Daphne

by Justine Picardie

  'One of the many odd things about Mr Symington,' she said, eventually, as we were getting closer to Haworth, 'is that his papers - everything relating to him, really - are kept in a file closed to researchers at the Brontë Parsonage. I've asked to see them, several times, but always been refused. So it seems even more extraordinary that you, of all people, should have stumbled across his legal correspondence with the Brontë Society. I'd love to take a look at those letters, if you wouldn't mind?' She glanced sideways at me as she spoke, catching my eyes, just for a second, no more than a heartbeat, and then I turned away, feeling as if I had been somehow caught out.

  'Well, they're back in London,' I'd said. 'I didn't bring the file here with me . . .'

  'Oh, never mind,' she said, lightly. 'I'll just have to go back to Plan A. Breaking and entering into the Parsonage library to get at the Symington papers!' Rachel laughed, and I laughed, too, glad that the moment of tension between us had been broken.

  It wasn't until I listened to her deliver her lecture - which took place not in the Brontë Parsonage, but just around the corner, in the local Baptist chapel - that I realised she might not have been joking. Of course, I could have been making too many assumptions about the subtext of her speech - she wasn't explicit about her interest in Mr Symington; indeed, she only mentioned him once. But she did talk about a missing notebook of Emily Brontë's poems - known as the Honresfeld manuscript, Rachel explained, because it was last located in the collection of Sir Alfred Law, a Conservative MP who lived in a Lancashire mansion named Honresfeld. 'Emily's notebook contained thirty-one poems, handwritten over twenty-nine pages, including fifteen of the twenty-one poems she published in her lifetime,' said Rachel to an attentive audience, 'and one of these is "Self-Interrogation", which has been a particular source of inspiration to my own work as a poet.' She paused, smoothing her dress down over her legs, just for a second or two. 'A reproduction in facsimile of this poem, and the rest of the Honresfeld manuscript, was included by a former curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, a Mr J. A. Symington, in his Shakespeare Head edition of the poems of the Brontë sisters, published in 1934. After this date, there is no record of the fate of Emily Brontë's notebook. I imagine that I am not the only person in this room who would dearly love to discover what became of what I believe to be the most precious of the missing Brontë manuscripts . . .'

  As she spoke, I felt her words were addressed to me, but I kept my eyes down, though there was a bubbling excitement inside me. Part of me wanted to get on the train to London, and get back to my desk as fast as possible, to check those solicitors' letters from the Brontë Society to Mr Symington, and see if they contained any references to the Honresfeld manuscript. But I also knew that this was extremely unlikely, given that Emily's notebook was not part of the Brontë Parsonage collection, but that of Sir Alfred Law. It was not impossible, however, that the local archive of Symington's papers in Leeds might contain some important clue that I'd missed when I went there earlier this year - after all, I'd gone through it so quickly, searching only for papers relating to Branwell and Daphne du Maurier. But I also began to realise that Rachel might be on to something, if she could somehow gain access to the material relating to Symington in the Brontë Parsonage. And if she was going to do that, then I wanted to be in on it, too.

  After her talk, Rachel was surrounded by a gaggle of admirers, asking her to sign their books of poetry, so I hovered to one side, watching her writing her name in bold black ink, over and over again, until at last she'd finished. 'Well,' she said to me, raising one of her elegantly shaped eyebrows, 'are you up for a bit of research in the Parsonage library? The librarian is going to be out for a little while, but I've promised we won't touch anything while he's not there . . .'

  I couldn't believe that we were actually going to be allowed into the library without supervision - I'm sure it's strictly against the rules - but Rachel had managed to talk her way in, which isn't surprising, because she's got this quietly seductive charm that gets under your skin, and she's beautiful, too, in a way that makes people want her to like them, as if her approval would validate them. 'I'm here for such a short time,' she said to the librarian, as he unlocked the door for us, `and obviously, I'll follow strict academic protocol at all times, as will my research assistant.'

  'Since when was I your research assistant?' I said to Rachel, after the librarian had gone, having first locked us in, with an apologetic explanation that he was obliged to make sure no one else could gain access to the library.

  'Do you want to be here or don't you?' she said, and I just nodded, and although it might sound as if we were being short with each other, it wasn't like that at the time; it felt like we were comrades, which was the most exhilarating of sensations.

  I'm not sure how she knew where to start looking - I guess she'd done some discreet research, on previous trips to the library, when she was editing a new edition of Emily Brontë's poems for an academic press - but she headed straight for a large filing cabinet, in the furthest corner of the room. 'I reckon we've got half an hour before the librarian comes back,' she said, pulling out a bulging foolscap file from the bottom drawer, 'so let's divide this between us, and start reading.'

  'And what if he does come back before then?' I said.

  'Don't fret, child,' she said, and put a sheaf of papers in my hands. We sat down on either side of a large mahogany table -as Victorian as everything else in the room, which is in a late nineteenth-century addition to the original Parsonage building - and started reading and making notes. 'We could really do with a photocopier in here,' said Rachel, as she scribbled furiously, but I didn't answer, I was too busy writing out extracts from Symington's letters, dating from the period when he was still curator and librarian at the Parsonage. The papers were scrambled - they weren't filed chronologically, or indexed; in fact, they looked as if they'd been put there decades ago, and then left untouched, if not forgotten - so it was hard to make sense of them, given that we were working separately, having divided them randomly between us. But what did become clear, slowly, was that Symington had spent several years asking for access to Sir Alfred Law's collection at Honresfeld, and was finally granted permission, just a few months before his dismissal from the Brontë Parsonage. By the time he was preparing his Shakespeare Head edition, he had borrowed many of the manuscripts from the Law collection, including the notebook of Emily's poems, which he arranged to have copied as a facsimile reproduction.

  I read my way through several letters he wrote to his publishers, concerning the volume of Emily's poems - which was a supplement to the original scheme for the Shakespeare Head edition, and contained the facsimile of her notebook -and then another letter, soon afterwards, referring to the death of Sir Alfred Law. So it seemed to me to be perfectly possible that Symington could have borrowed the notebook of Emily's poems, and seized the opportunity offered by Sir Alfred's death to keep hold of it, rather than returning the Honresfeld manuscript to the estate. 'You know, I really think that Symington was the last known person to have the Honresfeld notebook,' I said to Rachel. 'We're getting closer and closer here'

  It was then that we heard footsteps outside the door, and while I looked up, panic-stricken, as the key rattled in the lock, Rachel swept all the papers off the table into her capacious leather handbag. By the time the librarian was in the room, she was calmly flicking through a copy of the Brontë Society Journals, with the sort of cool you'd expect to see in a film about spies, though not in a respectable academic.

  'How are you getting on?' said the librarian.

  'Slowly,' said Rachel, with another of her most charming smiles, and as she turned towards him she revealed a crescent of golden-skinned cleavage, 'but I have come across this very useful article in volume 23 of the Brontë Society Journal, in which Daphne du Maurier wrote an epilogue, or what she termed, "Second Thoughts", to her previously published book on Branwell Brontë.'

  'I didn't know you were interested in Branwell?' said the libr
arian.

  'Not especially, but my assistant is. Might she take a copy of this?' He nodded, and she passed it over to me. 'I've marked the most relevant passage,' she said, and I started reading it aloud, partly as a way of covering my embarrassment; though once I'd started, I felt rather stupid. 'Both Charlotte and Branwell's appetite for reading was prodigious,' Daphne had written, in an essay I'd never even heard of until now, 'and that Branwell suffered from a surfeit of ill-digested matter is proven from his long manuscript "The Wool is Rising". I had the whole of this manuscript transcribed - the transcription is now in the Parsonage Museum - and I defy any student to read through these interminable unpunctuated pages without suspecting that the young author's verbosity was somehow compulsive; words poured from him without pause and often without meaning, just as they do at times from the insane.'

  My voice trailed away, and the librarian rather kindly suggested that I go with him to use the photocopier, so that he could explain to me how to use it. 'It's rather idiosyncratic, you see,' he said, and as I followed him out of the room, I wondered what, exactly, Rachel might do while we were gone.

  And that's what I'm thinking about now, at four o'clock in the morning, turning everything over and over in my mind, getting more confused, not less. I didn't get a chance to spend any time alone with Rachel afterwards; first we were with the librarian, and then the curator came to say hello to her, and then she was taken off to have tea with various dignitaries from the Brontë Society. She was staying the night in Ha-worth in a little bed and breakfast, within sight of the Parsonage, but nowhere had been booked for me, of course, given that I was just an afterthought, so I said it was no trouble, I'd catch the train back to London.

  Which leaves me here, alone in Rachel's old bed, while she is there, with her cache of Symington's letters. She hasn't rung, and I can't get in touch with her, because I don't have her mobile number, nor do I even know the name of the place where she's staying; not that I could ring there at 4 a.m., anyway. And everything seems completely mystifying, most of all, Rachel's motives. Why did she include me in her raid on the library, given that she could have done the whole thing herself? What was the point of sharing that secret with me? Yes, I know she wants to see my cache of Symington's letters, but even so, they're not necessarily vital in her hunt for Emily's notebook, especially now that she's got all the Symington papers from the Parsonage.

  No, there's something else going on; almost as if she needs me to be complicit with her. Or is that reading too much into it? And how does one read too much into a situation like this? Isn't it all in the reading?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Menabilly, July 1959

  'Have you any idea how much blood there is, when a person is shot?' said Tommy. 'It spills everywhere - it takes for ever to clean up.'

  He was standing by the fireplace in the Long Room, holding his revolver, and then he lifted the gun, and pressed its muzzle against his head. 'I might as well kill myself,' he said to her. 'I can't go on like this any longer.'

  Daphne was unable to move, to speak, but Tommy seemed frozen, too, his finger to the trigger, yet motionless, and his voice was flat, his face hard, and then suddenly, his eyes filled with tears, and he was crying, sobbing, his hands shaking, like his shoulders. And Daphne had gone to him, taken the gun from him, as easily as a rattle from a baby; then she walked out of the room, very quickly, locking the door behind her, and phoned the doctor in Fowey, who drove straight to Menabilly.

  'It's a cry for help,' the doctor said to her, after he'd spent a little time with Tommy, 'not a serious suicide attempt, he was probably too drunk to know what he was doing.' But Daphne wasn't certain what her husband had intended to do; though it occurred to her that he could have shot her as easily as himself, he was a soldier, unafraid to use a weapon, and yet he looked so desperate, so uncertain.

  'It's Rebecca, all over again,' she said to Tod, after the doctor had finally left, just before midnight, and Tommy was sedated and sleeping in his bedroom. Tod shushed at her, told her not to be so silly; not that Tod had ever liked Tommy, but she tried to reassure Daphne, like the doctor had done, and sent her to bed at last with a cup of hot milk, as if she were a child again, home at Cannon Hall.

  Daphne woke early the next morning, having dreamt of her father. 'It's not fair!' he'd said, tears in his eyes, sitting on the bed beside her, large as life and resurrected, younger than Daphne now. 'It's not fair that you're marrying Tommy. What's to become of me?' Gerald's voice seemed too real to be a dream; and his words were those that he'd used, in reality, twenty-seven years ago, when Daphne had confirmed to him what she'd already written in the letter to her mother, that she and Tommy were to be married, and as soon as possible.

  'Daddy,' whispered Daphne, opening her eyes to the watery dawn light in her bedroom. 'It's not fair, Daddy.' She focused on the portrait of Gerald that hung on the wall opposite her bed, and his collection of lucky charms that he'd kept in his theatre dressing room that were now arranged on Daphne's dressing table. Today was her wedding anniversary, but it felt funereal; Tommy in his bedroom, on the other side of the corridor, still sedated after the drama of yesterday evening; too close for comfort, yet also entirely remote from her.

  Daphne closed her eyes again, but that was no better; for she could not escape the vision of Tommy with his gun, and the scene played over and over again in her head, like an endlessly repeating reel from a film, one of the old melodramas her father had appeared in towards the end of his career, except sometimes there was a shift in the action, and Tommy pointed the gun at her head, not his own.

  'I must be strong,' Daphne said to herself, but she did not feel strong, she did not know how to nurse Tommy through this latest crisis. She wondered whether it would be better if he simply returned to London, to the Snow Queen's flat in Covent Garden; though she half-suspected that his misery might stem from the recent ending of that affair, an ending engineered not by himself, but by the Snow Queen, who could have tired of his mood swings, which were worsening since his retirement from Buckingham Palace.

  She thought of her mother, of what she would have done, in Daphne's place, for she was as icy as the Snow Queen at times, yet the perfect wife, or so it seemed; apparently able to turn a blind eye to Gerald's infidelities, except for once, when he had overstepped the mark. 'It's too much!' her mother had shouted at Gerald, one evening, loud enough for Daphne and her sisters to hear through the bedroom walls. 'I saw your car outside Gertie Lawrence's house this afternoon, it was there for hours, and her bedroom curtains were drawn! And don't tell me you were in a private rehearsal with that little slut; don't humiliate me even more, by behaving as if I were stupid, as well as unattractive.' Afterwards, her mother's voice had been muffled, as if Gerald had taken her in his arms, and held her close to him; that's what Daphne had thought at the time, though now she imagined her mother burying her face in a pillow, refusing to look at Gerald, muffling her sobs in the feathers.

  'I don't know how to do this,' whispered Daphne into her pillow; not that she was sure what 'this' might be. Last night, once her fear and anger had ebbed away, she was seized by a sudden impulse to laugh - it was so absurd, really, and such a cliched scene - and then she started feeling guilty again; as if she had betrayed everyone, not just Tommy, but her mother and her father, too, by falling in love with Gertie; for could it be this that was the real root of Tommy's despair?

  Today, though, she wasn't certain if she knew the meaning of love, or its consequences; for she felt empty, as if everything had been drained away from her, like a medieval blood-letting, and Gertie meant no more, or no less, than a character in one of her novels. And it was a good plot - more original than the episode with Tommy last night - the married woman who falls in love with her dead father's lover, a story there for the telling. But that doesn't make it true, thought Daphne; even though the stories in her head, both written and unwritten, had felt more true to her, at times, than her so-called real life.

  Sh
e got out of bed, still in her nightgown, and walked quietly to Tommy's door, listening, but there was no sound from within, and she hoped he was still sleeping; that he would go on sleeping until later this morning, as the doctor had promised he would do. It was still too early for the doctor to call, or for Tod to be about, so she decided she might as well get on with some work at her desk in the alcove of her bedroom. That way, she would hear if Tommy started moving about his room.

  When she pulled back the curtains, the sky was overcast, the day looked to be dreary, and she longed to be absorbed in writing a good story again; something to take her out of herself, out of this mess, this insoluble problem of Tommy; to lose herself in someone else's life. But Branwell seemed to be going nowhere - or rather, she was getting no closer to him -and neither was she proving any more successful in her efforts with Mr Symington. What on earth was the man doing, stumbling about in Yorkshire? There was still no sign of the promised manuscripts, or answers to her many questions; and as for her ambitious plan to provide evidence of Wise's forgeries, and uncover a sensationally talented novel by Branwell, and beat Miss Gerin to publication - well, all of this seemed impossible now.