Daphne (2 page)

He sighed, and then coughed, a small, dry, pathetic little cough. 'I love you, my darling,' she said to Tommy, even though she loathed him at that moment.

'I love you too,' he said, but he whimpered the words as he wept; and she felt nothing but contempt for him then, for he sounded like a little boy, not a man; he'd lost the commanding authority she had fallen in love with, her handsome major in the Grenadier Guards, a quarter of a century ago. She did not refer to their physical relationship, or its decline in the last decade; they did not talk about that; they never had done. She was fifty, and he was ten years older; she assumed that these things happened, this slow fading away of desire, this dwindling of the flesh. Boy Browning: that was his nickname in the regiment when she first met him in 1932, and it stuck, even as his boyish good looks aged; and now she was following in his footsteps, youth shrinking behind them, everything withering away.

Daphne could not bear to stay another night in London knowing that she was sleeping in the bed where her husband had been with his lover, her head on the same pillows, tangled in the same sheets; knowing that this place contained their words of endearment, their secrets, so she'd already crammed her things into a suitcase and taken it with her to the nursing home. She wondered if she should feel guilty about abandoning Tommy alone in his room on the top floor; and what would the doctors think of her, leaving her husband in London? 'Sir Frederick will need complete bed rest here for at least another week,' the young doctor said, taking her to one side as soon as she arrived. And she knew then that she would go mad if she stayed there with her husband; she would end up a wreck like him, locked up in that suffocating attic, with just a square of sky glimpsed through the window.

'I'm going to have to go home to sort everything out, darling,' she said to her husband, trying to keep her voice bright. 'I'm cancelling the wedding anniversary party, so you don't need to worry about that, you just concentrate on having a jolly good rest here, and catch up on your sleep.' She despised herself for sounding like a mother talking to a child; but she could not help herself, she could not help him, everything was twisted and distorted out of shape.

'Where are my boys?' he said to her; and that was all he could say, a grown man asking for his teddy bears, the boys, he called them, the tattered teddies he'd kept since childhood, that had travelled in his case to and from London and Menabilly for years, and before then, around the world with him, while he fought wars and led regiments of men; a steely-eyed general upon whom a nation depended, yet who himself relied on the comfort of a baby's soft toys. 'You must find my boys,' he said. 'I need to have them here with me.'

'I'm not sure where they are, darling,' she said. 'When did you see them last?' And he starting crying again and shook his head, unable to speak. They stared at each other mutely for a few seconds, and then she fled from the room, and went straight to Paddington Station. It seemed the only thing to do, to take the train back down to Cornwall, to make the long journey home.

And so here she was, alone again; not that she would ever be entirely alone in Menabilly; not here, with all the voices murmuring, soft yet insistent, asking her to listen . . .

'I'm not listening,' said Daphne, and went downstairs to let the dog out in the garden. The sun was just rising, but not yet visible in the flushed pink sky above the tall trees that surrounded Menabilly. She decided, suddenly, to walk down through the woods to the beach; to keep moving, she must keep moving. 'What is past is also future,' she muttered to herself, but she was not quite sure what this meant, though she believed it to be true when she wrote it late last night in a letter to Tommy. She did not know whether she would send the letter; she did not know the right thing to say to him; she feared that words had failed her, had failed them. Would they ever find the right words for each other again? It was as if they had somehow drifted into speaking in two different dialects, with no translator; and yet, right up until this crisis, they were still pretending to understand each other, they picked up on the occasional familiar word or phrase; they nodded and smiled, they were always apparently civilised.

As for Rebecca, the shape-shifting mistress of dissembling and pretence . . . 'I know you're here,' said Daphne, quietly. 'What do you have to say for yourself now?'

The tide was low this morning, the ancient shipwreck visible, a century-old skeleton half covered in sand, its funeral wreath of rotting seaweed draped about it still; and there was something almost obscene about its nakedness, its humiliation, revealed for all to see; the seagulls swooping over it with their mocking cries. But there was no sign of Rebecca, that sly girl, whom time did not fade. 'Where are you?' called Daphne, and her voice was caught by the wind and echoed against the rocks. 'You, you, you . . .' murmured the echo.

Daphne picked up a stone and threw it, and another one, and another. They cracked against the shingle, like gunshots, and she thought of Tommy's revolver, back at the house, she must hide it before he came home to Menabilly, it wasn't safe for him to have a gun, or his bows and arrows, which stood ready in sharp serried rows by the front door. He was at breaking point, something might snap, irrevocably, the act would be over, the veneer cracked; and in a blind rage, he could shoot her, like Maxim killed Rebecca, in the sinister little cottage on the beach. But Rebecca wouldn't die, even now, twenty-one years after Daphne first wrote her into existence; except then Daphne imagined herself as the second Mrs de Winter, shy and young and inexperienced, obsessed and possessed by Rebecca, haunted by the ghost of her glamorous predecessor. And slowly, slowly, the pattern turned in on itself, like a kaleidoscope, until Daphne was Rebecca, and her husband was ready to kill her, and replace her with a younger woman, but a clever one, no innocent anonymous girl, this time; for Daphne must face the implacable Snow Queen, who put a sliver of icy glass into Tommy's eye, as well as his heart, so that he could no longer see straight, he was cold to everything he once loved: a doomed and frozen de Winter.

'Stop it,' said Daphne, out loud, shocked at how fast these thoughts had risen and consumed her, like the tide on the turn, and the dog looked at her, surprised. 'Get a grip,' she whispered; she must get a grip; she could not let herself be gripped by the wild ideas that twisted and coiled within and without her; by these irrational thoughts of plots. There were no plots. 'This is it,' she said to herself, 'there is nothing more than this.' She was a fifty-year-old woman, walking on the beach, not long before her silver wedding anniversary, with a family gathering to postpone, lists to make and dates to check. Her husband was having an affair, but this could be dealt with, it was a messy episode in the ordinary muddle of life; the marriage would recover, just as it did after Daphne's affairs, not that poor Tommy necessarily knew about them all those years ago though perhaps he guessed, except surely not about Gertie, Tommy could not begin to comprehend such a thing. But Gertie was dead and gone; disappeared from the world of the living in a way that Rebecca was not.

Not Rebecca. She was not Rebecca. She wrote Rebecca, and she could write her off. She killed Rebecca, after all; she made her die, chose the manner of her ending, and if Rebecca rose again, why, she was nothing without Daphne; for she was Daphne's creation.

She whistled for the dog, turned her back on the waves and the melancholy wreck, avoided looking at Rebecca's cottage, empty now, and walked homewards. It was a mistake to come down to the sea so early, it was not part of her routine; she should still be fast asleep, the routine must be resumed, the routes, she and Tommy called them, the safe routes by which their lives were mapped and secure. She needed a bath and breakfast and then work, she must concentrate on another book, nothing to do with Rebecca, this would be the way to recovery, this was the only way forward, step by step, moment by moment, until lunch and an afternoon walk with the dog, as usual, to clear her head, and more writing, she had letters to send, and dinner and reading and bed, and so on, and on and on, inching to safety, away from the abyss, until everything became clearer again

Tod was awake by the time Daphne returned to the house, pottering around the kitchen, making breakfast. She looked at Daphne but did not question her; they knew each other too well for that, for Tod had been with Daphne for nearly forty years, on and off, more often than not, first as Daphne's governess in childhood, and then as governess to Daphne's own children, and now at seventy, she was still part of the household, though installed in a little flat of her own at the end of a long passage on the other side of the house. Tommy did not like her; he called her Mrs Danvers, after Rebecca's macabre housekeeper, which was absurd, of course, for there was nothing unnerving about Tod, just as there was nothing inherently murderous about Tommy, and though she was devoted to Daphne, it was not at all the same as Mrs Danvers' obsessive love for Rebecca.

What was clear, thought Daphne, as she looked at the familiar figure of Tod - rounded and comfortable, more like Mrs Tiggywinkle than Mrs Danvers - was that something would have to be done, if Tommy was to give up the London flat and the London job and the London woman, and live full-time at Menabilly, as Daphne suspected might be necessary in order to save their marriage. But he was often irritable and angry with Tod, and her feelings would be hurt, as had happened before now, like that uneasy Sunday lunch, not long ago, when Tod said that her throat hurt and asked Daphne for a remedy, and Tommy snapped, 'just cut it'. It would be impossible for the three of them to live together here, and yet Daphne felt responsible for Tod, who would be lonely if she was dismissed from Menabilly.

And then it came upon her again, the dread, with its choking sensation familiar from her recurring nightmares, not those of Rebecca in the mirror, but the other dreams, of the high tide, when Daphne was in the dark water, trying to keep afloat, but it was overwhelming, and she knew that she might drown. She must not panic: if the panic became too strong, she would be sucked under, dragged down to the depths; she must remember to breathe, though her throat was closing up.

'My dear,' said Tod, 'you look so peaky. You must eat something, you need your strength at a time like this.'

Daphne wanted to cry - it was easier to be alone, not to hear the kindness in her old governess's voice - but she would not break down in front of Tod; not after witnessing Tommy's terrible gulping tears in the nursing home, his face contorted, looking like a nightmarish gargoyle version of himself; Boy Browning turned into a weeping old man. She cleared her throat and told Tod that she was going to have some tea, and then she would be writing in her garden hut, as usual.

'Very sensible,' said Tod. 'Settle yourself into a routine, again. Best get on with your work.'

As Daphne walked across the roughly mown lawns in front of the house, she tried to gather her thoughts, her strength; she needed her strength, like Tod said. She could not run away from here. This was it; this was the task ahead of her, to . . . to do what, exactly? To return to her work, when her marriage was not working? She opened the door of her writing hut, breathing in its familiar smell of dust and wood and paraffin fumes from the old heater that warmed it in winter. Scattered across the desk were the untidy sheaves of notes and books she'd abandoned before rushing to London, to Tommy . . . was there any point in trying to pick up the pieces of what she had left here? What was she thinking, before the unthinkable happened? Daphne looked at the opened books - the Shakespeare Head edition of the Brontës; four volumes of their letters and juvenilia, filled with her pencilled marks in the margins - and it seemed to her as if it had been years since she had leafed through the pages, even though she recognised some of her notes as those she scrawled just a few days ago, along with the beginnings of a letter to the editor of these books, a Mr Symington. And then there was that name she'd written in capital letters on the front of her latest notepad. 'Branwell Brontë . . .' Daphne spoke his name out loud. 'Branwell?' she said again, but there was no answer, just the creaking of the floorboards as she walked across to her desk.

Why Branwell Brontë? Why try to write a biography of him now? It was risky, of course - he was a notoriously hopeless case, famous only for his failures - yet could she simply cast him aside; could she abandon the research she had already begun on him? Perhaps Tod was right, it would be good for her to get on with the book; Branwell might even be a lifeline. Yet the thought of Branwell in the water with her was not much help; he would be drowning, drunk already, or stupefied with opium, a dead weight dragging her down into the darkness, into the depths, the two of them tangled together, their limbs embraced . . . And really, what was the point of submerging herself with Branwell, or attempting to rescue him, when she had so many immediate problems to face? There were the conversations with Tommy to be had, and with his doctors; and she must find excuses for Kits to explain his father's stay in the nursing home, though perhaps the girls were old enough to understand the truth now, they'd seen enough of his drinking already, and the bouts of depression and melancholy which had led to his family nickname: Moper. ('Don't call me that,' he'd often said, but Daphne simply laughed. 'That laugh,' he said, 'the famous du Maurier laugh . . .')