June 1940
I’d been there near on a year (Doris was saying over tea). And it had been good, all told. I missed my mum and dad of course, and my brothers and sisters, but we got to be like family amongst ourselves, living so close by each other as we was.
Me and Emily—that’s the daughter from the big house, her as was throwing rocks at frogs as you might recall—had got to be…
well we wasn’t exactly friends. Hard to be friends with somebody when they’re from money and you’re not, when they spend their days in dresses the colour of summer throwing rocks at frogs and you have to darn your own stockings and clean up after the younger kids.
Still, we talked a fair bit. Most days actually.
I weren’t allowed up to the house much, ’cept on special occasions or if Sir Arthur had something he wanted to tell us, which he didn’t often.
But she’d be down in the woods a lot, down by the hermitage and that.
And we’d chat, like. Though I think she was laughing at me a lot of the time. Maybe all of the time.
“Hullo, nymph,” she’d say to me, when she saw me down by the river, and I’d say “hullo” back and then she’d tell me about something she’d read about in her father’s big library or learned about from one of her tutors and I’d say, “I don’t know about that,” and she’d say, “Don’t you? How queer,” or words to that effect.
I remember I was sitting by the riverbank one day, end of June it was, and suddenly this pair of hands come down over my eyes and I hear Emily’s voice in my ear saying, “Guess who, nymph.”
And I said “Emily” because she was the only girl on the estate what talked posh and because nobody else called me that ’cept her.
“You could have played along,” she said, taking her hands away. “A guessing game is no fun if you guess on the first try.”
I turned around to look at her. The sun was lighting her up from behind, and she looked like everything. Like freedom. Like an angel. Like the sort of thing the likes of me only sees in pictures. “Umm,” I said, “King George?”
“Better.” She smiled at me then. She often did but that day it was different. More for me less at me, if you get what I’m saying. “But no, it’s me. Aren’t you shocked?”
“Yeah,” I told her, doing my best to play along. “Shocked as arse.”
I’d heard her say worse, but she covered her mouth with her hands. “Doris, how dare you say such things. But you’ll be even more shocked when I tell you why I’m here.”
I wanted to think of something clever. Some kind of guess that would make her laugh. But I couldn’t so I just said, “Why’re you here?”
“Because I have a surprise for you,” she told me, “for your birthday.”
I’d forgotten. She’d got the day out of me months before, I’d thought just because we’d run out of other things to talk about. “You didn’t have to.”
“Don’t be silly. I want to.”
I sat there a bit. She didn’t give me nothing. “Well?”
“Impatient. I told you it was a surprise. Now I’m going to need to cover your eyes again.”
So she did. And she made me get to my feet and walk all the way up that hill with her guiding me.
It was further than she thought, I reckon, because we fell a couple of times on the way up, all tangled together like string and honestly if I’d had my way I’d have been happy to stay there.
But she got me to my feet and covered my eyes again and took me all the way up until I heard my shoes crunching on the gravel and then she put me up a step and into a chair and when she took her hands away I was sitting in the passenger seat of Sir Arthur’s Cadillac V-16.
“What’s this?” I asked, which even then I knew was a stupid question.
She got in the driver’s side, looked over at me, and grinned. “An adventure.”
I will say that what happened next was technically a crime.
Because it weren’t my car and it weren’t hers and what with us both being fourteen—me only just fourteen—we didn’t neither of us have much of an idea what we was doing with it.
But that was the thing with Emily. She was—nothing stopped her, no one said no to her. If she wanted to drive, she’d drive.
Honestly I’ve never been so scared in my life.
I mean, you’ve seen the roads round here and they was worse back in them days.
Rougher and narrower and we was going so fast round some of them bends that swear to God I thought she’d wrap us round a tree and kill us both.
Though looking back I think I’d have gone happy.
We drove for miles, which the rate Emily was going didn’t take us that long, until we got to Tapworth and then she parked up outside this old pub, got out and come round to my side to open the door for me, almost like we was courting.
I was going to ask her what we was doing in Tapworth, but I’d had enough of feeling stupid so I just let her lead me through the village to the little cinema they had there in them days. “I thought,” she said as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “we could see a movie.”
“Don’t got no money,” I told her, hoping she wouldn’t insist on paying for me.
“Don’t need any. Nobody pays to see movies. Follow me.”
So I followed her. The picture house was a run-down little thing, and it had a back door what didn’t lock.
“Ain’t you rich?” I asked her as we was creeping in the shadows that led into the theatre. “Couldn’t you just buy a ticket out front?”
“Could,” she whispered. “Shan’t. How do you think rich people get that way?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. God?”
“Generations of never paying for anything we don’t have to. Come on, quickly.”
She darted away then, into the dark, and I followed after her half certain I was going to get nabbed and sent to prison for skipping a movie ticket, but nobody spotted us and nobody cared.
She took me through this little service door, what I reckon the pianist used back when pictures was silent, and we slipped into some seats what nobody wanted and nobody would see.
“What film is it?” I asked her as the lights was going down.
“New Hitchcock,” she told me. “Rebecca.”
I’d heard of Hitchcock, of course. Everyone had heard of Hitchcock. Never heard of Rebecca. Not then I hadn’t anyway. Now—well, now I’ve had it on tape and DVD and them Blu-rays, what was big for a while. My grandson set me up with that thing, and I’ve got it on there and all.
It’s a good film. One of the best I reckon. Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier and that. And it brings back memories.
Emily didn’t take her eyes off the screen the whole time. But she held my hand, and I didn’t take my eyes off her.
After the show we grabbed some bread and some cheese from a shop in Taplow and Emily drove us out to a field not far from Patchley. We lay next to each other on the grass and ripped chunks off the loaf and fed them to each other.
“He kills her in the book, you know,” Emily told me.
“That seems a bit rough. They’ve only just got married.”
She laughed again. “Not the girl, nymph. Rebecca. But you’re not allowed to kill your wife in a movie so she had to kill herself.”
“Oh.” I chewed on a piece of cheese and gave it a think. “Good film, though.”
Emily was lying right beside me, her head next to mine. Our hair was all spilling together in the grass. “One day,” she said to the sky, or maybe to me, “I’m going to have a life like that.”
“What, marry a rich man with a dead wife?”
And she laughed at me. Of course she laughed at me. “Not like the girl—poor silly thing who doesn’t even get her own name. No, when I grow up I’m going to be Rebecca.”
“And get shot?”
I felt her nodding where her head was touching mine. “Go where I want. Do what I want. Love who I want. Die how I want.”
“You’re so—I dunno. Why’re you talking about dying?”
“Morbid.”
“You what?”
She shifted, rolling around and coming to her knees so she was kneeling over me, looking down. “The word for somebody who is fixated with dark things. With death and dying and the like. It’s morbid.”
“Then you’re morbid.”
And there was the laugh again. “I thought I should be. I believe it looks rather well on me.”
“You’re daft.”
That didn’t please her. “I’m not daft. I’m actually rather precocious.”
She tore a piece of bread from the loaf and worked it between her fingers. Crumbs from its crust were drifting down onto me like little brown snowflakes.
“We should have bought some honey,” she said, not really to me. “I’m in the mood for something sweet.”
I propped myself up on my elbows and tried to shrug, but it was hard with my weight all funny. “What we’ve got’s good enough.”
“I suppose it is,” she said.
And then, for the first time, she kissed me.