Rebecca's Tale (32 page)

When we reached the tiny church, it was deserted. May and I walked among the graves, in brilliant sunshine. I spelled out some of the names cut into the tombstones, scratching at the lichen:
BELOVED
WIFE OF…; DEAREST MOTHER TO…; HUSBAND OF…; FATHER OF
…; even then, I liked to trace the relationships I’d never experienced. May and I walked down to the river; the tide was high, and the water was fast flowing. I tossed a stick into the eddies and imagined it traveling all the way to the sea at Kerrith, all the way across the Atlantic. If I could hurt May, I wondered, did that mean she cared for me?

Then May took me into the cool, dimly lit interior of the church. It wasn’t much of a place, I thought in my ignorance. I glowered at the plain whitewashed walls, and the great thick pillars. The altar cloth was blue and gold. The dead were under my feet. I knelt down by the brass effigy of a de Winter knight, and glared at him. He was in full armor and helmeted, so I couldn’t see his whole face. His gauntleted hands were crossed on his chest; his feet rested on a small dog with a curly tail, and his inscription, on a banner above his head, was in Latin. I couldn’t read Latin. May, who could, said his name was Gilles de Winter, and he died on his return from the Crusades in 1148. His wife, Marguerite, who had born him ten children, four of whom survived, lay next to him.

May showed me what to do. She showed me how to fix the paper in place with tape; she showed me how to rub the black wax back and forth. I snatched the wax rudely out of her hand, and, with a sigh, May said she’d walk in the churchyard for a while, and leave me to it. I saw her look at her watch, and I knew she was hiding something. This was the moment when she’d drive off and leave me.

See if I care, I said to myself. I scratched away with the stupid wax. I listened to the sound of the oak door closing, my heart beating very fast and a sick dread rising in my stomach. I listened for the sound of the car’s engine. The minutes passed; I thought maybe May hadn’t been lying after all. I wanted to go and see if she was still in the churchyard, but I was bitter with pride, and I felt I’d rather die than let her see I was anxious.

I rubbed away with the wax; a pair of armoured feet began to emerge, Gilles began to emerge. I stared at him. He was there, of course, all the time, under the paper, and I knew that. Yet I felt I made him. I conjured him up. There was his helmet and his gloved hands, and his little dog with a curly tail and a lively eye. If I listened very hard, I felt I’d hear that little dog bark at me across the centuries.

I grew absorbed in my task. I had almost forgotten about May, and, when I heard the creak of the church door, I assumed she was returning. Then I heard a footstep, too light and too swift for May. I sat back on my heels and looked up. A stranger had come to a halt a few feet away. She was tall and slender. She was gripping the side of one of the oak pews, and looking down at me.

“It’s Tom, isn’t it? How quick you are!” she said. “Why, you’ve almost finished—and you’ve done it beautifully. I just met May in the churchyard, and she told me I’d find you here. I’m a friend of hers. How do you do, Tom?” She came closer, bent down and held out her hand to me. “I’m Rebecca.”

I looked at her warily, and then, with reluctance, took the hand she held out to me. I was suspicious of everything then—but especially of strangers. The woman looked closely at me, and I inspected her in return. I saw her eyes rest on my hair and my face; her hair, long and worn loose, parted on one side, was as dark as my own. I thought she had the strangest eyes I’d ever seen. In the dim light of the church, I couldn’t decide if they were a very dark blue or a very dark green or a very dark violet. I decided they were sea-colored.

She was wearing boating clothes: a loose striped cotton sweater, white trousers, and rope-soled shoes. Her hand felt cool in mine, and her clasp was strong, but as she drew back from me, I saw that she was trembling slightly. I thought it very curious that she should be as nervous as I was.

She sat down next to me on the cold floor of the nave and, after a pause, I went on with my brass rubbing. I bent my head over the paper, and refused to look up. I knew that in a minute, just as all adults did, she’d start talking, she’d start asking questions. I waited, feeling for the ridges and crevices, rubbing back and forth with my wax. She said nothing.

After a while, her proximity and her silence began to unnerve me. I looked up at her, to find that she was still watching me with her sea-colored eyes. I wondered if I were imagining her, or if she might be magic; she could be a river nymph, I thought—Edwin and May had given me a book with pictures of gods and goddesses; they’d been reading me stories about creatures who sprang from the waves, or from trees and breezes. They had strange names that I couldn’t spell, but was learning to pronounce. A zephyr. A nereid. A dryad. I tried
closing my eyes, in case that would make her vanish, and, when that didn’t work, I thought I’d answer the questions before she asked them.

“I live in Scotland now. I’m here on holiday,” I said, rubbing away at the brass plate. I gave her a quick glance. “I used to live in an orphanage. I’m adopted.”

“I know that,” she replied, and then added: “May told me.”

“I’m eleven. That’s old to be adopted. It’s unusual. Most people want babies.”

“I know that, too.”

“I have two names. My orphanage name and my new one.”

I stole another look, to check her reaction. May said all this information should make me proud; it meant I was loved and chosen—but I wasn’t too sure I believed that.

“That’s excellent,” said the woman in an easy way. “Everyone should change names from time to time, don’t you think? You have to find a name that fits—and once you do, you can keep it forever. Does ‘Tom’ feel as if it fits yet?”

I considered this; it had never occurred to me that you could try names on, like a pair of gloves. “It might do,” I said cautiously.

“I think it suits you,” she said. “It’s a handsome name. And for Sunday-best, you can always be ‘Thomas.’”

I turned this over in my mind; I think I smiled, because she responded, and her face lit in the most extraordinary way. She leaned forward, and touched my face with her fingertips, and such was the spell she’d begun to cast over me that I didn’t flinch or shy away, but let her hand rest there while she looked at me.

“Do you live here?” I asked when she finally drew back.

She laughed. “What, here in the church? No. Not yet, anyway.”

She made a face. I saw her gaze fall to my hands. My nails were chewed, and the cuticles were torn where I gnawed at them. I made a fist of my hands, so she couldn’t see them, and the blood rushed up my neck and into my face.

“I used to bite my nails,” she said in a practical tone. “My hands looked horrible—much much worse than that. My mother said I was a little cannibal. She went to the chemist and bought something called bitter aloes. It was supposed to taste so vile that you gave up biting them. Well, that didn’t work! I was so angry, I chewed them all the more.”

I looked down at her hands. She had long thin tanned hands, with perfect unblemished nails, cut short. On her left hand she was wearing two rings, one of which glittered like sunlight on water.

“I’ll tell you what to do,” she went on, in a conversational way, as if we were exactly the same age, and had known one another forever. “If you want to go on biting them, do—and the hell with what anyone thinks. But if you don’t, and you want to stop, just use your willpower. If you will something strongly enough, you can move mountains. You can do anything.”

I looked at her carefully. I was impressed by the word “hell,” especially in a church. No one had ever mentioned willpower to me before; at the orphanage it was faith that was supposed to move mountains, and the emphasis was on prayer. I’d spent a lot of time praying. I’d prayed to be adopted for at least seven years—but maybe I hadn’t been praying after all; maybe I’d been
willing
.

“Anything at all?” I asked warily.

“Absolutely anything,” she said. “For instance: I was very small as a child, I never seemed to grow and I wanted to be tall, so I willed it. And I grew six inches in six months. Just like a plant in a pot. It was easy.”

“Could you will yourself to read better, if you wanted? For instance?”

“Simple. Just snap your fingers, and do it.”

I frowned; this was encouraging, but I felt there was something missing here, possibly God. I glanced over my shoulder at the blue and gold altar table. I looked at Gilles and his little dog. I looked at her, and I saw that she wasn’t as confident as she sounded; maybe she’d believed that once, but perhaps the willpower wasn’t working too well for her now. There were doubts, way back in her eyes—a tide of doubt and sadness was welling up in them. I scowled at her and made a sneering face, and gestured at Gilles de Winter.

“What about him? I’ll bet you can’t will
him
back. He’s dead, he is.”

“No, no, you’re wrong.” She gave a sigh, and ignored my rudeness. “You
can
will the dead back. But you have to be careful, Tom. They don’t always manifest themselves in quite the way you expected. So on the whole it’s better to let them rest…or whatever it is that they do down there.”

She spoke seriously, her sea-colored eyes fixed on my face. It sud
denly felt very cold in that church, and I shivered. I thought of all the dead down there under our feet; I think she thought of them, too, for her face contracted. Then the church clock chimed the hour, and the spell was broken, and May’s strange friend sprang to her feet. She held out her hand to me for the second time.

“I’m very glad to have met you, Tom,” she said. “Tell May to bring you to see me one day. I live at Manderley—May knows where it is. It’s just near here. We could go out in my boat. It’s the prettiest boat, very strong and safe—would you like that?”

I would have liked that, and I passed on this invitation to May almost immediately. But May, who seemed pleased to “run into” her former friend, as she put it, was vague about the suggestion. We stood in the sunlight in the graveyard, watching a gleaming car disappearing fast up the lane; I stole out my hand, and took May’s. I’d decided I didn’t want to hurt her. I’d decided to
will
her to love me—and it seemed to work, for her face took on a soft, crumpled look, and she put her arms around me and hugged me. “When can we go and see your friend and go out in her boat?” I asked on the way home, and I kept on asking. “Oh, one of these days,” May would answer—but then she always seemed to forget, though I often reminded her.

Somehow there was never time, or we were doing something else—and I could sense that wasn’t the truth. I discovered a little. I found out that the woman with sea-colored eyes was newly married to someone called Maxim de Winter, a descendent of the very same Gilles whose effigy I’d copied; that May had first met her as a girl, when May was twenty and she was fifteen and they lived near one another in Berkshire.

Beyond this, May would not be drawn; one day Edwin took me aside and explained that my questions made May anxious; they made her feel I preferred her friend, he said, and that hurt May. “Give her time, Tom,” he said. “We’re still getting to know one another, and May wants to make you happy.”

I cared for May, so after that I dropped the subject. Our holiday ended, we returned home to Scotland; we never visited Pelynt or Kerrith again, and I never again met, or heard from, Rebecca. For a long while, though, her fascination endured, and I often thought of her. I discovered May’s strange friend had been right in her advice: I
was
able to stop biting my nails; I
was
able to read better; I
was
able to
be less stupid. But there are limits to willpower, of course. One day, there Rebecca’s picture was, on the front page of a newspaper. That boat of hers had not been so safe after all; it had disappeared at sea; it was gone, and she was gone with it.

Time passed. When her body was finally found, and I read the newspaper reports of her inquest, I saw the verdict was suicide. A last act of will, and the end of the story, I decided. Now I would never know who she was and why she had wanted to meet me that day—and by then I was very sure that encounter was willed, that May had been coerced, and Rebecca determined to meet me.

I put the matter out of my mind, and for years thought of the episode only rarely; but the story was not yet over, nor was my own involvement in it. Edwin Galbraith, a good and kind man, died when I was still at school. May, to whom I owe so much, died two years ago, of a heart attack. When her house in Scotland was finally sold last year I had to go through all her belongings. I found among her papers a letter that she might have destroyed had she not died suddenly and unexpectedly. I’ve been carrying it about with me ever since; sitting in the garden in London this morning, I opened it again, and re-read it. The address was 12C Tite Street, London SW3; the date was 1926, and—as I now know—the letter must have been written shortly after Rebecca’s marriage, and some months before that one occasion on which she met me.

She wrote:

My dear May,

I was glad to see you yesterday—and very sad to hear of your predicament. Not to be able to bear a child is such a hard fate for a woman. But you can still have a child and look after him and love him. You must adopt one—I’m sure Edwin will agree if you ask him.

As it happens, I know of a little boy who needs a family. He is in an orphanage near London at present, and a very barbaric place it is. He was moved on there from some foundlings’ home—in the country, I believe. According to when the children were placed there, they christened them. This little boy was part of the “T” contingent, so they called him “Terence.” His intake all had surnames taken from colors; there was a “Brown” and a “Black” and a “White” and a “Green”; Terence’s surname is “Gray.” I think Galbraith would suit him much better
.

I think you should go there and rescue him. I would rescue him myself, but Max might not welcome the idea, and you would certainly make a much wiser and better parent than I would
.