Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  Angela remembered the sense of grief that engulfed the country on the announcement on 21 January 1936 of the death of King George V. She and Daphne watched from the balcony at St James’s Palace the impressive funeral procession: ‘So much scarlet down below us worn by the troops lining the streets, and the unrelieved black of the mourning civilians, and the hushed quiet throughout the long hours of waiting for the cortège, and when it came, the gun carriage … with field-marshal’s helmet and baton … his sons following … the new King.’46 In fact, the glamorous new King, Edward VIII, promised so much, and lifted the mood of the nation. Although it was in part a calculated play for a good press, he seemed to understand the plight of the poorest of his subjects, endearing himself to the Welsh miners when he toured their depressed villages, where so many were out of work, and famously declaring that ‘Something must be done’. Little did any of his subjects know, however, the turmoil in his private life that meant before the year was out he would turn his back on duty, and on them all, for love.

  Angela’s life was becoming more brave and expansive. She bought her first car in 1936 and this marked a new stage in her life as an independent single woman. There was something confident, defiant even, about choosing a bright green sporty two-seater Morris Eight. This was a car for a bold woman about town, not the demure miss, waiting for her prince to come. She was to become a highly competent driver who prided herself on her assertiveness and speed, a better driver than most men. The heroines in her novels were also good, fast drivers at a time when it was quite racy for a woman to have her own car and bowl around the countryside on her own, or only in the company of a sister or female friend.

  While Daphne was sweating through the Alexandrian summer, struggling to finish her du Maurier family biography, Angela and Jeanne set off on a holiday to Majorca with their mother, Aunt Billy and the actress Jill Esmond, who was due shortly to give birth to her first child, Tarquin. The hotel was inferior, the weather bad and the lavatories smelt. Jill knew that her husband, Laurence Olivier, was already under the spell of another, the tragic enchantress Vivien Leigh. Nobody enjoyed the holiday except for Angela, who loved travel and revelled in the louche company at the café they frequented, whose ‘inmates and habituées might have been drawn from the type of novel one does not leave lying about in the schoolroom. (As I have remarked, I enjoyed the holiday).’47 That arch comment in parentheses in her memoir says a great deal about her new freedoms to choose. Muriel and Aunt Billy were rather shocked by the clientele, but Angela, recently so naïve and in thrall to her parents, now embraced this gay and carefree scene. How much Marda and Gwen and their circle had taught her. She made new friends and stayed drinking into the night (apricot brandy, wine and Chartreuse) before stumbling back to the room she shared with her sister, thoroughly drunk. She woke up Jeanne who was not best pleased, but backed up Angela’s lie to Muriel that her illness the following day was due to a surfeit of octopus.

  Triangular relationships can be full of tension and strife. Angela’s last poem to Marda seemed to express the impossibility of passion without responsibility for others:

  The sun has ceased to shine

  upon your head & mine

  Because of love we have

  too much partaken.

  For Passion like a sweet & poisoned wine

  Has blinded us to leave ought else forsaken.

  Marda had taught her how natural and carefree love could be, regardless of society’s attempts to control and constrain it. She had shown her that she was lovable and attractive, after thirty years of feeling both these qualities had passed her by to alight instead on her sisters. But above all, Marda had offered Angela honesty and loyalty and a true friendship that endured their separation and love for other women. Angela’s letters to her continued to start with ‘Darling’ and end with ‘your devoted Angela’, and so they remained through the years of their friendship.

  But into her life had come another influential woman who was to inspire her to write novels again, and for that Angela would always be grateful. Brigit Patmore was a flame-haired phenomenon. Already into her fifties when she and Angela met, Brigit had packed so much experience and heartache into her life she exuded hard-won wisdom and good humour. She was drawn particularly to poets, had married the grandson of the poet Coventry Patmore, then lived with the imagist poet Richard Aldington. It was rumoured, she had an affair with another imagist poet, Hilda Doolittle, who became Aldington’s first wife. Brigit was a friend and confidante to many writers – Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence among them – and she explained what she found so attractive about them. This was also the source of her gift to the writer manqué in Angela: ‘People haunted by sounds or words – especially words – were irresistible to me, and I liked best to meet them at the beginning of their search, when frustration made them silent or a frenzy of hope made them voluble.’48

  Angela first met Brigit Patmore in William Nicholson’s magical studio. She had been a great beauty but hardship and sorrow had made their mark on her fine skin, and the bright magenta of her dyed hair accentuated her pallor. It was the garish hue of her hair that first attracted Angela to her side, ‘and then I realised she had eyes like zircons. She lay on a sofa and seemed to me one of the most romantic women I had met.’49 Marguerite Steen was a good friend to Brigit and pointed out that she was always described as a beauty long after her looks had fled. Her loveliness, however, was still to be found in the sweetness of her expression, and in her tranquillity and grace.

  Angela would be attracted to older women throughout her life. The motherly mentor figure remained most seductive to this woman who still felt she was a girl, longing for the kind of love and appreciation that would draw her from her sisters’ shadows, a girl with so much still to learn. If Tod and Ferdy had educated and encouraged Daphne, then Angela’s female friends too educated her taste in literature and spurred her on. Brigit introduced Angela to the poetry of Yeats, to a range of modern poetry, and poets, she had never read before. She encouraged her to write her own poetry, to read boldly and widely, and Angela was a keen pupil. She wrote a poem for Brigit after they had been to Ferryside and had visited one of the lovely lonely Cornish coves the family knew so well. In it she acknowledged the confidence and encouragement that Brigit’s generous spirit brought to hers:

  … A breeze sea-laden & salt bespewn

  Blew past our lips & bade depart

  the honeysuckle-scented air –

  Meditation held my soul

  And all I asked of Life – your hand in mine,

  And turning, found it there.

  From this point, Angela began to collect an anthology of her favourite poems, writing them out longhand in two manuscript books, and hoping that one day they might be published. They all had personal reasons for inclusion. There was a great deal of Whitman, Mary Newcomb’s favourite, many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Marda’s contribution to her education, and lots of Yeats and Coventry Patmore – and Richard Aldington, of course – the result of Angela’s love and admiration for Brigit.

  Neither Brigit nor Angela were strangers to the misery of the lovelorn and the anguish of frustrated desire. Brigit had endured it when the love of her life, Richard Aldington, left her for her daughter-in-law Netta Patmore, while Angela’s heart, until Marda, had been on a rollercoaster of impossible dreams. Even Marda was ultimately unsatisfactory as a lover because she always belonged with Gwen and could never be truly hers. With Brigit’s example, Angela hoped to live by one of the sonnets by Gerald Gould that she had carefully copied out in her collection of much-loved poems: ‘For God’s sake, if you sin, take pleasure in it/And do it for the pleasure.’

  So, encouraged by Brigit’s brave and vivid life, and with her hand in hers, Angela started a new novel, for the first time in almost a decade. As with everything she did, she needed great encouragement and, as with all her writing, the impulse was personal. ‘I wished to help a friend of mine,’ she explained as she set out to tell t
he story of a woman, labelled by some disapproving critics as a nymphomaniac, and her disappointed life, full of unwise sexual conquests, drug-taking, misunderstandings, criminality, snobbery, religion, homosexuality and death. Angela called it The Perplexed Heart, a phrase taken from one of Rupert Brooke’s poems. And she dedicated it to Brigit Patmore ‘with dear love’.

  8

  A Transfiguring Flame

  Chapter III. Married, and so to Manderley. The house, the rooms, determined to do well. Mrs Danvers, such opposition. ‘It is a little difficult, madam, for us. You see we were all very fond of Rebecca.’

  DAPHNE DU MAURIER, The Rebecca Notebook

  AT THE BEGINNING of 1937, Daphne returned from Egypt to England to give birth to her second child. The nostalgic longing of the exile for her country, for Cornwall, had been the predominant emotion while away, and now at last she was home. She spent an exhilarating couple of months at Ferryside. Even the imminent advent of her unplanned baby seemed a small price to pay for the cliffs and coves and green fields she had missed so long.

  On 1 April, Daphne and Angela moved into a flat in St Anne’s Mansions near St James’s Park to await the birth. The day after the move Angela decided to take Daphne out for a drive in her racy bright green two-seater. She would later blame herself for bringing on her sister’s labour, two weeks early. The car’s suspension left much to be desired, and the constant jolting seemed to start off labour. If Angela’s driving had anything to do with it, at least she had precipitated a much easier birth, for it was all over in a few hours. Daphne wrote to Tod, ‘the child literally whizzed out!’ It was another daughter, but Daphne continued cheerily, ‘Don’t really mind half so much this time about not having a boy. Third time lucky?!!’1 Somehow the disappointments in real life were much easier to bear when she had an exciting new idea for a novel. Already Daphne was mulling over her next book, ‘a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower … Psychological and rather macabre’, and it was thrilling to begin inhabiting her newly created world as she worked out the characters and plot.

  Tommy had really missed his wife and finally returned to England a month later to be reunited with his family and meet his new daughter. He had chosen Flavia as her name, inspired by the heroine of one of his favourite books, the impossibly romantic and swashbuckling The Prisoner of Zenda. She was a peaceful baby who grew into a very pretty toddler. ‘With eyes like periwinkles and corkscrew curls, and terribly, terribly feminine,’2 was Aunt Angela’s verdict, while her father’s first words on seeing his daughter were, ‘Hmm, she’s plain.’3 In a family where good looks were mandatory, this verdict would resonate through her life, despite her evident beauty.

  Daphne had been looking forward to Tommy’s leave but, as she confided to Tod, reality never lived up to the dream. The summer holidays at Ferryside also disappointed. She felt pulled in too many directions by the needs of husband and small children when all she wanted was the peace and intellectual space to pursue her new idea. Daphne’s compelling fictions were spun from her own observations and experiences. This time her jealousy of Tommy’s previous fiancée, the exotic and enigmatic Jan Ricardo, was the spur to the novel she would call Rebecca, after the mysterious and bewitching first wife who in death acquired unassailable psychic power. Daphne had found a bundle of Jan’s old love letters to Tommy and was haunted by the fact that her defection had left him bereft, and her place in his heart was preserved for ever by her suicide under the wheels of a train. Daphne identified with the unnamed second Mrs de Winter, tentative about her own womanliness and fearful that she was not successful enough as a wife, increasingly intimidated by the shadow of her predecessor. Rivals we can never meet grow in the imagination into something superhuman and invulnerable, and so it was with Jan Ricardo/Rebecca.

  Social demands and family responsibilities were anathema to Daphne when she was working, for she inhabited fully her own created worlds and could only release herself through writing; her fictional people and plots she created held far more interest and thrill for her than her relationships in the material world. Even when she became obsessed with people in the real world it was largely as inspiration for her work. They became the ‘pegs’ around which her fictions were constructed, sometimes causing her emotional confusion and stress and doing damage to the person who became the focus of her imaginary recreation. Daphne explained that only by transforming the obsession into fiction did she become free.

  Angela’s novel was spurred on by Brigit Patmore, who managed to encourage her to believe in herself as a writer and the resultant The Perplexed Heart owed a great deal to Brigit’s tumultuous life and personality. Women and love were once more Angela’s subject matter, but unlike her first novel, her main character – a ‘female Don Juan’ was the description from at least one disgruntled reviewer – struggled to make sense of heterosexual love while cutting a romantic swathe through a motley collection of unsuitable men: a leading socialist politico, London playboy, married Lothario, troubled clergyman, jailbird, and an extra few young men on the side.

  Angela began with good intentions, but as ever found life too distracting. Her great friend and ‘twin’, Angela Halliday, had stayed on in Majorca after she, Jeanne and Muriel had returned to England in May 1936. Now in the height of summer she was forced to evade the Spanish Civil War that had arrived bloodily on her doorstep. The Republicans had begun a daring bombing raid on Palma and Cabrera in an attempt to reclaim the island. Angela was on tenterhooks following the astounding news in the papers and waiting for any word from her friend. Eventually she received a letter saying that six people had died in Palma the previous day and all foreigners were being evacuated by a British battleship to Marseille. Shaw, like all the other evacuees, was completely penniless and had to rely on the British consul at Marseille to bail her out and pay her bills. She had not lost her sense of humour, however, for this six-foot-tall, mannish woman, who was not in the least interested romantically in men, added as her postscript: ‘Imagine me with two thousand sailors!!!’4

  Meanwhile, Angela du Maurier was meeting another courageous woman who did not fit the conventional feminine model, and was to become the most important love of her life. Every summer for the last six years she had travelled north to stay with her friend, the actress Faith Celli, at her house and garden, An Cala, on the west coast of Scotland. And every summer she had looked across to the island of Mull and longed to go there. She thought it ‘a tall dark far-distant Shangri-La’ that called to her highly romantic spirit. This time Faith greeted her with the magical words: ‘We’re going to Mull. I’m going to take you to Torosay, to meet Olive Guthrie.’5

  They caught the ferry from Oban, passing islands, rocky islets, distant mountains and the magnificent, forbidding bulk of Duart Castle, the Maclean clan’s thousand-year-old ancestral seat where their seaborne power was based. Then suddenly she glimpsed the Castle of Torosay sitting at the centre of its tree-fringed bay. Built in the mid-nineteenth century in grand Scottish baronial style, it was a large, turreted country house with twelve acres of formal gardens extending to the shoreline of Duart Bay, where dolphins and otters could be glimpsed at play. Olive welcomed them to her magical castle with coffee, ‘wearing a very old tweed coat, an equally old (man’s) tweed hat (from which poked honey-coloured curls), her cigarette (which she was never without) in a holder, and she spoke in a voice that fascinated me from that first moment of meeting’.6

  Angela and Faith only stayed for three days but they were days extended by so much talk, walks with breathtaking views (the best being from the estate’s dogs’ graveyard), the fascination of the castle with its wonderful pictures, Fabergé treasures, and Olive’s Pekinese Impy, and a parrot. The parrot had started off below stairs with the faithful old butler; when it graduated to living upstairs, every time it heard a bell ring for the servants it muttered in the butler’s broad Scottish brogue, ‘Let the old bitch wait!’ which did not seem to disconcert Olive at all, and caused her family and guests much
mirth.

  Olive Guthrie was thirty-two years older than Angela, older even than Angela’s mother, but hardly a motherly presence and certainly the complete opposite of Muriel. She was the proudly Irish daughter of the pre-Raphaelite painter Sir John Leslie and aunt to the flamboyant diplomat and writer Sir Shane Leslie. Sister-in-law too to one of the glamorous American Jerome sisters, Olive was thereby an aunt to Winston Churchill, who visited her at Torosay. She was widowed young and had to gather her considerable forces of energy and character to take on the management for a while of her husband’s merchant bank, Chalmers, Guthrie & Co, with offices in Dundee and the City of London. She was involved in politics and the arts and was a director of the Chelsea Book Club, the first bookshop to stock Joyce’s Ulysses, but a club also that provided lectures and exhibitions in its premises at 65 Cheyne Walk. Olive was just as at home with the sporting pursuits of a great Scottish estate and was a superb shot, better than most men. Cosmopolitan, well-connected, politically savvy, she had a wonderful capacity for storytelling and anecdote (she recalled playing on the floor with Angela’s father when they were children – George du Maurier and Sir John Leslie being fellow artists and friends). This fascinating woman of the world would provide the next stage in Angela’s education in politics, literature and love.

  Angela returned south at the end of summer, bowled over by Olive’s personality and charm and the glamour of Torosay. The three days spent on Mull were a dreamlike interlude that she thought was unlikely to come again. London held its attractions too. Angela Halliday was back from her brush with a brutish civil war in Majorca and Angela’s own new friendships with Marguerite Steen and William Nicholson, Marda and Gwen picked up again now that the holidays were over. Angela also felt excitement at the feast of concerts that awaited her that autumn. She loved Sir Thomas Beecham and his series of Sunday concerts at Covent Garden, and was there when the immaculate Malcolm Sargent conducted one of his first performances after recovering from a near-fatal attack of tuberculosis. She saw Richard Strauss conduct the Dresden State Opera and Rachmaninoff play the piano. All her life, Angela would remember Barbirolli conducting the maestro Horowitz playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, a piece of emotional bravura entirely to her taste, and was lucky enough to hear Myra Hess’s celebrated interpretation of Brahms’s second piano concerto. In these highly charged performances, Angela never forgot her first love had been music and her first longing had been to be an opera singer.