'Would you like some cocoa brought up to you?'
'By Mrs Danvers?' he said. 'With a sleeping pill on the side, to keep me quiet?'
Daphne was shocked by the bitterness in his voice, by the look in his grey eyes. 'Let's not argue, darling,' she said. 'I just want you to feel comfortable here.'
'Do you?' he said. 'I'd have thought you'd be more comfortable without me, cluttering up the house.'
'I love you,' she said. 'I love you being here . . .'
'Don't lie to me, Daphne,' he said. 'It doesn't become you.' Then he turned from her and left the room, and she heard his footsteps on the stairs, slow and unsteady, stopping on the landing, and then going painfully upwards, along the corridor to his room, where she had made sure to leave his teddy bears on the bed; his welcome party . . .
She stood in the dining room for a few moments, trying to calm her breathing, then followed him upstairs and knocked on his door, gently. There was no answer, so she called out his name, and when he still did not reply, she turned the handle. It was locked. 'Tommy?' she said, more loudly.
'I'm trying to go to sleep,' he said, sounding muffled. 'Can't a man get some sleep around here?'
Daphne went downstairs in search of Peter, feeling as if all three of them were playing some half-forgotten childhood variation of hide and seek, the rules of which she did not fully understand. She called out his name, hurrying from room to room downstairs, and found him eventually in the last place she'd thought to look, the nursery on the ground floor at the front of the house. 'It hasn't changed in here since my first visit,' he said. 'Still the same old pictures on the walls.'
He was standing by the drawings of 'Peter Pan' that Daphne had hung in the nursery, soon after moving into Menabilly. 'It's looking a bit shabby, isn't it, after fifteen years?' she said, suddenly noticing that the green and pink rose-print wallpaper had faded in places, like the matching curtains. 'This was the first room I decorated in the house - I wanted it to look cosy for the children, because they were a bit dubious about coming to live here, they called it the rat palace. I remember choosing this wallpaper, and getting the drawings of your namesake framed, and the ones of Daddy as the ghastly Hook.'
'Gerald was always terrifying,' said Peter, tilting his head to look at the sepia photographs of an early production of Peter Pan. 'That diabolical smile, and the appalling courtesy of his gestures, as he poured the poison into Peter's glass. And then he'd reappear as Mr Darling, and one had to remind oneself that he was neither Captain Hook nor Darling, that it was simply Uncle Gerald. Not that being Gerald was ever simple . . .'
He looked over at her, and smiled his half-crooked smile that she loved, and raised his eyebrow again. 'Well?' he said. 'When are you going to tell me what's going on? Tommy barely said a word to me today. The last time I saw him like this was forty years ago, when we were both shell-shocked recruits, and refusing to talk about the horrors of the trenches. But at least then we could mumble to one another about the cricket.'
'You were so young,' she said. 'Not much older than Kits, and straight out of Eton into the war. . . That's what I've been reminding myself for the last few weeks, while Tommy was in the nursing home: that things could be far worse, that at least there's not a war on.'
'True,' said Peter, 'but that doesn't explain what's wrong with Tommy.'
'I don't think I can explain,' she said. 'Not yet, anyway. It's a frightful mess. And I'm so sorry to drag you down here, it's ghastly for you.'
'Not as ghastly as it is for you,' he said. 'How long has this been going on?'
'The stupid thing is, I don't know. I really thought that he was fine until this sudden collapse last month. But I suppose we hadn't been seeing enough of each other, and I'd somehow lost track of things. And now he's in such a bad way with this depression that he just can't seem to shake off.'
Peter was silent for a few seconds, and then he said, 'Do you remember what Jim Barrie wrote about our uncle Guy, after he'd been killed in the Great War? "He had lots of stern stuff in him, and yet always the mournful smile of one who could pretend that life was gay but knew it wasn't." That rather reminds me of Tommy, and the rest of us, don't you think?'
She sighed, remembering how noble Guy had seemed to her when she was still a little girl and he came to the house in his officer's uniform, the medals glinting on his khaki chest, and she was too shy to speak to him, just stood and stared, until her mother told her to stop being so rude. But she couldn't help it, and she'd felt the same awe in the presence of Peter's older brother George, even when he bent down to kiss her goodbye. Poor George, dying in action in Flanders just a week after Guy, when he was only twenty-one, and the rest of his life should have been ahead of him. 'Uncle Guy was such a hero,' she said to Peter, 'and Daddy always said that George took after him. My father was broken-hearted after they died - that awful week, Daddy crying, not trying to hide his tears from me, but telling us that we must always be proud of Guy and George. That's the thing about having heroes in the family - they make everyone else look tawdry, these days.'
'I'm not so sure about that,' said Peter, 'I don't think Tommy is tawdry, do you?'
'He's certainly stopped smiling, whether mournfully or not,' she said, sidestepping Peter's question. 'I can't even recall the last time I saw him smile.'
'I know the feeling,' said Peter, 'but we struggle on, don't we?'
Daphne thought he was talking about his wife, Margaret, who was a bit of a moaner, and she'd not wanted to pry, so she simply slipped her arm through his, and said, 'Let's go and forage for some supper.' Tod had left a green salad and cold roast beef in the larder, which they ate by candlelight in the dining room; and then they took their glasses of wine into the Long Room, and when Daphne went to turn on the electric lamps, Peter said, 'Leave it, the darkness is so lovely here . . .' So she lit the candles by the fireplace, and they sat in peaceable silence for a little while.
'Uncle Jim never saw this place, did he?' said Peter, eventually.
'No, he died before I leased it,' she said, 'but if only he had, he'd have loved Menabilly.'
'You know he used to come to Fowey on holiday? And perhaps he came walking along the coastal path, and stumbled across Menabilly, just like you did.'
'I wish I'd asked him,' said Daphne.
'We all wish we'd asked him more questions,' said Peter. 'But isn't that the du Maurier way? Not to ask, just to watch, and smile . . .'
Daphne stood up, to go over to the piano, and as she passed Peter, she reached out and brushed a finger against his lips, as soft and quick as a moth's wing. He closed his eyes, and leaned his head back against the armchair. The windows were open, the curtains not drawn, and the cool night air was in the room. Daphne shivered a little, and then she played 'Clair de Lune', very softly, and the wreaths of their cigarette smoke rose and twisted together towards the ceiling.
Peter left early the next morning, before Daphne came downstairs for breakfast. He slipped a note under her bedroom door, but by the time she woke and read it, he was gone. 'Dearest D,' he had written. 'I wish you courage in all that lies ahead. Excuse my hasty departure, but deadlines loom at the office, and I also imagine that you and Tommy need some quiet time to catch up with one another . . .'
In fact, the house was filled with people from that afternoon onwards. Tessa arrived first, with her husband and children, all squashed into a car with a large quantity of luggage; and then Flavia and her husband, and Kits came soon afterwards, on the train. 'How lovely,' said Daphne, at teatime, passing around slices of cherry cake, 'to have all of us here together again . . .'
And in the days that followed, Daphne tried to lose herself in the rhythms of family life, to give in to its ebb and flow. But she could not stop herself feeling anxious, for Tommy was always on edge - on the edge of tears, of anger, of irritation, of frustration - and he did not like being disturbed by Tessa's children, his little granddaughter, Marie Therese, who was two and a half, and the baby, Paul, who was only sixteen m
onths.
Daphne did her best to get the children out of the house as much as possible, down to the beach to paddle in the rock pools. But the weather was thundery - sudden and violent downpours, which sent everyone scuttling back into the house - and Daphne felt oppressed by the lowering skies, the clouds the colour of bruises, though she smiled, always, and was charming, she tried very hard to be charming. She made no mention in Tommy's presence of their silver wedding anniversary last month, nor the cancelled party; no mention, either, of his time in the nursing home. Daphne did her best to explain to Flavia and Tessa about what happened, but she could not bring herself to use the words 'mental illness' or 'breakdown', so she repeated the same phrase to both of them, which was 'nervous exhaustion', and she was also careful to avoid any reference to the Snow Queen; she was trying not to think about that woman, not here, not in Menabilly . . .
As for Kits: he was still too young, just sixteen, and despite his veneer of sophistication that he'd picked up at Eton, she cherished his bright-eyed innocence, his undimmed optimism and capacity to see the best in everything, and everyone. He reminded her of Peter's younger brother, Nico, who seemed somehow unscathed by the death of both his parents; and of course, he was just young enough to have avoided serving in the First World War. Was it their experiences in the trenches, she wondered, that had left Tommy and Peter with a streak of melancholy? Tommy was brave, there was no doubt about it, he had won a DSO for courage at the age of nineteen, but he still woke at night, crying out, indistinct sounds, and in the morning, when she asked him if he had been dreaming, he said, 'It's always the same nightmares, the bodies in the mud, and the rats, and the noise of men screaming. . .' But maybe it wasn't only the war that was to blame, maybe it was the du Maurier melancholy that descended upon Peter, as it did Daphne; and perhaps this was what had infected Tommy; perhaps it was Daphne who brought it upon him, though their son had so far escaped.
Sometimes, she looked at Tommy, and wondered if it was his double who had come home to Menabilly, a brooding, stooping, saturnine twin; while the real Tommy was still walking around in London, gay and charming, with a confident smile on his face, and the upright stance of a successful soldier. And if so, must she keep her own dark double locked out of Menabilly, the angry, vengeful woman who knew she was wronged? Was it Rebecca's voice, or hers, that wanted to spit insults at Tommy, that longed to taunt him and mock his weaknesses? But it was a voice that she made certain to keep silent, and she vowed that she would not complain, so when anyone enquired about Tommy's health - for something was clearly wrong, he was drained and white-faced and shaky - she answered in brave little lies, explaining that he was suffering from exhaustion, and his blood was going too slowly through his system, he needed pills to thin his blood. She said this so often that she began to believe it: the blood was not reaching his brain, hence his collapse.
And Daphne wondered if her blood was too thick, if her brain was starved, like Tommy's, for there were moments when she could not think straight; she felt literally unbalanced, and slept only fitfully. A week after Tommy came home to Menabilly, when the house was filled with other people's uneasy dreams, and the air inside too heavy to breathe, she decided to try to sleep outside in the garden, on an old lilo and moth-eaten blanket, dragged out from the cobwebby summer house. At first, she kept her eyes wide open, looking up at the midnight sky as the clouds gave way to infinite stars, and she told herself it was too beautiful to sleep, but she must have dozed, at last, for she heard a woman's voice whispering beside her, and then with a start realised she was awake, not dreaming, certain that someone else was there. At that moment, Daphne thought the voice was telling her something important, speaking to her through a tear in the veil between this world and another, secret one; but she could not grasp the words, they disappeared into the darkness as soon as they were spoken. She tried to cry out, distressed, but no sound came from her mouth, and there was silence all around, even in the woods, everything stilled and quietened, no wind to rustle the leaves, no living creatures in the undergrowth. And in that silence, a terrible dread had risen up and taken hold of her, and she ran back to the house, heart pounding, panic in her veins, leaving the makeshift bed behind her, fearing that if she stayed, she would be beckoned to a place from which there was no return.
Now, in the daylight hours, there were voices all around her; not only those of her family, but a ceaseless monologue of her own, looping and spiralling inside her head. A little of it was about Branwell Brontë - when she could snatch an hour or two to work in her writing hut, she was attempting to understand the chronology of Angrian history, which was more circular than linear, with endless digressions - though she was often distracted, and found herself repeating her wedding vows, not out loud, but running through them in her mind, over and over again. 'For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. . .' Tommy was sick, that much was certain, but she worried that he was sick with longing for someone else, for the Snow Queen.
One rainy afternoon, she sat in an armchair with Marie Therese on her lap, and read to her from a childhood collection of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales - the same book she'd read to Tessa and Flavia, and that her mother had read to her in the nursery. This frightened Daphne as a child, in a way that she had never forgotten, for her mother pretended to be the Snow Queen, and her face looked icily hard and blank, as if her true self had been revealed in the telling of the story, revealing what Daphne suspected, that her mother did not love her . . . And even now, after all those years had passed - so quickly that time seemed to have circled in on itself - when Daphne came to the tale of the Snow Queen, she had to blink hard to stop herself from crying. Close to the end, Marie Therese was nearly asleep, but Daphne kept reading aloud, very quietly, about how the little girl, Gerda, travelled far away to find her dearest friend, Kay -a boy as close to her as a brother - and at last she found him, sitting alone in the Snow Queen's palace, motionless and chilled to the bone. Gerda wept hot tears over him, and they dissolved his frozen heart, so that eventually, he began to cry, and a speck of glass came out of his eye; he could see clearly again, and the spell was broken. But Daphne could not cry, would not shed tears, not in front of Tommy, not in front of anyone. She felt that if she started weeping, then she would not stop, the tears would turn into a sea, and she would drown in them.
Daphne closed her eyes, while her granddaughter dozed against her shoulder, and let her thoughts drift to her father, whose bouts of weeping were inexplicable to her when she was younger. 'Life may be pleasant when you're young, but it's not so much fun when you come to fifty,' he used to say, and no one knew what brought on such sudden melancholy; it might have been prompted by little more than a sudden downpour of rain or a cold wind from the east; or maybe it was the memory of his brother Guy, or his sister, Sylvia, lying in their graves, leaving Gerald behind them.
Was there something of her father in Tommy? He drank too much, like Gerald did, and suffered from similarly unpredictable bouts of depression. 'The horrors,' Gerald called them, when he would stand with hands over his eyes, trembling, until the worst of it had passed. Tommy was handsome, too, like Gerald - six foot tall, and as debonair and beautifully turned out as a matinee idol - and still attractive to women, there was no doubt about it. Daphne knew about her father's affairs - they all did, his three daughters, and his wife, too, and everyone who had anything to do with the London theatre world - but she laughed about it then, when she was a teenager, poked fun at 'Daddy's stable', some of whom, like Gertie Lawrence, were only a few years older than she was. And most of the time, apart from a very occasional outburst, her mother seemed able to accept this arrangement, rarely acknowledging Gerald's liaisons with Gertie and all the rest of those pretty young actresses, though now Daphne found it hard to understand this; how had she been so uncomplaining? Surely it must have been enraging for Muriel, not only as Gerald's wife, but also as an ageing actress, to know herself betrayed by him with girls less than half her age? But she had ofte
n complained about Daphne (the middle daughter, caught between parents, her father's favourite child). And then later, her father was furious with her, too, when she was old enough to have boyfriends, interrogating her when she came home at night, accusing her of behaving improperly, as if she was somehow betraying him. He stood guard on the landing at Cannon Hall; she could remember him still, staring out of the window, waiting for her, turned into a night-time monster, his features distorted with rage. 'Did you let him kiss you?' he'd hiss at her, as she came up the stairs. 'Where did you let him kiss you?'
It was all impossible, the past and the present, tangled into a terrible mess, and she could see no way of smoothing it out. Her mother was still alive, living just across the river from Fowey, at Ferryside, with Angela (the favourite daughter, thought Daphne, and then scolded herself for self-pity). Muriel was old now, and declining fast; watching the tides from her bedroom window, trapped and immobile in what had once been a place for carefree summers, the holiday house that Gerald had bought in the prime of their lives. She tried to imagine going over to Ferryside, telling her mother everything, asking for her advice about how to make her own marriage work, asking Muriel to share her secrets, too, but she knew this would never happen, it was inconceivable: some secrets were not made to be shared.
And when another letter arrived from Mr Symington, Daphne slipped it into her pocket, deciding to keep it private, hidden from everyone else. It was absurd, of course - this was not a love letter, but even so, Daphne did not want to discuss its contents, nor Mr Symington himself. She imagined what he might look like - he couldn't be much older than Tommy, given that he was still a youngish man in the 1920s, when he joined the Brontë Society, and took over as curator at the Brontë Parsonage. She had never seen a picture of Mr Symington, but was beginning to think of him as looking rather like her grandfather George, who died a decade before her birth, leaving his self-portraits behind him. She kept one hanging in the drawing room at Menabilly, and his face seemed as real to her as if she had actually known him in childhood, a handsome, bearded gentleman, blind in one eye, and fearful of losing his sight altogether, yet more noble and resolute-looking than Gerald, she thought; a man to admire, a novelist as well as an artist; and looking at his portrait again, she was overcome with powerful nostalgia, longing to go back to a past she never knew; longing to be with her grandfather, in a time before his grandchildren existed.
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