One autumn evening I found a window unclasped in the ugly north wing at the back. It must have been intuition that made me bring my torch with me that day. I threw open the creaking window and climbed in. Dust. Dust everywhere. The silence of death. I flashed my torch on to the cobwebbed walls and walked the house. At last. I had imagined it so often. Here were the rooms, leading from one to another, that I had pictured only from outside. Here was the staircase, and the faded crimson wall. There the long drawing room, with its shiny chintz sofas and chairs, and here the dining room, a forgotten corkscrew still lying on the sideboard.
Suddenly the shadows became too many for me, and I turned and went back the way I had come. Softly I closed the window behind me. And as I did so, from a broken pane on the floor above my head came a great white owl, who flapped his way into the woods and vanished…
Some shred of convention still clinging to my nature turned me to respectability. I would not woo my love in secret. I wrote to the owner of the house and asked his permission to walk about his grounds. The request was granted. Now I could tread upon the lawns with a slip of paper in my pocket to show my good intentions, and no longer crawl belly to the ground like a slinking thief.
Little by little, too, I gleaned snatches of family history. There was the lady in blue who looked, so it was said, from a side window, yet few had seen her face. There was the cavalier found beneath the buttress wall more than a hundred years ago. There were the sixteenth-century builders, merchants and traders; there were the Stuart royalists, who suffered for their king; the Tory landowners with their white wigs and their brood of children; the Victorian garden lovers with their rare plants and their shrubs.
I saw them all, in my mind’s eye, down to the present owner, who could not love his home; and when I thought of him it was not of an elderly man, a respectable justice of the peace, but of a small boy orphaned at two years old, coming for his holidays in an Eton collar and tight black suit, watching his old grandfather with nervous, doubtful eyes. The house of secrets. The house of stories.
The war came, and my husband and I were now at Hythe in Kent, and many miles from Cornwall. I remember a letter coming from my sister.
‘By the way, there is to be a sale at Menabilly. Everything to be sold up, and the house just left to fall to bits. Do you want anything?’
Did I want anything? I wanted her, my house. I wanted every stick of furniture, from the Jacobean oak to the Victorian bamboo. But what was the use? The war had come. There was no future for man, woman or child. And anyway, Menabilly was entailed. The house itself could not be sold. No, she was just a dream, and would die, as dreams die always.
In ’43 changes of plans sent me back to Cornwall, with my three children. I had not visited Menabilly since the war began. No bombs had come her way, yet she looked like a blitzed building. The shutters were not shuttered now. The panes were broken. She had been left to die.
It was easy to climb through the front windows. The house was stripped and bare. Dirty paper on the floor. Great fungus growths from the ceiling. Moisture everywhere, death and decay. I could scarcely see the soul of her for the despair. The mould was in her bones.
Odd, yet fearful, what a few years of total neglect can do to a house, as to a man, a woman… Have you seen a man who has once been handsome and strong go unshaven and unkempt? Have you seen a woman lovely in her youth raddled beneath the eyes, her hair tousled and grey?
Sadder than either, more bitter and more poignant, is a lonely house.
I returned to my furnished cottage, in angry obstinate mood. Something was dying, without hope of being saved. And I would not stand it. Yet there was nothing I could do. Nothing? There was one faint, ridiculous chance in a million… I telephoned my lawyer and asked him to write to the owner of Menabilly and ask him to let the house to me for a term of years. ‘He won’t consent for a moment,’ I said. ‘It’s just a shot at random.’
But the shot went home… A week later my lawyer came to see me.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I believe you will be able to rent Menabilly. But you must treat it as a whim, you know. The place is in a fearful state. I doubt if you could do more than camp out there occasionally.’
I stared at him in amazement. ‘You mean—he would consent?’ I said.
‘Why, yes, I gather so,’ answered my lawyer.
Then it began. Not the Battle of Britain, not the attack upon the soft underbelly of Europe that my husband was helping to conduct from Africa, but my own private war to live in Menabilly by the time winter came again…
‘You’re mad… you’re crazy… you can’t do it… there’s no lighting… there’s no water… there’s no heating… you’ll get no servants… it’s impossible!’
I stood in the dining room, surrounded by a little team of experts. There was the architect, the builder, the plumber, the electrician, and my lawyer, with a ruler in his hand which he waved like a magic baton.
‘I don’t think it can be done…’ And my answer always, ‘Please, please, see if it can be done.’
The creeper cut from the windows. The windows mended. The men upon the roof mortaring the slates. The carpenter in the house, setting up the doors. The plumber in the well, measuring the water. The electrician on the ladder, wiring the walls. And the doors and windows open that had not been open for so long. The sun warming the cold dusty rooms. Fires of brushwood in the grates. And then the scrubbing of the floors that had felt neither brush nor mop for many years. Relays of charwomen, with buckets and swabs. The house alive with men and women. Where did they come from? How did it happen? The whole thing was an impossibility in wartime. Yet it did happen. And the gods were on my side. Summer turned to autumn, autumn to December. And in December came the vans of furniture; and the goods and chattels I had stored at the beginning of the war and thought never to see again were placed, like fairy things, about the rooms at Menabilly.
Like fairy things, I said, and looking back, after living here two years, it is just that. A fairy tale. Even now I have to pinch myself to know that it is true. I belong to the house. The house belongs to me.
From the end of the lawn where I first saw her, that May morning, I stand and look upon her face. The ivy is stripped. Smoke curls from the chimneys. The windows are flung wide. The doors are open. My children come running from the house on to the lawn. The hydrangeas bloom for me. Clumps of them stand on my piano.
Slowly, in a dream, I walk towards the house. ‘It’s wrong,’ I think, ’to love a block of stone like this, as one loves a person. It cannot last. It cannot endure. Perhaps it is the very insecurity of the love that makes the passion strong. Because she is not mine by right. The house is still entailed, and one day will belong to another…’
I brush the thought aside. For this day, and for this night, she is mine.
And at midnight, when the children sleep, and all is hushed and still, I sit down at the piano and look at the panelled walls, and slowly, softly, with no one there to see, the house whispers her secrets, and the secrets turn to stories, and in strange and eerie fashion we are one, the house and I.
Moving House
[1969]
Moving house, after twenty-six years, is rather like facing a major operation. Especially if the home one leaves behind has been greatly loved. As a young woman I moved often, being married to a soldier, and we were never more than eighteen months in the same place. This did not greatly worry me, because my husband organised everything, even to writing out the labels for the removal men and deciding where the various pieces of furniture should go. He would always try to make the new home as much like the old one as possible, for, although very go-ahead and progressive as a soldier, he was a stickler for routine in personal life. So, while desks were placed in new living rooms in identical corners beside new fireplaces, and while he arranged the familiar objects in the right order, I would wander around in a daze, trying to picture the sort of people who had lived in the house before. Also I felt sorry for th
e house we had left; I was sure it would be melancholy without us. This feeling passed, and soon I would ‘grow’ into the new house, taking something of its atmosphere into myself and giving something in return. Anyway, we were both young, and life was an adventure.
When the war came and my husband was serving overseas, I took a bold step and moved house on my own, with a nanny and three young children. I rented the old manor house Menabilly that I had written about in Rebecca, which had no electricity and no hot-water system, and was full of dry rot. My husband, in far-off Tunis, told his brother officers, ‘I am afraid Daphne has gone mad.’
The madness paid off. When he came on leave for Christmas, expecting to find us squatting in camp beds with the rain pouring through the roof, he found the telephone installed, electric light in all the rooms, a hot bath waiting, and the furniture brought from store and put in just the right places he would have chosen himself. There were sprays of holly behind every picture.
‘Well, I must confess, I didn’t know you had it in you,’ he told me.
He grew to love it as much as I did, and forever after, during his lifetime, Christmas was always the high spot of the year.
In 1964 we knew that our lease was coming to an end and that we should have to look for another home. The thought of moving from this particular bit of Cornwall was unbearable to both of us, and, like a miracle, unspoken prayer was answered. The lease of the one-time dower house to Menabilly, Kilmarth, fell vacant, and it was only half a mile or so away, with a splendid view over the sea beloved so well. We walked round the empty rooms, as desolate as Menabilly had been before we lived there, and he said to me, ‘I like this place. I can see ourselves here.’ He signed the lease a few weeks before he died.
This was all of four years ago, and in the intervening period, between writing books, I have been planning what I hope will be my final home. I moved into Kilmarth in June of this year, 1969, and count myself very fortunate that I had so much time to make the change. Day by day, week by week, month by month, I would visit the empty house, walk round the rooms, plan the decorations, watch the necessary alterations, decide where the furniture would ultimately go. The architect, the builder, the builder’s craftsmen, could not have been more helpful or more kind. We felt ourselves a team, creating a renewed Kilmarth which I felt very certain its predecessors had loved.
The Roger Kylmerth who lived here in 1327 may have been different in character from the one I have written about in my novel The House on the Strand, but the foundations of his home are beneath me now. The Bakers, merchants in the seventeenth century, touched these walls. Younger sons of Rashleigh parents bided here before inheriting Menabilly, rebuilding upwards from the foundations, while later tenants, so I am told, kept packs of collie dogs and even peacocks! I like to think of the latter strutting the walk where I now exercise my own West Highland terriers.
Kilmarth, today, has a slated eighteenth-century front, with twentieth-century additions on either side. The front garden is enclosed by walls and railings, giving a formal touch, and, although it was suggested I should take down the Victorian porch, I am glad I kept it; it has a delightful, old-fashioned air. The drawing room, or long room as I call it, is on the right of the hall, and to the left are my small dining room and library. When the doors of all three are opened you can see from one end of the house to the other, thus giving a sense of space. The french windows of the long room have been opened wide all summer long, facing due south, and I can see myself sitting here through the winter too.
The original dining room of my predecessors, three steps up from the hall, has been turned into a kitchen. Light paper on the walls, a warm brick-coloured floor and modern wall units with an electric cooker, this is one of the nicest rooms in the house. Once it was dark and narrow, but a wide window now gives light where the chimney breast used to be. The cramped rooms beyond, used in old days for staff or nursery, are now a separate suite for visiting grandchildren. The little ones can romp, the teenagers play their pop records, and their grandmother in the front of the house be none the wiser! What is more, they have their own staircase and their own entry, and the wing has all the appearance of a miniature house on its own.
The basement, useful for storage now, held the one time kitchen, pantries, laundry, stillroom of former tenants, no longer practicable today. Here are the cellar walls of antiquity, and I have turned one recess into a tiny chapel. To exorcise unquiet spirits? Perhaps. Who knows, it may have been a place for prayer in centuries past. The yard without, which surely once led from the mediaeval farmhouse building, has been relaid with the cobbled stones that, now lying about the grounds, may have graced it long ago.
Let us make our way above once more to the front of the house. The staircase leads to my own quarters, and to the guest rooms for family and friends. Here I admit to doing myself in style. Furnishings and fabrics are not new, they have been with me for much of my married life, but I have never before had a suite of dressing room, bathroom and bedroom; and the view from the bedroom, which overlooks the sea, is the best I have ever known. Ships anchor in the bay before proceeding to Par Harbour, and the ilex trees have a magic quality, outlined against the sky. It is a very pleasant room by day or night. The guest room along the landing I call the pink room. It contains my father’s four-poster bed, and the closet adjoining is now a bathroom. A narrow corridor leads to two double guest rooms and one single room, with their own bathroom and W.C. So when Christmas comes again I can, at a pinch, put up children, grandchildren, in fact the entire family, although there might be a certain amount of juggling with camp beds.
I hope, in time, to get the overgrown garden back into some sort of order. Last spring I planted dahlias, but none of them came up. The roses had the blight. Most of the undergrowth and brambles have been cleared, and new grass sown where the nettles grew. The apple trees are long past their prime, but the windfalls have gone into apple tart on Sundays. My husband’s old boat stands in her final resting place, and she shall have a coat of paint next spring. And so I look about me, planning the months ahead: one day, perhaps, reclaim the tennis court in the orchard, where Victorian ladies played patball with one another, though for tennis I feel it has probably had its day. A football pitch might be the answer for growing grandsons. Two meadows lie beyond, let for grazing to the neighbouring farmer, and I shall have to watch any battles between Chelsea and Spurs in case the flying ball should fall amongst, and startle, his pedigree herd of cattle.
I shall miss the acres of woodland that surround Menabilly. Here the only ‘plantations’ worthy of the name are those bordering the road leading to the village of Polkerris, and a winding shrubbery at the back of the house. Never mind. Wildlife abounds here as much as there. Badgers scratch the earth beneath tumbled leaves, jackdaws roost in the taller trees, owls hoot by night, and the long summer through swallows and martins built under the eaves. As for butterflies, the place abounds with them. Tortoise-shell, swallowtail, admirals, flit amongst the overgrown buddleia, and so, I regret to say, do wasps as well.
The pleasantest spot at evening is an old summer-house, built by one of my predecessors, where one can sit sheltered from cold winds and watch the sun go down across the bay. Steps lead down from the wall to the field below. Perhaps a peacock strutted here, his tail spread wide. And the collies surely rampaged in search of erring sheep. For my own part, rejoicing in a long hot summer, I have crossed the field most afternoons after tea and descended to the cliffs and the beach beyond. The sea, milky white from the sediment of china clay, has a strange attraction, to me at any rate, though I have heard grumbles at its stickiness from summer visitors. At high spring tides the water laps the cliffs and there is a strong undertow, dangerous, I would think, to the non-swimmer. Now, with the visitors departed, the only intruders upon the beach are oyster catchers and gulls.
Indeed, I tell myself, as I climb the steep hill back again to Kilmarth (Thrombosis Hill, I have called it, and time will prove if it lives up to its n
ame), I am most blest and truly fortunate. The house I looked upon with misgivings before I moved, wondering whether I should ever settle down in new surroundings, no longer gives me the somewhat dubious impression of a pleasant holiday residence lent to me for a season by obliging friends, but is transforming itself, day by day, week by week, with the familiar furniture and objects all about me, into the friendly warmth and comfort of a place well loved, where I am made welcome. In short, we are at one, and I am at home.
A Winter’s Afternoon, Kilmarth
It is the idle half-hour succeeding lunch, when, having written a number of unnecessary letters all morning, I can sip black coffee and smoke the first cigarette of the day. The back pages of yesterday’s newspapers are still unread, and it is my whim to contrast the current weather report with the advertisements for winter holidays in Cornwall.
‘The ridge of low pressure now approaching our western sea-board will deepen, and the showers at present falling on the Scilly Isles and Cornwall will become heavy at times, turning to hail and thunder on higher ground. Winds will increase to gale force, veering southwesterly to west, and later in the day temperatures may fall to 28 degrees. Outlook for the next two days cold and unsettled, with gales locally.’
I glance out of the window. My informant on the radio was right. The pine trees beyond the garden wall, planted by some Victorian predecessor in the belief that whatever suited the Scottish climate would defy the elements equally well in Cornwall—and how wise he was—are beginning to sway, while massive clouds, driven by some demon force, bank the far horizon, reminding me of a rather too elaborate production of Macbeth.
The Rebecca Notebook Page 12