Rebecca's Tale (2 page)

I picked up my pen, and began writing down my list of morning tasks. This habit, ingrained since my days as a subaltern, remains with me even now. I still write these dratted lists every day, although they test even my powers of invention. I can hardly write “potter about,” or “tidy desk,” or “read
Daily Telegraph
until general tomfoolery of the modern world threatens to induce heart failure.” I refuse to write “woolgathering” as a potential activity, although that is how I spend too much of my time.

Today, my list was distinctly promising. It read:

1. Rebecca’s death: Summarize salient
   facts
   . State objectives.
   
2. Draw up “witness” list re Manderley and de Winter family, etc.
   
3. Organize all confidential material relating to Rebecca, and file p.d.q.
   
4. Telephone Terence Gray.
   
5. Open parcel. If contents urgent (unlikely), reply.
   

For about two minutes, I felt galvanized by this list. Then a familiar panic set in. Writing the name “Rebecca” immediately upset me. I was daunted by that word “facts.” Somehow, whenever I consider Rebecca’s brief life, and the perturbing circumstances of her death, I find it difficult to retain my habitual objectivity. Facts are thin on the ground anyway; rumour is, and always has been, rife, and, with the best will in the world, certain prejudices seed themselves around.

Resolving to weed them out, I picked up my pen, drew out a sheet of paper, and began writing. At school, I was taught the fiendish art of
précis
by a melancholy beak called Hanbury-Smythe, a man with a Cambridge double first, who had had a briefly distinguished career in the Foreign Office. He had a weakness for the bottle, too, but we won’t dwell on
that
. His claim was that there was no problem, no situation, no matter how great its complexity, that could not be summarized in three sentences, and that
reducing
it in this way promoted clarity of thought. One’s subsequent course of action, one’s objectives, he believed, then became transparently obvious. I think this belief gave him some problems during his spell as a diplomat in the Balkans, but never mind. I was an early convert to the Hanbury-Smythe method, and used it throughout my Army career with conspicuous success.

I employed the Hanbury-Smythe technique now. Not long afterward (well, within the hour) I had produced the following:

T
HE
M
YSTERY OF
R
EBECCA’S
F
INAL
H
OURS

On the night of 12 April, 1931, Mrs. Maximilian de Winter returned from a visit to London, arriving at Manderley, her West Country home, some time after nine; at approximately ten
P.M.
, she left the house alone and on foot, walking down to the bay below, where her sailboat was moored. She was never seen alive again.

Fifteen months later, as a result of an unrelated shipping accident, and long after all searches had been abandoned, both her missing boat, which had been scuttled, and her body were discovered. The inquest verdict of “suicide” was controversial, but subsequently, and as a direct result of the local magistrate’s ingenious and energetic inquiries, it was discovered that Mrs. de Winter had been diagnosed as mortally ill and had been informed of that diagnosis
by a London doctor on the day of her disappearance; thus, a motive for killing herself, which had seemed lacking before, now presented itself and the matter was resolved.

I looked at this glumly: With the aid of clumsy sentence construction and sufficient semicolons, you can always cheat. My summary was dull; although factually “correct,” it contained at least eight evasions and one misleading assumption; I could count no less than six
suppressiones veri
, all of them whoppers. I’d got it down to three sentences, and I’d produced a travesty of the truth. Hanbury-Smythe was a donkey and a drunkard and his methods were useless.
The matter was resolved?
Would that it had been! I was not proud of myself. Rebecca deserved better than this.

Deciding to improve on this effort, I opened the desk drawer where I keep the press cuttings relating to Rebecca’s disappearance and death carefully filed. It is a thick file that has grown relentlessly fatter with the passing of years—there is something about this case that newshounds cannot resist. They’re obsessed with the idea that there was a miscarriage of justice, of course; most seem to believe there was a concerted cover-up (they don’t hesitate to point the finger, I might add) and, given Rebecca’s beauty and réclame, the story makes undeniably good “copy,” as someone said to me recently—it was Terence Gray, I think.

I inspected the cuttings carefully. The Hanbury-Smythe approach having failed me, maybe these professional wordsmiths could give me a few tips. They, along with our local gossips, have contrived to keep the story alive. Speculation about Rebecca herself, and the manner of her death, has never died down, as I’d once naively expected it would. Quite the reverse. Her disappearance and demise are still the subject of frequent articles; most of them—as Gray scornfully put it—are “cuttings jobs,” in which by dint of repetition the most dubious information has hardened into “truth.” There have been at least two books devoted to the subject, both purporting to contain new and sensational information—and both of them are works of romantic fiction (in my view, at least).

As a result, the “Manderley Mystery,” as it’s come to be called, has become one of the “Classic Conundrums of Crime”—I’m quoting
here from a man named Eric Evans, whom I was once foolish enough to allow to interview me. In those days—it was before the last war—there had been such a deluge of scandal, and it had rained down on my head for so long, that I’d finally decided to break my silence. I would produce proof of Rebecca’s final illness, and set the record straight. I know now that this was an error of the first magnitude. No self-respecting newshound is interested in “setting the record straight.” What they’re after is dirt.

Mr. Evans presented himself to me as an experienced crime reporter, a man with a nose for the truth. He wrote to me on paper with the
Daily Telegraph
heading (almost certainly pilfered, as I came to realize). I did notice that his letter was poorly typed, misspelled and ungrammatical, but I blamed some secretary girl. I believed him, fool that I was, when he spoke of a “crusade for truth.” I know I was at a low ebb—the gossip in Kerrith was by then so bad that I’d had to resign my seat on the Bench; even so I should have known better. I realized Evans was a crank within two minutes of meeting him, and ejected him immediately—thus acquiring a brand-new enemy, of course.

The scene of our interview, here in my study at The Pines, went like this:

(A November afternoon, 1936. Colonel Julyan, until recently magistrate for the district of Kerrith and Manderley, and an imposing figure, is seated at his desk. His wife, Elizabeth, whose health is now poor, opens the door, announces the visitor, and retreats. Enter Eric Evans, a man in his fifties, with thinning hair, a pale complexion, horn-rimmed spectacles, a northern accent, and a fanatical look. He is carrying a suitcase, which he immediately opens. It proves to be filled with newspaper cuttings, photographs of Rebecca de Winter torn from magazines, and the handwritten notes for the book that he now announces he is writing on the “Manderley Mystery.” He sits down and glares at Barker, the Colonel’s young dog, who is growling. Evans does not produce a notebook or a pen, but embarks on his questions at once.)

EVANS
: It was murder, wasn’t it?

COL
. J.: (
after a pause
) I think you’ll find the inquest verdict was “suicide.”

EVANS
: The husband did it. Any fool can see that.

COL. J
.: (
calm
) Are you familiar with the libel laws in this country, Mr. Evans?

EVANS
: Who was Rebecca’s lover? Did de Winter catch them
in flagrante
?

COL. J
.: (
less calm
) I thought you said you worked for the
Telegraph
?

EVANS
: There’s been a cover-up. You fixed things for your friend de Winter. I won’t be silenced! It’s a bloody disgrace!

(Exit Evans, pursued by a dog.)

Well, no doubt I exaggerate (why shouldn’t I indulge in a few fictions? Everyone else has), but it went something like that. And Evans was indeed not silenced. He was indefatigable, if lunatic. Over the years he published no less than sixteen articles on the de Winter case; he wrote a book,
The Lady Vanishes: A Solution to the Manderley Mystery
, which became a huge best-seller. He became the bane of my life, and before finally dying in the war when his bedsit was hit by a doodlebug (yes, there is a God), he created an industry. It was he, single-handed, who did the most enduring mischief. Sex and death are combustible components: Evans lit their fuse without hesitation. The result? Pyrotechnics. He turned Rebecca into a legend and her death into a myth.

In my file, I examined one of his earliest efforts. It originally appeared in 1937, a few months after our meeting. In the interim, someone—I suspect Jack Favell—had been bending Evans’s ear. Despite its blatant prejudice, its mind-bending vulgarity, its manipulations, unwarranted slurs, gross inaccuracies, and truly colossal stupidity, it had an enduring effect. This was the article that doomed Rebecca, Maxim, and me to a curious twilit afterlife in which characters that vaguely resemble us eternally perform gestures that vaguely reflect things we actually did or said. It’s a dumbshow; it’s a fairground mirror, and I—the last of us left alive—am still trapped in front of it, gesticulating away. I don’t recognize the people in the mirror, but who cares what I think?

If I were to tell the truth, what a Herculean task lay ahead of me, I thought, rereading Evans’s regrettable prose. The trouble was (and I had to admit this), some of Evans’s questions were pertinent; he was not without certain primitive skills, and at least his methods made the
background
a damn sight clearer than mine did.
O tempora, O mores
, I
said to myself. My predicament can’t be understood without quoting Evans, so I will. For better or worse, this was the article that launched the Rebecca industry; it has been much plagiarized since:

On the night of April 12, 1931, one of the most intriguing unsolved mysteries of recent times took place. The events of that night, and the drama of the months that followed, present the investigator with one of the classic conundrums of crime: Who was the lovely Rebecca de Winter, celebrated beauty and hostess, chatelaine of the legendary West Country mansion, Manderley? What were the events that led up to her tragic disappearance that fine April evening, and who was responsible for her death?

At the time of her mysterious disappearance, Rebecca de Winter had been married for some five years. Her husband, Maximilian (known as Maxim), came from an ancient West Country family. He could trace his ancestors back to the eleventh century. Manderley, his legendary family home, overlooking a wild and remote stretch of coastline, had been given a new lease of life, thanks to the taste and energy of his young wife: There were constant parties, entertainments, and fancy-dress balls. Invitations there were much sought after, and the eclectic guest list included many famous—and some infamous—names.

Mrs. de Winter, famous for her beauty, wit, charm, and elegance, featured regularly in society periodicals. She sailed (winning many cups at local regattas); her knowledge of gardening was extensive, and the Manderley gardens, redesigned and replanted during her years there, became renowned. She was much loved locally, especially by the de Winter tenants, but some of the old-guard families in this conservative part of the world had reservations. They found her direct manner of speech regrettable, and disliked her often unconventional views. Some expressed surprise that Maxim de Winter (ten years her senior and a traditionalist, it’s claimed) had married her. They regarded her as an outsider—and it is true that her background was mysterious. Who were her parents? Where did she grow up? Virtually nothing is known.

Despite the differences between husband and wife in background, interests, and age, the de Winters’ marriage appeared successful, although, after her disappearance, tongues began to wag.
The seeds of tragedy, it was hinted, had been sown long ago. Rumor proliferated, but it was to be over a year before, in the wake of a series of shocking and terrible events, the truth began to emerge. Scandal ensued. Yet it is evident that further details remain to be discovered about the events of April 12, 1931, and the tangle of intrigue that led up to them: Manderley protects the secrets of the de Winter family…even now.

Let us examine the events of April 12 and the questions surrounding them. That night, Mrs. de Winter returned from a brief visit to London, the purpose of which has never been adequately explained. Had she gone there to see a lover, as some claim? Why, when she had a flat in London where she frequently stayed overnight, did she make such an arduous journey—six hours there and six hours back by road—on the same day? Why, on her arrival home, in a state of turmoil and distress, as was noted by several of the maids, did she immediately set off for the beach below the house, leaving on foot at approximately ten
P.M.
? Was she meeting someone at the boathouse cottage she kept there (there were rumors it was used for clandestine assignations), or did she simply intend, as her husband claimed at the subsequent inquest, to go sailing—at night and alone?

Whatever the answers to these questions, one fact is incontrovertible: Beautiful Rebecca de Winter, then age thirty, never returned from that final fatal sail, and it was to be fifteen months before her sailboat—a converted Breton fishing vessel with the prophetic name
Je Reviens
—was recovered. When it was brought up from the bay below Manderley, where it had lain hidden for over a year, two terrible discoveries were made. The boat had been deliberately scuttled…and trapped in its cabin was the body of a woman. It was hideously disfigured and heavily decomposed. The precise cause of death was never to be determined, and, in the absence of firm evidence to the contrary, drowning was assumed. Astonishingly, when brought ashore, the body was at once identifiable. Everyone present on that macabre occasion knew immediately who this was: On her wedding finger, the dead woman was still wearing the two rings that, during her lifetime, had never left her hand….