Daphne (18 page)

It's a very sinister collection, about murder and paranoia and men in trilby hats, and the most macabre story is 'The Blue Lenses', which describes a woman who is recovering from an eye operation. When her bandages are removed, and icy blue lenses are fitted to her eyes by the surgeon, she feels no pain. But afterwards, to her shock, everyone around her appears to have an animal head. Her favourite nurse, Nurse Ansel, has a snake's head, which she first sees as a reflection in the mirror, its pointed barbed tongue swiftly thrusting and swiftly withdrawn, as its twisting neck comes into view over her shoulders, through the looking glass. Then her husband Jim appears with the head of a vulture, with a blood-tipped beak and a neck encased in flabby folds of flesh, and when she finally sees herself in the mirror, the eyes that stare back at her are doe's eyes, and her timid deer's head is meek, bowed as if ready for sacrifice.

You could use these stories, perhaps, as evidence of Daphne's distrust of the world around her, as well as her uncertainty of how to interpret what she saw. That's what Paul might say, I suppose, if he read the stories, not that he would, and I'm not going to ask him to. I couldn't bear to listen to him being dismissive about something that matters so much to me; which is maybe why all of this is still my own secret, that has nothing to do with my husband. But I keep thinking about the name Daphne chose for the husband in 'The Blue Lenses', Jim, which surely is an echo of Jim Barrie; and Barrie's wife was called Mary Ansell, which is too close to Nurse Ansel to be coincidental.

I've been making notes on this, and another story from The Breaking Point, which is called 'The Pool'. You don't have to be a genius to link this to her cousin Michael's drowning, which was rumoured to have been suicide, though the Coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death; and there's a suggestion that suicide is a possibility for the narrator in Daphne's story. She's a girl on the verge of adolescence, still allowed into a secret world unseen by adults, which can only be entered beneath the surface of a dark pool hidden within the woods in her grandparents' garden. I imagine this pool as being in the woods at Menabilly, and the girl as Daphne's younger self; though time becomes fluid within the story, shifting and liquid, like the beckoning water of the pool, where a series of ghosts return, passing through it into another world.

I'm not sure what, precisely, this has got to do with a PhD about Daphne and the Brontës; apart from the fact that she was writing these stories at the same time as doing her research into Branwell. I really need to talk it through with someone - and the only person I can imagine doing that with is Rachel. I've just got this feeling that she'd be able to make sense of it. The likelihood of such a conversation ever taking place is almost as remote as me being able to discuss any of this with my parents, but even so, when I read 'The Pool', they feel closer, like the shadows and phantoms in the woods, making their way back to the secret world.

When I was a student, I remember hearing a lecturer who said that writing is about negotiating with the dead - and maybe that's what reading is for me. I'm certainly not talking very much to the living. Paul says I'm too isolated; but then he seems to have isolated himself from me. I never imagined that marriage could be so lonely; before I met Paul, I thought that finding a husband was a way of never being alone again. Which just goes to show how imagination can fail you; or if not fail you, then lead you astray.

Daphne felt a sense of relief when she finished typing her letter to Mr Symington, for at least she now had a plan with which to proceed. Doubtless it would be expensive to copy the manuscripts, but she was determined to go ahead, whatever the expense, for surely this would be the key to Branwell, that would finally open the locked doors that had kept him hidden for so long. What Daphne did not say to Symington, but had finally admitted to herself, was that she must find a way of bringing her research to a conclusion, for though she had tried to set Branwell aside for a time, she could not free herself of him. It was as she had thought at the start of her research - that they were wedded in some way, as inextricably linked as she was to Tommy, and there was no means of evading that. And if she did not tell his story, as she had already vowed to do, then it would haunt her; he would haunt her, sending her round and round in circles, until she was altogether lost, with no sense of how to find her way out again. So it seemed to her that each manuscript she found and decoded would be a candle in the darkness, and if she followed them, step by step, they would lead her to safety, at last.

It was twilight when she walked back across the lawns to the house - five o'clock, and the winter's evening stretched ahead of her, like the long shadows of the trees beyond her writing hut, the place where she planned to be buried. Daphne knew she should be relishing her solitude: Tommy was working in London, seeming more able to cope by himself there, and Tod was away, also, visiting friends, so the house was empty, after the two maids went home. She reminded herself then that being alone like this in Menabilly - her safe house, her blessed refuge - was the closest she would ever come to bliss.

She lit a cigarette, and sat down at the piano in the Long Room, picking out a tune, her father's favourite, 'Clair de Lune'. Yet she could not settle, and paced the room, quietly, stealthily, almost certain that the veil between the living and the dead, the past and the present, had worn so thin in Menabilly that she might slip through whatever it was that divided them; or perhaps those others who inhabited the house, and her memory, could come forward to greet her; the others that she sensed, just ahead of her, or behind her, close enough to hear their quiet breathing.

The maids gossiped about ghosts from a faraway past, all the way back to the Civil War, when Menabilly was a Royalist stronghold. But Daphne imagined summoning up the spirits of those who were hanging on the walls, captured in framed family drawings by her grandfather, or in photographs, the same ones that had stood on the mantelpiece of Gerald's bedroom at Cannon Hall; a shrine to his family, grouped around a silver cross, and he had kissed each of the photographs every night, and muttered a little prayer to all of them, the dearly departed dead. The same photographs were now set along the mantelpiece of the Long Room in Menabilly, but at their centre was another picture, of Gerald in adulthood, a cigarette in his hand, his expression slightly mocking, his hair combed back from his face, his parting as sharp as a razorblade.

Daphne felt his eyes on her, even when her back was to him, and as she spun around to meet his gaze, she thought she saw him move, very slightly, behind the glass. One of his eyebrows was raised, and he seemed to look at her more intently, coolly, appraisingly, with a faint smile on his lips. She turned away from him again, but her neck was prickling.

And he was still watching her. 'I will always be watching over you,' he said to her, just before he died, but also long before that . . .

The day he saw her from the cliff, staring down at her, he was as silent then as he was now, though she knew that he could see her; that he could not take his eyes off her, that he saw everything.

Daphne closed her eyes, she did not want to see her father, she did not want to remember this, but she could not get away from him, from that summer's day, when his shadow fell across hers. It was the year she was fourteen, just after Michael died, and the family had gone on holiday to Thurlestone, and Geoffrey was there, with his second wife. Daphne was still a child, paddling and shrimping on the Devon beach, but then one day she glanced up, and Geoffrey was smiling at her, and her heart missed a beat. Why had she felt that way? Geoffrey was far closer in age to her father - thirty-six years old, an actor like his uncle, and he and Gerald were the greatest of friends; they looked so alike that they might have been brothers. But that smile had been the start of a secret between the two of them, Daphne and her cousin. As August progressed, so did their understanding, and she knew that no one else must know of it. After lunch, when everyone stretched out on the lawn like corpses under their rugs, Geoffrey would come and lie beside her, and take her hand in his, but no one could see them, the blankets hid everything; and at night, he would hold out his arms and dance with her at the Links hotel, singing along to the orchestra as it played 'Whispering', and the room spun around and around.

On the morning he left for London, he said to her, 'Come along and have a last look at the sea.' So she'd gone with him to the beach, just the two of them, hand in hand, though they did not speak, until suddenly he turned to her and said, 'I'm going to miss you terribly, Daph.' She nodded, but nothing more, she could not speak, Geoffrey was kissing her, his tongue pushing between her lips. Then at last he pulled away from her, looking up at the cliff, and as she followed his gaze, she saw her father standing there, staring down at them, as if he might jump, or swoop upon her like a bird of prey, and she felt a blush spread, livid, over her neck and face. 'There's Uncle Gerald, spying,' said Geoffrey, laughing a little, 'we'd better go, before he fetches a shotgun.'

Gerald had not accused her of anything afterwards, but from then on, something in his attitude to her changed. Geoffrey had been packed off on a lengthy theatre tour of America while her father had stayed at home in London, and there were moments when she felt his eyes upon her, for no particular reason, and she would blush, again. By the time she was fifteen or sixteen, Gerald used to take her out to lunch or dinner at least once a week, and they'd walk into a restaurant, hand in hand, all eyes upon them. 'We make a handsome couple,' he'd say, smiling benignly.

Daphne sighed, and sat down in the big armchair her father called 'Barrie's chair', the one that Uncle Jim had always chosen for his own particular seat on his visits to Cannon Hall, when she sat beside him, and he told her the secret adventures of Peter Pan, and she wished so hard that she had been born a boy, like her cousins. Oh, those boys, they were everything she wanted to be, though sometimes she confused that with wanting them.

'Don't grow up, my darling girl,' her father used to whisper to her; but she could not stop herself, she could not help letting him down. When she was twenty, Geoffrey had come to stay at Cannon Hall while his wife was in a nursing home, and at night, while everyone else was safely sleeping, he had kissed her in the drawing room, even more passionately than before. Daphne had kept her diary from the time, locked away in a secret drawer of her desk, and she went and got it for herself now, flicking through its pages, as she sank back into Barrie's chair. Were it not for the evidence of her own younger handwriting, she would find it hard to believe the carelessness of her behaviour with Geoffrey; and yet there was a strange clear-sightedness in her observations as well. It had seemed so natural to kiss Geoffrey, she'd written in her diary, immediately after their encounter in the drawing room, and he was so sweet and lovable, but it was also just like kissing Daddy. 'Perhaps this family is the same as the Borgias,' she wrote, 'a sort of incest . . .' And Daphne remembered the insouciance with which she described her theory to Geoffrey at the time, in between kisses. 'Daddy is Pope Alexander, you are Cesare and I'm Lucrezia,' she said, and he laughed, and said, 'Stop talking nonsense, you little fool, it doesn't become you . . .'

Poor Tommy, he'd been so honourable and good and true when he came sailing into Fowey harbour, looking for the girl who'd written his favourite book, The Loving Spirit, not realising the web of deceit she'd spun around her. He sent her a note, saying he'd known her cousins at Eton, and asked if he could take her out on his boat. She said yes, and they spent an afternoon together at sea, a fine bright April day, when the waves sprayed over them, and the cold, clean wind blew all muddied thoughts of Geoffrey and Gerald away. That evening, the wind had dropped just as the sun was disappearing, and they watched the sky fade to the palest pink, and then a pearl grey, and the sea was calm, the colour of the sky, and she felt she could do anything, with this man by her side, she felt filled with a sudden, wild joy.

In the following weeks, he returned often to visit her in Fowey, where she was staying alone in Ferryside, and it had been such a glorious courtship; it seemed like the sun shone whenever they were together, walking along the footpath from Boddinick to Pont, and then over the rickety footbridge, where the creek narrowed, and the swans glided to their nests. 'Let's not stop yet,' she said, wanting to go on walking with him, and they went up through the woods to Polruan, pausing at her favourite vantage points on the way, so that she could show him the views out across the silvery water. 'The most beautiful sight in the world,' she said to him, and he kissed her, saying, 'Almost as beautiful as you.' He fell in love with Fowey at the same time as falling in love with her, and she loved him all the more for that, telling him that when she first came here, and caught sight of Ferryside, and the estuary beyond, she'd remembered a line from a forgotten book, where a lover looks for the first time upon his chosen one, and declared, 'I for this, and this for me.' She met Tommy's eyes as she said the words, standing high above Fowey at St Catherine's Castle, and he repeated them back to her, catching hold of her hands as he did so.

He'd drive through the night to be with her, whenever he could get leave from his regiment, bringing her an armful of roses on the morning of her twenty-fifth birthday in May, and a bottle of champagne that they drank together in the garden at Ferryside, watching the great ships go out to sea from Fowey harbour, led by a sturdy pilot tug, as the dinghies and wooden yachts bobbed around in their wake. And they explored the little town, breathing in its smell of tar and rope and tidal water, and the coastline beyond it, walking out past St Catherine's Point to Coombe, where there was a hidden beach, a smugglers' cove, and the encircling cliffs were covered in ox-eye daisies, sea campion and blossoming primroses, that somehow clung to the crevices, and lapwings swooped down to the water's edge. Finally, she took him to her secret place, further west along the cliff from Coombe to the beach at Polridmouth, and then climbing over the gate by the solitary cottage, up the narrow path that led through the woods to Menabilly. The bluebells were out, their smoky scent mingling with the moss and the young bracken; their colour a challenge to the sky. When they reached the deserted house, she took him by the hand and led him to the window where you could see through tattered curtains into an abandoned room with dark panelled walls and a great fireplace, and a forgotten corkscrew lying upon an oak sideboard, and the solemn faces of family portraits staring down through their veils of cobwebs and cracked varnish. 'One day I'll live here,' she said to Tommy.