Rebecca's Tale (29 page)

The socialist who’d described his girlfriend to me as “common” took a swallow of the white wine I’d ordered, and settled down to explain yet another grievance.

“My father thought he was so bloody grand,” he continued. “He was a second son, never stopped boasting about the ancestral home, all his bloody Favell connections—well, the ancestral home was some vast ruin, and what money there was went to his elder brother. When Pa discovered he couldn’t make ends meet despite his old school tie and his connections, he was more than ready to marry a draper’s
daughter, especially when there was a generous marriage settlement—which he got through inside three years, incidentally. He dragged my poor mother out to Kenya because you could get land for next to nothing. Tried to ingratiate himself with the smart set, wrote to his old school pals, thought he’d make a go of it with a coffee plantation—and what did he end up as? A bloody pathetic little shipping clerk in a Nairobi office. Give me Jack Devlin every time. He never gave a damn what anyone thought of him.
And
he made a fortune, several times over. Of course, that really got up my father’s nose. Liked to say that if he earned a pittance, at least he earned it honestly.”

“The implication being that Jack Devlin didn’t? Was that true? How did your uncle make his money?”

Favell gave me a sidelong glance, then smiled. “In South Africa, eventually. And he may well have sailed a bit close to the wind; I told you, he was a born risk taker. But that’s jumping the gun a bit. He started out in the family firm to begin with. He worked for his father for a year or two, went to France, found new suppliers for the silks and the ribbons. Lived it up in Paris, I gather….”

Favell paused to mop up the last of his food in a greedy way, as if he hadn’t eaten a square meal in days. I considered this information. From the first, my instinct had been that there was a French connection somewhere.

“Did he meet Rebecca’s mother in France?” I asked.

“What makes you think so, old boy?”

“It occurred to me Rebecca could have had French connections. Someone mentioned to me that she might have had family in France. She chose to sail in a converted Breton fishing vessel, when she could easily have had a boat made for her locally. Her boat had a French name:
Je Reviens
. Also, there’s no record of Rebecca’s birth certificate. So, like you, she could have been born abroad.”

“Well, well, so you have done a bit of sleuthing.” Favell smiled, and lit another cigarette. “I was beginning to wonder. Come up with anything else, old boy?”

“Quite a few things.” I thought of the McKendrick postcard and decided to take a gamble. If my suggestion was wrong, it didn’t matter. It still might provoke a revelation from Favell. “For instance, I think she had theater connections as a child,” I said. “I think her mother was an actress.”

Favell raised his eyebrows, then laughed. “Not bad at all. How did you find that out? Rebecca kept
very
quiet on the mother question. Max probably knew, and I think that old Tartar of a grandmother of his knew as well—she didn’t miss a trick, in my opinion. But I don’t think they’d have been too keen on advertising the fact at Manderley, do you? Might have raised eyebrows among the county set down there. I mean—an actress! One step up from a loose woman in their eyes. They were still living in another era—probably still are. Even Max was a terrible old Victorian in some ways. Strait-laced. Full of inhibitions. Besides, there was the question of his father, Lionel.
He
never had any inhibitions about actresses, I hear. A regular stage door Johnny. He’d been dead for years, but his reputation lived on. You couldn’t spend five minutes in Kerrith without hearing about
his
exploits. So, Rebecca kept very quiet about dear Mama’s profession. Wouldn’t have gone down too well at her grander parties. Ah—food. And a Bordeaux. Pushing the boat out a bit, aren’t you, old boy? No complaints, mind you.”

There was a pause while the waiters served us our main course. Favell refilled his wine glass, and then returned to his story, picking up its threads where he had left off. There was no sign of any reluctance to talk—that came later.

“So—where was I? Paris, that’s it. Jack Devlin was based in Paris but he traveled a lot, visiting suppliers in France, but also Italy and England—and on one of those trips he met the fair Isabel. My mother used to say he met her on the Monday, married her on the Tuesday, and left her on the Wednesday—he didn’t hang around, Jack Devlin, that was the point. He was a young man, twenty-four, something like that, and he fell in love at first sight—one look. And I think that’s true, because he told me so, and he always said that to Rebecca, years later. Anyway, he married the fair Isabel at some little French country church, and he sent my mother a telegram and he was over the moon—and then something went wrong. Six months later there was another telegram: The fair Isabel was still in France, I think. But Jack certainly wasn’t. He’d left his wife; he was cutting his losses, making a new start, and he’d sailed for South Africa.”

He gave me a pale glance. “And don’t
ask
—I can see the questions ticking over. Well, I can’t answer them. You have to remember, this is going back a long way. It must have been 1900, because he left before
Rebecca was born, and she was born that November. I was three then, so all of this is hearsay, from my mother. She always said Jack had his heart broken; he certainly never divorced and he never remarried. But I didn’t even
meet
Uncle Jack for another fourteen years. I didn’t even know he had a child until I came to England, and I don’t think my mother knew, either…There’s always the possibility it was news to Uncle Jack, too. That idea crossed my mind more than once, I can tell you.”

Favell was right: There were umpteen questions I wanted to ask, but I decided to wait. He began eating with gusto, and, as he ate, began to fill me in on Jack Devlin’s subsequent career in South Africa. The details he gave me were colorful and, I suspected, apocryphal.

After some years of struggle, Jack Devlin, it seemed, had finally found his metier: It was mining, and he came into the mining business by accident. “He met some old panhandler in a bar in Jo’burg,” Favell said with a smile. “At least, that’s the way he told it. The old man was a standing joke, but he liked a drink, and a game of cards, so they played poker. Jack won. He won the man’s horse and his gun; by then the old boy had nothing left but the clothes he stood up in and the title he’d staked out on this little patch of ground in the Modder-fontein area, which the man swore had gold in it.

“They opened another bottle of schnapps, and they played one more time. The man had a good hand, but Jack Devlin held all four aces. So Jack won a pair of worn-out pants and a worn-out shirt and a little bit of land everyone said was worthless. Then they shook hands, and Jack let the old boy keep his clothes and his horse, but he took the gun and the title to that land—and it made his fortune.” Favell laughed. “There was gold in them thar hills. And that’s how Jack got rich. Or so he said. And it might have been true; he kept the revolver—or
a
revolver. It used to hang on the wall over his desk in the house he bought in Berkshire. It was his lucky gun, he said. And until he came back to England, Jack’s luck always held….” He paused. “Something wrong, old boy?”

“No, nothing,” I replied.

“Don’t believe me, eh?” Favell had seen me react, and he misinterpreted my reaction; he gave me a mocking glance. “I don’t blame you. But the point is, that’s the kind of man Jack was—and, the way
he used to tell it, I could see him doing it. If it wasn’t true—who cares? It comes down to the same thing in the end: He went into mining, and he invested in mines—not just gold, diamonds, too—and he made money, big money. I don’t say it was all aboveboard, and there may have been more to it than met the eye; in fact, later on, Rebecca used to tease him and say he made his fortune in armaments.” Favell smiled. “
Maxim
guns, maybe—who knows? Maybe that’s why Rebecca called her husband ‘Max’—no one else called him that, except me, of course. I followed suit. I could see it irritated the hell out of him…. Rescue that bottle, will you? None for you? I’ll finish it up, then. No point in wasting it. Where’s the gents, old boy? Downstairs? I won’t be a second.”

Favell rose to his feet. I considered the word “Berkshire,” which had come curling out of his story, and had hit me the harder for being unexpected. I must persuade him back in that direction, I decided. And when he returned, I tried to do just that. But it was then, just when I most wanted facts, that my difficulties began.

U
NTIL THAT MOMENT
, F
AVELL HAD SEEMED PERFECTLY
willing, even eager, to talk. He certainly enjoyed his Jack Devlin stories, and I thought they were probably a regular part of his repertoire. When he returned to the table, I could sense his mood had changed. I noticed he looked pale, and his manner was irritable. He slumped down into the seat next to me, and waved the menu away.

“Eaten too much, I think,” he said. “Rich food. Not used to it, old boy—not these days, that’s the trouble. Order another
fine
for me, will you, there’s a good chap. That always settles my stomach.”

I ordered the
fine
, though I thought he’d have been better off without it, and some coffee for myself. I waited for Favell to revive a little, and then tried some questions. I wanted to move him on to the moment when, aged seventeen, he came to England for the first time—and met Rebecca. I wanted him to tell me about the house in Berkshire. But it was at this very point, when his story, Rebecca’s, and her father’s intersected for the first time, that he became recalcitrant. At first, I had to coax every answer out of him.

“Jack Devlin came back to England in 1914—the summer the war broke out,” he said. “I don’t know why he left Africa. He’d had
enough of it maybe. He’d made his pile; he was still a young man, in his prime, not yet forty. And no, I don’t bloody well know exactly when Rebecca’s mother died. She was young, and it was sudden, and it wasn’t long before I came to England in 1915—I told you, Rebecca was still wearing mourning when I first met her. Beyond that, I don’t know a damn thing about her mother. I wasn’t interested in her mother. I never met the woman. I was interested in Rebecca.”

“I’m wondering if Jack Devlin came back to Europe
because
Rebecca’s mother was ill or had died. How did he make contact with Rebecca,
why
did he make contact?”

“Danny wrote to him, I think, and told him Isabel was ill. She traced him, and wrote to him. Danny was always in the picture, from way back. She was in service; she was in service her whole bloody life, and I think she’d worked for some family Rebecca’s mother knew. Danny was devoted to the mother
and
Rebecca, and it’s no good asking me the details, because, in the first place, I don’t
know
, and in the second, I don’t bloody well
care
. All I know is Jack Devlin came home and he bought this damn great house, stockbroker style, vulgar as they come, on the edge of the Berkshire Downs, and he went into horses in a big way. Built these vast stables, hired a trainer. Wanted to breed a Derby winner—not that he ever did. And by the time I arrived, they’d all been there a few months. Danny was looking after Rebecca for Jack Devlin, running his house, making herself indispensable—in like Flynn, was our Danny. And she was a pretty weird woman, even then. Never married. The ‘Mrs.’ was a courtesy title. Housekeepers were always called Mrs. Something then—God knows why.”

He frowned, and took a swallow of the brandy. “Greenways,” he went on, gazing off into the middle distance. “That’s what it was called, the house: Greenways. Near a village called Hampton something. Not far from Lambourn…. Ever been to that part of the world, old boy?”

“No—but I know of it. I had an aunt who grew up in the Lambourn area.”

“Pretty place. I wonder if the house is still there? I’ve thought of going back to take a look at it once or twice. Lovely setting. You could walk right out of the grounds, and up onto the Downs. I used to watch Rebecca ride there. She was a brilliant rider. Absolutely
without fear. And at fifteen she looked pretty damn amazing in a riding habit, with a whip in her hand, I can tell you….”

He left the remark hanging in the air, and glancing back at me, smiled. The next question had to be asked, and he’d just given me a cue, so I asked it. “You spoke of a couple of years when you and Rebecca were close. When was that exactly? When you first came to England?”

“Did I say that? Well, yes, then—I suppose…” He hesitated, and when he continued speaking, his tone had altered; from being suggestive, it became defensive. “Look—I was just a
boy
, all right? I was different then; I hadn’t had any bloody setbacks, for a start. So I was full of plans—optimism. I wanted to go into the Navy; I’d always wanted to serve in the Navy. My mother had stuffed my head with a whole lot of bloody nonsense about the Senior Service. So I was mad keen to train—couldn’t wait to captain a ship and kill Germans…. That’s how naive I was. It was exciting, planning it all. Rebecca and I used to lark around—practicing semaphore, learning Morse code—we just had
fun
. She was like a little sister to me—she looked up to me, couldn’t wait to see me in uniform. I was a hero to her. She was a funny little kid in some ways. Very droll. But we clicked. We laughed at the same things. We just got on together.”

“And then?” I prompted.

“And then Uncle Jack pulled a few strings, got me into Dartmouth. While I was training, it wasn’t too bad; I could get back to Greenways and see her. But Dartmouth was a damn snobby place: I didn’t get on with the other officer cadets, I didn’t like the discipline—and Rebecca couldn’t understand that, which was pretty rich, coming from her. So I lost a bit of the old luster. Had one or two rows with Uncle Jack—he thought I was a bad influence on her. Then, I was sent on my first tour of duty, and that was a bloody disaster. I hated it from day one. It was wartime, I could never get leave….”