Daphne (4 page)

Hampstead, January

I am trying. I am very trying. I must try harder. I am trying, though not yet succeeding, to write a proposal for what is supposed to be my PhD thesis on the Brontës' imaginary worlds of childhood, with particular reference to Branwell's influence on Emily and Charlotte. Or perhaps not, perhaps this idea is entirely misconceived, and I should start all over again with a different approach. 'Maybe you're trying too hard?' remarks my husband as he puts his head through my study door just now, and finds me hunched over my computer, looking miserable.

It's easy for him to say that I'm trying too hard. These things come more easily to him. He is an effortlessly successful English lecturer; though he would not approve of that description. He would say, ' "Effortlessly" is a cliché. Nothing is effortless.' And I suppose it must be an effort, being married to me.

Oh stop it, do stop this whining and self-pitying. I hate that in myself. That's why my mind keeps straying to Daphne du Maurier instead of Branwell Bronti?, that's what I like about her: her lack of self-pity, her remorseless, pitiless view of the world. You can see it in Emily Brontë, too. Nearly everyone is horrible to everyone else in Wuthering Heights. That's just the way it is, like the weather.

Sometimes, it seems inconceivable that I am married to my husband, that Paul chose me, rather than anyone else, as if I must have invented it. But I didn't. The wedding was less than six months ago, a very quiet affair in the local registry office at the end of last summer, and I felt so happy that day, but dazed, as well. It was just the two of us - he said he didn't want anyone else there, that I was all he needed - and so our witnesses were strangers, an elderly couple that were sitting on a bench outside the registry office when we arrived. I wore a white cotton summer dress and dove-grey ballet slippers, and carried a small bunch of rose buds, tied with a forget-me-not blue ribbon that had belonged to my mother. Afterwards, on our way out of the registry office, we passed another, much bigger wedding party, and I heard one of the guests say, 'What a shy-looking young bride she is . . .' I blushed, because it's true, I was shy, and I wonder if I also looked childish beside Paul, who was so much more confident than me. I was still a student when we met - not his student, I hasten to add, he'd never do anything as cliched as that, but I was his friend's lodger. I was in my final year at Cambridge, and Paul was (still is) an academic in London. Anyway, we met at Paul's friend's house, just over a year ago. I was living there, in the attic room at the very top of the house, and Paul came to stay for a week or so in December, while he was doing some research at the University Library, into the correspondence of Henry James.

And we got talking - not about Daphne du Maurier, I'd learnt by then to keep my mouth shut on the subject at Cambridge, where she was generally seen as irrelevant to the study of English literature - but about other stuff. I was alone in the kitchen when Paul got back from the library, and the house was empty, because my landlord, Harry, had already gone away for a few days. Paul hadn't appeared to take much notice of me when we first met the evening before, but now he glanced over as I filled the kettle to make us both a cup of tea.

'I don't suppose you know anything about George du Maurier?' he said, raising an eyebrow, quizzically.

I nodded, and Paul went on. 'Well, the first letter I read today was one that Henry James sent to various newspapers at the time of J. M. Barrie's divorce proceedings in 1909, asking the editors to keep the matter private. Here, take a look at it.' He pulled a photocopy of the letter out of his briefcase, and came to stand next to me, close enough for me to be able to smell the faint scent of lime on his skin. 'Look,' he said, his finger tracing a sentence in the letter, 'James said they owed this discretion to Barrie, "as a mark of respect and gratitude to a writer of genius". George du Maurier was dead by then, but my theory is that James's real reason for protecting Barrie from unwelcome publicity might have been because of Barrie's involvement with George's daughter, Sylvia, and her sons. Which is why the second letter I've been looking at today is also interesting. Here, let me show you.' He bent down to his briefcase again and his hair was long enough to fall over his face, in thick, unruly curls. 'James wrote this the following year, to George du Maurier's widow, Emma, just after Sylvia died of cancer, and see here, he says "she leaves us an image of such extraordinary loveliness, nobleness and charm".'

It happened very quickly. We'd been talking for an hour or so, and then we went out for a walk, because he needed some fresh air after spending so long in the library, and we kept walking and talking, down West Road and then circling back again, past Newnham and on into the gothic grounds of Selwyn College, and he said it felt like walking into another century, being there, looking up at the mullion windows, all darkened now, and the castellated towers that rose up out of the clutch of the ivy. 'And you,' he said, 'you look like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel, with your beautifully serious face and your grave, grey eyes. So do you have a suitably romantic story to tell?'

'Not very,' I said, 'though I suppose it's quite Victorian, being an orphan. My father died when I was very young, just before my fourth birthday, I barely remember him, and then my mother died, a month after I started in my first year at Cambridge, and I don't have any brothers or sisters.'

'That makes two of us,' said Paul, and then he kissed me. It was the most astonishing thing that had ever happened to me. He took my face in his hands, very gently at first, and kissed me in the twilight of the college gardens, in the long shadow of the chapel, on a frosty winter evening, close to the turning of the year. No one else was around: it was the holidays, the other students had all gone home for Christmas by then, but I was staying on in Cambridge. I didn't have anywhere else to go, which was fine by me, I liked it there. And I adored Paul, I loved him kissing me, the way he pulled me towards him; he seemed so much more expert at it than the boys I'd kissed before, not that there were very many of them, no more than two or three; two, in fact, to be honest, and one of them was so drunk he could have been kissing the floor.

We ended up spending that New Year's Eve together, a night which might have meant nothing to another girl, but it meant everything to me. 'You've never done this before?' he said to me, in the darkness, in my bed, in the empty house, sounding amazed; and my voice was trembling when I said, 'This is the first time . . .'

I told him I loved him that night - I could not stop myself -as soon as he started making love to me, as if he was somehow creating me as he did so, as if he was making me, so that I felt my limbs, my body, come to life as he ran his hands over me, wordlessly, his lips just touching my skin. His first wife had left him, and he was lonely, I could tell that he was lonely, because he was so hungry for me; he couldn't bear the sudden emptiness around him after she'd gone, and the sense of failure, and then I came along, and he saw me as something fresh and unspoilt. Paul said that to me, he said, 'You are my virgin territory.' He felt like a blessing to me - a miracle, appearing out of nowhere; and maybe that feeling swept us along too quickly, a joyous, impulsive urgency, though it didn't last long after our wedding day, it couldn't, not when the dark failure of his divorce was lurking in the corner, ready to spring out at us again, and I was no longer his virgin: he had conquered me. Of course, all his friends were disapproving, you could tell they thought he'd ended up with me on the rebound: a sweet young student, a blank page, no threat to his equanimity, but no real match for him, either, nothing but an easy salve to his wounded feelings after Rachel abandoned him and ran away to a new job at an American university, leaving him and everything else behind.

Maybe his friends were right. But here we are, married now, in his house in Hampstead, not far from the rented flat where I grew up on the other side of the high street, in Frognal. Yes, he's got a whole house, handsome redbrick Victorian, on a quiet road that leads straight to the heath; though it's not paid for out of an academic's salary, this was his father's house, and he left it to Paul in his will, ten years ago. That's one of the things we've got in common, Paul and me: our parents are dead, though his lived a little longer than mine, long enough to see him into adulthood. But we share some of that same feeling of weightlessness, of being adrift, though I suspect I have drifted further and faster than he has, carried out of my depth. He felt lost, of course, after Rachel left him, but he has the anchorage of his job, which he is very good at, and the house, and me. And I know I should be grateful, I should feel like the luckiest girl in the world, chosen by a handsome, intelligent man, the first man who ever told me that I was beautiful, who brought me to live in his house, this lovely, gracious house, filled with books and comfortable chairs in which to curl up and read. The light streams in through big, generous windows, and is reflected on polished wooden floors, and in the garden there are espaliered apple trees, and scented creamy roses that Paul's mother planted, entwined with evergreen clematis and a climbing jasmine that smothers the brick walls, even now, in the depths of winter.

But sometimes I feel like a lodger again, as if I am just staying here until Rachel comes home to reclaim what belongs to her; cleaning her house, keeping it pristine and fresh for her; camping out in her bedroom, sleeping on her white linen sheets, beneath her feather duvet; borrowing her husband, who might already be missing her, or maybe he's just beginning to get bored of me. I have very few belongings of my own in this house, just my books, a pitiful collection, when compared to Paul's library, and my clothes, huddled like refugees in a corner of Rachel's empty mahogany wardrobe. And my face in her wardrobe mirror is washed-out and pale, and my fair hair turned into a colourless reflection, a curtain that shadows my eyes.