'What am I doing here?' I whispered. There was no answer, of course, just the almost imperceptible hum of the house, and I couldn't understand why I was in this place - not just crumpled at the bottom of the stairs - but also how I had come to be here, married to a man who no longer appears sure that he wants me. That sounds old-fashioned, doesn't it? I mean, why don't I seize the initiative in our relationship, and make it clear what I want? But it feels like we're both frozen, unable to move towards one another in bed at night, yet pretending that nothing is wrong. And when he does reach out to me, it's as if he is compelled by a desire that he no longer trusts, as if he is swept up by it for a while - and sweeps me along with him - and then afterwards, he seems desolate, like a man washed up by the tide in a place where he does not belong, does not even recognise. And we don't discuss it; just as we don't talk about why Rachel left him.
I stood up, carefully, because my legs still felt shaky, and murmured to myself what my mother used to say when I'd fallen over, 'Don't worry, nothing's broken.' I took a few steps along the hall, just to check that I hadn't sprained an ankle, which I hadn't, and then I caught sight of my face in the mirror, and for a few seconds, it was like seeing a girl in a dream, and not knowing if she were me, as if I was watching myself, rather than being myself. But at least it was my reflection; a bit pale, but indisputably there. Which was a relief, because I was beginning to wonder if I'd imagined everything, if I imagined myself here in this house, and if I looked into the mirror - Rachel's mirror, of smoky Venetian glass - there'd be no one there. I reached out, and touched the glass, tapped the reflection with my fingertips, because I didn't want to think what I had been thinking; that I was becoming disembodied, like a whispering ghost who has forgotten what it means to be alive, or maybe she never was alive, just a ghost of other people's lost hopes and desires.
The thought seemed like a horrible one - maudlin and neurotic, and yet I'd let it out, I'd released it into the house, where it might hide, or breed. I turned away from the mirror, and took a few deep breaths, like I used to do before the beginning of a race at school. I was always good at running - not the best, but a reasonably fast sprinter - and I knew that I needed to steady myself again, to stop panicking.
I suppose it was then that I began to realise that I had let myself get too isolated here, that I was talking to myself too much in my head, becoming disconnected from everyone else, and losing touch with reality. Not that I've ever been surrounded by lots of friends, but I'm not a completely solitary creature. I got a scholarship to a private girls' school in Hampstead, just a mile or so down the hill towards Swiss Cottage. Most of the other girls lived in very different homes from mine. Even if their parents were divorced (and quite a lot of them were), they were part of big, sprawling families, with siblings and cousins and uncles and aunts and stepparents. Their houses were full of people, in a way that my mother's flat could never be: she was an only child, like my father, and all four of my grandparents were dead before I was even born. I had one great-aunt, who lived in Chelsea with a caged canary, and she died when I was about ten. Other than that - well, I know it seems implausible, but there were no relatives in my life. My mother was in her early forties when I was born, and my father was fifteen years older than her; I was an unexpected baby, much cherished, but a surprise, nevertheless. 'I'd almost given up hoping,' my mother told me, 'and then there you were, my miracle daughter.'
If she wondered why I so seldom brought friends home to the flat, she never asked me. She was very tactful in that way; never probed too much, and as a consequence, I tended not to ask her questions about herself, either. We were happy together, adhering to a gentle routine, which I preferred to keep separate from my friends by the time I was a teenager. I wasn't ashamed of my mother, or the flat we lived in, but she was so different from the other mothers; older than them, less fashionably dressed, and the flat reflected that, with furniture that had been there since I was born, the walls covered in bookshelves, and a little portable television in the corner that was a fraction of the size of those in the other girls' living rooms. So my friends assumed that I'd want to go to their houses, to watch TV and sprawl on the sofa and eat takeaway pizza; which I often did on Friday and Saturday evenings, though I was happy to stay in with my mother during the week, when we read, or played Scrabble, or listened to The Archers (my mother's favourite, which I pretended to find boring, though she knew I was as addicted to it as she was).
I had several friends at school, none of them Queen Bees, the Alpha females with their long blonde hair and mocking laughs; we tended to stay on the sidelines, not unaware of the daily theatrics of teenage dramas, but not part of them, either. We weren't complete geeks - we listened to pop music, read magazines - but there was something about us that made us invisible to boys. 'Don't worry,' one of my friends' mothers said to me. 'When you're older, men will begin to notice you, and they'll realise that you're beautiful, and so will you.' This seemed unlikely to me at the time, but at least I had the comfort of knowing that I was good at passing exams, and that this might be my escape route.
Except I didn't really know where I wanted to escape. I had a romantic idea of going to Europe, to write a novel, but my teachers encouraged me to read English at university, because they said it would be 'a good grounding', a phrase that reminded me as much of punishment as encouragement. But I was a good girl, who accepted the need for a good grounding; and when I got into Cambridge, I knew it would make my mother happy, because she'd studied English there and remembered it with affection. She had just retired by then, and once I'd started at college, it was as if she decided that I was in a safe place, and she allowed herself to leave me, very quietly, in death, as in life. She died in her sleep, the doctor told me. It was in the early hours of a Monday morning; and I'd spoken to her on the phone just a little while previously, as we always did on Sunday evening, it was part of the new routine we'd established since I'd started at Cambridge.
'Are you feeling OK?' I said to her, towards the end of the phone call, because she sounded tired, and her voice was slightly slower than usual.
'I'm fine,' she said, 'don't worry. I've just got a little headache.'
It was a brain haemorrhage, the doctor told me. She was in bed asleep, he said, so she wouldn't have felt anything. But I couldn't help wondering if he just told me that, to make me feel better, which it didn't. I imagined her brain filling with blood, and her lying there, awake, but unable to move or speak; silenced, in that silent flat . . .
Afterwards, my tutor at Cambridge said to me, 'If ever you need to talk about it, come and see me, OK?' I nodded, but I wasn't sure what the 'it' was; it was too enormous to be reduced to such a small word, or any words at all, so talking wasn't really an option. My mother was dead, and I was alone in the world, which was an embarrassment and an inconvenience to others, as well as cataclysmic to me. I dealt with this situation by not dealing with it; so that the awfulness of 'it' was put away in a box, leaving me to get on with each day, though getting on meant staying put in the place that my mother believed would be safe for me. If anyone asked how I was coping, I'd say, 'I'm taking each day as it comes.' And eventually, they stopped asking, and those days turned into weeks, and months, and now it's three years since my mother died, and here I am . . .
'I am here,' I just typed into my laptop in the attic. 'Is anybody there?' I thought about sending it as an email to everyone in my address book: my old tutor, my current one, my scattered school friends, and so on. Actually, 'and so on' is a euphemism. My computer address book is pitifully sparse, because I've lost touch with most of the girls I knew at school, apart from one who's teaching English in Prague, and none of them are living in the area where we grew up.
As for the people I knew at university: well, there were no proper boyfriends, no lovers, not until that astonishing night when I first slept with Paul. But I did have two close friends, both of them studious, bookish girls like me, and about the time I got married, one of them, Je
ss, moved to America, on a scholarship to an Ivy League college, and the other, Sarah, went back home to Edinburgh, to do teacher training. I could ring them or email them or write, I know, and sometimes I do, but less and less, because neither of them was convinced that I was doing the right thing in marrying Paul; both of them said, in the gentlest of ways, that they thought it was far too soon, that I should have waited. 'I understand why you want to get married,' Jess said to me, 'and I also understand why it might seem you need to get married - to feel safe, to have a home, all those things that other people might take for granted. But why don't you see how it goes with Paul, before actually marrying him?'
'I love him,' I said, as if that were as simple as that. And I did think it was simple at the time, but it's only now that I've realised that loving someone isn't enough; that it's not enough to make everything safe and secure.
I haven't said this to Jess; I haven't really told her or Sarah anything about what's been going wrong with Paul. It's not that I used to tell them everything - I never talked to them about my mother's death, I didn't talk about that to anyone -but our conversations about books have melted away, along with those consoling Cambridge afternoons of tea and biscuits in front of a flickering gas fire, and walks along the river, feeding the ducks, and talking about the impossibility of understanding the footnotes to The Waste Land, or whether Emily Brontë's childhood fantasy of Gondal could be traced in Wuthering Heights. When we were students, it seemed like the time we spent together would go on for ever; but of course, there was an ending, there had to be, when our finals were over, and we left to make way for a new batch of girls, who would move into the college rooms we had once occupied.
And maybe I've forgotten how to sustain friendship; maybe I live too much in my head. That was what my mother said to me just a few days before she died. 'Don't forget to talk to other people, darling,' she said. Which was odd, coming from such a quiet woman, a librarian, as it happens, who was accustomed to silence, who found it peaceful, rather than oppressive.
Perhaps that's why I became even more attached to Rebecca after my mother died; it was familiar, at the same time as remaining insoluble. I loved the book as a teenager, loved its promise of escape, its wild Cornish landscape that seemed a million miles away from London, and yet somehow within my reach. But now I reread it for clues, trying to see if there was anything I missed, just as the second Mrs de Winter tries to read her husband's face, trying to make sense of everything. Which is hopeless, of course; the novel is supposed to be mysterious, to leave one wanting to know more. One thing I'm certain of, though: 'the lovely and unusual name' which belongs to the nameless narrator before she becomes Mrs de Winter must be Daphne du Maurier.
Anyway, I've decided to make far more of an effort with Paul, and I'll start by persuading him to come home for dinner tonight, instead of working late. I'm not going to consult Rachel's cookery books - I'm not going to look at them ever again, they make me feel like an interloper - but I'll make roast chicken, like my mother used to do for the two of us on Sunday evenings. She always added lots of lemon juice, and bay-leaves and thyme from the garden, and in the winter she baked apple crumble as well, and we'd talk about the books that I was reading, about The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Wuthering Heights; and I shivered at the thought of Cathy's ghost, tapping at the window, crying 'Let me in, let me in'; but I was safe, I knew I was safe inside with my mother.
I'm not quite sure what Paul and I will talk about - he clearly doesn't like it when I ask him what's keeping him so much at work these days, and I can't mention Daphne, either; I can't say anything about her to him ever again, because last time I did was disastrous, he said I was turning into a weird kind of du Maurier stalker, that I was losing touch with reality, as well as with him. I don't think that's true - he's the one that is spending more time away from this house, not me. But I don't want to argue with him again, I can't bear it when people shout at each other, and anyway, no one hears what's being said, it's just an angry sound.
But I also know that silence doesn't seem to help. 'Silence is your default setting,' Paul said to me last week, 'occasionally punctuated with a sharp burst of static electricity, and maybe you don't know how enraging that can be.' So I've vowed to try to find the right words for him, to make it clear that I'm not living only in my head; for if the outlines of our life together have become blurred and indistinct (if, indeed, they ever clearly existed), then I must find a way to fill them in, to make them real again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Menabilly, August 1957
Daphne stood at her bedroom window as the sun was sinking in the sky, looking down to the drive that circled in front of the house, and she felt rigid, like a sentry, like Mrs Danvers . . . No, not like Mrs Danvers, she told herself. She was Lady Browning, a loving and dutiful wife, waiting for her husband to return home again.
Tommy was on his way back to Menabilly after three weeks in the nursing home, after tranquillisers and electric shocks and God knows what else, her husband was being delivered back to her this evening, like a parcel. No, not a parcel, what was she thinking of? 'He will need a great deal of your support and affection,' the doctor told Daphne on the telephone two days ago, when he rang to explain that Tommy was now well enough to leave the nursing home, and spend the rest of the summer convalescing in Menabilly. 'No stress, obviously, no over-excitement, absolutely no alcohol. Just keep everything very quiet and peaceful for him.'
It was inconceivable to Daphne that she could drive Tommy all the way from London (she rarely drove anywhere these days, not even to Fowey), and the train seemed too lacking in privacy, as did a hired driver. It wasn't fair to ask either of her daughters to take responsibility for such a long journey, but she didn't trust anyone outside the family, so in the end, she decided to ask her cousin Peter, who had been at Eton with Tommy, and served alongside him in the First World War. She telephoned Peter at the publishing company he ran with his younger brother Nico and he agreed, readily, and didn't ask for any further explanation than Daphne had already offered: that Tommy was suffering from nervous exhaustion, hence the stay in the private nursing home and the cancellation of the silver wedding anniversary party.
She made sure that Menabilly was looking at its best for Tommy's arrival: vases of roses in the Long Room and the entrance hall, and everything swept and scrubbed clean and polished, just as he liked it. Then she changed out of her usual nondescript trousers into a blue chiffon dress, dabbed perfume at her wrists and throat, and applied her make-up with unusual care, gazing into her dressing-table mirror at her pale, anxious face, powdering over its shadows and uncertainties. But would she meet Tommy's high standards? Would he find her lacking?
When Daphne saw Peter's car turn into the drive, just after half past seven in the evening, she took a sharp intake of breath, and smoothed her hands across her hair, then ran downstairs to the front door, so that she would be standing there, a smile on her face, ready to welcome Tommy. She'd got Tod out of the way with various errands, and the maids had left for the day, which meant that Tommy could slip in without a fuss.
'Darling,' she said, as he got out of the car, 'how lovely to see you again, and you're looking so much better.' In fact, she was shocked by his appearance, for although he was immaculately dressed in a suit and tie and polished brogues, his face was a powdery grey, like dirty chalk, and rather than his usual confident stride, he seemed to shuffle towards her.
'Good drive?' she said, patting him awkwardly on the arm.
Tommy shrugged, and gestured towards Peter. 'Ask your cousin,' he said. 'I had my eyes closed for most of the journey.'
'It was terribly kind of you,' she said, turning to Peter and kissing him on the cheek. For a moment she felt as if she were watching all of three of them, jerking like marionettes, as if she were back up again in her vantage point at the bedroom window, at one remove from this stiff little scene by the front door. 'I suppose both of you men are longing for a . . . for a cup of tea.'
Tommy grimaced, while Peter raised one eyebrow at her almost imperceptibly. 'You're sounding more and more like my mother,' said Tommy. 'What we all need is a stiff drink.' He stumped into the house, leaving the front door open behind him, and as Daphne looked at Peter, she wondered if he could see the flush that she felt rising from her neck, across her face.
'I take it a drink isn't yet in order?' said Peter.
'Not yet,' she said. 'Just hang on for a bit . . .'
By the time she found Tommy in the dining room, he had already poured himself a large glass of whisky. 'Darling,' she said, 'the doctors are very keen that you don't'
'Damn the doctors,' he said. 'They've been torturing me for nearly a month. You have no idea, Daphne, the horror of it all . . .' His voice broke, and he put his hand over his eyes, turning his face away from hers.
'I'm so sorry,' she said.
'I see you kept well clear,' he said, 'as usual . . .'
'I didn't think it would help you, having me around, when you needed to rest.'
'Rest?' he hissed at her. 'Is that your definition of rest? A thousand volts of electricity shot into your head?'
She heard Peter cough outside in the hall, and said to Tommy, 'Shall we go and sit in the Long Room, where we can be more comfortable?'
'I don't want to sit anywhere,' said Tommy. 'I'm deadbeat. I'll finish my drink and take myself to bed.'
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