Daphne

by Justine Picardie

  And I got everything mixed up when I was with Paul -getting obsessed with the relationship between Daphne and Symington, when I should have been paying more attention to what was going on between Paul and me; or maybe between Paul and Rachel. I still don't understand the state of their relationship; when I think about it now, it seems like a nation state, and I'm an illegal immigrant who somehow stumbled across their borders.

  I'm mixing up my metaphors, aren't I? And I know I'm probably still not thinking straight, and although there's a certain liberation in that, I don't want to let my thoughts twist in on themselves. That's why my first instinct was to start working as a librarian, after Paul told me I needed to get a job and find somewhere else to live, and, by implication, someone else to love. I thought it would be soothing, to spend my days putting books in alphabetical order; that indexing and filing would be a useful way to smooth out my problems. But when it came to it, I decided I didn't want to fall into following my parents, not without trying something else first. I can see that working in a bookshop might not seem the boldest of alternatives to librarianship, but it's a start. And unlike libraries, you have to talk in a bookshop, and that's been good for me, though it's a struggle sometimes. Customers come in and ask for advice on what they should buy as a birthday present for a melancholy teenage daughter, or an irritable great-uncle, and I do my best to be helpful, to make useful suggestions.

  This morning, a woman said to me that she was looking for something to read when she went into hospital for an operation. 'I need a book to save my life,' she said, half-smiling. 'And I don't mean the Bible, or any religious tract.'

  I looked at her and I said, 'What about Jane Eyre?'

  'What about it?' she said.

  'Well, it's about being a survivor, isn't it?' I said.

  She laughed, and shook her head. 'I want something slightly more cheerful.'

  'So that rules out Wuthering Heights,' I said. 'And probably Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel, as well.'

  'Daphne du Maurier?' she said. 'That's not a bad idea. I could do with a bit of romantic escapism.'

  I thought about telling her that Daphne du Maurier wasn't necessarily escapist, nor was her writing particularly romantic - it's much too menacing for that - and that actually, Jane Eyre has a very happy ending, which most people found cheering in some way. But I stopped myself, and went off to the far corner of the shop to find a copy of Frenchman's Creek, du Maurier's most straightforwardly romantic novel, and when I came back, the woman said, 'Thank you, my dear, that looks just what the doctor ordered.'

  So I was feeling reasonably pleased with myself and wondering if I might turn out to be quite a competent bookseller, after all. And then I saw Rachel walk into the shop. I don't think she had expected to find me there - because she looked as surprised as I did; her cheeks flushed red, and she put her hand to her forehead, almost as if she were taking her own temperature, to see if she was feverish. And as I looked at her, looking at me, I suddenly guessed that she'd come from Paul's house - their house - and they had been talking about me. Perhaps that was just me being childishly self-centred; they might have had better things to talk about, or maybe she hadn't been with him, and the entire episode was coincidental. But anyway, once the thought had lodged itself in my head, it wouldn't go away.

  'Hello,' I said to Rachel, because it wasn't a big enough shop for us to pretend that we hadn't seen each other. 'Can I help you?'

  She raised an eyebrow, as if trying to regain her usual composure and self-possession. 'I don't know,' she said. 'Can you?'

  Suddenly, I found her incredibly annoying. 'Rachel, don't be arch with me,' I said, 'and please stop manipulating me.' Which struck me as one of the bravest and boldest things I've ever said to anyone; pathetic, I know, but you have to start somewhere. 'I suppose you've already heard that Paul and I are separating. It wouldn't surprise me if you've just come from his house, and the two of you have been discussing me. I must seem like a problem that needs to be got rid of.'

  'It's not like that,' she said.

  'Like what?' I said, and folded my arms, to stop them from trembling.

  'Look, do you want to talk?' she said, and I said no, I was at work, and it wasn't appropriate. 'Inappropriate because you're at work, or because my ex-husband is now your ex-husband?' she said, and smiled at me.

  There was something about that smile that was so beguiling and seductive that I wanted to laugh and to be seduced again, even though I'd hated her a minute ago. But I stopped myself because I knew that if I fell for Rachel's charm, I'd be back where I started again; which would be hopeless - it would be like falling into someone else's scheme of things, instead of my own. Not that I have a scheme, but even so . . .

  'Well?' said Rachel, reaching out to touch my cheek.

  'I just don't get you,' I said, which wasn't a very elegant turn of phrase, but I was feeling flustered. 'I don't see why you dragged me into your burglary of the Symington papers from the Brontë Parsonage.'

  'I thought you'd be interested,' she said, letting her hand drop again, by her side.

  'Well, of course I'm interested,' I said, 'but then you disappeared. So I'm an accessory to your crime, but with none of the proceeds.'

  'I'm surprised at you,' she said, 'I thought you'd be more enterprising, and come after me.'

  'I don't want to come after you,' I said. 'That's the point. It's been bad enough coming after you with Paul. I'm not going to chase you over some old manuscripts. Did you find what you were looking for, anyway? The notebook of Emily Brontë's poems?'

  'The Honresfeld notebook,' she said, and a wistful look passed over her face. 'There are some very interesting references to it in those papers that I borrowed from the Brontë Parsonage.'

  'Borrowed?' I said. 'I imagine that's how Symington would have explained his thefts. "Borrowed in the interests of academic research . . ." '

  'Don't be such a boring child,' said Rachel. 'And I returned the Symington file on the same day that we were there, as it happens, before anyone had noticed that it had gone. Anyway, aren't you interested to know that Symington was the last person to have the Honresfeld notebook? He borrowed it from the Law collection, supposedly in order to have it copied as a facsimile for his Shakespeare Head edition. He mentioned it in several letters in the 1930s, and then it disappears from sight. Sir Alfred Law died childless in 1939, and no one knows what became of his collection - whether it was sold and dispersed to other private collectors, or whether it was passed down to another branch of the family. But wherever the Law collection went, Emily's notebook never turned up again, and I'm desperate to find out what Symington did with it. As far as I can see, he didn't return it to the Law collection at any point . . .'

  As she talked, I was finding myself getting interested, despite my vow not to be sucked in again. 'I already knew that Symington had taken the notebook,' I said, not wanting Rachel to think that she'd discovered something new to me. 'But I wonder if Symington sold it to Daphne du Maurier, along with the other Brontë manuscripts that she bought from him?'

  'That's what I've been wondering,' said Rachel, 'so it's a shame you didn't tell me you were going to be making an expedition to Menabilly. We could have gone together, and done a bit more research . . .'

  When she said that, I felt angry again, thinking of how Paul had told her that we'd been to Cornwall last month; and that they had been talking about me. And yes, I know that sounds childish, because I should have been the one who told Paul about my encounters with Rachel; I shouldn't have let him discover that from her, rather than me. 'Rachel,' I said, trying to keep my voice steady, 'you can't possibly believe that we would find a lost Brontë manuscript in Menabilly. Daphne moved out of the house in 1969.'

  Rachel clicked her tongue, impatiently, and said, 'I know she left Menabilly, but she moved down the road to Kilmarth, and there might be someone who remembered what became of her library. Did she leave it to her family, or sell it, or what?'

  'Apparently she ha
d a huge bonfire of papers when she was forced to leave Menabilly,' I said, slowly. 'I've always thought it sounded a bit like a re-enactment of the end of Rebecca, like Mrs Danvers setting the house on fire, or Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre . . .'

  'Surely you're not suggesting that Daphne du Maurier burnt a priceless Brontë manuscript?' said Rachel.

  'No, I'm not,' I said, 'but I wouldn't be surprised if a few of the letters she had from Symington are missing, and I've sometimes wondered if she burnt those.'

  'Why?' said Rachel. 'It doesn't make sense, when she kept the other letters from him. Which I'd still very much like to read, by the way.'

  'I bet you would,' I said. 'I suppose you need them for a new book.'

  'As a matter of fact, I do,' she said. 'I was going to dedicate it to you.'

  'Why would you do that?' I said.

  'I love the idea of the scandal it would cause in academia,' she said. 'And it seems fitting, as well. You know how interested I am in exploring the idea of literary influences - of what has been passed from the Brontës to du Maurier, and of what passes between women.'

  'I don't think I do know,' I said.

  'Oh yes you do,' she said. 'You just haven't realised it yet.'

  And then she scribbled down her phone number on a bit of paper - a London number, I noticed, not American. 'Keep in touch,' she said, over her shoulder, as she walked out of the shop, 'and don't forget to tell me your new address.'

  I didn't say anything - I couldn't fit the words together in my head, let alone my mouth. But now, I'm thinking of all the things I should have said to Rachel. What did she want from me, apart from Symington and Daphne's letters to one other? Why had she involved me in her relationship with Paul? Was it some sort of strategic move, which formed part of a larger plan that would bring them together again? Or had they ever really given up on each other? Was I just a temporary interloper?

  As for talking to Paul about all of this: well, I want to, but he hasn't come home yet, and it's late, past midnight. I imagine he's with Rachel, wherever she might be; her dark glossy hair swinging over her face, over the curves of her lips and cheekbones, so that I can't see her properly, even in my mind's eye. It's probably just as well, though, that Paul isn't here to answer my questions. If I started talking to him about Rachel, I'd be part of her triangle again, and I know that it would be better to stay out of it. Actually, I'm probably still in it, but edging my way to a different place; slowly, slowly, but I'll get there, eventually.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Menabilly, January 1960

  A new year, a new decade, but Daphne felt caught in the past, not just Branwell's, but her own. She was working on the book for long hours every day, determined to finish it before Winifred Gerin completed her biography, forcing herself into the writing hut every morning, whatever the weather, wrapped up in a blanket in front of her typewriter, while the wind rattled the windows. Sometimes, in the dark evenings, she longed to see a child's face at the window, like Cathy's ghost in Wuthering Heights, or to feel its ice-cold hand reaching out to hers; to hear its voice saying, 'Let me in - let me in', and she would welcome it in, she would welcome the ghost of the young Branwell if he came back to his Cornish motherland. But it was not Branwell that she glimpsed one night at the window of her writing hut, but herself as a child, a frightened child who did not realise that she was seeing herself in the future; a child aghast at the grey-haired woman working in her shabby hut, an old-looking woman surrounded by the dark woods, lost in the wilderness of her thoughts.

  But no, this will not do, Daphne told herself, to dwell on the child she once was. 'Children do not see into the future,' she wrote, in her notebook. 'Remember the Brontës, who wrote their youthful diary papers, knowing nothing of their deaths to come; early deaths, yet whose shadows do not fall across their present, which is long past now.' Yet still her thoughts circled around her, filling the hut in eddying currents of anxiety. Branwell had been troubled by nightmares of phantoms as a child, just like her cousins Peter and Michael, who had seen ghosts coming into their windows at night, the shadow of Peter Pan, or was it their dead father they had seen, or another phantom conjured up by Uncle Jim?

  But Branwell had nothing to do with Peter or with Michael, she must not let these boys get muddled in her head; Branwell's Angria was not the same as Neverland, and she must concentrate on mapping out his world, the infernal world that would provide the title to her biography of him. Her eyes ached, like her head, when she tried to assemble the Angrian manuscripts into order, for though some had been transcribed by her researchers at the British Museum, others remained unreadable. But as far as she could tell, Branwell's history of the kingdom of Angria was told in nine parts, including many poems, covering dozens of sheets of manuscripts, all of them written in microscopic handwriting, and now scattered between various collections: the British Museum, the Brontë Parsonage, the Brotherton Collection, and elsewhere, sold to an unknown number of private collectors by that scoundrel, T. J. Wise, with Charlotte's name forged on the pages, if necessary. It was a gigantic fantasy, this imaginary colony of Angria, founded by Branwell's soldiers and adventurers when he was eleven or twelve years old, split into kingdoms and then united into an empire; Branwell the chief architect of its constitution and the commander of its army, the boy who noted every detail of the Angrian geography and population. He drew its maps, recorded its military and political history, and the life stories of the individual Angrian leaders, describing in minute detail their personal appearances, their hopes and fears and failings and triumphs.

  And yet it had all come to nothing, for even as Branwell's alter ego, Northangerland, had journeyed through the world, Branwell had declined at home in Haworth, burnt up with thwarted hopes and frustrations, while Angria was always just out of reach, a promised land that remained beyond his horizon; a forgotten kingdom now, locked away in airless library vaults and museum cabinets. But would anyone else care about Branwell and Angria? Daphne knew she could not prove his literary worth to the world - his writing was naïve and undisciplined, and what did it matter that Wise had forged Charlotte's signature on some of Branwell's Angrian chronicles, for those pages were no more finely written than any of the others; they were all a rambling childish fantasy. Poor Branwell, whose early talent had never unfurled itself into a novel to equal Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights; poor Branwell, whose only champion was an ageing novelist in a draughty hut in Cornwall; a woman out of time with the outside world, trying to rescue a boy who never came into his own.

  Nor did Branwell's love-life amount to anything, for Daphne was now certain that he imagined the entire affair with Mrs Robinson, the mother of the boy he had tutored, before losing his job for some unspecified act of gross misconduct. As for what that act might have been: Daphne had no proof - for there was nothing but hearsay and gossip about the supposed affair, nor any detail about the circumstances of his dismissal - but she could not help wondering if Branwell had perhaps tried to lead his young charge astray, had made tentative sexual advances towards the thirteen-year-old Edmund Robinson? Something had gone badly wrong for Edmund; he never married, and drowned before he grew old . . . Just like Michael, but what was she to make of that? What was she to make of anything?

  Back in the big house, Tommy was writing a little book of his own, a short history of the Queen's life when she was Princess Elizabeth, covering the period while Tommy had been Comptroller of the Royal household. He seemed calm enough, and as far as Daphne could tell, the Snow Queen had removed herself entirely from his life, from their lives; Daphne must have rescued him from her icy grip, without even realising. Yet sometimes, Daphne found herself wondering if a sliver of glass has remained lodged in his eye, and hers; if perhaps they were both deluding themselves now; and her cousin Peter, too, who was engaged on what appeared to be a never-ending task of editing his family history. 'How goes the Family Morgue?' she said to him on the telephone, in their weekly conversation.

  'Rotten,' sai
d Peter, 'sometimes I can't see the point of going on with it all . . .'

  'I do feel for you, darling,' she said, 'I truly do. The middle of a book is always the hardest to write, and now that I'm halfway through this hideous marathon of Branwell's biography, I can't imagine making it to the end.'

  'Ah, but you will finish it,' he said. 'You are a natural survivor, Daph, even though you don't necessarily realise it.

  You'll always make it through to the end.'

  Then Peter sighed, so deeply that she felt his unhappiness seeping out of the phone line, into the receiver she held to her ear; and she imagined the two of them in a sepulchre, picking over the bones of corpses, making notes as they sat there, surrounded by the skeletons and skulls.

  But she must not give in; she must bring the dead alive again, like Rebecca, whose body was washed up from the sea, who was buried in a family crypt, yet who walked again. 'Walks again,' whispered Rebecca's voice in Daphne's ear. 'Present tense, and still waiting for you . . . I made you rich, but Branwell will make you nothing, his story will never be read and remembered like mine. Forget him, forget Michael, forget Edmund, forget all of those lost boys . . .'

  Occasionally, on her afternoon walk through the woods (a brief respite from the writing hut, snatched in the short hours of daylight), Daphne came across the two elderly ladies, one of them blind, who lived in what used to be a gamekeeper's cottage, halfway between Menabilly and the sea. She was not sure if they were sisters or friends - she wondered if they were once lovers; if they looked at her, and recognised her as one of their own - but the Menabilly housemaids said that that the blind one was a psychic medium, who summoned up the voices of the dead at weekly seances in the cottage. It remained unclear whether or not the maids' gossip was entirely true, but Daphne longed to know; and a part of her hoped to be invited by the pair into the cottage, though she also felt repelled by them for reasons she did not quite understand, by their grey tweed skirts and masculine shirts, by their direct gazes. Even the blind one stared straight at Daphne, but what did she see? Did she see Daphne with Gertie Lawrence? Did she see their kisses, or something more than that?