Daphne

by Justine Picardie

  Freedom: that was the thing, to be free, not endlessly caught up on a stage, tangled and tripping over the wires; and was that what Michael had sought, unleashed in the water, unlocked from the words? Perhaps that was the only way forward, to be free of everything, of everyone, maybe even to be free of Branwell. . . But could she cut herself loose, at last?

  Menabilly,

  Par,

  Cornwall

  10th January 1959

  Dear Mr Symington,

  I hope this New Year finds you well. I have had so much pleasure from the Brontë books that I purchased from you - is it over a year ago, already? - that I have been wondering if you have any other volumes or material that you have not yet disposed of which I might be able to add to my collection?

  I am afraid it is still only a hobby for the winter evenings, as I have not yet been able to devote sufficient time to a properly worthwhile book about Branwell Brontë and I know that it would be essential for me to make a trip to Yorkshire to devote myself to the research. I have not given up on this idea altogether, but domestic problems have intervened. Sadly, my mother passed away last winter. Since then, my husband's health has been indifferent, my son has just left school and is starting his first job, and meanwhile I have been working on a new collection of short stories, which proved to be a distraction from Branwell.

  Nevertheless, I have not given up studying the Brontë manuscripts in your Shakespeare Head edition, nor those in the British Museum, though they place an appalling strain on the eyes!

  I shall be very interested to hear how your own research is progressing.

  With kindest regards,

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Newlay Grove, January 1959

  Quite unexpectedly, a letter had arrived for Mr Symington, from Daphne, after her long silence. She did not apologise for the protracted delay in replying to his last letter, which he had sent over a year before, and Symington considered giving her a taste of her own medicine, and leaving the letter unanswered. But as he reread the letter, several times, despite his previous feelings of annoyance and betrayal by Daphne - who had picked him up and then dropped him, as if he were nothing but a stray dog - he found himself beginning to warm to her again. Not that he wanted to be too encouraging to her; not after the year he'd had, with that long spell in hospital after he fell and broke his arm and dislocated his knee, trying to move a box of manuscripts from the attic down to his study.

  The fall had been a shock - he spent several hours on the floor, unable to move, waiting for Beatrice to get home - but in a curious sense, it was also a relief. While he was in hospital, one of the doctors had diagnosed him as having 'a weak heart'; there was no remedy for it, apparently, other than calm and rest. Beatrice had been more sympathetic since then, aside from the occasional tart remark about being run off her feet while he sat there with his feet up; but she appeared to be mollified, also, by their tacit understanding that he would no longer be engaged in examining the contents of his boxes. His son Douglas had been summoned to the house, to pack everything away back into the attic, and afterwards, Symington felt almost liberated, as if Branwell had been locked up in the attic, as well, with no chance of escape, and no means of voicing his complaints.

  Occasionally, Symington had a momentary pang of guilt, thinking of Branwell's fate in the attic, shut away from the gaze of the world, and sometimes he woke in the night, his heart pounding, certain that he heard shuffling footsteps in the corridor outside the bedroom, or a low moaning noise, or a lunatic's laughter, coming through the ceiling, or closer, getting closer, right at the door, while Beatrice slept on, peacefully. Symington was uncertain which would be more terrifying: Branwell's ghost, or living burglars, though in daylight, he consigned both to the realm of fanciful imagination, or, more likely, a symptom of indigestion, which is what Beatrice suggested, when he told her that he had been suffering from nightmares. 'Best to steer clear of cheese in the evening,' she told him, not unkindly, and sent him to bed with a cup of milky Ovaltine.

  During his convalescence, Symington tried to avoid reading anything about the Brontës, and browsed through some of Beatrice's books, instead, including several by Daphne. He enjoyed My Cousin Rachel, though he was frustrated by its inconclusive ending, which did not confirm whether the beautiful Rachel was an evil murderess, intent on poisoning those who stood in her way, or the innocent victim of her cousin's paranoid delusions. Similarly, he found Rebecca far more absorbing than he had expected, and once he had started it, he did not want to stop, but there were elements of the novel that were as exasperating as they were intriguing. Why did the narrator not have a name? Presumably it was to make Rebecca seem more alive, more in control, from beyond the grave, than her living successor, but even so, thought Symington, wasn't this too contorted a device? And who had started the fire that burnt Manderley to the ground? Was Mrs Danvers the arsonist, or not? At least you knew where you were with Jane Eyre when the fire was clearly ignited by the first Mrs Rochester.

  Symington would have liked to question Daphne on these matters, to ask her directly about her motives as a writer, and how she conceived those cunning plots and brooding characters. Where, he wondered, had Rachel and Rebecca sprung from? He could hear no echo of their voices in Daphne's measured letters to him. But much as he was drawn to the idea of engaging Daphne in a direct dialogue about her books - a dialogue that would have a certain romance to it, given its basis in his privileged position of access to her - he was also aware this would be impossible. For to do so would be an admission that he had read her books; and he was loath to let her know this, as it might shift the precarious balance of power between them, making her the expert, and him the amateur, rather than the other way round.

  It was, perhaps, for similar reasons that Symington waited for over a fortnight before replying to Daphne's letter, and when he did so, he tried to confine himself to the briefest of notes. Yet he could not bring himself to be entirely discouraging; for if she was to commence her researches again, then he should be keeping an eye on her. As for her request to buy more material from his library, Symington was uncertain which was more pressing, his financial needs or his decision to keep Branwell safely locked away. Finally, after much deliberation, he chose one of the dullest books in his library, the collected works of the Reverend Patrick Brontë; let the father speak for the son . . .

  Newlay Grove,

  Horsforth,

  Leeds

  Telephone: 2615 Horsforth

  29th January 1959

  Dear Miss du Maurier,

  Thank you for your letter. I was glad to hear that you have not abandoned Branwell altogether; though to be truthful, I do not think it would be worth your while to go to the trouble of making the long journey to Yorkshire, for there is little prospect of you finding a shred of new evidence about Branwell.

  But if you are intent on making such a visit, I will gladly be available to help you in any way I can, as your discreet comrade in arms. Meanwhile, I am still searching through my files of manuscripts, but in the interim I enclose 'Brontëana: the Collected Works of the Rev. Patrick Brontë: edited by one of the founders of the Brontë Society, Mr J. Horsfall Turner. I trust you will find it of very great interest,

  Yours sincerely,

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Hampstead, May

  After the morning that I went into Paul's study and saw those emails on his laptop, I felt somehow compromised - as if I was the one with the guilty secret, not him. I was relieved that he didn't appear to realise that I'd read the emails, but I couldn't help worrying that he'd find out somehow, that I would give myself away. So I suppose I've been even more withdrawn from him than usual for the last few weeks, trying to immerse myself in work; though actually, it's not difficult to get absorbed, it's easier to escape into my research than anywhere else. I've been burrowing around the Internet, up half the night, night after night, searching through the catalogues of various remote outposts of library archives, following
ancient trails of Daphne's letters - there are dozens to her publisher and editor and agent, for she was an assiduous correspondent - but I'd just about given up on finding Symington's letters to Daphne. Then a couple of days ago I came across a reference to the fact that she'd destroyed many of her private papers in a huge bonfire when she was forced to move out of Menabilly, after her lease came to an end in 1969, and as soon as I knew that, I started worrying that she'd burnt Symington's letters, along with loads of other stuff. After a sleepless night of obsessing about what might have been lost in that fire - and her reasons for starting it, given that it seemed eerily like the work of Mrs Danvers - I decided that I needed to stop going around in circles, or at least, to try to consider things from a different angle. Hence my train trip up to Yorkshire again, but this time to Haworth, which seemed like a good place to think about the mysterious Mr Symington.

  That's where I went today - well, yesterday, because it's after midnight now, but I'm too excited to sleep - and the journey there was far more nostalgic than I'd expected, because I'd only ever done it once before, with my mother, when I was about thirteen. I'd just read Wuthering Heights, which I loved, and was halfway through Jane Eyre, and my mother suggested that we went to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, to see where the books had been written. She was good like that, my mother. She made it feel like an adventure, rather than an educational outing. That was her at her best - she could talk to me about the books, and somehow through the books. It kind of made up for the times when she was silent, except now I'm beginning to wish that I'd asked her what she was thinking, during all those long silences; because I'm sure she was thinking about something, and it was clamorous inside her head . . .

  Anyway, the thing that surprised me about the Brontë house when I'd gone there as a child, still surprised me yesterday, because although I'd imagined the parsonage as being high up in the middle of the moors, miles away from anywhere, and as isolated as Wuthering Heights, in fact it turns out that the Brontës lived close to Keighley, a big, bustling Victorian town. I suppose it was Mrs Gaskell who really started the myth that they were completely cut off from the rest of the world - that's what my mother had said to me, on the bus ride to Haworth from Keighley station - though Charlotte also did her bit to suggest that they were in a remote wilderness; a landscape which existed more in her mind, I think, than it ever did in reality. But maybe she needed to imagine it that way?

  The parsonage wasn't too crowded - I managed to arrive just as a minibus of Japanese tourists were leaving - and I pottered around the museum by myself, trying to stop thinking about my mother and where she might be now and whether she was with my father. It reminded me of when I had just started junior school, and our teacher talked to us about heaven - I'd imagined my father floating through the Reading Room at the British Museum, up above where my mother was still working as a librarian, higher and higher, up to the glass roof, and then through it, just fading through it, into the sky on the other side. It's hard not to think about death when you're in the Brontë parsonage, not just because of all the deaths in the family, but also because of the immediate view over the graveyard, those grey ranks of headstones, hundreds of them, pressing up against the garden walls, as if they were waiting to be let in; or maybe it's the other way round, maybe they were waiting for the occupants of the parsonage to join them in the graveyard.

  Yet there's such an odd feeling of aliveness there, as well -as if the Brontë children had just put down their pens and papers, or come back from walking the dogs, as if they were just around the corner, a little way out of sight, laughing quietly at everyone else, hands over their mouths.

  I spent a longtime halfway up the stairs at the parsonage, gazing at Branwell's portrait of his three sisters, where he has painted himself out of the picture, turning his figure into a sort of pillar. Which is odd, in a way, given that he was the very opposite of being a pillar in the family, though I suppose his unstableness and alcoholism drew his sisters together, closing ranks against the outside world, as well as against Branwell. Perhaps that's what the picture suggests, Branwell locked away inside his solitary column, separated from the girls, even though he is right beside them.

  Then I looked at Charlotte's dresses and jewellery in her bedroom, wondering how they could have survived for so long after her death, and I thought about my father, and how I had so little of him, just his notebooks that I couldn't read, and a small photograph album with a few blurred pictures of my parents' wedding (only of the two of them - their parents were dead by then, though I often wonder why no one else was in the picture?) and several more of me as a baby, with my father gazing at me worriedly, as if I were a very small wild animal that might bite if he came too close.

  When I went into the other bedroom at the front of the parsonage, which Branwell periodically shared with his father, from his earliest years into adulthood, it was impossible not to think about how suffocating that must have been for a son who dreamt of escape, who spent his time drawing maps of faraway lands, planning battles and romances. No wonder poor Branwell went mad and drank himself into oblivion, cooped up in the parsonage, his only way out through painting pictures and telling stories of his alter ego, Northangerland, the swashbuckling earl with three wives and a talent for piracy, and a ship that takes him around the world. And in the end, Branwell found an exit from his father's bedroom only in death, in a coffin that carried him no more than a hundred yards through the garden gates and into the graveyard.

  I looked at Branwell's sketches of Northangerland, all of them wildly romanticised versions of himself, now displayed in a back room that was said to be his studio; and it felt dark and airless in there, or was that my own, equally romanticised version of a more complicated truth? And I started to get frustrated, staring at the little books that were locked away in a glass cabinet in Branwell's studio, so that you could just see a couple of pages from the Brontës' childhood stories of Angria and Gondal, with those incredibly beautiful, intricate illustrations made with delicate mapping pens. Eventually, my eyes were aching from trying to read their microscopic handwriting through the glass, and I was beginning to fantasise about staging a smash and grab robbery, at which point I decided it was probably time to get out of there, and buy myself a cup of tea and a tuna sandwich, before catching the bus from Ha-worth back to Keighley train station.

  But instead of ending up in one of several Brontë cafes on the village high street, I wandered into a second-hand bookshop and started browsing. I was looking for books on Branwell to add to my collection, but there was nothing new, and then I picked up one at random, which turned out to be a dusty biography of a former president of the Brontë Society, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, who died in 1923. Inside, written on the frontispiece in barely visible copperplate, there was a date - Christmas 1925 - and an inscription, 'To J. A. Symington'.

  I was so excited that I let out a small shriek, and the grey-haired man behind the counter looked up from his newspaper. 'Found something interesting?' he said.

  'Well, it is to me,' I replied, and handed over the money for the book (an absolute bargain at £2.50).

  'You're keen on Robertson Nicoll, are you?' said the bookseller, looking surprised.

  I told him I'd never heard of Nicoll, or his biographer, a Mr T. H. Darlow, but it was Symington that I wanted to know more about. We ended up talking for a while - I explained that I was a student, and I was looking for research material for my dissertation - and eventually, the bookseller said 'It's your lucky day; I've taken a liking to you,' and he disappeared into the back room, before emerging, five minutes, later, with a cardboard folder and a wide triumphant smile. 'Here's your Mr Symington,' he said, and told me to take a look inside. And there they were: faded carbon copies of Symington's letters to Daphne du Maurier, and some of his other correspondence as well, that had been tucked inside a small box of his books, including the Nicoll biography, bought by the bookseller at a local auctioneer's in north Yorkshire.

  'Thirty
quid, and they're all yours,' he said. 'No one else is interested in Mr Symington. That folder has been in the shop for two or three years gathering dust - it's about time it found a good home.'

  I wrote out a cheque and thanked him, feeling a bit dazed -I mean, it seemed so unlikely - and then realised that I'd just missed my train. But it didn't matter, nothing mattered, apart from the fact that I'd found Symington's letters, or rather that they had found me, just like Daphne's had done in Leeds. It was as if I'd had another sign - I'm not sure who from, but it meant something, like an acknowledgement that I was on the right track.

  And the letters are even more interesting than I'd expected, as I discovered when I read through them all, several times over, on the slow train home. It's not just the correspondence with du Maurier that is so intriguing; there are also Symington's replies to a firm of solicitors acting on behalf of the Brontë Society, stapled to the original legal letters he'd received from them, which were written over the summer of 1930, just after he'd stopped working as curator and librarian at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. The solicitors were threatening to take action against Symington, and accusing him of stealing various manuscripts and relics from the museum: thirty-one items, including original Brontë letters and manuscripts, and a set of keys for the locked cases in the Parsonage library and museum.

  Despite the seriousness of the allegations, the legal correspondence appears to have had no conclusion - at least not in the letters I bought - and I wonder if the Brontë Society eventually decided to give up pursuing Symington, and their lost manuscripts; perhaps they felt that a public court case would be too embarrassing, that these matters should be kept secret. Certainly, by the time Daphne started writing to Symington, twenty-seven years after this suppressed literary scandal, she had no idea of the cloud over his departure from the Parsonage, and he gives nothing away to her, though reading between the lines, you can sense that he's in a difficult position, because she starts asking him about the whereabouts of certain manuscripts, which she has been told by a Mrs Weir, a retired secretary to the Brontë Society, are most likely to be in Mr Symington's possession.