Rebecca's Tale (10 page)

At the end of the meeting there were, as always, refreshments: stewed coffee, well-named rock cakes, and sausage rolls. Ellie and I stood to one side; Mr. Gray was instantly surrounded. A posse of old pussies, led by the Lane woman, closed in. Were they discussing gibbet sites and my revelations concerning them? No, they were not. They had instantly homed in on the question of marriage—never far from their minds at the best of times, of course.

“Why weren’t you snapped up years ago, Mr. Gray?” Elinor Briggs piped up, as I advanced from the rearguard, intent on rescue (Elinor has always been quick off the mark). All the old bats bared their teeth in roguish smiles, and I awaited Gray’s reply with interest. Would he venture some quip? Make some smooth disclaimer? No, neither. He colored and stammered a defensive answer. Did they lose interest? Far from it. Women cannot resist shyness in a handsome man. The capitulation of Kerrith’s female population was instantaneous.

Months later, this pertinent question still remains unresolved, and Gray’s biography may be summarized in brief. He hails from Scotland—from the Borders, I think. After attending a grammar school I’ve never heard of, he won a scholarship to Cambridge (my own alma mater; I was at Trinity prior to Sandhurst; Gray was at some other college. King’s? Caius? I forget). He took a good degree (it may even have been a first) in History, and I think became a teacher of some kind until, in 1939, the war intervened. I assume he then volunteered or was called up—but he chooses never to discuss this period and having a respect for such silences myself, I have not pressed him. Recently, there seems to have been some personal crisis,
almost certainly involving a woman. Whatever it was that happened, it led him to make changes in his life.

He seems to have thrown in his job, cut all his ties, and come looking for employment in, of all unlikely places, this neighborhood. Once here, despite being ludicrously overqualified, he applied for and got a temporary and part-time position at our county archive library in Lanyon—a position so short-term, dull, and ill-paid that it had remained unfilled for months. There he now works, three days a week, cataloging the de Winter estate papers, deposited there after Maxim’s death, as I understand it, by lawyers acting for the second Mrs. de Winter. He rents a tiny cottage on the outskirts of Kerrith, and devotes the rest of his ample free time to what he calls “his researches.” He always speaks of these in a very modest way, but I believe there is a great deal more to Mr. Gray than meets the eye and I suspect him of
writing
. In my opinion he has ambitions as an author, and these “researches” are intended to form the basis of a
book
. I have a pretty damn shrewd idea of its subject matter, too…but I mustn’t get ahead of myself.

When I first began to suspect this, I’d known Gray about six weeks, we had begun to meet regularly and I had warmed to him. He is an excellent listener; he is astute, knowledgeable, persistent, and highly intelligent. I welcomed the idea that Gray might make use of material I could give him. The book I then envisaged his writing was a very general one, rather like my grandfather’s inestimable
History of the Parishes of Manderley and Kerrith, with Walks
.

Safe in this belief, I opened up. Then I became aware that Gray’s field of interest was narrowing. From concerning himself with a large local area and several ancient family estates, he homed in on one estate in particular: Manderley. I was still so convinced that Gray was a dull dog librarian, whose chief concern was such topics as medieval field boundaries, that even then I felt no alarm. I allowed him to draw me out. More than was prudent, I feel in retrospect.

Then, gradually, I began to notice: Medieval field boundaries were
not
his concern; he was not really interested in the early history of the de Winter family, either. It is a colorful history, with the beddings, bastardy, and amours of the eighteenth century being particularly eventful, but all my stories about these de Winters, including the
most colorful of all, wicked Caroline de Winter and her rake of a brother, fell on deaf ears. Mr. Gray’s concerns were far more modern.

When I finally realized that—and I now curse myself for being so slow—I at once became cautious, and renewed my own inquiries. Who exactly was Mr. Terence Gray, lately come amongst us? Why had he been so anxious to take that ill-paid minor job—and why had he been so anxious to befriend me?
Was
it truly, as Ellie claimed, that he liked me? I began to doubt his motives and this philanthropy.

The Briggs sisters, Marjorie Lane, and others, filled me in. Terence Gray, it seemed, had a sad and touching background: Orphaned as a small boy, or as a baby (everyone seemed suspiciously vague on this point), he had spent his early childhood in various children’s homes. He had then been adopted by a woman known as “Auntie May,” a saintly and kindhearted body living near Peebles (or possibly Perth). Auntie May had relations in this neck of the woods and had brought the boy here on numerous holidays, when he had gamboled on the sands, walked the coast paths, et cetera, et cetera, and had formed an emotional bond with Kerrith and the surrounding neighborhood.

After the war, Auntie May had died, leaving wee Terence a small legacy. This legacy gave him a measure of independence, allowing him to return to the scenes of his childhood idyll, and it now eked out his inadequate salary. There were even rumors that enough had been salted away by this prudent Scotswoman to enable Gray to consider buying the property he was renting. The Briggs sisters were particularly warm on this aspect of the story. For reasons beyond my comprehension they seemed to believe that whether or not Gray was sufficiently set up in life to own property would be a matter of concern to me.

“Of course, we’ve given him every encouragement!” Jocelyn, the younger Briggs, cried. “We think it would be so suitable in every way, don’t we, Elinor? He’s made the cottage so very snug and charming—and it’s only ten minutes walk, less, to The Pines! What could be more convenient?”

“Convenient for whom?” I asked coldly.

“Why,
everyone
, Arthur, dear,” said Jocelyn, becoming flustered.

“We mean,” Elinor put in, giving her sister an admonitory look, “that it would be delightful if he were to stay here
permanently
. And
so nice for you, Arthur, dear! You’re such great friends now, and you share so many interests…” She paused. “I find it hard to believe he never told you about his childhood. He never mentioned his Aunt May? How strange! Jocelyn and I were counting on you to fill in the gaps—we thought you’d be familiar with the whole story….”

I
was
familiar with the whole story. I had read it, or variations upon it, in countless novels. It had Dickensian echoes that unsettled me. Did I believe in Auntie May, alias Betsy Trotwood? Not being as gullible as the Briggs spinsters, I wasn’t at all sure that I did. I thought there might be very good reasons why the Terrier had spared me these details—he couldn’t pull the wool over
my
eyes, and I think he knew that.

My suspicions being thus aroused (What was Gray hiding? Could he be
illegitimate?
Ye gods, could he be
married?
Could there be a deserted wife and child in Peebles or Perth?), I took care what I divulged, and I watched with an eagle eye the precise nature of his inquiries. At once, his angle became obvious. Medieval field boundaries? What a dimwit I’d been! Gray was interested in the de Winter family, yes, but his chief interest was, and always had been, Rebecca.

Now why should that be? Once I had marked his interest, that was the question I asked myself. Could there be some small personal link that explained it? I wondered. If Gray’s claims regarding childhood holidays could be believed, he’d have been coming here during the latter half of the 1920s, when Rebecca was still alive and at the height of her social fame. If his visits continued into his teens, he might have stayed here at the time of her disappearance, or the subsequent inquest. Details of that were splashed across the pages of the newspapers, and gossip was rife. Had Gray and his Aunt May, staying in a modest boardinghouse, perhaps, heard these stories? Had the seeds of Gray’s interest been planted then? It seemed possible. Crime (and punishment) were certainly subjects that interested him.

Finally, exasperated, I asked him straight out. I put this scenario to him. He denied it. He had been aware of Manderley as a boy, he added—how could he not be when every second shop sold postcards showing views of the house? He and his aunt generally stayed farther up river; they used to rent a tiny waterside cottage near the ancient church at Pelynt. He thought he
might
have made a visit to the Manderley church to take brass rubbings of the medieval de Winter tombs on one occasion, but he and his aunt moved in very modest
social circles and he could remember no discussion locally of those exalted beings, Rebecca and Maxim de Winter. As for the inquest and the subsequent fire, he thought he could remember reading about them in the national newspapers—but he was at least fifteen then, and the holidays in this area had ceased.

He paused; then, as if satisfied with this thumbnail portrait of an earnest little boy, an infant historian in the making, he changed the subject. On balance, I believed that story about brass rubbings. It was in character. Even as an adult, Gray retains a fondness for churches and tombs, and will walk miles in all weathers to visit them. It goes hand in hand with his passion for old books and documents, for the days he spends trawling through archives, newspaper libraries, and antiquarian bookshops.

This is a man who loves
evidence
—or so I initially thought—a man who delights in reconstructing the past by means of estate records, church registers, the incunabula of birth, wedding, and death certificates; this is a peruser of wills, a disinterer of dusty forgotten letters, diaries, and notebooks—and I could quite see that for such a man Manderley represented a special challenge. Why? Because there were gaps—huge gaps—and the historian in Gray was at once drawn to this apparent vacuum.

When Manderley burned down, the contents of the house were destroyed completely. The fire occurred within thirty-six hours of the inquest into Rebecca’s death. It began at night and raged through the building. Everything went: all the exquisite furniture Rebecca had assembled, all those spying portraits that so terrorized me as a child—and all the de Winter family papers.

But the estate records, as I’ve said, had survived. At the time of the fire, they’d been lodged at the estate office, under Frank Crawley’s fussy care; now they had passed to the very archive where Gray works, and—needless to say—Gray was quick to make himself familiar with them. His fascination with this dry-as-dust stuff amused me at first. That a fit, active young man with a good mind should choose to bury himself in these details of acreages, tenant farms, rents, and crop rotations seemed to me absurd. My own interest in history takes a more romantic turn; Malory has left an enduring legacy. I like love affairs, fatal passions, dastardly deeds, battles, and derring-do—and, fool that I was, I felt patronizing toward Gray for the footling mat
ters that so absorbed him. The more he labored away at the coalface, the less I thought of him.

I can now see that these labors were preparatory; I
suspect
Gray may have uncovered several little gems in those records that no one could have foreseen. He has certainly shown a marked interest in one de Winter tenant family, the Carminowes, whom I remember well from my childhood, and about whom I have long held my own conjectures. Their story is a sad one—three sons dead in the first war, their pretty widowed mother left to bring up her two surviving children herself, and one of those children—the boy, Ben—an idiot from birth.

It was Gray who bothered to follow up on their history, and Gray who discovered that Ben Carminowe, who used to haunt the coves below Manderley, was dead—apparently he ended his days in the county asylum. Maybe it was when Gray began to cross-question me about these loyal de Winter tenants that I first became uneasy. My misgivings soon deepened. Having exhausted the estate papers, Gray turned his attention to my own little archive. The Manderley family records might have gone up in smoke, but what about all that rich information packed away in my study—and in my memory?

It was then that the Terrier’s interrogations really started. He wanted to know about Lionel and poor Virginia and the Termagant. He wanted to know about Maxim as a boy, and he became very animated indeed when I let slip that, millennia ago, when my bluestocking sister, Rose, was young and lovely, she and Maxim had for a brief period been expected to marry. “Just before the first war?” he asked sharply.

“Round about then,” I said, retreating rapidly. “Probably nothing to it, now I look back. People were always speculating—he was the heir, after all. He and Rose were close in age; they were friends, which was surprising in some ways…”

“Why?”

“Because Rose always had her nose in a book, even then. And that wasn’t really Maxim’s taste at all. Most of the de Winters were philistines, now I think about it, and Maxim was influenced by them. He liked to be outdoors. He sailed. He rode. On the other hand, he was handsome. He was dashing. There was a streak of melancholy even then, even before the war—I expect that intrigued Rose….”

“He was also very rich, of course. One day, he would own Manderley.”

I was annoyed. “And you’re barking up the wrong tree if you think that would influence my sister,” I said with some heat. “You don’t know Rose. Rose was a socialist in the nursery. She was a suffragette at six. All Rose wanted to do was to go off to Cambridge, God help us, and spend the rest of her life writing unreadable books with lots of footnotes. Which is exactly what she
did
do. She’s now
Dr
. Julyan. She may even be
Professor
Julyan. She’s a feminist, a man-hating eccentric, and an embarrassment to the entire family.”