Authors: Sally Beauman
“Oh, madam, how it burned!” Mrs. Danvers said, gazing over my shoulder. “All that paneling, such dry tinder, and up it went in a sheet of flame, just the way I knew you wanted. You could see the flames from ten miles away, like a great beacon. You could hear them, too—a noise like roaring. It raced from one end of the house to the other, so fast; I couldn’t believe how fast it was. I said to myself, That’s my darling, she’s done for them. Miss Rebecca never would let anyone get the better of her—then I came here. You take care of the flat, Mrs. Danvers, he’d said, You make the arrangements….
He
never cared what happened to this place and all your lovely things. Too busy trying to forget you. I knew he never would. He could marry a hundred women, but he’d never replace you. You marked him for life—I could see that when I looked in his eyes—even if
she
couldn’t. It was killing him—being without you. Shall I show you your surprise? It came just the other day, or the other week, I forget. First the azalea, then this. I knew they were harbingers, I knew you were coming. I can’t tell you the joy. I knew I hadn’t much longer to wait. Look, madam.”
She reached across to me and laid her thin fingers on my arm; she began to tug at me, and although she had almost no physical strength, the force of her will was mesmeric. I followed her, then halted. Of all the evidence of the past that I might have found in that terrible place, the last thing I would have wanted to see was this, yet there it was, laid out on the only table in the room that was upright.
Two smart boxes, once white, now yellowed, their lids removed, and the tissue paper folded back for my inspection. Inside, carefully folded, baby’s clothes just as described: tiny matinee jackets, nightgowns, bonnets, and booties, a gossamer shawl, fine enough to pass through a wedding ring. The smallest pearl buttons, faded threads of ribbon, exquisite hand stitching, knitted of the finest wool, on the thinnest needles: a wardrobe for a child never born. It was recognizable, but pitilessly moth eaten. Lying on the remains of the shawl was a blue enameled butterfly brooch, and next to it, carelessly tossed aside, the brown envelope it had arrived in, addressed to “Mrs. Danvers.”
I stared at the baby clothes and the brooch; I couldn’t bring myself to touch them. I suppose I’d known from the instant she opened the door to me that there was no possibility Mrs. Danvers could have
sent those notebooks or that ring of Rebecca’s to anyone. She was too frail to break out of her obsession in that particular way; someone else must have sent them, and sent this, too, I thought, looking at the brooch that had been Rebecca’s talisman, her blazon. I felt jerky, sick, and trapped. I no longer cared who had sent these things or why—all I wanted to do was escape from this woman and this place and breathe air again.
But I couldn’t leave her. I couldn’t just walk away and do nothing. It repelled me to look at her, but I made myself do so. I could see she was desperately ill, physically as well as mentally; the emaciation was very advanced. How long had she been shut away here? How did she eat? How did she exist? “Danny,” I said quietly, “how do you manage here? Do you go out to the shops? What do you do for food?”
She looked at me as if I were the insane one. “Tins,” she said, making me jump. “Cupboards full of tins. I went on working until last year, madam. People always need housekeepers and companions. I always left a message here for you, so you’d know how to reach me. I looked ahead; I was careful with my money and, when I was stronger than I am now, I laid in the stores—I never knew when you might come back, you see, madam. And I still go out even now—sometimes, not so much recently.” She gave a little grimace. “During the day—when
she’s
out, that spy downstairs. I wait till she’s gone, I’m in and out—I don’t like her to see me. I don’t like anyone to see me. It’s more difficult now. The pain’s been bad these last weeks. And my eyes aren’t what they were—I expect you can see that, madam.” She turned her milky gaze in my direction. “I can see you, though—oh, yes, I can see you. I remember that dress. Your daddy bought you that dress, one day at Greenways.”
“Danny, do you have a doctor?” I asked. “Is there a doctor you see? Someone who might help if you fell ill…” I hesitated. “Or, say, if I did?”
If I hadn’t added that last suggestion, I’d have met with a blank dismissal, I knew—but putting it that way seemed to convince her.
“Oh, yes, oh, yes,” she said, looking around her. “I
was
ill last year, madam. Sick, so sick. I couldn’t seem to eat, and the pain was terrible. I saw a doctor then—well, I had to. And I was in hospital for months; until this January. I had the very finest treatment—I have a card somewhere, madam. Let me see, where did I put it?”
I thought of the periods of activity Selina had described, and the periods of silence. Did this hospital stay explain that?
Mrs. Danvers finally found the card. It was inside a vase filled with shells on the same table as the baby clothes. She picked up the butterfly brooch as she passed it, and to my dismay and shame, pinned it on my dress. She gave the doctor’s card to me in a childlike trusting way, and I saw that the only way to proceed was to tell her firmly what to do; the sad instincts of feudalism remained with her still. The instant I gave orders, she seemed much less uneasy.
In this way, I persuaded her back downstairs. Even then, she insisted I see “my room,” which she’d kept as I’d always liked it. She opened a door, and I looked into a large square chamber, dominated by a four-poster bed. The blinds were down; the light in the room was thick and shadowy. The disorder upstairs was not repeated here. Apart from the thick silvering of dust on every surface, this bedroom must have been just as Rebecca left it.
There were silver hair brushes on the dressing table; on a chest was a small triptych of photographs in a blackened silver frame. I moved hesitantly toward it. Under a veil of dust were the photographs of Rebecca’s mother that Jack Favell had described to Tom; here was Isabel-Isolda as eternal understudy, as lady-in-waiting and as Desdemona; here was the final resting place of that shrine to her mother that Rebecca had erected at Greenways. “So beautiful and so gifted,” said that low voice behind me. “When she died, it made my blood run cold. I’ll never forget it. It’s branded on my memory.”
Was she thinking of Isabel’s actual death, or Desdemona’s—or Rebecca’s? I couldn’t tell. I was beginning to feel dizzy and light-headed; the room felt hallucinatory. I turned to look at the bed. What I had taken for thin muslin hangings were spiders’ webs; the bed was sheeted with cobwebs.
I closed the door on that room, and persuaded Mrs. Danvers that she must lie down and rest. I could see that the very last of her energy had been exhausted. She leaned on my arm, and I helped her into a little dark cupboard of a room nearby; I assumed she had used it when she left Manderley, but its importance to her went back further than that, I discovered.
“Do you remember when we came here after your daddy died?” she said, staring at air as I folded back the coverlet. “I had my savings,
you sold those bracelets, and you said to me, ‘There you are, Danny, that will buy us a refuge.’ I found this place and I took out the lease and I brought you here. How ill you were—I was beside myself with worry. Night after night, those terrible dreams—how he haunted you, your daddy. But I was always here. I sat up with you night after night. You were like a daughter to me, my own little girl—you knew I’d never leave you. ‘Now I’m going to mend myself, Danny,’ you said. ‘One piece at a time. You’re going to help me, and we’re going to make all the joins invisible.’ And you did, too. I loved your mother, but she was nothing to you. I’ve never known anyone with a quarter your courage and willpower.”
Tears had come to her eyes. Taking her hand, I told her she must rest. She was fretful and bewildered at first, but I managed to make her lie down on a narrow bed, and drew the musty coverlet over her. I tried to open the window to let some air into the place, but it wouldn’t budge an inch. I went in search of a telephone, but there wasn’t one. I found my way to the kitchen, and fetched her a glass of water. I opened one of the cupboard doors and there were battalions of tins, some prewar I think, just as she claimed; I wanted to weep when I saw them. When I returned with the water, her eyes were shut. I stood, afraid, in the doorway, then I saw the slow rise and fall of her chest, and knew she was breathing.
I know some people find it very hard to be close to illness, or close to the old and the infirm—they can’t deal with the smell of sickness apart from anything else; I was like that once, but I’m not now. Nursing my mother and looking after my father has cured me of that kind of fastidiousness. So I went back to that bedside, and took Mrs. Danvers’s hand in mine. I explained that I was going out briefly, but would return, and I was taking the key to this flat with me.
I don’t think she heard or understood any of this; but I’m glad that I took her hand, in view of what happened afterward. She clasped it tight in hers with surprising strength. Her milky eyes flickered open, and fixed on a vacancy behind me. I think the last of her energy and the last of her will had been used up in admitting me, talking to me, and fetching that stone-cold tea. Now, her lips moved, shaping words, but no words were spoken. A ghost of some gladness came into her face, then her eyes flickered shut, and I saw that she was sleeping.
The details of what happened after that don’t matter. The logistics of finding that doctor, persuading him to see me, persuading him that action was necessary, and persuading him, eventually, after endless delays, to come back to the house with me, are just that, logistics. He administered an injection, and then took me aside into that studio room. Its insanities seemed scarcely to bother him; maybe, with a busy London practice, and many poor elderly patients, he saw similar decay and confusion on a daily basis. He certainly made no comment on it. The cancer, he said, had been already advanced when surgery took place last October; it had brought some months of remission; Mrs. Danvers had been first in hospital, then a nursing home until January this year. He was very definite about these dates, to which I paid careful attention. They meant that whoever Selina had seen on the stairs in last November’s fog, it could not have been Mrs. Danvers.
Consulting his notes, he said he had last seen her in February at his surgery, by which time it was clear to him that the cancer had spread; when no further contact was made, he had assumed she’d died, or left London. He was surprised that she could have survived another three months—but I wasn’t.
I knew what had kept her alive; I knew
who
had kept her alive. I knew that the end couldn’t be long delayed, and it would be easier for her now she believed she’d been reunited with Rebecca. Did I feel guilt at the deception on my part? Of course not. I’ve spent the last ten years of my life with the old and the ailing. I know: Truth can damage, and deceptions can be a blessing.
Mrs. Danvers did not wake from that last sleep of hers; she did not recover consciousness, and I was glad. I thought it merciful. She was taken to a hospital in Chelsea, but when I went there the next day, still wearing that butterfly brooch, I was told she hadn’t made it through the night. She had died at three in the morning, in what Rebecca called the dangerous hours after midnight.
H
OW
I
WANTED TO LEAVE
L
ONDON THEN
. I’
D SPENT THE
night before at Rose’s St. John’s Wood house, talking to the women students who rent rooms there. I’d said nothing to them about how I’d spent my day, and I must have disguised my feelings, for they
seemed to notice nothing. They were friendly and kind; they talked about lectures and examinations, parties and men, and they seemed to believe that this world they conjured up could be mine for the asking. I nodded and smiled, but I could feel that world receding further and further away from me. Its gestures and delights came from the other side of a thick glass pane. I couldn’t join the young women the other side of it, I was over there in another world with the old, the haunted, the sick, and the dying.
It would have been wicked in me to regret that, I felt—but I went to bed tied up in knots of yearnings, desires, and duties. The following morning, leaving that hospital, all I wanted to do was rush to Paddington, get on a train, and escape home to The Pines and the sea. Once I was there, I felt I might forget that terrible studio room and forget all my disloyal conflicts. But I’d arranged to talk to those artist friends who had shared a house with my sister Lily, and who had told Selina those ghost stories; they still lived in Tite Street. I’d once known them well; they were looking forward to seeing me; I felt I couldn’t cancel the visit.
They occupied a large bohemian house, a short way along the street from Rebecca’s flat. For as long as I could remember, that house had always been crammed with visiting friends, with mistresses, wives and ex-wives, with tribes of children of confusing parentage, all of whom came and went very amicably. I found it little altered since I last saw it, just before the war, when Lily was leaving London with her married lover to make a new life in Australia. It still had the same rich, gypsyish beauty that had so fascinated me in my teens: There were still the same bright rugs, the vivid blue and scarlet painted rooms were still crammed with pictures. In the kitchen, the still life of an eternal convivial meal lay on the long scrubbed kitchen table; a fat jug spilled dog roses and scarlet poppies; I could hear the sound of a violin from upstairs, and the shouts of children from the garden.
They led me out into that garden, and it was still an Eden, just as I remembered it, a long country garden in the midst of London, weedy, overgrown, and beautiful, heady with the scent of roses and orange blossom. I was kissed and hugged, introduced to new occupants and reintroduced to old ones. I was led to a rickety wooden table shaded by a scarlet Japanese parasol; there was a large bowl of
ripe strawberries on the table. A woman I didn’t recognize from before, with a long rope of auburn Pre-Raphaelite hair, brought the men cigarettes and a jug of red wine. She was heavily pregnant, rapt, and majestical; she was wearing a vivid peasant skirt and a careless silky shawl embroidered with flowers and butterflies. I looked enviously at her from the other side of my pane of glass; she smiled at me, then wandered back to the kitchen. In this household, for all its liberality, I reminded myself, women had always been treated as muses—and servants.