Rebecca's Tale (6 page)

And here he might wink, or slap me on the shoulder, man-to-man, and I would say, “Yes, sir,” but I didn’t follow his meaning at all. Who was the “old girl”? His mother, or poor Virginia? Neither of them wore aprons. I thought Lionel, with his flushed face, his sulks, and silk waistcoats, was an idiot and a popinjay. I didn’t like the tone he used when addressing his wife—it was very domineering and rude; my own father would never have dreamed of speaking to my mother in that way. And I was first hurt, then angered, that he never once asked after my father, his former friend. He was obviously not in the least interested in his welfare—but then he showed no interest in anyone’s welfare except his own.

The Termagant was another matter. She was a great deal more intelligent than her son—I think I realized that by instinct, and very quickly, as children do. She ruled the roost, and had no intention of taking herself off to the dower house, Tilly maintained. She felt for poor Mrs. Lionel, she really did, Tilly said; stuck with a husband and a mother-in-law like that—she wouldn’t be in her shoes, not for all the tea in China, Tilly declared.

The Termagant was very tall, and her voice was very loud. Everyone, including her son, was terrified of her. She seemed to me to know only two forms of conversation: either she was barking orders or firing questions at you: How old are you? Why doesn’t that mother of yours have your hair cut? Do you ride? You
read
? A boy your age? Lionel never bothered with books—what’s the matter with you? You should run around more. Tell me about India—do you miss India? Why? When’s that father of yours coming back? Is he ill? Everyone in India gets ill sooner or later. He isn’t? Then he’s a lucky man….

And then would follow a diatribe, for she seemed to hate the very idea of India—for no very good reason, I think, beyond the fact that it was outside her circle of influence. She was fiercely dismissive of what she called, with a wave of the hand, “abroad.” One memorable day, when Virginia’s sisters came to tea in the Manderley gardens, and Evangeline spoke of her recent honeymoon in France, and pretty, charming Isolda sighed and said wistfully that she would love
to travel, Lionel’s mother called them fools. “What fools you are,” she said, gesturing across the lawns toward the sea: “You’ll see nothing lovelier than this, however far you travel. Much better to stay here.”

Evangeline gave her a cool look and raised her eyebrows; poor Virginia sighed; pretty Isolda made a face the instant her back was turned. When the elder Mrs. de Winter was called back to the house shortly afterward, the three sisters laughed.

“What an old
beast
she is—how can you put up with her, Virginia?” Isolda said, tossing back her curls.

“You should make a stand, darling—she’s a monster,” said Evangeline crossly.

“Hush,” said poor Virginia, glancing at me and Beatrice: “
Pas devant les enfants
. Little pitchers have big ears….”

I agreed with Isolda: Mrs. de Winter
was
an old beast—and that first summer, how she harped on the subject of India! I think she knew I resented it and that drove her on: dirt, disease, dishonesty (she was especially fierce on disease, looking at me as if I might be carrying half a continent’s germs on my clothes). I would slowly inch away from her height, and her cold blue eyes, while all my precious memories of India shattered one by one under her terrible fusillade. That’s when I would long for my zephyr, pray for my zephyr. That’s when I would hang my head and screw up my eyes and conjure her out of the air. My zephyr (I can see now) bore more than a passing resemblance to Virginia’s sister Isolda, with whom I was fiercely in love from the age of seven to nine: She was a glorious creature with long flowing hair; she swept into the stuffy room, shaking the heavy curtains with their fringing and frogging, fluttering the tapestries, rattling the doors. This was a zephyr powerful enough, and merciless enough, to topple the Termagant, and silence her forever more.

My grandfather used to say that I shouldn’t mind, that Mrs. de Winter meant well, that her bark was worse than her bite, and so on—but my grandfather was a saintly man, and one of the limitations of saintliness is a tendency to excuse or underestimate such people. I thought Tilly was much nearer the mark when she declared the woman was a Tyrant and a Tartar; when she added that the Tartar’s son, apple of her eye, wasn’t no better than a Tomcat, I found it very interesting, indeed. I had noticed the tomcat sniffing around.

“I’ve heard tales about
him
,” Tilly would say, rolling her eyes at
our housekeeper, Mrs. Trevelyan (the source of quite a few of those tales, I suspect, Tilly’s being from London and Mrs. Trevelyan’s being local). I longed to hear those tales, needless to say, and that longing increased as time passed, but no one ever enlightened me. All I ever gleaned (and this was much later, when, desperate for information on this and any other adult subject, I took up a brief and unsuccessful career as an eavesdropper) was that blankets were mysteriously involved—especially the wrong side of them. What did tomcats have to do with blankets? Did a blanket
have
a wrong side?

As to the Termagant’s interrogations, I used to believe at the time that my stammered answers were of little account. No matter my reply, the same questions would be asked again on my next visit. I now think that I was being assessed, and that Mrs. de Winter the elder wanted to get the measure of me, even then. She pushed simply to see how far she
could
push before I rebelled.

I never did—politeness and a fear of being rude to any adult were so deeply ingrained in me, so soaked into my very soul, that even when she made me cry, I did so in secret. I think she did this partly from habit—she spoke to everyone in this way—and partly because she gained knowledge by it, which she then stored up until such a time as it might be useful to her. And in my case, many years later, it was—but that particular episode (it was during the first war, in 1915, and it still shames me) I will return to another time.

Meanwhile, she was better informed than I had realized, and accurate in some of her suggestions, as I learned. My father was indeed ill, though that knowledge was carefully concealed from me. He contracted an enteric fever in Kashmir, recovered in a military hospital in Delhi, relapsed a few weeks later, and died one month before my sister Rose was born.

For a week, no one told me. I knew something was wrong: Something happened to the air at The Pines that reminded me of Manderley. It was full of whispers, and conversations broken off; doors slammed, feet ran back and forth along the corridors, Tilly’s eyes were red, my grandfather’s face was grave, and I wasn’t allowed to see my mother—I could hear her weeping, but they said she was ill and locked her away.

Finally, my grandfather took me by the hand, led me down here to this terrace above the sea, and explained. He had lost his only son;
then, in the childish egotism of my grief, it didn’t occur to me that he, too, had lost someone irreplaceable. Now, when I’m older than he was then, and have had tribulations of my own, I know how much it must have cost him to remain so quiet and so calm. When his explanation was over and my tears were done, he took my hand in his and asked me very gently if I thought I should like to live here now, with my mother, and the little brother or sister who would be shortly arriving, and whether I would let him look after me now that my dear father was gone.

I said yes, which brought on another storm of tears—and that is how I came to live here; that is how my bond with this part of the world was forged. I knew the place both before Rebecca and after her advent. I knew Maxim from birth; I remember seeing him as a baby, being pushed in his pram by poor, doting, proud Virginia. I remember the disbelief that greeted the announcement of his name—Maximilian!—and Tilly’s prediction: “That old Termagant named him,” she cried. “And she means to get her hands on him. Poor Mrs. Lionel won’t get a look in, you mark my words!”

Tilly’s prophecy proved correct. Poor Virginia had had innumerable miscarriages, as I know now, but, having produced an heir at last, she did not survive him long. She seemed to wither away, growing sadder and quieter day by day, her thin face lighting up only when her beloved son was brought to her. She died when Maxim was three, and I think (my sister Rose confirms) that Maxim clung tenaciously to the few sad half-memories he had of her.

He resembled his mother to a striking degree. Beatrice might have the de Winter looks, but in Maxim’s narrow face and dark, intelligent, watchful eyes, Virginia and his Grenville ancestors lived on. He inherited aspects of her character, too; as a small child, he was quiet, dreamy, and shy, clearly fearful of his father, and in awe of his formidable grandmother. I remember him well as a boy, when my grandfather helped to tutor him in the summer holidays. Despite his obvious intelligence, he was backward at his lessons, perhaps because his grandmother held education in utter contempt, and was forever telling him that books were a waste of time. At Manderley, there was a splendid library, well stocked by some of Maxim’s more enlightened ancestors, but the only books she ever consulted were those that detailed bloodstock—human and equine.

The elder Mrs. de Winter liked to imply that books, universities, and so on, were all very well for the likes of me: I had no land or estates, and would have to earn my living in some way. But Maxim would have all
this
, she would say, gesturing around that terrible drawing room of hers: This house, these fields, these farms, that sea were his destiny. All that mattered meanwhile was to get him into the same school every male de Winter had attended since time immemorial; once that small matter was out of the way, Maxim would return home and learn the only lesson that mattered: how to run Manderley.

Maxim was brainwashed in this way, day in, day out. I think that, thanks to my grandfather’s influence—and, to a much lesser extent, mine—he did see that there was another world, a world elsewhere. But I always felt he looked at that world somewhat wistfully, as if he might like to investigate it, even yearned to investigate it, but already accepted that it was beyond his Manderley palisade. One summer, when I was at home for the university vacation, I took pity on him. He emerged white-faced from my grandfather’s study and his struggles with Latin verbs, and when I asked him where he was off to, he replied he supposed he was going home. He looked lost and dejected, so I took him out in my dinghy and taught him to sail—and that was the first of the many trips we made across the bay to Manderley.

We’d always known each other, but it was that summer that we overcame the disparity in our ages, and became friends. Maxim would then have been about ten or eleven; I suppose that in some ways he looked up to me, and I grew attached to him, recommending books and generally taking him under my wing. My grandfather encouraged the friendship, believing that Maxim was lonely. I think that was true, certainly by the time he reached his midteens.

His father’s illness first began to manifest itself then. It took an unpredictable—and unpleasant—form; until Lionel de Winter was finally persuaded to confine himself to his sickroom, visitors to Manderley were not encouraged, and when Maxim returned from school in the holidays, he spent long periods alone. By then, I had left the area, and was in the Army; my sister, Rose, closer to Maxim in age than I was, became his confidante in my stead, and for a brief period just before the first war became closer to him in other ways; Rose used to say—and still maintains—that Maxim was always lonelier than we knew.

How very near those years seem to me now! The lives of the de Winters have always overlapped and interlocked with my own; my study is filled with the evidence of that closeness, with letters, with photographs, invitation cards, all the flotsam and jetsam that, assembled, might tell their story. Thinking of that, sitting on my boundary wall this morning, I told myself that, if there were gaps in that story, they could be filled, so long as my memory did not let me down.

Somewhere there, if I could find her, was Rebecca. If she was to be understood, it was in the context of that family and that house. “Who are you?” I said to her once, not that long before her death, as it happens. “Who
are
you, Rebecca?”

“I’m the mistress of Manderley,” she replied, with an enigmatic sidelong glance very characteristic of her. It was wintertime; we were walking one of the coast paths; Rebecca had paused close to the cliff edge; she was always careful with words. “Just like one of those Gothic romances,” she went on, with a smile. “Don’t you think that suits me? I do. Tell Max I want it on my gravestone—H
ERE LIES
R
EBECCA, MISTRESS OF
M
ANDERLEY
. Or, R
EBECCA, LATE OF
M
ANDERLEY
, that would do. I want a plain stone, Cornish granite, with good, clear, simple lettering. I want to be in the churchyard, with a view of the sea—don’t let them hide me away in that de Winter crypt, will you?”

“Anything else?” I said—and I expected more, for Rebecca was a perfectionist in everything. I was not taking this conversation seriously, though I should have been, I see now. Rebecca liked to tease me—I always found it hard to know when she was serious—and she was so young, just thirty. I was twenty years older. If anyone’s funeral were on the agenda, it was likelier to be my own. “Flowers?” I went on. “Type of coffin? Hymns? Should I be a pallbearer?”

“Yes, I’d like that. As to the rest”—she looked away and frowned—“I don’t care, not really. But I mind about the stone, and I mind about the churchyard. So don’t forget, and don’t back down when Max makes a face and says it’s vulgar and unsuitable….”

“And if I do?” I replied, with a smile.

“You’ll regret it. I hate that crypt, and I hate the people in it. I’ll come back and haunt you. I’ll never rest there.”

What could she have meant by that remark? Why would she hate the occupants of that crypt? She had known none of them. Even its
most recent arrivals, Maxim’s parents, had been there years before her marriage, years before Rebecca first came to Manderley. Did I ask her? If so, I was given no reply.