Daphne (5 page)

I'm not quite sure why I seem to be spending more and more time alone here, looking after the house, wiping and washing and ironing, just like I used to do for my landlord when I was a student, earning some money to supplement my grant. I don't think Paul notices all the cleaning I do when he is at work (though he might notice if I stopped doing it), but he is encouraging me to concentrate on my PhD. 'You're a very clever girl,' he says. 'You got a Cambridge scholarship, and a First in your finals, and funding for your PhD - so don't let it go to waste, don't fritter your time away like this . . .'

But I wonder, sometimes, if he says all this in order to make himself feel better about having married me; to make me seem more grown-up, less of a pointless appendage, an embarrassment in the eyes of his friends (and himself? Maybe that, too . . .) We hardly ever saw his friends before we got married - I was still at college during term-time, and in the Easter holidays, I stayed in Cambridge to revise for my finals. And then we went away for three weeks in the summer, to a rented cottage in the Cotswolds, just the two of us. It was idyllic, like a honeymoon before the wedding, with long, languorous days in the garden, and night after night entwined in bed together, when he said I made him feel young again. But afterwards, in September, he went back to work, and back to his previous life, too, seeing several of the friends he'd lost touch with after he and Rachel had split up. At first we saw them together, in the pub around the corner from his office at the university but I always felt uneasy with them, tongue-tied and gauche, while they traded jokes and told stories about people that I didn't know, and episodes in the lives they'd shared long before I came along.

I suppose that was when Paul began to see me differently; it was as literal a change as that, when his eyes narrowed slightly after one of those uncomfortable evenings in the pub, and he tilted his head to one side, and stared at me, appraisingly. 'How about getting a haircut?' he said. 'You look like a schoolgirl auditioning to play Alice in Wonderland, with your hair brushed straight down your back like that.' So I went to the hairdressers, hoping for a transformation, but not really wanting a radical crop, and the stylist just trimmed a couple of inches off, saying, 'You've got beautiful long glossy hair, you should enjoy it, at your age, while you're still young enough.' Paul didn't comment on it; I'm not sure he even noticed, he seemed quite preoccupied with work by then, and as the weeks passed, I realised that he was seeing his friends by himself, straight from the office, before coming home later in the evenings. I didn't mind that - I didn't particularly like his friends; they seemed so pleased with themselves, and competitive, like the contestants in a radio quiz, all eager to get the first word in, and score points over one another.

But what I do mind is that there's this niggling tension between us now, even when we're alone together, that wasn't there before; or at least, I don't think it was there until I finally admitted to him that I was just as interested in Daphne du Maurier as the Brontës. 'Oh God, not her again,' he said, when I told him this a few weeks ago, after he'd discovered me in my study re-reading Rebecca, instead of getting on with my thesis. 'Why is it that adult women have this obsession with Daphne du Maurier? I can just about understand why an immature teenage girl might be fixated on her, but surely it's time to grow out of her? I can't believe that you would be as predictable as that.'

He sounded dismissive, but furious, as well, and I couldn't understand what I'd done to make him so angry; his outburst was illogical, and completely disproportionate. 'This is absurd,' I said. 'I happen to think du Maurier is an intriguing writer, and to dismiss her seems to me to be a kind of knee-jerk intellectual snobbery.'

'Better to be an intellectual snob than a dimwit,' he said, and then went downstairs and turned the television on, while I slipped out for a walk in the dark wintry evening, which wasn't very satisfactory as a protest, because he fell asleep on the sofa and didn't even realise that I'd gone.

Still, I want to make everything right between us again, but it keeps going wrong. I can't seem to find the right thing to say to him, or the right way to touch him, so I wait for him to reach out to me, which happens less frequently than before, so that sometimes when I'm with him I feel like I'm shrinking and disappearing, blurring at the edges into a nobody; though when I'm alone, and away from this house, I feel more myself again.

And now I have this odd sense that there's an unspoken secret that stands between us; a secret, which shouldn't be a secret, that has something to do with what he sees as my obsession with Daphne du Maurier. But at the same time, it's hard to stop thinking about Daphne, because Paul's house is just across the road from where she lived in Hampstead, when she was growing up as a child in Cannon Hall, one of the grandest mansions in London. I don't understand why Paul isn't as fascinated as I am; in fact, his antipathy seems down-right perverse to me, given his interest in Henry James and J. M. Barrie and so on. After all, this is the very same house that Barrie used to visit every week; Daphne writes about it in one of her memoirs; she'd call him 'Uncle Jim', and play games pretending to be Peter Pan, while one or the other of her sisters was Wendy, and her aunt Sylvia's boys might be there, too, the Lost Boys, playing hide and seek with their younger cousins.

I can see into what used to be her back garden from my study on the top floor; I can see into it now, when the leaves are all fallen from the trees, and the bare branches look like a dark lattice against the sky, and the earth is black and sodden, with just a few snowdrops in the ground. But if I close my eyes, it's easy to imagine the du Maurier family are still there, Daphne and her two sisters, Angela and Jeanne; three girls, invisible yet very close, calling out to one another at the end of a summer's day, when the light is slanting, soft and golden, and the roses are in full flower. It's the most wonderful place, a secret garden that is hidden from the street by a circle of very high brick walls, and built into the side of the wall, at the point furthest away from the house, is the old Hampstead lock-up, a tiny prison cell with barred slit windows. But there's nothing confined about the garden - it's an acre or so of terraced greenery, south-facing, with a view over the whole of London - and it was once even more rambling, before the vegetable patch and tennis court beneath the parapets were sold off to provide a building plot for a multimillionaire. Cannon Hall itself is as beautiful as its garden: a graceful Georgian house, amongst the biggest in Hampstead; elegantly symmetrical in design, tall sash windows filling it with sunshine, I imagine, and a grand sweeping staircase, though I have never been inside, only examined it from my vantage point, my attic eyrie.

I think Paul would prefer me to give up on the Brontës altogether, and write a PhD on George du Maurier and his relationship with Henry James: it would be sufficiently scholarly a topic for research, he says; even though George du Maurier is now dismissed as much more minor than James, he is not quite as minor in the literary canon as Daphne. 'He's almost certainly due for a comeback,' says Paul, 'and I could help you out on the Jamesian connection, of course . . .' Ridiculous, isn't it, these league tables? As if you can measure literary excellence with precise instruments; as if there were a science of writing, governed by equations that reveal immutable truths.

Me, I can't help myself. I'm still stuck on Daphne, lost in the fog. Have been for years, ever since I first read Rebecca when I was twelve, and devoured the rest of her books, terrifying myself with her short stories, wide-eyed and sleepless after 'Don't Look Now' and 'The Birds', which were probably far too scary for me at the time (I've been wary of magpies and crows and yellow-eyed seagulls ever since). It was the same when I started reading the Brontës about six months later. I was totally enthralled by them, and frightened, too, by Cathy's ghost with her bleeding wrists at the windows of Wuthering Heights, and the living wraith that is Mrs Rochester, slipping through the doors of her attic prison, carrying her candle, dreaming of burning the house to ashes; though Charlotte annoys me sometimes when she gets too priggish about religion, as if she is trying to dampen down her overpowering rage, and put out the fire within herself. I mean, can you actually remember the exact details of the ending of Jane Eyre? Everyone goes on about the madwoman in the attic and the reworking of gothic plots - Mr Rochester and his crazed first wife; conflagrations and blindings and revelations, all of which I love - and then they ignore the preachy Christianity in the final pages, with St John Rivers leaving England to be a missionary in India, as if anyone cares about him by then; all they want to know is that Jane has married Rochester, and they've had a baby, and look set to live happily ever after, for ever and ever, amen.

Paul, of course, would be horrified if he caught me thinking like this. He believes in coincidence. I mean it - he really believes in coincidence, in the coincidental being evidence of the essential randomness of the world; he can't bear it if I see patterns in life, or echoes or mirroring, he sees that as magical thinking, as irrational foolishness, as the most insidious kind of intellectual laziness.

Even so, I think I've just stumbled across something interesting. Not here, not in this house: that would be too neat. But I'm hoping that I might be able to track down something that might, just might, constitute original material for my PhD: some of Daphne's old letters, written by her to a now-forgotten Brontë scholar called John Alexander Symington, when she was working on The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, which is actually dedicated to Mr Symington. And I'm hoping I'll discover Symington's replies to her, as well. I have no idea if any of these letters have survived, but the correspondence must once have existed, because Daphne referred to it in several other of her letters to a close friend; letters that form part of the du Maurier Family Archive at Exeter University. Yes, there is such an archive, and I've been emailing a very nice librarian there, and she put me in touch with another librarian at Leeds University, and then he told me about Daphne's visits to Leeds in the 1950s, when she came to the university library to examine a special collection of Brontë manuscripts whilst researching her biography of Branwell.

Paul doesn't think this is particularly interesting. 'It's a cul-de-sac,' he said, when I tried to tell him about it last night, 'as moribund as du Maurier's book about Branwell. This can't possibly lead you anywhere.'

'But it could be relevant to my PhD,' I said.

'How do you know any of this is relevant,' he said, 'when you don't know what's in these letters, if indeed the letters are there to be found?'

'I don't know, but until I do, how can you be so sure it's irrelevant?' I said, suddenly furious with him. He didn't answer me, just walked out of the room, banging the door hard behind him. But whatever Paul says (or doesn't say), I'm still intrigued by Daphne's letters to Symington, and by his replies to her. What did they write to one another in their letters? What did they feel about each other? Were they united by a strange, shared passion for a dead writer, whom just about everyone else had forgotten, or consigned to the dust-heap of failure? Did they fall in love with each other, as well as with Branwell? No one knows, and maybe no one cares, except for the librarian at Leeds University, who told me that Mr Symington was himself a librarian at the university, and at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. OK, I'm sorry, there are a lot of librarians in this story, and libraries as well (which maybe doesn't bode so well for originality). People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries - as if the words are synonymous with boredom or timidity. But isn't that where the best stories are kept? Hidden away on the library bookshelves, lost and forgotten, waiting, waiting, until someone like me comes along, and wants to borrow them.