by Jane Dunn
They decided to meet again in February when Angela would once again go to Torosay. This time the lovely landscape of Mull was shrouded in snow and the sunny days were crystal bright, the air astringently cold. The castle was freezing and Olive and Angela spent the days together in the library trying to keep warm by a great fire, enjoying their meals there, playing bezique and reading. It was perhaps at this time that Olive invited Angela to share her bed, a routine that happened on each subsequent visit, even when other visitors were there. When Olive’s daughters remonstrated Olive, unperturbed, pointed out that the castle was so cold and damp it made sense to sleep together. This was undoubtedly true, but Olive did not offer to sleep with her other visitors who were left to shiver in their beds alone. It was accepted in the family, but not approved of at the time, that Olive and Angela’s relationship was ‘physically intimate’.16
The honesty and frankness of these two women about their unorthodox relationship showed a courage and freedom from the judgemental social mores of the times. It was certainly easier for Olive to live as she pleased; she was much older and more worldly than Angela. Having been happily married, had children and been widowed, she was allowed greater sexual freedoms than those extended to an unmarried young woman. Most telling, however, was the fact that Olive was a woman of high social status, chatelaine of Torosay Castle and its estates, with a backbone already stiffened by being born to the proudly independent-minded Irish Leslies. Angela had none of these advantages. She was brought up to mind very much what others thought of her by a conventional mother and an overbearing and influential father. She was also vulnerable as a single woman without an independent career, and so reliant on her family’s allowance to live. Her refusal to hide her feelings for Olive, or to prevaricate in the face of Guthrie family disapproval, said a great deal for how much her association with her open-minded and welcoming London friends had helped her overcome her shame and live more openly as she pleased.
Angela’s first poem to Olive Guthrie was shy and rather clumsily expressive of her gratitude for the love of a remarkable woman who suddenly was of great importance in her life:
…
And all I ask is this
your daily kiss.
To hear you call me friend
would be the end
Of troubles great & small.
For you are all
That’s beautiful & fair,
A being rare
That fills my heart with love … Some benediction new
Is born through you.
It was the beginning of 1938 and the mood in Europe was ominous, though at home things seemed less grim. Daphne’s husband Tommy, along with many of the military men and politicians in the know, was full of foreboding of what he considered an inevitable war. But the country at large, with its island mentality, appeared more sanguine and hopeful. After all, it had survived the crisis of the abdication of Edward VIII and, with the coronation of George VI the previous summer, had welcomed a new royal family with two young daughters full of youth and promise. Not even a generation had passed since the end of the last war and for men like Tommy, young enough to fight in both world wars, the prospect of another global conflict was daunting.
As war loomed closer, Angela embarked on what she considered to be the great love affair of her life. She tried to capture something of Olive’s unique attraction, already in her sixties when Angela fell in love with her:
She was the most remarkable woman I ever knew … She had the ability and integrity of a man, the fascination of a woman, the enthusiasm of a child and the imagination of a fairy … she had led the most surprising and wonderful life, had known people in every walk of life – kings, statesmen, poets, bandits, singers, writers – had travelled the globe from one end to the other in strange and unconventional ways, had herself worked in the City doing a man’s job as Chairman of a great bank … she had a fund of stories and anecdotes unparalleled, which only an Irishwoman such as she was could have told with just the right amount of wit, or pathos, or credulity.17
Angela considered that Olive’s life had been so varied and rich it needed a whole book to do it justice; instead she used it as the inspiration for her third novel. In 1938 she was to spend more than four months in Olive’s company and every year until 1941 spent anything between three and nine months of the year at Torosay.
Angela and Olive left the island of Mull on 3 March and parted at Dover, Angela bound for a hospital in Germany, recommended to her by a friend as the best place to go to have her periodic abdominal pains diagnosed and treated. Olive was heading for Athens and due to meet Angela a month later, after she had spent some weeks with her mother and Jeanne, holidaying in Italy. With Angela pursuing love in London and the Isle of Mull, and Daphne in Hampshire with her family, Jeanne had become their mother’s main companion. Widowed mothers expected to be looked after by their unmarried daughters and, apart from Jeanne being her youngest and favourite, it seemed natural to lean on her. Jeanne, however, still managed to conduct her own painting life and friendships independent of Muriel, and to break away from her allotted duties, to the irritation at times of her older sisters.
At their parting, Angela wrote a poem for Olive that she copied into a specially commissioned leather-bound book, their two sets of initials embossed in gold at either corner of the front cover. Entitled ‘DOVER March 1938’ it read:
How can I brave the long forsaken hours
That beckon me with weary leaden hands
Jeering with ghoulish joy that other lands
Have taken to their midst my well-belov’d …
How may I count the days that one by one
Appear unsmiling, greeting me at dawn
With laggard footsteps, pitiless forlorn
Sunless with your absence & my tears …
How shall I bear the loneliness of sleep
When nightly by my side your body lay
Slaked with my love yet bidding me to stay
To crown you with the passion of my heart …
Your little whispered words … your woman’s smile
The mistress in you, – & eternal child,
Which has so utterly & well beguiled
Your lover’s heart for ever & a day!
Cannot a ghost or shadow – you return
To lay a head upon my outstretched arm
And comfort me & tell me that no harm?
Can come upon you while we are apart?
Angela and Olive were to meet up again in May and spend the month travelling to some of Europe’s most romantic places, Venice, Lake Garda and eventually Paris, in what would become a kind of honeymoon tour. But first Angela had to endure the efficient but, she felt, unkind treatment of the medical staff in a German clinic as they passed tubes into her stomach, gave her every kind of internal and invasive examination (‘revolting treatment they forced on me’) and x-rayed her from all angles, but still did not ascertain the source of her pain. While she was there the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria, occurred and the horror of her experience at the hands of the medical staff felt amplified by the Führer’s harsh rhetoric, crackling from every hospital radio. She escaped ‘Hitler’s minions’ without any kind of diagnosis and met up with Mary Fox, one of the theatrical Fox family and a great friend of Jeanne’s. They travelled together to join Jeanne and Muriel at Portofino, a beautiful and then still unspoiled fishing village on the Italian Riviera.
Mary Fox and her family grew closer to the du Mauriers during the war when they lived nearby. Her mother was the actress Hilda Hanbury and her brother became the famous theatrical agent Robin Fox, whose children, actors Edward, James and Robert Fox and grandchildren Emilia and Laurence, continued the tradition. Mary was a ‘twin’ with Daphne, sharing her birthday, just as Shaw shared Angela’s, and was to be an important friend to the du Maurier sisters, but particularly to Jeanne with whom she shared for a while a market garden during the coming war. The four women lived in a villa near Portofino�
�s Castello Brown, made famous by Elizabeth von Arnim, who wrote her bestseller, The Enchanted April, while staying within its romantic walls.
Restored to health, Angela left Portofino and set off for Venice where she met up with Olive on her return journey from Athens. The first time Angela had seen Venice was after Gerald’s death, when Micky Jacob had sent her off with a couple of her gay friends. Angela then was lonely and bereft. This time she had been through a sea change: she was meeting the woman she loved. Arriving late at night, she was met by Olive in a gondola, ‘and quietly, in the light of a full moon, we slowly drifted down the side canals to the hotel’.18 They ate in different hotels or cafés every day, had drinks at Florian’s, the famous mirrored bar on the Piazza San Marco, and dinners at Fenice, the exquisitely embellished opera house. Olive and Angela travelled always by gondola, silent through dark and mysterious canals, a thrilling backdrop to their romance. Remembering this time in Venice, Angela wrote discreetly: ‘What a week we had.’19
San Vigilio on Lake Garda followed and then Paris in May, with the chestnut trees and lilac flowering in the streets, scenting the air. There was the added luxury of an embassy car put at Olive’s disposal and the women purred from delicious meals to exquisite shops and then off to the theatre. Little did they know what horrors and indignities were about to befall France and Paris, its precious jewelled heart. They were enjoying the glories of Europe before it re-entered the dark ages, and they rounded off the experience with a few days in London. She and Olive spent one of the best evenings Angela could ever remember at Covent Garden where Richard Strauss’s savage opera Electra held her spellbound, as Sir Thomas Beecham once again lorded over the orchestra pit.
For the next three and a half years Angela could hardly bear to be away from Olive Guthrie and Torosay. Shortly after returning with her to England, she once more headed back to Mull, and signed herself in to the visitors’ book on 11 June as ‘Tommy’.
This adoption of a masculine nickname was obviously very significant but it was difficult to know for certain what exactly she meant by it. It was quite common at the time for lesbian women to adopt male soubriquets. When Angela was a young woman and had first met Naomi Jacob, everyone accepted that Naomi preferred to be known as Micky. Radclyffe Hall was an androgynous response to her overtly feminine given name, Marguerite; and Valentine Ackland had chosen her similarly androgynous first name when she left ‘Molly’ behind, along with her abandoned petticoats. Marda and Bo, Angela’s previous inamoratas, were also adaptations of more obviously feminine first names. Perhaps the fact that Angela adopted this masculine nickname when she was staying at Torosay marked her public acknowledgement of her love for Olive, for every visitor and member of Olive’s family was free to see it clearly written there.
More surprising was the actual name that Angela had chosen for herself. Tommy was Daphne’s husband’s name, one by which he was universally known in private. Why choose this rather than Freddy, or Billy or Will? Given she was a du Maurier, could it have been a joke? But if so, it would have been a joke only she and possibly Daphne would have appreciated. Was she so identified with Daphne that she desired to be part of her intimate life by sharing a name with her husband? Was it a subliminal way of getting closer to the sister who already outshone her in most things? Of course, Angela had seen ‘Tommy’ Browning first as he motored his boat in the harbour at Fowey, and, although she had found him interesting, once again it was her little sister who had won the prize of his attention, love and eventual hand in marriage. Was calling herself Tommy somehow a way of imagining what might have been if Daphne had not been on the scene? Angela would certainly have felt that, had she married, she would have been a more committed and supportive wife and mother than her sister could ever be.
Angela spent most of the summer at Torosay working on her novel. Brigit Patmore had provided the spark and Olive now nurtured the creative flame with love, admiration and care, amid the extraordinary beauty of the gardens and landscape that surrounded the castle. Finally, with her completed manuscript in her suitcase, Angela returned to London. There she spent many hours at the home of Michael Joseph, who had now started his own publishing house and, after a full day’s work at the office, gave up his evenings to help his young protégée by closely editing her book. ‘I owe much of its success to him and his brutal blue pencilling,’ Angela recalled, paying tribute to his dedication: ‘together we took line by line, scratching this, deleting that, until I was so despondent and miserable that I asked him why he bothered to publish the damn thing at all. He said he believed I would one day write a good book …’20
Angela dedicated The Perplexed Heart to Brigit, for it was she whose encouragement and colourful life had inspired her to begin again in her quest to become a recognised author. Published as her first book in February 1939, she inevitably attracted attention because of her name, but the timing could not have been more unhelpful. Daphne’s phenomenal success with Rebecca, burst upon the world just the previous year, was still very much in everyone’s mind. It was already public knowledge that Alfred Hitchcock would be filming it and titillating debate ensued as to which actor would play Maxim de Winter and who, of a range of Hollywood beauties, would win the battle to portray his wife.
Angela’s rather leaden offering, with an unsympathetic heroine driven by her passions to no great effect, meant any comparisons between the two du Maurier sisters could only be to her detriment. This was already a well-established pattern in their lives and by now Angela expected it. She was indignant at the idea, mooted by friends, that she should write under a nom de plume. ‘Why should I? I am proud of being a du Maurier, and having never parted with my name for love of a man I am not likely to let it go for a possible success story.’21
The best review in England was perhaps the effusive offering of Philip Page, drama critic of the Daily Mail, who declared theatrically, ‘the du Maurier family gives us another brilliant writer’, and suggested the book ‘was illuminated by something very near genius’. In America, where reviewers were less sycophantic, Angela was published by Daphne’s publisher Doubleday, and again this intensified the cruel comparisons. Virginia Kirkus had started an influential magazine that specialised in advance reviews of most of the trade books published in the United States, taken notice of by the whole literary world, the libraries, booksellers and film agents. The verdict on The Perplexed Heart was frank and damning: ‘second rate, and if Angela du Maurier was not the sister of Daphne, the book would not get to first base’.22 The Saturday Review gave Angela’s book more space, but the ghost of her sister’s Rebecca haunted all the reviewers’ minds and this one reached a similarly downbeat verdict:
If Rebecca herself, and an adoring cousin, had alternated in telling Rebecca’s story, it might have read like this first novel of Daphne du Maurier’s elder sister. But … Verona herself is not enough of a person to make her life worth writing. If Miss du Maurier had been able to analyse her thoughts and emotions more deeply, Verona might have stood for the restlessness of the modern woman and the strange paths along which it sometimes leads her …23
Angela had realised early in life that her surname was a double-edged sword. It brought notice and opportunities where otherwise there may have been only struggle and obscurity. Although she would nearly always be unfavourably compared with her younger sister, for an extrovert and born performer like herself, some attention, even adverse, would always be better than being ignored. Her name also brought old friends of her father’s willing to trumpet the glories of his offspring. Dennis Wheatley tootled, ‘I say, without hesitation, that its publication will establish Miss du Maurier as an important novelist immediately … the book [is] so outstanding … Angela du Maurier is a consummate artist …’24 Despite radically divided opinions on The Perplexed Heart, publication brought her name to an international public and she was excited by being noticed at last for something she had done, rather than merely her relationship to a more famous du Maurier, ‘for suddenly I was
in the news … and let’s face it – enjoying the fact’.25
Angela had returned again to Olive and Torosay in the autumn of 1938, travelling up on the train in the company for the first time of her Pekinese Wendy. Her mother and Jeanne were due for two weeks in October, their first and only visit, while Angela herself would stay on until the middle of November. Her heart was light, she was heading north to her beloved’s castle on a magical island, she had finished her novel at last, and, it seemed, Neville Chamberlain had triumphed in Munich and brought home ‘peace for our time’. Despite the catastrophe that followed and his subsequent vilification, Angela remained a champion of Chamberlain’s all her life. One of his daughters told her some years later that on that fateful trip to Munich, the Prime Minister had packed a copy of Rebecca in his luggage, to take his mind off the momentous business he had to conduct. All her life Angela would be known for her loyalty to people and ideas.
1939 was marked by her with a hectic round of socialising. In February, Angela was taken by Olive for a month’s visit to Castle Leslie at Glaslough in County Monahan in Ireland, the Leslie family’s stately and rather forbidding Victorian pile. Here dinners, balls, and shooting parties, where Olive showed off her prowess with shotgun and rifle, rotated with card and musical evenings and visits to the other grand houses of the neighbourhood. The hospitality of the Leslies, and the Irish generally, was legendary. Olive had promised to take Angela to visit Yeats, but that was the one treat denied her for the great man of Irish letters had died just a couple of weeks before.