Daphne (16 page)

I thought of how she'd taught me to cross the road - I could almost hear her voice saying, 'Look left, look right, look left again' - and how she always used to say to me, 'Take care, sweetheart' before I went to school in the morning. And she said it to me in our last conversation. 'Take care of yourself,' she said. 'I will,' I said, and afterwards, when she was dead, I was so sorry that I hadn't told her that I loved her before putting the phone down, that those should have been my last words to her. Now, when I remembered her again, I thought, well, the least I can do is keep my promise, instead of hanging over a parapet. 'I love you, Mum,' I whispered, and then I came back inside, closing the door behind me, but I didn't lock it; I didn't like the idea of being locked in.

I felt too shaky to go straight back to work, and too foolish, as well. I thought, God, I hope no one saw me up there on the balcony, behaving like a lunatic. What I needed, I told myself, was to do something comfortingly normal like make a cup of tea and rummage through the biscuit tin (my biscuit tin, not Rachel's). So I went downstairs to the kitchen, and ate two chocolate digestives while I was waiting for the kettle to boil, and then, just as the steam started coming out of the spout, I was struck by an idea. Well, not a whole, fully formed idea, exactly, just the beginnings of one . . . Daphne was using the Brontë poem as the starting point for her novel when she was almost exactly the same age as her cousin Michael Llewelyn Davies had been, when he drowned in a pool at Oxford, as an undergraduate. Also, she had turned fourteen less than a week before Michael's death, on a sunny May afternoon, and I wonder . . . what on earth went through her mind then?

By the time I'd made my tea, I was feeling quite excited, and I rushed back upstairs to my study to see whether Daphne had written anything about this in her autobiography. I've already read it loads of times, searching for clues - it's the most elliptical of memoirs, but it contains these tantalising snippets from her diary (a diary which is now locked in a bank vault, as she instructed in her will, not to be released until fifty years after her death). Anyway, as I flicked through the book, I already knew that she didn't refer to Michael's drowning, but I was almost certain that his death coincided with the period in her life when she felt her first sexual awakenings with her cousin Geoffrey. What I needed to double-check in her memoir was the timings - and there it was, on page 60 -the summer that she was fourteen she was on a family holiday with Geoffrey, her aunt Trixie's son. He was thirty-six, and old enough to be her father; indeed, was as close to her father as a brother. She kind of hints at an incestuous impulse, both with Geoffrey and her father; she says - and I've underlined this in the book - that her flirtation with Geoffrey was 'a reaching out for a relationship that was curiously akin to what I felt for D[addy], but which stirred me more, and was also exciting because I felt it to be wrong'.

So, I suppose there might be a link between sex and death in all of this. Michael drowned in the arms of another male undergraduate; Geoffrey and Daphne held hands together in secret, by the sea, hiding from her possessive father; and later on, in several of her most climactic fictional episodes, her heroines are engulfed by the waves - Rebecca, murdered by her husband for taking lovers; and the daughter in Julius, drowned by her father, whose incestuous desire for her is such that he would rather kill her than let her have sex with another man.

And then I suddenly remembered the girl in her short story, 'A Borderline Case' - at least, I thought I remembered it, but first I had to find the book it was in, which took me about ten minutes of frantic searching, while I got more and more agitated. Finally I discovered it, in a second-hand edition without a jacket that had fallen down behind my desk, but it was just as I remembered it, about a girl who travels to Ireland soon after the death of her father, and ends up making love with a man who turns out to be her real father, an ex-British army officer who lives on an island, and conducts clandestine operations for the IRA. 'Don't go, don't ever leave me!' she cries out to her father, just after they have made love; as if in an echo of Daphne's words in her autobiography, when she described her panic, as a girl, when Gerald announced that he was going up on the roof of Cannon Hall during an air raid. 'I stretched out my arms and cried, "Don't go . . . don't go . . . Don't ever leave me." '

The trouble is, as an idea, it doesn't get me very far with a PhD on Daphne and the Brontës. And it certainly doesn't seem to be doing much for my own marriage. I mean, there's far more sex in Daphne's writing than there is in my life right now, not that I want the incestuous sort that lurks between the lines in her books, even if Paul is old enough to be my father. Admittedly, I don't have much in the way of experience to judge these things, but I don't think it can be normal to live like this. Paul slept in another bedroom last night - he says it's a temporary measure, because I've been so restless at night and keeping him awake, making him too exhausted to be able to cope with his job. So there we were, marooned in our separate beds, me alone in the room he had shared with Rachel, and him on the other side of the wall, back in the single bed he had slept in as a child.

And we're separated in our daytime lives, as well, because Paul seems intent on becoming hermetically sealed from me. I'm almost beginning to wonder when he'll start refusing to share the milk; it's as if he's frightened I'm going to infect him with something. Either that, or he finds me repellent, and most of the time, he avoids looking at me, but occasionally, I'll catch him staring at me, appalled, like he's seen a ghost.

When I start thinking about it, though, about what might happen if he tells me to leave, because he doesn't want to live with me, it's impossible - it's literally impossible, I've got nowhere else to go, nowhere to be; it would be like climbing out of the attic again, up on to the parapet . . . No, I'm not going to let myself go there again; no good can possibly come of that.

So. I'm trying not to think about the separate beds; or about those emails, which I can't talk to Paul about, because I can't admit to having read them. They'll have to be a secret, just like Rachel's book in my drawer, just like the secret of Daphne's relationship with Gerald. What was it that Paul said in his email? That he knew how to interpret Rachel's covert glances and remarks? But what if he was wrong? And maybe I'm misinterpreting Paul's current desire for solitude; maybe it's nothing to do with me, maybe he just needs some time to be alone?

This is why I've got to concentrate on my PhD instead. I'm hoping several solutions will present themselves, if I keep on working at it. Not that I'm entirely sure what 'it' is. But that, too, will probably come clear, one of these days. In the meantime, I've just reread Emily Brontë's diary entry, written on Branwell's twentieth birthday, when she was looking ahead in time, to four years hence, when she would be twenty-two, the same age as me. 'I wonder where we shall be and how we shall be and what kind of day it will be then let us hope for the best.'

Menabilly, December 1957

'Lady du Maurier is peaceful, but sinking further into a coma,' said the doctor to Daphne, just before she went into see her mother in the bedroom at Ferryside, his voice hushed yet still professional. Daphne nodded, to indicate that she understood what the doctor was telling her - that her mother was close to death - but as she walked into the room, she felt as if none of it was real, as if she had been propelled into a scene in someone else's book. She tried to concentrate on what the doctor had said to her, though his words seemed to float past her, past the frail old woman lying in bed, and then Daphne imagined her mother's body in the rising night-tide that lapped a few feet beneath the window, drifting and submerged by the waves, but not yet sinking, not quite yet.

She sat on the chair by the bed, and leant down, resting her face against her mother's cheek, and as she did so, Muriel turned and kissed Daphne, very gently, her eyes still closed, her lips as soft and papery as a moth's wings. Then she sighed, almost imperceptibly, seeming to move further away again, and Daphne told herself that her mother was at peace, not only because all of her suffering was nearly over, but also because there was a reconciliation between the two of them, after the undercurrent of hostility that had pulled them apart in the early years.

They had begun to make their peace a longtime ago, after Gerald's death; but even so, Daphne wanted to believe that the kiss melted any remaining ice in both of their hearts. She wished she could lay her hands upon her mother's face, and smooth the years away, but instead she took her mother's hand, cradling it in hers, feeling the pulse still flickering, and though the doctor had warned her that this was the end, Daphne was comforted by the warmth of her touch, which seemed as if it would endure, even when Muriel's body turned cold.

Yet they were not together at the moment of Muriel's death; her mother slipped away when Daphne was not in the house, saving her final goodbye for Angela, who she always loved more. Although Daphne told herself not to see this as another rejection, she could not help but brood on it, and she wondered if the unexpected sharpness of her grief was as much for herself as her mother. After the funeral at a crematorium near Truro - a bleak affair, on a raw and melancholy afternoon, the last day of November - she and Angela and Jeanne caught the train to London, taking with them an urn of their mother's ashes, and scattered them beside their father's grave in Hampstead, close to the house where he had been born. Standing in the churchyard between her two sisters, surrounded by all the family graves, Daphne found herself wishing that she could stay there, a kind of quiet death wish, though it was not necessarily oblivion that she sought, but the beginning of another chapter, or a different story.

Daphne almost expected to see her father at her sisters' side, for surely he was as close as he could ever come to them now? 'Suppose that we were really dead, and didn't know it?' she said to her sisters, and they both looked at her, surprised, but didn't answer. When Gerald was still alive, he'd visited the graveyard often, on the anniversaries of his family's births and deaths, bringing spring flowers for his parents, and bulbs for his sister Sylvia, and a wreath with the Fusilier ribbon on it for his soldier brother, Guy; laying his offerings beside the headstones, and sitting there with the dead for a while, as if in a family reunion. Was this how he had felt then, the longing that Daphne felt now?

Poor Gerald, who died of cancer a week after his sixty-first birthday, on 11 April 1934, the dates carved on to his grave. She did not go to her father's funeral, for she could not bear to see the coffin lowered into the earth, knowing that his body would be trapped and rotting there in the dark, locked away and abandoned. Instead, she'd stayed behind at Cannon Hall, and then walked across the road to the heath, taking with her a cage of two white doves. At the top of a grassy rise, unseen by anyone, Daphne opened the cage, just as her father had done so often when he was still alive; he bought caged wild birds from an East End market, linnets and finches and thrushes, hundreds and hundreds of them over the years, and set them free in Hampstead, saying that birds should not be imprisoned, it was too cruel to keep them behind bars. And she'd done the same thing as a child, releasing the pet doves she was given by her aunt Trixie for her fifth birthday, half-terrified that the birds would not choose freedom. She remembered a similar moment of fear when she went to the heath after her father's death, turning her head away after she unlocked the cage and put it on the ground, willing the doves to take flight, while she muttered the lines from her favourite poem by Emily Brontë, closing her eyes, as if in prayer. And as Daphne stood beside her father's grave now, she whispered the lines again, like an incantation.

Then she lifted her head up, hoping to see a sign, and there were birds in the sky, wheeling and soaring, and she wished that her father was free of the earth, at last, and her mother up there beside him.

But she suspected that they were still lingering here on the ground. Daphne imagined them gathering together after she and her sisters had gone home, a clan of du Maurier ghosts, congregated around the gravestones. The words on her cousin Michael's memorial were simple: 'An undergraduate who was drowned at Oxford while bathing 19 May 1921, but no one had known how to talk about his death, and what would his family of ghosts say about it now? Would they change the subject, in death as in life; would they do just as they had always done?

Not long after her cousin George had died in the war, Uncle Jim had taken her on a Sunday afternoon outing to the zoo with Nico, and they had stared at the lion's cage, but when Michael died, there was no question of going anywhere, Barrie had been inconsolable, and he had broken down; that's what her father had said, 'Jim broke down in the dressing room at the theatre, just after he'd heard the news, and I should have felt sorry for him, but I couldn't help hating him.' And that was that, her father said nothing more, and the funeral had taken place without Daphne, without comment. Daphne bought a little bunch of violets for Michael a few days after his burial, and left them for him by the newly dug grave, slipping away from the house, not telling anyone, but wondering if she was being watched, in the churchyard, wondering if Michael was there, laughing at her, in that gently mocking way of his.

She'd stayed in touch with the other Llewelyn Davies boys, of course, with Jack and Peter and Nico; and though handsome Jack was the cousin who Daphne admired most when she was a girl (swooning over him as a teenager, and tongue-tied as a child, when he would come to visit her, bringing sweets and balloons), and charming Nico the easiest to get along with at parties, she had always been closest to Peter. 'Family, that's the most important thing,' she said to him, when they met for a drink at the Café Royal, after Muriel's ashes had been scattered. She reached over and touched his hand, just for a moment, and as he smiled at her, with that grave, crooked smile, she thought to herself that perhaps she should have married him, not Tommy, that they would have understood one another so well.

'How did we come to be so grown-up?' she said. 'Peter Pan isn't supposed to grow old.'

He flinched as she spoke, and she said, 'Oh Peter, I'm so sorry, I know you hate it'

'That terrible masterpiece,' he said, and raised his glass, as if in a mocking toast to his namesake.

'What's in a name?' she said.

'My God, what isn't?' he said. 'If that boy so fatally committed to an arrested development had only been dubbed George or Jack or Michael or Nico, what miseries might have been spared me?'

'But Michael suffered too, didn't he?' she said. 'When I was little, I overheard a conversation that I shouldn't have been listening to, between my nanny and yours. And your nanny said that Michael was having bad nightmares, of ghosts coming through the windows, but when I heard them talking, I knew the nannies were wrong. It wasn't ghosts that frightened Michael, it was Uncle Jim and Peter Pan.'

'Poor Michael,' he said. 'I remember his nightmares, and mine too, about winged creatures . . . You know, peple used to tell us that Barrie was our guardian angel, but now I look back on it, perhaps there was something of the angel of death about him. Maybe Michael knew something about him that we didn't.' He laughed, as if to take the sting out of his words, but Daphne made sure not to mention Peter Pan again in the conversation, knowing that the burden of Barrie's most famous creation weighed heavily on Peter, who as he grew older seemed increasingly oppressed by his ageless counterpart.

She was still preoccupied by this the next day, on the train going back to Cornwall with her sisters. 'Who said it first?' she muttered on the train, hardly knowing she was speaking aloud.

'Who said what?' said Jeanne, looking up from her newspaper.

' "To die will be an awfully big adventure",' said Daphne. 'I was just wondering who Barrie got it from?' Jeanne shrugged, and Angela's eyes were closed, her mouth twitching, as if she was dozing. 'I think it was Michael,' Daphne said, almost to herself, 'he always had a way with words. And Barrie was always quick to seize on them . . .' That's what Peter had said to her, years ago, that Barrie had taken his words out of his mouth, when he was a child, and those of his brothers, too, and woven them into the myth of Peter Pan.

'Daddy said he seized on all of us,' said Jeanne. 'Mind you, if it hadn't have been for Uncle Jim, we might never have been born.'

And it was impossible to forget Barrie, even now, as the train gathered speed out of London. He came with her, just as he had been there in the Hampstead graveyard, hovering at the margins of the gathering of the ghosts. Could he fly, at last, that small, slight man, who had dreamt of Neverland? They had all been drawn into Jim's kingdom - all of them, even Angela, cast as Wendy when she was eighteen, and already knew the play off by heart, like Daphne and Jeanne, for they'd watched it every Christmas since they were little girls, knowing it was written for their cousins, and acting it out themselves in the nursery, sometimes for Uncle Jim to watch, longing for his applause.

Which is why, perhaps, Daphne could not rid herself of the idea that if her ghostly relations were scudding across the sky above her, they were attached by unseen wires, like the actors had been in Peter Pan; not yet free, and still bound in some way, not only to one another, but also to the material world.

Back in Menabilly, at last, she did not feel comforted by this thought, for it suggested that she would be earthbound, now and always, so that there could be no real prospect of escape. Christmas was coming, and another family gathering, which might bring with it a return of all of the tensions of the summer, Tommy drinking steadily, then becoming unsteady, and everyone pretending that nothing was wrong. Daphne considered, briefly, the whimsy of having Branwell as a distraction at Menabilly - not simply in her head, in an unwritten book (a book that might never be written, if she did not get a move on), but as a guest in the house; a disreputable yet intriguing figure to draw the attention away from Tommy.

And just for a little while, she smiled. Other people's families were generally more manageable than one's own; though Daphne occasionally longed for just an hour of Branwell's company, with a nostalgia as deep as if he had once been part of her past; as if he had been her own brother, or lover, or father, as deeply as she had once longed for Peter Pan, and all the other Lost Boys, when she had willed them to be real, not grease-painted actors; yet at the same time wishing them freedom, taking flight from the dusty wings of a theatre, and out towards the stars of a clear night sky.

Freedom: that was the thing, to be free, not endlessly caught up on a stage, tangled and tripping over the wires; and was that what Michael had sought, unleashed in the water, unlocked from the words? Perhaps that was the only way forward, to be free of everything, of everyone, maybe even to be free of Branwell. . . But could she cut herself loose, at last?