Symington picked up his pen, and then realised that he was smiling; but not only smiling, he was making an unfamiliar wheezing noise; no, not wheezing, he was laughing, he heard the sound of his own laughter, for the first time in years . . .
Newlay Grove,
Horsforth,
Leeds
Telephone: 2615 Horsforth
12th November 1957
Dear Miss du Maurier,
I do hope that your Brontë research is progressing satisfactorily, as the nights draw in. I expect you have also been kept very busy with your family; my wife Beatrice certainly has her hands fill at the moment
I, too, have been much preoccupied, though with domestic matters of another kind, relating back to the Brontës' life at the Parsonage, and those stories that they wrote in between peeling potatoes and so forth. Not that Branwell was likely to have been involved in culinary activities, though one never knows!
But forgive me for my whimsical approach. In fact, I have been engaged in very serious investigations, and I feel certain that you would be interested to know more about the precise information that I have uncovered.
One more afterthought, before I get this letter of to the post box While sorting and re-ordering my files, I came across this old theatre programme of the touring production of your play, 'September Tide: I happened to see the play when it came to Leeds in 1948, as my wife was a fan both of yours and your leading lady, G m d e Lawrence. It brought back memories of a most enjoyable evening, despite a very thick pea-soup fog that surrounded the theatre! I enclose the programme, which I thought might amuse you.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Yours sincerely,
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hampstead, 14 February
Something very odd happened today. I haven't got it quite straight in my head. I went to the British Museum Reading Room - the old one, where Daphne would have done her original research - because I wanted to look around there, even though the Brontë manuscripts she studied are now in the newer British Library building on the Euston Road. I suppose it was a bit of romantic whimsy on my part, and not just to do with Daphne; I also liked the idea of going there because it was where my parents met. It's one of the very rare stories my mother told me about my father -that it took him a month of seeing her there every day, before he had the courage to say a word to her. Not that they were allowed to talk inside the Reading Room - silence prevailed, of course -but he managed to say hello to her outside, in the courtyard at the front of the museum, and in the following weeks, they progressed to sitting on a bench together, and then having tea around the corner, and eventually (her word, not mine), they were married.
She had just started working in the Reading Room when they met; my father was already a librarian there, and he'd been working at the museum for many years, a solitary man, more at home with books than people. At least, I imagine he was, but my mother never really talked about their life together, and there was something about her silence that made it impossible for me to ask her to tell me more. He died the week before my fourth birthday - I don't know exactly how or why, she just said he was ill, he had a weak heart, and then he died, and for some reason, I didn't feel able to ask her for further details - and I can't remember much about him, just that day he took me to the library, and a trip to the theatre, and the feel of his rough tweed jacket against my cheeks when he carried me in from the cold.
My father was a writer, as well as a librarian, I know that, but I don't have any of his books, I don't even know if they were published; I think not, because I've never found any record of them, and I've searched for a very longtime. All I have are half a dozen small black leather-bound notebooks, filled with his tiny, indecipherable handwriting, which I found tucked away in my mother's desk, after she died. I was clearing everything out before giving up the lease; not that there was much to clear in a little two-bedroom attic flat. Still, I'd felt lucky to live there, at the very top of a big old Hampstead house called Bay Tree Lodge, which my father had already rented before he met my mother. 'We live on the servants' floor,' my mother used to say, with a small smile curving her lips; but I thought it was by far the best place to be, high above the streets.
As far as I know, my father had always earned his living as a librarian, like my mother, though she said his heart wasn't in the job, but in his writing. And this worried me as a child, in the years after his death, when I thought about him. I imagined his heart as having been weakened and then separated from his body, and somehow contained within the dusty leather covers of an old book, and the dust wasn't good for his heart, it was clogging everything up, slowing his heart down, and then one day it stopped, and he was dead. As for the book that had contained his heart . . . well, I wasn't sure what had become of it, but I knew it was lost to me.
Anyway, although all of this is odd, it is not the odd thing that happened today. It's Valentine's Day, which Paul ignored, because he says it's a load of commercialised rubbish, but then he looked embarrassed when I gave him a card before he went to work this morning; a card I'd made myself, with a red heart on the front, shaped out of rose petals from the back garden, that I'd pressed and dried last summer, just after I'd moved here. That was something my mother taught me to do - to put flowers between sheets of white tissue paper, and then into the leaves of the heaviest book we could find, which was her copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the one I still use it now. I'd wanted to find a romantic quote from Henry James to write inside the card, but nothing seemed quite right, so in the end, I just wrote, 'I love you', and when Paul read it, he said, 'You're such a sweet girl . . . And too young to know the meaning of heartbreak, aren't you?'
So there I was, sitting in the Reading Room today, trying to write an outline of my dissertation, but wondering what Paul was trying to tell me, and not getting anywhere. Then I started thinking about broken hearts, and I wished I'd told Paul that I did know something about them. I knew a little bit about my father and his heart, and also about heartbroken Branwell, who never got to fulfil his dream of coming here to the Reading Room; though in the end, the year before his death, he'd written a letter to his friend, Joseph Leyland, saying that he'd once thought it would be paradise to spend a week in the British Museum, but now he was so depressed, his eyes would roam over 'the most treasured volumes like the eyes of a dead cod fish'. Poor, lugubrious Branwell; if only he'd escaped from home . . .
I scribbled a reminder to myself, to check the references about whether Branwell had ever actually visited London. And then all of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Rachel at another desk, bending over a notebook, writing in it. It was hard to tell, with her smooth dark hair falling over her face, but the longer I stared at her, the more I wanted it to be her, which was not at all what I'd expected to feel. After a few minutes, she glanced up, as if she'd somehow sensed my gaze, pushing her hair away from her eyes, and she smiled at me, almost conspiratorially. I blushed, as if I had been caught out doing something wrong, though of course I hadn't. She didn't know me, she'd never met me, as I'd only started seeing Paul after she'd left him and gone to America. Half an hour later, when I got up to leave the Reading Room, she came after me, or maybe she just happened to be going at the same time, and as we went down the stone steps outside, she said, 'Do I know you? I'm so sorry if we've already been introduced - I'm good at remembering faces, but hopeless with names.'
Her voice was light, with a promise of laughter in it, and she smiled as she spoke. I wasn't sure what to say - I mean, I wasn't completely certain that it was Rachel - so I could hardly tell her that she didn't know me, but I knew her, because I was married to her ex-husband. So I just said that I thought I recognised her from a photograph in the newspaper, the one that accompanied the piece about her new book of poetry, and then I apologised for saying so, for being intrusive.
'That's OK,' she said, and she was close enough for me to smell her perfume, a kind of exotic, expensive scent of amber
; and she wore an amber necklace, as well, heavy beads that shone against her golden skin. 'I never expect to be recognised anywhere, least of all here. I just like spending time in the Reading Room, when I'm working on a new poem. I think of all the other writers who have sat here, and I find it comforting.'
I told her that I was a fan of her writing - that I thought about it a lot, which is true, I've bought her latest book; though of course I didn't say that I keep it carefully hidden in the bottom drawer of my desk, and that I only read her poems when Paul isn't around. But maybe Rachel sensed that I was fascinated by her - because I am, of course; by everything about her, especially when I realised that she looked so like Paul that she could almost have been his sister - and perhaps she found it flattering, without needing to know much more about me, because it was all about her, that was what I tried to make clear when I talked about how much I liked her new book. 'The poems have lodged themselves inside my head, ever since I read them,' I said, 'they're really haunting.'
'That's so good to hear,' she said, 'and it's a very well-timed bit of encouragement. I'm in London for a few days, to see my publisher about another book.'
'Do you think you'll come back to live here again?' I said, trying to keep my voice as light as hers. 'The piece in the newspaper mentioned that you were working at an American university?'
'Well, I'm beginning to miss London,' she said, 'and the fellowship at Rutgers was never supposed to be a permanent one.'
'Rutgers?' I said. 'I was just doing some research into someone whose collection of manuscripts ended up there.' And I found myself telling her about Symington and Daphne du Maurier; the story came spilling out for the first time, and she listened to it all, and it was easy to tell her the details, in a way that it would not have been with Paul, partly because she was good at listening, and also because she said that she was a du Maurier admirer, had been for years.
When she said that - that she was a fan of Daphne - I felt my cheeks flush, and I said, 'You too?' But I stopped myself saying anything else, even though I was burning to know more. Why did I not tell her about Paul? Well, I was embarrassed, I suppose, because I didn't know how to, not at the beginning, and then after I'd told her about Symington, it was much too late to add, 'Oh, and by the way, guess who we have in common?' Also, I had the strangest feeling that we might be allies after all, because we both like Daphne, despite Paul's disapproval; and I wanted Rachel to like me, too; there was something about her that made me wish we could be friends, a kind of warmth and intelligence in her eyes, though I could imagine her being fierce as well; the sort of woman you'd prefer to have on your side, rather than your enemy. Which sounds so childish, doesn't it? But I realised, as we talked - not for very long, only ten minutes or so - that I haven't ever been able to speak like that to Paul. At the end, she said, 'Oh God, is that the time? I'm going to be horribly late for a meeting - I must get a move on.' So there was no awkwardness about her asking my name - it just didn't come up, and then she was in such a rush to go, and flashed another quick smile at me, and said, 'Good luck with Daphne' from over her shoulder as she started running towards the street, which was impressive, given that she was wearing patent black leather boots with very high heels. Fuck-me boots, I thought to myself, and then I felt faintly ashamed, but also a twinge of discontent as I looked down at my own shoes, a pair of scuffed grey canvas sneakers with pink laces that suddenly seemed childish.
It was only afterwards, when I got back home, that I started to worry about meeting Rachel. It's not just that I didn't tell her the truth about myself - but the fact that we came across each other at all is making me feel uneasy. I mean, it seems too much of a coincidence, doesn't it? Of course, Paul would say that there's no such thing as too much of a coincidence - that that's the point about the coincidental; it is simply a haphazard event in a random universe. He might also say to me, as he often does, 'Don't read so much into things.' Which is a bit rich, coming from a man who spends his working life reading books, picking them apart, and ferreting meaning out of them.
But I can't talk to Paul about it, and there isn't anyone else to tell, either, which seems really weird; I mean, I must be freakish to have ended up as solitary as this. And, also, if I'm honest, I'm starting to feel anxious that I somehow imagined the whole thing, especially as Rachel is the name of a du Maurier character; the central pivot to the entire plot of My Cousin Rachel, which also hinges on whether the narrator in the novel is actually unhinged. But surely this couldn't be possible, me imagining the entire encounter, because I don't feel delusional in other ways. And the physical details were so clear: Rachel's black silk shirt and her narrow jeans and the gleam of her glamorous boots; her dark red lipstick, the same colour she'd chosen for the bedroom walls; her nail varnish, which was even darker, almost black; and her eyes, which are grey-green, like Paul's, cat's eyes, I thought, as I looked at them. Or is that part of the problem of being delusional? That the details of the delusions feel completely real and true?
OK, I've got to stop thinking like this, or I'll drive myself crazy. I happened to meet a woman called Rachel in the Reading Room of the British Museum. She happened to be my husband's ex-wife. She also happened to be interested in Daphne du Maurier, like me, like thousands and thousands of other people . . . That's all. These things happen in a big city: sometimes the universe chimes, very quietly. That's what my tutor once said to me, at college, when we were discussing the role of coincidence in Victorian novels. I'd not really understood what he was suggesting then, but now, it seems like a wonderfully helpful phrase. Anyway, it's not as big a coincidence as in Jane Eyre, when Jane discovers that the strangers with whom she has sought refuge are, in fact, her cousins. It's simply one of those occasional happenings in an ordinary life; a marker amidst the random chaos of the everyday, a small yet helpful sign on a map that might provide a clue to where I am going to, as well as where I have come from.
That's what I was telling myself just now, anyway. And then I went upstairs to run a bath, before Paul arrived home from work (and where the hell is he? It's getting really late . . .) I undressed, and decided to light an expensive-looking candle that I found last night when I was tidying one of the cupboards in the spare bedroom. I suppose I was imagining a romantic scene, with me lying naked in the water, in the gentle glow of candlelight, when Paul came into the room to find me. But a few seconds after putting a match to the candle, as the wax was softening, I suddenly recognised the fragrance that was beginning to rise from the flame. It was the scent of amber, Rachel's perfume. It was her candle that I was burning in the room.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Menabilly, November 1957
'This is Lady Browning,' said Daphne, when the Buckingham Palace telephone operator finally answered her call.
'Shall I try to put you through to Sir Frederick?' said the man's voice, sounding faintly puzzled. 'It's nearly midnight, Lady Browning, so I would imagine he's left his office for the evening.'
'I'm sure you're right,' said Daphne, trying to keep her voice calm and authoritative, though she felt like weeping with panic and anxiety. 'The thing is, there's an emergency, and I need to speak to someone in charge, and it's terribly urgent.'
'Wait one moment,' said the operator, and the line seemed to go dead for a few seconds, but then there were faint clicks, and Daphne gasped, wondering if somebody was eavesdropping on the call.
'Hello?' she said. 'Hello, is anyone there?'
She drummed her fingers on the table in the hall, and glanced behind her, very quickly, but it was impossible to tell what might surround her, at the edges of the dark corridors and blind corners, beyond the small pool of electric light in which she was standing.
At last, another voice came on the line. 'Lady Browning?' he said. 'This is the night duty officer. Is there anything I can do to help?'
'You must listen to me very carefully,' she said, taking a deep breath, attempting to steady herself. 'There is a plot against the Royal Family - a life-threa
tening plot, that you must take seriously. It is my duty to warn you, and your duty to act upon my warning.'
'Can you give me some more details?' said the man, his voice still smooth.
'The details of the plot?' she said.
'Yes, that would be helpful.'
As he spoke, she felt herself lose the thread of her thoughts, they were unwinding and tangling inside her, and the details of the plot were obscured, even though they had been so vividly clear in her mind a little while ago.
'Lady Browning?' he said. 'I'm not quite clear whether you are Lady Browning?'
'I' m so sorry,' she said, after a long pause. 'I'm not sure, I'm a little confused . . . I must go now.' She put the telephone down without saying goodbye. It was as if she had once known the answer to the man's question, but the precise outline of the plot was now gone and forgotten, the same feeling that consumed her when she woke in the early hours of the previous morning, after a recurring nightmare, in which she knew she had been expected to do something important, something involving a meeting, and money, and specific figures, not the watching figures from that nightmarish day at the British Museum, but numbers, arithmetic, like the sums she did in her red accounts book at the end of every week at Menabilly, adding up everything she had spent. Afterwards, she woke with a sense of being spent, of everything slipping away from her, of being mistaken and confused and utterly forsaken.
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