Now it's owned by someone very rich in the City, a man one never sees; not at all like Daphne's father, Gerald du Maurier, who was a well-known actor-manager when he bought it in 1916, and a familiar figure in Hampstead, presumably. He'd spent his childhood just around the corner from here, first in Church Row, then in New Grove House, where his father, George du Maurier, wrote Trilby. Imagine! Daphne's grandfather might have walked along this road with Henry James, on their weekly expeditions to Hampstead Heath, before going home to tea; and it was during one of those companionable Sunday afternoons that George told Henry the outline of his idea for the story of Trilby, and Henry encouraged him to go ahead and write it as a novel, never dreaming that his friend would become immensely rich and famous.
I think Paul would prefer me to give up on the Brontës altogether, and write a PhD on George du Maurier and his relationship with Henry James: it would be sufficiently scholarly a topic for research, he says; even though George du Maurier is now dismissed as much more minor than James, he is not quite as minor in the literary canon as Daphne. 'He's almost certainly due for a comeback,' says Paul, 'and I could help you out on the Jamesian connection, of course . . .' Ridiculous, isn't it, these league tables? As if you can measure literary excellence with precise instruments; as if there were a science of writing, governed by equations that reveal immutable truths.
Me, I can't help myself. I'm still stuck on Daphne, lost in the fog. Have been for years, ever since I first read Rebecca when I was twelve, and devoured the rest of her books, terrifying myself with her short stories, wide-eyed and sleepless after 'Don't Look Now' and 'The Birds', which were probably far too scary for me at the time (I've been wary of magpies and crows and yellow-eyed seagulls ever since). It was the same when I started reading the Brontës about six months later. I was totally enthralled by them, and frightened, too, by Cathy's ghost with her bleeding wrists at the windows of Wuthering Heights, and the living wraith that is Mrs Rochester, slipping through the doors of her attic prison, carrying her candle, dreaming of burning the house to ashes; though Charlotte annoys me sometimes when she gets too priggish about religion, as if she is trying to dampen down her overpowering rage, and put out the fire within herself. I mean, can you actually remember the exact details of the ending of Jane Eyre? Everyone goes on about the madwoman in the attic and the reworking of gothic plots - Mr Rochester and his crazed first wife; conflagrations and blindings and revelations, all of which I love - and then they ignore the preachy Christianity in the final pages, with St John Rivers leaving England to be a missionary in India, as if anyone cares about him by then; all they want to know is that Jane has married Rochester, and they've had a baby, and look set to live happily ever after, for ever and ever, amen.
As for my own happy ever afters . . . Well, I'm beginning to wonder if I'm heading for a dead end, the point of no return, where stories unravel into unhappiness. That's what often happens in Daphne du Maurier narratives, the details of which are preoccupying me just as much as those of the Brontës. Because here I am, living across the road from Daphne's childhood home, not far from my own, in a part of London that has just as many ghosts as the Cornish coast or the Yorkshire moors; city ghosts that might rise up from between the cracks in the pavement, if the mist has blown in from the heath, where Wilkie Collins first saw his woman in white. The heath is London's moor, a place that can slip just beyond the reach of the rational mind, or at least it does if you are feeling alone, in the midst of this crowded city. And I do feel alone here, sometimes, when I walk along the streets at dusk, glancing into the lighted rooms, where families gather, and they have a whole life spilling out of them, shining bright against the winter gloom; though not all the houses are filled with life, there are several on this road with shuttered windows and drawn blinds, turned inward, away from the world. That's when I start thinking about Daphne du Maurier again, and it hasn't escaped me, the parallels between my life and the heroine of Rebecca, the orphan who marries an older man, moves into his house, and feels herself to be haunted by his first wife (and then there's the unsettling matter of My Cousin Rachel, which happens to be another of my favourite du Maurier novels, but I suppose I'm getting ahead of myself here).
Paul, of course, would be horrified if he caught me thinking like this. He believes in coincidence. I mean it - he really believes in coincidence, in the coincidental being evidence of the essential randomness of the world; he can't bear it if I see patterns in life, or echoes or mirroring, he sees that as magical thinking, as irrational foolishness, as the most insidious kind of intellectual laziness.
Even so, I think I've just stumbled across something interesting. Not here, not in this house: that would be too neat. But I'm hoping that I might be able to track down something that might, just might, constitute original material for my PhD: some of Daphne's old letters, written by her to a now-forgotten Brontë scholar called John Alexander Symington, when she was working on The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, which is actually dedicated to Mr Symington. And I'm hoping I'll discover Symington's replies to her, as well. I have no idea if any of these letters have survived, but the correspondence must once have existed, because Daphne referred to it in several other of her letters to a close friend; letters that form part of the du Maurier Family Archive at Exeter University. Yes, there is such an archive, and I've been emailing a very nice librarian there, and she put me in touch with another librarian at Leeds University, and then he told me about Daphne's visits to Leeds in the 1950s, when she came to the university library to examine a special collection of Brontë manuscripts whilst researching her biography of Branwell.
Paul doesn't think this is particularly interesting. 'It's a cul-de-sac,' he said, when I tried to tell him about it last night, 'as moribund as du Maurier's book about Branwell. This can't possibly lead you anywhere.'
'But it could be relevant to my PhD,' I said.
'How do you know any of this is relevant,' he said, 'when you don't know what's in these letters, if indeed the letters are there to be found?'
'I don't know, but until I do, how can you be so sure it's irrelevant?' I said, suddenly furious with him. He didn't answer me, just walked out of the room, banging the door hard behind him. But whatever Paul says (or doesn't say), I'm still intrigued by Daphne's letters to Symington, and by his replies to her. What did they write to one another in their letters? What did they feel about each other? Were they united by a strange, shared passion for a dead writer, whom just about everyone else had forgotten, or consigned to the dust-heap of failure? Did they fall in love with each other, as well as with Branwell? No one knows, and maybe no one cares, except for the librarian at Leeds University, who told me that Mr Symington was himself a librarian at the university, and at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. OK, I'm sorry, there are a lot of librarians in this story, and libraries as well (which maybe doesn't bode so well for originality). People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries - as if the words are synonymous with boredom or timidity. But isn't that where the best stories are kept? Hidden away on the library bookshelves, lost and forgotten, waiting, waiting, until someone like me comes along, and wants to borrow them.
CHAPTER FOUR
Menabilly, July 1957
Daphne always cherished her isolation at Menabilly, indeed, fell in love with the house for its remoteness from the first time she saw it, as a trespasser, nearly thirty years ago, when it had been derelict and uninhabited, the trees coming close to colonising its abandoned rooms, the rampant ivy strangling everything, creeping into the roof, slithering through the cracked windowpanes. Now, Menabilly was restored, brought to life again by Daphne's love and a great deal of her money; which was as it should be, she thought, given that her fortune was made by Rebecca, a story inspired by Menabilly; no, more than that, she felt, a story that belonged to Menabilly as much as it did to her. All of it was made safe, except for a crumbling, uninhabited wing where none but Daphne dared venture, for its rooms were the most shadowy o
f places, with no electricity to bring light to dark corners, though this part of the house seemed to possess an occasional crackling humming of its own, on a frequency that only she could hear.
She also took care to preserve Menabilly's secrecy, along with its walls, this house that could not be seen from the road or the sea, its grey stones hidden by the contours of the land and a shroud of impenetrable forest. It was the closest place she could find to a desert island, she told her cousin, Peter Llewelyn Davies, when she moved into Menabilly at the end of 1943. 'But you will adore this house, as I do,' she wrote to Peter. 'You must come to stay, though I'm hoping the bats and rats and ghosts will keep all other visitors away.'
She was true to her word, and kept Menabilly as an island; peaceful in her solitude; the very opposite of her father, who could not bear to be without a great gang of friends and family around him, and who could only tolerate silence when his audience held their breath during a brief, dramatic pause in the theatre, waiting for him, and the action, to move on, until its foregone conclusion, the cheers and thunderous applause . . .
Yet for the last few days, she had been chafing at the seclusion, longing for a message from the outside world; specifically, for the arrival of a reply to her letter to Mr Symington.
This morning, at last, the postman made his slow way up the long, curved drive from the West Lodge, and Daphne was waiting at the front door, having seen the red van from her bedroom window. Much to her relief, the delivery was of a brown paper parcel with a Yorkshire postmark, addressed to her in spidery black capital letters, and as she opened the package, pulling at the knotted string and examining the musty-smelling contents, Daphne experienced a moment of pure pleasure, such that she had not felt for a very long time. For not only did the parcel contain a rare copy of one of Branwell's stories, as well as a privately printed volume of his letters to a friend, Joseph Leyland, Mr Symington had also enclosed a very intriguing handwritten letter, partially obscured by inkblots and heavily crossed out sentences, yet hinting that there might be a mystery associated with Branwell's manuscripts. Daphne scanned the letter rapidly, still standing in the hallway, then went to her chair in the library, where she reread it, several times over, until she could make sense of Mr Symington's elaborate circumlocutions.
And yes, he was guarded, his language as fenced and hedged as the Menabilly estate, forcing Daphne to read between the lines, and those crossings-out and obscuring inkblots were as infuriating as they were intriguing. But even so, Symington's letter suggested that he suspected there had been some previous deception concerning the Brontë manuscripts. If this were true, then she might be on the trail of a most remarkable literary scandal, and the very idea of this was thrilling to her now. Symington did not say who was responsible for the forgeries, though Daphne wondered whether he might have been hinting that his former colleague, T. J. Wise, was the culprit? Why else would Symington have referred to what he called 'the fog and mist' that surrounded Wise? It seemed unlikely - after all, Wise was a widely admired president of the Brontë Society - and Daphne wondered if there was another element to the story; perhaps Symington had some hidden feud with Wise?
But the important thing was that he had replied to her letter in the most tantalising of ways, and as she reread his words, holding them in her hands, an anticipatory sensation seemed to tingle in her fingertips. Symington asked her to keep the information a secret, not that he had given her any hard facts or provable information, not yet . . . But part of Daphne's pleasure was triggered by that request, for he had chosen her to share his secret, and in doing so, perhaps he was extending a tacit invitation to share more with him? She would become his confidante, she was almost certain of that; and there was something intensely exciting to her about the prospect of this being conducted in a manner both intimate -for Symington's handwritten letter seemed to bring him very close to her; she could sense his presence between the lines -and yet also at a safe distance. Daphne was less sure, however, about whether she could reciprocate in kind; she preferred keeping her own secrets, for now, in the safety and security of Menabilly.
As for Branwell himself: well, Daphne wanted to be entirely alone with him, so she took his books with her to the writing hut, telling Tod not to disturb her, she would not be needing lunch, and settled down at her desk there to read his volume of letters. The door to the hut was closed behind her, but the window was open, letting in the soft scent of honeysuckle and the temptations of a clear blue sky. Yet as Daphne worked her way though the volume of letters, it seemed to her as if they summoned up a cloud that was obscuring the sunlight; not constantly, but little mackerel clouds, gathering together and then scurrying apart; and with this came a troubling undercurrent of anxiety, mixed in with her excitement.
The letters appeared to corroborate the story told in Mrs Gaskell's biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, suggesting that Branwell's downfall was precipitated by his dismissal, in July 1845, from his position in the Robinson family household at Thorp Green Hall in Yorkshire as tutor to their son, Edmund. Daphne's childhood copy of Mrs Gaskell's book lay open on the desk, covered with her pencilled notes and asterisks, though as she reread it, alongside Branwell's letters, she found herself wishing that his youngest sister, Anne, had provided some form of substantiating evidence. After all, Anne had also been working for the same family as a governess to the Robinsons' two daughters, and left her job just before Branwell's abrupt departure. Mrs Gaskell believed that Branwell was disgraced because of the discovery of his scandalous affair with Mrs Robinson, who was not only married, but fifteen years older than her son's tutor; and certainly, that was the impression Branwell himself gave in his letters to Leyland. But what did Anne believe to be the truth of the matter? And anyway, whispered a small voice in Daphne's head, what gave her the right to uncover the truth over a century afterwards? Who was she to rummage through the indignities of someone else's life, when she protected the fragile dignities of her own?
Still, she could not stop reading, she felt a kind of compulsion to continue, despite a faint nausea that rose in her throat and an odd feeling of weakness, as the day wore on. There was something exhausting about having Branwell so close at hand, his words in her hands, as she turned the pages. For as much as Branwell declared himself to be thwarted in love, his despairing frustration as a writer came spilling out of these letters in equal measure, or thus it seemed to Daphne. His voice, which remained cloaked in the pages of his childhood Angrian legends, was far clearer in the letters; so much so that she began to hear it in her head, drowning out her own thoughts, drowning out her thoughts of Tommy, and his silent presence in the nursing home. Branwell appeared to have no such need of silence; his was an anguished voice, sometimes plaintive, sometimes excitable, that demanded her attention, demanding not to be forgotten. Daphne made copious notes as she read, copying out quotes that seemed particularly relevant, trying to make sense of the tumbled unhappiness, the choked ambition and panicky self-importance. And amidst the confusion of his life, as told in these letters, Daphne began to trace his story, though gaping holes remained within it.
Most intriguing of all, she thought, was the letter that Branwell wrote to his friend Leyland in September 1845, declaring, with a mixture of pride and melancholy, that he had 'devoted my hours of time snatched from downright illness, to the composition of a three-volume Novel - one volume of which is completed - and along with the two forthcoming ones has been really the result of half-a-dozen by-past years of thoughts about, and experience in, this crooked path of Life.' Yet by the following spring, the promised novel remained incomplete, as far as Daphne could tell from the letters, while Branwell was still professing himself to be broken-hearted over Mrs Robinson.
She copied out a sentence from one of his letters, half-hoping that her act of writing Branwell's words might summon up his ghost for her, here in the little hut. 'Literary exertion would seem a resource,' he wrote in May 1846, and Daphne whispered his words out loud, 'but the depression a
ttendant on it, and the almost hopelessness of bursting through the barriers of literary circles, and getting a hearing among publishers, makes me disheartened and indifferent; for I cannot write what would be thrown, unread, into a library fire.' He made no mention of his sisters' first venture into publishing, which presumably coincided with his letter that month, when their poems were printed, at their own expense, under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. It was not clear whether he even knew about their book; or did he prefer to pretend not to know, wondered Daphne, given that he had not been asked to contribute to it by his sisters, who were formerly his collaborators and closest friends?
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