Rebecca's Tale (19 page)

I’m now learning, I hope, how to
look
and how to
listen
. Very often it isn’t
what
someone told me, but the
way
they told me that is the most revealing. No doubt I’d be less vulnerable to these bouts of pessimism if I had someone to talk to, someone I could discuss all this
with over a drink at the end of the day. If a Cambridge friend were here, or May were still alive, I probably wouldn’t get as downcast as I sometimes do. But they aren’t, and there’s no one in Kerrith I can confide in, so occasionally I feel lonely and cut off here.

It isn’t that I mind being alone. I learned to value privacy very quickly at the orphanage. If you spend all day every day being herded, if every act is a public one, witnessed and jeered at, if you go to sleep being taunted and wake to more taunts, then solitude is a luxury. It always has been for me; it probably always will be, and if I’m denied it too long I start to crave it. That’s one of the legacies of the orphanage years—Nicky would say one of the scars. I don’t like that term; it’s predictable. Besides, scars indicate healing, and they’re harmless.

But there’s a vast difference between being alone and being lonely—there’s an ocean between those two states, as I’m discovering. I’m not the child I was, thank God, and I’m no longer the sullen suspicious young man I was when I first went up to King’s. I now need friends, and can even admit that to myself. In fact, I’ve made such progress that Nicky says I’m approaching normality—though there’s still room for improvement, he tells me. He says I can now talk to people as if they were people and not robots, which is an advance. A few more years and, with luck, I’ll be emotionally “housetrained,” as he charmingly puts it.

I thought of Nicky’s comments as I finally reached The Pines. Maybe I’d have progressed further and faster with Colonel Julyan had I been more open with him—though there was a limit, obviously, to how open I could be. I decided to make an effort today. I’m fond of the old man, and I was looking forward to seeing him. He’d promised to start going through all those boxes and files of his in search of letters he wanted to show me.

I wasn’t sure whether this “archive” (as the Colonel’s now begun to call it) contained anything of use, or decades of irrelevant rubbish. I was hopeful, though. I’d been given glimpses of its contents, enough to feel that there might well be some gems, especially if the Colonel can locate the folders he claims he’s mislaid, which contain “Notes from Rebecca” and “Letters from Maxim.”

Even though we’ve made our pact and I am now “co-opted,” I’m not allowed, of course, to search through any of this material myself.
The Colonel has to do so, and in conditions of some secrecy—so I suspect he might want to vet the contents of anything he finds before showing it to me. He is beginning to trust me, though, so perhaps today I’d make a breakthrough, I thought. My spirits rose; they were dashed almost as soon as I entered the house. The Colonel was nowhere to be seen, and Ellie met me with the news that he’d worn himself out looking through all his boxes and files the previous day; this morning he’d been very fretful. Taking me through into the kitchen, she told me she’d packed him off to bed, where he was now sleeping peacefully.

I was concerned, and genuinely sorry to hear he’d been upset by his activities, but my face fell. I wasn’t able to hide my disappointment. Ellie, who misses very little, saw it at once; it may have hurt her, but if so, she covered it up quickly.

“Don’t look quite so miserable,” she said with a smile. “I know it’s my father you want to see, but it won’t hurt you to talk to me for five minutes. I’ll make some coffee and we can sit outside—it’s such a lovely day. No, please don’t rush off—I haven’t had a chance to speak to you alone since the day we went to Manderley, and there’s something I want to tell you.”

She made the coffee; I was instructed to fetch cups and a tray. The kitchen at The Pines is a pleasant room; it looks as if it hasn’t been altered in years, and I’m sure hasn’t changed since Ellie was a child. I could imagine a time when Ellie had sat here with her brother and elder sister—and I suppose that made me like the room even more. Never having had one in the usual sense, I’m sentimental about families. On the table was a pile of the Sunday newspapers, and a book that Ellie had evidently been reading before I arrived. I wanted to see what it was, but I couldn’t read the title without moving the papers; I had to wait until she had her back to me. I’m not sure what I was expecting: one of those women’s novels about marriage and domesticity, perhaps; or, given her aunt Rose’s influence, Austen maybe, or the Brontës. It proved to be Camus,
The Outsider
. I hid it under the newspaper again.

We went out into the garden, past the palm and the monkey puzzle, and down to the terrace at the far end. The church bells were ringing for morning service; a light breeze from the water made the rigging of the yachts anchored below us reverberate with a strange
rhythmic humming. The view over the harbor, with the boats moving lazily at anchor and the ferry churning the water as it departed from the pier, was ceaselessly interesting and calming. In harbors, time stretches; and of all the ones I know well, including the tiny and remote one that May and Edwin’s house overlooked, I like Kerrith the best. I associate it with the first true freedom and happiness of my childhood.

Ellie stretched like a cat in the sun, then sat down on the wall, hugging her knees, and watching the water. I tried to decide if she’d changed in the months since I first met her, or if I was only now learning how to look at her. For a long time, I think, I couldn’t see beyond the fact that she was the Colonel’s daughter; it certainly took a while for me to notice she’s pretty—in fact very attractive, in a boyish gamine way. She’s very slim; today, her soft brown hair was tied carelessly back from her face; she was wearing a short-sleeved blouse and narrow trousers; she’d kicked off her shoes, and I noticed her feet, like her arms and her face, were tanned gold. The light was dazzling. Ellie pulled out a pair of dark glasses and put them on. At once she looked different again—and I realized how much I depend on reading her eyes. Ellie has remarkable eyes, of a clear hazel. They’re exceptionally candid—and, now they were hidden behind those smoky lenses, I was thrown. I felt I had no idea who she was, or how to go about talking to her.

She may have sensed this, because she took charge. Trying to put me at my ease, I suspect, she began telling me about her father and his progress. I was thinking how little I knew about her. The Briggs sisters had told me that as a child Ellie was exceptionally clever, that she took after her aunt Rose, that she’d won a scholarship to Cambridge, and would have gone there to study literature at Girton, but her mother became ill, so she gave it up and stayed here to nurse her. Now she was nursing her father. I wondered if she ever fretted, if she regretted sacrificing her life in this way. I thought not. There’s nothing bitter about Ellie. She’s generous, smart, loyal, and observant—with flashes of intelligence that took me by surprise at first. Would I have regarded Ellie differently had she gone to Cambridge and taken a degree? I knew I would—and that made me ashamed. Now I knew her better, I was beginning to see that I might have underestimated Ellie.

“I want to say something to you,” she began, after we’d been sitting there in the sun for a while. “It’s about my father, and, no, it’s not about his health, or not directly. I want to ask you not to judge him.”

That took me by surprise. If Ellie knew me better she’d realize I’m in no position to judge anyone. “Why should you think I would?” I said.

“You might. People here have. Journalists have. And my father’s suffered accordingly. He’s learned to live with that—but he likes you. How you think of him matters to him—not that he’d ever admit that. He’s proud, as you’ve probably seen. I’m sure he’d never defend himself. So I want to do it for him.”

“Ellie—you don’t need to do that.”

“Yes, I do. I want you to understand. People here accuse my father of a cover-up. I know they’ll have told you this. I know you’ll have read all the articles, those damn stupid books. They say Rebecca’s death was never investigated properly, that more could have been done—I don’t know what, and neither do they, but that doesn’t stop them. They talk and write such rubbish—some people even claim my father invented all that evidence about Rebecca’s having cancer and being mortally ill. Well, he didn’t. They’d never have traced that London doctor if it hadn’t been for my father. And Rebecca
was
dying—I hope you’re in no doubt about that? Dr. Baker sent written confirmation. I’ve seen the letters.”

“I’ve never doubted that, Ellie.” I hesitated; I knew how defensive of her father she was, and this was difficult territory. I could see that the Colonel’s hands had been tied. Even so, he did not believe himself blameless. Should I risk pushing Ellie on this point? I decided I would. “I’ve asked your father several times,” I said, “but there’s still something I’m not clear about. What did your father think at the time? What did he believe in his heart, Ellie?”

Ellie gave me a look that might have been scornful or amused—I couldn’t tell because of those dark glasses. With a restless gesture, she swung her legs off the wall, and produced a packet of cigarettes from her pocket. I’d never seen her smoke before—but then I’ve scarcely talked to her without her father being present. “In his heart?” she said now, lighting her cigarette. She gave me a small glance that I was almost sure
was
amused. “Well, it’s always difficult to read people’s hearts, of course…. But he
knew
—of course he
knew. Not at the very beginning. I’m sure he believed in the accident at sea at first. He had no suspicions when that first woman’s body was found and Maxim identified it as Rebecca’s. He pitied Maxim then—everyone did.”

She paused. “It was later that everything changed, when Maxim went abroad and he remarried. That caused such a scandal. My mother was appalled, and people like the Briggs sisters—they were bewildered, I think. You see, they’d all believed Maxim loved Rebecca, that he adored her. And then, when she wasn’t cold in her grave—that’s the way Elinor Briggs put it—he came back from France with a child bride. It was like
Hamlet
—you know the line in
Hamlet?
”

“ The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’?”

“Exactly. My father tried to defend Maxim. I know he was shocked, too, because he’s old school; conventions matter to him. But he was loyal to Maxim, and he was very short with people who criticized him…. I’ll tell you when his doubts began: It was when Rebecca’s boat was found. My father was there when they raised it. They went down to the boathouse cove at dawn—and that’s why he’s avoided that place ever since. It haunts him. They took
Je Reviens
to that little deserted creek, the one near James Tabb’s old boatyard. That creek silts up at low tide, and it was disused even then; no one ever goes there—do you know it?”

“I’ve passed it.”

“They wanted somewhere quiet, and private. A fine and private place…” Ellie looked away toward the water; the smoke of her cigarette curled. “My father was there as magistrate; Maxim was present, of course, and our local doctor, Dr. Phillips. The harbormaster was there and a police inspector…. It was all very official. You have to remember that, at that point, everyone believed that Rebecca’s body had
already
been found, so no one knew whose body this was; they didn’t even know if it was a man or a woman. When the body was finally brought ashore, and they came to identify it, Maxim tried to touch Rebecca’s rings—she was still wearing them. My father didn’t tell me that until years afterward, but I know it was then that he started to have doubts. He saw something in Maxim’s eyes, maybe. Then, after the inquest, he was deeply uneasy….”

“Because of Tabb’s evidence? Because the boat had been deliberately scuttled?”

“Well, obviously,” she replied, her tone cool. “That inquest was a farce. The coroner must have been a fool. But it wasn’t just that—it was something less tangible. Has my father ever talked to you about Rebecca’s burial service?”

I shook my head. This subject, as I’d learned, was verboten for Colonel Julyan.

“Maxim and he quarrelled about it,” she went on. “Maxim insisted on Rebecca’s being buried in the de Winter crypt, and my father knew Rebecca hadn’t wanted that. But Maxim wouldn’t listen. He insisted it all had to be done quickly, immediately after the inquest.”

“What about the other woman—the woman whose body he’d misidentified? She was already buried there.”

“I know. Her coffin had to be removed. I think that was done during the inquest. Frank Crawley probably made the arrangements—he usually did. I know there were police present. They spirited her away, at a time when they knew there’d be no danger of publicity because all the journalists were at the coroner’s court. I don’t know what happened to her then. Nobody was interested in her, poor woman.” There was a pause; when I didn’t speak, she turned away, frowning, her gaze resting on the water below us. “I can understand the secrecy up to a point,” she went on. “You’ve read the newspaper coverage. My father loathed publicity of that kind, and it was anathema to Maxim. So I see why those arrangements had to be made in that surreptitious way—but when it came to Rebecca’s burial, why did that have to be such a shabby hasty affair? She’d been Maxim’s
wife
; there were people here who loved and admired her—and yet she was buried like a pauper, or a criminal.”

“That caused comment presumably?”

“It caused
offense
,” Ellie said sharply. “No one in Kerrith even knew the funeral was happening, and we only did because my father was attending it. I can remember that night so well: My brother was away at school, but the rest of us were here; my mother was very distressed, and so was my sister, Lily—Lily worshipped Rebecca. She’d come home—she lived in London then—because she wanted to go to Rebecca’s funeral. And then she couldn’t, because there
wasn’t
a funeral as such, just this horrible, hasty, guilty interment. When my
father came back that night, his face was white—ashen. I’d never seen him look like that. He wouldn’t speak to any of us. He went into his study and shut the door on us.