Daphne (14 page)

Menabilly, November 1957

'This is Lady Browning,' said Daphne, when the Buckingham Palace telephone operator finally answered her call.

'Shall I try to put you through to Sir Frederick?' said the man's voice, sounding faintly puzzled. 'It's nearly midnight, Lady Browning, so I would imagine he's left his office for the evening.'

'I'm sure you're right,' said Daphne, trying to keep her voice calm and authoritative, though she felt like weeping with panic and anxiety. 'The thing is, there's an emergency, and I need to speak to someone in charge, and it's terribly urgent.'

'Wait one moment,' said the operator, and the line seemed to go dead for a few seconds, but then there were faint clicks, and Daphne gasped, wondering if somebody was eavesdropping on the call.

'Hello?' she said. 'Hello, is anyone there?'

She drummed her fingers on the table in the hall, and glanced behind her, very quickly, but it was impossible to tell what might surround her, at the edges of the dark corridors and blind corners, beyond the small pool of electric light in which she was standing.

At last, another voice came on the line. 'Lady Browning?' he said. 'This is the night duty officer. Is there anything I can do to help?'

'You must listen to me very carefully,' she said, taking a deep breath, attempting to steady herself. 'There is a plot against the Royal Family - a life-threatening plot, that you must take seriously. It is my duty to warn you, and your duty to act upon my warning.'

'Can you give me some more details?' said the man, his voice still smooth.

'The details of the plot?' she said.

'Yes, that would be helpful.'

As he spoke, she felt herself lose the thread of her thoughts, they were unwinding and tangling inside her, and the details of the plot were obscured, even though they had been so vividly clear in her mind a little while ago.

'Lady Browning?' he said. 'I'm not quite clear whether you are Lady Browning?'

She did not discuss the telephone call with Tommy; she wasn't even sure if the Palace had mentioned it to him. Perhaps he chose to stay silent on the subject, hoping it would pass over, preferring not to talk about the details of the evening, given that he had not returned home that night, or so Daphne suspected, for after that terrible, shaming phone call to the Palace, she'd tried to reach him on the telephone, ringing his Chelsea number repeatedly, every half an hour, then every five minutes, until finally, at four o'clock in the morning, she took a double dose of sleeping pills, to stop herself doing what she wanted to do, which was to dial the number of the Snow Queen's flat.

The next day, she was exhausted, with a sinking sense of humiliation, yet at the same time she felt a strange chemical feeling of adrenalin pumping through her veins that kept her pacing up and down, unable to settle at her desk, unable to write or read or do anything other than circle the house. She rang the doctor in Fowey, and asked him to come and visit her at home. 'I can't leave the house,' she said to him on the phone.

'Can't you get a taxi to the surgery?' he said.

'No, you don't understand me,' she said. 'I cannot leave Menabilly.'

He arrived in the early afternoon after the morning surgery was finished, and she told him that she couldn't think straight, because she couldn't sleep. 'It's not good for you to be alone in this empty house,' the doctor said to her, 'letting your worries prey on you, no wonder you can't sleep.'

She nodded her head, and forced herself to smile at him, so as not to arouse his suspicions. 'You're quite right,' she said. 'But my son is back at boarding school, and our housekeeper -well, of course you know about Tod, she's over at Ferryside, helping Angela with my mother, who's not too good at the moment. So we're all at sixes and sevens for the time being, as they say . . . I just need a good night's sleep, and then all will be well again.'

He took her pulse, and prescribed her some new sleeping pills, and an iron tonic for her nerves. After he'd gone, she took the dog for a walk, hoping to be soothed by the wild anemones in the woods, and the deserted, wind-scoured beach. But then a heavy curtain of rain swept in from the west, submerging the pale winter light, and the seagulls dived and shrieked, their beaks as sharp as knives, as if they might turn on her and pluck out her eyes, and she thought, 'There can be no more desolate place than this.' She trudged back up Rebecca's path to Menabilly, feeling the rain running down her face, like tears. That night, she ate sardines on toast, and drank a glass of wine that tasted too vinegary to finish. She went to bed early, having taken two of the new pills, and dozed, fitfully, between inexplicable yet dreary anxieties about the train timetable from Par to Paddington, and diversions and delays on the line. Eventually, she fell into a deeper sleep just as the birds started singing outside the bedroom window, and dreamt that she was setting off for London from Fowey harbour, determined to sail there in a boat, Tommy's boat, but when she was out at sea, the boat started filling with water, and however fast she tried to bail out, it was not fast enough to keep afloat, and she knew she was scuppered and done for.

There was the same, odd chemical feeling in her bloodstream the following morning, and yet, despite her agitation, she forced herself to try to come to a rational judgement about her best course of action. When she felt the fear of a plot seeding itself in her mind again, and her thoughts running wild like the hydrangeas outside, she knew she must go back to London. She must do what the doctor told her, to get away from the silence of the empty house, and spend a little time with Tommy, and see Peter, who would understand what she meant if she were to talk to him about the darkness that seemed part of their inheritance, the vein of unhappiness that ran through the family's bloodline. Not that she would necessarily say these things to him, but the thought that she could, if need be, was a comforting one.

When she arrived in London that evening, Tommy seemed surprised, but not unfriendly. 'What a lot of rushing up and down you're doing,' he said, as he opened the door to the flat. 'I got your telegram, saying you were on your way from Cornwall today, but I must say, isn't all this travelling a bit much for you? We should buy shares in the railway . . .' He looked at her, quizzically, and she wished he would put his arms around her, like he did in the old days, before they had started shrinking away from each other. But at least he was calm, back to his usual measured manner, with none of the shakiness of the summer, nor did he seem angry with her, and she wondered if her suspicions about the Snow Queen were unfounded, because after all, he was here in the flat, with no sign of another woman. Perhaps the worst was over . . .

And although being back in London was maddening, at least it was in a different way, in a more familiar, manageable form this time. Of course, she still felt swamped by the crowds, as always, but she did not believe herself to be pursued through them by a faceless man in a trilby hat. What continued to worry her, however, was that even if she could now recognise her paranoia as being irrational -which she did, except when she was in the throes of it - she could not predict when it might descend upon her again.

So she decided that the only remedy was to concentrate on Branwell Brontë to keep hold of him, even when she was most distracted, to write her way out of the mess that she was in, by turning Branwell's chaotic life into a beautifully composed biography. She rang her publisher, Victor Gollancz, to arrange a date to talk to him about her idea for the book. 'I'd like to see him as soon as possible,' she said to Victor's secretary, 'tomorrow, preferably, as it's rather urgent.' Once that appointment was safely in her diary, she telephoned Peter, to ask him to meet her for lunch that day at the Cafe Royal.

'Is everything all right?' he said, after they had ordered a bottle of wine, and she realised that she was tapping her foot, very fast, beneath the table.

'Of course,' she said. 'Why do you ask?

'It just seems slightly out of character,' he said, 'you being in London, instead of Menabilly. Though I'm delighted you're here, naturally.'

'I needed a change of scenery,' she said. 'I was getting a bit jittery at home, and anyway, there's a tremendous amount of work that I have to get on with at the British Museum.' She started telling him about the Brontë manuscripts, and about all the misunderstandings that surrounded Branwell, though as she tried to explain her research, Daphne felt anxious that Peter wouldn't understand what she was saying, that she wasn't making her ideas clear. 'Do I sound like a lunatic?' she said.

'Not at all,' he said. 'It sounds to me like you've got under Branwell's skin. Or has he got under yours?' She laughed, but then Peter suddenly looked more serious, and said, 'Go carefully, Daphne, don't lose yourself in Angria or Gondal.'

'Don't worry, I'll leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind me, to find my way back.'

'And where are you coming back to?'

'To Tommy, of course,' she said, feeling a sob rising in her throat, and biting her lip, hard, to stop herself from crying.

He reached his hand out to her, and said, 'You are very loyal to him.'

'Am I? I'm not sure Tommy would agree with you.'

'How is Tommy?'

'Back at work, and apparently coping with the pressure, though under strict doctor's orders not to overdo it. A little less silent than when you saw him last, and looking himself again, but still not tremendously talkative . . .'

'And into the silence steps Branwell?'

'Yes,' she said, 'though he's apt to go quiet on me, too.'

The next day, she lunched with Victor Gollancz, and he readily agreed to her proposal for a biography of Branwell. 'The story of the Brontë family always seems to me to be at least as dramatic as their novels,' he said.

'I warn you, it's going to be a very serious, scholarly affair,' she said. 'I want to do something really worthwhile.'

'Everything you write is worthwhile.'

'If only the critics agreed with you,' she said, trying to keep her voice steady.

'Who cares about them? You're the best-selling author in the country.'

'I care,' she said. 'And I'm hoping that this will be the book that finally proves me.'

'But you've already proved yourself, time and time again, to millions of readers.'

'It doesn't feel like that,' she said. 'I'm feeling somewhat of a failure. And Victor, I do fret when you advertise me as a best-selling author, it puts the critics off, because nowadays it's something to be ashamed of, don't you think?'

Victor looked at her, and laughed, as if she had just made a joke; and so she smiled back at him, though she worried that her right eye was twitching. It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying about the book trade, but she forced herself to do so, and then the conversation became a little easier, when she asked him if he knew anything about T. J. Wise, and the rumours surrounding his forgeries. Victor said he had come across some of Wise's faked first editions of Browning poetry, and there were stories that Wise had torn pages out of rare books at the British Museum, and then sold them in discreetly conducted deals to private collectors. Victor had never heard of Mr Symington, however, though he remarked to Daphne that any of Wise's former colleagues might perhaps be considered as unreliable, potentially untrustworthy. And Daphne rushed to defend Symington, determined that he should not be judged as harshly or unfairly as Branwell had been, and she felt an unexpected sense of protectiveness about both of them, almost as if any hostility expressed toward Symington or Branwell was also a challenge to herself.

'Don't forget,' she said to Victor, 'Symington has been open with me from the start - he's the one who suggested that Charlotte and Emily's signatures could have been forged on Branwell's manuscripts.'

'Perhaps,' said Victor, 'or might that not be a double-bluff? Because if it was Symington who was responsible for the forgeries in the first place - or if not him, then Wise, with Symington's full knowledge - he could be trying to put you off the scent.'

'That sounds like a rather overly complicated conspiracy theory,' Daphne said, and Victor smiled, saying, 'My dear, you're the expert on literary conspiracies and fictional plots -the consummate mistress of them all - so I have no doubt in your ability to find your way through this one.'

She laughed, which was what he wanted, but that night, Victor's words niggled at her, like whining mosquitoes. m y , exactly, did he mention plots to her? Was he sending her the subtlest of messages? And if so, what was the message?

'You're looking tired,' said Tommy to her, over breakfast the following morning. 'Why not try and have a break from working?'

'I need to have a break from not working,' she said. But the trouble was, every time she sat down at her desk to read through her notes from the British Museum, or to sketch out an early plan for the form her book might take, she found herself returning to her meeting with the Snow Queen, reliving it, reworking their dialogue. She wondered whether their conversation could have taken a different direction; whether she might have been more forceful with the Snow Queen, and proved herself to be as implacable as her adversary.