Daphne

by Justine Picardie

  She wondered if Branwell might make his presence felt at a seance, and what would he say, if he did? Would he still be a hopeless reprobate, asking for a sovereign to spend on gin and laudanum, or would his spirit have been purified? Daphne had even considered taking a dose of laudanum herself, to share the same sensations as Branwell. Indeed, she had got as far as procuring a phial from a helpful local chemist; 'purely in the interests of research', she'd explained to him. But when it came to swallowing the drug, she could not do it - she felt suddenly terrified of what she might see or hear whilst under its influence - and poured it down the basin of the downstairs lavatory. Afterwards, she washed her hands, and then returned to her hut, feeling shaky and yet also inspired, and wrote a scene for the biography, as if through the eyes of Branwell, when his pain and misery were blotted out by laudanum, but just before oblivion descended upon him, he saw visions of his dead mother and sister, the two Marias, mother and daughter, their shining faces merging into one.

  Daphne had read the stories about Branwell's laudanum-induced debauchery - the upset candles, burning bedclothes, concealed carving knives - but somehow, when she came to write them herself, she could not see Branwell in her mind, but Hindley Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, and even that figure was unclear, his face in shadow. And at night, half-dreaming, half-awake and fretting about her book, she dozed and saw Tommy's face instead of Hindley's, drugged and weeping, like he was in the nursing home; but he was not being cared for by nurses, he'd escaped and come back to Menabilly, a carving knife hidden beneath his navy flannel dressing gown, making his way to her bedroom, carrying a candle in his shaking hand. In the dream, her husband was menacing, yet also pathetic, and she felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him, at the same time as fear. When she woke -lying there alone in her bed, in the dark - she wondered if Tommy was sleeping in the bedroom along the corridor.

  And where was Branwell in all of this? A lost boy, still, along with all the others, though his face was not at the window, and his fingers did not tap at the glass.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Newlay Grove, March 1960

  Symington would not move, he could not move, he had taken to his bed. Beatrice would have to put the bed in a removal van and shift him along with the rest of the furniture, if she was to have her way, and sell the house. 'This place is crumbling around us,' she said, despairingly, 'and there's no money to fix the roof, the rain has been pouring into the attic all winter, and now it's running down the walls, into your study, Alex, the damp is getting everywhere. Alex, are you listening to me?'

  He opened his eyes and regarded her, briefly, and then closed them again. He knew about the leaking roof and the rising damp; he knew that the mildew had crept through his boxes and files and cartons, like a curse. A fortnight ago, while he was still able to get up and down the stairs, he had examined his most precious manuscripts, and found them covered in green mould. The pages of Emily's notebook of poems were damp and clammy, like his hands, and his fingers were trembling while he tried to rub the mildew from the paper, and the ink had come away beneath his touch, disappearing into the mould. Emily's words were becoming invisible, and so were Branwell's; but then so much of Branwell's writing had always been as good as invisible; still impossible to make sense of, even after all these years of living with it, of tracing his fingers over Branwell's words.

  Symington had felt the mildew rise from the pages and into his mouth, and now it was mouldering in his lungs, he knew it was taking a hold of him there, colonising his body, its tentacles spreading steadily, like they had done through the house. Beatrice had sent for the doctor, who said he was suffering from pneumonia, and must be moved to hospital, but Symington refused to go. 'I am not going anywhere,' he said.

  He was not writing, either. His last letter to Daphne was posted several weeks ago, when he had felt compelled to tell her that Lord Brotherton had never even seen or handled the Brontë manuscripts in his collection. 'I had everything to do with the whole collection,' he had written to Daphne, in a sudden fit of irritation. 'Lord Brotherton just financed my activities.' And yesterday, finally, a letter had arrived from Daphne, brought up by Beatrice to his bedroom, along with a cup of weak tea. 'Shall I read it aloud to you?' she asked; and he said no, he would do so himself, and Beatrice had looked annoyed, and clicked her tongue.

  'Dear Mr Symington,' he read. 'I have left you without news for too long, but I am happy to report that at long last I am close to completing the book about Branwell. I must tell you, however, that I have been very disappointed in the manuscripts I had transcribed for me at the British Museum. I had hoped that they would at last show us something that would put Branwell on a level with Charlotte and Emily, or at least with Anne, but alas, the writing is very immature, even for a young man, and the stories make tedious reading, very verbose and difficult to follow, and after ploughing through them for all this time, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that his writing talent was not equal to his sisters', and he was chiefly remarkable for working out the conception of Angria, and its history, politics, geography, etc. It is disappointing, because I had hoped to quote large extracts from all the manuscripts, but frankly, apart from a page or two, I shall not bother to do so. In other words, Branwell turns out not to be the man I had hoped him to be . . .'

  Symington felt a terrible misery descend upon him as he read, and he wanted to stop reading, wanted to throw her letter to the floor, or tear it up into tiny pieces, obliterate her words, but he could not, he had to reach the end. 'Nevertheless,' continued Daphne's brisk typescript, 'I think I have followed Branwell's career from childhood and boyhood through to manhood and decline in a clear, straightforward fashion, quoting extracts from prose and poems where necessary (the ordinary reader is going to be a bit fuddled by Angria but it can't be helped, there is scarcely anything of Branwell's that is not Angrian) and I have taken the line that there was not anything in the Robinson affair, I am more than ever certain that Branwell imagined the whole thing . . .'

  He put the letter down, and stopped reading. So, Daphne had given up on Branwell, too; and for all her early promises of championing him, she had joined his detractors, and marked him down as a deluded fantasist, an untalented writer who had imagined the unhappy love affair that had been the cause of his decline and death. Well, so be it.

  'You have made your own bed, and now you can lie in it,' murmured his mother's voice in his ear.

  'That's no help,' he muttered, 'but when were you ever a help to me?'

  'I've always helped you, Alex,' said Beatrice, 'I've always done my best by you and your boys.'

  The boys, thought Symington, and his lips made a shape of the words. The boys. They were all scattered now, over the oceans and across the waves, gone far from home, and they were lost to him, lost like Emily's words.

  'Shall I ask Douglas to come and visit you?' said Beatrice.

  But Symington was deep in the darkness that seeped through his head, and he did not hear her. 'Branwell,' he whispered, his lips barely moving.

  'Burn what?' said Beatrice. 'I can't understand what you're trying to tell me, Alex. You'll have to try to say it more clearly . . .'

  'Branwell Brontë,' murmured Symington, but he did not speak again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Hampstead, September

  I am sitting in my room - a room of my own - at the top of the house, a little attic with a view of the rooftops and chimney pots, and if I lean out of the window, I can see the heath, and the rooks circling over the trees in the evenings. I've rented it from a couple who need a bit of extra help with childcare, and I can hear their boys playing football outside in the garden; there's three of them, all under ten, and the deal is that I do a couple of nights' babysitting each week. I don't mind - I like the children, I even like their noise, the way their voices fill the house, and they seem to like me, as well. I play endless games of Monopoly and snap with them, and it means my rent is less than it would be, so I can afford to
live quite close to the bookshop, and still walk to work. I think Paul would have preferred it if I'd moved further away, to the other side of London, but I don't see why I should. It's not him that's keeping me here in Hampstead, and it's not anything to do with staying near to Daphne's childhood home, not really, though it's a familiar part of my landscape. This is where I grew up, and I happen to like it round here, whether or not I bump into Paul again.

  As it happens, I haven't seen Paul, nor Rachel either, not since she came into the bookshop earlier this month, but I rang her a couple of days ago, and got her address, which wasn't far away, just on the other side of the heath in Highgate. 'Are you coming to visit me?' she'd said, and I said no, but I was sending her a set of copies of the Symington and du Maurier letters in the post.

  'That's very generous of you,' she said; but I didn't feel like I was being self-sacrificing. It made me feel good, actually, to let go of those letters. I mean, I still have my own set of copies, but I've put them in a file at the bottom of a drawer in my desk. I don't need to do anything with them - not just yet, anyway. I'm not going to do a PhD on du Maurier and the Brontës; I'm not going back to college again. I'm not sure what I will do, actually, but I'm happy at the moment. I feel as free as I've ever been, the same feeling as when I was running along the cliffs from Menabilly last month, though without the undercurrent of fear. I can't really explain why - though I suppose it's got something to do with leaving Paul, at last, and earning my own living, and I've just got back in touch with my friend Jess, and she said it was so good to hear from me again, and that I should come out to America to visit her this winter.

  But there's something liberating, also, in not knowing what's going to happen next. I think that's why I don't want to write a dissertation - I don't want to try to marshal my feelings about Daphne du Maurier into a neat academic theory, though admittedly, I still find myself wondering about her, from time to time, and trying to work out what she means to me. But I don't believe that her stories define me any more; I don't feel like I'm living in some echoing version of Rebecca or My Cousin Rachel. I don't look in the mirror and see anyone but me.

  'Don't look back. .' That's what Paul said to me, when we said goodbye. I'm not sure whether he meant it literally - that he didn't want me to turn round and wave as I walked down the street. Or am I supposed to be moving on, and not dwelling on the past? If that's what he meant to suggest, then of course, it's not possible. I went back to my parents' flat the other day - I just wanted to look at the outside of the house, and then I noticed the elderly couple who'd lived in the flat below ours, and they recognised me, and waved from the front door. They'd been out shopping, and invited me to come in for a cup of tea, so I did, and we ended up talking about my parents, because this couple had owned their flat for years, even before my parents had married, when my father was living there alone. I can't understand why I hadn't asked them about my father before now, it would have been so easy, but I suppose I had a sort of tunnel vision; as if no one else could know anything about my father, just because I didn't know him.

  Anyway, it turns out that my father and the man in the flat below, Mr Miller, had a shared interest in local history, and apparently my father had been researching the life of a bookish Victorian, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, who had owned Bay Tree Lodge, the house that was later converted into the flats where we lived. 'As I recall, your father was rather disappointed than no one shared our interest in Nicoll,' said Mr Miller. 'He'd approached several publishing companies about writing a biography, but they all told him that his subject was far too obscure to sell. Such are the demands of the modern marketplace . . .'

  Frankly, Nicoll sounded pretty obscure to me, as well, but his name was familiar, for some reason - maybe because my mother had mentioned it to me as a child, though I couldn't remember her doing so. And then all of a sudden, it clicked. 'That's extraordinary,' I said, nearly knocking over my teacup in my excitement. 'Sir Robertson Nicoll was a former president of the Brontë Society, wasn't he? I bought his biography in a second-hand book shop in Haworth earlier this year.'

  The Millers seemed less surprised by this coincidence than I was - they just sort of took it in their stride, and carried on chatting about how Robertson Nicoll had been a great friend of J. M. Barrie, and that my parents had taken me to see Peter Pan when I was a very little girl, and I'd been frightened, and couldn't sleep that night, in case Peter came to get me, and carried me away out of the window. 'You were still too young, I suppose, for the theatre,' said Mrs Miller. 'You can't have been much more than three - just a baby, really.'

  'I only dimly remember it,' I said. 'I don't really remember the theatre, except for the little light that danced in the darkness, which was Tinkerbell, and everyone had to shout out that they believed in fairies, so that she didn't die. And then afterwards, being scared in my bedroom, that's got sort of merged into a different memory, from when I was older, and I'd been reading Wuthering Heights, and my mother was already asleep, and I thought I could hear Cathy's ghost at the window, but then it turned out to be a strand of ivy, brushing against the glass.'

  'You were such a sweet, serious child,' said Mrs Miller, 'always with your head in a book.'

  'No bad thing, that,' said her husband. 'Out of children's books come the eerie landscapes of imagination. Just look at Peter Pan.'

  'It's quite odd,' I said, 'because I've been doing some research into Daphne du Maurier, and it seems that her father was also great friends with Barrie - Gerald was the first Captain Hook and Mr Darling in the stage version of Peter Pan.'

  'Ah yes, the doubling,' said Mr Miller. 'The good father and the bad one. The shadow side that every child fears . . .'

  'You can tell that he did his degree in psychology, can't you?' said Mrs Miller, and they both started laughing in a comfortable way, and I looked at them, and realised how happy they were together, and a bit of me wished that I was part of their family - that they could be my grandparents -but it was just a pang, not a terrible heartache; and I reminded myself of my new vow, which is to make friends, but not try to attach myself to people too soon; not to repeat the mistakes I made with Paul and Rachel.

  I said I ought to be getting home - it was my evening for babysitting - but as I was leaving, they asked me round to dinner next week, and they said they'd introduce me to their nephew, which was nice of them; he's my age, apparently, and has just moved to London. On the way back, I went along Church Row, as the late afternoon sunlight was slanting over the graveyard where Daphne's relatives are buried - all those du Maurier headstones, crowded together as if in a family gathering, her grandparents, George and Emma, and her parents, Gerald and Muriel, and Gerald's sister Sylvia, who died young, like her husband, Arthur, and their children, the five lost boys who Barrie had adopted. And I wondered if my father had thought about them, too, as he walked this way, along the pavement where the du Mauriers walked, my feet following in his footsteps, and theirs.

  Or was he just interested in Robertson Nicoll? And did he ever make the connection between Nicoll and J. M. Barrie, who must have come to visit him here? Did he think of them as he walked along Church Row, or in the hidden lanes just to the north of the graveyard, where there is a beautiful little chapel that still seems as remote from the city as it must have done when my father first came to Hampstead, and long before that, too, when Nicoll and Barrie strolled together through these peaceful streets, talking of Charlotte Bronté I wanted it all to make sense - to fall into place, like the missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle - but it didn't, not really. I wanted it to be meaningful, but to be honest, it seemed a bit random, though there were those oddly chiming resonances: me buying the book about Nicoll in Haworth, not realising that I had grown up in his house; not knowing anything of my father's interest in him, and bringing the book home to Hampstead, but never reading it, because I was more obsessed by Symington.

  When I got back to my room, I found the biography of Nicoll, and examined it more carefully. There
was the inscription I remembered on the frontispiece - Christmas 1925, To J. A. Symington. But what I hadn't noticed before was the signature beneath, in rusty-coloured ink, so faded that it had nearly disappeared: 'from T. J. W.'. So it had to be from Wise, it just had to be, and I was holding in my hands a book that Wise had held in his; a book whose pages had been turned by Symington. I went through the chapters, more carefully than I'd done before, and came across some photographs - of Bay Tree Lodge at the end of the nineteenth century, and the book-lined library inside - and I wondered if my father had studied the same photographs, if he had longed to be able to go back in time as I had done, to slip into an old photograph, or between the printed lines of a page; to become a bystander in the past, to see it as it really was, rather than as it has been seen in retrospect.

  Since then, I've tried to read Nicoll's biography, but to be honest, it's quite boring. Yes, he knew some interesting people - Barrie, and George du Maurier, and Robert Louis Stevenson - and he founded and edited a successful journal, the British Weekly, as well as writing a series of volumes called Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, in which he collaborated with T. J. Wise, of all people, though I suppose at that point Wise was still highly regarded as a bibliophile, and not yet disgraced for his forgeries and thefts. Apparently Volume II, which appeared in 1895, included a fairy tale said to have been written by Charlotte Brontë at the age of fourteen, which came from Wise's collection of manuscripts; and I've also come across a story that has Nicoll travelling to Ireland with his friend Wise, in search of more of the Brontë manuscripts and relics taken there by Charlotte's widower. So I can understand why my father was interested in Nicoll, but I can also see why very few other people are. Surely it would have made far more sense to have written a biography of Wise -who turns out to have lived just round the corner from Robertson Nicoll, in Heath Drive - given that my father's work at the British Museum would have presumably given him access to some of the details of Wise's scandalous forgeries and thefts? But other people's obsessions and passions must remain incomprehensible, I suppose.