Daphne

by Justine Picardie

  All of his letters to the solicitors were typewritten in 1930, and he also referred to having a secretary, but by 1957 he was writing his letters to Daphne by hand (luckily, his prose is mostly very legible). There is a printed letterhead, giving his address - Newlay Grove, Horsforth, Leeds - and a phone number: 2615 Horsforth. I had to restrain myself from ringing it when I got home, because Paul's got one of those old, black bakelite phones that had belonged to his parents - not that I know what the code for Horsforth would have been - but in the quiet of the house, when it seemed like the city was sleeping, and only the foxes were out, it felt almost as if I could reach across the years, as if Mr Symington might still be waiting for me in Newlay Grove, sitting by the telephone.

  And there are so many questions I'd like to be able to ask him. Why, for example, was he prepared to give hints to Daphne about his suspicions concerning the forgery of Charlotte's signatures on many of Branwell's early manuscripts of the Angrian chronicles, without quite naming the culprit? He comes pretty close to accusing T. J. Wise, his co-editor on the Shakespeare Head edition of the Brontës' collected works, telling Daphne that he did almost all of the work on these volumes, because Wise was not only in ill health, but subsequently in what Symington describes as 'the fog and mist' surrounding the exposure of his forgeries in other fields. Still, it's not an explicit accusation.

  A bit later on in the correspondence, he also told Daphne that she was right to suspect that some of the poems attributed to Emily were, in fact, by Branwell, 'and I did get a great protest some thirty years ago when I dared to say so'. Where, I wonder, did the protest take place? I've not been able to find reference to it, or to Symington's claims on behalf of Branwell, in any official Brontë scholarship or academic research. More letters follow in quick succession, with Symington selling Daphne some of his library, which I would dearly like to get my hands upon, including several privately printed volumes of Branwell's letters and stories.

  And then his letters stop for over a year - in line with Daphne's. It is Daphne who goes silent first, without any explanation, after a series of apparently cordial letters, but Symington comes to an abrupt halt, also. Why didn't Daphne immediately follow up his leads about the forged signatures? I mean, surely she should have been able to discover more about what could have been - could still be, perhaps - one of the greatest literary scandals for decades?

  But the odd thing is, instead of diving into that investigation, she stopped writing to Symington, and in 1958 she wrote a collection of short stories instead, which she called The Breaking Point. It's out of print now, but I've got a second-hand copy, and the stories appear to have nothing to do with Symington, or Branwell, or any of the Brontës. But even so, they're really intriguing, because this is the book she wrote when she broke off her correspondence to Symington, though her later letters suggest that she was still studying Branwell's manuscripts in 1958. And re-reading the collection, it's as if her stories are a response to his, though her own life is woven into it all, as well . . . and death; there's so much death in this book.

  It's a very sinister collection, about murder and paranoia and men in trilby hats, and the most macabre story is 'The Blue Lenses', which describes a woman who is recovering from an eye operation. When her bandages are removed, and icy blue lenses are fitted to her eyes by the surgeon, she feels no pain. But afterwards, to her shock, everyone around her appears to have an animal head. Her favourite nurse, Nurse Ansel, has a snake's head, which she first sees as a reflection in the mirror, its pointed barbed tongue swiftly thrusting and swiftly withdrawn, as its twisting neck comes into view over her shoulders, through the looking glass. Then her husband Jim appears with the head of a vulture, with a blood-tipped beak and a neck encased in flabby folds of flesh, and when she finally sees herself in the mirror, the eyes that stare back at her are doe's eyes, and her timid deer's head is meek, bowed as if ready for sacrifice.

  You could use these stories, perhaps, as evidence of Daphne's distrust of the world around her, as well as her uncertainty of how to interpret what she saw. That's what Paul might say, I suppose, if he read the stories, not that he would, and I'm not going to ask him to. I couldn't bear to listen to him being dismissive about something that matters so much to me; which is maybe why all of this is still my own secret, that has nothing to do with my husband. But I keep thinking about the name Daphne chose for the husband in 'The Blue Lenses', Jim, which surely is an echo of Jim Barrie; and Barrie's wife was called Mary Ansell, which is too close to Nurse Ansel to be coincidental.

  I've been making notes on this, and another story from The Breaking Point, which is called 'The Pool'. You don't have to be a genius to link this to her cousin Michael's drowning, which was rumoured to have been suicide, though the Coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death; and there's a suggestion that suicide is a possibility for the narrator in Daphne's story. She's a girl on the verge of adolescence, still allowed into a secret world unseen by adults, which can only be entered beneath the surface of a dark pool hidden within the woods in her grandparents' garden. I imagine this pool as being in the woods at Menabilly, and the girl as Daphne's younger self; though time becomes fluid within the story, shifting and liquid, like the beckoning water of the pool, where a series of ghosts return, passing through it into another world.

  I'm not sure what, precisely, this has got to do with a PhD about Daphne and the Brontës; apart from the fact that she was writing these stories at the same time as doing her research into Branwell. I really need to talk it through with someone - and the only person I can imagine doing that with is Rachel. I've just got this feeling that she'd be able to make sense of it. The likelihood of such a conversation ever taking place is almost as remote as me being able to discuss any of this with my parents, but even so, when I read 'The Pool', they feel closer, like the shadows and phantoms in the woods, making their way back to the secret world.

  When I was a student, I remember hearing a lecturer who said that writing is about negotiating with the dead - and maybe that's what reading is for me. I'm certainly not talking very much to the living. Paul says I'm too isolated; but then he seems to have isolated himself from me. I never imagined that marriage could be so lonely; before I met Paul, I thought that finding a husband was a way of never being alone again. Which just goes to show how imagination can fail you; or if not fail you, then lead you astray.

  Was this what Daphne felt, when she decided to return to Branwell, after The Breaking Point? That she would be safer with historical facts; that these would guide her away from the slippery edges of the pool, towards solid ground? Not that Branwell was very solid; but perhaps she thought that she could believe in him, like Mr Symington; or maybe it's just me that needs to believe in all of them.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Menabilly,

  Par,

  Cornwall

  7th February 1959

  Dear Mr Symington,

  Your parcel and letter arrived this morning, for which many thanks. You have been put to some trouble in searching through your library, and you have not told me the price of the Reverend Brontë's book. I trust that the enclosed cheque for five guineas will cover this.

  I must admit, I am a little bewildered, as some years have passed since the publication of your Shakespeare Head edition, as to the actual whereabouts of many of the manuscripts included in your excellent edition. I know that T.J. Wise's collection is in the British Museum, and the Bonnell collection was bequeathed to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth. The Brotherton Collection is, I presume, in the hands of Leeds University. But what, and where, is the Law collection? I have heard it mentioned, but its fate seems uncertain.

  I would very much like to track down every one of Branwell's manuscripts, in this country and in America, and have them photostated and transcribed (at any rate, all those that were not transcribed in the Shakespeare Head edition). Do you think this might be possible? I suppose that photostats cost a mint of money, but it would nevertheless be
a useful step forward. I see that most of Branwell's stories of Alexander Percy, alias Northangerland, have never been transcribed; and I wonder if a comprehensive account of this curious character might throw some light on the development of Branwell's own dual personality.

  I have also been giving some thought to your suspicions that various of the early Angrian manuscripts bear a forged Charlotte Brontë signature on the title page. It would be very interesting to have an expert in handwriting and forgeries study these Angrian manuscripts, and finally pronounce on whether they were written by Charlotte or Branwell.

  I do look forward to coming to Yorkshire some time in the not too distant future, and meeting you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Daphne felt a sense of relief when she finished typing her letter to Mr Symington, for at least she now had a plan with which to proceed. Doubtless it would be expensive to copy the manuscripts, but she was determined to go ahead, whatever the expense, for surely this would be the key to Branwell, that would finally open the locked doors that had kept him hidden for so long. What Daphne did not say to Symington, but had finally admitted to herself, was that she must find a way of bringing her research to a conclusion, for though she had tried to set Branwell aside for a time, she could not free herself of him. It was as she had thought at the start of her research - that they were wedded in some way, as inextricably linked as she was to Tommy, and there was no means of evading that. And if she did not tell his story, as she had already vowed to do, then it would haunt her; he would haunt her, sending her round and round in circles, until she was altogether lost, with no sense of how to find her way out again. So it seemed to her that each manuscript she found and decoded would be a candle in the darkness, and if she followed them, step by step, they would lead her to safety, at last.

  It was twilight when she walked back across the lawns to the house - five o'clock, and the winter's evening stretched ahead of her, like the long shadows of the trees beyond her writing hut, the place where she planned to be buried. Daphne knew she should be relishing her solitude: Tommy was working in London, seeming more able to cope by himself there, and Tod was away, also, visiting friends, so the house was empty, after the two maids went home. She reminded herself then that being alone like this in Menabilly - her safe house, her blessed refuge - was the closest she would ever come to bliss.

  She lit a cigarette, and sat down at the piano in the Long Room, picking out a tune, her father's favourite, 'Clair de Lune'. Yet she could not settle, and paced the room, quietly, stealthily, almost certain that the veil between the living and the dead, the past and the present, had worn so thin in Menabilly that she might slip through whatever it was that divided them; or perhaps those others who inhabited the house, and her memory, could come forward to greet her; the others that she sensed, just ahead of her, or behind her, close enough to hear their quiet breathing.

  The maids gossiped about ghosts from a faraway past, all the way back to the Civil War, when Menabilly was a Royalist stronghold. But Daphne imagined summoning up the spirits of those who were hanging on the walls, captured in framed family drawings by her grandfather, or in photographs, the same ones that had stood on the mantelpiece of Gerald's bedroom at Cannon Hall; a shrine to his family, grouped around a silver cross, and he had kissed each of the photographs every night, and muttered a little prayer to all of them, the dearly departed dead. The same photographs were now set along the mantelpiece of the Long Room in Menabilly, but at their centre was another picture, of Gerald in adulthood, a cigarette in his hand, his expression slightly mocking, his hair combed back from his face, his parting as sharp as a razorblade.

  Daphne felt his eyes on her, even when her back was to him, and as she spun around to meet his gaze, she thought she saw him move, very slightly, behind the glass. One of his eyebrows was raised, and he seemed to look at her more intently, coolly, appraisingly, with a faint smile on his lips. She turned away from him again, but her neck was prickling.

  And he was still watching her. 'I will always be watching over you,' he said to her, just before he died, but also long before that . . .

  The day he saw her from the cliff, staring down at her, he was as silent then as he was now, though she knew that he could see her; that he could not take his eyes off her, that he saw everything.

  Daphne closed her eyes, she did not want to see her father, she did not want to remember this, but she could not get away from him, from that summer's day, when his shadow fell across hers. It was the year she was fourteen, just after Michael died, and the family had gone on holiday to Thurlestone, and Geoffrey was there, with his second wife. Daphne was still a child, paddling and shrimping on the Devon beach, but then one day she glanced up, and Geoffrey was smiling at her, and her heart missed a beat. Why had she felt that way? Geoffrey was far closer in age to her father - thirty-six years old, an actor like his uncle, and he and Gerald were the greatest of friends; they looked so alike that they might have been brothers. But that smile had been the start of a secret between the two of them, Daphne and her cousin. As August progressed, so did their understanding, and she knew that no one else must know of it. After lunch, when everyone stretched out on the lawn like corpses under their rugs, Geoffrey would come and lie beside her, and take her hand in his, but no one could see them, the blankets hid everything; and at night, he would hold out his arms and dance with her at the Links hotel, singing along to the orchestra as it played 'Whispering', and the room spun around and around.

  On the morning he left for London, he said to her, 'Come along and have a last look at the sea.' So she'd gone with him to the beach, just the two of them, hand in hand, though they did not speak, until suddenly he turned to her and said, 'I'm going to miss you terribly, Daph.' She nodded, but nothing more, she could not speak, Geoffrey was kissing her, his tongue pushing between her lips. Then at last he pulled away from her, looking up at the cliff, and as she followed his gaze, she saw her father standing there, staring down at them, as if he might jump, or swoop upon her like a bird of prey, and she felt a blush spread, livid, over her neck and face. 'There's Uncle Gerald, spying,' said Geoffrey, laughing a little, 'we'd better go, before he fetches a shotgun.'

  Gerald had not accused her of anything afterwards, but from then on, something in his attitude to her changed. Geoffrey had been packed off on a lengthy theatre tour of America while her father had stayed at home in London, and there were moments when she felt his eyes upon her, for no particular reason, and she would blush, again. By the time she was fifteen or sixteen, Gerald used to take her out to lunch or dinner at least once a week, and they'd walk into a restaurant, hand in hand, all eyes upon them. 'We make a handsome couple,' he'd say, smiling benignly.

  Daphne sighed, and sat down in the big armchair her father called 'Barrie's chair', the one that Uncle Jim had always chosen for his own particular seat on his visits to Cannon Hall, when she sat beside him, and he told her the secret adventures of Peter Pan, and she wished so hard that she had been born a boy, like her cousins. Oh, those boys, they were everything she wanted to be, though sometimes she confused that with wanting them.

  'Don't grow up, my darling girl,' her father used to whisper to her; but she could not stop herself, she could not help letting him down. When she was twenty, Geoffrey had come to stay at Cannon Hall while his wife was in a nursing home, and at night, while everyone else was safely sleeping, he had kissed her in the drawing room, even more passionately than before. Daphne had kept her diary from the time, locked away in a secret drawer of her desk, and she went and got it for herself now, flicking through its pages, as she sank back into Barrie's chair. Were it not for the evidence of her own younger handwriting, she would find it hard to believe the carelessness of her behaviour with Geoffrey; and yet there was a strange clear-sightedness in her observations as well. It had seemed so natural to kiss Geoffrey, she'd written in her diary, immediately after their encounter in the drawing room, and he was so sweet and lovable, but it was also just like kissi
ng Daddy. 'Perhaps this family is the same as the Borgias,' she wrote, 'a sort of incest . . .' And Daphne remembered the insouciance with which she described her theory to Geoffrey at the time, in between kisses. 'Daddy is Pope Alexander, you are Cesare and I'm Lucrezia,' she said, and he laughed, and said, 'Stop talking nonsense, you little fool, it doesn't become you . . .'

  Poor Tommy, he'd been so honourable and good and true when he came sailing into Fowey harbour, looking for the girl who'd written his favourite book, The Loving Spirit, not realising the web of deceit she'd spun around her. He sent her a note, saying he'd known her cousins at Eton, and asked if he could take her out on his boat. She said yes, and they spent an afternoon together at sea, a fine bright April day, when the waves sprayed over them, and the cold, clean wind blew all muddied thoughts of Geoffrey and Gerald away. That evening, the wind had dropped just as the sun was disappearing, and they watched the sky fade to the palest pink, and then a pearl grey, and the sea was calm, the colour of the sky, and she felt she could do anything, with this man by her side, she felt filled with a sudden, wild joy.

  In the following weeks, he returned often to visit her in Fowey, where she was staying alone in Ferryside, and it had been such a glorious courtship; it seemed like the sun shone whenever they were together, walking along the footpath from Boddinick to Pont, and then over the rickety footbridge, where the creek narrowed, and the swans glided to their nests. 'Let's not stop yet,' she said, wanting to go on walking with him, and they went up through the woods to Polruan, pausing at her favourite vantage points on the way, so that she could show him the views out across the silvery water. 'The most beautiful sight in the world,' she said to him, and he kissed her, saying, 'Almost as beautiful as you.' He fell in love with Fowey at the same time as falling in love with her, and she loved him all the more for that, telling him that when she first came here, and caught sight of Ferryside, and the estuary beyond, she'd remembered a line from a forgotten book, where a lover looks for the first time upon his chosen one, and declared, 'I for this, and this for me.' She met Tommy's eyes as she said the words, standing high above Fowey at St Catherine's Castle, and he repeated them back to her, catching hold of her hands as he did so.