The Other Rebecca

by Maureen Freely

  ‘But for the record, the way I look at it is this: we’re all here today because of a series of actions I undertook to save my own skin. Perhaps it was as desperate as I thought it was. Perhaps there are times when you have to act selfishly, when you have to be your own best friend, when the only path open to you is over other people’s fragile lives and in spite of your children – when it’s either them or you. I acted viciously, I’ll be the first to admit it. And I got what was coming to me. I degraded myself and stared death in the face. But I came through. I have pulled myself together. Remade myself. Since which time I’ve been showered with more rewards than any selfish feminist explorer could possibly deserve. Now I would like to spread around my good fortune. As Hemingway said, “The bill always comes.” What I’m trying to do now is beat the waiter to it. This is me going straight up to the cashier and saying, “Don’t let me walk out without paying everything I owe.”

  ‘So please, I’m asking you all, help me do the right thing.’ Here, for the first time, she looked directly at me. And smiled through me.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  And so she resurrected herself while also offering to save the family fortunes and the family name. What did it matter that she did it with a carefully sculpted version of the truth? She had kept Bea out of it, and Max’s father’s love life out of it. She had turned Max from a woman-hater and a murderer into a stoic and a martyr while also making his opponent Jack Scully look as good or better. She had taken responsibility for the dead girl and promised to take the consequences. She had offered to keep both presses afloat. She had said the words that would mend the children’s broken hearts but graciously offered to let the family decide on the right sort of custody. After the court was adjourned, she had even forced a reconciliation between the family and Danny. So everyone had benefited. Everyone but me.

  But in the commotion, who was going to notice? Especially since Rebecca herself took such care to be kind to me. She was the one who noticed how exhausted I was after the press conference on the steps. She was the one who vetoed the suggestion to go to the Groucho Club to celebrate. ‘We’ve got to get this poor thing back to her own bed,’ she said with a firmness I found daunting. Of course she had her own reasons for wanting to get back to Oxford. But she had also been the only one to notice I was flagging.

  How did she do it? She couldn’t possibly feel as comfortable as she pretended to be, sitting there in the limousine with Max who would neither look at nor speak to her, with Danny clinging to her shoulder and weeping, while Bea and Giles took turns coming up with bright questions to save us all from the awkward silence. Was San Francisco as delightful as it used to be? they wanted to know. Did she have a flat or a house and was it in a foggy or a sunny area? Was she working on a new novel? Did she find Britain different?

  She answered each question in full, with witty flourishes, and was even better than they were at thinking up new ways to stave off silence. She also charmed the driver. ‘Weren’t you the one who went to Cambridge?’ she asked. She asked Bea about her daughters, Giles about his poets. She asked after Janet and all the other family retainers. It was only when she enquired about William and Hermione that her voice faltered.

  When Bea said, a bit too drily, ‘Well, they’re as well as could be expected,’ I saw her hand clench, but even then, she dissolved the tension in her face with yet another joke.

  ‘Well, I hope you realise that there’s one thing I’m not going to let them do, and that’s forgive me.’

  How could she say such a thing and still laugh? How could she drive right back into the heart of her former misery and say, ‘Beckfield might be the first circle of hell, but it sure as hell is beautiful!’? Where did she find her smiles for the press pack? How could she keep talking to me as if we were having a friendly conversation when she could only get monosyllables out of me? I hated my ungraciousness. I knew the others would remark on it later, saying, ‘Well, she didn’t do a very good job of hiding her feelings, did she?’ But the more I hated my inability to be gracious, chatty and witty, the heavier my limbs, the more leaden my tongue.

  And with my every failure to rise to the occasion, the wittier, chattier and more gracious she became. When she put her arm around me to help me into the cottage – my cottage, not hers any more, although this did not seem to register – when she took my hand and said, ‘Let’s make you some tea’ and took me into my kitchen, even then she had just the right words ready. ‘Oh, my God!’ she said. ‘Max, I can’t believe it. You still have the same crappy old pepper shaker! Is this a mausoleum or what?’ I could not understand how the artefacts in the mausoleum had no effect on her. This was the kitchen where she had once chopped her hand instead of a clove of garlic and then, instead of going straight to casualty, stopped to write a poem about it, dreaming of death. She had probably used that knife on the magnetic strip, and this cutting board, but now there was no pull, no connection, no fear, no regret.

  How could she stay so strong? Why was I the one to feel faint? Why was she the only one to notice? ‘Here, take my arm,’ she said. I didn’t want to take her arm, and I didn’t want her taking me into my own bedroom and smiling as if it were still her bedroom. And most of all, I didn’t want her sitting down on the bed next to me, taking my hand and looking into my eyes. How could she be so earnest?

  ‘You’re very tense,’ she said.

  I tried to nod politely.

  ‘My coming back like this must be very hard for you.’

  Hoarsely, I said, ‘Well, according to you, I’m the one who provoked you into doing it.’

  ‘Well, yes and no. You certainly pressed the right button, but I was bound to resurrect myself sooner or later.’ She laughed. ‘You know the worst part about being officially dead? Picking up your last novel and finding that someone has changed the ending. Galling is not the word!’ But she sounded too good-natured to sound galled at all.

  ‘They really take the cake, don’t they?’ she continued. ‘These Beckfield mafiosi – what’s that English expression? It’s been so long since I used it. They take the biscuit. Or is it bite the biscuit?’ I couldn’t help her, but she didn’t mind. ‘No, anyway, I was never going to take that lying down, believe me. Not even dead. No, really, I should be thanking you for calling me a bad mother. You said what you thought at least! You went on what you knew! You haven’t been here long enough to have learned how to be cruel by being kind.’

  She squeezed my hand again. ‘What I didn’t have the chance to say when I was doing my spiel is how well written that piece of yours was. It’s really strange, you know, when you admire a piece of writing even though it’s cutting your heart up. Another thing I should tell you. I’m a fan of your book.’

  ‘Well, if you are, you’re almost alone of all your sex,’ I said.

  She laughed as if I had made the funniest joke in the world. Then, just as suddenly, she turned serious. ‘I’m a fan of your book, but I also know you have a better book inside you, and I know what it’s like here, I know what they do to people, and the long and the short of it is that you’ll never write this book, you know, unless you get away from them, and – listen, learn from my experience – if you wait until this child is born, they’ll never let you take it with you, so you should go now, honestly, I mean it, now. I’m here, I can cover for you, let me do it.’

  She looked at me, breathless as if she had been running, even afraid. ‘I know this might sound strange, coming from me and under these circumstances, but … our recovery depends on our telling our own story.’

  Now the words came out without my willing them. ‘Take your hands off me. Take your hands off me and get off my bed.’

  ‘Oh, please don’t—’

  ‘It’s my bed now, in case you haven’t noticed. It’s my bed and you can’t just come in here and walk all over it.’

  ‘Oh, I see, you think I’m jealous, don’t you? Well, I can see why you’d think that. Except that—’

  She was unable to finish h
er sentence. My raised voice brought Max into the bedroom. In a cracked voice, but still not looking at her, he said, ‘What are you doing in here? You’re not upsetting her, are you? I don’t think this is a good idea.’

  Before she could answer him, Bea had come bustling in, saying that it was all set, there was a refrigerator of cold champagne waiting for them, and she was going straight back to the house to get everything ready for their little celebration, and did Rebecca remember how to drive on the wrong side of the road, and if so, did she want the job of collecting the children?

  ‘Are you sure? Do you trust me to do it on my own?’

  ‘I’d better come with you,’ Max said stiffly.

  Bea nodded. ‘That’s probably a better idea.’

  ‘But you’re not going to make me sit in the passenger seat, are you, Max? Please let me drive. Please?’

  He lowered his head as if in defence against a screech that hurt his ears. Or was he just trying not to show a pleasure he was afraid I might not be able to understand? ‘Why don’t you go outside and wait for me there?’ he said. He reached into his pocket and threw her the keys.

  ‘Still the same key chain even,’ she said. ‘It gets curiouser and curiouser.’

  Before she got up, she gave my hand one last squeeze and said, ‘Please don’t misunderstand what I was trying to say. We can talk more later.’

  After she had left the room, Max said, ‘What was she saying to you?’

  ‘Oh, the usual nonsense.’

  ‘Yes, but what usual nonsense?’

  ‘That I should choose art over love, because I had a better book in me.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Don’t we all?’ He put his hand through my hair. In a dead voice, he asked, ‘How are you taking this?’

  ‘I’m glad she’s left the room. But … but …’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But I can see why you were in love with her.’

  He frowned. ‘I’m glad someone can. I don’t know if I can. But I suppose … Never mind, we can talk about that later. I’m worried about you. You don’t look well. I don’t think you should come to this party tonight. I’d like you to stay in bed.’

  ‘But I can’t stay in bed. Even if I did stay in bed, how could I relax?’

  ‘You’d still be better off here and not there. You’ve had enough for one day. I don’t want her working on you any more. She never knows when to stop. Let me handle her. It’s going to be a very tricky evening and I’d like to keep you out of it.’

  ‘But you can’t keep me out of it! I’m your wife!’

  His face turned red. ‘You’re also pregnant, and even if you don’t have the good sense to think about your own health, you must think of the baby.’ He pounded the bedside table. ‘It’s my baby, too, God damn it! It’s my baby and I have no control over it!’

  ‘And you think I have any more control over it than you? Look at me, Max! I can’t even breathe, for God’s sake!’

  Now he put his fingers through his own hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, more to the floor than to me. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘You must be feeling very confused,’ I offered.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know if I’m feeling anything. Except very, very tired.’ But for the first time in two days, he did not look tired. Instead he looked edgy, almost elated. He glanced at his watch. ‘I must go,’ he said. ‘Promise me you’ll look after yourself.’

  ‘I love you,’ I said as he took his hand away.

  He kissed my head. ‘And I love you.’

  Would I have acted differently if he had recited his lines with just a bit more conviction?

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  I know there’s no point in asking this question. In the seven years since the events I’m describing I’ve learned just how pointless, but going around in circles is a habit I can’t break. Last night, for example. We were at a drinks party in North Oxford. It was the usual collection talking about the usual subjects, and so it was almost without thinking that I gravitated towards the one person in the room who looked less at home than I did. I knew he was American before he opened his mouth. It was partly his too casual clothes, partly the wild and puzzled expression on his face, as if it were ropes and not good manners that held him to his chair, as if he would happily agree to pay any money to be tearing across the mesa on a motorcycle – or so I thought. It is possible I was reading my own wishes into him.

  He turned out to be from New Mexico. Not originally, of course. ‘That sort of goes without saying. The average American moves once every five years.’ He asked me where I was from. I told him I wasn’t sure which place counted. He nodded knowingly. ‘That makes you an honorary average American.’

  He asked me why I had settled in Oxford. Was I a don? ‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘I’m here because I’m married.’ I was looking around the room to point Max out, when I saw him standing right behind me. He already had his coat on. He told me he was going home.

  There was alarm in the American’s eyes as we watched Max leave. ‘What’s wrong with that guy?’ he asked. Then he said something else no British person would ever dream of saying under such circumstances: ‘He looks like he’s preparing for the Second Coming.’

  ‘Oh, he is,’ I said. ‘You’re right about that.’

  ‘Is he always that bad?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘He just doesn’t like parties now that he doesn’t drink any more. He’s also afraid of leaving the children with babysitters.’

  ‘I know lots of women who would kill for a husband like that. Or is it a drag, always having to go out alone?’

  I was no longer used to taking such direct hits, so I decided to change the subject. I asked him what he did for a living.

  He told me he was a fire sculptor. His most recent performance piece, he said, had involved setting alight a flotilla of miniature boats he had made and sending them down the Mississippi.

  ‘What was the point of it all?’ I asked.

  He said, ‘To prove that true beauty never lasts.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but if it doesn’t last, then almost by definition it can’t be art.’

  He didn’t agree with me. ‘If it’s really beautiful, no one who’s seen it can ever forget it. It continues to illuminate their lives every bit as much as that fleeting memory of the Parthenon in moonlight, or the long-ago glimpse of the Vermeer woman with her pitcher.’

  ‘But what if it didn’t stop there?’ I wanted to know. ‘What if your flotilla had not just disintegrated but also started a larger fire and destroyed everything around it? What if that had been your secret desire from the outset? Surely it was only art to the degree you could contain it?’

  That was to confuse the cause with the effect, he told me. Art might start out as a controlled experiment, but the interesting part was seeing what happened after it was beyond the power of the creator to stop it.

  His voice was loud and by now our conversation had attracted interest. I could already predict what would happen later on, after I had left the party. He would say, ‘I had the strangest conversation with that woman in the long blue dress.’ He would repeat it, not quite verbatim, and then this other person would say, ‘Well, you know who she is, don’t you?’ I could foresee all this, but still I could not help it. I said to this fire sculptor that the only thing that made his work qualify as art was that his intention had been to lie to himself.

  Art made something out of nothing. The beauty of fire, I told him, was that it did the opposite. Fire was beautiful when it made nothing out of something that had been squeezing the life out of you. When it seemed to read your mind, I said.

  But of course even that could be a lie.

  After the others had left for the big house, I watched myself on the seven-o’clock news and again at nine. But there is a limit to the number of times you can bear to see a young and breathless newscaster standing outside your house trying to guess why you looked wan and your husband tense while Rebecc
a stole the limelight. ‘So, Annabel, is the second marriage null?’ asked the newsreader in the studio. I turned off the television before she gave her answer. There is only so long you can look at a blank screen, a cold fireplace, an empty room.

  I tried reading a book but then a car would stop outside the main courtyard. Cameras would flash. There would be a flurry of questions, and then the car would continue. A single peal of laughter would float through the open window, and I would try to imagine who had just arrived, what the reporters were saying to each other, what the others in the big house were doing, what I was missing, what they didn’t want me to see. Who were they to say? I asked myself. I needed to see it. I needed to know what they were like when they thought I wasn’t there. One look was all I needed.

  I wanted to see if my fears had come true. Perhaps that is a better way of putting it. As I stepped out of the house, I might even have admitted that I was looking forward to the pain. There is a satisfaction in seeing that you have imagined the unknown correctly. Across the lawn I went to face the big house.

  In the front room, a fire was taking the edge off the cool spring night. Danny and Rebecca were giggling and whispering in the shadows of the corridor that led to the kitchen. They disappeared, I made my way around the wing that housed Beckfield Press. It was not its usual tidy self. Books thrown here and there indicated that Rebecca had been in here looking at her English editions. There was a poster that someone – Danny perhaps? – had unrolled and tacked up on the wall. It was the famous photograph of Rebecca in the wrong dress, the one that had appeared on the back covers of the English and American editions of The Marriage Hearse. ‘Can you take it?’ her smile seemed to say to me. ‘When you see the truth, will you sink or swim?’ I continued around the house, past the kitchen, where the butler for the evening was arranging trays of canapés and shining champagne glasses. Past the dining room where Janet was setting the table. And now the sitting room. The French windows were open to make up for the heat of the fire.