Daphne (20 page)

Hampstead, 2 June

I'd given up all hope of seeing Rachel again - I guessed she was back in America - and then the phone rang this morning, quite early, though Paul had already gone, and I picked it up, and a woman's voice asked for him. I knew it was Rachel, before she'd said her name, before I'd even told her that Paul had left for the airport, on his way to an academic conference in Italy. And I did something entirely unexpected, I don't know why, I'd done it before I could stop myself. I said to Rachel that I was Paul's new wife, and that I'd met her a few months ago, in the Reading Room at the British Museum, but I'd been too shy and inept to tell her then. 'I'm so sorry,' I said. 'You must think I'm an idiot.'

'You're the young girl in the Reading Room?' she said, slowly. 'The one who's interested in Daphne du Maurier? I do remember you . . . How very odd . . .'

'I know, it must seem like a peculiar way to behave,' I said, 'inexcusable, really. But I was wondering if we might meet up, when you're in London next?'

'I'm back here already,' she said, 'though it's just for a couple of days, on my way to Yorkshire. That's why I was ringing Paul. I realised I'd left some of my books in the house, and I wanted to come and pick them up, today, if that was OK with him. There's one I need, in particular, for a talk I'm giving up there.'

'He's not back till next week,' I said, 'but you could get your books anyway - whenever you want. I'm here, I don't have any plans for the day.'

She arrived an hour or so afterwards - quickly enough for neither of us to change our minds. And it was extraordinary, of course, yet also surprisingly easy; she made it easy for me, even though it must have been strange for her, because as far as I know, nothing has changed in the house since she left it, nearly two years ago, apart from me moving in.

Anyway, she rang the doorbell, though it occurred to me that she might still have a key, and there was a brief moment of awkwardness in the hallway, when she waited for me to gesture where we should go - downstairs to the kitchen, or to the right, into the living room - and I didn't take her cue, it was as if I was waiting for her to take the lead. I saw her glance at herself in the mirror, and she put her hand up to her hair, very quickly, and swept it away from her face. 'Let me take your coat,' I said, and she took it off, an immaculate cream-coloured trench coat; and as I hung it on the hook in the hall cupboard, I couldn't suppress the thought that if I'd worn it, it would already be covered in streaks of dirt, and how did she keep it so perfectly unmarked? 'Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?' I said, and she said yes, tea would be lovely, so we went down to the kitchen, and I regained just enough composure to go first, though my hands were shaking as I filled the kettle with water, presumably a kettle that she'd already used, thousands of times before, and the cup, too, and we sat down at the table. It was still her kitchen, really, she seemed entirely at home, more at ease than I was; though she kept her eyes on me, rather than looking around the room.

'How's it going?' she said, and for a moment I thought she was asking about Paul, and felt too panic-stricken to say anything, but before I could blurt out an answer, she'd added, 'Have you found out anything new about Daphne du Maurier?'

So I told her about the Symington correspondence, and also about the suggestions contained within the letters that there were forged signatures on Branwell's manuscripts. 'It would be amazing if I could prove that were true,' I said, 'though it's odd that Daphne never went into this in her biography of Branwell, nor anything else she wrote about him, as far as I know. But Symington made it pretty clear to her that he believed Charlotte's signature had been forged on some of Branwell's Angrian manuscripts, though they're all juvenilia, essentially. What would be even more interesting, of course, would be to discover if some of the Brontë sisters' adult manuscripts were, in fact, by Branwell.'

Now, I'm wondering if that was a stupidly incautious thing to do, if I was giving too much away, but at the time, I just wanted Rachel to know everything, and she was so encouraging, such a sympathetic listener. 'What a marvellously intriguing story,' she said, at the end, and reached out to me across the table, touching my hand, very briefly, with hers.

As she did so, my eyes filled with tears, maybe because it was so long since anyone had reached out to me like that. On the rare occasions that Paul brushes against me, it's as if he's done so by accident and then he pulls away, I can feel him trying to maintain the distance between us.

'What's wrong?' said Rachel, taking my hand again, but I couldn't answer, I just shook my head. 'Look, I know this must feel very strange for you,' she said, 'but it's OK, I bear no grudge against you, truly. I was the one who left Paul, after all. You haven't wronged me in any way, you have nothing to feel guilty about.'

'It's not that,' I said, and then I felt a lump in my throat, and I had to choke back sobs; it was hideous, I didn't know where they were coming from, I didn't know how to hide them, but I couldn't break down entirely, not in front of Rachel, and so I struggled, and swallowed hard, and kept silent, apart from the occasional gulp.

Rachel looked at me, quizzically, and then stood up and came round to my side of the table. 'Come on, let's go and find these books,' she said, putting an arm around me, and I could feel the warmth of her skin, bare and tanned where it emerged from her white T-shirt. I wanted to rest my head against her shoulder, and just stay there for a little while, not saying anything, but I managed to pull myself together, and we went upstairs to the living room, which is lined with bookshelves; Rachel leading the way, me following behind her.

'There it is,' she said, pointing to one of the highest shelves to the right of the fireplace, and she went and got a wooden chair that unfolded into a step-ladder, opening it out in a way that I'd never done myself. As she climbed up the steps, I tried not to stare - not at her, though she was an imposing sight, towering above me on the ladder - but at the shelf, where she moved the front row of books aside to reveal another row, hidden behind them, that I'd not even known were there.

Rachel handed a book down to me. 'The Collected Poems of Emily Brontë, with all my scribbles inside.' I opened it, and the pages were covered with her handwritten notes, between the lines and up and down the margins.

'This reminds me of that scene in Wuthering Heights,' I said, 'when Lockwood finds Cathy's old book in the bedroom where he is supposed to be sleeping'

'-and the book is filled with her scribbled notes,' said Rachel, finishing my sentence, which might have been irritating under other circumstances, but I was grateful to her, because she seemed to understand. 'And this somehow presages her appearance as a ghost later that night, as if the act of reading her handwriting is an unintentional way of summoning up her spirit. I wonder, does that mean that I am a ghost in this house?'

I didn't answer her, and then she said, 'Of course, some people insist it's not Cathy's ghost, in any real sense, it's Lockwood's dream, and her summoning up is a psychological one, rather than anything supernatural.' I knew when she said this that she was talking about Paul, for this was an argument that I'd already had with him, because it enraged me when he dismissed the supernatural in Wuthering Heights as being 'nothing but your own projections.' (His words, not mine.)

'Was there anything else you needed?' I said, giving the book back to Rachel, even though I was longing to study her annotations, particularly those around Brontë's 'Self-Interrogation', which was the most well-thumbed page.

'Well, that's the book I needed most urgently,' she said, 'but there are a few others here of mine. Would you mind if I had a look for them?' I could tell, without her being any more explicit, that she wanted me to leave the room, so I did; it would have seemed rude to have remained there, hovering, as if I didn't trust her. Why trust her? I know that's the obvious question, but I wanted to believe in her, I felt as if I needed to, that it was terribly important to do so, almost as if in trusting her, I might find a compass for the future; something I am badly in need of. . .

I went back downstairs to the kitchen, and left her to it, and after about twenty minutes, she joined me again, balancing a small pile of books in her hands. 'All my missing Brontë books,' she said, with a smile. 'Not really Paul's taste, either, so I'm sure he won't mind me reclaiming them.'

'Where are you going to do your talk?' I said, feeling uncomfortable at the mention of Paul's name, even though it was always going to be there, hanging in the air between us. 'I'd love to hear it . . .'

'Haworth,' said Rachel. 'The Brontë Society has asked me there, as part of its annual get-together at the Parsonage. I'm talking about the literary influence of Emily Brontë on subsequent female poets - Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and so on. You could come, if you'd like . . . I mean, if it would be helpful to go there, anyway, as part of your research. You could spend a bit more time in the library, or whatever? I'm driving up first thing tomorrow morning - I could give you a lift, if you wanted, if you don't mind leaving early.'

'Yes,' I said, without pausing to think, and she smiled, and said, 'Good, that's settled.'

It's unbelievable, I know, but there you are. Here I am, setting my alarm for 5 a.m. tomorrow morning, because Rachel said she'd be here just before six. I still haven't told Paul; his mobile is switched off, which is a relief, because I don't have to feel guilty about not telling him, though now I've decided to stop worrying about what he might think if he knew where I was going. Because he doesn't need to know, and he isn't here, anyway, and who knows what he is doing in Italy; all I know is that I don't know, that's all that's certain; and that will have to be enough.

Menabilly, June 1959

Daphne scanned the piece with the same breathless yet sinking feeling with which she'd read bad reviews in the past, and the sensation was one of a self-inflicted wound, or a humiliation that she must accept as being deserved, which was curious, given that it was entirely out of her control. She had already read Gerin's book about Anne Brontë, and the glowing reviews it had received in the last month; all of the praise twisting like barbs in Daphne's side, for it seemed to her to simply highlight how snide the critics had been about her own writing. 'You never remember the good things,' Tommy said to her, whenever she complained about unkind reviews, 'only the bad. Why can't you concentrate on what people admire in you, instead of picking over unpleasantness?'

And yet despite the part of her that shrivelled up inside upon hearing the news of Gerin's book about Branwell, Daphne was also aware of another, stronger instinct, which was to make contact with her rival - to reach out to her, just as she had done with the Snow Queen. Indeed, she intended to send Miss Gerin a letter; a conciliatory one, wishing her every success, and saying that she was far better placed in every way than Daphne to do a thorough biography of Branwell. For there was no hiding the fact that Daphne had planned her own book, the TLS article had already made this abundantly obvious, and the competition between the two of them. But when Daphne sat down to write her letter to Miss Gerin, she tried to sidestep this, brushing aside her own work as 'some sort of study or portrait that need not affect yours'.

What, exactly, her portrait should consist of, remained unclear to Daphne. She knew that she must act quickly -Victor Gollancz had told her that if Miss Gerin's biography came out first, then Daphne's book would be killed. 'Killed': he actually used that word to Daphne, when she telephoned him this morning to discuss the matter, and her throat constricted in panic, but then a surge of adrenalin came racing through her bloodstream, readying her for the fight.

It had been an exceptionally dry and sunny summer so far, the kind of blessed weather that Daphne would usually be basking in, swimming in a sea the colour of turquoise, in between the dark rocks or out to the reef, and sunbathing during the long June afternoons, in a private corner of Polridmouth beach, the sand warm against her back, and then walking back to Menabilly, to lie on the newly mown lawn beneath a chestnut tree. But instead, she stayed indoors, shut away in her writing hut for hours at a time, oblivious to the hum of the bumblebees, reading through her notes from the British Museum, puzzling over Branwell. All that she had read so far of his writing suggested that he was not as talented as his sisters, yet she wanted to go on believing in him, for so many of his manuscripts remained lost or missing or indecipherable.

But as for the question of the forged signatures on Branwell's manuscripts: she was becoming less hopeful of proving anything there. Yes, Symington had eventually given her specific references of pages that he believed to contain forgeries of Charlotte's signature, all of them reprinted as facsimile manuscripts in his Shakespeare Head edition; but as Daphne worked her way through these - and she had spent many long days on this Herculean task, using a magnifying glass, studying the illegible pages until she felt the words would blind her - they all turned out to be Angrian juvenilia, childish and rambling and no proof of genius. It was all very well Symington being secretive, demanding that she destroy his letter to her that contained the numbered page references - which she had already done, burning it after marking the pages carefully on her edition of the Shakespeare Head - but in the end, he had provided no real evidence about Branwell's talents as a writer. She was almost certain that these pages were collaborative efforts, anyway, between Branwell and Charlotte, each of them adding to the labyrinthine stories in their microscopic handwriting; a private and secretive endeavour, too coded for the outside world to unravel. What did it matter if T. J. Wise had scribbled Charlotte's signature on to these pages - for Charlotte surely had a hand in many of them, if not quite all, as she and Branwell expanded on their endless, incomprehensible chronicles of Angria?

Meanwhile, Daphne had also paid for several diligent researchers at the British Museum to transcribe two of Branwell's Angrian stories held there in the collection that T. J. Wise had left in a bequest after his death. They were still labouring over the utterly illegible 'A New Year's Story', but were closer to delivering a transcript of the oddly titled 'The Wool is Rising', a hand-sewn pamphlet dated 26 June 1834. This, Daphne noted with some excitement, was Branwell's seventeenth birthday, and she couldn't help but imagine him as a confident, ambitious lad, knowing nothing of the future failures that would blight him. Unlike the elusive Mr Symington, these researchers - Mrs D'Arcy Hart, Mrs St George Saunders, and Miss O'Farrell - provided detailed accounts of their modest expenses (bus fares and the occasional cup of tea), and also of their lengthy endeavours, in regular and conscientious reports that they posted to Menabilly.

The most intriguing of their reports, so far, concerned a passage from 'The Wool is Rising', which appeared to be a brief sketch of a 'colour grinder. . . a fellow of singular aspect'. Miss O'Farrell had thought it interesting enough to send it in advance of the rest of the transcript, and having read it, Daphne felt certain that it might constitute a more realistic self-portrait of Branwell than his romanticised alter ego, Northangerland. 'He was a lad of perhaps seventeen years old,' Branwell had written, 'and his meagre freckled visage and large Roman nose, thatched by a thick mat of red hair, constantly changed and twisted themselves into an endless variety of restive movements. As he spoke, instead of looking his auditor straight in the face he turned his eyes - which were further beautified by a pair of spectacles - away from him, and while one word issued stammering from his mouth it was straight way contradicted or confused by a chaos of strange succeeding jargon.'

'Bravo!' Daphne had written by return of post to Miss O'Farrell, and went on in her letter to express some regret that she was not working alongside these three industrious ladies. 'Unfortunately, my husband needs me at home with him in Cornwall, which keeps me away from the delights of the Reading Room,' she concluded, and then felt guilty about not telling the truth. But she had vowed not to return to the British Museum, in case it might precipitate another crisis of her own. For she still shuddered at the memory of her encounter there with the Snow Queen, and the subsequent episodes, which she now labelled simply as a prolonged attack of 'the horrors', borrowing her father's phrase for what might, perhaps, be a family affliction; certainly, her cousin Peter had spoken to her, in the most guarded terms, of suffering in a similar way. 'I fear we carry the seeds of madness within us,' he had said to her last month, towards the end of a lunch at the Cafe Royal, when they had talked about Gerald's bouts of black despair, that were kept hidden from everyone but his family, covered up by stage make-up or stagecraft; the latter as effective a disguise outside the theatre as within it. 'It's what did for poor Michael,' said Peter, 'and you and I must bear the burden of that inheritance, too . . .'

Daphne was aware that Peter was struggling with his own book - an edited edition of an enormous trove of family letters and history. 'The family morgue,' he called it, bitterly, and she found her mind drifting towards her cousin, as the hours passed by in the writing hut, wondering how he was getting on. But Daphne tried to concentrate only on Branwell, who had suffered himself, after all, dogged by misery and brought down further by drink, like Gerald; no, stop now, stop thinking about Gerald, this was not about him . . .

She knew from previous experience that her own horrors must be kept well away from here; held at bay with hard work and strict routine. Sometimes, she thought of telephoning Peter - of asking his advice, of confiding more in him, about Tommy, about the Snow Queen, about everything. But Peter had his own problems; he was constantly worried about money, she knew, though it was an uncomfortable topic of conversation between them, given her own wealth. And she wondered if the real root of his melancholy had less to do with his present circumstances than those of the past, that must have been coming close again as he delved further into the family morgue.

But if Daphne was honest with herself - and she was trying very hard to be, to see more clearly than she might once have done - then the real truth of her recent avoidance of Peter was that his offices were in Great Russell Street, across the road from the British Museum, and the very knowledge of his proximity to the scene of her disgrace (yes, disgrace, there was no other word for it) made her feel increasingly uncomfortable; indeed, it was so troubling that she was struggling to keep it out of her head. And still, she kept returning to it. Might Peter have seen her, meeting the Snow Queen in the forecourt of the British Museum, a little less than two years ago? And did he also see her, running from the scene, pursued by a man in a trilby hat? And if he had been witness to these events, what would he make of them?

The more that Daphne tried not to think about this, the more persistent the thought became, until at last, she buried her face in her hands, closing her eyes to everything, which only made matters worse, for then she could see the scene more vividly, played out on an endless loop in her head. 'There's nothing for it,' she said out loud, 'I'll have to speak to Peter.' And she made her way back to the house, hoping that it would be empty, so that there was no possibility of anyone overhearing her phone call.

Once inside, Daphne went to the long wood-panelled passageway where the telephone squatted on a small table, surrounded by forlorn raincoats hanging on rusty hooks, forgotten boots and a child's bicycle. There was a small mirror hanging above the telephone, but she turned her head away from it, and looked up Peter's telephone number in her address book. 'Museum 3946,' she said, under her breath, forcing herself not to read anything sinister into the random configuration of numbers. She dialled the number, half-hoping that there would be no answer, but a secretary answered, and then Peter was on the line.

'Daphne,' he said, 'how splendid to hear from you.' But he was surprised, she could hear it in his voice; for this was not her usual time to speak to him, it was a break from routine, an unswerving timetable that incorporated telephone calls to family and friends on specific evenings, and never during office hours on a weekday, unless in times of crisis.

'I'm sorry to disturb you at work,' she said, 'but I'm feeling rather doom-laden. I've discovered I'm up against another woman - it turns out I have a rival . . .' Daphne paused, remembering the feeling she had in London last month, at Sloane Square tube station, on her way from the flat, when she'd been standing close to the edge of the platform, and had suddenly thought how easy it would be to jump in front of the next train; how easy it would be not to be; just one last step, and then she could stop trying, stop everything . . . But now, as then, she pulled back from the brink; for she could not imagine how to find the words to tell Peter about her encounter with the Snow Queen, however close it had been to him. 'Have you heard of Winifred Gerin?' she continued. 'Well, it's most unfortunate, but she's my rival for Branwell's affections.'