Daphne

by Justine Picardie

  I've also dug out my father's leather-bound notebooks, and tried to decipher his writing, now that I know he was researching Nicoll. There's a quotation that I've only just discovered is from a J. M. Barrie novel, that my father copied out on the opening page in professionally neat copperplate: 'The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.' Aside from those lines, I can recognise a few names in the rest of the notebooks - J. M. Barrie, Clement Shorter, T. J. Wise - and the occasional address, like Heath Drive or Bay Tree Lodge, but it's still almost entirely illegible, it seems to be mostly written in a sort of coded shorthand of his own devising, or maybe it's not, maybe I just can't make out the tiny scratchy marks of his pen. I know I could drive myself mad, trying to understand the hieroglyphics, using a magnifying glass or whatever, but I'm not going to. I've got my father's notebooks, and that will have to be enough. Although actually, today I bought a black notebook that looks almost exactly like his, and I've written my name on the inside cover, and when I start filling the empty pages in my own handwriting, I think it will be legible.

  There's one good thing that emerged out of my father's notebooks. I was looking at them just now, before I put them away into a drawer of my desk, and for some reason, as I glanced out of the window, out across the rooftops and up into the sky, which seems so high and clear tonight, I thought of that day in Fowey with my mother, standing on the cliffs by St Catherine's Castle, and I remembered what she said, finally; it just came into my head, without me trying, without me searching for it.

  I was holding my mother's hand, and she said, don't go too close to the edge; but I wanted to see the waves crashing on the rocks below. So we were standing there together, my hand in hers, and she said, 'Don't keep looking down, sweetheart. Look out to sea - it goes all the way to the sky. Just look how far you can see, Jane . . . You can see forever today.'

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Menabilly, April 1960

  The phone call, very early in the morning, woke Daphne from sleep. At first, she was confused, thinking that the ringing was the bell on Cannis Rock, out beyond the headland, being tolled by the swell of the sea, in warning to boats that might run aground on the reef, and she was struggling to reach it, to surface from a dream; but then she realised it was the telephone in her bedroom, the one she kept there for emergencies.

  'Hello?' she said, her voice still thick and heavy with sleep.

  'Daphne,' said a woman's voice, 'I'm so sorry to wake you, but I have very bad news.' She paused, as if choking back a sob, and for an awful moment Daphne thought that it was the Snow Queen, ringing to tell her that Tommy had shot himself in London, for he had been there for the last few days.

  'It's Margaret,' said the woman, and then Daphne recognised her voice, Peter's wife; what the hell was she ringing about, at six thirty in the morning? 'I had to call you, before you saw the papers,' she said. 'I didn't want you to find out the news that way. Peter killed himself last night, and it's going to be everywhere this morning, the reporters were on to it from the start.'

  'That's impossible,' said Daphne. 'I can't believe it . .

  'Well, I'm afraid it's happened,' said Margaret. 'He threw himself under a tube train at Sloane Square yesterday evening. I can't talk now, Daphne, but I'd appreciate it if you could tell your sisters, before they see some hideous headline this morning.'

  'Of course,' said Daphne, 'but Margaret, this is terrible, there must be something else I can do? Please tell me if there's anything I can do to help.'

  'I fear it's too late for that,' said Margaret, and then there was nothing, just the click of the receiver, and silence.

  Daphne felt breathless, there was no air in the room; she lay down on her bed, but that was worse, she couldn't breathe, so she sat up again and put her head between her knees, then went to the window, and opened it wide. It had rained in the night, but the sky was clearing, and there were gleaming ribbons of light streaming down across the sea. 'The Spirit moving on the Waters,' Tommy used to say, whenever they'd seen the same light, that often appeared to be shining over the sea after heavy rain or a stormy day. 'Oh God,' said Daphne, quietly. 'I have failed in every way.'

  She had finished her book, less than a week before, and had sent Peter a copy of the final draft. Indeed, she had rung him three days ago, to tell him to expect it in the post, and to share her sense of triumph at getting it to her publishers long before Winifred Gerin had completed her biography. Now, she found it hard to remember why she had cared so much about Branwell Brontë, or what had made her so determined to win her race to outdo a rival author; but she forced herself to remember the details of the final telephone conversation she'd had with him. What had she said to Peter, and how could she not have realised that he was suicidal? It was so brief, that was the trouble; and she had made it brief, she had not given Peter sufficient time to talk about himself, or to share his troubles with her. She told him that she had delivered her biography, at last, and that it was to be titled, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, and dedicated to the mysterious Mr Symington. 'Not that I'll say "mysterious",' she said to Peter. 'I shall keep it concise, something along the lines of, "To J. A. Symington, editor of The Shakespeare Head Brontë, whose life-long interest in Branwell Brontë stimulated my own." That should keep him happy, don't you think?'

  But Peter had said very little in response, just that he was 'sinking under the weight of the Family Morgue'; those were his words, 'I am sinking . . .' Yet she had not taken them seriously, just brushed them aside, instead of reading between the lines. 'I must let you get on,' she'd said, her cue to him that she had other things to do and was ending the conversation. Afterwards, she'd sent him a copy of her final draft of the book, and a note, saying, 'I am imbued with consumption, schizophrenia, epilepsy, sleep-walking, split personality, alcoholism - the (Brontë) Works. Hopefully, you will delight in it.'

  And now she felt wretched and worthless, knowing that he would have received the package on the morning of his suicide. She did not know whether he'd started reading the book - Daphne hoped not - but when she rang Peter's younger brother, Nico, before breakfast, to try to discover more about the circumstances of Peter's death, he mentioned to her that it had arrived in the first post, at the office he shared with Peter in Great Russell Street; that Peter had even commented on the manuscript to him. 'He said something about the Brontë family history being slightly less oppressive than our own,' Nico told her.

  'And what else?' said Daphne.

  'Well, there's much I can tell you,' he said. 'Peter was still in the office at five o'clock, and that's when I headed off home. He told me he had an appointment with an author, but apparently he just went to the bar of the Royal Court hotel, spent some time alone there, drinking, before crossing the road to Sloane Square tube station, where he threw himself under the first passing train.'

  The papers had been full of it, of course, just as Margaret had warned her; the headlines were everywhere, and they stuck in Daphne's head, like a foolish song from a West End musical or a jaunty nursery rhyme. PETER PAN'S DEATH LEAP. THE BOY WHO NEVER GREW UP IS DEAD. THE FINAL FLIGHT OF PETER PAN.

  The headlines were bad enough, but what was even more tormenting was her imagined enactment of the scene; for however hard Daphne tried to concentrate on something else, anything else, she could not escape returning to Peter's suicide . . . It was a Tuesday evening, 5 April, just yesterday, but it was a lifetime ago. There had been a spring breeze in Menabilly, and even the city streets might have seemed fresher than before, if you were young and hopeful, but Peter did not feel the warmth in the air, nor the blossom budding on the trees, he felt nothing but the darkness around him as he hurried to the tube station, and down the steps, the same steps that Daphne took every time she went to and from their flat in London. Then he was out on to the platform, not stopping to look at anyone, just gripped by tunnel vision, looking in
to the tunnel, readying himself to step over the edge, leaping in front of the first incoming train. And Daphne saw him, then, caught by the headlights, just for a split second, flying in a swan dive . . .

  But what was Peter thinking? Daphne could not imagine what was going through his head before he smashed it to pieces; even though she was trying to, as she typed a letter to Nico, now the only surviving one of her cousins. He would dismiss her as absurdly sentimental, perhaps, because she was writing to him that she believed that Peter would make his way out of the impasse of Purgatory, having finally had it out with Uncle Jim. 'It may be, that in creating Peter Pan, Uncle Jim planted the seeds of the real Peter's destruction,' she wrote to Nico. 'But I can see Peter shaking hands with Uncle Jim, everything settled in the end, and rushing into Sylvia's arms, his mother's arms at last, because really, it was about time he did, having longed for her for about fifty years.' She typed on and on, the typewriter keys making their comfortingly familiar click-clack, describing her lunches with Peter at the Café Royal. 'We talked of grandpapa George, who as you know lived for a time just a few doors along from your offices in Great Russell Street, before moving the family to Hampstead. We talked of the past, sometimes with weeping nostalgia (after the second Dubonnet) and later with uproarious and irreverent hilarity (after the third).'

  Daphne paused, overcome with remorse again, knowing that Peter would not see the unveiling of the plaque commemorating their grandfather's former house on Great Russell Street - a ceremony which had been planned for the end of March, but which she, Daphne, had delayed, in order to finish her wretched book about Branwell, even though it was Peter who had gone to the trouble of editing their grandfather's letters. And now the ceremony was to take place next week, which was too late for Peter. Poor Peter . . .

  'I believe so tremendously in an after-life,' she continued in her letter, 'and indeed, it was one of our regular topics of conversation at the Café Royal, and Peter then seemed to be undecided about it. My insistence that our grandparents, along with Gerald and Sylvia, were delighted to see us lunching together, would bring a dubious nod of his head. "You're probably right," he would say, eventually. So, dearest Nico, one knows that all is well.'

  But she did not know that all was well, and what would Peter think of her now; if indeed he was still thinking? Daphne started typing again, tears running down her face, though she did not pause to wipe them away. 'What angers me, and makes me question myself, is that possibly if I had sent Peter a very jolly letter just beforehand (intended, and never written, you know how it is), it might have tipped the scales for him, from frustrated despair to at least a momentary chuckle.' But she had not sent him a jolly letter, just a manuscript of her depressing book about an alcoholic failure, and that stupid note, that Peter might have taken as a reference to his own depression and drinking, and his sense that he had never really come to anything, for his publishing company was winding down, and he was being forced to leave the offices in Great Russell Street, they were too expensive for him, he'd admitted as much to Daphne on the telephone when they'd spoken last month, the time before the last time, and yet another occasion when she had failed him.

  'You're the only true success amongst us,' he'd said to Daphne, and she'd said no, don't be so silly; but she should have said more, she should have said that she had admired him, that he never published anything cheap or tawdry or sensational, that his edition of their grandfather's letters represented everything that was true and good about the family; that she was the one who had let everyone down, not him.

  Daphne sighed, and returned to her letter to Nico. 'Being myself, constantly, and for no earthly reason, a potential suicide, I don't think one does it from despair, but from anger - it's a hit out at THE OTHERS - The Others being, to the potential suicide, everything that ONE is not. The violent feelings rising within can only be assuaged by greater violence, hence Peter's decision to kill himself beneath the wheels of the train. The off-balance Self says to the mythical Others, "If this is what you are doing to me - Right, Here We Go." ' She stopped, appalled by her own words on the page before her. What if everything she was writing was meaningless? What if it all meant nothing, in the end? What then?

  Newlay Grove,

  Horsforth,

  Leeds

  Telephone: 2615 Horsforth

  5th May 1960

  Dear Miss du Maurier,

  I am sure you will be sorry to hear that my dear husband has passed away. His funeral took place a fortnight ago. I am sorry not to have written sooner, but the shock has been terrible, and I am packing up our house, which has had to be sold, and I am to move to a very much smaller house, quite close to this one.

  Sadly, my husband died just a few days before the typescript of your book reached him in the post, so he did not have a chance to read it, nor did he see your kind dedication of the book to him. He would have so appreciated it, and to have known that it was his life-long interest in Branwell Brontë that stimulated your own, and encouraged you to undertake your recent biography of Branwell.

  While I was going through my husband's study, I came across this package, which he had addressed to you, but not yet posted. I am therefore sending it on to you, and hope you will find the contents interesting

  Yours very sincerely,

  Beatrice Symington

  THE YORKSHIRE POST

  PO Box No. 168

  Leeds 1

  Telephone: 32701 (22 lines)

  1st June 1960

  Dear Miss du Maurier,

  Thank you very much for your letter, and for sending me a draft copy of your forthcoming book, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë.

  I have just finished reading it, and find it uncommonly good. The suggestion that Branwell had to leave Thorp Green because he had a bad influence on the boy has never appeared in print before, so far as I remember, but this possibility that the tutor was thought to be a dangerous influence on the child's mind and morals had long ago occurred to both Mrs Weir (my colleague at the Yorkshire Post and the Brontë Society) and myself. These are dark depths, and we cannot be sure of ever throwing strong light at what happened at Thorp Green and other places in Branwell Brontë's story.

  Now to the other matter that you raised in your letter, a memorial fund for the late Mr Symington. I can understand your distress on receiving Mrs Symington's letter, and appreciate your sympathetic thoughts, as well as your observations about Mr Symington's considerable contribution to Brontë scholarship. But there is clearly much that you do not know about Mr Symington and his former relations with the Brontë Society and the University of Leeds. It is a sad and disturbing story, which is best kept confidential. I can rely on your discretion, I am sure, but you should be aware that in view of the trouble we had in our dealings with Mr Symington, it is most improbable that members of the Brontë Society would wish to contribute to the memorial fund you have in mind. At one time the Society was faced by the very disagreeable prospect of taking legal proceedings against Mr Symington. You will realise from this that the trouble was very serious. The less said about it the better, but Mr Symington was far from trustworthy in his dealings.

  I notice from the bibliography of your excellent book that you purchased a number of Brontë manuscripts from Mr Symington. It is, I am sorry to say, entirely possible that the items sold to you by him may have come from the Parsonage Museum or the Brotherton Collection. He was forced to leave his post as librarian and curator to the Parsonage after various key items were found to be missing from the collection. Mr Symington subsequently left the Leeds University Library staff after it had been discovered that he took some of the manuscripts that the University considered its own. His explanation was that Lord Brotherton had told him that he could help himself to anything he wanted from the contents of the Brotherton Library, but he never produced any documentary support of this claim.

  A very brief notice of Mr Symington's death was reported in the Yorkshire Post but there were evidently no tributes from the Un
iversity or any members of the Brontë Society.

  Yours sincerely

  Linton Andrews

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Menabilly, June 1960

  The darkness was dwindling now, the days lengthening toward midsummer, and Daphne listened to her grandchildren's voices calling out to each other across the lawn in front of Menabilly, where the long grass had just been mown. A blackbird sang in the chestnut tree, and the light was clear; the dust washed away by last night's rain. Tommy was outside with the grandchildren, rounding them up for a game of cricket; his face was less haggard, his hands less shaky than earlier this year. As Daphne looked out at him, through the open windows of the Long Room, she felt a rush of tenderness, seeing him take his granddaughter's hand, then limping slightly while he walked alongside her. She remembered the long-ago days when he had played on the lawn with their children, before the years had overtaken them; yet on a June morning such as this one, the past seemed to offer some promise of hope to the future.