at all. But during that long and lonely first winter, I had no idea how to live with myself. I didn’t know who I was. All I knew was that I had thrown myself into a world where even people who might have liked to put me first could not do so because of other allegiances that predated me. Where taking my side even in small matters would cost them. I didn’t want to drag down the ones I still trusted. I didn’t want to show my hand to the ones I didn’t trust. And so by the end of February I was confiding in no one.

  I was confiding in no one and I was unable to work on my book. By now I had just under a hundred pages of a new draft and they were still not right. Again, I couldn’t figure out where the trouble was. Again, whenever I tried to imagine what came next, my mind went blank. My thoughts would return to the same nagging questions – about Max, about the court case, about what the critics were going to do to my book, about my fatigue and my nausea and my poor unsuspecting, unborn child. About my future. About its future. The more the responsibility weighed on me, the more I asked myself why it hadn’t weighed on Rebecca.

  And yet I knew. I knew from sitting in her bed. I knew from her writing. I knew from The Marriage Hearse that she, like her heroine, had sat here with her hands on her stomach, waiting for her baby to kick, wondering what the baby looked like, longing to see that baby with her own eyes and hold it in her arms. The evidence was in every poem from that period: ‘Swimming Inside’, The Hand on the Cord’, ‘The Pregnant Pause’, ‘Return to Eden’. Rebecca had started out like me. What had they done to her to push her so far away from her own children?

  How could I find out so that they didn’t do the same to me?

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  With hindsight it seems inevitable that I would take my questions to Danny. In fact, I became her pawn by accident – and only after long weeks of hating the sight of her. Bea had talked her into clearing Rebecca’s study and storing the contents in a boxroom in the big house. This was a job that would have taken a normal person less than a week. For Danny it was clearly going to be a life’s work. She was in and out the door and up and down the stairs all day. When she wasn’t talking to herself, she was humming spirituals or, even worse, listening to relaxation tapes. What seemed inevitable at the time was that the day would come when she sang one ‘Sweet Lord’ too many and I would not be able to keep my scream silent.

  Outright war began with a chocolate mousse Danny had made for a Beckfield Press supper and then given to Hermione and William the following day for tea. As much as I myself hated having to make and supervise their tea, I disliked her doing it even more. I couldn’t stand seeing what she put out for them. It was all sweets and sandwiches. I wanted them to be eating real food, and until the crisis with Max I had been making good progress. But then, when Bea put me under bed arrest, she also decided that Danny should be helping me more. The result of this was that she went back to making them the unhealthy foods they preferred, and – even more annoying – rearranging the kitchen according to her own lights. This meant keeping the butter and the milk outside the refrigerator, and refrigerating half-finished tins, and, on more than one occasion, putting an opened jar of mayonnaise back into the cupboard.

  The chocolate mousse had sat in a warm room for five or six hours before she had refrigerated it. When the children fell ill and were diagnosed as having salmonella, her first response was to say it couldn’t have been the mousse, because she had made it with free-range eggs. It had to be something they’d eaten at school, at a friend’s house, or at the tea-room Bea had taken them to earlier in the week. Or perhaps it was not salmonella but listeria. When the doctor drily explained what the odds were for the mousse and against the other possibilities, she became first hysterically apologetic and then hysterically solicitous of the children. Until their fevers broke, they were going to die.

  When I, too, came down with a fever, she launched into a frantic hygiene campaign. This involved soaking all our linen in disinfectant. When I objected to the smell that lingered, she said that I ought to have thought about that before feeding the children raw eggs. When I pointed out to her that she was the one who had fed them raw eggs, she accused me of being a liar.

  I lost my patience. I had had some spotting during the early days of the fever. This had convinced me that I was going to have a miscarriage. Now my fear turned to fury and burned through what was lef
t of my tact. I told Danny it was pathetic how she spent her life in service to a shadow. Had she ever done anything in her own right? Would she ever?

  She asked me, who was I to talk? If anyone was living in service to a shadow, I was. When I first arrived, she had felt sorry for me. She had not wanted to see another innocent destroyed. She had taken hope from the fact that I was a Rebeccite. She had hoped against hope that I had been sent to break the curse. But she had long since given up on getting through to me. There were times, she said, when you had to stand back and respect an individual’s right to walk the plank. Lapsing into the quasi-American accent she often assumed in extremis, she cried, ‘And when you’re dead and gone, who is going to be making tea for that as yet unborn little one? Yours truly!’

  ‘Unless it dies before it’s born because its mother has listeria!’

  This was my trump card. It had the desired effect. Danny gasped and pulled her hair back from her face in two big clumps and said, ‘Oh no, you can’t be serious. You can’t be! Am I to have this on my conscience as well?’ It was with tears streaming down her face that she waited on hold to speak to my doctor, with a tissue fixed against her nose that she admitted the doctor.

  The doctor is now one of my best friends, and so I know now that she always took Danny with a gallon of salt. But on the day in question, even I was convinced by her show of concern when she arrived. She listened solemnly to Danny’s full confession, after which she advised me to do what I was already doing, which was to stay in bed. ‘We shall hope for the best, shan’t we, Danny, but we shall remain cautious as well, and so I hope you can find it in you to give your friend the care she needs.’

  And so it was that Danny became my nurse. I would wake up in the morning to find her on her knees next to the bed with a hot cup of tea, whispering, ‘I don’t want you to die. I don’t want the baby to die. I have enough on my conscience already! Enough! Enough!’

  One morning – after enough time had passed to convince her I was out of danger – she woke me up to tell me she had made a pact with the goddess within her to tell me the truth about the things on her conscience if the goddess made sure I recovered. ‘The bad part of the truth is – I could have saved Rebecca. The good part – Rebecca has left us the wherewithal to save you.’

  ‘Do you know?’ I remember her saying. ‘I was rereading The Marriage Hearse last night when it suddenly occurred to me, Rebecca wrote this entire book with you in mind. Failing that, I’m still unnerved by the degree to which she predicted you. People are for ever making the mistake of seeing Rebecca as the heroine. But of course she was far too much her own person to have been swayed and swamped like that. She always held her own. She never lost her fighting spirit. You could say she killed herself fighting. That’s why they can’t forget her. You, on the other hand …’

  She retrieved a copy of the book from her bag and leafed through the first pages. ‘Look at the inscription, for instance. “To everywoman, especially the one in my shoes.” That’s you – undoubtedly. And you’re so much like her heroine, such a gullible person, so quick to bend, to suffer silently in order to please. But then there’s the thing that you have that she didn’t have. You could call it heart or charity, or whatever you like, really. It all amounts to the same thing. She predicted this in you, too. This passage, for instance. Shall I read it out loud?’

  I remember nodding in that careful way you do if you find out a friend takes her horoscopes literally. I remember thinking, as she read out the first few words, that really, I had grown to dislike the earnestness in Rebecca’s prose. Danny’s declamatory reading style only increased it.

  ‘Just as there are no two blades of grass alike, so too are there no standardised mass-produced answers. We each have our own puzzle to solve. We spend most of our lives hunting for the last missing piece, and when we find it, we have to change the shape of everything else to fit it in, and even when we’re done, we still find the full picture lacking, because of a piece that God forgot to give us. I do not have the heart to keep going. I can say no but I can’t say yes. My question to you, dear reader – can you?’

  She looked up at me. ‘Can you say yes? Can you bear the truth about the man you love and still carry the cross?’

  The question caught me unawares and made me shiver, but it also made me hungry. She knew where he was, I thought. She knew why. She knew what Rebecca had done to him. What he had done to Rebecca. She wanted to tell me. She wanted to tell me even the parts that other, saner people would edit or omit. And I needed to know these things. I needed to know the truth about the man who had left me without a heart. ‘I have no idea what you mean,’ I said carefully.

  ‘What I mean, my dear thing, is that we mustn’t go any further, honestly, not a step further, unless you’re prepared to make Rebecca’s agony your own and triumph over the gnomes of literary London by becoming her living message.’

  V

  She Speaks from the Grave

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The fifth of May. I can close my eyes and I’m back in that bed again. My every need met, my future as clear as it is righteous and inevitable. I can hear Danny upstairs, going through the boxes one last time. I can feel the duvet beneath me and the tartan blanket draped over my legs and the baby inside me shifting its weight. I can open my eyes and see on my writing tray a half-finished cup of tea and a notebook open to a page containing five attempts at the same sentence, all crossed out. On the floor next to me and within easy reach, the telephone, the pile of manuscripts and yesterday’s paper open to the TV listings. Pressed against the rain-streaked windows, great green leaves made phosphorescent by the harsh white light filtering through them, and quivering magnolia blossoms.

  In front of the fire, still crackling, throwing more light than heat, a pale but clear-eyed Hermione playing with her Gameboy, an emaciated but flushed William making his first attempt at his prep. I can close my eyes and feel at peace with them as I never have before. But only because the story that has become my life and raison d’être calls for it. Because I never have felt at peace with them, I’ve never been able to make them mine, I’ve always had to force myself to pretend to enjoy their company, I can’t look at them without seeing something I wish I could change, without remembering I haven’t the power to change anything. If I’m not making it up, if I really do want them with me in my room, it must be because I know my custodial sentence is ending.

  They are about to start school again, after four weeks at home. Tomorrow will be their first half-day, which makes this morning our last full day together. But I can shut that thought out too. Even now I can convince myself: this morning will never end.

  In a moment William will come over with a pencil and paper and ask me to write down exactly how to make popcorn. I’ll tell him instead, get him to repeat the instructions back to me, and after he has skipped off to the kitchen, Hermione will look at her charm necklace and notice one is missing, the one with the boy on the dolphin. She’ll search every inch of floor, dissolve into tears, tears that I’ll bring to an end by taking her hand and putting it on my stomach and asking her if she can feel the baby, her baby, our baby, kick. ‘Bring me a book,’ I’ll say. She’ll choose the Puffin version of the Iliad – shiftily. This is a test. She’ll be waiting for me to say, ‘No, not that one, the chapters are too long.’ But I won’t fall for it. I’ll say, ‘Fine, what a good choice,’ and begin reading. After two pages her eyes will begin to wander. She’ll decide she wants to draw instead. Until she smells the popcorn.

  William will carry it into the room, climb onto the bed with it. They’ll have a fight over the last popped kernel. I’ll manage to convince them that the best thing is for neither of them to eat it and both of them to sketch it. As Hermione screws up her eyes, trying to get the dimensions right, William will watch only what Hermione puts on the paper. He’ll copy her drawing exactly, but upside down.

  And while they’re quiet, I’ll force myself. I’ll pick up the papers and try to re
ad about the trial. I’ll begin with Tuesday, and Max’s flat account of his early years with Rebecca. I’ll look at the photograph of Max and Bea looking grandly stoic as they guide Max’s father’s wheelchair through the crowds outside the court. I’ll look at the sketch of Max in court in the Wednesday paper, and I’ll read his account of his later years with Rebecca. I’ll read his account of his last day with Rebecca in today’s paper and I’ll try and convince myself this is not a stranger but my husband. Not my saviour but my greatest danger. I’ll try to hold this foreign, horrifying thought, and although the fire will have taken hold by now, although there’s enough heat in the room to make even the bright-green leaves and the rain-streaked window panes look cosy, I’ll not be able to stop myself from shivering. Face the truth, I’ll hear a foreign voice inside me say. Face the truth. Say it. Write it and then tell the world. Everything will become so much easier if you do.

  And so I’ll try. As I watch the logs turn red and serrated, a new sentence will form in my head, a new sentence that sums up everything I want to say. I’ll lift my pen. I’ll write, ‘My name is …’ But just as I am about to put the truth on the page, a branch will hit against the far window as if in anger, as if to warn me that I’m about to transgress, and I’ll remember that my haven is not safe, that my time here is about to run out.

  Hide while you can, the branches cry, hide while you can. But I’ll know I can’t hide, not even in my own bed. Because today, the fifth of May, today is my book launch and so my one and only chance to say my piece. Or rather, her piece. Where will I find the courage? Every time I close my eyes I see a room of faces. I see a stand with a microphone and beyond it in the half-light I see a drinks party interrupted, I see hands clutching drinks and fixed smiles as I prop my pages on the stand and look down to the page to find the print has dissolved, as I open my mouth to speak only to find I have no voice. As the silence goes on too long, the smiles disappear, the glasses clink ever more nervously, the whispering begins. I hear one person say, ‘Did you read that terribly funny review in The Spectator?’ I hear another say, ‘But it isn’t a patch on the one in the Literary Review.’ I hear someone else clearing his throat in annoyance at the noise they are making; I look up to see the gossips dissolve into giggles …