Daphne (9 page)

The thought seemed like a horrible one - maudlin and neurotic, and yet I'd let it out, I'd released it into the house, where it might hide, or breed. I turned away from the mirror, and took a few deep breaths, like I used to do before the beginning of a race at school. I was always good at running - not the best, but a reasonably fast sprinter - and I knew that I needed to steady myself again, to stop panicking.

I suppose it was then that I began to realise that I had let myself get too isolated here, that I was talking to myself too much in my head, becoming disconnected from everyone else, and losing touch with reality. Not that I've ever been surrounded by lots of friends, but I'm not a completely solitary creature. I got a scholarship to a private girls' school in Hampstead, just a mile or so down the hill towards Swiss Cottage. Most of the other girls lived in very different homes from mine. Even if their parents were divorced (and quite a lot of them were), they were part of big, sprawling families, with siblings and cousins and uncles and aunts and stepparents. Their houses were full of people, in a way that my mother's flat could never be: she was an only child, like my father, and all four of my grandparents were dead before I was even born. I had one great-aunt, who lived in Chelsea with a caged canary, and she died when I was about ten. Other than that - well, I know it seems implausible, but there were no relatives in my life. My mother was in her early forties when I was born, and my father was fifteen years older than her; I was an unexpected baby, much cherished, but a surprise, nevertheless. 'I'd almost given up hoping,' my mother told me, 'and then there you were, my miracle daughter.'

I had several friends at school, none of them Queen Bees, the Alpha females with their long blonde hair and mocking laughs; we tended to stay on the sidelines, not unaware of the daily theatrics of teenage dramas, but not part of them, either. We weren't complete geeks - we listened to pop music, read magazines - but there was something about us that made us invisible to boys. 'Don't worry,' one of my friends' mothers said to me. 'When you're older, men will begin to notice you, and they'll realise that you're beautiful, and so will you.' This seemed unlikely to me at the time, but at least I had the comfort of knowing that I was good at passing exams, and that this might be my escape route.

Except I didn't really know where I wanted to escape. I had a romantic idea of going to Europe, to write a novel, but my teachers encouraged me to read English at university, because they said it would be 'a good grounding', a phrase that reminded me as much of punishment as encouragement. But I was a good girl, who accepted the need for a good grounding; and when I got into Cambridge, I knew it would make my mother happy, because she'd studied English there and remembered it with affection. She had just retired by then, and once I'd started at college, it was as if she decided that I was in a safe place, and she allowed herself to leave me, very quietly, in death, as in life. She died in her sleep, the doctor told me. It was in the early hours of a Monday morning; and I'd spoken to her on the phone just a little while previously, as we always did on Sunday evening, it was part of the new routine we'd established since I'd started at Cambridge.

'Are you feeling OK?' I said to her, towards the end of the phone call, because she sounded tired, and her voice was slightly slower than usual.

'I'm fine,' she said, 'don't worry. I've just got a little headache.'

It was a brain haemorrhage, the doctor told me. She was in bed asleep, he said, so she wouldn't have felt anything. But I couldn't help wondering if he just told me that, to make me feel better, which it didn't. I imagined her brain filling with blood, and her lying there, awake, but unable to move or speak; silenced, in that silent flat . . .

Afterwards, my tutor at Cambridge said to me, 'If ever you need to talk about it, come and see me, OK?' I nodded, but I wasn't sure what the 'it' was; it was too enormous to be reduced to such a small word, or any words at all, so talking wasn't really an option. My mother was dead, and I was alone in the world, which was an embarrassment and an inconvenience to others, as well as cataclysmic to me. I dealt with this situation by not dealing with it; so that the awfulness of 'it' was put away in a box, leaving me to get on with each day, though getting on meant staying put in the place that my mother believed would be safe for me. If anyone asked how I was coping, I'd say, 'I'm taking each day as it comes.' And eventually, they stopped asking, and those days turned into weeks, and months, and now it's three years since my mother died, and here I am . . .

'I am here,' I just typed into my laptop in the attic. 'Is anybody there?' I thought about sending it as an email to everyone in my address book: my old tutor, my current one, my scattered school friends, and so on. Actually, 'and so on' is a euphemism. My computer address book is pitifully sparse, because I've lost touch with most of the girls I knew at school, apart from one who's teaching English in Prague, and none of them are living in the area where we grew up.

As for the people I knew at university: well, there were no proper boyfriends, no lovers, not until that astonishing night when I first slept with Paul. But I did have two close friends, both of them studious, bookish girls like me, and about the time I got married, one of them, Jess, moved to America, on a scholarship to an Ivy League college, and the other, Sarah, went back home to Edinburgh, to do teacher training. I could ring them or email them or write, I know, and sometimes I do, but less and less, because neither of them was convinced that I was doing the right thing in marrying Paul; both of them said, in the gentlest of ways, that they thought it was far too soon, that I should have waited. 'I understand why you want to get married,' Jess said to me, 'and I also understand why it might seem you need to get married - to feel safe, to have a home, all those things that other people might take for granted. But why don't you see how it goes with Paul, before actually marrying him?'

'I love him,' I said, as if that were as simple as that. And I did think it was simple at the time, but it's only now that I've realised that loving someone isn't enough; that it's not enough to make everything safe and secure.

I haven't said this to Jess; I haven't really told her or Sarah anything about what's been going wrong with Paul. It's not that I used to tell them everything - I never talked to them about my mother's death, I didn't talk about that to anyone -but our conversations about books have melted away, along with those consoling Cambridge afternoons of tea and biscuits in front of a flickering gas fire, and walks along the river, feeding the ducks, and talking about the impossibility of understanding the footnotes to The Waste Land, or whether Emily Brontë's childhood fantasy of Gondal could be traced in Wuthering Heights. When we were students, it seemed like the time we spent together would go on for ever; but of course, there was an ending, there had to be, when our finals were over, and we left to make way for a new batch of girls, who would move into the college rooms we had once occupied.

And maybe I've forgotten how to sustain friendship; maybe I live too much in my head. That was what my mother said to me just a few days before she died. 'Don't forget to talk to other people, darling,' she said. Which was odd, coming from such a quiet woman, a librarian, as it happens, who was accustomed to silence, who found it peaceful, rather than oppressive.

Perhaps that's why I became even more attached to Rebecca after my mother died; it was familiar, at the same time as remaining insoluble. I loved the book as a teenager, loved its promise of escape, its wild Cornish landscape that seemed a million miles away from London, and yet somehow within my reach. But now I reread it for clues, trying to see if there was anything I missed, just as the second Mrs de Winter tries to read her husband's face, trying to make sense of everything. Which is hopeless, of course; the novel is supposed to be mysterious, to leave one wanting to know more. One thing I'm certain of, though: 'the lovely and unusual name' which belongs to the nameless narrator before she becomes Mrs de Winter must be Daphne du Maurier.

Anyway, I've decided to make far more of an effort with Paul, and I'll start by persuading him to come home for dinner tonight, instead of working late. I'm not going to consult Rachel's cookery books - I'm not going to look at them ever again, they make me feel like an interloper - but I'll make roast chicken, like my mother used to do for the two of us on Sunday evenings. She always added lots of lemon juice, and bay-leaves and thyme from the garden, and in the winter she baked apple crumble as well, and we'd talk about the books that I was reading, about The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Wuthering Heights; and I shivered at the thought of Cathy's ghost, tapping at the window, crying 'Let me in, let me in'; but I was safe, I knew I was safe inside with my mother.

I'm not quite sure what Paul and I will talk about - he clearly doesn't like it when I ask him what's keeping him so much at work these days, and I can't mention Daphne, either; I can't say anything about her to him ever again, because last time I did was disastrous, he said I was turning into a weird kind of du Maurier stalker, that I was losing touch with reality, as well as with him. I don't think that's true - he's the one that is spending more time away from this house, not me. But I don't want to argue with him again, I can't bear it when people shout at each other, and anyway, no one hears what's being said, it's just an angry sound.

But I also know that silence doesn't seem to help. 'Silence is your default setting,' Paul said to me last week, 'occasionally punctuated with a sharp burst of static electricity, and maybe you don't know how enraging that can be.' So I've vowed to try to find the right words for him, to make it clear that I'm not living only in my head; for if the outlines of our life together have become blurred and indistinct (if, indeed, they ever clearly existed), then I must find a way to fill them in, to make them real again.

Menabilly, August 1957

Daphne stood at her bedroom window as the sun was sinking in the sky, looking down to the drive that circled in front of the house, and she felt rigid, like a sentry, like Mrs Danvers . . . No, not like Mrs Danvers, she told herself. She was Lady Browning, a loving and dutiful wife, waiting for her husband to return home again.

Tommy was on his way back to Menabilly after three weeks in the nursing home, after tranquillisers and electric shocks and God knows what else, her husband was being delivered back to her this evening, like a parcel. No, not a parcel, what was she thinking of? 'He will need a great deal of your support and affection,' the doctor told Daphne on the telephone two days ago, when he rang to explain that Tommy was now well enough to leave the nursing home, and spend the rest of the summer convalescing in Menabilly. 'No stress, obviously, no over-excitement, absolutely no alcohol. Just keep everything very quiet and peaceful for him.'

It was inconceivable to Daphne that she could drive Tommy all the way from London (she rarely drove anywhere these days, not even to Fowey), and the train seemed too lacking in privacy, as did a hired driver. It wasn't fair to ask either of her daughters to take responsibility for such a long journey, but she didn't trust anyone outside the family, so in the end, she decided to ask her cousin Peter, who had been at Eton with Tommy, and served alongside him in the First World War. She telephoned Peter at the publishing company he ran with his younger brother Nico and he agreed, readily, and didn't ask for any further explanation than Daphne had already offered: that Tommy was suffering from nervous exhaustion, hence the stay in the private nursing home and the cancellation of the silver wedding anniversary party.

She made sure that Menabilly was looking at its best for Tommy's arrival: vases of roses in the Long Room and the entrance hall, and everything swept and scrubbed clean and polished, just as he liked it. Then she changed out of her usual nondescript trousers into a blue chiffon dress, dabbed perfume at her wrists and throat, and applied her make-up with unusual care, gazing into her dressing-table mirror at her pale, anxious face, powdering over its shadows and uncertainties. But would she meet Tommy's high standards? Would he find her lacking?

When Daphne saw Peter's car turn into the drive, just after half past seven in the evening, she took a sharp intake of breath, and smoothed her hands across her hair, then ran downstairs to the front door, so that she would be standing there, a smile on her face, ready to welcome Tommy. She'd got Tod out of the way with various errands, and the maids had left for the day, which meant that Tommy could slip in without a fuss.

'Darling,' she said, as he got out of the car, 'how lovely to see you again, and you're looking so much better.' In fact, she was shocked by his appearance, for although he was immaculately dressed in a suit and tie and polished brogues, his face was a powdery grey, like dirty chalk, and rather than his usual confident stride, he seemed to shuffle towards her.

'Good drive?' she said, patting him awkwardly on the arm.

Tommy shrugged, and gestured towards Peter. 'Ask your cousin,' he said. 'I had my eyes closed for most of the journey.'

'It was terribly kind of you,' she said, turning to Peter and kissing him on the cheek. For a moment she felt as if she were watching all of three of them, jerking like marionettes, as if she were back up again in her vantage point at the bedroom window, at one remove from this stiff little scene by the front door. 'I suppose both of you men are longing for a . . . for a cup of tea.'

Tommy grimaced, while Peter raised one eyebrow at her almost imperceptibly. 'You're sounding more and more like my mother,' said Tommy. 'What we all need is a stiff drink.' He stumped into the house, leaving the front door open behind him, and as Daphne looked at Peter, she wondered if he could see the flush that she felt rising from her neck, across her face.

'I take it a drink isn't yet in order?' said Peter.

'Not yet,' she said. 'Just hang on for a bit . . .'

By the time she found Tommy in the dining room, he had already poured himself a large glass of whisky. 'Darling,' she said, 'the doctors are very keen that you don't'

'Damn the doctors,' he said. 'They've been torturing me for nearly a month. You have no idea, Daphne, the horror of it all . . .' His voice broke, and he put his hand over his eyes, turning his face away from hers.

'I'm so sorry,' she said.

'I see you kept well clear,' he said, 'as usual . . .'

'I didn't think it would help you, having me around, when you needed to rest.'

'Rest?' he hissed at her. 'Is that your definition of rest? A thousand volts of electricity shot into your head?'

She heard Peter cough outside in the hall, and said to Tommy, 'Shall we go and sit in the Long Room, where we can be more comfortable?'

'I don't want to sit anywhere,' said Tommy. 'I'm deadbeat. I'll finish my drink and take myself to bed.'

'Would you like some cocoa brought up to you?'

'By Mrs Danvers?' he said. 'With a sleeping pill on the side, to keep me quiet?'

Daphne was shocked by the bitterness in his voice, by the look in his grey eyes. 'Let's not argue, darling,' she said. 'I just want you to feel comfortable here.'

'Do you?' he said. 'I'd have thought you'd be more comfortable without me, cluttering up the house.'

'I love you,' she said. 'I love you being here . . .'

'Don't lie to me, Daphne,' he said. 'It doesn't become you.' Then he turned from her and left the room, and she heard his footsteps on the stairs, slow and unsteady, stopping on the landing, and then going painfully upwards, along the corridor to his room, where she had made sure to leave his teddy bears on the bed; his welcome party . . .

She stood in the dining room for a few moments, trying to calm her breathing, then followed him upstairs and knocked on his door, gently. There was no answer, so she called out his name, and when he still did not reply, she turned the handle. It was locked. 'Tommy?' she said, more loudly.

'I'm trying to go to sleep,' he said, sounding muffled. 'Can't a man get some sleep around here?'

Daphne went downstairs in search of Peter, feeling as if all three of them were playing some half-forgotten childhood variation of hide and seek, the rules of which she did not fully understand. She called out his name, hurrying from room to room downstairs, and found him eventually in the last place she'd thought to look, the nursery on the ground floor at the front of the house. 'It hasn't changed in here since my first visit,' he said. 'Still the same old pictures on the walls.'

He was standing by the drawings of 'Peter Pan' that Daphne had hung in the nursery, soon after moving into Menabilly. 'It's looking a bit shabby, isn't it, after fifteen years?' she said, suddenly noticing that the green and pink rose-print wallpaper had faded in places, like the matching curtains. 'This was the first room I decorated in the house - I wanted it to look cosy for the children, because they were a bit dubious about coming to live here, they called it the rat palace. I remember choosing this wallpaper, and getting the drawings of your namesake framed, and the ones of Daddy as the ghastly Hook.'

He looked over at her, and smiled his half-crooked smile that she loved, and raised his eyebrow again. 'Well?' he said. 'When are you going to tell me what's going on? Tommy barely said a word to me today. The last time I saw him like this was forty years ago, when we were both shell-shocked recruits, and refusing to talk about the horrors of the trenches. But at least then we could mumble to one another about the cricket.'

'You were so young,' she said. 'Not much older than Kits, and straight out of Eton into the war. . . That's what I've been reminding myself for the last few weeks, while Tommy was in the nursing home: that things could be far worse, that at least there's not a war on.'

'True,' said Peter, 'but that doesn't explain what's wrong with Tommy.'

'I don't think I can explain,' she said. 'Not yet, anyway. It's a frightful mess. And I'm so sorry to drag you down here, it's ghastly for you.'

'Not as ghastly as it is for you,' he said. 'How long has this been going on?'

'The stupid thing is, I don't know. I really thought that he was fine until this sudden collapse last month. But I suppose we hadn't been seeing enough of each other, and I'd somehow lost track of things. And now he's in such a bad way with this depression that he just can't seem to shake off.'

Peter was silent for a few seconds, and then he said, 'Do you remember what Jim Barrie wrote about our uncle Guy, after he'd been killed in the Great War? "He had lots of stern stuff in him, and yet always the mournful smile of one who could pretend that life was gay but knew it wasn't." That rather reminds me of Tommy, and the rest of us, don't you think?'

She sighed, remembering how noble Guy had seemed to her when she was still a little girl and he came to the house in his officer's uniform, the medals glinting on his khaki chest, and she was too shy to speak to him, just stood and stared, until her mother told her to stop being so rude. But she couldn't help it, and she'd felt the same awe in the presence of Peter's older brother George, even when he bent down to kiss her goodbye. Poor George, dying in action in Flanders just a week after Guy, when he was only twenty-one, and the rest of his life should have been ahead of him. 'Uncle Guy was such a hero,' she said to Peter, 'and Daddy always said that George took after him. My father was broken-hearted after they died - that awful week, Daddy crying, not trying to hide his tears from me, but telling us that we must always be proud of Guy and George. That's the thing about having heroes in the family - they make everyone else look tawdry, these days.'

'I'm not so sure about that,' said Peter, 'I don't think Tommy is tawdry, do you?'

'He's certainly stopped smiling, whether mournfully or not,' she said, sidestepping Peter's question. 'I can't even recall the last time I saw him smile.'

'I know the feeling,' said Peter, 'but we struggle on, don't we?'

Daphne thought he was talking about his wife, Margaret, who was a bit of a moaner, and she'd not wanted to pry, so she simply slipped her arm through his, and said, 'Let's go and forage for some supper.' Tod had left a green salad and cold roast beef in the larder, which they ate by candlelight in the dining room; and then they took their glasses of wine into the Long Room, and when Daphne went to turn on the electric lamps, Peter said, 'Leave it, the darkness is so lovely here . . .' So she lit the candles by the fireplace, and they sat in peaceable silence for a little while.

'Uncle Jim never saw this place, did he?' said Peter, eventually.

'No, he died before I leased it,' she said, 'but if only he had, he'd have loved Menabilly.'

'You know he used to come to Fowey on holiday? And perhaps he came walking along the coastal path, and stumbled across Menabilly, just like you did.'

'I wish I'd asked him,' said Daphne.

'We all wish we'd asked him more questions,' said Peter. 'But isn't that the du Maurier way? Not to ask, just to watch, and smile . . .'

Daphne stood up, to go over to the piano, and as she passed Peter, she reached out and brushed a finger against his lips, as soft and quick as a moth's wing. He closed his eyes, and leaned his head back against the armchair. The windows were open, the curtains not drawn, and the cool night air was in the room. Daphne shivered a little, and then she played 'Clair de Lune', very softly, and the wreaths of their cigarette smoke rose and twisted together towards the ceiling.

Peter left early the next morning, before Daphne came downstairs for breakfast. He slipped a note under her bedroom door, but by the time she woke and read it, he was gone. 'Dearest D,' he had written. 'I wish you courage in all that lies ahead. Excuse my hasty departure, but deadlines loom at the office, and I also imagine that you and Tommy need some quiet time to catch up with one another . . .'

In fact, the house was filled with people from that afternoon onwards. Tessa arrived first, with her husband and children, all squashed into a car with a large quantity of luggage; and then Flavia and her husband, and Kits came soon afterwards, on the train. 'How lovely,' said Daphne, at teatime, passing around slices of cherry cake, 'to have all of us here together again . . .'

And in the days that followed, Daphne tried to lose herself in the rhythms of family life, to give in to its ebb and flow. But she could not stop herself feeling anxious, for Tommy was always on edge - on the edge of tears, of anger, of irritation, of frustration - and he did not like being disturbed by Tessa's children, his little granddaughter, Marie Therese, who was two and a half, and the baby, Paul, who was only sixteen months.

Daphne did her best to get the children out of the house as much as possible, down to the beach to paddle in the rock pools. But the weather was thundery - sudden and violent downpours, which sent everyone scuttling back into the house - and Daphne felt oppressed by the lowering skies, the clouds the colour of bruises, though she smiled, always, and was charming, she tried very hard to be charming. She made no mention in Tommy's presence of their silver wedding anniversary last month, nor the cancelled party; no mention, either, of his time in the nursing home. Daphne did her best to explain to Flavia and Tessa about what happened, but she could not bring herself to use the words 'mental illness' or 'breakdown', so she repeated the same phrase to both of them, which was 'nervous exhaustion', and she was also careful to avoid any reference to the Snow Queen; she was trying not to think about that woman, not here, not in Menabilly . . .