Daphne (23 page)

Menabilly,
Par,
Cornwall

19th July 1959

Dear Mr Symington,

Just a brief note - for today is my wedding anniversary, and I must spend some time with my husband. I am feeling increasingly anxious about the need to get ahead with the book, if I am not to be beaten by Miss Gerin, and it really is most frustrating, hearing no news on the outcome of the printers' strike. Is there no way of finding an alternative printing press, or could I perhaps be allowed to study the original documents, rather than waiting for the facsimiles?

I am, of course, sorry to hear about your fall. I trust you are now recovered, and look forward to your next letter.

Yours sincerely,

Newlay Grove, August 1959

Symington had, at last, posted the manuscripts of three of Branwell's poems to Daphne, including the two sonnets, 'Peaceful death and happy life' and 'The Callousness produced by care' that had been ready in an envelope to be sent to her for several months. He had finally given up the attempt to make fruitful use of their titles in an accompanying letter to her; a letter that he drafted and redrafted until it made no sense at all, and he could no longer remember what his original point had been in writing it, other than a vague hope that he could prove his scholarship to be of a higher grade than hers. This last endeavour had left him exhausted and frustrated; and he felt increasingly irritable about her continuing demands for further information, and disconsolate that these manuscripts had finally gone from his house, though not from his heart. He had, at least, made copies of all of them, yet it grieved him to have relinquished the originals to Daphne, particularly as some lines from one of the poems had lodged in his head, repeating themselves over and over again, even when Symington felt that he had forgotten everything else; for everything was slipping away from him, just as it had done from Branwell.

'Increase of days increases misery,' he muttered to himself, when Beatrice was out of the room, closing his eyes and seeing the words on the manuscript appear before him, as if being written for the first time, 'And misery brings selfishness . . .'

And it was these lines that Symington quoted to his son, when Douglas telephoned to complain that he was never invited to the house; but Douglas didn't understand, he never had done. 'None of you boys ever understood me,' said Symington.

'It's the poem I don't understand,' said Douglas, 'that, and why you care more about the inconsequential words of Branwell Brontë than you do about your own family.'

'Inconsequential!' said Symington. 'There will be consequences, just you wait and see . . .'

Since then, he had not heard again from Douglas, and his other sons were silent, too, Colin flying the world as a pilot, and Alan down in Wiltshire, while Jim was farming in Norfolk and Donald was all the way over in New Zealand; no time for their father, so what was Douglas complaining about? Always complaining, that one . . . But never mind them, Symington told himself, he had work to do, he was overwhelmed with work, fielding endless queries from Daphne, who appeared to believe that he had nothing better to do than answer her questions about Branwell.

It was this rising sense of injustice - for it was unjust, thought Symington, her expectation that he would do her bidding, just because she was a famous author - along with his pressing need for money, that had prompted him to sell Daphne another of Branwell's poems, entitled 'On Landseer's painting', in the hope that she might take the hint contained within the opening lines:

Indeed, as Symington reread this manuscript just before sealing it into an envelope - a brown paper coffin, he thought gloomily - along with the others for Daphne, it struck him that he had something in common with the subject of Branwell's poem, and that of Landseer's original painting, 'A Dog keeping watch at twilight, over his master's grave'. Even if Daphne was too grand and famous to feel real affection for Branwell, then Symington knew himself to be a true and faithful mourner. Not that he would be able to prevent Daphne from digging up Branwell's bones, which she seemed intent upon doing; picking over the manuscripts at the British Museum, as well as demanding more from Symington.

As for those manuscripts which he had recently borrowed from the Brontë Parsonage: he decided to let her see eight pages from one of them, a notebook from Branwell's time as a clerk at the railway station of Luddenden Foot, though Symington was not permitting Daphne to examine the original notebook, simply the facsimile reproduction that he had arranged to have printed by a local firm that had done similar work for him in the past. It was a strange mixture of notes on railway affairs, fragments of poetry and sketches; Symington had agreed to allow Daphne to have reproductions of the sketches, but the original notebook he would keep for himself, for as long as possible. It might form an interesting comparison with the handwriting in Emily's notebook of poetry; if, that is, he could find her notebook again, for it remained buried somewhere in his boxes and files. Still, not to worry, he reassured himself, for at least it was safe in his care, while he watched over it like the faithful dog in Land-seer's painting; keeping his silence, as always.

Newlay Grove,
Horsforth,
Leeds
Telephone: 2615 Horsforth

31st August 1959

Dear Miss du Maurier,

Just a few lines, to let you know that the printer's dispute is at last settled, and I enclose facsimiles of eight pages from Branwell's Luddenden notebook
-
those with sketches on them, which you may find helpful.

I also enclose manuscripts of three of Branwell's original poems, which will, I
trust,
keep you well ahead of Miss Gerin in the race! These are from my private collection, and really priceless, as you can imagine, but I hope you will agree that £100 is a reasonable figure for them. I am sure they will be helpful to you in a myriad of ways.

Yours sincerely,

Hampstead, June

Ever since my day in Haworth with Rachel, I've been daydreaming about similarly daring escapades - climbing over the high brick wall into Cannon Hall, say, and exploring the garden that I can see from my attic window; maybe even slipping into the house itself. Or catching the train down to Cornwall, and trespassing on the Menabilly estate, like Daphne did as a young woman, when the house was still deserted, abandoned and overgrown with ivy. Because that's the only way I'll be able to see either of the places where she once lived - they're both closed to the public, kept private from the outside world, which only adds to their mystery, and to my intense desire to see inside their walls.

I've actually got as far as writing letters to the current occupants of both houses, explaining that I am a graduate student, engaged on further research, and was keen to visit the places where du Maurier wrote, but whoever owns Cannon Hall didn't respond, and the owner of Menabilly sent me a polite reply saying that he and his family lived quietly, and did not wish to be disturbed. I wasn't surprised, not really, because who would want legions of du Maurier fans tramping around, poking their noses into cupboards, hoping for skeletons?

And of course, I haven't stopped thinking about Rachel since our expedition; if anything, I'm even more obsessed than before, because I still don't know if she's now in possession of a letter that definitively proves that Symington stole the notebook of Emily's poems; and if that crucial piece of evidence linking him to the Honresfeld manuscript was in the file of papers that she smuggled out of the Parsonage. If she does have the proof, then she will have beaten me hands down. And I can't help wondering if that's why she hasn't been in touch again, because she doesn't need me any longer (if she ever did), and the next I hear of her will be another laudatory newspaper article, proclaiming her astonishing discovery of a literary scandal. When I really want to torment myself, I imagine that Rachel not only has the evidence to link Symington with the theft of the Honresfeld manuscript, she has also used this to track down the notebook itself of Emily's poems - an achievement which would make her the most famous literary detective in the world, and leave me as the also-ran.

All of which makes it impossible to banish Rachel from this house. Sometimes, her presence here feels more powerful than Paul's or mine; and I find myself wondering whether she gazed into the garden of Cannon Hall, like I do, and if she argued with Paul while they sat in the kitchen, or was it in bed, and did she get up and go into the spare room, just leaving a trace of her amber scent behind?

He's away again this weekend, at another conference -who'd have thought there could be quite so many academic conferences on Henry James? - and this time I didn't even ask him if I could go with him; I didn't want to see the look on his face when he tried to find a plausible reason to say no. And I still haven't told him about Rachel, about her coming here, and taking the books, and our trip to Haworth together. I know I should tell him when he gets home; I shouldn't let Rachel hide in the silence, beckoning to me behind Paul's back.

But the thing is, it's not quite so uncomfortable any more, that silence; we're beginning to grow accustomed to it, and the tension between us seems to be lessening, as if the taut thread that once held us together has slackened. There are still nights when we don't sleep in the same bedroom, because Paul says I keep him awake; but at least he doesn't look at me as if he hates me; the expression of his face is more quizzical these days, though I often wonder if I am as much of a stranger to him as he is to me. That's what is so odd: that we can live together in this house - that we are married, for God's sake - and yet we still know so little about one another.

It's not that he hasn't tried to find out more about me, and I can see it must have been quite annoying last week when I said to him, 'What's to tell?' He'd been asking me about my parents, and as I struggled to find a few facts - because all I really knew was that my parents were librarians who'd met at the British Museum, and that they were both only children, whose parents were dead by the time they got married - I realised that I didn't actually want to tell him anything else. I suppose it was an omission on my mother's part, not to have filled in the factual gaps of our history; but also on mine, not to have made it clear to her that I needed to know more about my father, and my grandparents. Except I don't think that I did feel the need, back then, which probably means I was a very odd child. No wonder I didn't have many close friends at school; no wonder my teachers used to write on my report, 'she lives in a dream world'.

Maybe that's why the most vivid scenes of my early childhood are woven into the pages that I read in my favourite books, or that my mother read to me, at bedtime. I know that some observers might have looked at the two of us and thought we were very alone - no father, no husband, no siblings, no visible web of family - but it never felt that way, because we were surrounded by the people in the books that I loved, and they were as alive to me as the other children in the playground; and often more consoling. Narnia seems almost more real, as a memory, than learning geography at infant school, because when I looked at the map that my teacher pinned to the wall, I was certain I could see the ocean that the Dawn Treader voyaged across, or the high mountains that were home to Aslan. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is more indelible in my mind than the classroom in which I read it, though I do remember coming home across the heath in a wintry twilight, and hearing a wolf howling on the other side of the lake, and I turned, wide-eyed, to my mother, and she took my hand in hers, and smiled at me. Was that before, or after, we went to Kensington Gardens, while we were reading Peter Pan, and she told me that this was where Peter had lived? I'm not sure, but as I looked around - at the manicured lawns and ferociously neat herbaceous borders - I thought that my mother must be mistaken, that Peter could never have lived here, that maybe he had flown over it, on his way to Hampstead, swooping through the night sky, skimming the tree-tops, over the wolves, but never touching the ground.

Last week, after Paul realised how little I could tell him about the facts of my childhood - and I could see he was shocked, it was as if he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing (or not hearing) - he said to me that maybe I should start seeing a therapist. I laughed, and said I didn't need therapy, my childhood was far too boring for that. And Paul said he didn't think that boring was necessarily the right word to describe it. 'So how would you describe it?' I said.

'Devoid of something, perhaps?' he said. 'And maybe you're trying to fill up that space with the details of someone else's life? Could that be why you're so absorbed in the life of Daphne du Maurier?'

It seemed too glib an analysis, to be honest, a sort of mistranslation, but I was touched that he was trying to understand me. I could have pointed out to Paul that he was equally absorbed in Henry James - not the biographical details, perhaps, but the minutiae of his novels, the subtext of the texts. And I've been thinking about this since then, and I don't know, is being interested in a writer's life an indication of some hidden neurosis? I remember once at college, overhearing an argument in the room next door to mine, and a girl's voice was saying, 'Oh, get a life!' And it stuck in my head. Get a life. Is that what I'm doing? Trying to kidnap Daphne du Maurier's life, when I should be living my own?

Or perhaps that's too trite a reading of the situation. OK, reading is probably the wrong word to use here, given that I'm supposed to be finding ways of living that aren't necessarily to do with reading; at least I think that's Paul's prescription for me. But I feel alive when I think of Daphne du Maurier; I feel that her life contains all kinds of clues and messages that might help me make sense of mine. And if that is evidence that I need to see a therapist, well, I'd rather not. Not yet, anyway.