Daphne (13 page)

The main entrance hall to the block smelt of rubber, as always, but there was something else in the air; an almost imperceptible scent of the Snow Queen's perfume, or was it even more poisonous than that? She held her breath, and dashed into the lift, the iron gates clattering behind her; and by the time she got out, Daphne felt choked of oxygen, as if some invisible presence in the lift had wrapped its fingers around her throat to suffocate her. Tommy was already there when she unlocked the front door, and he looked at her strangely. 'What on earth is the matter, old girl?' he said. And she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror, ashen-faced and sweating. She wanted to tell him everything - about the meeting with the Snow Queen, about the people who had been following her, about the menacing ringleader in his trilby hat - but then she was struck by a terrible thought. What if Tommy was in on the plot? Could he have been brainwashed, just as he'd been deluded by the Snow Queen, so that he could no longer see straight? Could that have been the reason for his breakdown? Not the slow moving of his blood, but water washing into his brain, a rising tide, swallowing everything he held dear?

After that terrible day, Daphne came home to Menabilly. She would be safer here, in the house hidden from the outside world, invisible, even, from the sea. She must be very cautious, very careful, she now realised. It was dangerous to let one's guard down to strangers, dangerous to even allow their letters into the house. She would not reply to Mr Symington's letters, nor to anyone else's, except those from her children (but what if they had been got at? No, surely not . . . though how could she be certain?). Tod could be trusted, at least, but the doors must be locked at night, the rusting wrought iron gates kept closed at the West Lodge, and the second set of gates must be shut, as well, closer to the house. They might come through the woods, if she was not careful; you couldn't be too careful, these days. She must speak to the farmer about renewing the barbed wire around the boundaries of the estate; she would retreat, yet also be prepared against attack. Menabilly had withstood siege in the Civil War, as a Royalist stronghold. Let it be a stronghold again, thought Daphne, as she checked and re-checked that the front door was bolted; as she walked the passageways at night, like a restless ghost, like Rebecca, too swiftly for anyone to catch her; fighting sleep, until the dawn came, and she lay down at last.

Newlay Grove, November 1957

Symington felt old, declining as the year drew to its close. He was tired, and his bones ached, and his head hurt, as did his eyes. Everything was blurred around him, his spectacles no longer worked, he could not read, even the legible words in Branwell's manuscripts swam away from him, the letters dissolving into watery confusion.

He was so tired, he longed to close his eyes and sleep his way through the afternoons, but Beatrice would disapprove, and it didn't matter if she was out of the house, she somehow sensed if he had been in their bedroom while she was gone; she said he creased the sheets that she had smoothed and tucked in so carefully first thing in the morning.

Today, he considered stretching out on the floor of his study, but it was too dusty, too hard, and he worried that even if he managed to lower himself to the ground, he would be too stiff to get up again, his joints betraying him; he might petrify and fossilise there, and Beatrice would not care, she came into his study so seldom these days, she might not find him until it was too late.

Everything was silent now, the house shrouded and quiet, and the outside world seemed to have receded and disappeared in the winter fogs and perpetual rain clouds. There was no word from Daphne du Maurier, not even a brief acknowledgement of Symington's previous letter. Not that he had said much in the letter to her, it had been just a note, telling her that he had been unable to provide precise answers to her last set of questions, but that he was re-reading his notes and files, in the hope of revealing some new information. Which was, in fact, entirely truthful, though he did not tell her that his investigations concerned the wrongful attribution to Emily of an unfinished poem by Branwell. The poem, as it happened, was one of Symington's favourites, and he found himself quoting it out loud, knowing that no one would ever hear him.

Symington was surprised by the sound of his own voice, declaiming the lines, confident and strong, but he also realised, not for the first time, that he remained unsure of what, exactly, Branwell was suggesting in his poem. He knew that Wise had bound the manuscript in green morocco leather, as part of a slim volume sold to a wealthy American collector, Mr Bonnell, who had no interest in Branwell, but was happy to accept this fragment as being by Emily, once her forged signature was added to it. He knew, also, that the poem was written on the back of a letter drafted by Branwell in the summer of 1835, to the secretary of the Royal Academy, when Branwell was coming up to his eighteenth birthday, and hoping to come to London to study art. He knew that Branwell never went to the Academy; indeed, that his only trip to London, planned in the expectation of an interview at the Royal Academy, was alleged to have ended in disgrace, drunk in a Holborn tavern, after wandering the streets, if, indeed, Branwell ever actually made it to the capital city at all; which remained unproven, like many other episodes in the life of the Brontës. Symington knew all these things, from his studies at the Brontë Parsonage, which inherited, amongst other treasures from the Bonnell collection, the green morocco volume of poetry, the same volume that Symington had brought home with him while he was working there in order to examine it in more detail.

The green morocco volume was still in his study - for safekeeping - but Symington worried that he would die before making sense of the poem, for even though it was written in a clearly legible hand, unlike Branwell's Angrian histories and manuscripts, it was nevertheless as opaque in meaning as it had been when he first read it at the Parsonage, over a quarter of a century ago.

'The Heart which cannot know another,' muttered Symington, again. 'Which owns no lover friend or brother. . .' As was so often the case with Branwell, the composition was fragmentary, inconclusive and spattered with misspellings and grammatical quirks; but he liked the sound of the words, their rhythm and pace, which gave them purposefulness. And though the meaning had proved elusive, there must be a purpose to the poem; it was simply a matter of finding it. 'Press on, Symington,' he urged himself. 'Press on . . .'

He closed his eyes, and tried to remember a time when his heart had echoed with thoughts of another, another who was not Branwell. And into his mind floated the memory of the last time he had felt prosperous; back in 1948, it must have been, he sold a stack of manuscripts to Rutgers University, and one of their professors travelled all the way to Leeds to see him. Beatrice had cooked them roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for lunch, and then Symington took him to his library annexe in the house next door, and the American had been impressed, the look on his face was unmistakeable, when he saw the book cases stacked to the ceiling with treasures. 'This is an Aladdin's Cave,' said the professor, 'it is quite extraordinary . . .'

Afterwards, Symington had shown Beatrice the cheque for $10,000, and she put her arms around him and said, 'Oh Alex!', and he waltzed her about the room, and she threw her head back and laughed. It was a winter of fuel cuts and fog, he remembered that, but the house seemed full of light that evening. . . and the next day, he bought tickets for them to go to the theatre, for Beatrice's birthday treat. What was it they had seen? Of course - and Symington slapped his hand on the desk as the memory surfaced - it was the play by Daphne du Maurier.

Could this possibly be a clue to the purpose in Branwell's words? Was this the hidden message of the poem, after all these years, that he should swallow his pride, and relinquish solitude, if he was to avoid following in Branwell's wake, unheeded, sinking into oblivion? Symington felt a surge of energy and excitement, and a sense of awakening, of adventure, even. He understood the poem at last: it was a call to arms, not an admission of defeat; a message of hope, rather than despair or submission. He must write again to Daphne. They would be comrades in their endeavours.

Symington picked up his pen, and then realised that he was smiling; but not only smiling, he was making an unfamiliar wheezing noise; no, not wheezing, he was laughing, he heard the sound of his own laughter, for the first time in years . . .

Newlay Grove,
Horsforth,
Leeds
Telephone: 2615 Horsforth

12th November 1957

Dear Miss du Maurier,

I do hope that your Brontë research is progressing satisfactorily, as the nights draw in. I expect you have also been kept very busy with your family; my wife Beatrice certainly has her hands fill at the moment

I, too, have been much preoccupied, though with domestic matters of another kind, relating back to the Brontës' life at the Parsonage, and those stories that they wrote in between peeling potatoes and so forth. Not that Branwell was likely to have been involved in culinary activities, though one never knows!

But forgive me for my whimsical approach. In fact, I have been engaged in very serious investigations, and I feel certain that you would be interested to know more about the precise information that I have uncovered.

One more afterthought, before I get this letter of to the post box While sorting and re-ordering my files, I came across this old theatre programme of the touring production of your play, 'September Tide: I happened to see the play when it came to Leeds in 1948, as my wife was a fan both of yours and your leading lady, G m d e Lawrence. It brought back memories of a most enjoyable evening, despite a very thick pea-soup fog that surrounded the theatre! I enclose the programme, which I thought might amuse you.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Yours sincerely,

Hampstead, 14 February

Something very odd happened today. I haven't got it quite straight in my head. I went to the British Museum Reading Room - the old one, where Daphne would have done her original research - because I wanted to look around there, even though the Brontë manuscripts she studied are now in the newer British Library building on the Euston Road. I suppose it was a bit of romantic whimsy on my part, and not just to do with Daphne; I also liked the idea of going there because it was where my parents met. It's one of the very rare stories my mother told me about my father -that it took him a month of seeing her there every day, before he had the courage to say a word to her. Not that they were allowed to talk inside the Reading Room - silence prevailed, of course -but he managed to say hello to her outside, in the courtyard at the front of the museum, and in the following weeks, they progressed to sitting on a bench together, and then having tea around the corner, and eventually (her word, not mine), they were married.

She had just started working in the Reading Room when they met; my father was already a librarian there, and he'd been working at the museum for many years, a solitary man, more at home with books than people. At least, I imagine he was, but my mother never really talked about their life together, and there was something about her silence that made it impossible for me to ask her to tell me more. He died the week before my fourth birthday - I don't know exactly how or why, she just said he was ill, he had a weak heart, and then he died, and for some reason, I didn't feel able to ask her for further details - and I can't remember much about him, just that day he took me to the library, and a trip to the theatre, and the feel of his rough tweed jacket against my cheeks when he carried me in from the cold.

My father was a writer, as well as a librarian, I know that, but I don't have any of his books, I don't even know if they were published; I think not, because I've never found any record of them, and I've searched for a very longtime. All I have are half a dozen small black leather-bound notebooks, filled with his tiny, indecipherable handwriting, which I found tucked away in my mother's desk, after she died. I was clearing everything out before giving up the lease; not that there was much to clear in a little two-bedroom attic flat. Still, I'd felt lucky to live there, at the very top of a big old Hampstead house called Bay Tree Lodge, which my father had already rented before he met my mother. 'We live on the servants' floor,' my mother used to say, with a small smile curving her lips; but I thought it was by far the best place to be, high above the streets.

As far as I know, my father had always earned his living as a librarian, like my mother, though she said his heart wasn't in the job, but in his writing. And this worried me as a child, in the years after his death, when I thought about him. I imagined his heart as having been weakened and then separated from his body, and somehow contained within the dusty leather covers of an old book, and the dust wasn't good for his heart, it was clogging everything up, slowing his heart down, and then one day it stopped, and he was dead. As for the book that had contained his heart . . . well, I wasn't sure what had become of it, but I knew it was lost to me.

Anyway, although all of this is odd, it is not the odd thing that happened today. It's Valentine's Day, which Paul ignored, because he says it's a load of commercialised rubbish, but then he looked embarrassed when I gave him a card before he went to work this morning; a card I'd made myself, with a red heart on the front, shaped out of rose petals from the back garden, that I'd pressed and dried last summer, just after I'd moved here. That was something my mother taught me to do - to put flowers between sheets of white tissue paper, and then into the leaves of the heaviest book we could find, which was her copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the one I still use it now. I'd wanted to find a romantic quote from Henry James to write inside the card, but nothing seemed quite right, so in the end, I just wrote, 'I love you', and when Paul read it, he said, 'You're such a sweet girl . . . And too young to know the meaning of heartbreak, aren't you?'

I scribbled a reminder to myself, to check the references about whether Branwell had ever actually visited London. And then all of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Rachel at another desk, bending over a notebook, writing in it. It was hard to tell, with her smooth dark hair falling over her face, but the longer I stared at her, the more I wanted it to be her, which was not at all what I'd expected to feel. After a few minutes, she glanced up, as if she'd somehow sensed my gaze, pushing her hair away from her eyes, and she smiled at me, almost conspiratorially. I blushed, as if I had been caught out doing something wrong, though of course I hadn't. She didn't know me, she'd never met me, as I'd only started seeing Paul after she'd left him and gone to America. Half an hour later, when I got up to leave the Reading Room, she came after me, or maybe she just happened to be going at the same time, and as we went down the stone steps outside, she said, 'Do I know you? I'm so sorry if we've already been introduced - I'm good at remembering faces, but hopeless with names.'

Her voice was light, with a promise of laughter in it, and she smiled as she spoke. I wasn't sure what to say - I mean, I wasn't completely certain that it was Rachel - so I could hardly tell her that she didn't know me, but I knew her, because I was married to her ex-husband. So I just said that I thought I recognised her from a photograph in the newspaper, the one that accompanied the piece about her new book of poetry, and then I apologised for saying so, for being intrusive.

'That's OK,' she said, and she was close enough for me to smell her perfume, a kind of exotic, expensive scent of amber; and she wore an amber necklace, as well, heavy beads that shone against her golden skin. 'I never expect to be recognised anywhere, least of all here. I just like spending time in the Reading Room, when I'm working on a new poem. I think of all the other writers who have sat here, and I find it comforting.'

I told her that I was a fan of her writing - that I thought about it a lot, which is true, I've bought her latest book; though of course I didn't say that I keep it carefully hidden in the bottom drawer of my desk, and that I only read her poems when Paul isn't around. But maybe Rachel sensed that I was fascinated by her - because I am, of course; by everything about her, especially when I realised that she looked so like Paul that she could almost have been his sister - and perhaps she found it flattering, without needing to know much more about me, because it was all about her, that was what I tried to make clear when I talked about how much I liked her new book. 'The poems have lodged themselves inside my head, ever since I read them,' I said, 'they're really haunting.'

'That's so good to hear,' she said, 'and it's a very well-timed bit of encouragement. I'm in London for a few days, to see my publisher about another book.'

'Do you think you'll come back to live here again?' I said, trying to keep my voice as light as hers. 'The piece in the newspaper mentioned that you were working at an American university?'

'Well, I'm beginning to miss London,' she said, 'and the fellowship at Rutgers was never supposed to be a permanent one.'

'Rutgers?' I said. 'I was just doing some research into someone whose collection of manuscripts ended up there.' And I found myself telling her about Symington and Daphne du Maurier; the story came spilling out for the first time, and she listened to it all, and it was easy to tell her the details, in a way that it would not have been with Paul, partly because she was good at listening, and also because she said that she was a du Maurier admirer, had been for years.

When she said that - that she was a fan of Daphne - I felt my cheeks flush, and I said, 'You too?' But I stopped myself saying anything else, even though I was burning to know more. Why did I not tell her about Paul? Well, I was embarrassed, I suppose, because I didn't know how to, not at the beginning, and then after I'd told her about Symington, it was much too late to add, 'Oh, and by the way, guess who we have in common?' Also, I had the strangest feeling that we might be allies after all, because we both like Daphne, despite Paul's disapproval; and I wanted Rachel to like me, too; there was something about her that made me wish we could be friends, a kind of warmth and intelligence in her eyes, though I could imagine her being fierce as well; the sort of woman you'd prefer to have on your side, rather than your enemy. Which sounds so childish, doesn't it? But I realised, as we talked - not for very long, only ten minutes or so - that I haven't ever been able to speak like that to Paul. At the end, she said, 'Oh God, is that the time? I'm going to be horribly late for a meeting - I must get a move on.' So there was no awkwardness about her asking my name - it just didn't come up, and then she was in such a rush to go, and flashed another quick smile at me, and said, 'Good luck with Daphne' from over her shoulder as she started running towards the street, which was impressive, given that she was wearing patent black leather boots with very high heels. Fuck-me boots, I thought to myself, and then I felt faintly ashamed, but also a twinge of discontent as I looked down at my own shoes, a pair of scuffed grey canvas sneakers with pink laces that suddenly seemed childish.

It was only afterwards, when I got back home, that I started to worry about meeting Rachel. It's not just that I didn't tell her the truth about myself - but the fact that we came across each other at all is making me feel uneasy. I mean, it seems too much of a coincidence, doesn't it? Of course, Paul would say that there's no such thing as too much of a coincidence - that that's the point about the coincidental; it is simply a haphazard event in a random universe. He might also say to me, as he often does, 'Don't read so much into things.' Which is a bit rich, coming from a man who spends his working life reading books, picking them apart, and ferreting meaning out of them.

But I can't talk to Paul about it, and there isn't anyone else to tell, either, which seems really weird; I mean, I must be freakish to have ended up as solitary as this. And, also, if I'm honest, I'm starting to feel anxious that I somehow imagined the whole thing, especially as Rachel is the name of a du Maurier character; the central pivot to the entire plot of
My Cousin Rachel
, which also hinges on whether the narrator in the novel is actually unhinged. But surely this couldn't be possible, me imagining the entire encounter, because I don't feel delusional in other ways. And the physical details were so clear: Rachel's black silk shirt and her narrow jeans and the gleam of her glamorous boots; her dark red lipstick, the same colour she'd chosen for the bedroom walls; her nail varnish, which was even darker, almost black; and her eyes, which are grey-green, like Paul's, cat's eyes, I thought, as I looked at them. Or is that part of the problem of being delusional? That the details of the delusions feel completely real and true?

That's what I was telling myself just now, anyway. And then I went upstairs to run a bath, before Paul arrived home from work (and where the hell is he? It's getting really late . . .) I undressed, and decided to light an expensive-looking candle that I found last night when I was tidying one of the cupboards in the spare bedroom. I suppose I was imagining a romantic scene, with me lying naked in the water, in the gentle glow of candlelight, when Paul came into the room to find me. But a few seconds after putting a match to the candle, as the wax was softening, I suddenly recognised the fragrance that was beginning to rise from the flame. It was the scent of amber, Rachel's perfume. It was her candle that I was burning in the room.