Free Rebecca's Tale by Sally Beauman Page A

crossed off my witness list earlier, is one hundred and ninety years old—and that’s a conservative estimate. He was always a de Winter apologist; he never liked Rebecca, whom he regarded as an interloper; in short, the one-time butler is an unreliable witness and, if not gaga, a snob, a snoop, a fossil, and an inveterate nincompoop.
    Gray had no business to consult him without my being present, and the fact that he’d done so alarmed me. Gray has demonstrated these unilateral tendencies before (he went off to London to pursue his de Winter researches last week, and I still don’t know why, though it’s not for want of asking). Now, in the blink of an eye, he was about to see that liar Favell, and he’d already talked to Frith. Sometimes, I feel Gray plays his cards very close to his chest. Frith knows a great deal about me, as well as the de Winter family, and if he talked for two hours— two hours !—heaven only knows what rigmarole he chose to invent.
    Could Gray be devious? That suspicion has crossed my mind more than once. Ellie will have none of it, of course. She claims I read too many detective stories; she says I’m getting unnaturally suspicious, and I’ll start suspecting her of plotting next. She is always trumpeting Gray’s virtues, chief of which (according to her) are neither his conspicuous good looks nor his unmarried status, but his kindness toward me. “He takes you out of yourself,” she says. “It’s good for you to have someone to talk to about the past and Manderley and…and so on. Especially when he’s so interested in the subject himself. Don’t be such a curmudgeon. He bucks you up—you said so yourself.”
    This particular refrain was repeated several times this morning. Ellie had changed her clothes, I noted. In honor of the Terrier, shewas now twenty-one, that is, ten years younger than she was yesterday, and ten times prettier to boot. How do women effect these transformations? For once, she was sensibly dressed, not in trousers (she will wear trousers) but in a modest skirt and a plain blouse; she was wearing the string of pearls her mother and I had given her to mark her twenty-first. She looked innocent, mischievous, and radiant. Her soft brown hair was newly washed; her skin glowed; there was a brilliance to her candid eyes that made me fear for her. I want a happy future for Ellie, and I cannot bear the thought that in the pursuit of happiness she could be hurt.
    Ellen, my Ellie, is all I have left. My wife, Elizabeth, died during the war, after years of illness; my son Jonathan’s fighter plane went down, and was never recovered, two weeks before the armistice; my elder daughter, Lily, from whom I was estranged, died in childbirth in Australia five years since, her baby son surviving her for only two weeks. I never refer to this Greekish sequence of events, and I will not do so again here. I will merely state the obvious: I can hope and plan for no one now, except Ellie—and I thought deeply of my dearest Ellie during the course of the morning as I waited for Gray to arrive for lunch.
    I was at a loose end. I pottered about, first in my study, then in my garden, then in the kitchen, where I was a nuisance and got under Ellie’s feet. Somehow I could not settle. I was worried about Ellie’s future, haunted by that winged child in the photograph; once again I felt old, seedy, and maladroit. My fine resolve of the night before now seemed less and less possible. Write the truth? What was the truth? Perhaps it was not the past, but the present, with which I should concern myself.
    Then I was struck by an idea: If I did co-opt Gray, as provisionally planned, if I involved him in my Rebecca “quest,” he would of necessity have to visit The Pines more often. Ellie would then encounter him more often. That might not altogether please me, but it would certainly please her. We live quite a solitary life and Ellie does not get out much. This magnanimity on my part immediately