Daphne

by Justine Picardie

  I hope that your worries will be over soon,

  With kindest regards,

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Cornwall, August

  It was my wedding anniversary yesterday - our first anniversary, though Paul and I don't seem sufficiently united to describe anything as 'our'. It's his house, his car, his job, his book. Yes, his new book: he's started writing one about Henry James and George du Maurier. 'I might as well,' he'd said, 'given that you didn't take me up on the suggestion for a PhD. It's a terrific idea, after all . . .'

  Anyway, he asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate - though he seemed almost amused when he said this, as if it were a private joke - and I said I wanted to go to Cornwall, to get away from London. 'And get closer to Menabilly?' he said. 'Well, why not. . . Fowey might be as good a place as any, I suppose.'

  So he chose a sweet little hotel in Fowey for us to stay in, overlooking the water and the harbour. We drove down here the day before yesterday, in terrible traffic and torrential rain, hardly speaking the whole way, and arrived after dark, and the darkness seemed to seep between us and spread around us, a black cloud of misery. But in the morning we woke up to sunshine, it flooded in and spilled into me, and I felt filled with hopefulness, as unexpected as the high blue sky, and I turned to Paul in bed and kissed him. And he didn't turn away. 'I love you,' I said, and I meant it, as the silvery light from the sea came through the open windows and the ripples were reflected in the mirror opposite the bed, and so were we, the two of us entwined together in the looking glass.

  Afterwards, we ate breakfast on an outdoor terrace, and the air was so clear after London, with a gentle breeze, and across the water I could see Ferryside. And my optimism spilled over, because instead of keeping quiet about Daphne, I said to him, 'Do you see that beautiful house on the other side of the estuary? That's Ferryside - Gerald du Maurier bought it for family holidays in the 1920s, and it's where Daphne wrote her first book.'

  He nodded his head, thoughtfully, and said, 'Have you been to Fowey before?'

  'Only once,' I said, 'when I was a child, too young to remember much, but I've seen pictures of it, and looked at maps . . .'

  'And of course you've read du Maurier's books,' he said.

  'Yes!' I said, so grateful that we could finally acknowledge this, without him getting angry, 'I've read them over and over again, and the thing about her novels is that you begin to feel you inhabit the places that she describes; she gives so much detail, it's like walking into the landscape of someone else's mind.'

  Paul just looked at me and smiled, and that's when I seized the moment and told him that I wanted to walk along the coast from Fowey to Polridmouth beach, on the outskirts of the Menabilly estate.

  The sky was still blue, and the wind was behind us as we took the road out of Fowey, down the hill to Readymoney Cove, where Daphne had lived in a little white cottage at the beginning of the Second World War, just before she'd made enough money from Rebecca to lease Menabilly from the Rashleigh family. I told Paul all about this as we walked -about how she'd started writing Rebecca in Egypt in 1937, while her husband Tommy was stationed there, and then when war broke out she'd come with her children to Fowey, where her two sisters and her mother were living in Ferryside. Her father was dead by then, and Tommy was fighting abroad, so Daphne was alone with her daughters, Tessa and Flavia, and her baby boy, Kits.

  'How do you know all of this?' said Paul.

  'Reading,' I said, 'though du Maurier's memoirs and autobiographical writing is quite opaque, there's quite a lot of information, especially in some of her essays. But it's like searching for the hidden pieces of a jigsaw puzzle or clues to a treasure hunt.'

  'So what's the treasure?' asked Paul.

  'I don't know,' I said. 'And that's the point, isn't it? You don't know what you're going to find at the end of a treasure hunt, and you don't even know where you're going, until you've got to the end.'

  By then, we'd left the cove, and were climbing the stepped footpath up to the little ruined fort on the other side, St Catherine's Castle. It was steep, and I was feeling dizzy, because I'd run up the first half of the steps, and maybe that made me a bit light-headed.But anyway, when we reached the castle walls, I suddenly remembered being there before as a very small child, or at least, I felt I'd been there, but maybe I was imagining it, because there was something dream-like about the memory. I was holding my mother's hand, and she said, don't go too close to the edge; but I wanted to look over the edge of the castle walls, all the way down to the rocks and the waves below. So we'd stood there together, looking down at the sea, my hand in hers, and she said . . .

  'What are you thinking about?' said Paul, interrupting my reverie.

  I told him I was trying to remember if I'd been here before with my mother. 'And there was something she said to me, but I can't remember it, even though it feels so close, it feels as if it's just around the corner of my mind.'

  'Déjà vu,' said Paul. 'There's a physiological reason for it, apparently. Something to do with a trigger to the optical and neural pathways . . .'

  I didn't reply - I couldn't think of anything to say - but I didn't want him to think I was being silent, again, so I just took his hand and kissed it. 'Sweet girl,' he said, and then we started walking again, hand in hand, along the coastal path, towards Menabilly, while the swifts soared high above us, in a display of aerial acrobatics.

  'I'm not sure if this is the way Daphne came, from Ferry-side, when she first saw Menabilly,' I said. 'There was an old driveway in those days, at a crossroads just outside Fowey, that led to the house, so she might have come along that. But I don't think you can go that way now, and anyway, we'd be trespassing . . .'

  Paul laughed, and said he thought that that was the plan -to do as Daphne had done, and creep through the overgrown woods to get to the main house. 'How do you know about that?' I said, surprised, because I hadn't told him the full story about the first time Daphne had discovered Menabilly, when it was deserted and half-choked by ivy, and she'd had to get up very early one morning as dawn was breaking and walk for miles through the abandoned estate, where the undergrowth was running wild, an orgy of wilderness, just as she described it in Rebecca.

  Paul looked embarrassed, briefly, and then said, 'Rachel told me. She was always passionate about Daphne du Maurier.'

  'So have you been here before?' I said, suddenly gripped by the thought that they'd come this way together, and he'd never told me, even though he'd seen it all before, and heard it all before, everything that I said to him today, on our wedding anniversary; Rachel had already told him everything, they had already shared our day, and why had I not realised that, why had I blinded myself to the obvious?

  He turned his head away from me, but I couldn't let this pass, I had to know, I told him, I had to know. He paused, and looked out to sea, and then he said, very fast, 'Yes, we went to Menabilly, to a cottage in the woods. Rachel wanted to stay there for a few days while she was working on some poetry. It was an old gamekeeper's cottage that you can rent for holidays, though it's not widely advertised. Rachel found out about it - she was very persistent. Apparently, it's the only way you can see Menabilly, by renting this spooky little cottage in the grounds. She loved it there, but I thought it was rather sinister . . .'

  'I can't believe you've never told me this before now,' I said. 'Why would you not tell me?'

  'I don't know,' said Paul. 'I mean, I do know - there are all sorts of good reasons not to tell you. I didn't want to talk to you about Rachel, and I especially didn't want to talk about that holiday. It was the last one we'd had together, just before we split up. In fact, it was then that she told me she'd accepted a job in America, which seemed like the beginning of the end for us; I felt like she was abandoning me. And then, when you started obsessing about Daphne du Maurier, I thought, Jesus, it's happening all over again, it's like a nightmare, like history repeating itself, how could I have not realised what I was doing, when I married you.'
/>   'But I'm not leaving you,' I said.

  'Not yet,' he said.

  'What's that supposed to mean?' I said. 'You've got everything the wrong way round - it's you that's been abandoning me.'

  We hadn't stopped walking - actually, we'd been walking faster than before, as if we were trying to get ahead of ourselves, or maybe run away from each other. The sky clouded over, the swifts disappeared and as it began to rain, I felt like crying; I couldn't believe it, everything seemed to have gone so wrong, and I didn't understand why. By the time we reached the path down to Polridmouth beach, it was raining hard, a torrent driven into our faces from the glowering sky, and the rocks were slippery, and I wished Paul would reach out and help me, but he was in front of me, not looking back. I called out to him, but he didn't hear, he was too far in the distance. So I followed, quite slowly, and when I got to the beach, I went down to the edge of the sea, because the tide was a long way out, and there was this mass of litter that had been washed up on to the sand, left there by the last high tide, plastic bottles and broken glass and odd trainers, mixed with greying, decaying seaweed; it was all so depressing, really, in the rain.

  And even when I realised I could see the remnants of the shipwrecked boat that had inspired Rebecca, it didn't seem romantic or mysterious, just like a dead animal's rotting bones. I can't imagine there was so much litter when Daphne lived in Menabilly and walked here every day, and I didn't like to think of this rubbish-strewn beach as being Rebecca's sanctuary, either, even though this was where Daphne imagined her, a place of freedom and escape, until she was shot dead by Maxim in the old boathouse just above the shoreline. The house is still there, but it's obviously been smartened up, it looks like a bijou holiday cottage, with ruffled chintz curtains at the modern aluminium windows, though outside, beyond the terraced patios and neat flower-beds, the lake remains the same, with swans and ducks gliding across its dark surface in the rain.

  That's where Paul was standing, staring at the water, on a little bridge across the stream that runs from the lake to the sea. I looked at him and thought, how does it all go wrong? He loved me this morning, and now he doesn't; he loved me when he met me in Cambridge, and then he didn't. And I just didn't know how to make sense of it.

  Eventually, I started walking in his direction, and he came down to meet me on the sand, and I didn't say anything, I just buried my face in his chest; it was so miserable in the pouring rain, like being drenched in the cold water from a sluice, and I wanted him to put his arms around me. 'I'm sorry,' he said, and sort of patted me on the back.

  I should have told him then about how I'd met Rachel - I know I should have said sorry, too - but I felt too weary to say anything, really; and too confused. I couldn't see the point of talking, so I just stayed where I was, closing my eyes against the rain, shutting out everything, shutting out the grey sky and the grey sand, the scattered litter and the waves, churning against the shingle. Eventually, Paul suggested that we head back to Fowey, and when I didn't move, he tried to lift my head up, so that he could see my face. 'Come on,' he said, 'you'll feel better after a hot bath.'

  'I don't want to go yet,' I said. 'I want to see Menabilly . . .'

  He frowned, and sighed, then shrugged his shoulders and said, 'Well, I suppose we could walk up the path for a bit, into the woods, and at least get out of the rain. I don't suppose anyone will be out looking for trespassers today, not in this weather. But for God's sake, if we do come across a gamekeeper or whoever, let me do the talking. I'll say I've rented the cottage before now, and just wanted to take another look at it, for old times' sake.'

  And it was as simple as that, really. He remembered where the path was, into the Menabilly estate, through a padlocked gate marked 'Private'. We climbed over the gate, and then we were in the woods almost immediately, the trees forming a canopy, high, high above our heads, like a green cathedral. The rain still dripped down, but not as heavily as before, and there was a sort of sighing sound all around us; I couldn't tell whether it was the wind in the leaves, or the waves breaking on the beach, but muffled now by the dense undergrowth. On either side of the path were rhododendrons, but not like any I'd seen before; these were huge giants, over fifty feet tall; some had toppled over and their pale roots were exposed, looking somehow indecent, and there was a sort of sour smell to them, if you got too close. Neither of us spoke, until the path forked, and Paul said, 'Menabilly is up there, to the left, and the cottage is to the right.' He'd stopped walking by then, and we were standing beside a pool that was covered in emerald algae, though not entirely, so you could see the black water between the islands of green. The pool looked very deep, and dangerous, but maybe that was illusory, because of all the shadows cast over the water from a strange giant-leaved plant, too exotic to be growingin an English woodland. I took a few steps along the right-hand turning, just far enough to be able to see the cottage, which was like a witch's house in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, except it was built out of granite, rather than gingerbread, and the trees were all around it, pressing in, making a circle with those dense, dark banks of sinister rhododendrons.

  'Come on,' said Paul, 'we'd better turn back.'

  'But I want to see Menabilly,' I said, again, even though I knew I must be sounding like a whiny, irrational child.

  'It's private property,' he said, irritated. 'It's not part of some du Maurier heritage trail, for God's sake, with a tearoom attached, and a shop selling Rebecca's azalea-scented handkerchiefs. Just leave it alone now, we've come far enough.'

  'OK, you go back to Fowey,' I said, 'I don't care, you don't want to be with me anyway.'

  'Don't be so adolescent,' he said.

  'Go on,' I said, suddenly furious. 'Tell me to grow up! That's what you want, isn't it?' And I came back down the right-hand path, to the fork where he was waiting for me, but I wasn't going to go back to the beach with him, I was heading in the other direction, for Menabilly. He called after me, but I didn't turn around, not until it was too late, and he had gone, and I was alone on the path, walking up a slope, my footsteps muffled by fallen leaves. I was still furious - I wanted to shout out loud, to stamp my feet and shriek, to ask why Paul had brought me back to the same place where his first marriage had ended. It seemed like a monstrous thing to do, and I found myself muttering the word to myself, 'monstrous, monstrous', like it was a mantra or something. And then suddenly, I turned a corner and saw grey stone walls rising out of a clearing, and gracefully symmetrical windows, looking out on to the trees . . . and there she was: Menabilly.

  I gasped, and stood still, holding my breath, as if even the softest of sounds would alert the inhabitants of the house to my presence, or the house itself, which seemed to be breathing, too. Everything was quiet and still, until something came crashing out of the trees, and I ran from the path, heart pounding, to hide myself in the undergrowth. The crashing had lasted for only a few seconds, and then I saw what had been making all the noise, it was just a pair of pheasants, running down the path together, looking as startled as me. For a moment, I thought I should run after them, and catch up with Paul and try to make everything right between us. But I didn't, I just sat down in a small gap between the rhododendrons, waiting for something, I don't know what. But there was nothing, just the silent house, and the sighing in the trees, and after a while, that was enough, that was all I needed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Menabilly, October 1959

  Daphne woke with a sense of rising anxiety, curdling her stomach, coming up into her throat, sour and corrosive. She forced herself to get out of bed, to stick to her routine, a quick breakfast, and then straight to her desk in the writing hut, until lunch. But when she sat there, surrounded by the mounting piles of paper ± the newly prepared transcripts of Branwell's manuscripts from her diligent researchers at the British Museum; the opaque letters from Mr Symington ± she felt even more panicky. She knew she must start writing her book ± she must win the race and publish ahead of Miss Gerin ± but she felt ov
erwhelmed by her research, and Branwell seemed even more elusive than before, slipping out of her fingers in these disordered piles of paper.

  She had taken an extra sleeping pill last night - she felt she must sleep, she would gomad if she lay awake, night after night - but even so, she was plagued by nightmares, in which the BrontëÈ manuscripts crumbled away in her hands. And as they fell to pieces, dissolving into dust and ashes, the Snow Queen watched her, and laughed. 'You don't have the right touch,' she said to Daphne, and her face was cold, even as she smiled. 'You never did. Does the phrase "deathly prose" mean anything to you? You know what I am referring to, don't you?'

  'Tommy doesn't love you any more,' whispered Daphne in the dream, but her voice was barely audible and she could feel the Snow Queen's icy breath, making her hands freeze, her mind grind to a halt; and she could not write, she could not think straight, she was like the boy in the fairy tale, caught in the Snow Queen's grip, imprisoned inside an ice palace, trying to solve an impossible problem, a Chinese puzzle with no solution.

  In the daytime, the dream receded a little, but not enough; and she felt furious with Tommy, though not openly, for the doctors had reiterated that he must be in a calm environment if he was to recover from his breakdowns. Daphne tried to smile at him, tried to sound soothing, like a mother nursing a sick child. But when she was alone - when she escaped to her writing hut, between mealtimes - she seethed, knowing that he was still drinking, hiding his bottles from her in the cupboard of a disused bathroom, on the far side of the house; hiding everything, his letters from the Snow Queen, and his treacherous love for her. And it was in these moments, too, that Daphne's rage mingled with fear, when she was tormented by the suspicion that the Snow Queen had got the best of Tommy - his charming urbanity, his wit and intelligence -while Daphne was left with the dregs, the broken bits and pieces of himself that he brought home to be put back together again. Except Daphne did not know how to make her broken husband whole, he was as insoluble a problem as Branwell; and when they sat together at lunch today, she felt a kind of icy contempt for him, or a numb emptiness, as if she was beyond caring, as if in his weakness, he could no longer touch her.