ELLIE BROUGHT OUR MORRIS OXFORD ROUND TO THE front gate, and, with Gray’s assistance, I was bundled into it. Given my rheumatism and general decrepitude, it’s quite a performance getting me into a car, but in the end we managed it. Gray sat in the back behind Ellie, and Barker sat behind me, occasionally licking the backs of my ears, and panting expectantly.
It was a truly glorious day, and my spirits lifted as we bowled along (Ellie is an impetuous driver). We bounced down the narrow, steep hill that leads into Kerrith from our aerie, chuntered along past the brightly painted cottages that perch by the harbor, and skirted the pier, where the ferry departs up river to villages such as Pelynt, where Gray may or may not have stayed in his childhood.
Coming out on the far side of the town, with the Manderley headland directly opposite us across the brilliance of the water, we passed Golden Guinea cove, where Gray’s rented cottage is located, and where, allegedly, smugglers once stored their loot (though it’s difficult to find a cove around here where they allegedly didn’t). Ellie, practising for Le Mans, spun the wheel; we zipped around the notorious blind bend where, shortly after his marriage to Rebecca, Maxim once wrote off his latest motorcar (and was lucky to survive, as it happened). We began the long climb inland, the road snaking along the indentations of the creeks, and mounting toward the thick plantations of oak, beech, and Scots pine that mark the farther boundaries of the Manderley woodland.
Gray was unusually silent, even for him; Ellie was concentrating on double declutching, and I was drifting about on the seas of the past, as usual. At 3:15, we reached the crossroads where, as I’d explained in my history society talk, a gibbet had once stood, and public executions had provided a cheap form of popular entertainment. We parked outside the now shuttered and deserted lodge at this Four Turnings entrance to Manderley, and I began on my habitual ritual: searching for the key to the tall gates, which might be in any one of fifteen tweedy pockets, and which unfailingly turns out to be in the last one.
I keep quiet about this key in local circles, and have sworn Gray to secrecy concerning it. It was originally my grandfather’s, given to him by the Termagant, I think, so he could have access to the woods for his butterfly expeditions. In those days, we rarely used it, for the lodge-keeper was usually there to let us in; I think I may have used it on later occasions, once or twice—Rebecca, knowing my love for these woods, more or less told me to come and go as I pleased. After the fire, when Manderley was abandoned, I expected the locks on the gates to be changed, but they never were, so I can use my key still whenever Ellie, Barker, and I want to walk in a place where we can be sure of meeting no one—a major consideration in the summer months, when even Kerrith is now becoming infested with tourists, and we have to go farther afield to find the lovely isolation that has delighted me from my boyhood.
Where was that infernal key? I started the familiar process of patting my pockets. Ellie sighed. Gray wandered over to the gates, and looked through them to the wilderness, the beautiful Eden, beyond. Not in my overcoat, not in my jacket, not in my trouser pockets…Gray was inspecting the large notice that hangs drunkenly by the gates, and has done these twenty years. It was put up by the land agents who have been responsible for these woods, and for what is now left of Manderley itself, ever since that disastrous fire.
Originally, they answered to Maxim, during the years of his self-exile abroad; now, since both Maxim’s marriages were childless, they answer to the remote branch of the de Winters that inherited all this after his death. Whoever these heirs are—they are domiciled in some vast heap in Yorkshire, I believe, but are said to prefer the several villas they own in the South of France, or their castle in the Scottish Highlands—they take no interest whatsoever in Manderley, and as far as I know have never set foot here. Presumably they’re content to receive the income from the tenant farms (still flourishing) and refuse to bother themselves about a ruin. The land agents, I suspect, take a similar view, since they seem to do damn all. Maybe they inspect the place once a year or so, but no effort has been made to manage these woods, or protect the once-beautiful gardens, or indeed to shore up the house itself, although the last of the roof has now fallen in, and the site—as I often say to Ellie—is positively dangerous.
The notice Gray was inspecting, the sole evidence that the land agents have ever bestirred themselves, was battered; its paint was peeling. The words could still just be read: PRIVATE—NO TRESPASSING.
I looked at it with a scornful eye. Such warnings do not apply to me, I have always felt. As an old friend of the family, I am entitled to come here. Maxim would have wished it; Rebecca would have wished it; and the indolent land agents can go hang themselves. With which thought, my hand finally closed over the missing key, buried under a quantity of farthings and fluff in my overcoat pocket. As I drew it out with an exclamation of triumph, I saw Gray give a frown. He turned the iron handle on the tall iron gates; they creaked and—lo and behold—they opened.
Gray seemed less surprised by this phenomenon than I might have expected. I was considerably startled. “Good grief,” I said. “Well, I’m jiggered. Ellie—you don’t think that we—?”
“Definitely not. We were last here a week ago. I remember, because it was the day Mr. Gray went up to London. And we locked the gates when we left, I know we did. Don’t you remember, Daddy? The lock was stiff, and I had to help you….”
Her voice trailed away. She looked through the open gate and along the winding drive, her expression apprehensive. I must admit, I felt a certain apprehension, too. My first thought was that one of the land agents had decided to put in an appearance on this fine April afternoon—and, if so, I wasn’t anxious to encounter him. While I felt certain as to my rights here, I wasn’t anxious to explain them to some bumptious tweed-suited twerp who would no doubt be young enough to be my grandson. He might not understand; he might not know who I was, or appreciate my claims…. I hesitated, suddenly doubtful of our expedition. The sun passed behind a cloud, the landscape momentarily darkened, and I felt the fingering touch of those superstitious fears that now come to me without warning. Looking at the winding drive, my dream came back to me: I saw the tiny coffin and heard again the small and insistent voice that rose up from it: Let me out. I can’t sleep…. I can’t rest. Lift the lid—I must talk to you.
I shivered; beside me, Barker made a low whining sound, and I saw that his hackles had risen. It was the anniversary of Rebecca’s death, and I was suddenly afraid. There were worse encounters to be made in these woods than with some anonymous, unimportant land agent. They were filled with ghosts, as I already knew. Among these trees, in the past, I often glimpsed my grandfather and my mother, and if these quiet figures were just projections of my thoughts, I was the sadder, for I wanted to encounter them. These were the kindly ones—that is how I thought of them; today, looking along that driveway, narrowed now by the undergrowth on either side, its center marked by a spine of grass, I felt that I had been lucky in the past. Today, the presences I could half sense beckoning from the shadows were less kindly, and more threatening.
I was about to suggest we go home and postpone this visit when Gray, having pushed the gate wide, walked through. “Someone’s driven this way recently,” he said. “Look, you can see the tire marks.”
He indicated a muddy patch a few yards inside the gates, where the gravel, once raked daily by a battalion of gardeners, had thinned. Ellie went to inspect them.
“Someone could be here now,” she said in a hesitant way. “Perhaps we should do this another day. It’s odd. No one ever comes here. We never meet a soul….”
She paused. I forbore to contradict her.
“We don’t want a scene….” She lowered her voice, though I could still hear her. “Technically, we are trespassing, I suppose—and if anyone were to challenge us…It would upset Daddy. He tends to get very fractious and difficult when we come here anyway, but I can’t stop him. He will come. He always comes here on the anniversary of Rebecca’s death…. And he was so anxious to show it to you.”
“I don’t think we should worry.” Gray glanced over his shoulder at me. “These tracks are probably days old—and if they aren’t, and we meet someone, I’m sure I can talk our way out of it. We’re not doing any harm, after all. I’ll take responsibility. My only worry is the distance. How far is it to the house from this entrance?”
“A long way. It’s endless, this drive. We haven’t been as far as the house for ages.” She hesitated. “We just walk a little way. There’s a place my father likes, where you hear the sea for the first time. You can see the house from there in the winter. And last year we brought the car in and walked from the house to the Happy Valley—the place where Rebecca had those wild azaleas planted. It leads down to the sea—but that was before, when Daddy was stronger.”
“That’s what we should do now,” Gray said. “Drive as far as the house—walk, if your father feels strong enough, and then come back.” He lowered his voice, and, leaning down to her, said something further that I couldn’t quite catch; whatever it was, it seemed to convince her. Ellie turned back to me, her face bright with purpose—that meant she expected me to make difficulties.
I made no difficulties. The word “fractious” lingered in my mind; I wasn’t sure if I was pleased or displeased to see Ellie and Gray exchanging these confidences and “ganging up” on me. In any case, I was determined to see the house, though, now I was here, I knew I’d never be able to walk to it.
Gray opened the gates for us, closed them, then rejoined us. Ellie eased the car forward and we entered the cool tunnel of trees, arching up from deep banks that were bright with emerald mosses, harts’ tongue ferns, and primroses. My fears, and my ghosts, receded. My past came back to me as we drove in, the way it does now that age has given me the strange option of binocular vision. All I have to do is adjust my invisible lenses, and the distance and the decades disappear; then I can see the past close-up, right in front of my eyes. It’s there all the time, of course, on the far horizon of the present—and I sometimes feel sorry for people like Gray and Ellie, who are too young and still too shortsighted to see it.
So I watched myself, in a blue serge sailor suit, run through the trees, the butterfly I was pursuing just out of reach. I watched my mother, stately, dreamy, and gentle, in the mourning she never left off, stoop by one of these banks to examine a wild orchid, its leaves freckled, its petals the startling magenta of methylated spirits. “Look, Arthur,” she said, and then straightened, and turned through eighteen years to greet my sister, who came along the drive, lovely in a rose-colored dress, swinging a parcel of books on a strap, and laughing over her shoulder at Maxim. “People ask me why I married Max,” Rebecca said to me as more years sped past in the slipstream of her car, low-slung, fast, with its spread silver wings on its long expensive bonnet. She braked hard, and stopped, here on this drive, at this very bend, or the next one. She turned to look at me, her hair tousled from the wind, her skin glowing, and her eyes, lit by the sun, then shadowed as the branches moved above our heads, were exultant, then secretive, as unpredictable as April.
“I tell such lies when they ask me—I despise them for asking me. I say I married him on a whim one rainy weekend, or for money—how they like it when I say that, it keeps them in gossip an entire winter. But you never ask, so I’ll tell you the truth. I married him for this. Listen. You can hear the sea from here. Walk through those trees, and you can see it. How many flowers can you see? How many birds can you identify? There’s a thrush that nests just there, it has six eggs the color of the sky. I saw a sparrow hawk here once. This is why I married him. It belongs to me and I belong to it. I knew that the first time I saw it.”
“You were already engaged to him when you first saw it,” I replied, clinging to the prosaic, as always on the defensive, afraid to meet her gaze because if I did all the rules of my life might fail me. “You were already engaged. Maxim told me. So something else must have influenced your decision. You exaggerate.”
“You’re wrong. I’ve known this place all my life. I’ve seen it and imagined it. And now it’s mine—”
“Courtesy of Maxim.”
“If you choose to think so. What a literal tiresome man you are today. Here.” She stretched out a bare brown arm, reached across, and opened the passenger door. “You shall walk the rest of the way. When you’ve stopped being an actuary, if you stop, we’ll still give you tea. No, I mean it. Out you get. I don’t allow actuaries in my car, and I don’t allow them at Manderley.”
“Rebecca,” I said, and Ellie, reaching across, patted my hand. “You dozed off,” she said. “Look, we’re almost there.”
I rubbed at my eyes; behind me, Barker made a low, whimpering sound; Gray tensed; the gravel crunched, the trees thinned, and across a wilderness of arching brambles, lit by an April sun, lying crouched along the side of the rising ground, were the broken walls and the bare ribbed beams of Manderley. I wound down my window and leaned out eagerly. In the distance, light glanced on the sea; I could taste salt on the air; a blackbird sang from a bush, and, behind and through its song, I could hear the tide approaching, approaching.
WE PARKED ON THE GRAVEL SWEEP, NOW MUCH SHRUNKEN and weed infested, where the carriages of my early boyhood, and later the motorcars, used to draw up on the north side of the house, by its heavy ornamented portico. Here, once upon a time, Frith would descend the steps in state to greet guests. Here Rebecca, returning from her honeymoon and arriving at Manderley for the first time as a wife, had been received by Frith with full Manderley majesty: all the outdoor servants, from head gardener down to the lowliest stable boy, clutching their hats, lined up on the gravel; and in the vast hall beyond, every indoor servant in ranked lines and full livery, jackets brushed, aprons starched, eyes lowered, awaiting their new chatelaine.
“I think Frith may have hoped to intimidate me,” Rebecca said, giving me a small sidelong glance of secret amusement. “There he was, guarding the ancestral lair. He was longing for me to make a mistake. I nearly did, just for the pleasure of watching his reaction. But I’d promised Max—no tricks! And I kept my word. It was a faultless performance—I wish you’d been there to see it.”
“I hear you dropped your gloves, so Frith had to stoop and pick them up,” I said. “That wouldn’t have been deliberate, by any chance, would it?”
“Certainly not. Those gloves were the first present Max ever gave me. They were beautiful gloves, the softest suede—my mother had some like them once. I wouldn’t have spoiled them for the world—not even to annoy Frith. I only dropped one, anyway, on the steps outside, when I saw that great tomb of a portico rearing up. It was an accident—truly.”
I looked up at the portico now. Its pediment was deeply cracked and sprouting a rich growth of ivy and infant willow herb; one of its supporting pillars, blackened from the fire, still stood upright; the other leaned dangerously. I bent to release Barker from his lead; he at once trotted off in the direction Gray and Ellie had taken, and I followed more slowly.
Later in the year, when the brambles and weeds have had time to recover from winter, to spring up and re-establish themselves with new vigor, it becomes very difficult to make a circuit of Manderley. But in early April, especially in years like this when the winter has been hard and prolonged, it’s still possible. Clutching my stick, wary of rabbit holes, I stepped onto the once-smooth grass and made my way around the great ruined northern flank of the house, to its once-famous, long west front, with its heady view straight out to the ocean.
In this central section of the west wing, the most beautiful part of the house, Rebecca and Maxim made their rooms, ignoring tradition and refusing to occupy the more sheltered south-facing bedrooms that had always been occupied by the heads of the family. Here, on the ground floor, was the great drawing room where I first saw her on my return from Singapore; here she came running in from the gardens in her white dress, astonishingly young and three months married. Here, farther along and on the first floor, was the room I never saw but that I know she made her bedroom. “I can always sleep there,” she said to me. “I have the windows opened wide. Even in a storm, I open them. I can hear the sea. I can smell the sea. It always calms me.”
There is no trace of those rooms now. I believe the fire first sprang up in this part of the house—that was what I always heard, anyway—and it was in this wing that it burned most intensely. I touched the blackened stones that were all that was left; I leaned against a crumbling stone quoin that had once framed a window. I peered through into the interior, trying to make sense of the rubble, the charred and fallen beams, the windings of brambles. I tried to reorder it in my mind’s eye, to reassemble the walls and restore the dimensions to what they had been, to decide that there was the fireplace, there a doorway, but the chaos confused and saddened me.
I turned away and looked at what was left of a lawn: Over there, under that beech tree, a little boy in a sailor suit had once sat and taken tea with the Grenville sisters, and fallen in love with pretty Isolda. Over there to my right, I had once watched Rebecca cut great branches of white lilac. She walked toward me now, carrying them in her arms. All this past, so visible to me, so invisible to others. I looked at the sea and the sky, my vision blurring.
For a moment, I felt my age. I felt infirm, my hands trembling slightly. Then Barker, who always senses my moods, returned to my side and pressed his damp gray muzzle against my legs; a breath of salt freshness came to me on the air, and I rallied. I had a reason for coming here today, I reminded myself. Every year on this date, I make this no doubt foolish pilgrimage as an act of…what? Contrition? Respect? Sentiment (since I am not, alas, devoid of sentimentality) ? But this year I had a secondary purpose—and I was forgetting it.
“Come on, Barker,” I said, and set off across the rank tussocky grass toward my daughter and Terence Gray; they had been wandering ahead of me, and had come to a halt at the southwest corner where Lionel de Winter had had his rooms. This extremity of the house was the least damaged. The towerlike structure where Lionel inched out his last hideous years, and where he finally died, was still standing, though its roof had long gone, and owls now nested behind the thick ivy that shrouded it. I looked up at the window that had been his; my younger self, wearing uniform, looked down at me.
The year 1915: I was in England on two days’ leave, to see my wife and newborn son; by that evening I would be back on a troopship; by tomorrow I would be back in France; by the day after, or the week after, I would most probably be dead, as so many of my friends were. Meanwhile, I had been summoned to Manderley once more by the elder Mrs. de Winter. I was to be one of the witnesses to her son Lionel’s newly revised will; Frith, who was shortly to be promoted to butler, was to be the other. Why me? Because Mrs. de Winter had learned years before how far she could push without my resisting? Or because statistics suggested I was unlikely to survive Lionel very long and was therefore unlikely to talk? Lionel was surely too ill to understand what document he was signing, though his mother claimed otherwise. He died later that same day; I’ve defied statisticians to live on for thirty-six years—and that action of mine remains on my conscience. Twice in my life, as I’m now bitterly aware, I’ve allowed myself to be taken advantage of by the de Winters.
This is a part of Manderley that I have never liked. Beatrice once brought me here as a child, claiming its corridors were haunted, and we would see some fearsome apparition—a headless man or the wicked deadly ghost of Caroline de Winter. We saw nothing, but I felt much, and I’ve never succeeded in shaking off that childish dread entirely. I approached it now, even now, with reluctance, and was relieved to see that Ellie was waiting for me. Gray was no longer with her; he was already moving off at a rapid pace in the direction of the sea. I halted.
“Doesn’t it look beautiful in this light?” Ellie said, coming to join me. “Sometimes I think it looks even more lovely like this than it ever did before. It was splendid then, of course—but now it’s so still and quiet. It’s magical. There’s a foxes’ den under the tower there—she has cubs, I think. I could hear them. In another few years, there’ll be nothing left of the house. Nature will have reclaimed it for the birds, the foxes, and the badgers…. The ivy will win—and the brambles.”
“Maybe. Maybe,” I said. “Sit, Barker.”
Ellie rested her hand on my arm; the breeze lifted her soft hair away from her face; it had brought color to her cheeks. For a few moments, neither of us spoke, and Ellie continued to look toward the woods, just coming into leaf, the light slanting through their branches. She looked at the pale pools of primroses; beyond them, in the cool of the trees, there would soon be bluebells, thousands upon thousands of them. In the distance, the sea moved and turned, crested and sparkled. I could feel spring: Its restlessness and promise were in the air—and I could see spring in my daughter’s eyes: Its loveliness touched me to the heart; it also dismayed and pained me.
Ellie is attuned to me; I think she sensed this, for she gave a sigh and shook off her reverie. “Well, at least we didn’t meet anyone,” she said, the dreaminess leaving her voice as if she had decided, for my sake, to concentrate on more everyday matters. “I’m glad of that. I wonder if they employ a keeper now, to patrol the woods? Or maybe they’ve sent someone in to look at the house—to shore it up, perhaps? It’s so dangerous—those agents ought to have done that long ago. I think they’ve finally got around to it. Someone’s certainly been here, Daddy—did you notice?”
“No. What makes you think so?”
“Well, look—” Ellie pointed. “That patch of nettles and briars is all trodden down. And over there—on Lionel’s tower—you remember the windows had been boarded up years ago? They’re not boarded now. The planks have been been pried off.”
“Could have been a storm. During the winter—wind damage. Those boards were rotten.”
“No, it’s not storm damage. Someone’s used a tool to lever the boards off. You can see the marks at the edges. And look, the ivy’s all ripped away, and there’s mud on the sill. I think someone’s climbed in there, and recently, too. Terry said it was probably just children, daring one another, something like that. I told him children never come here—”
She broke off with a frown. Following her gaze, I looked at the window in question; someone had, indeed, forced an entry—and Ellie was right, it was unlikely to be children. Tempting though ruins and deserted places are, not only to children but to others who seek privacy, solitary walkers, courting couples, Manderley has remained strangely unexplored, neither vandalized nor violated.
And both Ellie and I knew why: The atmosphere here by the house, and in the encircling woods, too, has a virgin and forbidding quality. Ancient forces protect it—or so I sometimes feel—and to walk here is to feel one is entering a sanctum. I’ve felt something similar in the past when I’ve walked through ruined temples in the Far East, or sacred groves in parts of Greece or Italy. The fact that one may not believe in the deities once worshipped in such places is immaterial; one can sense their powers, and I’ve always felt it was an unwise man, a foolhardy man, who dismissed or denied them. Call it instinct or superstition; I would not relish coming here alone now, especially after dark, and I would never allow Ellie to do so. I looked at the window Ellie indicated; I looked at my daughter. Terry…She had never used that name before; when had that change happened?
A faint breeze came from the sea. I thought of that zephyr of my childhood; I gave a small shiver, and turned away from the window; that fearful tendency I’ve recently noticed in myself was creeping upon me, and it made me irritable. I gestured toward Gray, still in view, but now some distance away. “Where’s he off to?” I said. “He seems in a devil of a hurry—he might have waited….”
“He wants to see…well, the place where Rebecca’s boat went down, I think. The cove. Her boathouse cottage…” Ellie gave me an anxious look. “He knew it was too far for you, and he didn’t want you upset, so he said he’d just walk down quickly on his own, and then come back.”
“Too far? Too far? It’s a quarter of a mile at most.” I bristled. “Whippersnapper. Who’s he to decide what’s too far and what isn’t?”
“Now, Daddy…”
“Anyone would think I was some useless old crock…. I brought him here, damn it. He has no right…. ‘Upset’? Certainly I’m upset. He’s upset me. Gallivanting here, there, and everywhere. Off to London, God knows why. Off to see Frith, without so much as a by-your-leave. Who told him where Frith was? I did. Writes to Favell, arranges to meet him. And now this. Prowling around, leaving you behind, no manners, wet behind the ears, I’ve had enough of it. ‘Too far’? I’ll show him…”
Well, I said something of this kind. It went on quite a while. I grew more and more peppery, more and more indignant, more and more confused and heated. All the time I knew that Gray was right; it was too far and too steep; all the time I knew it would distress me to go down to that cove—I haven’t set foot there in decades. The more I knew how right Gray was, how right Terry was, the more incensed I became. One second I was Colonel Julyan, wise old bird, the next I was King Lear. The fact that I knew this perfectly well made it all the more painful.
“Daddy, calm down—please don’t do this,” Ellie interjected at intervals. “This is ridiculous,” she said finally, growing visibly upset and losing patience. “Why are you so stubborn? You know what happened last time you went that way. We got as far as the Happy Valley and you collapsed. Oh, for heaven’s sake! The doctor’s warned you, I’ve warned you, your own body’s warned you. You’re not well, and it’s too far and it’s too steep—”
“Leave me alone, Ellie,” I cried. “Don’t interfere. Since when did I take orders from you?”
“I’m not ordering you, I’m asking you. I’m asking you, for once in your life, to listen to me, and think, and be reasonable—”
“Let go of my arm, damn it. Let go this instant. And don’t start snivelling, for God’s sake. Red eyes and a running nose will do nothing for you, Ellie. If you want to look pretty for Mr. Terence Gray, and I’m sure you do, that won’t be the way to go about it, believe me.”
“Daddy—stop this….” Ellie let go of my arm, and took a step back. The hurt and the apprehension in her eyes were so acute that I hated myself—and that enraged me further.
“Making him lunch! Making eyes at him at lunch! Don’t think I didn’t see. Sheep’s eyes! You’re making a damn fool of yourself, Ellie. It’s painful to watch—and he’s not interested. Look at him, waltzing off at the first opportunity. Bleating away—‘Daddy this’ and ‘Daddy that’—I expect he’s sick and tired of it. Damn it, I’m sick and tired of it. Leave me alone, and go and snivel somewhere else, for God’s sake….”
Color flushed up from Ellie’s throat into her face. When she finally spoke, her voice sounded terrible, all breathless and choked. She was very angry.
“That’s a hateful thing to say—hateful. I wasn’t…I didn’t…How can you say that, you of all people? I remember you—sighing and moping and snapping at everyone except Rebecca. It broke mother’s heart, and it made me miserable, miserable. Make a fool of myself? You made a fool of yourself for five years…. Well, go if you want. I don’t care any more. Go chasing off down to her beach. She never wanted you there then, and she wouldn’t want you there now. Maybe you’ll finally realize that, you stupid, stupid old man….”
She turned away with a coughing sound and covered her face with her hands. I could see she was trembling from head to foot. There was a terrible silence, a silence that seemed to me to go on for a very long time. A crying girl, whom I loved with all my heart; a pigheaded, frightened, indeed stupid old man. Tears came to my own eyes, and I brushed them furiously aside. I watched myself with disbelief, shame, and bemusement as I swung around, slashed at the grass with my stick, and then, without further speech, left her and stalked off seaward.