Rebecca's Tale, Page 3

  On the few occasions I’d met her, I’d found her vapid; in fact, I didn’t take to her, though, given my admiration for Rebecca, I was biased, I expect. True, the second Mrs. de Winter might know more about Rebecca’s death than anyone else; I’ve no doubt Maxim would have taken her into his confidence. But would she ever reveal her knowledge to me? Hell would freeze over first, I thought—and in any case, being practical, I had no way of locating her. According to my spinster cronies Elinor and Jocelyn Briggs, no one in this locality remains in touch with her. She’s said to have walled herself up in Toronto (or was it Montreal?) and no one has her address.

  I ran my eye down my list again: Not many names left. As Terence Gray has remarked, there’s a distinct paucity of informants in this case. Of the remaining candidates, several could be quickly eliminated. I had no intention of consulting antediluvian Frith, erstwhile Manderley butler, footman, bootboy, et cetera. I’ll admit he was an exemplary butler, but he was also an exemplary busybody, and he had an inexplicably knowing way of looking at me that I still resent. He’s now in a local nursing home and virtually senile, in any case. Why had I added his name to my list in the first place? Probably because Terence Gray has taken an interest in him, I decided. More fool him. I drew a thick line through the noodle’s name. Who else?

  In Rebecca’s day, in the Manderley glory days, when the house was filled every weekend with distinguished guests, there was a tribe of servants, most of them invisible—invisibility, dumbness, and deafness being the mark of the well-trained servant then, of course. Many of them are still alive, and many of them still live in the Kerrith area. Unlike evil Evans and his disciples, who were not above interviewing former maids, asking zealous questions about bedroom arrangements and so forth, I drew the line at female staff: Most were empty-headed gossipers, who knew nothing (not that this prevented them from inventing reams of stuff for the newshounds, rattling on about sheets, shouts, rows, and rapprochements, et cetera). Some of the menservants, however, Robert Lane for instance, might have a morsel of knowledge to contribute.

  I bump into Robert from time to time, as one does in a small place, and he’s always struck me as a nice enough chap. Once a young footman at Manderley (Footman! How antique that sounds), he survived the last war, and—according to the Briggs sisters, my invaluable local informers—is now married with four children. He has brilliantined hair and works behind the bar in an unprepossessing hotel at Tregarron, a souvenir-ridden, plaster-piskie infested tourist trap some three miles from here.

  Robert, once notorious in Kerrith for his weakness for redheads, was rumored to be loquacious. Could this be true? My confidence sagged. Robert might be talkative, but he’s never struck me as in the least observant, and I didn’t relish the prospect of pumping questions at him across a bar. There was something unspeakably seedy about it; interrogate a man who used to bring me a whisky and soda? Unthinkable! Who else, who else? My list of informants was shrinking by the second. Only two names were left. With a certain reluctance, I considered my next candidate: Mrs. Danvers. A peculiar woman, Mrs. Danvers.

  She was an obvious candidate, it’s true, in that she was housekeeper at Manderley throughout the Rebecca years, and always claimed to be closer to Rebecca than anyone else. I placed little credence in that claim (whoever Rebecca was close to, truly close, it wasn’t her). Certainly she knew Rebecca as a child. But as neither she nor Rebecca ever explained where, when, or under what circumstances, this nugget of information had never seemed of any great use. The Danvers woman was an hysteric, as I spotted the first time I laid eyes on her (one picks up useful psychological insights of this kind in the Army); besides, fantasist though she was and therefore of limited use as a “witness,” she was unavailable, too. She left the area on the night of the great Manderley fire, and not one person to my knowledge has laid eyes on her, or heard word of her, since. She might be in the land of the living (that’s certainly Terence Gray’s opinion), but more probably she too has turned up her toes.

  That left just one other obvious candidate, Jack Favell, Rebecca’s black sheep of a cousin, and a singularly odious man. Favell was a cad and a wastrel: He was kicked out of the Royal Navy (how he got into it in the first place is a mystery to me), and, by the time he first started turning up at the odd Manderley party (self-invited, I feel sure), had embarked on a rather more successful career as a sponger. I met too many men of Favell’s type during my Army years not to see him for what he was at once; I first met him shortly after he began gate-crashing Manderley events—in about 1928, some two and a half years into Rebecca’s marriage—and I loathed him the instant we shook hands. I was shaking hands with my nemesis as it happens, but I wasn’t to know that then, alas.

  I always suspected Favell had some hold over Rebecca that went back to their early years; apart from Mrs. Danvers, who kept her mouth buttoned, he was the only person, the only person, I ever met who had known Rebecca as a girl…. Not that he ever discussed that with me. Our dislike was mutual; our exchanges were curt; I doubt we ever exchanged more than three sentences until after Rebecca’s death. Nor was I alone in my dislike; Rebecca never seemed to me to be too fond of her cousin (although certain newshounds have suggested otherwise). Maxim loathed him from the first, and didn’t trouble to disguise it. He and Favell were chalk and Cheddar, of course. Maxim, like myself, had standards: Favell, loose-mouthed, a heavy drinker, given to swearing, overfamiliar to women, was never going to be welcome at Manderley—though I always suspected the problems went deeper than that.

  Was Maxim jealous of Favell? My wife certainly thought so; perhaps women are quicker than men to sense such feelings. I am not a jealous man myself. My own instinct was that Favell, who liked to cause trouble, told Maxim tales about Rebecca’s past that put the marriage under strain—this would have been toward the end, in the year that led up to Rebecca’s death. During that period, the atmosphere at Manderley was certainly uneasy. Even Rebecca’s considerable acting abilities could not always disguise the marital tension. The whiff of marital tension, in my experience, can always be detected from a long way off.

  I know Maxim banned Favell from the house after one disgraceful drunken episode, yet he continued to worm his way in there. I may have mentioned the matter to Rebecca, once or twice. I suspected she’d been talked into lending Favell money, and, if this were the case, I thought someone should warn her off. When I remonstrated with her (anything to do with Favell made me hot under the collar, so I may have expressed myself strongly), Rebecca smiled. My “protective” instincts always amused her, I suspect. She said she knew perfectly well what kind of man her cousin was, and then added in her enigmatic way (Rebecca could be both a sphinx and a minx) that, for all his faults, Favell was “accurate.” Accuracy? I saw damn little sign of it, although I should admit that I began to see what she might have meant, after her death.

  JUST THINKING ABOUT FAVELL WAS MAKING ME AGITATED. This happens now, and, since my Jonah of a doctor tells me it’s inadvisable, I again rose and walked about the room. Those ghostly presences that have taken to dogging my footsteps were back. They were settling themselves in the corners, settling in for the duration, I expect. Barker growled at them. I tried to ignore them, and failed. I returned to my desk. My hands were unsteady. I re-examined my witness list.

  I thought of the last time I’d seen Favell. It was the day that was to prove crucial to the entire case; it was the day after the inquest into Rebecca’s death. Favell was not satisfied with that suicide verdict and, in truth, neither was I. I thought it nonsensical. There was no indication of a motive, she had left no note, and I simply could not believe that the Rebecca I knew would ever take her own life. I therefore suggested we do something that was actually very obvious: We should look into Rebecca’s movements on the last day of her life; you’d have thought the coroner at the inquest might have had the nous to do that, but he had not.

  We examined Rebecca’s appointments book (which, fortunately, Mrs. Danvers had kept), and th
at was how we discovered that, in secret, telling no one, Rebecca had consulted a London doctor—a specialist in women’s ailments—at two P.M. on the last day of her life. Rebecca had recorded this appointment in a curious semicoded way, which made me suspicious. This man would have been one of the last people to see Rebecca alive. Why had she consulted him, and not her usual local doctor? What had he told her that last afternoon?

  The following day, I drove to London to interview him. I was accompanied by Maxim and his new wife, and Jack Favell—he insisted on being present, and I suppose as Rebecca’s cousin he had the right. In fact, Favell was claiming to be rather more than a cousin to Rebecca at that point. He was making the most sordid and reprehensible claims about their relationship. Favell was an habitual liar, so I did not necessarily believe him, but I could see that his allegations, if true, gave Maxim a motive for murder. That concerned me. I already had profound misgivings as to Maxim’s possible involvement in Rebecca’s death.

  We spoke to Dr. Baker at his home, not his consulting rooms. It was an ordinary, pleasant house, I remember, somewhere in north London. When the interview was over, we came out into a leafy suburban street. Some poor relic from the first war was playing “Roses in Picardy” on a barrel organ, a tune I can never hear now without experiencing distress. I was in a state of profound shock. Dr. Baker, we’d learned, had seen Rebecca twice: at the first appointment, a week before her death, X rays were taken and various tests performed; at the second, he gave her the results. He had had to tell her that she had a cancer of the womb, and that it was inoperable; she faced a period of incapacity and worsening pain. She had, at best, three or four months to live.

  This was not the information I had been expecting Baker to give us. Standing outside his house, I was struggling not to betray the shock and pity I felt. I was brought up to believe that it isn’t manly to show emotion and I have an abhorrence of tears as a result.

  Had Rebecca suspected she was ill? Or had Baker’s diagnosis come as a complete surprise to her? It pained me to think of her concealing this knowledge, and at first I was too numb to think beyond that. Then I realized: The implications of this information were considerable. Now, there was a clear motive for suicide; now, that inquest verdict would never be overturned, and the police could have no possible grounds for reopening their investigations—no matter what accusations Favell, or anyone else, chose to make. Maxim de Winter was in the clear, off the hook. I turned to look at my old friend; his sweet little wife had just sweetly clasped his hand. To my horror and disgust, I saw relief flood his face.

  I knew then for sure, I think—but I’m recording the truth now, so I’ll admit: I had had doubts as to Maxim’s innocence before, on two occasions. First, when Rebecca’s poor body was recovered, and I’d watched his face as he bent over it to make a formal identification. Second, at that travesty of a funeral Maxim arranged for Rebecca, when he and I, the sole mourners, stood side by side in the de Winter crypt.

  I’ve never discussed that funeral with anyone, not even Ellie, not even my late wife. Yet it will not let me forget it, and winds its way into my dreams at night. Funeral is not even the correct word; it was an interment, arranged at indecent speed, immediately after the inquest. It was hasty and it was secretive—in this respect everything that man Evans wrote about it was correct. It was evening, and raining heavily. The crypt, a series of low vaulted chambers with iron gates, is even older than the Manderley church itself, and that is ancient. Once one is underground, the proximity of the river, of the graveyard nearby and in places directly above, can be felt; the glimpses one gets of dead de Winters in lead-lined coffins laid to rest on either side, the recent coffins still intact, the older ones not—well, it is not a place in which anyone would ever want to linger. And on that occasion I…but it doesn’t matter what I felt. I’ll say only that I’d had the very deepest affection for Rebecca, and I was close to breaking point.

  The crypt was bitterly cold, and the walls ran with damp; the electric cables, fed through underground in heavily corroded metal tubing, kept shorting, so, as we stood there, listening to the words of the burial service, the lights flared, then failed, then flared again. The vicar, as uneasy as I was, was gabbling the prayers. I had been standing with my head bent, but at one moment, sensing movement from Maxim, who was standing beside me, I looked up. For a brief second, as the power surged and the lights flickered, I met Maxim’s gaze—or at first thought I did. He was white-faced and visibly sweating despite the chill; he was not looking at me, I realized, but slightly over my shoulder, at air, and whatever it was that he saw in the air, it left him transfixed. I will never forget his expression, and the agony I then saw in his eyes. When I say that I felt I was looking directly at damnation, I do not exaggerate. I fought in the first war; I fought in the trenches—so I can speak with some authority: I recognized that expression because, God help me, I’d seen it before on the faces of other men, now long dead.

  I looked at him, appalled, for what can only have been an instant, though it felt hours long; then, with a hissing, crackling sound, the lights flickered and dimmed again. Before the prayers were over, while the words May she rest in peace were still being spoken, Maxim tried to leave. He attempted to push past me. I put my hand on his arm to restrain him, and found he was shaking. He could not meet my eyes then—and he could not meet them now.

  Standing in that suburban street, I knew with every instinct I possessed that Rebecca had not killed herself. I knew Maxim had been involved in some way in her death. I think I was bewildered, still in shock, my mind not operating well. As I looked at him, I was already imagining some mitigating circumstances—a violent quarrel, perhaps. Could he have struck Rebecca, could she have fallen and fatally injured herself? Could it have been manslaughter? I couldn’t believe Maxim capable of premeditated murder. He was my friend, an honorable man…. I still believed in honor then, of course.

  To this day, I believe that if I’d drawn Maxim to one side at that exact moment, and asked him for the truth, he might have told me. He was in a desperate state, very close to the edge. There were a few minutes of silence. I looked along that leafy road. We had reached what I can now see was the definitive moral turning point of my life. I was about to make a decision that has haunted me ever since. If Favell had kept his mouth shut at that crucial point, perhaps everything would have turned out differently. Who can know? I certainly don’t.

  Favell didn’t hold his tongue—he was incapable of it. To be fair to him, I believe he was genuinely shocked, too—he wasn’t without feelings for Rebecca. He’d been walking back and forth in a dazed way, saying he couldn’t believe it, that he needed a stiff drink. Then, in a way that sickened me, he asked whether Rebecca’s cancer was “catching”—a suggestion typical of the man, and typical of the foul way in which he thought. Having failed to get a rise with that remark, he rounded on Maxim and on me. Was that the first time the term “cover-up” was used? I know Favell, in his sneering way, congratulated Maxim on being “off the hook.” I know he was quick to suggest that the doctor’s information must have delighted me, too, since my old friend was in the clear now. I know he insinuated that I’d hush things up, that the “old boy” network would take care of its own. I was a snob who valued my invitations to Manderley; I could be relied on to protect a de Winter, he said.

  I was deeply angered. Loathing Favell, detesting him, his code, and everything he represented, I made my decision there and then in that street. There was a clear motive for suicide; there was no evidence of murder, let alone proof. You cannot put a man on trial for a facial expression; you can’t condemn a man because you believe you’ve seen guilt in his eyes—not when the crime of murder carries the death penalty. So I decided: Let that be an end of it. I would make sure Dr. Baker’s information was circulated. Beyond that, I would take no further action. All over. Draw a line under it. Let the matter be laid to rest.

  IT WASN’T, OF COURSE, AS I SHOULD HAVE FORESEEN. BUT all those newshoun
ds, all the Kerrith gossips who found other reasons for my actions were very wrong. To them I was at worst a toady to the de Winters, and at best too loyal to my friend. They were all so sure that it was Maxim’s interests I sought to defend, that they never saw the truth—yet it was obvious enough. It was Rebecca, not her husband, whom I hoped to protect.

  I always knew what would happen if there were any further investigation into her death; I knew her reputation would be thrown to the wolves. I knew it would all come out: all the sordid allegations of love affairs, duplicity, and intrigue that Jack Favell was only too eager to boast about. I knew that if people began to suspect Maxim had killed his wife, they’d look for a motive—and they wouldn’t have to look very far. What motive could he possibly have had other than infidelity on her part? Secretly, of course, I believed in that infidelity myself. I told myself it had to be true, that Maxim would never have harmed his wife unless given very strong cause. What a betrayal of Rebecca that was.

  At that point, when I made my decision, the floodgates of gossip were still closed. Whatever the claims of journalists, there were as yet no rumors of “lovers” or “clandestine assignations”—at least none I’d heard. I wanted that state of affairs to continue now Rebecca was gone. I wanted that more than anything else. That was why I tried to persuade everyone that, rather than die a slow painful death, Rebecca had killed herself. I wanted people to remember her as I’d always imagined her: as a beautiful, virtuous, and courageous woman. I wanted my image of her to be the one that prevailed.

  How Rebecca would have laughed. Her notions of virtue weren’t mine, and she was always more realistic than I was. She’d have known that the more you try to silence them, the more tongues wag. Jack Favell was on the telephone to his drinking cronies in Kerrith before I even returned from London. There was never the least hope that I’d stem the gossip, malice, and sheer propensity for making things up that are so deeply embedded in human nature. Silence the rumors? I was a Canute, telling the advancing waves to turn back.