Daphne (10 page)

As for Kits: he was still too young, just sixteen, and despite his veneer of sophistication that he'd picked up at Eton, she cherished his bright-eyed innocence, his undimmed optimism and capacity to see the best in everything, and everyone. He reminded her of Peter's younger brother, Nico, who seemed somehow unscathed by the death of both his parents; and of course, he was just young enough to have avoided serving in the First World War. Was it their experiences in the trenches, she wondered, that had left Tommy and Peter with a streak of melancholy? Tommy was brave, there was no doubt about it, he had won a DSO for courage at the age of nineteen, but he still woke at night, crying out, indistinct sounds, and in the morning, when she asked him if he had been dreaming, he said, 'It's always the same nightmares, the bodies in the mud, and the rats, and the noise of men screaming. . .' But maybe it wasn't only the war that was to blame, maybe it was the du Maurier melancholy that descended upon Peter, as it did Daphne; and perhaps this was what had infected Tommy; perhaps it was Daphne who brought it upon him, though their son had so far escaped.

Sometimes, she looked at Tommy, and wondered if it was his double who had come home to Menabilly, a brooding, stooping, saturnine twin; while the real Tommy was still walking around in London, gay and charming, with a confident smile on his face, and the upright stance of a successful soldier. And if so, must she keep her own dark double locked out of Menabilly, the angry, vengeful woman who knew she was wronged? Was it Rebecca's voice, or hers, that wanted to spit insults at Tommy, that longed to taunt him and mock his weaknesses? But it was a voice that she made certain to keep silent, and she vowed that she would not complain, so when anyone enquired about Tommy's health - for something was clearly wrong, he was drained and white-faced and shaky - she answered in brave little lies, explaining that he was suffering from exhaustion, and his blood was going too slowly through his system, he needed pills to thin his blood. She said this so often that she began to believe it: the blood was not reaching his brain, hence his collapse.

And Daphne wondered if her blood was too thick, if her brain was starved, like Tommy's, for there were moments when she could not think straight; she felt literally unbalanced, and slept only fitfully. A week after Tommy came home to Menabilly, when the house was filled with other people's uneasy dreams, and the air inside too heavy to breathe, she decided to try to sleep outside in the garden, on an old lilo and moth-eaten blanket, dragged out from the cobwebby summer house. At first, she kept her eyes wide open, looking up at the midnight sky as the clouds gave way to infinite stars, and she told herself it was too beautiful to sleep, but she must have dozed, at last, for she heard a woman's voice whispering beside her, and then with a start realised she was awake, not dreaming, certain that someone else was there. At that moment, Daphne thought the voice was telling her something important, speaking to her through a tear in the veil between this world and another, secret one; but she could not grasp the words, they disappeared into the darkness as soon as they were spoken. She tried to cry out, distressed, but no sound came from her mouth, and there was silence all around, even in the woods, everything stilled and quietened, no wind to rustle the leaves, no living creatures in the undergrowth. And in that silence, a terrible dread had risen up and taken hold of her, and she ran back to the house, heart pounding, panic in her veins, leaving the makeshift bed behind her, fearing that if she stayed, she would be beckoned to a place from which there was no return.

Now, in the daylight hours, there were voices all around her; not only those of her family, but a ceaseless monologue of her own, looping and spiralling inside her head. A little of it was about Branwell Brontë - when she could snatch an hour or two to work in her writing hut, she was attempting to understand the chronology of Angrian history, which was more circular than linear, with endless digressions - though she was often distracted, and found herself repeating her wedding vows, not out loud, but running through them in her mind, over and over again. 'For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. . .' Tommy was sick, that much was certain, but she worried that he was sick with longing for someone else, for the Snow Queen.

One rainy afternoon, she sat in an armchair with Marie Therese on her lap, and read to her from a childhood collection of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales - the same book she'd read to Tessa and Flavia, and that her mother had read to her in the nursery. This frightened Daphne as a child, in a way that she had never forgotten, for her mother pretended to be the Snow Queen, and her face looked icily hard and blank, as if her true self had been revealed in the telling of the story, revealing what Daphne suspected, that her mother did not love her . . . And even now, after all those years had passed - so quickly that time seemed to have circled in on itself - when Daphne came to the tale of the Snow Queen, she had to blink hard to stop herself from crying. Close to the end, Marie Therese was nearly asleep, but Daphne kept reading aloud, very quietly, about how the little girl, Gerda, travelled far away to find her dearest friend, Kay -a boy as close to her as a brother - and at last she found him, sitting alone in the Snow Queen's palace, motionless and chilled to the bone. Gerda wept hot tears over him, and they dissolved his frozen heart, so that eventually, he began to cry, and a speck of glass came out of his eye; he could see clearly again, and the spell was broken. But Daphne could not cry, would not shed tears, not in front of Tommy, not in front of anyone. She felt that if she started weeping, then she would not stop, the tears would turn into a sea, and she would drown in them.

Daphne closed her eyes, while her granddaughter dozed against her shoulder, and let her thoughts drift to her father, whose bouts of weeping were inexplicable to her when she was younger. 'Life may be pleasant when you're young, but it's not so much fun when you come to fifty,' he used to say, and no one knew what brought on such sudden melancholy; it might have been prompted by little more than a sudden downpour of rain or a cold wind from the east; or maybe it was the memory of his brother Guy, or his sister, Sylvia, lying in their graves, leaving Gerald behind them.

Was there something of her father in Tommy? He drank too much, like Gerald did, and suffered from similarly unpredictable bouts of depression. 'The horrors,' Gerald called them, when he would stand with hands over his eyes, trembling, until the worst of it had passed. Tommy was handsome, too, like Gerald - six foot tall, and as debonair and beautifully turned out as a matinee idol - and still attractive to women, there was no doubt about it. Daphne knew about her father's affairs - they all did, his three daughters, and his wife, too, and everyone who had anything to do with the London theatre world - but she laughed about it then, when she was a teenager, poked fun at 'Daddy's stable', some of whom, like Gertie Lawrence, were only a few years older than she was. And most of the time, apart from a very occasional outburst, her mother seemed able to accept this arrangement, rarely acknowledging Gerald's liaisons with Gertie and all the rest of those pretty young actresses, though now Daphne found it hard to understand this; how had she been so uncomplaining? Surely it must have been enraging for Muriel, not only as Gerald's wife, but also as an ageing actress, to know herself betrayed by him with girls less than half her age? But she had often complained about Daphne (the middle daughter, caught between parents, her father's favourite child). And then later, her father was furious with her, too, when she was old enough to have boyfriends, interrogating her when she came home at night, accusing her of behaving improperly, as if she was somehow betraying him. He stood guard on the landing at Cannon Hall; she could remember him still, staring out of the window, waiting for her, turned into a night-time monster, his features distorted with rage. 'Did you let him kiss you?' he'd hiss at her, as she came up the stairs. 'Where did you let him kiss you?'

It was all impossible, the past and the present, tangled into a terrible mess, and she could see no way of smoothing it out. Her mother was still alive, living just across the river from Fowey, at Ferryside, with Angela (the favourite daughter, thought Daphne, and then scolded herself for self-pity). Muriel was old now, and declining fast; watching the tides from her bedroom window, trapped and immobile in what had once been a place for carefree summers, the holiday house that Gerald had bought in the prime of their lives. She tried to imagine going over to Ferryside, telling her mother everything, asking for her advice about how to make her own marriage work, asking Muriel to share her secrets, too, but she knew this would never happen, it was inconceivable: some secrets were not made to be shared.

And when another letter arrived from Mr Symington, Daphne slipped it into her pocket, deciding to keep it private, hidden from everyone else. It was absurd, of course - this was not a love letter, but even so, Daphne did not want to discuss its contents, nor Mr Symington himself. She imagined what he might look like - he couldn't be much older than Tommy, given that he was still a youngish man in the 1920s, when he joined the Brontë Society, and took over as curator at the Brontë Parsonage. She had never seen a picture of Mr Symington, but was beginning to think of him as looking rather like her grandfather George, who died a decade before her birth, leaving his self-portraits behind him. She kept one hanging in the drawing room at Menabilly, and his face seemed as real to her as if she had actually known him in childhood, a handsome, bearded gentleman, blind in one eye, and fearful of losing his sight altogether, yet more noble and resolute-looking than Gerald, she thought; a man to admire, a novelist as well as an artist; and looking at his portrait again, she was overcome with powerful nostalgia, longing to go back to a past she never knew; longing to be with her grandfather, in a time before his grandchildren existed.

Daphne was tempted by the idea of sending a note to Symington suggesting that they meet. It would be a diversion from her days with Tommy, when everything felt brittle, ready to crack, unbearably tense, at times - yet she also worried about leaving Tommy, about not being by his side. She had hoped that the last few weeks would bring them closer together - that her loyalty and forgiveness would elicit some tenderness. But instead, he seemed to have withdrawn from her, as if in punishment, just like her father again whenever she'd been out at night with a boyfriend, though Gerald was less silent than Tommy; Tommy never shouted at her, bombarding her with hysterical accusations.

Sometimes, she wished that her husband would say more, accuse her, even, for at least then she would know what he knew about her. As it was, she wasn't sure if he was certain of anything, for she had never confessed to her own past infidelities; and he had never asked her outright. She imagined revealing, in a rush of emotion soon after discovering his affair with the Snow Queen, that she, too, had been unfaithful to him. But the story seemed impossible to tell; it was so shabby, so shaming. How, exactly, would she explain her behaviour to Tommy? 'Darling, when we were staying with the Puxleys in Hertfordshire, while you were stationed nearby, I became involved with Christopher . . .' Well, it was impossible to say aloud; and it might do Tommy more harm than good, to rake over the past, for it had been, what, seventeen years ago? Her marriage was far more important, infinitely stronger, than any passing affair; and Christopher Puxley had ceased to matter to her long ago; though she felt more and more guilty about his wife, Paddy, her friend who she had betrayed, repeatedly, blinding herself to the consequences. She was just as selfish as her father, though now she was being punished, now her infidelity had come back to haunt her . . .

Daphne considered writing a letter to Paddy, asking for her forgiveness all these years later; but when she sat down, and tried to do so, she found herself unable to give shape to her wretchedness; there was only one phrase in her mind, which was 'I am rotten to the core'. And Daphne did feel rotten inside; she wondered if she would be punished, like Rebecca, with uterine cancer, for she was as twisted as Rebecca, unforgivably disloyal and treacherous and malformed, and not only in her betrayal of Paddy. Who could blame Tommy if he felt as murderous as Maxim de Winter, if he was to say of her, as Maxim said of Rebecca, 'She was not even normal?' He would have every right to say such a thing, if he ever discovered the real truth about her relationship with Gertie; he would be disgusted, horrified . . .

Not that Daphne was certain as to what that truth might be, for it seemed dream-like, both in recollection and at the time, a fantastical improbability, a fantasy, perhaps; though sometimes, in the night, when she woke from dreaming of Gertie, feeling her hands still upon her, it felt more real than anything around her, closer than Tommy, who lay sleeping in his bedroom across the hall. She could never tell Tommy about those dreams, of course; she could not tell anyone what Gertie had meant to her, or explain why she had been so obsessed by this woman, one of her father's mistresses of all people, the last of Gerald's actress lovers.

None of it made sense when she tried to untangle what had happened, or why, for it was Gertie who became sick, not Daphne, Gertie who died of a malignant tumour, five years ago, when she was only fifty-four. And in the dark, as Daphne lay awake while the rest of the household was sleeping, she feared the death was in some way her doing, a repeat of her actions in killing off Rebecca and Rachel in the novels, as if that were the only solution to the knot they were all in; as if Gertie was another of the mysteriously threatening women who must be exorcised from Menabilly to preserve its peace and sanctity.

'Except you can't get rid of us, can you?' whispered Rebecca's voice in her head, just as Daphne was drifting towards sleep, at last, in the slowly whitening hour before dawn.