Daphne (29 page)

Menabilly, January 1960

A new year, a new decade, but Daphne felt caught in the past, not just Branwell's, but her own. She was working on the book for long hours every day, determined to finish it before Winifred Gerin completed her biography, forcing herself into the writing hut every morning, whatever the weather, wrapped up in a blanket in front of her typewriter, while the wind rattled the windows. Sometimes, in the dark evenings, she longed to see a child's face at the window, like Cathy's ghost in
Wuthering Heights
, or to feel its ice-cold hand reaching out to hers; to hear its voice saying, 'Let me in - let me in', and she would welcome it in, she would welcome the ghost of the young Branwell if he came back to his Cornish motherland. But it was not Branwell that she glimpsed one night at the window of her writing hut, but herself as a child, a frightened child who did not realise that she was seeing herself in the future; a child aghast at the grey-haired woman working in her shabby hut, an old-looking woman surrounded by the dark woods, lost in the wilderness of her thoughts.

But no, this will not do, Daphne told herself, to dwell on the child she once was. 'Children do not see into the future,' she wrote, in her notebook. 'Remember the Brontës, who wrote their youthful diary papers, knowing nothing of their deaths to come; early deaths, yet whose shadows do not fall across their present, which is long past now.' Yet still her thoughts circled around her, filling the hut in eddying currents of anxiety. Branwell had been troubled by nightmares of phantoms as a child, just like her cousins Peter and Michael, who had seen ghosts coming into their windows at night, the shadow of Peter Pan, or was it their dead father they had seen, or another phantom conjured up by Uncle Jim?

But Branwell had nothing to do with Peter or with Michael, she must not let these boys get muddled in her head; Branwell's Angria was not the same as Neverland, and she must concentrate on mapping out his world, the infernal world that would provide the title to her biography of him. Her eyes ached, like her head, when she tried to assemble the Angrian manuscripts into order, for though some had been transcribed by her researchers at the British Museum, others remained unreadable. But as far as she could tell, Branwell's history of the kingdom of Angria was told in nine parts, including many poems, covering dozens of sheets of manuscripts, all of them written in microscopic handwriting, and now scattered between various collections: the British Museum, the Brontë Parsonage, the Brotherton Collection, and elsewhere, sold to an unknown number of private collectors by that scoundrel, T. J. Wise, with Charlotte's name forged on the pages, if necessary. It was a gigantic fantasy, this imaginary colony of Angria, founded by Branwell's soldiers and adventurers when he was eleven or twelve years old, split into kingdoms and then united into an empire; Branwell the chief architect of its constitution and the commander of its army, the boy who noted every detail of the Angrian geography and population. He drew its maps, recorded its military and political history, and the life stories of the individual Angrian leaders, describing in minute detail their personal appearances, their hopes and fears and failings and triumphs.

Nor did Branwell's love-life amount to anything, for Daphne was now certain that he imagined the entire affair with Mrs Robinson, the mother of the boy he had tutored, before losing his job for some unspecified act of gross misconduct. As for what that act might have been: Daphne had no proof - for there was nothing but hearsay and gossip about the supposed affair, nor any detail about the circumstances of his dismissal - but she could not help wondering if Branwell had perhaps tried to lead his young charge astray, had made tentative sexual advances towards the thirteen-year-old Edmund Robinson? Something had gone badly wrong for Edmund; he never married, and drowned before he grew old . . . Just like Michael, but what was she to make of that? What was she to make of anything?

Back in the big house, Tommy was writing a little book of his own, a short history of the Queen's life when she was Princess Elizabeth, covering the period while Tommy had been Comptroller of the Royal household. He seemed calm enough, and as far as Daphne could tell, the Snow Queen had removed herself entirely from his life, from their lives; Daphne must have rescued him from her icy grip, without even realising. Yet sometimes, Daphne found herself wondering if a sliver of glass has remained lodged in his eye, and hers; if perhaps they were both deluding themselves now; and her cousin Peter, too, who was engaged on what appeared to be a never-ending task of editing his family history. 'How goes the Family Morgue?' she said to him on the telephone, in their weekly conversation.

'Rotten,' said Peter, 'sometimes I can't see the point of going on with it all . . .'

'I do feel for you, darling,' she said, 'I truly do. The middle of a book is always the hardest to write, and now that I'm halfway through this hideous marathon of Branwell's biography, I can't imagine making it to the end.'

'Ah, but you will finish it,' he said. 'You are a natural survivor, Daph, even though you don't necessarily realise it.

You'll always make it through to the end.'

Then Peter sighed, so deeply that she felt his unhappiness seeping out of the phone line, into the receiver she held to her ear; and she imagined the two of them in a sepulchre, picking over the bones of corpses, making notes as they sat there, surrounded by the skeletons and skulls.

But she must not give in; she must bring the dead alive again, like Rebecca, whose body was washed up from the sea, who was buried in a family crypt, yet who walked again. 'Walks again,' whispered Rebecca's voice in Daphne's ear. 'Present tense, and still waiting for you . . . I made you rich, but Branwell will make you nothing, his story will never be read and remembered like mine. Forget him, forget Michael, forget Edmund, forget all of those lost boys . . .'

Occasionally, on her afternoon walk through the woods (a brief respite from the writing hut, snatched in the short hours of daylight), Daphne came across the two elderly ladies, one of them blind, who lived in what used to be a gamekeeper's cottage, halfway between Menabilly and the sea. She was not sure if they were sisters or friends - she wondered if they were once lovers; if they looked at her, and recognised her as one of their own - but the Menabilly housemaids said that that the blind one was a psychic medium, who summoned up the voices of the dead at weekly seances in the cottage. It remained unclear whether or not the maids' gossip was entirely true, but Daphne longed to know; and a part of her hoped to be invited by the pair into the cottage, though she also felt repelled by them for reasons she did not quite understand, by their grey tweed skirts and masculine shirts, by their direct gazes. Even the blind one stared straight at Daphne, but what did she see? Did she see Daphne with Gertie Lawrence? Did she see their kisses, or something more than that?

She wondered if Branwell might make his presence felt at a seance, and what would he say, if he did? Would he still be a hopeless reprobate, asking for a sovereign to spend on gin and laudanum, or would his spirit have been purified? Daphne had even considered taking a dose of laudanum herself, to share the same sensations as Branwell. Indeed, she had got as far as procuring a phial from a helpful local chemist; 'purely in the interests of research', she'd explained to him. But when it came to swallowing the drug, she could not do it - she felt suddenly terrified of what she might see or hear whilst under its influence - and poured it down the basin of the downstairs lavatory. Afterwards, she washed her hands, and then returned to her hut, feeling shaky and yet also inspired, and wrote a scene for the biography, as if through the eyes of Branwell, when his pain and misery were blotted out by laudanum, but just before oblivion descended upon him, he saw visions of his dead mother and sister, the two Marias, mother and daughter, their shining faces merging into one.

Daphne had read the stories about Branwell's laudanum-induced debauchery - the upset candles, burning bedclothes, concealed carving knives - but somehow, when she came to write them herself, she could not see Branwell in her mind, but Hindley Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, and even that figure was unclear, his face in shadow. And at night, half-dreaming, half-awake and fretting about her book, she dozed and saw Tommy's face instead of Hindley's, drugged and weeping, like he was in the nursing home; but he was not being cared for by nurses, he'd escaped and come back to Menabilly, a carving knife hidden beneath his navy flannel dressing gown, making his way to her bedroom, carrying a candle in his shaking hand. In the dream, her husband was menacing, yet also pathetic, and she felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him, at the same time as fear. When she woke -lying there alone in her bed, in the dark - she wondered if Tommy was sleeping in the bedroom along the corridor.

And where was Branwell in all of this? A lost boy, still, along with all the others, though his face was not at the window, and his fingers did not tap at the glass.

Newlay Grove, March 1960

He opened his eyes and regarded her, briefly, and then closed them again. He knew about the leaking roof and the rising damp; he knew that the mildew had crept through his boxes and files and cartons, like a curse. A fortnight ago, while he was still able to get up and down the stairs, he had examined his most precious manuscripts, and found them covered in green mould. The pages of Emily's notebook of poems were damp and clammy, like his hands, and his fingers were trembling while he tried to rub the mildew from the paper, and the ink had come away beneath his touch, disappearing into the mould. Emily's words were becoming invisible, and so were Branwell's; but then so much of Branwell's writing had always been as good as invisible; still impossible to make sense of, even after all these years of living with it, of tracing his fingers over Branwell's words.

Symington had felt the mildew rise from the pages and into his mouth, and now it was mouldering in his lungs, he knew it was taking a hold of him there, colonising his body, its tentacles spreading steadily, like they had done through the house. Beatrice had sent for the doctor, who said he was suffering from pneumonia, and must be moved to hospital, but Symington refused to go. 'I am not going anywhere,' he said.

He was not writing, either. His last letter to Daphne was posted several weeks ago, when he had felt compelled to tell her that Lord Brotherton had never even seen or handled the Brontë manuscripts in his collection. 'I had everything to do with the whole collection,' he had written to Daphne, in a sudden fit of irritation. 'Lord Brotherton just financed my activities.' And yesterday, finally, a letter had arrived from Daphne, brought up by Beatrice to his bedroom, along with a cup of weak tea. 'Shall I read it aloud to you?' she asked; and he said no, he would do so himself, and Beatrice had looked annoyed, and clicked her tongue.

'Dear Mr Symington,' he read. 'I have left you without news for too long, but I am happy to report that at long last I am close to completing the book about Branwell. I must tell you, however, that I have been very disappointed in the manuscripts I had transcribed for me at the British Museum. I had hoped that they would at last show us something that would put Branwell on a level with Charlotte and Emily, or at least with Anne, but alas, the writing is very immature, even for a young man, and the stories make tedious reading, very verbose and difficult to follow, and after ploughing through them for all this time, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that his writing talent was not equal to his sisters', and he was chiefly remarkable for working out the conception of Angria, and its history, politics, geography, etc. It
is
disappointing, because I had hoped to quote large extracts from all the manuscripts, but frankly, apart from a page or two, I shall not bother to do so. In other words, Branwell turns out not to be the man I had hoped him to be . . .'

Symington felt a terrible misery descend upon him as he read, and he wanted to stop reading, wanted to throw her letter to the floor, or tear it up into tiny pieces, obliterate her words, but he could not, he had to reach the end. 'Nevertheless,' continued Daphne's brisk typescript, 'I think I have followed Branwell's career from childhood and boyhood through to manhood and decline in a clear, straightforward fashion, quoting extracts from prose and poems where necessary (the ordinary reader is going to be a bit fuddled by Angria but it can't be helped, there is scarcely anything of Branwell's that is not Angrian) and I have taken the line that there was not anything in the Robinson affair, I am more than ever certain that Branwell imagined the whole thing . . .'

He put the letter down, and stopped reading. So, Daphne had given up on Branwell, too; and for all her early promises of championing him, she had joined his detractors, and marked him down as a deluded fantasist, an untalented writer who had imagined the unhappy love affair that had been the cause of his decline and death. Well, so be it.

'You have made your own bed, and now you can lie in it,' murmured his mother's voice in his ear.

'That's no help,' he muttered, 'but when were you ever a help to me?'

'I've always helped you, Alex,' said Beatrice, 'I've always done my best by you and your boys.'

The boys, thought Symington, and his lips made a shape of the words. The boys. They were all scattered now, over the oceans and across the waves, gone far from home, and they were lost to him, lost like Emily's words.

'Shall I ask Douglas to come and visit you?' said Beatrice.

But Symington was deep in the darkness that seeped through his head, and he did not hear her. 'Branwell,' he whispered, his lips barely moving.

'Burn what?' said Beatrice. 'I can't understand what you're trying to tell me, Alex. You'll have to try to say it more clearly . . .'

'Branwell Brontë,' murmured Symington, but he did not speak again.