Daphne (30 page)

Hampstead, September

I am sitting in my room - a room of my own - at the top of the house, a little attic with a view of the rooftops and chimney pots, and if I lean out of the window, I can see the heath, and the rooks circling over the trees in the evenings. I've rented it from a couple who need a bit of extra help with childcare, and I can hear their boys playing football outside in the garden; there's three of them, all under ten, and the deal is that I do a couple of nights' babysitting each week. I don't mind - I like the children, I even like their noise, the way their voices fill the house, and they seem to like me, as well. I play endless games of Monopoly and snap with them, and it means my rent is less than it would be, so I can afford to live quite close to the bookshop, and still walk to work. I think Paul would have preferred it if I'd moved further away, to the other side of London, but I don't see why I should. It's not him that's keeping me here in Hampstead, and it's not anything to do with staying near to Daphne's childhood home, not really, though it's a familiar part of my landscape. This is where I grew up, and I happen to like it round here, whether or not I bump into Paul again.

As it happens, I haven't seen Paul, nor Rachel either, not since she came into the bookshop earlier this month, but I rang her a couple of days ago, and got her address, which wasn't far away, just on the other side of the heath in Highgate. 'Are you coming to visit me?' she'd said, and I said no, but I was sending her a set of copies of the Symington and du Maurier letters in the post.

'That's very generous of you,' she said; but I didn't feel like I was being self-sacrificing. It made me feel good, actually, to let go of those letters. I mean, I still have my own set of copies, but I've put them in a file at the bottom of a drawer in my desk. I don't need to do anything with them - not just yet, anyway. I'm not going to do a PhD on du Maurier and the Brontës; I'm not going back to college again. I'm not sure what I will do, actually, but I'm happy at the moment. I feel as free as I've ever been, the same feeling as when I was running along the cliffs from Menabilly last month, though without the undercurrent of fear. I can't really explain why - though I suppose it's got something to do with leaving Paul, at last, and earning my own living, and I've just got back in touch with my friend Jess, and she said it was so good to hear from me again, and that I should come out to America to visit her this winter.

But there's something liberating, also, in not knowing what's going to happen next. I think that's why I don't want to write a dissertation - I don't want to try to marshal my feelings about Daphne du Maurier into a neat academic theory, though admittedly, I still find myself wondering about her, from time to time, and trying to work out what she means to me. But I don't believe that her stories define me any more; I don't feel like I'm living in some echoing version of
Rebecca
or My Cousin
Rachel. I
don't look in the mirror and see anyone but me.

'Don't look back. .' That's what Paul said to me, when we said goodbye. I'm not sure whether he meant it literally - that he didn't want me to turn round and wave as I walked down the street. Or am I supposed to be moving on, and not dwelling on the past? If that's what he meant to suggest, then of course, it's not possible. I went back to my parents' flat the other day - I just wanted to look at the outside of the house, and then I noticed the elderly couple who'd lived in the flat below ours, and they recognised me, and waved from the front door. They'd been out shopping, and invited me to come in for a cup of tea, so I did, and we ended up talking about my parents, because this couple had owned their flat for years, even before my parents had married, when my father was living there alone. I can't understand why I hadn't asked them about my father before now, it would have been so easy, but I suppose I had a sort of tunnel vision; as if no one else could know anything about my father, just because I didn't know him.

Anyway, it turns out that my father and the man in the flat below, Mr Miller, had a shared interest in local history, and apparently my father had been researching the life of a bookish Victorian, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, who had owned Bay Tree Lodge, the house that was later converted into the flats where we lived. 'As I recall, your father was rather disappointed than no one shared our interest in Nicoll,' said Mr Miller. 'He'd approached several publishing companies about writing a biography, but they all told him that his subject was far too obscure to sell. Such are the demands of the modern marketplace . . .'

Frankly, Nicoll sounded pretty obscure to me, as well, but his name was familiar, for some reason - maybe because my mother had mentioned it to me as a child, though I couldn't remember her doing so. And then all of a sudden, it clicked. 'That's extraordinary,' I said, nearly knocking over my teacup in my excitement. 'Sir Robertson Nicoll was a former president of the Brontë Society, wasn't he? I bought his biography in a second-hand book shop in Haworth earlier this year.'

The Millers seemed less surprised by this coincidence than I was - they just sort of took it in their stride, and carried on chatting about how Robertson Nicoll had been a great friend of J. M. Barrie, and that my parents had taken me to see Peter Pan when I was a very little girl, and I'd been frightened, and couldn't sleep that night, in case Peter came to get me, and carried me away out of the window. 'You were still too young, I suppose, for the theatre,' said Mrs Miller. 'You can't have been much more than three - just a baby, really.'

'I only dimly remember it,' I said. 'I don't really remember the theatre, except for the little light that danced in the darkness, which was Tinkerbell, and everyone had to shout out that they believed in fairies, so that she didn't die. And then afterwards, being scared in my bedroom, that's got sort of merged into a different memory, from when I was older, and I'd been reading Wuthering Heights, and my mother was already asleep, and I thought I could hear Cathy's ghost at the window, but then it turned out to be a strand of ivy, brushing against the glass.'

'You were such a sweet, serious child,' said Mrs Miller, 'always with your head in a book.'

'No bad thing, that,' said her husband. 'Out of children's books come the eerie landscapes of imagination. Just look at Peter Pan.'

'It's quite odd,' I said, 'because I've been doing some research into Daphne du Maurier, and it seems that her father was also great friends with Barrie - Gerald was the first Captain Hook and Mr Darling in the stage version of Peter Pan.'

'Ah yes, the doubling,' said Mr Miller. 'The good father and the bad one. The shadow side that every child fears . . .'

'You can tell that he did his degree in psychology, can't you?' said Mrs Miller, and they both started laughing in a comfortable way, and I looked at them, and realised how happy they were together, and a bit of me wished that I was part of their family - that they could be my grandparents -but it was just a pang, not a terrible heartache; and I reminded myself of my new vow, which is to make friends, but not try to attach myself to people too soon; not to repeat the mistakes I made with Paul and Rachel.

I said I ought to be getting home - it was my evening for babysitting - but as I was leaving, they asked me round to dinner next week, and they said they'd introduce me to their nephew, which was nice of them; he's my age, apparently, and has just moved to London. On the way back, I went along Church Row, as the late afternoon sunlight was slanting over the graveyard where Daphne's relatives are buried - all those du Maurier headstones, crowded together as if in a family gathering, her grandparents, George and Emma, and her parents, Gerald and Muriel, and Gerald's sister Sylvia, who died young, like her husband, Arthur, and their children, the five lost boys who Barrie had adopted. And I wondered if my father had thought about them, too, as he walked this way, along the pavement where the du Mauriers walked, my feet following in his footsteps, and theirs.

Or was he just interested in Robertson Nicoll? And did he ever make the connection between Nicoll and J. M. Barrie, who must have come to visit him here? Did he think of them as he walked along Church Row, or in the hidden lanes just to the north of the graveyard, where there is a beautiful little chapel that still seems as remote from the city as it must have done when my father first came to Hampstead, and long before that, too, when Nicoll and Barrie strolled together through these peaceful streets, talking of Charlotte Bronté I wanted it all to make sense - to fall into place, like the missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle - but it didn't, not really. I wanted it to be meaningful, but to be honest, it seemed a bit random, though there were those oddly chiming resonances: me buying the book about Nicoll in Haworth, not realising that I had grown up in his house; not knowing anything of my father's interest in him, and bringing the book home to Hampstead, but never reading it, because I was more obsessed by Symington.

When I got back to my room, I found the biography of Nicoll, and examined it more carefully. There was the inscription I remembered on the frontispiece - Christmas 1925, To J. A. Symington. But what I hadn't noticed before was the signature beneath, in rusty-coloured ink, so faded that it had nearly disappeared: 'from T. J. W.'. So it had to be from Wise, it just had to be, and I was holding in my hands a book that Wise had held in his; a book whose pages had been turned by Symington. I went through the chapters, more carefully than I'd done before, and came across some photographs - of Bay Tree Lodge at the end of the nineteenth century, and the book-lined library inside - and I wondered if my father had studied the same photographs, if he had longed to be able to go back in time as I had done, to slip into an old photograph, or between the printed lines of a page; to become a bystander in the past, to see it as it really was, rather than as it has been seen in retrospect.

Since then, I've tried to read Nicoll's biography, but to be honest, it's quite boring. Yes, he knew some interesting people - Barrie, and George du Maurier, and Robert Louis Stevenson - and he founded and edited a successful journal, the British Weekly, as well as writing a series of volumes called
Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century
, in which he collaborated with T. J. Wise, of all people, though I suppose at that point Wise was still highly regarded as a bibliophile, and not yet disgraced for his forgeries and thefts. Apparently Volume II, which appeared in 1895, included a fairy tale said to have been written by Charlotte Brontë at the age of fourteen, which came from Wise's collection of manuscripts; and I've also come across a story that has Nicoll travelling to Ireland with his friend Wise, in search of more of the Brontë manuscripts and relics taken there by Charlotte's widower. So I can understand why my father was interested in Nicoll, but I can also see why very few other people are. Surely it would have made far more sense to have written a biography of Wise -who turns out to have lived just round the corner from Robertson Nicoll, in Heath Drive - given that my father's work at the British Museum would have presumably given him access to some of the details of Wise's scandalous forgeries and thefts? But other people's obsessions and passions must remain incomprehensible, I suppose.

I've also dug out my father's leather-bound notebooks, and tried to decipher his writing, now that I know he was researching Nicoll. There's a quotation that I've only just discovered is from a J. M. Barrie novel, that my father copied out on the opening page in professionally neat copperplate: 'The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.' Aside from those lines, I can recognise a few names in the rest of the notebooks - J. M. Barrie, Clement Shorter, T. J. Wise - and the occasional address, like Heath Drive or Bay Tree Lodge, but it's still almost entirely illegible, it seems to be mostly written in a sort of coded shorthand of his own devising, or maybe it's not, maybe I just can't make out the tiny scratchy marks of his pen. I know I could drive myself mad, trying to understand the hieroglyphics, using a magnifying glass or whatever, but I'm not going to. I've got my father's notebooks, and that will have to be enough. Although actually, today I bought a black notebook that looks almost exactly like his, and I've written my name on the inside cover, and when I start filling the empty pages in my own handwriting, I think it will be legible.

There's one good thing that emerged out of my father's notebooks. I was looking at them just now, before I put them away into a drawer of my desk, and for some reason, as I glanced out of the window, out across the rooftops and up into the sky, which seems so high and clear tonight, I thought of that day in Fowey with my mother, standing on the cliffs by St Catherine's Castle, and I remembered what she said, finally; it just came into my head, without me trying, without me searching for it.

I was holding my mother's hand, and she said, don't go too close to the edge; but I wanted to see the waves crashing on the rocks below. So we were standing there together, my hand in hers, and she said, 'Don't keep looking down, sweetheart. Look out to sea - it goes all the way to the sky. Just look how far you can see, Jane . . . You can see forever today.'

Menabilly, April 1960

The phone call, very early in the morning, woke Daphne from sleep. At first, she was confused, thinking that the ringing was the bell on Cannis Rock, out beyond the headland, being tolled by the swell of the sea, in warning to boats that might run aground on the reef, and she was struggling to reach it, to surface from a dream; but then she realised it was the telephone in her bedroom, the one she kept there for emergencies.

'Hello?' she said, her voice still thick and heavy with sleep.

'Daphne,' said a woman's voice, 'I'm so sorry to wake you, but I have very bad news.' She paused, as if choking back a sob, and for an awful moment Daphne thought that it was the Snow Queen, ringing to tell her that Tommy had shot himself in London, for he had been there for the last few days.

'It's Margaret,' said the woman, and then Daphne recognised her voice, Peter's wife; what the hell was she ringing about, at six thirty in the morning? 'I had to call you, before you saw the papers,' she said. 'I didn't want you to find out the news that way. Peter killed himself last night, and it's going to be everywhere this morning, the reporters were on to it from the start.'

'That's impossible,' said Daphne. 'I can't believe it . .

'Well, I'm afraid it's happened,' said Margaret. 'He threw himself under a tube train at Sloane Square yesterday evening. I can't talk now, Daphne, but I'd appreciate it if you could tell your sisters, before they see some hideous headline this morning.'

'Of course,' said Daphne, 'but Margaret, this is terrible, there must be something else I can do? Please tell me if there's anything I can do to help.'

'I fear it's too late for that,' said Margaret, and then there was nothing, just the click of the receiver, and silence.

Daphne felt breathless, there was no air in the room; she lay down on her bed, but that was worse, she couldn't breathe, so she sat up again and put her head between her knees, then went to the window, and opened it wide. It had rained in the night, but the sky was clearing, and there were gleaming ribbons of light streaming down across the sea. 'The Spirit moving on the Waters,' Tommy used to say, whenever they'd seen the same light, that often appeared to be shining over the sea after heavy rain or a stormy day. 'Oh God,' said Daphne, quietly. 'I have failed in every way.'

She had finished her book, less than a week before, and had sent Peter a copy of the final draft. Indeed, she had rung him three days ago, to tell him to expect it in the post, and to share her sense of triumph at getting it to her publishers long before Winifred Gerin had completed her biography. Now, she found it hard to remember why she had cared so much about Branwell Brontë, or what had made her so determined to win her race to outdo a rival author; but she forced herself to remember the details of the final telephone conversation she'd had with him. What had she said to Peter, and how could she not have realised that he was suicidal? It was so brief, that was the trouble; and she had made it brief, she had not given Peter sufficient time to talk about himself, or to share his troubles with her. She told him that she had delivered her biography, at last, and that it was to be titled, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, and dedicated to the mysterious Mr Symington. 'Not that I'll say "mysterious",' she said to Peter. 'I shall keep it concise, something along the lines of, "To J. A. Symington, editor of The Shakespeare Head Brontë, whose life-long interest in Branwell Brontë stimulated my own." That should keep him happy, don't you think?'

But Peter had said very little in response, just that he was 'sinking under the weight of the Family Morgue'; those were his words, 'I am sinking . . .' Yet she had not taken them seriously, just brushed them aside, instead of reading between the lines. 'I must let you get on,' she'd said, her cue to him that she had other things to do and was ending the conversation. Afterwards, she'd sent him a copy of her final draft of the book, and a note, saying, 'I am imbued with consumption, schizophrenia, epilepsy, sleep-walking, split personality, alcoholism - the (Brontë) Works. Hopefully, you will delight in it.'

And now she felt wretched and worthless, knowing that he would have received the package on the morning of his suicide. She did not know whether he'd started reading the book - Daphne hoped not - but when she rang Peter's younger brother, Nico, before breakfast, to try to discover more about the circumstances of Peter's death, he mentioned to her that it had arrived in the first post, at the office he shared with Peter in Great Russell Street; that Peter had even commented on the manuscript to him. 'He said something about the Brontë family history being slightly less oppressive than our own,' Nico told her.

'And what else?' said Daphne.

'Well, there's much I can tell you,' he said. 'Peter was still in the office at five o'clock, and that's when I headed off home. He told me he had an appointment with an author, but apparently he just went to the bar of the Royal Court hotel, spent some time alone there, drinking, before crossing the road to Sloane Square tube station, where he threw himself under the first passing train.'

But what was Peter thinking? Daphne could not imagine what was going through his head before he smashed it to pieces; even though she was trying to, as she typed a letter to Nico, now the only surviving one of her cousins. He would dismiss her as absurdly sentimental, perhaps, because she was writing to him that she believed that Peter would make his way out of the impasse of Purgatory, having finally had it out with Uncle Jim. 'It may be, that in creating Peter Pan, Uncle Jim planted the seeds of the real Peter's destruction,' she wrote to Nico. 'But I can see Peter shaking hands with Uncle Jim, everything settled in the end, and rushing into Sylvia's arms, his mother's arms at last, because really, it was about time he did, having longed for her for about fifty years.' She typed on and on, the typewriter keys making their comfortingly familiar click-clack, describing her lunches with Peter at the Café Royal. 'We talked of grandpapa George, who as you know lived for a time just a few doors along from your offices in Great Russell Street, before moving the family to Hampstead. We talked of the past, sometimes with weeping nostalgia (after the second Dubonnet) and later with uproarious and irreverent hilarity (after the third).'

Daphne paused, overcome with remorse again, knowing that Peter would not see the unveiling of the plaque commemorating their grandfather's former house on Great Russell Street - a ceremony which had been planned for the end of March, but which she, Daphne, had delayed, in order to finish her wretched book about Branwell, even though it was Peter who had gone to the trouble of editing their grandfather's letters. And now the ceremony was to take place next week, which was too late for Peter. Poor Peter . . .

'I believe so tremendously in an after-life,' she continued in her letter, 'and indeed, it was one of our regular topics of conversation at the Café Royal, and Peter
then
seemed to be undecided about it. My insistence that our grandparents, along with Gerald and Sylvia, were delighted to see us lunching together, would bring a dubious nod of his head. "You're probably right," he would say, eventually. So, dearest Nico, one knows that all is well.'

But she did not know that all was well, and what would Peter think of her now; if indeed he was still thinking? Daphne started typing again, tears running down her face, though she did not pause to wipe them away. 'What angers me, and makes me question myself, is that possibly if I had sent Peter a very jolly letter just beforehand (intended, and never written, you know how it is), it might have tipped the scales for him, from frustrated despair to at least a momentary chuckle.' But she had not sent him a jolly letter, just a manuscript of her depressing book about an alcoholic failure, and that stupid note, that Peter might have taken as a reference to his own depression and drinking, and his sense that he had never really come to anything, for his publishing company was winding down, and he was being forced to leave the offices in Great Russell Street, they were too expensive for him, he'd admitted as much to Daphne on the telephone when they'd spoken last month, the time before the last time, and yet another occasion when she had failed him.

'You're the only true success amongst us,' he'd said to Daphne, and she'd said no, don't be so silly; but she should have said more, she should have said that she had admired him, that he never published anything cheap or tawdry or sensational, that his edition of their grandfather's letters represented everything that was true and good about the family; that she was the one who had let everyone down, not him.

Daphne sighed, and returned to her letter to Nico. 'Being myself, constantly, and for no earthly reason, a potential suicide, I don't think one does it from despair, but from anger - it's a hit out at THE OTHERS - The Others being, to the potential suicide, everything that ONE is not. The violent feelings rising within can only be assuaged by greater violence, hence Peter's decision to kill himself beneath the wheels of the train. The off-balance Self says to the mythical Others, "If this is what you are doing to me - Right, Here We Go." ' She stopped, appalled by her own words on the page before her. What if everything she was writing was meaningless? What if it all meant nothing, in the end? What then?