Rebecca and the many Ghosts of Menabilly by Gemma Elise

With my knees hugged to my chest, I sit and stare out across the bay.

The sea is soft this morning; docile, quiet. Nothing breaks the stillness. There is just the sound of wavelets shrugging themselves over time-worn rocks, and spreading across the sand like butter.

Where water finds rock the disturbance wrinkles the smooth sheen of the Atlantic, sending concentric circles outwards from each point of contact; circles that meet each other as they expand, crossing over each other, waving into each other, until my eyes forget water and find nothing but geometry. I’m seeing through reality, staring directly into the base code of the universe.

Far out, beyond the ripples, a cormorant disappears himself again and again, snaking beak-first into the blue, his whole body following through one single point, as though with each dive he threads himself through the eye of an invisible needle. He is his own magic trick, reappearing again in a different place each time.

I watch, waiting.

Over my left shoulder the sun creeps above the horizon. I take a deep breath, filling my lungs with salted air.

Midges dance over sea pinks. The rising sun dances across the ocean. The rocks are still, still, still, exactly as they have been for millennia — except of course that each droplet of water and each degree of sunlight changes them into a new thing. They gleam where the sinking tide has left them exposed, sparkle in the crevices turned into rock pools, and at the water’s edge, in just the right place, I lose myself in the silvery dance of reflections rippling across their surface.

Blackbirds and robins and blackcaps sing. Chiffchaffs keep rhythm. Oystercatchers call to each other in thin peeping cries. Amongst the birdsong, I can hear my grandmother’s voice, floating up from the beach.  I can picture her; looking for seashells, ankles deep in the ocean, wearing a white skirt and her favourite buttercup-yellow jumper. She loves it here, too.

I hug my knees a little tighter, and wonder if this is the most beautiful, most haunted place I know. Yes, haunted. This is Menabilly, known by readers around the world as Manderley. Daphne du Maurier left the title character of her most famous novel here; a glamorous ghost to linger forever in the cove, trailing the scent of azaleas in her wake. Rebecca. In the book, her memory tortures her widower and casts a dark-haired shadow over his seaside manor house — Manderley — and over his new wife, to the extent that she is named only as ‘the second Mrs de Winter’. It is a ghost story within a love story. (Or perhaps the other way around.) And the sharp corners of the love triangle cut deeply, leaving their marks on our cultural consciousness. In the 75 years since its first publication there have been numerous on-screen adaptations, and the story has inspired countless others, including the plots of Latin-American soap operas and at least one Taylor Swift song. It is a seductive formula: the young wife, made to feel invisible; the older husband, trying to escape; the beautiful first wife, troubling them both from beyond the grave. And the tangled question of whom each of them really loves.

Within the framework of the novel, that is a near impossible question to answer. Rebecca might be the title character, but she is dead, and voiceless. Her successor is the story’s narrator, but she is unsure of herself, and nameless. Their shared husband is masked, seen only through the double-glazing of his own duplicity and his second wife’s naivety. It is these uncertainties which keep us coming back to Manderley, and keep us imagining and reimagining the tale into new adaptations for new eras. ‘Je Reviens’ was the name of Rebecca’s boat: a promise to herself, to her husband, to his second wife, and ultimately to du Maurier’s readers. Je reviens. “I’ll return”. 

At first glance the gothic power of the novel and its famous seaside manor house can be explained by Rebecca’s restless memory. But look a little deeper, and you find that the woman who haunts the house is the rule, rather than the exception. Think of the famous opening line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”. The narrator is many miles and many years away from the place, but in her dreams, she returns. She cannot help it. Perhaps what really drives the plot is the manor house, rather than the family who live within its grounds. They are all under the spell of the estate, and their strongest motivation is not the way they feel about each other, but the way they feel about Manderley. Now, in the real world, the memories of these characters haunt Menabilly. In the text, it haunts them.

Maybe my reading of Rebecca has always been coloured by my own longing. I know what it is to fall in love with stone, and sea, and sky.

I have been sitting on these rocks for as long as I can remember. Every summer, my sister and I spent two weeks here making sandcastles and digging new routes for the stream that flows across the beach on its way to the sea. With my parents and my grandparents, we played French cricket and pétanque and frisbee, and ate stray grains of sand with flapjack and tiffin and poppy-seed cake. I read Rebecca here — sitting in the bay window of the holiday cottage that has been immortalised as the boathouse in the novel — and learned a little about how to capture a place within the confines of language. As I grew up, I also learned heartbreak, and how to give it to the ocean. How to sit on these rocks and let the waves smooth the jagged edges of grief. Lately I have been sitting here with my husband, imagining a future with boats, and babies, and another generation paddling in the water, hunting for treasure in rock pools.

Like Daphne du Maurier, I couldn’t help but fall in love with this place. Almost as famous as the story of Rebecca is the story of how du Maurier found the manor house at Menabilly — built in the days of Shakespeare — abandoned, boarded up and overgrown with ivy — love at first sight — and how she eventually came to lease the house from the family who have always owned it, living there with her husband and children for a quarter of a century, until the lease expired. Du Maurier wrote Rebecca in the fifteen years between her first meeting with Menabilly and the moment her wish of leasing the property was finally granted, in a time where her dream of living there must have seemed impossible. No wonder the real love between its pages is for the cove, and the woods, and the old house itself. No wonder the book radiates longing; the kind that comes from loving somewhere so completely, and knowing that you could never stay.

Writing in The Rebecca Notebook, du Maurier describes the magic of that first meeting; of how she woke early to walk into the dawn light — past the spot where I sit today — and trespassed through the woods to find the house, which ‘possessed’ her ‘as a mistress holds her lover’ and made du Maurier ‘hers upon the instant’:

‘As I sat on the edge of the lawn and stared at her I felt […] she had a personality that was hers alone, without the touch of human hand. One family only had lived within her walls. One family who had given her life. They had been born there, they had loved, they had quarrelled, they had suffered, they had died. And out of these emotions she had woven a personality for herself, she had become what their thoughts and their desires had made her.’

In du Maurier’s notes, the house is immediately captivating, and immediately alive; a ‘she’ rather than an ‘it’, with her own secrets, and personality. This is a place that remembers the people who have come and gone. It holds on to them.

I take another deep breath, almost tasting the scent of wild garlic that drifts from the flowers in the woods. It is the middle of May and they are fading now, losing their brilliant white sparkle, like the final moments of a firework show. The scent mingles with the salted air, and the whisper of the sea, and the chorus of birdsong. When I think of heaven, I think of here.

Stolen fragments of faraway conversation add their own song to the morning. I smile at the sound of my grandmother’s voice. I have missed her, since she died. But the water brings her back to me, returning the playful cadence of her speech, and the slower, softer sound of my grandfather’s replies. The water remembers, and when I sit on these rocks their words still find me. Time unravels gently. My parents are here too; all four of them. One pair is waking up in the house amongst the trees, while their echoes play forever in the sand with their young daughters, twenty years of laughter lines smoothed from their faces. I tuck my hair behind my ears, and down on the beach the little girl who used to be me does the same. Salt water washes away all thoughts of ‘linear’. There are no straight lines in nature.

Out in the bay, the cormorant blooms from beneath the surface with a flatfish clasped in his bill, bigger than his head, who wriggles and flaps in a final, futile attempt at survival. With ease, the bird rotates his meal, tossing and catching the fish in a deadly three-point turn until the fish stares into the bird’s gullet, into the abyss, and is swallowed head-first. The cormorant’s snake-neck bulges, cartoonishly. Sunlight glints off his bill as he shakes his head from side to side, as if to clear his throat, and the lump sinks downwards. When it is over he stands on the rocks, holding his wings out to the open ocean, and looking for all the world like a preacher delivering a sermon to the waves. I wonder how he feels about Time, while he waits for his inky feathers to dry.

Hearing footsteps behind me, I turn to find my dad. ‘Peregrine!’, he says, pointing with a hand that casts a reassuring shadow, ‘Flying right!’ Just a flash, an incision made across the blue sky. Blink, and he’s gone. The sky is whole again. The stillness settles once more.

Smiling at the moment, I unravel myself, stretching my limbs into the soft sunshine. One version of me walks back through the woods with my dad — along the path lined with wild garlic and white azaleas — towards breakfast, and packed bags, and the drive back to Hertfordshire, and reality. The other remains, melting into the fabric of the morning, slipping like grains of sand through the grasp of time.

Je Reviens.

300 miles from Menabilly, I shut my eyes, and hear the sea breathing.

***

Gemma Elise is a wildlife charity worker, backpacker, and nature photographer. She is currently writing a book about a year of rediscovering seasonal magic in the chalk grasslands and beech woodlands of her childhood home in the Chilterns. Read more about Gemma on her website.

The photograph at the head of this essay is by the author.