Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  Neither sister was a great stylist but both responded deeply to the spirit of place, and it was Daphne’s sharp eye for disturbing or illuminating detail that made her evocation so atmospheric and compelling. Most tellingly, Angela lacked her sister’s macabre imagination and ability to inhabit her misanthropic worlds, in which complex plots unfolded with a ruthless psychological logic that kept the reader enthralled. Perhaps Angela’s most successful novel was her fourth, Treveryan, a melodramatic gothic tale that was appreciated as an overwrought pastiche of her sister’s Rebecca, and other Cornish novels.

  Weep No More proved to be one of Angela’s least convincing novels. The story was deeply personal and the heroine embodied both women’s qualities: Olive’s nobility, valiant spirit and once flaming red hair; Angela’s loyalty and girlish sentiment. Olive’s first marriage to Murray Guthrie had been a very happy one, cut short by her husband’s premature death. He was buried at Torosay at the spot where he used to look out on one of the most breathtaking views on his estate. Touched by Olive’s experiences of loss, Angela attempted in this novel to restore to her heroine the long-absent love, in the person of a young artist friend of her heroine’s son who shared his bizarre first name, Sirion. In America, an influential reviewer found it all too much to bear:

  100% romanticists might be tricked into enjoying this lush novel of reincarnation, ineptly set in Europe of the World War, the Austrian Anschluss and the submarine warfare of the present crisis. But to the hard-headed average reader, the story is unreal, – sublime, perhaps for the heroine, but ridiculous for the audience.3

  As a girl, Angela had wilted under lack of appreciation and given up her singing and acting careers at the first hurdles. Now in the warm acceptance she found at Torosay, with encouragement and time to work, she cast off the poor reviews and continued to write, even beyond the three novels she had initially promised Michael Joseph. In his treatment of Angela, in the teeth of unenthusiastic reviews and indifferent sales, Michael Joseph was the exemplary supportive publisher. She was lucky he was, as there was no doubt that she did not want to return to her life as an unmarried and dutiful daughter, based largely now in Cornwall. She was happy enough to leave Jeanne shouldering everything while she continued her much more congenial work, writing and gardening, under Olive’s accommodating wing.

  From childhood, Angela may have felt disadvantaged in looks and love compared with her sisters, but throughout her life she always insisted on her particular rights as the eldest – ‘Esau-ing’ as Daphne called it. In likening her sister to Isaac’s elder son, did Daphne realise that Esau lost his birthright as the first-born to the trickery of his younger twin? If Angela’s birthright as heir to du Maurier celebrity was lost to her, it was more due to the fickleness of fate and her early defeatism than any conscious plan on Daphne’s part.

  An example of Esau-ing occurred while Angela was at Torosay. Jeanne was struggling, not only with the market garden but also their mother’s poor health. Muriel had had some teeth removed, was poleaxed by flu, had suffered a bad fall and was diagnosed with arthritis all in a short space of time. She was feeling very sorry for herself and her doctor suggested that the isolation of Ferryside might be contributing to her depressed malaise and it might be better to move across the water into a cottage in more-lively Fowey. Angela on her distant isle had not liked this idea at all, as it involved her leaving Ferryside too, and mentioned that she thought the decision Jeanne had made, to take a modest house on the Esplanade in Fowey, ‘curious’. This provoked an exasperated letter from her long-suffering sister:

  I’m trying to be unbiased, but your letter rather gave the impression of what you wanted to do … Life is curious these days – it is curious that Mummie who once cared so much about changing for dinner doesn’t any longer, that she carves only for herself and doesn’t mind my hacking the joint under her eyes, curious that I am concerned more for it to rain for my Cabbage Plants than to fill the Tanks for Baths, that I have to peruse prices and lists of seeds in lieu of Tubes of paint, that one doesn’t get shoes cleaned unless done by oneself …4

  While Angela was busy writing, sustained by love and Olive’s faithful staff in a Scottish baronial castle, and Jeanne was toiling in Cornish mud, Daphne, usually so concentrated on her writing and prolific in her output, was finding her ‘Muse’ had temporarily fled. ‘I don’t feel like “musing” myself. I don’t think I could lose myself in a fictitious story whilst living in such uncertainty. I fluctuate between insanely deciding to join the WAAF (!) if Tommy goes abroad, or trekking for a Pacific Island and never mentioning war,’5 she told Angela. What Daphne did not admit to her family until later was that she was pregnant with her third child – and pregnancy always made her dreamy and less ambitious.

  By July 1940, Tommy was stationed in Hertfordshire and Daphne moved as a paying guest into a beautiful Lutyens house, Langley End near Hitchen, owned by Christopher and Paddy Puxley. The Puxleys were a charming couple in their early forties who extended their unstinting hospitality to Daphne – and Tommy on his infrequent leaves – and then to their children who joined the household later. They were childless and Paddy had thrown herself into voluntary work with the Red Cross and Women’s Voluntary Service, and ran the house immaculately. When the Browning girls finally arrived there was an instant rapport. Paddy treated them as if they were special and interesting and Flavia particularly was thrilled to have so much motherly attention and affection directed her way. But Paddy Puxley’s generous impulse towards this glamorous family was to have tragic consequences for her marriage, to which Daphne was oblivious at the time. Many years later, however, she did suffer a pang of remorse at how shabbily she had repaid Paddy’s kindness and trust, but by then it was too late to repair.

  Tommy was away a great deal trying to deal with the increasingly grim progress of the war and his country under continual threat of invasion. When Daphne did see him he was exhausted or fraught with the nervous strain of it all, magnified by the intransigence, as he saw it, of many senior military commanders and civilian counterparts in power. The handsome windswept sailor who had seemed, when she had first met him at Fowey, to have not a care in the world, was now short-tempered and weighed down with responsibility, with little time or energy for his wife.

  Christopher Puxley, on the other hand, was charmed by his beautiful houseguest. Unlike Tommy, with the world’s very real cares on his shoulders, he had been excused active service and had little to do all day but waft around his exquisite house and garden and tinkle on the grand piano in the flower-filled drawing room. Daphne too had nothing much to do. As a paying guest, she was freed from any responsibility for meals, servants, the domestic organisation that kept a large house running seamlessly, and freed too by Nanny from the daily concern of her children. ‘I breakfast in bed and wander in the garden, and go for walks to my heart’s content,’ she wrote to Tod. She also lay languidly on a sofa in the sunlit drawing room while Christopher, looking like a young Compton Mackenzie she thought, ran his fingers thrillingly over the keys, entertaining her with Chopin’s difficult Preludes.

  The love affair that ensued was hardly a fully consummated sexual affair, for Daphne did not care for that and Puxley was rather lacking in vigour. It was more a romantic obsession, spiced up with some sexual foreplay, between a weak and unhappy man who lacked purpose and a powerful and beautiful woman who needed some diversion, and a spur to her imagination. She wondered if perhaps ‘falling in love’ was merely ‘a fabricated compensation for lack of inner stability’,6 and for a while considered him a kind of soul mate who made her feel less solitary.

  For Daphne, having a lover obsessed with her was a familiar and comforting condition to be in. From earliest childhood, she had known her father adored her above all others; then against some competition she won Ferdy’s love and kept it for the rest of the Frenchwoman’s life. She had practised her power to attract on Cousin Geoffrey, the actress Molly Kerr, tyro film director Carol Reed and magnate Otto Kahn.
Then she captured the heart of a real hero in Tommy. His distance from her, now he was engrossed in matters of life and death and the very future of his country, made her feel she had lost her precious power, and with it a central part of her identity. Years later she was amused by the thought that women could be divided into three kinds:

  the ruling type, the ministering type, and the prostitute … I realise I started out in married life by trying to be the ministering type, and succeeded but at great mental disturbance to myself, and a squishing of the ruling type, who simmered. Came the war, and the ministering type began to fade, and the ruling type emerged, bringing a feeling of mental power to myself (and, I suspect, a feeling of squished humility to [Tommy]).7

  Daphne often pointed out that she was the daughter of an actor and had herself been an actress all her life: this fugitive sense of self only gained substance in her imagination, and in the reflection of that recreated self in the reactions of others. Christopher Puxley reflected back at her a conquering and seductive spirit with the power to change lives. His life, diminished through alcoholism, was affected by her for the remainder of his days. He eventually died wishing to see only her, something in the end Daphne could not face.

  What she did face in a confessional letter to a friend was the painful recognition, seven years after she first met the Puxleys, that she had played a significant part in the destruction of their marriage and in Christopher’s further decline into alcoholism and ill-health. Daphne had insisted in previous letters that, as there were no children involved, she had little conscience over it all, but then suddenly burst out with, ‘all D. du M. achieved in the great war was to keep her own home intact, but to break up somebody else’s more successfully than an atom bomb could do’.8

  Being pregnant, spending the summer lazing in a beautiful garden, flirting with her host while being educated in the beauty of Chopin’s piano music, insulated Daphne somewhat from the realities of war. Tommy was back so infrequently now, and she rather dreaded his visits because of the grim news he brought and the shortness of his temper through sheer exhaustion and frustration with the bureaucracy of war. He had told her that he thought the British Army came nowhere near the professionalism of the German military machine and likened it to ‘putting up an indifferent clubside to tackle Internationals at Twickenham’.9 But protected by the champagne and roses of life at Langley End, Daphne could still watch a formation of twenty German bombers on their way to bomb Luton, only eight miles away, and see the beauty of them rather than the deadly menace they embodied. To Angela in Torosay, she wrote dreamily: ‘It really was rather an exquisite sight, so remote and unreal, those silvery creatures like humming birds above us at about twenty thousand feet, whilst above them circled their own protective fighters.’10

  But then she also was capable of patriotic outrage, noble lack of self-interest and some exasperation at America’s continued disengagement from the war. Someone in the Doubleday rights department in New York wrote ‘a silly letter’ suggesting they could get her a great deal of money for serialising her next novel, if she would only let them know something of the plot. ‘So I wrote a rather thick letter back, saying as the New York office was many thousands of miles away they perhaps did not realise that this country was faced with the biggest crisis in history and almost certain invasion … and that “vast sums for the next novel” seemed a little beside the point –!’11

  Daphne’s lazy summer was rewarded in November by a quick labour and the miracle of a longed-for son. After three tries she had her Christian at last (she told Angela that if the baby had been another girl she would have called her Gloria). She reported to Tod in triumph: ‘Well, I’ve done it at last! For seven years I’ve waited to see “Mrs Browning – a son” in the Times!’12 She had trumped her mother and wished her father had been alive to see his favourite daughter produce the son he had always wanted. In Gerald’s absence, Daphne set out to turn her precious boy into a little Gerald, commenting how like his grandfather he was and setting out to spoil him as thoroughly as Gerald’s mother had spoiled her youngest child, her ‘ewe lamb’.

  Realising that she may have been taking too great an advantage of Paddy Puxley’s generosity, Daphne had moved to another house nearby called Cloud’s Hill for her confinement. It was here that she gave birth, and astounded her family by the transformation in her maternal feelings. Tessa was seven and Flavia three and a half when their brother was born. Both were very aware that their much-loved but remote mother was suddenly behaving in a strange manner: ‘She adored Christian Frederick du Maurier Browning from the moment she clapped eyes on him,’ Flavia recalled, ‘hugging and kissing him in a way which made Tessa and I stare in astonishment, for we had never received such treatment. We would watch him lying gurgling in her arms, her face buried in his tiny neck, and we would slip from the room, uncomfortable, knowing we were not wanted there.’13

  Remarkably, Tessa and Flavia did not resent this newcomer, but came to be as enchanted with his sunny nature and funny little ways. It helped that their mother’s love for her son did not alter her unwillingness to give up her routine of breakfast on her own in her room and uninterrupted writing time, regardless of what staff illness, child neglect and domestic chaos was raging outside her door.

  By the beginning of 1941, the family had accepted the Puxleys’ hospitality once more but now had to share their elegant house with a number of refugees taken in by their hostess. Daphne had begun Frenchman’s Creek and told Tod it would be a ‘Romance with a big R, to help you forget the war!’14 She was fired up by her infatuation with Christopher Puxley and, freed from domestic duties, wrote it quickly, despite both her daughters succumbing to a severe attack of measles, and Nanny collapsing once more with nervous exhaustion. ‘So great was my Gondal-Peg [imaginative recreation] urge towards the man,’ she explained years later to a friend, ‘that Frenchman’s Creek absolutely tore along.’15 Within six months, the book was finished and dedicated to the Puxleys. By early September she had advance copies and sent one to Tod, before heading off at last to Ferryside with Tommy for a week’s precious leave.

  Nothing Daphne wrote could really be called Romance with a capital R, if by romance one means inhabiting a fundamentally just and benign world in which the heroine gets her man, and love in the end prevails. Daphne provided all the props of romance, powerful and poetic evocations of landscape and place, adventurous or compelling situations, psychological suspense, but her heroes and heroines were unsympathetic and loveless. Her women were only admirable if they were women who should have been men, but even they in the end were thwarted in their lives or ended up murdered. Her men were just as unsatisfactory, either weak and ineffectual or brutish and bullying. But the dark and menacing relationship between the sexes she returned to time and again was fascinating and distinctively hers. Frenchman’s Creek was the novel Daphne was least proud of, a swashbuckling adventure that moved between the high seas and a Cornish ancestral estate. She used her fabrication of Christopher Puxley’s character as the cultured pirate, a heroic figure who almost managed to seduce the aristocratic heroine away from her husband and duty to her family. Years later, however, she admitted that ‘anything less like the Frenchman, really, than that poor man, there couldn’t be, but I Gondalled [imagined] him into it, and saw him that way!’16

  But Puxley had for a while embodied that compelling psychological manifestation of a soul mate, a reflection of herself that made her feel less insubstantial and alone:

  she was filled with a great triumph and a sudden ecstasy … she had known then that this thing was to happen, that nothing could prevent it; she was part of his body and part of his mind, they belonged to each other, both wanderers, both fugitives, cast in the same mould.17

  This recognition opened her aristocratic heroine up to a kind of ecstatic love she had never before experienced and, although her reckless adventure with her Frenchman did not last, she returned to a new reality changed by the experience. The story was also powered
descriptively by Daphne’s lifelong love for the mysterious beauty of Cornwall and the untamable Cornish sea. Her knowledge and fascination with birds, something she and her sisters all inherited from their bird-watching father, also added colour, for in this novel she had more than ninety references to birds, including fifteen different species.

  Daphne had tossed into Victor Gollancz’s lap another highly marketable novel, and film rights were soon sold. The critics hailed it as an excellent piece of escapist storytelling, and her growing public read it avidly as a welcome relief from the hardships and horrors of war. She was amused by two schoolmistresses who had written to her to say how the book had shocked them to the core because, ‘you made immorality attractive’.18 The film rights alone were so lucrative that Daphne, for a moment, thought her fortune made, but tax was swingeing at the time and she told Tod she was left with only £2,500 of the original £25,000. She was astounded to realise that her book’s film rights, have ‘given the Govt enough to build a Lancaster Bomber!’19

  The idyll at Langley End of flirting, writing and listening to music, however, came to an abrupt end. Although the relationship between Daphne and her host had become embarrassingly evident to the nanny, Margaret, Paddy Puxley had not suspected a thing, until she unexpectedly came upon her husband with their houseguest in his arms. Appalled, yet civil to the end, all she said to Daphne was that she had thought she was her friend. In fact the betrayal went very deep indeed, for to a woman who had longed for and failed to have children, whose bloom was gone, Daphne represented beauty, youth, and most cruelly, fertility, careless of the gifts of her lovely daughters and triumphant at producing her son.