Fowey, Cornwall

November 2013

You want to go to Menabilly? Impossible. Visit it? You must be joking. See it? No one sees Menabilly. Menabilly is inaccessible. The Rashleigh family, who have owned the mansion since the sixteenth century, wish it to remain that way. I observe the property on Google Maps: the house appears, seen from above, a pale square surrounded by greenery, then the sea, very close, an emerald ribbon touching a rocky coastline. But this is not enough. I want to see it with my own eyes.

It is surprisingly bright, this late in the year, and the cool air smells of salt, grass, damp earth. Holding my map, I leave the Menabilly Barton farm and turn right toward the little beach at Pridmouth. The quiet footpath descends toward the sea, and I hear its murmur grow louder as I approach. The beach is scattered with large gray rocks covered with lichen, the same gray as the granite cottage that sits almost at the edge of the sand. The same cottage that inspired the one in Rebecca, a place of mystery and tragedy. Apparently, you can rent it by the week. It sleeps eight and is almost always booked up. To the right, a wooden footbridge climbs up toward a large red-and-white beacon that stands on the hill at Gribbin Head. To the left, an uneven road and a rusted winch. Daphne used to come here every day, with her children or alone, accompanied by her dogs, even in bad weather. In the summer, she liked to swim and sunbathe here. Going back up the path, I am aware of walking in her footsteps and I try to walk like her, quickly, with long strides.

Menabilly is only a few minutes’ walk from where I stand now, but as I have been warned, there are signs with STRICTLY PRIVATE in large letters on all of the high gates. I could, at my own risk, approach the house by that secret path that goes under the trees; I could ring the bell at the lodge, which is no longer abandoned as it was when Daphne first visited, and ask the guard if I could meet the owners. The Rashleigh family decided long ago not to give any interviews or information about their famous tenant, who spent nearly twenty-five years in the mansion. Since the publication of Rebecca in 1938, Menabilly has exerted a magnetic attraction over readers from all over the world, who continue to travel all the way to Fowey in the hope of being able to explore the property that was such an inspiration to the author. Like me, they find the way barred. So I must use cunning, if I want to get any closer to the house. There is, I have been told, only one path that allows the mansion to be seen from a distance. You must climb above the farm, walk along the coast, go past fields enclosed by wooden fences, climb farther up to Polkerris, and, at the junction, take a right, toward Tregaminion Chapel. The bright green pastureland that overlooks the sea is usually deserted, but when I pass a woman there, she greets me with a polite smile, which I return.

While I continue along my path, I think about the moment when I discovered Rebecca in English, at eleven. I read it several times. Then, at sixteen, I read the French edition, a gift from a friend. Translation by Denise Van Moppès, 1940. I immediately noticed that there had been cuts made in the French version; they were too significant not to be noticeable, particularly if you knew the original text as well as I did. Altogether, about forty pages had been removed.

From a distance, I see the clock tower of the little church. I am almost there. I can’t stop thinking about that translation. Daphne had a perfect understanding of French. Did she compare that edition with the original version? Did she realize just how many of her descriptions had been shortened? I discovered that the translator had, here and there, performed a disappearing act on the heroine’s reminiscences, her obsession with Rebecca, and her thoughts spreading into daydreams, all of Kicky’s influence. The rhythm of the book had been altered, losing much of the atmosphere that Daphne had so meticulously created. But what most upset me was the fatal diminution of two essential scenes, the first with Mrs. Danvers in the large bedroom in the west wing, stripped of its dramatic tension, and the second with Maxim, the climax of the book, that moment when the truth is revealed—what happened in the cottage on the beach where Rebecca used to go with her lover—of which an entire page of dialog is missing. I have not been able to find any trace of a correspondence between Daphne and her French publishers, Albin Michel, concerning the translation of Rebecca.

I reach the chapel and look southward, over the fence and the sheep grazing in front of it. There is no one else here. A golden light pierces the low-hanging clouds. In the distance, the roof of Menabilly’s north wing is just visible through the trees. I feel the same emotion I felt outside Cannon Hall. A little patch of roof is all I will ever see of the house that Daphne du Maurier loved so passionately.

*   *   *

Summer 1943. Daphne is thirty-six years old. Her royalty payments are pouring in, making her a wealthy woman, so much so that she starts to complain about the high rate of income tax she must now pay. She has no desire to buy dresses, cars, works of art. There is only one thing she wants to spend her money on, but it is not for sale. How unbearable, that vision of Menabilly, neglected, left to rot year after year. One morning, she has an idea: call her lawyer in Fowey, Walter Graham, to ask him to contact Dr. Rashleigh and find out whether it would be possible to perhaps rent Menabilly. It’s a long shot, obviously, and she doesn’t mention the idea to anyone else. She braces herself for a refusal. But, one week later, her lawyer gives her an unexpected reply: the Rashleighs agree. Mrs. Browning can live in Menabilly in exchange for a rental payment to be determined and subject to a contract that they will draw up. Jubilation and incredulity. The lawyer warns her that the house is in a deplorable state: the roof might collapse at any moment, damp has infiltrated the walls, but Daphne interrupts him: she is so moved, so happy, she has not felt anything like this since Kits was born three years ago. Her mother and her sisters attempt to dissuade her. She must be crazy: there’s no running water, no electricity, no heating; it’s impossible! While Tommy fights the war on the front, Daphne fights for Menabilly. Walter Graham enters into lengthy, ill-tempered negotiations with Dr. Rashleigh. After a great deal of hairsplitting, an agreement is reached. Daphne will rent the house for twenty years, and she will pay for all work carried out on it. Does this give her cold feet? Not at all. She manages to obtain some government aid for the renovation but finances most of it herself.

For the moment, she does not tell her children anything about this. They see her leave every morning with Margaret, armed with brooms, mops, and cloths. A stranger in a suit, carrying a large box filled with mysterious maps, spends several evenings at Readymoney Cove, shut up in the office with their mother. One day, pressured by their constant questioning, she finally admits that she is preparing a surprise for them and that they must wait patiently for it to be ready.

Dressed in pants, sweater, and boots, Daphne spends her days at Menabilly with her team: lawyer, bricklayer, roofer, plumber, electrician. Whenever she is told that something is not possible, Mrs. Browning becomes offended, then begs them, asks them, to see what they can do. The renovation takes six months, and Daphne is inordinately happy as she directs the building work. Electricity, water, and heating are installed, doors and windows are changed, the roof is entirely replaced, dust and saltpeter removed, the walls repainted. And all this in wartime. It’s a miracle.

Menabilly comes back to life. The ivy is trimmed, and sunlight again enters the house. The long rooms regain their old nobility. Daphne feels overwhelmed by love. Is it wrong to love stone as if it were a person? A house that isn’t even hers, that she will never own. Does it matter? She lives here now, and she will for the next twenty years—a long time. She will be fifty-six then, she will be old; she will have time to get used to the situation. She has moved in her own furniture, recuperated from storage, and has bought new furniture, too, and in December 1943, the three dumbstruck children discover their new abode. On the doorstep, their mother announces with a dazzling smile: Welcome to Mena!2

“Mena” bears no resemblance to the abandoned mansion of the previous summer. The wooden floors shine once again, a fire blazes in the large living room hearth, the flowered wallpaper matches the fabric on the chairs and couches. The old rocking horse waits for them in front of the sparkling stained-glass windows. Stunned, the children walk through to the book-lined library where a baby grand piano stands on a white carpet and the wood-paneled walls are decorated with engravings of hunting scenes. They find their grandfather Gerald’s bronze bust and walking sticks, the caricatures drawn by their great-grandfather Kicky. They run up the grand wooden staircase, admire the portrait by Whiting of their mother and their aunts when they were children, with the little dog Brutus in Jeanne’s arms. On the second floor, they find long red-carpeted corridors, their parents’ bedrooms, and other bedrooms, most of which look out over the garden, and then their own room, a beautiful space, painted green, with images of Peter Pan pinned to the walls, and with three beds—a sight that makes Tessa cry, because she refuses to sleep with her younger siblings. Margaret firmly but gently puts an end to her tantrum.

Daphne has planned everything for Tommy’s return during the New Year holidays, down to the smallest Christmas decorations. Her mother and sisters are openmouthed with admiration. How did she do it? Daphne wonders, seeing her family united in front of the Christmas tree, in this house she loves so much. She believed in it, she wanted it, she got it. But she must admit that she’s exhausted now. She will need twice as many servants to look after the children, the housekeeping, the cooking, the garden. There is always a fire to be lit, a child to be watched over, an object to be repaired, wood to be chopped. Daphne manages to find a retired schoolteacher from Tywardreath, who comes by taxi three times a week to give Tessa and Flavia lessons. Will she soon be able to think about a new book? She will have to get back in the saddle after the half failure of Hungry Hill, which did not sell as well as Victor had hoped. She feels like writing a few short stories, perhaps a play, while she waits for the idea of a novel to start “brewing.”*

Daphne orders new stationery for her correspondence with a simple letterhead that makes her swell with pride: MENABILLY, in red letters, and to the left a winged crown, the Browning family coat of arms. From January 1944, in her new house, Daphne remains faithful to her “routes.”* The maid, Violet, wakes her at nine o’clock with the breakfast tray: coffee, and toast with honey. The children come in to give her a kiss and a hug, and at ten she starts work, sitting behind the desk in her bedroom with its faded wallpaper decorated with white roses. She uses a new typewriter, a portable Underwood Standard. Kits (four) is the only one allowed to stay with her while she writes. This is unfair to Tessa and Flavia, but that’s just how it is. He plays with his collection of lead Indians until Margaret comes to fetch him without disturbing Mrs. Browning. Daphne does not stop writing until one o’clock, when she always eats lunch alone. At two comes the children’s favorite moment, when the four of them go for a walk. In good weather, they head down to the sea at Pridmouth and play games around the wreck of the Romanie, the remains of which are still there. If it rains, they explore the mysteries of the forest. Carrying a long stick, wearing her jacket, pants, and boots, Daphne guides them, tirelessly energetic. She always pauses to chat with Mr. Burt, the handyman and part-time gardener, who works hard, armed with a scythe, accompanied by his dog, Yankie. A quick stop to let Kits play on the swing, and then it’s time for tea.

Daphne sips her China tea alone in the library, then goes back to her room to work, until it is bathtime, when she sometimes takes over from Margaret. The children’s bathtub is high and deep, with ball and claw feet. The water used for washing comes from pumping a distant pond, located near the gates that lead to the house. It is supposedly filtered, but it always looks greenish and leaves marks on the enamel, as well as in the children’s blond hair, which amuses them no end. After their supper, Tessa, Flavia, and Kits come in to kiss their mother, in the library where she reads the newspapers near the fire, with the old gramophone playing a Rachmaninoff tune. She changes her clothes for her solitary meal, wearing a long embroidered jacket with velvet pants and a silk blouse.

The children’s bedtime takes a while; Kits does not like the dark—they have to light a little night-light—and the girls are scared, because Mr. Burt told them about a ghost, a lady in blue who roams the empty bedroom next to their father’s walk-in closet. And then there are the rats, which have never left the attic and which, all night long, make noises in the ceiling above their heads. And that’s without even mentioning all the bats that fly around outside the window at sunset. When the children complain to their mother about this, she invents such funny stories about bats and rats that they end up laughing with her and making the best of the situation. Their mother’s new nickname is Bing, inspired by her beloved dog, Bingo, her faithful companion at Ferryside.

Besotted with Menabilly, Daphne is able to bear the coldness of the house in that first winter, unlike the children and Margaret. With its high ceilings, the house is almost impossible to heat, and the corridors are always freezing. The children get ear infections and chest infections, but Daphne’s morale never wavers, especially with spring just around the corner. She looks happier than she has ever been. Her dream has come true: she is the mistress of Menabilly. Does she suffer from Tommy’s absence? Of course, but she has built herself an enchanting and exclusive refuge, sheltered from everything, and that is enough. Spurning the dark heart of the war, Daphne locks herself away in her imaginary world, where she reigns like an empress over her characters. Nothing else matters.

American soldiers regularly discover the path to Menabilly and ring at the door of the mansion, a copy of Rebecca in hand. Is this where the great novelist lives? Daphne forgets how famous she is. She is intimidated by the prospect of meeting her readers, and prefers to hide on the parapet that surrounds the roof, leaving ten-year-old Tessa to answer the door to unexpected visitors. A tried-and-trusted speech: Daphne du Maurier is out, and she won’t be back until evening. Undaunted, the G.I.s come back the next day, with their books to sign, and sometimes Daphne yields, smiling at them and tracing her name on the flyleaf of their books.

While Daphne retreats into her bubble at Menabilly, Tommy becomes a lieutenant general at forty-seven years old, the commander of the 1st Airborne Division. In the spring of 1944, vast preparations are secretly in progress for D-day. Husband and wife see each other briefly in May. Every morning, Daphne writes to him, and the mailman brings her several letters each week in return from Tommy. The envelopes are stamped with the Browning seal and the missives invariably begin with My own beloved Mumpty. The words are scribbled in haste and signed Your devoted Tib, with all the love a man’s heart can hold,3 with Xs for kisses, sent by the eight favorite teddy bears that the lieutenant general still takes everywhere with him.

The entire coastline, from Exmouth to Falmouth, is tense with excitement and nerves on the eve of the Normandy landings, of which Daphne and her family know nothing, but which they all hope for. She imagines how hard her husband must be working during these crucial hours. The authorities ask Mrs. Browning to organize a top-secret lunch at Menabilly for about sixty American war correspondents who are in the region incognito. Under a shroud of secrecy, Muriel, Jeanne, and Angela help her to host the lunch. Her own cook, the nanny, and the maids have been sent out on a picnic for the day, so they do not suspect anything. Menabilly is invaded by an efficient American team led by a chef who prepares a festive meal in a battery of saucepans and platters bearing the insignia of the U.S. Navy. It is a great success, which must never be spoken of.

On June 6, 1944, Angela and Jeanne call their sister, feverishly excited: while they were taking care of their tomatoes for the Women’s Land Army, they noticed that, by evening, there was not a single American ship in the bay. Daphne spends her days listening to the radio, on the alert for anything concerning the airborne divisions, the ones that are supervising Tommy’s men in Normandy. She knows how furiously her husband is working to fight the Nazis and their allies, and even if the first reports of the landings are positive, he is not out of danger yet.

In September 1944, Daphne’s anxiety is at its height. Tommy is a key element in the preparation of the biggest airborne operation of the war, code-named Market Garden. Conceived by General Bernard Montgomery, its objective is to parachute Allied divisions behind German lines in order to capture strategically important bridges that will enable the ground troops to enter Germany. The most remote target is the city of Arnhem, Holland, situated on the Rhine. Not everyone is convinced of the soundness of the idea behind this massive operation. Tommy publicly expresses his doubts to General Montgomery: We might be going a bridge too far, sir.4 The battle rages for nine days, the Germans resist, and strategic mistakes put the operation in peril. On the bridge in Arnhem, the order is given for the Allies to withdraw. Seventeen thousand soldiers are killed. When he returns for a leave, in October 1944, Tommy is exhausted. A luxurious weekend with his wife at Claridge’s in London is not enough to soothe him, and Daphne realizes just how psychologically scarred her husband is by that defeat. What kind of a man will he be by the end of this war, when he used to have nightmares, as a young man, because of what he experienced in Gauche Wood? Will he ever be able to vanquish the demons of Arnhem?

In November, a gala evening is organized at the Troy Cinema in Fowey in honor of the movie adapted from Frenchman’s Creek, directed by Mitchell Leisen. Daphne, looking glamorous in a long dress, attends with her mother and her sisters. She dislikes the Californian Technicolor sunsets, so far removed from the Fowey estuary, and suppresses a shudder of disgust at Joan Fontaine’s red wig. But, despite the extravagance of the costumes, which she disapproves of, the film is quite well done, and she is happy to learn that the book is selling again as a consequence. Victor knows that Daphne is finishing a play; he would have preferred a novel, and she promises him one for next year. The play, The Years Between, tells the poignant story of a colonel who disappears at sea and whose widow, Diana, overcoming the ordeal, manages to forge a new life, falling in love with another man. Then it is that her husband, whom everyone thought dead, returns. Daphne tried to give a glimpse of her happy isolation at Menabilly, that selfish well-being she feels, far from her husband, that no one would ever be able to understand or accept. In December, the play is staged at Wyndham’s, her father’s old theater, and it proves a success.

One December morning, Daphne receives a letter from her French editor, Robert Esménard. Dear Madame, Delighted as I am that the mail is now being delivered once again between our two countries, I hasten to enter back into correspondence with you in order to keep you up to date on the distribution of your works in France. Our publishing house did everything it could to ensure the successful publication of Rebecca. As you surely know, the representative of Curtis Brown in France has given me a general option on all your productions. I would like to express here, once again, the esteem I feel for your wonderful talent.5 More good news accompanied this letter: the release of French royalty payments, which had been frozen during the war. Since its first appearance in France, in 1940, Rebecca has sold five hundred thousand copies, and it is still selling.

At the end of 1944, an even greater distance is put between Mr. and Mrs. Browning: Tommy is appointed Lord Mountbatten’s chief of staff in Ceylon, in southern Asia. Daphne is saddened by his departure, but her next novel is “brewing”* nicely; this will be the first book she has written in Menabilly, and she is eager to get started.

*   *   *

She will write the history of the mansion, using what happened within these walls during the English Civil War, between 1642 and 1649, a series of conflicts that led to the fall and then the execution of Charles I and the establishment of a new regime, the Commonwealth. Daphne will return to that tormented period in Menabilly’s past and excavate the legend of the mysterious walled-up room and the skeleton of the Cavalier dressed in a royalist uniform. Full of hope, she sends a letter to William Rashleigh, the family heir, who lives near Plymouth. Could she have access to documents, private letters? He refuses, but Daphne is undeterred and tries his daughter, who is better disposed. Miss Rashleigh gives the author the family tree and files relating to the years that interest Daphne, a mine of information that delights her. The Cornish historian Alfred Leslie Rowse, a friend of the Quiller-Couches, also provides some primary source material. For several weeks, Daphne immerses herself in history books, pores over letters, examines maps, sketches out the novel’s structure. Victor is relieved to learn that she is writing again; Daphne is his flagship author, his biggest earner, with advances of three thousand pounds per book and royalties of 25 percent. She promises him she will finish it by July 1945.

On a night with a full moon, just after Daphne has begun writing the novel, she stands close to her bedroom window and thinks she hears the muffled thunder of hundreds of galloping horses; she makes out the clinking of harnesses and the animals’ panting breath, as if a whole army were encircling Menabilly. She opens the window and leans out to observe the silent garden. Nobody there. The next morning, she tells her children about this strange sensation and they listen, wide-eyed.

Her new heroine is Honor Harris, a young royalist who truly existed, and the story begins in 1620 when she is only ten years old. Even at that age, she is already a compelling character with a bold, insolent temperament that stimulates Daphne’s imagination, a tomboy in the same swaggering, fearless vein as Janet Coombe, Mary Yellan, Rebecca de Winter, and Dona St. Columb. Her older brother Christopher has just married the fiery Gartred Grenvile. The Grenviles are one of the most powerful families in Cornwall. Ten years later, Honor’s destiny is dramatically altered, and it is Gartred’s younger brother—the irresistible, impetuous Richard Grenvile—who is the cause.

Locked away in her room, Daphne leaves the care of the children and the house to migraine-stricken, overworked Margaret. What a bore, all these material necessities, when the only thing that counts is Honor Harris. Things get done without Mrs. Browning—shopping, cleaning, cooking—so why should she take care of all that, when there are others who can do it? She no longer drives, has not been behind the wheel of a car since her wedding day, and she doesn’t miss it. No one disturbs her. No one dares. From time to time, she gets up from her desk (who could imagine that just writing for hours on end would cause such pain to one’s entire body?), stretches her numb legs, massages her stiffened fingers. Standing up, leaning against the window, she smokes a cigarette and looks out toward the slim blue line of the sea, lost in her thoughts. She does not see the children playing at the edge of the woods, nor Mr. Burt, the gardener, hard at work; she is in the seventeenth century, amid the murderous violence of the revolution, she hears the crowd shouting, the cannons booming, the crossfire of muskets; she sees the sack of Menabilly, bastion of royalists, the furniture on fire, the torn clothes, the smashed mirrors. She sees the secret room, impossible to locate, buried somewhere in the mansion that she has searched so many times in vain. She will recount, once again, her love of Cornwall, the sea, the violence of storms, the scented rain, the wind that sweeps everything before it, and her passion for this house, stronger than anything she feels for man, woman, or child. She will describe the war, how it changes the course of a life, describe the agony of waiting suffered by women who are not at the front but who feel it in their flesh just as men do, who hide fugitives, surrender to invaders, protect children and houses, heal wounds, but who, like Honor, hold their heads high, with faith in the future. Daphne mixes the insurrections of 1648 with what she understands of the current global conflict and the complexity of military strategies, she who has a husband fighting in the thick of the action. The book is dedicated to him, in fact, and its title is The King’s General.

On May 8, 1945, the day after Germany’s unconditional surrender, Daphne, her mother, and her sisters listen to the radio as the Allied governments announce the official end of the war in Europe. This does not mean that Tommy will be coming home, however; he is still kept abroad by his military career. When Daphne thinks about his return, she is torn between joy and fear: How will they pick up the threads of this marriage weakened by his long absence? How will she explain to him that she has become attached to her solitude, that she now likes nothing more than writing, alone, in Menabilly, following her “routes,”* surrounding herself with silence? Daphne unearths an old military redingote that used to belong to Tommy and puts it on for her lone dinner in the library. With her blond hair now showing hints of silver, Daphne looks feminine, beautiful, but suddenly formidable, as if that purple and gold jacket accentuated a previously concealed power. Sometimes, late, as night is falling, Flavia and Kits stealthily descend the stairs to spy on her while she dreamily plays a few chords on the piano. To them, Daphne seems dazzling and unreachable. In the end, they go back upstairs in silence and slip into their beds without waking Tessa.

Daphne finishes the book in July 1945 and sends it to Victor, highly satisfied, who plans to publish it in a blaze of publicity (the war is finally over!) with a print run of seventy-five thousand copies in 1946. Despite the tiredness she always feels after completing a novel, Daphne must manage her household. Flavia has broken her arm, falling off Mr. Burt’s pony, and Margaret is again tormented by migraines. Poor Mrs. Hancock, who does all the cooking for the family, cannot do everything on her own. For a while now, Daphne has had an idea in mind, and she can’t stop thinking about it. Why not try it? It would, after all, be the perfect solution. Yes, she will ask Tod, dear Tod, her favorite governess, to come and work at Menabilly. Daphne and Tod have remained close over the past twenty years, writing to each other on a regular basis. Tod has already met Daphne’s husband and their three children. She must break the news gently to Margaret, who has been in the Brownings’ service since Tessa’s birth, explaining to her that Tod will not be replacing anyone but will take care of the children’s education. Tod is not certain that she can start work for Daphne straight away, however, as she is under contract with her current employers, an aged couple in Yorkshire.

One night in September 1945, while they are in bed, the children learn from the beaming Margaret that the war is officially over, and they rush downstairs to the library and noisily announce the good news to their mother. She looks up at them, puts down her newspaper, and responds with unexpected severity: Yes I know it is, go back to bed this instant.6 Crestfallen, they troop back upstairs, baffled by their mother’s strange attitude. They are waiting for just one thing now, the return of their father, but that is not going to happen immediately: Tommy must first go to Singapore, where he will oversee the demobilization of hundreds of thousands of men.

Miss Maud Waddell, alias Tod, arrives at Menabilly in October 1945, preceded by her numerous suitcases and her watercolor painting materials. A small, renovated apartment awaits her in the oldest part of Menabilly, the west wing. She moves in, organizes her lessons with Tessa and Flavia every morning, and in no time at all she manages to smooth over the frequent misunderstandings between the two sisters, while making herself liked by Margaret. Daphne is so happy to see this familiar face again, to hear the rich, deep voice that resounded through her childhood, her sentences that invariably begin with My dear. Daphne had been a similar age to her daughters when Tod arrived in Cannon Hall in 1918. How distant that period seems! Listening to Tod make her daughters recite their multiplication tables, Daphne sees herself with Angela and Jeanne, sees her father again in the garden at Hampstead, lighting a cigarette, always ready to clown around, and she is seized by a nostalgia for her childhood days. Daphne is one of those writers who prefer looking back to looking forward, who is capable of filling entire pages with what was, a place, a trace, putting words to the fleeting moment, the fragile memory that must be bottled like a perfume. Tod has known her for almost thirty years; she has seen her become a novelist, watched as the talent of that determined, solitary, book-hungry girl blossomed into fame, and now she is here to help her in her role as a mother and wife. Tod’s searching eyes do not miss a beat. Acute and understanding, never judgmental, she sees Daphne’s all-consuming preference for little Kits, to the detriment of his sisters; she sees the magic spell that “Mena” has cast over Daphne when it is, in reality, just a big, cold house lost in the forest, infested by rats and bats. Like Fernande, she is the sentinel of Daphne’s past, the privileged witness to her youth, one of the few to understand her complex nature. It is out of the question that Tod should join Daphne for a drink in the evening, or eat with her when she sits alone in the library, dressed in the crimson redingote, nibbling her light meal. Tod knows better than anyone how much Daphne likes her solitude. What will she do when her husband returns?

New residents arrive at “Mena” at almost the same time as Tod: two young goats given to Tessa by her godfather. They are both females, but the children insist on calling one of them Freddie, after their father, whose real name is Frederick. The other is named Doris. With their gentle eyes and adorable bleating, they bring joy to everyone … until the morning when Daphne finds them happily settled on her bed, having already eaten her nightgown and made a good start on her silk robe.

Soon after the goats’ arrival, Victor warns Daphne that she will have to submit to another photo session to help publicize the book—and this time it will be a family portrait. The photographer will be Miss Compton Collier, the same lady who immortalized Daphne at Ferryside thirteen years before, in 1932. She has lost none of her theatricality, turning up at Menabilly in her tweed suit, followed by an assistant, soaked with sweat and buckling under the weight of the cameras, tripods, and bags he must carry. Flavia and Tessa have a fit of the giggles, which they overcome only with difficulty. While Miss Compton Collier sets up her equipment, she suggests to Mrs. Browning that she change her clothes. Daphne firmly declines this offer, believing that her outfit is perfect: beige linen pants, a white shirt, and a cardigan. The look on the photographer’s face sends the girls into hysterics again, and this time their mother joins in.

The session is not off to a good start. Mrs. Browning and her children cannot keep a straight face. Miss Compton Collier finds this regrettable and becomes angry. She suggests bringing in the goats, which she has spotted grazing in the distance, to create a diversion. While Tessa and Flavia fetch them over, and the photographer is hidden behind the camera beneath a vast black cape that blocks out the light, Doris and Freddie, panic-stricken by the sight of this ominous shape, rush at it, heads down and horns out. Helpless with laughter, Daphne and her children hurry to the aid of Miss Compton Collier. The goats are banished, the tweed suit readjusted. Thankfully, the photographer possesses a sense of humor, and she too is able to joke about the misadventure. The photo shoot is a success.

*   *   *

In early 1946, Daphne becomes Lady Browning, after the knighthood given to Tommy, who is now Sir Frederick Browning. She is pleased by this distinction. Tommy is still not back from Asia—I honestly don’t think that there is going to be much chance of a man getting back soon,7 he tells his wife in one of his letters—and he is counting the days until he can be reunited once again with his family. This return weighs on Daphne’s mind. How will they be able to reforge their old complicity, now that she is in the grip of Menabilly? This house, her very own Manderley, grown from the same magical soil as Uncle Jim’s Neverland, this place where she always enters alone, to which no one else possesses the key.

While she waits for Tommy’s return and the publication of her novel, Daphne enjoys her tranquility in Fowey. In November 1945, she signs a contract with her French publisher Albin Michel via the intermediary of her agents Curtis Brown and Michel Hoffman for the publication of three of her books: Gerald: A Portrait, The Du Mauriers, and I’ll Never Be Young Again, her second novel. Her sister Jeanne, after spending the last few years working in the fields for the Women’s Land Army, has been able to return to her canvases. Her pictures are delicate, luminous interiors and still lifes. Her works are exhibited in St. Ives, about thirty-five miles from Fowey, where a community of artists has been established. For Muriel and Angela, who are more interested in Jeanne’s work than Daphne is, Bird has inherited her grandfather’s artistic talent (she is already using Kicky’s old easel), and they feel certain she is set for a great career as a painter. Jeanne, their mother’s favorite, is a pretty thirty-five-year-old with blond, curly hair, but she does not have the same striking beauty as Daphne; her features are less harmonious, her personality more reserved, sometimes even a little cantankerous. Flavia and Tessa prefer the company of their comical aunt Piffy, always good for a laugh. Angela is relieved that her work in the fields, which she hated, is over and that she can now start going to the theater again, traveling, can reestablish her friendships with actresses, aristocrats, women of the world, friendships and loves that she mentions only to her sisters. She is horrified by the Dantesque vision of London, devastated by the Blitz, and irritated by all those people who no longer dress up to go to the opera. Her fifth novel is published in the spring of 1946 by her cousin Peter Llewelyn Davies, who has founded his own publishing house. Michael Joseph has retired, and the young man who replaced him rejected Angela’s book. Lawrence Vane does not arouse any interest in the press, despite its bold subject matter: it is the story of a young concert musician who goes blind at the zenith of her fame and marries her pen pal, Paul, a possessive man who has never revealed to her that he is mixed-race, with an Indian mother. One acerbic review in Kirkus Reviews goes as far as advising people not to borrow the book from a library. The New York Times Book Review criticizes the book, “told with flat British restraint that doesn’t whip up ardent sympathy for the lovers.” Angela, used to such reviews by now, keeps smiling. During a vacation in Italy, at a fashionable hotel—the Bella Riva, on Lake Garda—she is signing her name in the register when an affable customer walks up and thanks her for her help with her nephew. Angela raises her eyebrows, and the woman goes on: You and your husband were so kind to him … Angela interrupts her with a smile: I expect you think I am my sister, Daphne Browning? I am Angela du Maurier.8 The woman recoils, looking angry, and tells her husband, It’s only the sister! She turns on her heel and leaves Angela gaping. How many times has Angela heard that phrase? It’s only the sister. She should write a book about it, one day. Her memoirs. Why not? In the meantime, she is planning to write a collection of short stories.

A young editor at Gollancz, Sheila Hodges, works with Daphne on the proofs of The King’s General, her eighth novel. Aware that her grammar and spelling are far from perfect, Daphne recognizes the importance of this correction work, is happy to accept the editor’s suggestions, and does not become offended when her mistakes are pointed out to her. She has great hopes for this novel’s publication, after the mediocre reviews and disappointing sales of the last one. But the newspapers’ coverage irritates her more than anything. Reviewers appreciate the powerful love story between Honor Harris and Richard Grenvile, but condescendingly emphasize it to the detriment of the rest of the novel, reducing the book to the status of a simple romance. Her in-depth research is not even mentioned, nor is her skill in mixing fact with fiction. Though she is indignant about this, Daphne’s good humor is restored when Victor tells her about the excellent sales figures and about the juicy offer for movie rights of sixty-five thousand pounds.

But, in truth, it is not the literary world that occupies Daphne’s mind in the summer of 1946. Tommy has just been appointed Military Secretary of the War Office in London.

He will soon be back, after six years of absence.

*   *   *

The woman in the mirror confirms what she sees: Daphne is beautiful, her skin tanned, her eyes shining, her ash-blond hair set in attractive waves at a recent visit to the hairdresser, her slender figure accentuated by a chic suit. No one would guess she was thirty-nine. Tommy returns on the day of their wedding anniversary, July 19, surely a good omen for their reunion. His latest letters have been full of life, love, joy at the prospect of seeing her again, and fear that she will be disappointed, that she will find him changed, no longer the same man. She waits for him on the runway of the RAF airport in Northolt, near London. Tommy’s airplane finally arrives, and her stomach is in knots. The doors open noisily, his tall figure appears, walks quickly down the steps, and she starts to rush toward him, then holds back, and it looks as if he is holding back, too: he doesn’t hug her, just pecks her on the cheek. Perhaps this is because of the presence of his team, because they are not alone? But Daphne is also left wondering about that beautiful brunette in her early twenties: her name is Maureen, apparently, and she is Tommy’s assistant.

This is all it takes for Daphne to feel invisible: the lack of warmth in Tommy’s clumsy embrace, and the presence of the disturbingly pretty Maureen. They spend their first night together in the small, gloomy apartment on the sixth floor of Whitelands House, on the King’s Road in Chelsea, near Sloane Square, that Tommy has rented for his new job. The rooms are narrow, the floorboards creak, and the air smells faintly of gas. The Brownings spend a night together without tenderness, without love. But Tommy is probably tired, exhausted in fact, and things will be better at Menabilly, where he is going for a six-week vacation before taking up his new office in London. After that, he will take the train to Cornwall every weekend to see his family. Daphne had made her feelings clear: there was no question of her leaving Menabilly to move in with him in the capital. Was she too intransigent? Too attached to her independence?

Tommy falls asleep, and Daphne’s thoughts race. When was the last time they “waxed”*? It seems an eternity ago. It’s been a long time since they’ve done any “spinning”* or had “Cairo,”* but of course there was the war, the war that drained all desire, the war and its attendant woes that had such an effect on her Boy. Her handsome, green-eyed Boy is nearly fifty now, and looks it. She watches him sleep and wonders what happened to the magnificent young man on his white boat. And what about her? Since she last saw him, Lady Browning has fallen madly in love with a house. How can she explain that to her husband? It’s not the kind of thing that can be explained, only observed.

At Menabilly, Tommy is shocked by how much his children have grown. Tessa (thirteen) is a willowy adolescent with blue-gray eyes, Flavia (nine) is a gap-toothed, short-haired tomboy, and Kits (five) is the apple of his mother’s eye. That summer, Margaret leaves the family’s service. The children are saddened to see her go, but happy to have their father again. How he has changed! His wrinkled forehead gives him a permanent worried look. And whereas their mother almost never gets annoyed with them or raises her voice, whereas she is so smiling and patient and funny, their father flies into a rage over nothing, seems unable to relax. Sometimes he is in such a foul mood that the only thing they can do is keep out of his way. Quite often, Tommy refuses to have anything to do with the two main obsessions in Daphne’s life: “Mena” and Kits. Is this a manifestation of his jealousy, a desire for revenge?

Occasionally, Tommy forgets his wretchedness for long enough to have fun with Kits and Flavia at bathtime. In the still-greenish water, he organizes merciless naval battles with a large sponge and a fleet of wooden boats. Later, in the living room, if his good mood lasts, there will be a cataclysmic cushion fight, then he will pursue the children through the long corridors, buzzing like a bee, deaf to their pleas. When Tommy smiles like that, it is like the sun emerging from behind the clouds.

Their favorite activity? The mini-Olympics organized in the living room on the orange carpet, with four disciplines determined by their father: boxing matches, hurdles races, long jumps, and horse races. The spectators are Daphne, Tod, Tessa, and the eight “Boys,” Tommy’s teddy bears, who have been through two wars with him. The victor is presented with a silver cup that Tommy won back in his Eton days, and two shillings. Sometimes, Tommy can be cuddly; he likes to hold Flavia’s hand, sitting peacefully on the couch, while listening to Swan Lake.

The three children are now old enough to eat their evening meals in the dining room with their parents and Tod. Tommy monopolizes the conversation: politics, local events, the boat he wants to have built. Tod is the only one who responds to him, because Daphne picks at her food, her eyes distant. Well, what do you think, Duck? (This is Tommy’s nickname for her, and she calls him the same thing in return.) Daphne comes back to the present, looks at her family, and smiles. Well, I can hardly say, Duck, she replies vaguely. Tommy gives her a gently scornful look and sighs: Woman, you live in a dream! He has frequent arguments with Tod and the atmosphere deteriorates. He and Tod do not get along. One night, at the table, the governess complains about a persistent throat infection. Eyes sparkling with sarcasm, Tommy hands her a carving knife: My dear Tod, why don’t you cut it?9 Tod is not amused. She leaves the table, and sulks for a week, until Tommy, at the urging of his wife, is forced to apologize, somewhat ungraciously.

Most often, to get away from Menabilly, Tommy spends his time on the water, as if he wanted to catch up on all those years lost to the war. These are the only moments of sweetness with Daphne. His new boat, the Fanny Rosa—named after the heroine of Hungry Hill—is a robust fishing boat with a blue-green hull and rust-colored sails. It sleeps six. But its great disadvantage is that it tends to pitch rather violently. Kits and Flavia are the ones most affected by seasickness, drawing the contempt of their father and their older sister, an experienced skipper. Tommy’s assistant, the pretty brunette Maureen, comes to stay for a few weeks. The whole family falls for her kindness, her sweet smile, and Daphne forgets her brief spurt of jealousy. Muriel and Angela visit Menabilly once a week, arriving in the large Hillman, which Mo drives as if she has never learned how to get out of first gear. Muriel does not like walking and insists on driving the car down to the beach, jolting along the uneven path. God help you all, Tommy mutters mockingly as he watches them leave. Kits and Flavia open the gate; Daphne accompanies her mother in the car, holding a picnic basket, while Tod takes her painting supplies; Angela and Tessa come last, dawdling as they chat. The picnic consists of egg and tomato sandwiches, which are delicious, except for one time when Tod sat on them, reducing their meal to a squished mess. The family passes hours on end splashing around in the natural pools formed by rocks or swimming in the sea, while Tod sits in the shade and paints. At the end of the day, Muriel spends half an hour reversing the car up to “Mena.” The Hillman’s engine whines painfully, attracting the notice of other bathers and walkers, who laugh at the spectacle of the elegant old lady grappling with her motorcar amid the stench of burning rubber.

One day, the children, playing in the garden, hear a loud explosion and a group of men arrive from the beach with a wounded man on a stretcher, his leg half torn off. The war may be over, but its memory is never far away: the land mines on the beaches must be defused, all along the coastline. This does not prevent the children having fun in the forest, left to their own devices. With some neighbor youngsters, they build tree houses and make camp in the bushes, then come home late at night, disheveled and starving. Deep in the forest, two ladies live in a cottage named Southcott: Miss Wilcox and Miss Phillips, vaguely mysterious creatures—witches, according to Daphne—and the children suspect that those ageless ladies, one of whom has strange opaque, thoughtful eyes, will one day end up in a book.

The only person Daphne dares confide in about the slow wreckage of her marriage is her faithful Fernande, in a few disillusioned letters. She describes to her the summer of 1946 as it comes to its end and Tommy prepares to return to London for his job. From now on, she explains to Ferdie, their relationship is entirely platonic: they go sailing together, watch the birds, walk around Fowey like good friends, like a brother and sister. Tommy seems rested, tanned, more peaceful, but this summer break has not brought them any closer. Daphne had insisted on having her own bedroom, partly out of selfishness, partly out of apprehension. Was she wrong to do so? That ham-fisted maneuver seems to have sounded the death knell to their physical intimacy. So many times in the night, she confesses to Fernande, she would get up, gently open the door, and see that Tommy wasn’t sleeping either, that there was a shaft of light beneath his bedroom door. She tells Fernande about her uncertainty: Should she go to see him, take him in her arms, kiss him? But she remained motionless in the doorway, sad, troubled, and then wearily went to her bathroom to swallow sleeping pills, cursing herself when she woke in a fog the next morning. Daphne spent the whole summer watching out for a signal that never came. But what if her husband was doing the same? Maybe he too would stare hopefully at her door? Maybe he didn’t dare knock on it either? They spent the summer missing each other, she complains in the letters to her confidante.

As fall draws near, Daphne decides to act. No more hesitation, she wants to give herself a chance to strengthen their marriage. Despite her dislike of London, she goes there once a month on the train, dressed in her city clothes—suit, high heels, coat—to see Tommy. But only more disillusionment awaits her: her husband’s time is monopolized by his new job. Every time she visits him, she feels sidelined, unimportant, even if he does tell her in detail about his recent trip to bombed-out Berlin. All his conversations revolve around the devastation wreaked by the war. In the face of this relentless pessimism, Daphne feels powerless. What can she do in London? Visit Christopher Puxley? This makes her feel better, even if it’s not a very good idea. She also sees Carol Reed again: not only has he married since she last saw him, but he is now in the middle of a divorce. She bumps into her old friend Pat, Edgar Wallace’s daughter. Her past is all around her, bringing with it feelings of nostalgia, and she surprises herself with the bitter observation that she is coming to resemble her father. who, as he grew older, always looked backward, not forward. Her youth has slipped between her fingers. In the mirror is a woman with graying hair, whose assertive chin gives her an almost severe look. Daphne does not like what she sees.

There is always writing, but for the moment nothing comes; nothing is “brewing.”* No novel in sight. No short stories or plays either. The winter of 1946–47 that descends on Fowey is worthy of Siberia. At “Mena,” the water freezes in the pipes; the power goes out. The children have to sleep in their clothes and coats, under piles of blankets. Snow piles up in the garden and the forest, and the house is cut off from the rest of the world for a whole week. The children build enormous snowmen and sled down hills on metal trays. It is so cold that Tessa keeps the goats, Doris and Freddie, in her bedroom. This is a disaster, as they get into Tommy’s closet and eat his favorite coat, an heirloom from his father. When he sees what they have done, Tommy yells with rage and hunts the terrified goats through the house with his bow and arrow. His curses make the servants blush.

The cold spell lasts all winter, the temperature finally rising with the arrival of spring. But Daphne and Tommy’s marriage just seems to grow ever colder. Not that this is visible from the outside. For their children, their friends, and even Maureen—Tommy’s assistant, who is becoming increasingly close to the Brownings—they still appear the perfect couple: handsome, athletic, funny, complicit. No one suspects the invisible barrier that is rising between them. And still Daphne doesn’t write: the clatter of the Underwood has been silenced.

During the first sunny days of 1947, Daphne suggests to her husband that they go on vacation, to a neutral country unaffected by the ravages of war. She hasn’t been abroad for nearly ten years. She believes that this trip will provide them with the stimulation they need and convinces Tommy. They head for Switzerland, with its lakes, its pure air, its peaceful countryside. Two weeks of walking, resting, reading … and yet there is still no intimacy between them, physical or emotional. Saddened, Daphne does not talk about it. She suffers in silence, concealing her feelings from everyone. Her pain is doubled by her inability to write. No love, and no book. She misses writing as much as she misses those sensual moments with her husband. She has been seized by a sort of intellectual barrenness, making it impossible for her usually fertile imagination to rain down ideas. And this is compounded by the sensual aridity affecting her most intimate desires. Unlike many authors, Daphne has never lived in fear of writer’s block. She has never lacked inspiration before. All that remains to her now is the pleasure of living in Menabilly, with the coming summer, in the company of her friends, Maureen, Foy Quiller-Couch, Clara Vyvyan, Carol Reed, Mary Fox, her mother and her sisters, and her children: Tessa, gracious and perspicacious; Flavia, shy and dreamy; and Kits, the center of her universe, in all his perfection.

Daphne is forty years old, the age that her father so dreaded, but in the summer of 1947, playing and sunbathing on the beach at Pridmouth with her children, never writing a word, she is still as beautiful as ever. Her books continue to sell, all over the world, and in France, I’ll Never Be Young Again is being translated for Albin Michel. Michel Hoffman, her French agent, informs her that the novel will be translated by Mlle Van Moppès (who recently married and became Mme Butler), the same woman who translated Rebecca and Jamaica Inn. Daphne does not know this Mme Butler, but she places her trust in her. She is unaware that her translator is also a novelist, that her first novel, Dormeuse, was published by Grasset in 1932, when she was twenty-five. Daphne has been told by Michel Hoffman that Mme Butler was authorized to “modify” the text in order to adapt it for French readers. Daphne decides to trust her on this matter, too, and in September 1947 Mme Butler thanks her for her confidence in a letter.

To coincide with the release of the movie version of her novel Hungry Hill—directed by Brian Desmond Hurst and starring Margaret Lockwood and Denis Price—a team of journalists arrives at Menabilly to film an interview with Daphne. She cowrote the screenplay for the movie with Terence Young. The reviews are bad, especially the one in the New Yorker: “The interminable British saga of several generations, which could only interest those mentioned in their will.” Daphne is disappointed, having enjoyed this first collaboration with Terence.

In the black-and-white images of the TV interview, the author emerges from the impressive manor house, followed by Kits and Flavia. Daphne wears a pantsuit, à la Marlene Dietrich, her hair flowing over her shoulders, and her stride is long and elastic, like an overgrown adolescent. She walks around, hands in pockets, the mistress of her kingdom, then—after pushing Kits on the swing—she sits nonchalantly on a stone bench, in a boyish pose, with one foot lifted up on the seat. Daphne looks radiant, at the zenith of her life and career, but what no one sees is the crisis that rages inside her. Menabilly remains her fortress, the guardian of all her secrets.

*   *   *

A telephone call fills her with dread, one evening in September 1947. She must go to New York. Her American editor, Nelson Doubleday himself, is the one who asks her. Daphne hangs up, feeling nervous and worried: another accusation of plagiarism against Rebecca! Six years earlier, the New York Times ran an unsettling article citing the numerous similarities between Rebecca and a novel published in 1934 that Daphne had never read—La Successora by Carolina Nabuco, a famous Brazilian novelist—which had a comparable narrative structure, a second wife, a large mansion. Daphne’s editor had vigorously defended her, rejecting all suggestions of plagiarism, and thankfully no one had followed the story up. Then another complaint hit Nelson Doubleday’s desk, almost at the same time, lodged by an unknown author, Edwina MacDonald, who was convinced that Daphne du Maurier had drawn inspiration from her earlier novel, Blind Windows, another story of remarriage that Daphne had never read. In 1942, Daphne published a cutting letter in the New York Times, in which she sarcastically asked Miss Nabuco and Mrs. MacDonald if they could work out which one of them had written her book. The case dragged on, before Doubleday’s legal team once again managed to quash it without any intervention from Daphne. And yet it was still not finished. With Mrs. MacDonald now dead and the war over, her son decided to take the matter to court. This time, Daphne has to appear in person, in New York, to explain to the judge how and why she wrote Rebecca in 1938. The thought terrifies her. Of course she did not plagiarize anyone—there is not the slightest doubt about that—but the idea of publicly describing the mechanics of writing, that very intimate, very particular process, makes her fearful, as does the prospect of facing the crowds, the press, the photographers, of answering indiscreet questions that expose the darkest secrets of her soul, as a writer and as a woman. Yes, she must go there; she must even stay a few weeks, possibly even a month, because such trials can be protracted. Resigned to this fate, she reserves two cabins on the Queen Mary: one for Kits and herself, the other for Flavia and Tod. Tessa will not come, as she is about to start boarding at her new school, St. Mary, in Oxfordshire, a prospect that excites her: she is eager to make new friends and to get away from “Mena.” She is the only one of the three children not to like the old house’s peculiar atmosphere. As for Tommy, he will remain in London to work, and Maureen will look after him. Daphne and her family will stay with Nelson Doubleday and his wife, Ellen, in their house on Long Island.

The first thing she must attend to is her wardrobe. For more than a decade now, Daphne has been living in pants and sailor sweaters, her children wearing the same old rags. In the United States, she knows, she is a star author, and there is simply no way she can attend the trial dressed in her casual Menabilly clothes. She also suspects that Barberrys, the Doubledays’ luxurious Long Island home, is a society magnet, which only serves to increase her anxiety. She does not know Ellen Doubleday, but she has heard about her elegance, and imagines she must look like those bejeweled, emaciated American ladies she dislikes so much, such as Wallis Simpson. Miss Tryel, the local seamstress, works like a slave to produce clothing worthy of the occasion in time for the family’s departure: matching outfits in navy blue and red for Kits and Flavia, suits and evening dresses for Daphne. The next priority is a family visit to the hairdresser. A cut and a perm for Daphne—the cut a little too short, the curls a little too tight, perhaps, she thinks regretfully—but she refuses to dye her few gray strands. Tessa gives up her long braids, Flavia is given a new hairstyle with bangs, which suits her, and Kits is proud of his boy’s haircut.

Daphne travels to America for the first time in her life. Tommy and his assistant, Maureen, come to bid them good-bye, on this cold November day. The Queen Mary awaits them in Southampton. The children are so excited: never in their lives have they seen such a huge ship, over a thousand feet long and capable of carrying more than two thousand people. Their comfortable cabins are filled with flowers, and Flavia is thrilled by the small, mahogany-paneled bathrooms. The first night goes well: the sea is calm, no one gets seasick.

The next morning, while Daphne is with Tod and the children in her stateroom, there is a knock at the door. A slender, dark-haired lady in her early fifties stands there, holding a bouquet of white roses. Behind her is a steward carrying a basket full of gifts. The woman smiles and introduces herself: Ellen Doubleday. She has come in person to welcome the famous novelist published by her husband, to make sure she arrives safe and sound. The children and Tod are charmed by their new companion. But for Daphne, the feeling is more intense than that. She cannot take her eyes from this gorgeous vision; she is bewitched by the elegance of her publisher’s wife, her graceful movements, her hazel eyes, her velvet voice, her refinement, her distinction.

While she listens to Ellen Doubleday, while she accepts the roses, the gifts, her heart is pounding, and it is a boy’s voice that whispers in her ear—the voice of Eric Avon, whom she locked away in his box, so long ago, back when she first met Tommy. Eric Avon comes back to life, sparkling and resplendent, hammering with both fists against the lid of his box, shouting out that he is alive, he is here, real, now, just as he was at Camposenea, when he became intoxicated by the scent of Fernande Yvon’s handkerchief, and the feeling is so powerful, so feverish, that Daphne cannot speak; she can only observe Ellen Doubleday in silence, transfixed, her hands writhing, her breathing fast.

All the way through the crossing, Daphne remains dazzled by Ellen, admiring her clothes, soothed by her soft voice. There are rumors that Greta Garbo is on board the Queen Mary, but Daphne couldn’t care less: all she sees is Ellen, as if this woman’s presence has woken her from a hundred-year sleep. When they arrive in New York, there are a Buick and a Cadillac waiting to take them to Oyster Bay. Barberrys is only thirty years old, but looks more ancient, a lovely house with pale walls overlooking a yacht-speckled bay, with terraces and beautiful gardens. There are nineteen bedrooms, each one decorated with tasteful luxury; a swimming pool, tennis courts. After Menabilly, with its cold drafts and its rats and its green water, the Doubledays’ heated house is a wonder. The Brownings are welcomed as if they were part of the family. Ellen rules over her home and her servants like Rebecca de Winter, no detail escapes her. Nelson, tall, stout, and graying, is just as friendly as Daphne remembers him from their meeting in London in 1931, the one and only time she saw him before. But beneath the veneer of perfection, Daphne detects a discreet tension between the Doubledays, she notices Nelson’s mood swings, his fragile health, his tendency to drink one glass too many, his wife’s worried looks.

The trial begins, and it truly is a trial for Daphne. The prosecution lists forty-six parallels between Blind Windows and Rebecca. They seem determined to make Daphne confess, in spite of everything, that she read Mrs. MacDonald’s story before writing Rebecca and was inspired by it. They question her relentlessly. As she stands in the witness box, it requires a concerted effort from Daphne not to dissolve into panic. Miss du Maurier reads the Times Literary Supplement, does she not? So Miss du Maurier must have seen a review of Mrs. MacDonald’s story published on May 20, 1928? Daphne replies as calmly as possible, but her heart is pounding beneath her new suit. She feels intimidated by all the eyes in the courtroom trained on her. She was only twenty-one in 1928, she says; she was writing short stories, one of which was published in the Bystander magazine, but she had not begun a novel, and no, she never read that review in the TLS.

The prosecutor Charles S. Rosenschein is remorseless, and so is his colleague Arthur L. Ross. They take it in turns to grill the author with a barrage of questions. Miss du Maurier knew the author Edgar Wallace, did she not? Yes, Daphne replies, she was friends with his daughter Pat in the twenties and thirties. Smiling triumphantly, Ross holds up one of Edgar Wallace’s books, published by John Long Ltd. He opens the book and shows the court an advertisement for other novels published by John Long Ltd, one of them, Blind Windows by Edwina MacDonald. Miss du Maurier must certainly have seen this ad, he insists; she can’t possibly have missed it. The defense lawyers object and, when it is Daphne’s turn to speak again, she manages to say, in a phlegmatic voice that conceals her inner torment, that she never saw those advertisements.

Every afternoon, Daphne emerges from the courtroom drained of all energy. The trial seems interminable—there is no way it will be over in a few weeks—and she is already exhausted by it. At Barberrys, Ellen awaits her return and pampers her, making her Earl Grey tea, cinnamon toast, sitting next to her on the sofa in the magnificent living room with its view over the bay. Not a word, Daphne dear, until you have something warm inside you, no sir.10 She often ends her sentences with this peremptory no sir, which makes the children laugh. Later, the two women will share a light meal in Daphne’s room, because she feels too tired to dine with the others downstairs.

On the weekends, as Daphne feared, the Doubledays have guests over. But Ellen is so warmly welcoming and enthusiastic that Daphne ends up having fun at these spectacular parties. The mistress of the house insists on taking her shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue, so that her husband’s star author can shine during these dinners in her honor. Daphne does not object; how could she say no to Ellen? Mrs. Doubleday’s maid had thought that one of Lady Browning’s evening dresses, made by Miss Tryel, was a nightgown, a misunderstanding that sent Daphne and her children into hysterics. When Daphne descends the wide staircase to meet the guests, dressed in a new outfit, a gift from Ellen, her children admire her, dazzled by the transformation in their mother. All eyes on her, Daphne du Maurier shines.

As the end of the trial nears, in mid-December 1947, Daphne prepares like a boxer about to enter the ring for one last fight. She knows she must do everything she can to convince the judge she did not plagiarize anything. Her lawyers reassure her, but Daphne cannot help feeling afraid: if she loses this case, it will cost her a great deal of money and, even worse, be a blow to her reputation.

Daphne enters the witness box, hands trembling and mouth dry. But her voice is clear, assertive, melodious. Her voice is a powerful weapon. She explains that she began writing Rebecca in 1937, when she was in Alexandria with her husband. She describes the unbearable heat, her desire to go home to Cornwall, and in one hand she holds up her little black notebook, the one in which she wrote her first notes for the novel. She speaks for a long time, not rushing; she is the daughter of actors, capable of remaining on the stage for hours. Those anonymous faces, those eyes staring at her, all those people who have never written a novel in their lives … what can they understand of the writing process? What do they know of the doubts that assail novelists? Do they believe, these strangers listening to her now in the silence of this austere Federal Court in Foley Square, that a book is written just like that, built on a single idea? That all the author has to do is follow that idea, placidly, sheeplike? They could never imagine how nebulous and complex a novelist’s thoughts are, how filled with contradictions and subconscious impulses, nor how degrading it feels to stand there, facing them, to have to coolly analyze her inspiration as if it were merely a recipe for a meal, to have to expose the intricate mechanisms behind this intimate alchemy, the labyrinthine workings of her brain.

Why should writers be obligated to explain themselves, to reveal the secrets of their art? What would they make—all these lawyers and journalists, these ladies and gentlemen of the jury—of her secret jealousy toward beautiful, dark-haired Jan Ricardo, Tommy’s first fiancée, this woman who (as she read, perplexed, in the newspaper) had thrown herself under a train in August 1944, when she was married to Mr. Constable-Maxwell, when she was mother to a two-year-old girl? Must she confess that she searched through her husband’s desk drawer, that she read love letters to him sent by another woman? What would they make of Eric Avon, who has urged her to explore her masculine side since she was ten years old and who is now banging on the inside of his box as if he sensed the importance that Ellen Doubleday would have in Daphne’s life, a sudden, dizzying thunderbolt of love capable of ridding her of her writer’s block?

Not for anything in the world would Daphne admit to them the true genesis of her novels; not for anything in the world would she reveal that a book came from a visceral feeling, that her characters are sorts of “pegs,”* a code word of her own invention, hooks on which she hangs a personal blend of fantasy and truth. The prosecutors, Rosenschein and Ross, are right: yes, writers are liars, con artists, constantly reinventing other people’s lives, using smoke and mirrors to mislead their readers, concealing themselves under a smooth, kind, generous façade in order to facilitate their lying. They are supreme falsifiers, because their world, like the world of actors, is created from mystification, illusion, appearance; in this way, and only in this way, are novels born. But Daphne says nothing of all this. She follows through with her plan, choosing her words prudently, calmly, not raising her voice, not flinching as she explains how she imagined Manderley as a cross between Milton Hall and Menabilly, the first house captivating her as a child and the second exercising an enchantment over her life that still holds her spellbound today.

When she leaves the witness box, she is pale, but her head is held high, and it seems to her that Kicky and Gerald are applauding from somewhere up above. Arriving at Barberrys, she collapses. Ellen sits at her bedside for hours on end, and in spite of her exhaustion, Daphne savors this delightful closeness. How happy she feels, in this cozy bed, in this enveloping comfort, and, above all, in the glow of that velvet hazel gaze, with the touch of that soft little hand which she holds tightly. The judge will deliver his verdict in January 1948, but Doubleday’s lawyers have no doubt: Daphne has nothing to worry about: she won hands down. Why not spend Christmas here? Ellen suggests. Daphne could continue her recuperation at Barberrys. Daphne is tempted, but Tommy and Tessa are waiting for them, and everyone is ready to spend Christmas together at “Mena” after their long absence. The tickets are booked on the Queen Mary, and the time has come to say good-bye to the Doubledays. Once again, their cabins are filled with gifts and flowers; Ellen has even given each child one present to open for each day of the crossing. The return trip is spoiled by the terrible weather, however, the Queen Mary enduring one of the most horrific journeys in its history. There is nothing to do but lie in their beds as the ship violently rolls and pitches all the way to their arrival in the Channel. When Daphne finally reaches Whitelands House, in London, she is so worn-out, so thin, so pale, that Tommy calls the doctor. His verdict: Lady Browning is exhausted and is in need of complete rest. Her despondency resembles the hollowness she felt during her separation from Fernande, in November 1925. Who could imagine, twenty-five years on, that the person she is missing so desperately is none other than Mrs. Nelson Doubleday, her publisher’s wife?

*   *   *

Daphne returns to “Mena” for Christmas 1947. Tommy has been named Comptroller and Treasurer to the young Princess Elizabeth and her new husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, at Clarence House, a prestigious position he is proud to accept, and which means he will spend the majority of his time in London, assisted by the faithful Maureen. But for the still-weak Daphne, Ellen is the only person who matters; she sends her letter after letter, confessing her feelings, trying to describe this coup de foudre, this thunderbolt of love. From her bedroom, she writes: Go right back into the past and see D. du M as a little girl like Flave, very shy, always biting her nails. But never being a little girl. Always being a little boy. And growing up with a boy’s mind and a boy’s heart. Writing to Ellen, she at last admits what she thinks she is: a strange hybrid, a woman with the soul of a boy, an oddity she has never confessed to anyone before, keeping the secret for so many years. To Ellen, she can—she must—tell everything about the being that lives deep inside her: Eric Avon. A boy with nervous hands and a beating heart, incurably romantic, and wanting to throw a cloak before his lady’s feet. At eighteen, this half-breed fell in love, as a boy would, with someone quite twelve years older than himself who was French and had all the understanding in the world, and he loved her in every conceivable way.11 However, there is no question of her wanting to confess any “Venetian”* tendencies to Ellen. By God and by Christ, if anyone should call that sort of love by that unattractive word that begins with “L,” I’d tear their guts out, she makes vehemently clear.

While preparing “Mena” for the New Year festivities, Daphne continues her interminable correspondence with Ellen, watching out for the mailman’s red van with the same impatience she used to wait for letters from her darling Ferdie. Walking through the forest to gather mistletoe and holly branches so she can decorate the house, she is already thinking of the next letter she will write to her: And then the boy realized he had to grow up, and not be a boy any longer, so he turned into a girl, and not an unattractive one at that, and the boy was locked into a box forever. D. du M. wrote her books, and had young men, and later a husband, and children, and a lover, and life was sometimes lovely and sometimes rather sad, but when she found Menabilly and lived in it alone, she opened up the box sometimes, and let the phantom, who was neither girl nor boy but disembodied spirit, dance in the evening when there was no one to see.12

Christmas, this year, is spent with Muriel, Angela, Jeanne, and Aunt Billy, Mo’s sister, plus another Angela, a good friend of Piffy’s, whom everyone calls Shaw, accompanied by their turbulent Pekinese. The Browning children have never believed in Santa Claus; Daphne has always told them the truth, disapproving of those fables children are encouraged to believe, and they recognize the presents under the tree wrapped by their mother, the ones in crumpled paper with lopsided ribbons. During the Christmas dinner, as the guests laugh loudly and Tommy carves the turkey, kicking the dogs out of the room, Daphne thinks about Ellen, who must be celebrating at Barberrys with her husband and children, Madeleine, Pucky, Nelson Junior, and Neltje, and the smile fades on her lips. Is Ellen wearing that black-and-red dress that suits her so well? At the end of the day, when the guests have left, Daphne goes to her bedroom, closes the door, and begins a new letter, looking up continually at the photograph of Ellen that now stands atop her chest of drawers. I pushed the boy back into his box again and avoided you on the boat like the plague. Watching you at Barberrys was very hard to bear. You looked lovelier every day. It just defeated me. I wanted to ride out and fight dragons for you, and bring back the Holy Grail.13 What if, one day, someone were to read these letters, these private missives in which she pours out her heart, strips herself bare? Her husband, or Ellen’s husband? She doesn’t think about it; these pages are a sort of liberation for her, and the more she confides, the lighter she feels, as if the act of telling Ellen everything is a balm for her soul. Daphne lies down, exhausted, and as she dozes, Kits silently joins her in bed and falls asleep beside her. Downstairs, in the empty living room, Tommy looks for another bottle of champagne, but it’s all gone, so he pours himself another gin and tonic, smoking cigarette after cigarette. His bad mood gets the better of him and he starts kicking his presents. Tod and the girls leave him to his rage.

Ellen’s replies arrive in dribs and drabs and reflect their author: gentle, comforting, levelheaded. For six letters sent from Menabilly, only two come from the United States. Ellen explains to Daphne, with infinite tact, that she feels a deep friendship for her, but that this affection could never be transformed into anything else. Daphne is not downcast by Ellen’s gentle rejection because she refuses to recognize it for what it is. Thanks to Ellen, her new “peg,”* she is inspired once more and she begins “to brew” a new novel; she feels herself come alive again, grow stronger, regain her sense of humor, and laugh with her loved ones, especially seven-year-old Kits, who seems to have inherited his grandfather Gerald’s talents for mimicry and mockery. The code words she used with her sisters when she was young are now part of the daily vocabulary of the Browning children, remaining a mystery for guests, who are never able to guess their meanings. And in truth, it is not easy to imagine what is meant by “crumb,”* “royal,”* “waine,”* “honky,”* and “Nanny.”* The children also know the meaning of “Robert,”* because Daphne, traumatized by her own mother’s silence concerning menstruation, explained it all to them, even Kits.

On January 14, 1948, the verdict of Judge Bright and the jury members on the Rebecca affair is finally delivered: Miss du Maurier did not plagiarize Edwina MacDonald’s Blind Windows. Relief all around, but Daphne has already moved on to something else. In the silence of her room, she writes—for Ellen, and about Ellen. No one will know, though: it will be their secret. Daphne feels as if she is breathing in Ellen’s perfume, L’Aimant from Coty, with its scents of peach, jasmine, rose, and vanilla, a fragrance that suits her perfectly. By February 1948, Daphne has already finished it: a play, September Tide, written in barely two weeks, the story of a widow who falls in love with her daughter’s husband, a young painter. An impossible love. How good it feels to hide herself behind this young man, to adopt Eric Avon’s voice, to reveal in this way her attraction to the dazzling fifty-something woman, the mother of his new wife. Could anyone read between the lines, detect the feelings she has for Ellen-Stella? No, Daphne has covered her tracks too well. The one recognizable element, a source of amusement to her friends and family, is the décor of the living room at Ferryside, faithfully reproduced down to the sounds of foghorns and the backwash and the cries of seagulls. It feels good to write so quickly, with so much pleasure, to embellish a fantasy that will soon be played out onstage, made public, but the true meaning of which will be understood only by Ellen and herself. It is dangerous to be loved and desired by a writer; she went through this with Christopher Puxley, the “peg”* for her French pirate. That story left a bitter aftertaste, not to mention the Puxleys’ torpedoed marriage. Despite the danger of this new “Ellen peg,” she cannot resist the voracity of the desire to write that grips her once again, to the point that the rest of her life seems colorless and bland, and she emerges each evening from her room staggering like a junkie.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Ellen is shocked by the advance of her husband’s cancer; the doctors give him only one year to live. He is recovering from a last-chance operation, and Daphne’s letters to her friend are full of tenderness. At Fowey, spring finally arrives, with the hyacinths and rhododendrons in bloom. Angela has a short story collection, Birkinshaw, published by Peter Llewellyn Davies, which vanishes unnoticed; this time, however, she is stung by its lack of success. The only way to battle her disappointment is to start on a new novel, and between two vacations this is what she does. As for Jeanne, she has moved to St. Ives to pursue her artistic career more seriously; she meets the painter Dod Procter there, with whom she embarks on a series of journeys to Africa.

*   *   *

At Menabilly, next to Gribbin Head, is the hut where Captain Vandeleur lives—a name that might easily have come from one of Daphne’s novels. Flavia claims he looks like a large, cap-wearing toad with bulging eyes. Captain Vandeleur is employed by the Rashleigh family to maintain and watch over the vast domain of Menabilly. He lives alone with his dogs and spends his days wandering the woods, paths, and fields of the farm. His garden includes a beautiful bed of camellias, Daphne’s favorite flower. There are twenty-eight vases to be filled with flowers at Menabilly, one of the few domestic tasks carried out by Lady Browning, and unfortunately there are very few camellias in her part of the property. It is tempting to pilfer a few from Captain Vandeleur, but this involves quite an operation. Kits and Flavia cycle along the path that leads to his hut, to check whether his car is in the garage. If the way is clear, Daphne quickly walks over there, secateurs in her pocket, while the children stand guard. She hastily cuts a few, here and there, from the profusion of white, pink, and red flowers, then hurries back home, followed by her escort. One day, Captain Vandeleur catches her red-handed. While she attempts to conceal the flowers behind her back, embarrassed, he tells her, with gentle irony, Good evening, Lady Browning, how nice to see you. Do please let me know if you would ever like some camellias, as I should be most happy to give you a flower or two.14

Only once did Captain Vandeleur blow his top. Carol Reed came to spend a few days at “Mena.” He was a movie director now. After dinner, Carol made Daphne laugh by announcing, like some juvenile prankster, Let’s have a huge bonfire! That rhododendron bush by your writing hut, you said yourself its height spoils the view of the sea.15 In a rush of enthusiasm, he went off to find paper, kerosene, and matches, followed by the children. After a few minutes, it was all ready, and the bush caught fire in a very cinematic way, a huge orange burst lighting up the night, accompanied by a loud crackling noise. The flames rose up in the dark sky and the nearest neighbors arrived, looking amazed. We thought t’was the blinking house on fire, like in the film Rebecca,16 joked one observer. While everyone was admiring the fire, Captain Vandeleur appeared, followed by his dogs. Upon discovering that the fire had been started by one of Lady Browning’s guests, he seemed wild with rage. You will be hearing from the estate, Lady Browning, and no doubt Dr. Rashleigh,17 he said, furious, as he was leaving. Thankfully for Daphne, she never received any complaints from her landlord regarding Carol’s bonfire. But Captain Vandeleur sulked about it for quite a while.

He is not the only man in a bad mood: there is also Tommy, who takes his work at Clarence House very seriously and finds it exhausting. No one in his office suspects how tired he is, except Maureen, his devoted assistant. Boy Browning, complain? Never! He goes back to his small apartment at Whitelands House every night, alone and depressed, succumbing to one glass of gin, and then another. Little by little, alcohol becomes a pernicious influence in his life, along with cigarettes. Daphne knows this, guesses it; she thinks of her father, who had gone down the same road, and feels powerless. On Friday evenings, Tommy arrives late at Menabilly, having taken the last train from Paddington; he smiles at the idea of returning to the Fanny Rosa and his family, but his joy is short-lived. By Sunday morning, knowing that he must leave again that evening, his face darkens, his stomachache returns, and he locks himself away in his melancholy. The hardest moment, for him, is when he has to pack his suitcase, with his teddy bears that still go everywhere with him. Kits, unwittingly, finds a new nickname for his father. Daphne asks one morning where Tommy is, and Kits replies, In his room, moping.18 Moper. A soubriquet that will stick to him and that he will never be rid of. And yet he and Daphne enjoy some pleasant moments on the Fanny Rosa in that summer of 1948, sailing to Falmouth with Daphne at the helm, and for a few days she has the illusion that they have rediscovered their old closeness. It is a fleeting impression.

The challenge, in the fall of 1948, is to decide who will play Stella Martyn. Every famous actress over forty is in contention: Diana Wynyard, Carol Reed’s delightful ex-wife; Gertrude Lawrence, a close friend of the playwright Noël Coward, fresh from her success in Pygmalion: and the great Shakespearian actresses Fay Compton and Peggy Ashcroft. Daphne is invited to London to meet the casting directors, and Tommy takes advantage of this trip to introduce her to Princess Elizabeth and her husband, moments that she narrates in detail to Ellen in a letter. The princess is sweet, but sort of shy, and the prince a “menace,”* except too fair and pale.19

Fifty-year-old Gertrude Lawrence finally obtains the role. Daphne is not thrilled by this; she thinks her too old, dislikes her dyed hair, her artifice, and, above all, the fact that she is one of those actresses who once belonged to her father’s “stable,” with Daphne in no doubt as to the nature of their relations at the time. Gerald and Gertrude met in 1930, on the set of Lord Camber’s Ladies, produced by Hitchcock, and they played opposite each other in a play by John Van Druten, in London, in 1932. “Gertie,” with her cheeky wit, her fleshy lips, her piercing voice, her Cockney accent, her swearwords, her booming laughter, her dancelike gestures … no, none of this is right for Stella-Ellen, the epitome of class and distinction. However it isn’t Daphne who has the last word, but Irene Hentschel, the play’s director. Daphne attends the first rehearsals, but she is infuriated, ill at ease; she feels as if she is witnessing a travesty of her work. No, that’s not right: Stella would not stand like that; she wouldn’t kiss Evan in that way. Daphne keeps quiet, bites her nails. She is so annoyed that she has to swallow two pills to go to sleep every night.

Breathing in the atmosphere of the theater, however, Daphne realizes that she is in the grip of an unexpected pleasure: reliving the ambience of her childhood, as if she might find her father again amid these dusty, familiar smells of dressing rooms and scenery, while enjoying the company of stage managers and actors, a unique and special world that she has missed. She thinks about Gerald as she watches her characters evolve on the stage, as if he were standing next to her in the wings, observing and joking.

Gertie, a will-o’-the-wisp, has a je ne sais quoi reminiscent of Gerald in the way she clowns around, the way she is always the center of attention, the way she absolutely has to win over everyone she meets, instantly. Gertie is capable of losing her temper over a trifle, flying into a rage, and unleashing a volley of insults, an exhausting and fascinating creature. Daphne knows exactly what makes her tick, because her father was the same—except that he would never have used a swearword. The most unexpected thing is the way Gertie inhabits the character of Stella, takes possession of it, adding her own personal touch, her emotions, and Daphne realizes, to her growing confusion, that Gertie is instinctively appropriating what Daphne tried to capture of Ellen, as if Gertie, on the stage, is channeling Ellen’s personality. How is that possible? The magic of the theater? The talent of the actress? Daphne opens up about it in her letters to Ellen, describing how Gertie, quite unconsciously, puts on an American accent, which makes Daphne miss Ellen even more. Once, she says, it was too much to bear, and Daphne had to leave the theater.

The first night is set for the end of November 1948 at the New Theatre in Oxford. After that, the play will be performed at the Aldwych Theatre in London, from December 15, with Michael Gough as Evan and Anne Leon in the role of Cherry. Gertie’s American husband, Richard Aldridge, comes from New York for the occasion. All of London rushes to see the play performed at the Aldwych. Queen Mary, Princess Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret go, too, accompanied by Tommy. It is a success, Gertrude Lawrence’s comeback, a triumph. September Tide will be performed for months and will mark the birth of a deep friendship between Gertie and Daphne. Daphne calls her Cinders, after Cinderella, while Gertie calls her Dum, for her initials. During the dinner to celebrate the first night, Michael Gough, the handsome young actor who is playing the part of Stella’s son-in-law—visibly charmed by Lady Browning, as so many people are—asks Daphne how she invents her characters. She replies, with a mischievous smile, Most of my characters are based on real people, only sometimes are they invented out of thin air.20

Thanks to Gertie, Daphne’s desire to go out is rekindled; once again, she enjoys making herself beautiful, having lunch at the Savoy, at the best table, where Gertie flirts outrageously and hilariously with the waiter. Daphne wears a new perfume created by Germaine Cellier, Vent Vert from Balmain, leaving an audacious, green scent in her wake—an avant-garde fragrance described in the press by Colette as having the bittersweet tang of crushed plants. The kind of thing that will please those she-devils of today. Daphne likes to go to Dover for the day with Gertie, to visit Noël Coward, who wrote the hugely famous play Private Lives just for Gertrude, his childhood friend. At White Cliffs, Noël’s spectacular white villa, built into the cliff, Daphne rejoices in the company of actors such as Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, enjoying the sometimes scabrous, mordant, droll conversations. She succumbs to the champagne that flows like water, the wreaths of cigarette smoke, the open-throated laughter, to that sparkling atmosphere that her father was so good at distilling when they lived at Cannon Hall. Swept along on this wave of sociability, she accompanies Tommy to a ball at Buckingham Palace, in a shoulderless lilac dress lent to her by Molyneux, on the astute recommendation of Gertie. Later, in a letter to Ellen, she describes the outfits and fineries glimpsed at the palace.

Daphne’s newfound joy is tempered by the death of Nelson Doubleday, at fifty-nine, on January 11, 1949. It is time now for her to console and comfort her friend, to be present, even if she is distant in a physical sense. Her passion for Ellen is undimmed and as secret as ever; no one knows to what extent Ellen haunts her days and nights. In February 1949, the idea of a novel germinates, and she is able at last to get back to work. First piece of business: leaving her bedroom, which is too noisy, too close to the sounds of slamming doors and footsteps. She moves a table, chair, and typewriter into a rudimentary little cabin at the bottom of the lawn, heated by an oil stove, where she is tranquil. She calls it her hut.

Her novel is personal, inspired by the world of the theater, rediscovered with such glee, and her own family. The title? The Parasites. The family’s name is Delaney: a clan of wealthy, bohemian artists, whose father, Pappy, is a famous opera singer and mother, Mama, a famous dancer. The beautiful Maria (the heir to Gertie’s extravagance), the illegitimate daughter of Pappy and an Austrian actress who died in childbirth, is now a spoiled and idolized actress, married to a rich, kind man. Niall, a composer, is the son of Mama, his father unknown. Celia is the Delaneys’ only legitimate child, and since the death of her mother she has spent most of her time looking after her sick father. Daphne enjoys exploring a new, satirical side to her imagination, and the book’s tone is at once maliciously amusing and languid, slightly weary. Her caustic gaze oversees a series of journeys, hotel rooms, previews, dazzling parties, featuring her egocentric, arrogant characters, but the heart of the book is the emotionally incestuous relationship between Maria and Niall, a theme she already touched on in The Loving Spirit and The Progress of Julius, and which obscures the light of happiness. It is Charles, Maria’s miserable husband, who proffers the truth (a truth that would certainly make Jeanne and Angela du Maurier smile): A parasite. And that’s what you are, the three of you. You always have been and you always will be. Nothing can change you. You are doubly, triply parasitic; first, because you’ve traded ever since childhood on that seed of talent you had the luck to inherit from your fantastic forebears; secondly, because you’ve none of you done a stroke of ordinary honest work in your lives, but batten upon us, the fool public who allow you to exist; and thirdly, because you prey upon each other, the three of you, living in a world of fantasy which you have created for yourselves and which bears no relation to anything in heaven or on earth.

Finishing the novel several months later, Daphne suspects that it will disconcert readers, who risk being unsettled by that new tone, half-cruel, half-disillusioned, never mind the three main characters, wallowing in a selfishness that, although comic, is utterly reprehensible—and very difficult to identify with. Another pitfall is the book’s structure, which is ambitious to the point of being confusing, with the narration moving between “I” and “we,” as if Niall, Celia, and Maria were speaking together, and it is sometimes hard for the reader to work out who is narrating. Angela is enthusiastic, convinced that Gerald would have loved it, while Gertie already sees herself playing the role of Maria, and Victor seems thrilled. He is banking on a first print run of one hundred thousand copies.

When The Parasites is published, in the fall of 1949, Daphne discovers she was right to beware the book’s critical reception—dingy, according to her. In the Daily Herald, the famous poet and literary columnist John Betjeman shoots down the novel almost angrily, reproaching Daphne for her “heavy, dull and obvious sentences,” written only “to titillate the public and secure sales.” Victor sends him a stinging letter in defense of the novel and its author, the first time he has done such a thing in twenty-seven years as a publisher. There is one pleasant surprise, however: Ivor Brown, another eminent journalist, writes in the New York Times Book Review that the book is “magnetic” and wonders why so many of his fellow critics persist in scorning Daphne du Maurier’s work for being “so wickedly readable.”

Daphne has developed thick skin, and she no longer lets the book’s reception affect her, accepting that it will not be a great success and instead concentrating on an event that overwhelms her as a mother: the departure of eight-and-a-half-year-old Kits for his first boarding school, West Downs, in Hampshire. No matter how she tries to reason with herself, to get a grip on her emotions, she remains inconsolable after her beloved son has gone. Her reddened eyes draw the sarcasm of Angela, there to eat lunch. Pull yourself together for a start, Bing!21 she tells her sister, in an irritated tone.

Flavia, age twelve, finds herself alone at Menabilly. Tod gives her lessons every morning, and in the afternoons she goes walking with her mother for a few hours. What a privilege, having her mummy all to herself! They are accompanied by Mouse, Daphne’s new Westie, and even when it rains they walk along the beach to the Gribbin, dressed in rubber boots, sweaters, and oilskins. Daphne grows closer to her daughters, whose very different personalities she enjoys. In the letters she sends each week from her boarding school, and which begin with My darling Bing, Tessa writes openly and humorously to her mother, signing off With all my love, from your little pup.22

Soon after Kits’s departure, Daphne joins Ellen in Paris, in September 1949, for a long-planned trip to Italy, just the two of them. Ellen had postponed this journey on numerous occasions, as if she doubted her friend’s motivations. The week proves hurtful and sad for Daphne, with Ellen calmly but firmly putting things straight on the very first night: no, there is no possible “Venice”* between herself and Daphne. At last Daphne admits, to her pain, that the fervor she feels for Ellen—a mix of hope, delusion, and idolatry—will never be reciprocated. Prey to a bitter melancholy, Daphne watches Mrs. Doubleday walk so elegantly through the Tuscan light, and the idea of a novel comes surreptitiously to her mind. The story of a beautiful and irreproachable widow around whom floats an obscure aura, a barely visible cloud beneath the veneer of perfection. Angel or demon? Manipulator? Victim? Executioner? Daphne scrawls a few lines in Kicky’s favorite notebook, which she takes everywhere with her. It is hard for her to distance herself from this romantic disappointment. Writing will help. When she returns to Menabilly, she is cheered by Gertie’s joyful, almost childish postcards from Florida, begging her to come and visit. Not that this prevents her sending a few vicious, resentful letters to Ellen, which she will later describe, when apologizing to her friend, as her gin & brandy letters. Thankfully, Ellen retains her sangfroid and is not angry with Daphne for very long.

It is once again Ellen, unattainable, inaccessible, who provides the driving force for her new novel, though still no one suspects a thing. The whole complex range of her feelings for Ellen is at work here: her gratitude, her passion, but also her bitterness; everything she has experienced since that day of enchantment on the Queen Mary in November 1947, three years ago already, and also the bereavement she is attempting to go through for this impossible love. By writing about the “Ellen peg”* perhaps she will be able at last to get it out of her system, to drain it, to vanquish it forever?

So, that trip to the United States … Why not? To feel the sun on her face again, and the warm welcome of husband-less Gertie, who is waiting for her there. Tommy is busy with his duties in London, Tessa and Kits are at boarding school, and Flavia is being chaperoned at “Mena” by Tod. The way is clear. Struggling against her fear of flying, Daphne takes the airplane during this cool early spring of 1950, landing in the tropical mildness of Florida. She discovers, to her amazement, the white beaches of Naples, the fine sand, the long pier stretching out into the blue-green water, so warm compared to the English Channel. Gertie is as puckish and bewitching as ever. Impossible to resist her pranks, her humor; being with “Cinders” is like rediscovering her youth, sharing the same teasing camaraderie she once shared with Carol, the jokes, the complicity, the giggles that Daphne so desperately needs. Gertie, fifty-two? Impossible. She is youth personified, and her irreverence, her wit, her charm remind Daphne so much of Gerald. As for Daphne, she no longer feels forty-three; she is Eric Avon once again, the perpetual adolescent who runs along the beach, hair blowing in the wind. Eric Avon admires Gertie’s sinuous figure, finds her beautiful, takes her hand. He could never take Ellen’s hand; she always pushed him away, gently but firmly. At sunset, Eric Avon savors a Sea Breeze on the terrace. His pale thigh rubs against Gertie’s tanned thigh. He laughs at her jokes, succumbs to her generous warmth, to her ocean-salty kisses. Life is offering him a brief interlude of happiness, pleasure, and sensuality, so why not take it? In this sunny refuge, there is no one to judge Eric Avon, no one to reprimand him, to order him back to his box, to lock him in and throw away the key.

*   *   *

At “Mena,” during her daily walks in the woods with Flavia and Mouse, Daphne makes a discovery: an old granite monument, engraved with the Rashleigh family’s coat of arms, hidden behind thick vegetation. Daphne crouches down and, with her daughter’s help, pulls the leaves from the crumbling stone. It will be perfect for Daphne’s new hero, Philip; here, he will sit down and daydream, alone beneath the trees, with only birdsong for company. Once again, Menabilly is the setting of a novel. Though never named, it is the manor that belongs to Ambroise Ashley, whose surname recalls that of the Rashleighs. For this tenth novel, Eric Avon writes in the first person, as with I’ll Never Be Young Again, this time in the person of Philip Ashley, the narrator, a twenty-three-year-old orphan, Ambroise’s nephew.

Each morning, Daphne goes to her hut, emerging three hours later, when Tod rings the bell, to eat a quick lunch, then working again until 7:00 pm. An oil lamp illuminates her desk, and to keep warm she wraps a blanket around her knees, as she used to do at Ferryside when she was writing The Loving Spirit. On her desk is a dictionary (rarely consulted, as it annoys her to have to break the flow of words so she can open it), a Thermos of coffee, and some Fox’s Glacier Mints, her favorite candy. Sometimes her fingers freeze on the Underwood and she stares vacantly through the little window. She recalls her Floridian escapade, feels the sun on her skin again, tastes Gertie’s secret kisses. Then she thinks about the ascendancy Ellen has over her, against which she must fight. Her only weapons are words on paper, her only strategy to construct a novel around Ellen’s influence in order to destroy it.

As with Rebecca, the story that is taking shape explores jealousy and obsession, but considered from a man’s point of view. Daphne describes this new book in a letter to Fernande as rather sinister and a bit creepy, and you will never really know whether the woman is an angel or a devil.23 The woman in question is Rachel, a petite brunette in her forties, with large hazel eyes, a distant cousin of both Ambroise and Philip Ashley, and the widow of a Florentine count. In a notebook, Daphne makes a detailed plan, and then the opening pages come to her suddenly. What she wants is a disturbing atmosphere similar to those of Jamaica Inn and Rebecca, an atmosphere lacking in her most recent novels. A return to the nineteenth century, to horse-drawn carriages, crinolines, and redingotes. Rachel has none of Rebecca de Winter’s fatal, flamboyant beauty. She is gentle, reserved, covered by a mantle of class and distinction, a woman who never raises her voice and is, at first sight, unremarkable. But beware. Rachel is the kind of woman for whom a man might do anything. A woman to make you lose your head.

Another Philip disturbs Daphne’s concentration in April 1950: the Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Elizabeth’s husband, invited to Menabilly by Tommy. Prince Philip will only spend one night there, but the family is thrown into a panic by this princely visit and the house is cleaned from top to bottom for the man Daphne nicknames P.P. The blue room, “Blue Lady,” the best in the house, is reserved for the prince (despite it being haunted, though no one has ever seen the ghost), and his valet will sleep in Tommy’s walk-in closet, close by. The bodyguard won’t be far away either, in the bedroom known as “Little Arthur,” also haunted, according to Flavia, by the noisy ghost of a little Rashleigh, who died at the age of seven within those walls. Daphne asks her young housekeeper to make sure that everything is impeccable in the prince’s room. The housekeeper replies with a smile that she doesn’t see why Lady Browning is making such a fuss: the prince is a human being, like any other. Infected by the general fluster, and mocked for it by Tod, Tommy starts polishing everything he sees. He decants port left, right, and center, while Daphne laments that there are only four presentable knives and the candelabra must be repaired. At the last minute, new wineglasses are bought and the children ordered to tidy their rooms, while Daphne agonizes over what to wear: Oh, Duck, do you think I have to put a skirt on?24 She feels like Maxim de Winter’s second wife, gauche, timid, and incapable, and makes her children laugh by telling them that she is bound to trip over while shaking the prince’s hand or spill her cup of tea.

When it comes to setting the table for their very important guest, Tommy is unable to remember in which order the little and large forks should be put and he loses patience. Everything was going so well, with new place mats and candlesticks, and the salt and pepper cellars polished to such a sheen that you can admire your reflection in them, but this thing with the forks makes him click his tongue (bad sign), gnash his teeth, then go red: Christ, why haven’t we got a butler? Why is everyone so bloody hopeless in this house? You two get the hell out of here!25 This last remark is addressed to Flavia and Kits, back at “Mena” for their school holidays. Tod makes a comment on how tables are set in France, which only serves to stir up Tommy’s wrath. What the bloody hell have the bloody French got to do with it? Silly arse!26 With this, Tod, incensed, goes up to her rooms. Daphne, as usual, does not deign to get involved with household preparations. Ignoring the conflicts around her, she concentrates only on arranging flowers in the house’s twenty-eight vases. P.P. is due to arrive around 4:00 pm, and after a moment of hesitation—should they stand in front of the gates in order to salute the royal Daimler as soon as it comes into sight?—the family ends up waiting outside the front door. Daphne and Flavia curtsey, while numerous suitcases are taken from the trunk of the car. P.P. is thirty years old, very tall and cheerful. The valet seems taken aback that there are no servants to carry the luggage, so the bodyguard takes care of this. Later, the prince greedily eats the dinner prepared by Mrs. Burt, the gardener’s wife. Daphne has finally swapped her usual pair of trousers for a very elegant dress that used to be Ellen’s. The next morning, Tommy gets up at the crack of dawn to set the breakfast table himself. When the prince leaves that morning, the children accompany the Daimler to the gates on their bicycles and P.P. gives them a big smile and a wave of farewell.

With Prince Philip finally gone, Daphne is able to get back to her own Philip, a tall, lanky, charismatic, dark-haired man, behind whom she is delighted to hide, taking more pleasure in the writing than she did when incarnating the immature and egocentric Dick. It is impossible not to become attached to Philip, not to be moved by his urges, his stubbornness, his loyalty, not to feel as outraged as he does when he learns one morning that his dear uncle Ambroise, the man who has looked after him since the death of his parents, is, at over fifty years old, going to marry a distant cousin encountered during a trip to Florence. Ambroise, an inveterate bachelor, marrying a perfect stranger? Incredible! And yet this is, horribly, the truth. But what most disturbs Philip are the vague, muddled letters Ambroise writes to him from Tuscany, letters that portend the worst. When Ambroise dies suddenly and inexplicably in Italy, Philip ponders the matter fearfully. Who really is this cousin Rachel? There is only one way to find out. He must confront his uncle’s widow. He must go to Florence right away.

Sitting in her hut, impervious to the rest of the world, Daphne writes in a fever, devoting herself to perfecting the character of Rachel, the enigmatic heroine with the name that is at once soft and harsh, a woman as charming as she is disturbing, the twin sister of Ellen Doubleday down to her composed voice, her dancer’s gait, and her velvet-brown eyes … this Ellen-Rachel is the most complex, most inspired, most personal “peg”* of Daphne’s career, her greatest secret. Not forgetting Florence and the golden light of that disastrous trip with Ellen. This is how novels are nourished—on their authors’ passions and obsessions, all those things that cannot be exposed overtly to the outside world for fear of appearing insane, all those things that idiot judges and lawyers have never even imagined or anticipated, all that is woven in a writer’s soul: fragments of truth and fantasy, a personal clay molded and fired at will in the twisting curves of a labyrinth of intimacy forbidden to visitors and onlookers.

Philip is bewitched by Rachel, as Daphne was by Ellen: possessed, hypnotized, to the point of losing sleep, to the point of banging his head against walls, swept away by a hurricane of emotions that rages within him. The way her story slowly tightens its grip, each sentence polished to a shine, gives Daphne an intense pleasure that she hasn’t felt since Rebecca. The fate she reserves for Rachel is chilling. This novel will, she knows, satisfy her publisher and her readers, stamped as it is with the peculiar brand of subtle psychological horror that has contributed to her fame.

Meanwhile, in France, it is once again Mme Butler, alias Denise Van Moppès, who translates The Parasites—a little too hastily, apparently, as in April 1950, Albin Michel ask her to review her translation very seriously. While her younger sister is busy writing, Angela publishes her sixth novel with Peter Llewellyn Davies, Reveille, a family saga with political overtones. There is not a single review in the press upon publication. At forty-six, Angela feels the time has come to write her memoirs, and it is at Menabilly, in the living room, while her sister is finishing her novel fifty yards away at the end of the garden, that Angela embarks upon the story of her life. As for Jeanne, while she is traveling with Dod Procter, a renowned artist belonging to the St. Ives movement, she meets Noël Welch, a petite, intense-looking, thirty-year-old brunette who writes poetry. There is electricity between them, instantly. Jeanne is distancing herself from Fowey, from her sisters and mother. She is the most reserved of the three, Muriel’s favorite, the baby of the family who now wants to break free, leaving her older sisters to look after their aging mother at Ferryside.

Tessa, sixteen, is interested in France and her ancestors, and her command of French, taught to her by Tod, is good. Relations between Tessa and Daphne have grown close; in her letters, Tessa confides in her mother, telling her about the spark she feels for Ken Spence, Tommy’s godson. My darling Bing, I was so menaced* by him I didn’t know what to do! My God, it’s so wonderful to be able to tell all this to one’s mother, I must be the only person in the world to do so! But don’t tell anyone!27 Daphne tears herself away from her novel, deciding to take her eldest daughter to discover Paris in June 1950. She has arranged things with Fernande; after a few days in the capital, they will go to her house in the Yvelines, about twenty miles from Paris, where Tessa will spend the summer, under Ferdie’s care. Tessa has never taken a plane before, and she is perturbed at seeing her mother look so tense during the short flight, eyes closed, as if this were her final journey. Daphne and Tessa are welcomed to Paris by a charismatic young American man, Frank Price, who runs the Doubleday office in Paris and is thrilled to be able to show Tessa the City of Light. Frank lives in a large apartment on Rue de la Faisanderie, in the 16th arrondissement. He offers to put up Lady Browning and her daughter there—why go to a hotel when they can stay with him? They accept. Tessa suspects her mother is rather “menaced”* by the charming Frank. He is funny and clever and looks a little like the young actor Danny Kaye. Frank takes them out to dinner at the Eiffel Tower, where Tessa tastes côte de boeuf in Béarnaise sauce for the first time. After that, they go to the bar at the Ritz and then a nightclub in Montmartre. Frank tells the teenage girl, moving rather stiffly on the dance floor, to relax. In Paris, Daphne seems to come back to life: she is laughing, rejuvenated, and easily mistaken for her daughter’s elder sister. The apartment on Rue de la Faisanderie, a short walk from the Bois de Boulogne, is magnificent, with its high ceilings, its crystal chandeliers, and a succession of rooms with communicating doors. A few days later, they go to see Fernande, who lives in Mesnil-Saint-Denis with her mother, an old lady who does not speak a word of English and whom Daphne calls Maman. When Tessa returns at the end of August, in time for Fowey Regatta, which she refuses to miss, her French is as good as Daphne’s. She is delighted by her first taste of France and talks about it constantly. Fernande and she went to see Manon Lescaut at the Opéra, and there is nothing more beautiful than Paris at night. Daphne smiles at the thought that Paris has cast a spell over Tessa, too; Kicky would be proud of his great-granddaughter’s accent.

*   *   *

My Cousin Rachel is published in July 1951, with a first print run of 125,000 copies. To Daphne and Victor’s joy, it is as resoundingly successful as Rebecca. The critics are unanimous: Daphne du Maurier, at forty-four, is at the zenith of her literary powers. “Spectacular, surprising, masterful,” announces the magazine The Queen. The review in The Guardian is even better—“It is in the same category as Rebecca, but is an even more consummate piece of storytelling”—while the critic from Kirkus Reviews raves: “A gifted craftsman, and spinner of yarns, Daphne du Maurier excels herself.” The ambiguous ending, a method already used in Frenchman’s Creek and Rebecca, and which can leave some readers frustrated, does not seem to disconcert anyone this time. Whether Rachel is a poisoner or not, readers still love her story. The movie rights are sold for fifty thousand pounds sterling in the same month the book first appears, and Richard Burton, a rising young star, is cast to play Philip Ashley, with the beautiful Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine’s sister, in the role of Rachel, directed by Henry Koster. An article in the News Chronicle names Daphne as the best-paid novelist in the country. As her royalties increase, however, so does Daphne’s generosity: she is never hesitant to help her friends and family financially. Even Margaret, her former nanny, benefits from Lady Browning’s munificence to open a little shop.

Still basking in the glory of Rachel, Daphne goes to London in September 1951 to attend a literary cocktail party given by Ellen at the Ritz. Although she rings the bell for Mrs. Doubleday’s suite, no one answers. A young woman in her twenties is also waiting on the doorstep. Tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, she introduces herself as Oriel Malet, a writer published by Doubleday. In contrast to her womanly curves, she has a voice like a little girl’s. As the two of them wait in the luxurious corridor, Daphne makes the young brunette laugh with her ironic remarks. They discuss literature and Paris, because Oriel is a Francophile and her godmother is the French actress Yvonne Arnaud. Oriel did not recognize the famous Daphne du Maurier, but she is already under the spell of this distinguished forty-something with her pretty, suntanned face and her scathing wit.

When Ellen arrives, late, with a cohort of guests, followed by waiters bringing petit fours, flowers, and champagne, Oriel at last realizes—to her stupefaction—who this mysterious, acerbic blond woman actually is. The author of Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel! The guests chat, glasses in hand. There are other writers here, plus journalists, and that tease Frank Price. In a few recent letters to Fernande and Ellen, Daphne admitted “spinning”* with Frank, whom she saw again in Paris and London in the spring of 1951. Nothing too serious, just a few kisses, one of them in the restaurant La Tour d’Argent, in front of a magnificent view of Paris, but also in front of all the other customers. Was she testing out her seductive abilities? Either way, she behaved like a teenager and is faintly ashamed of her behavior now.

After a glass of champagne, Daphne sneaks out and finds herself face-to-face with the intimidated Oriel Malet in the elevator. She is interested in this young woman with intelligent eyes and invites her to get something to eat at her apartment in Whitelands House before she catches her train back to Cornwall. While Daphne packs her suitcase, Oriel admires the photographs of dogs, boats, and children, particularly one of a mischievous-looking blond boy: One’s son, it’s my French blood, I expect!28 She thanks Oriel for coming to keep her company that night, as Kits went back to boarding school that very afternoon and she had been dreading the empty apartment. After a quick supper, Daphne and Oriel say good-bye. This is the beginning of a long friendship and a rich epistolary correspondence. But on board the night train that takes her back to Fowey, Daphne does not think about that meeting, even less about her son, alone in his dorm, nor of Ellen or Gertie, her usual obsessions. Something dark and sinister is hatching inside her: a collection of short stories that she already knows will shock her family and friends, her readers, the press.

She has to get this darkness off her chest, no matter what. She mustn’t be afraid to explore the extreme, to offend people, to shock them. It’s like those gray hairs she’s getting—why dye them? Why pretend? It is time to put blondness, softness, behind her. What emerges on paper is morbid, disturbing. Sometimes, Daphne stops herself when she is in full flow and smiles pensively as she looks at the photos that Gertie mailed her, snapped during another trip Daphne took to Florida: two figures in bathing suits on the beach, laughing, entwined, brazenly beautiful. On the backs of the pictures, Gertie scrawled a few libertine phrases that Tommy unfortunately saw one morning, Daphne having stupidly left the photos on the desk in the library. Cup of coffee in hand, cigarette dangling from his lips, he had put the photographs back without a word. After that, Daphne hid them away in her hut, to have them close to hand, so she can admire the blue sky and Gertie’s impertinent smile and dive once again into the torments of her poor, mistreated characters.

Oriel Malet, recovering from a motorcycle accident, comes to spend a few days at Menabilly in October 1951, on Daphne’s invitation. One morning, they are crossing a straw field with Mouse, near the farm in Menabilly Barton, and they see dozens of birds circling in the sky. Daphne tells her friend she has always loved birds, just as her father did. Gerald used to watch them with binoculars, for hours: I’ve often thought how “nanny”* it would be if all the birds in the world were to gang up together and attack us.29 Oriel feels sure her friend, whom she now calls Bing, has found a subject for one of her short stories. Daphne imagines incomprehensible attacks by sparrows, robins, quails, thrushes, larks, metamorphosed into killers of human beings. Storks, partridges, and seagulls join this murderous flock, descending on houses, smashing shutters and windows with their beaks, swooping down chimneys to peck out the inhabitants’ eyes. Is climate change to blame for these violent attacks? No one knows. The authorities are powerless, and it’s every man for himself. One brave farmer, Nat, barricades himself in his house with his family while around them, chaos reigns. The story ends in a crepuscular atmosphere, with no hope for the future. Oriel thinks it brilliant, and terrifying. She will not be the only one.

Even though Daphne’s stories are set in peaceful locations—the Côte d’Azur, Hampstead, Cornwall, the Alps—the ambience is instantly suffocating. In “The Apple Tree,” a widower is obsessed by a small tree that reminds him of his dead spouse, whom he never loved. Nature will avenge itself pitilessly on him. In “Monte Verità,” Daphne chooses, somewhat perversely, the name of her editor, Victor, for the narrator of a symbolic story that touches on sects, sexuality and moonbeams. My next story—I hope to get on with it when the dreary cold goes—is one you will hate, Daphne writes to Oriel about “The Little Photographer.” About a sensual, rather foolish woman, who through idleness, lets a honky* man from a shop make love to her, and then when he begins to get serious, she gets frightened, she only meant it as a pastime, but I shan’t tell you how it ends.30 The sordid one-night stand between the rich Marquise and the young disabled man is horribly cruel, but Oriel doesn’t hate it at all; on the contrary, she loves it and asks for more. “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” narrates a macabre fling in a cemetery between a bloodthirsty movie-theater usherette and a naïve mechanic, and “The Old Man” reveals a family secret, its final sentence leaving the reader stunned.

While Daphne mercilessly plumbs these murky depths, Angela publishes her memoirs, still through their cousin Peter Llewellyn Davies. The title is ironic: It’s Only the Sister. The book retraces her childhood, her career, her beginnings in the theater, her love of the opera, her travels, her books. Her prose reflects her personality: chatty, sparkling, full of humor. There are generous extracts from letters written by Daphne, an unexpected gift for her younger sister’s innumerable admirers. Family photographs complete the package. For once, this publication is greeted with a warm welcome, and Angela’s spontaneity and wit are certainly a big part of that. But it does now seem impossible for Angela, nearly fifty, to ever escape her sister’s shadow. The same is true for Jeanne, despite a few prestigious exhibitions.

It is early 1952 and My Cousin Rachel is about to be released in the United States, when Ellen Doubleday suggests that Daphne come to New York to promote the book. Why not ask Oriel Malet, who is also bringing a book out, to accompany her? The two novelists take a night flight in first class, their tickets paid for by their publishers. Oriel, who has never visited America, is very excited. As for Daphne, despite her fear of flying, she is secretly thrilled at the prospect of seeing, in that same country, that same city, the two women who are more important to her than any others. It is simultaneously an ordeal and an exultation to find herself with Ellen again, as serene and distinguished as ever. Daphne’s passion has dimmed now, even if her feelings for Mrs. Doubleday retain traces of their former wild intensity. Daphne’s suffering is less, though, as if the fact of having bumped off Rachel Ashley on paper had, thanks to the “Ellen peg,”* been enough to dull her ardor. What remains, after that, is a solid friendship. It is also a joy to see her beloved Gertie again, filling Broadway theaters for the past nine months alongside the Russian-born actor Yul Brynner in the musical comedy The King and I.

One evening, Daphne and Oriel go to the St. James Theatre on 44th Street to watch Gertie in the role of Anna, the English governess hired by the King of Siam. It is a breathtaking performance. Gertie twirls through sumptuous sets in ball gowns designed by the ultra-fashionable Irène Sharaff, and the duo she forms with the charming Brynner, who has shaved his head to play the Eastern sovereign, is a delight. At the show’s best moment, the famous song “Shall We Dance?,” Anna, dressed in a voluminous pink satin crinoline, teaches the king how to dance the polka, and the couple pirouette at vertiginous speed like spinning tops. Daphne is frightened, gripping tightly to her armrests. As the curtain falls and applause rings out, her Cinders looks suddenly exhausted, withered: Is she overdoing it? The play lasts three hours, and she sings and dances throughout—and she’s been doing it eight times per week since March 1951. Not only that, but the famous prink crinoline weighs more than seventy pounds, Gertie later admits a little boastfully.

When they are alone in the apartment belonging to Gertie and her husband, Daphne notices how unwell her friend looks; she hadn’t detected it under the thick stage makeup. Numbed by a torpor that is alien to her, Gertie admits to Dum that she has had a few medical exams, but that the doctor hasn’t found anything. Curled up in front of the TV set watching bad soap operas, Gertie seems lonely and fragile, and Daphne, unsettled, feels an urge to protect her. Sometimes, the old Gertie bursts back into life, to Dum’s joy, as one evening when their limousine, stuck in a traffic jam, is passed by some lout, and Gertie lowers the window to yell, Fuck you, we’re in a hit!31

During their stay in New York, and when Daphne’s busy schedule allows it, she and Oriel visit the Frick Collection and the Cloisters museum and go for brisk walks around Central Park. My Cousin Rachel is acclaimed upon its American release, and the book sells just as well as it had in Great Britain. Here too, Daphne du Maurier tastes triumph, thirteen years after Rebecca. Now it is time to return to Europe, to Menabilly, where Daphne must finish the short story collection, which Victor plans to publish in the spring. On the return flight, she thinks about Gertie, incandescent in her pink dress. Gertie, her ray of sunshine, to whom, as she was leaving, she gave a heart-shaped brooch. They will see each other again soon, very soon. So why, then, does she feel this pang of anxiety? When she gets back to Menabilly, Gertie still haunts her thoughts.

*   *   *

As Daphne no longer drives, it is Angela who takes her to London, one cold February day, to meet up with Tessa. Arriving in the capital, Daphne notices that all the flags are at half-mast. Intrigued, she asks a sad-looking shopkeeper for an explanation. The king has died in his sleep. The highly sensitive Angela begins to weep, while Daphne is rendered speechless. George VI was only fifty-six, one year older than Tommy. Daphne thinks about her husband, who has been in Africa for the past few days with Princess Elizabeth and her husband. Tommy will have to escort the new Queen of England, twenty-five years old, back home, on this day of bereavement: February 6, 1952. Does the Princess at least have something dark to wear in her suitcase for the airplane’s arrival? The whole city, the whole country, is in mourning. Black is everywhere: in windows, on doors, on clothes, in people’s hearts. On the square outside Buckingham Palace, despite the icy rain, a crowd gathers until late at night in tribute to the late king. At Sandringham, where his body rests, people mass outside the castle gates. When the funeral train rolls toward London with the royal coffin aboard, people rush to the railway tracks to bid farewell to George VI, who is buried on February 14, 1952. The Brownings attend the funeral service at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor. Daphne feels sure that her husband’s career will evolve as a result of this royal death. And she is right: his new position will be Treasurer to Prince Philip, at Buckingham Palace, still assisted by Maureen. Lady Browning will have to take part in the commemorations, festivities, and galas for Elizabeth II, sumptuously crowned the following year, in June 1953, although the solitary mistress of Menabilly finds such social duties tedious.

In the spring of 1952, most of the reviews of Daphne’s short story collection are virulent. Victor had predicted it; many people consider Daphne du Maurier a “romantic” author and are horrified by the violence and the sordid nature of her stories, particularly the journalist Nancy Spain, of the Daily Express, who claims that these nauseating tales draw their inspiration from “malformation, hatred, blackmail, cruelty and murder.” She expresses her repugnance with such bile that Victor picks up his pen for the second time to defend Daphne. These unfavorable reactions have no effect on the novelist, who long ago became immune to them. Her readers devour the collection, and Hitchcock, once again, buys the movie rights, to “The Birds.” Her family and friends are also disconcerted by the book’s tone. Daphne finds herself in the same state of mind as when The Progress of Julius caused so much offense, twenty years before. No, she certainly isn’t a romantic author—what claptrap! Good God, don’t these journalists understand how important it is for a writer to experiment, to explore dark avenues in order to reinvent herself? Daphne has just turned forty-five, she’s not a kid anymore; her hair is gray, her childlike face is lined … it’s time they gave her a break from that image of a writer of old-fashioned melodramas! While Daphne is being critically damned and commercially successful, Angela publishes her seventh novel, Shallow Waters. Again, there is not a single newspaper review of her book, an ode to her youth and the world of the theater, the story of an actress who will abandon all artistic leanings in order to concentrate on being a mother. Angela consoles herself by remembering the warm welcome that greeted her autobiography the year before.

In Paris, it is Albin Michel’s turn to publish these dark short stories. Daphne’s translator, the all-powerful Mme Butler, has her say once again, making clear her reservations about “The Old Man” and “Monte Verità,” which she finds “not very credible” and “boring.”32 In her opinion, it would not be “very desirable” that these stories should form part of the collection. So Daphne must accept that they won’t be published in France! Michel Hoffman, her agent, suggests replacing them with two other stories, “No Motive” and “Split Second.”

In another reverse for Daphne, Henry Koster’s movie version of My Cousin Rachel has just been released and it is a disappointment, even though she enjoys the acting work of young Richard Burton, playing the impetuous Philip Ashley to a T, and is very glad that some of the scenes were shot in Cornwall rather than Hollywood. The unctuous, irritating Olivia de Havilland bears no relation to her conception of the enigmatic Rachel. With her convoluted bun and her middle parting, she looks like the Duchess of Windsor. When Flavia enthusiastically declares that the actress reminds her of Ellen Doubleday, however, Daphne falls silent, momentarily troubled.

Tommy is busy building a new boat; he has to replace old Yggy, which has come to the end of its seaworthy life and now rests in the garden at Menabilly. The Ygdrasil II is also a motorboat, but bigger and faster than its predecessor. It is only out on the water that Daphne and Tommy rekindle their old closeness. Tommy now sets to work on his latest project—designing a sailboat, to be named the Jeanne d’Arc. It will be pricey, but Daphne doesn’t have the heart to refuse him.

With the return of the good weather, Daphne accepts an invitation from her great friend Clara Vyvyan to go hiking with her, first in Switzerland and then in the Rhône Valley. A robust walker in spite of her sixty-two years, Clara fascinates Daphne with her Gypsy-like appearance, her dry, copper-hued skin, her sparkling eyes, and her endless memories. Lady Vyvyan has been around the world, alone with her backpack, from Greece to Alaska, from Montenegro to Canada. Daphne has read and enjoyed her travel books, published by Peter Owen Publishers.

During the summer of 1952, Daphne’s letters to Oriel retain their mischievous spirit, recounting her excursion with Clara, who does not share Daphne’s ideas of comfort: Lady Vyvyan is capable of sleeping in a haystack, while Daphne needs her awful ritual of creaming my face, and my hair in pins, and breakfast in bed! Another panic arrives when she gets her period while climbing in Switzerland. Lady Vyvyan will despise me if I don’t walk up a mountain because of Robert.* What shall I do with the Robert* things? I see myself furtively changing behind a glacier.33 The house has not emptied after the summer. Tod is recovering from an operation on her varicose veins and Maureen from the removal of her tonsils. Tommy is out on the boat from dawn till dusk. Fowey Regatta, which takes place every year at the end of August, has been a great success, and the famous dancer Margot Fonteyn, a friend of Tommy’s, comes to spend the weekend at “Mena.” Tommy is rather menaced* by her, awfully nice and easy, and reminded me of a Red Indian,34 she tells her young friend. The weather has been glorious; Daphne goes swimming every day and has never been more tanned. Tessa, nineteen and gorgeous, has invited a young man home. Tommy and I went for a short cruise in the boat to the Helford River, I did this on purpose so as not to be there to make conversation!35 The only sad lines in this summer correspondence concern Gertie. Daphne confesses to Oriel that the lawyer Fanny Holzman, a close friend of Gertie’s, wrote to warn her: Gertie is seriously ill. She fainted onstage and had to be replaced at the last second by her understudy, Constance Carpenter, and it may take her a long time to recover.

Three days later, when Daphne gets back from a walk along the shore, she is handed a telegram. Her heart contracts as she opens the little envelope, and she has to concentrate to decipher the few words it contains. Gertrude Lawrence died of cancer on September 6, 1952, in New York. Daphne stands in the entrance hall, suddenly numb. She can’t hear anything—not Tommy, asking her if she’s all right, because she looks so pale, nor the voices of her children as they play outside on the lawn, nor the barking of Mouse, her Westie. Maureen gently takes her by the arm and offers her a cup of tea. Tod leads her toward the couch. Still Daphne says nothing. Her face is white and the telegram a crumpled ball in her hand. The telephone starts to ring: it’s Oriel Malet for Lady Browning. Daphne struggles to her feet and puts the receiver to her ear. Oriel was shelling peas in her kitchen when she heard the news on the radio; she immediately thought of Bing. Daphne nods, stammers something about being shattered, thanks Oriel, and hangs up.

Daphne won’t say much for several days. Her family and friends watch in astonishment as she withdraws into a catatonic sadness. So Cinders was really that important to Daphne? And yet they had only been friends for a few years. The truth is that no one guesses at the depth of Daphne’s feelings for Gertie; no one knows about their closeness, their secrets, their frolics. From her bedroom, Daphne follows reports of the funeral, learning that her Cinders was buried in her pink crinoline and that the lights on Broadway were dimmed for three minutes in tribute to the actress with the Cockney accent. How can she explain to her loved ones that she feels as if she has lost Gerald again, eighteen years after his death? Daphne recalls her grief on the Heath, watching the two pigeons she’d released from their cage fly away, the day of her father’s funeral. Gertie and Gerald, fanciful and capricious, impish and beguiling, are gone forever.

*   *   *

The only way to survive this bereavement is to write. But try as she might to find inspiration—shutting herself away in her hut, going for walks with her dog on the Gribbin—nothing “brews.”* The coming winter horrifies her. Flavia has just gone away to boarding school and, for the first time, “Mena” seems too empty to her. She misses Kits, of course, but also her daughters—and that is new. She is united by a deep tenderness to Tessa and Flavia, even if her son remains her favorite. Daphne takes an interest in Tessa’s love life and likes her first boyfriend, Ken, but there is another “menacing”* young man in the picture. She enjoys her long philosophical discussions with Flavia, in whom she recognizes her own sensitivity and inclination toward daydreaming. Now there is only Tod and herself in the house, and her old governess often gets on her nerves.

In desperation, Daphne suggests to Victor that she write a nonfiction book about Mary Anne Clarke, her ancestor, Kicky’s maternal grandmother, in the style of her biography on the du Mauriers. She had wanted, a while back, to write a play based on the life of her famous eighteenth-century forebear, convinced that Gertie would be ideal in the role of such a dazzling character. Then Gertie passed away. So why not return to this germ of an idea by writing a novel dedicated to Cinders? But first of all, Daphne must do some research, because she doesn’t know very much about the tumultuous life of her great-great-great-grandmother, the bawdy effigies of whom, inherited from Gerald, show a buxom lady in low-cut dresses pursued by vicars and kings. There is no question now of going to London to visit the British Library; she is too fond of her reclusive life at “Mena.” She could ask Oriel Malet, who lives in the capital, to help her, and she could call on the services of young Derek Whiteley, an assistant at her publishers.

Her heart isn’t in it. Writing becomes a chore. In spite of the ample documentation gleaned by Oriel and Derek in libraries, Daphne’s progress is laborious. She admits to Victor and Sheila, her editors, that this is a novel written with the head, not the heart.36 And yet the life of Mary Anne Clarke, who quickly climbs the ladder of high society despite her humble origins, is not lacking in spice. Like Daphne, she laments being born a girl. Clever, ambitious, and attractive, Mary Anne is not content to be the submissive wife of a lazy, drunken husband or to raise his four children in the slums of London. A feisty heroine in the style of Dona St. Columb or Honor Harris, Mary Anne decides to exploit the most advantageous part of her resources: herself. Becoming the Duke of York’s mistress, she makes use of information gleaned between the sheets, indiscreet pillow talk.

Daphne is bedridden by a bad case of flu for several weeks in March 1953, and when she starts work again, in April, her prose seems to her watered down, insipid, bereft of its usual vigor. What is happening to her? She doesn’t recognize her own sentences. Will this book be as much of a struggle to read as it has been to write? Won’t her readers be bored to death? And then an even darker apprehension grips her: Once she is finished with this novel, what will she do with her time? She is capable of spending hours in the sun whenever it appears, sitting on the lawn, with her back to the hut. She writes to Oriel: I wish I knew what it meant to love the sun so much.37 She also tells her young friend about what she is reading and how she is finding a certain comfort in the works of Carl G. Jung, whom she finds “nicer” than Freud or Adler: He does say that the ordinary life of an artist or writer can never be satisfactory, because of this awful creating thing that goes on inside them all the time, making them Gondal.38* “Gondal,” a new code word between Daphne and Oriel, borrowed from the Brontë sisters, means “the world of the imaginary.”

In the fall, thirteen-year-old Kits goes off to Eton, where his father went before him. It is Tommy who goes with him for his first day. Daphne feels enormously proud, watching him leave, so handsome in his black morning coat.

September 1953 brings a new obligation: a stay at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, the royal family’s summer residence. There is no way to get out of it: Tommy has already postponed the trip once before, the previous year, when he was slightly injured in a boating accident. The young queen has just been crowned, and the Brownings’ presence is fully expected. As always, Daphne is thrown into a panic by the need to pack suitcases, wear long dresses and jewelry, inhabit the role of Lady Browning, and forget the writer. Even the place’s beauty has no effect on her, so ill at ease does she feel. She is plunged back into the crippling shyness that used to overcome her on Sundays at Cannon Hall; she does her best to smile, to keep up with the conversations, but she is counting the days until she can go home again. The constant curtseying and the formal clothing leave her exhausted. The only moment of joy is when the Queen Mother, a great lover of her books, asks her about the novel she is working on now. Daphne tells her about the life of her amoral ancestor and explains that she has not yet decided what she should censor, or not, for the book. The Queen Mother responds enthusiastically by begging her to not leave anything out.

Upon their return to Menabilly, a sizable surprise awaits the Brownings. Tessa announces to them that she wishes to become engaged to the young man she has been dating for a while now, a soldier named Peter de Zulueta. She is only twenty! Daphne likes the young man in question—good family, elegant—but she is not completely convinced. Tommy feels the same reservations. But their daughter is so fervent that they end up agreeing. The wedding will take place the next year, in March. For now, Daphne concentrates on the final pages of Mary Anne, which she finishes, with difficulty, in the fall of 1953. She sends it to her publishers with a note addressed to Victor: You’ll have to be ruthless, don’t pass what is doubtful.39 And, in fact, the book will require considerable rewriting, carried out by Sheila. This does not bother Daphne, who feels no real attachment to the novel. She finds it dull and thinks it reads like journalism. Her only consolation is that it does not contain even a hint of romance. I’m done with romance forever,40 she writes ironically to Sheila.

*   *   *

The big event in March 1954 is the wedding of Tessa Browning to Captain Peter de Zulueta of the Welsh Guards. It is the kind of wedding that Muriel would have loved Daphne to have, a church ceremony at St. James, in London, followed by a party for several hundred people at the Savoy, as Tommy has recently joined the hotel’s management committee. Tessa’s robe is silk brocade, and her veil has a train several yards long. Her maid of honor, seventeen-year-old Flavia, wears gold satin. The young couple emerges from the church under a guard of honor formed by the raised swords of the groom’s officer friends. The newlyweds will honeymoon in Switzerland.

Her daughter, married! Carrying the young bride’s lily, Daphne feels her heart melt as she looks at her, so pretty, so fresh-faced. At her age, all Daphne’s dreams were of independence. She observes her husband, who has traded his Moper melancholy for a more affable expression. He looks very elegant in his impeccably tailored morning coat and an immaculate silk shirt, a white carnation in his buttonhole. Everyone seems to know him, greeting him as “Boy,” and Daphne notices the admiring glances he receives from other women, their gazes lingering on his tall frame, his distinguished face. Even now, at fifty-eight, Boy Browning still has the same effect on women. Is she completely crazy, leaving this man alone all week in London, insisting on having separate rooms in Menabilly for the last eight years? They talk on the phone every morning, but is that enough to keep a marriage alive? Tommy has made new friends, has become passionate about the ballet, which leaves Daphne cold. He has become a committee member of the Royal Academy of Dancing and in his spare time is writing the script of a ballet, based on Tchaikovsky’s opera The Maid of Orleans. In London, Tommy goes out, accepts invitations, never misses a musical comedy or a show, and when he arrives at “Mena” on Friday evenings, he tends to sink into a torpid apathy, a glass of gin always at hand. Has Daphne pushed herself too hard, locking herself away for selfish reasons, in the name of writing and creativity? And in the end, what has it gotten her, all that ambition—a novel that will come out in a few months’ time, for which she feels nothing but shame? During the reception, Daphne listens to these alarm bells going off inside her, but she quickly silences them. She will think about this tomorrow.

Her first priority is to get away: to take a trip with her beloved Clara, this time in Greece, a country she has never been to before. Under a burning sun, the two women visit the islands in boats, on buses, and on donkeys, climbing hills and sleeping under the stars. Daphne gets her fill of savage nature, flowers, little hillside churches, Greek blue skies, accumulating as much energy and vitality as she can in order to deal with her return to England and the much-dreaded publication of Mary Anne in June 1954. Victor has ordered a print run of 125,000: Too optimistic? The Daily Herald goes first, with this ambiguous line: “A book which will bring delight to the hearts of circulating libraries and acute nausea to critics.” The West Morning News warns its readers that the novel is “a disappointment.” One of the book’s few champions, the New York Herald Book Review, finds Mary Anne “a lively lady.” Catholic World does not hold back, calling it “a slipshod and thoroughly unpleasant book” with a “nasty and immoral” heroine. Kirkus Reviews is a little more positive: “not top drawer du Maurier, but a sure best-seller.” Her friend the historian Alfred Leslie Rowse, though not generally fond of historical novels, at least appreciates the acuity of her research, which is some comfort to her.

Victor takes her out to lunch at the Criterion in Piccadilly to celebrate the book’s publication, but Daphne is filled with ennui. What happened to the pleasure of writing? At twenty years old, she used to line books up one after another, insatiable for more. Is the death of Gertie responsible for this scarcity of inspiration? Or is it the inexorable approach of that dreaded passage in a woman’s life? Daphne will be fifty in three years’ time, after all. Next year, she will certainly be a grandmother. She has no right to complain, she reminds herself, sipping her champagne: she has a husband, three children, a magnificent house, and her books are bestsellers. So where, she wonders, looking at the neo-Byzantine décor of the restaurant as Victor orders dessert, does this feeling of emptiness come from? It is as if a long black ribbon were slipping between her fingers: her father held it, Kicky too … perhaps the du Mauriers have this sadness in their blood, and Daphne has handed this ribbon on to dreamy, sensitive Flavia. Angela, though unsuccessful as a novelist, seems untouched by this hereditary gloominess; she continues to flirt with women, to travel, and has never married. Does her solitude pain her? No, she loves her Pekinese dogs as if they were her children. In the drawer of her bedside table, Angela keeps the timetable for the Orient Express, and just looking at it is enough to inspire her. As for Jeanne, the youngest, the artist, she perhaps held this black ribbon in her hands for a while, but she has met her soul mate in the person of the young poet Noël Welch. Jeanne and Noël have chosen to live in the heart of Dartmoor, north of Plymouth, in a setting of hills, streams, and waterfalls. Daphne envies them their cottage, with its novelistic name Half Moon, where Jeanne paints, far from her sisters and her mother and Fowey. Over coffee, while Victor lights his cigar, Daphne thinks bitterly that her two sisters enjoy a freedom that she does not possess. She is no longer free because she has run out of ideas.

When a publisher asks Daphne to write the preface to the new edition of Wuthering Heights, she seizes the opportunity. In October 1954, she suggests to Flavia and Oriel, who are fourteen years apart in age, that they go with her to visit the Presbyterian “Parsonage” in Haworth, Yorkshire, where the Brontë children grew up. It is a pleasant, studious vacation, in spite of the cold that leaves circles of frost on their windowpanes each morning. Watching her mother take so much pleasure in following the footsteps of her favorite novelists, Flavia suspects that she will one day write a book related to the Brontës. The new preface is written quickly, and Daphne leaves Yorkshire with a feeling of work well done and future inspiration. The Brontë she is most interested in, she admits to the two girls on the train home, is Branwell, the unsung, unfortunate brother, who was nevertheless just as talented as his sisters.

Soon after this literary getaway, Daphne receives a letter from her publishers, Doubleday. The lease on the large apartment on Rue de la Faisanderie will not be renewed after Frank Price’s departure, and it will remain vacant for six months before the next tenant moves in. How would Daphne like to take advantage of this fact, given her love of Paris and France? To move back to the city she so adores, to write in a room overlooking chestnut trees, to go for strolls in the nearby Jardins de Bagatelle … it’s a tempting prospect. But she cannot leave “Mena,” nor Tommy, who comes to see her every weekend. If she lived in Paris until next spring, it would put further strain on their marriage. She has a different idea: Flavia and Oriel could occupy the apartment, one to learn French, the other to write, and that way, Daphne could go to visit them occasionally. Both girls are game: How could anyone turn down an offer like that? They arrive at the Gare du Nord in freezing rain, but even that does not dampen their enthusiasm. The winter of 1954 is one of the harshest since the end of the war, and the girls shiver in the vast apartment, even more so when the building’s boiler breaks down. Flavia enrolls in art courses in Kicky’s former studio on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, while Oriel starts writing a novel. But after a week, they are so fascinated by Paris that writing and painting are neglected. Daphne goes to visit them several times, and each time she feels her love for France surge up again. When she goes to Rue de la Tour in an attempt to resuscitate Kicky’s old Passy in a now-modern Paris, Daphne feels a frisson of excitement that she has not felt for a long time. Why not explore, once and for all, those famous French roots of hers? Go in search of the Bussons du Maurier, in Sarthe? That’s it, the subject of her next novel: finding the traces of those aristocratic glassblowers from whom she is descended, seeing their châteaux, their houses, visiting their graves. Kicky and Gerald would be so proud. The time has come to lay claim to her French blood.

While she is organizing this trip, Daphne almost chokes as she is leafing through the French translation of Mary Anne, published by Albin Michel in late 1954, a few copies of which she has just received from her agents. The cause is her translator, Denise Van Moppès, alias Mme Butler. Lady Browning writes a long, angry letter to Michel Hoffman in Paris, who in turn hastens to contact her French publishers. I must make you aware of a very serious mistake committed by Mme Butler in her translation of Mary Anne. On the last page of the novel, there is the word “starling,” which of course means “étourneau” or “sansonnet,” and which Mme Butler unfortunately decided to translate as “un million de petites étoiles” [“a million little stars”], presumably confused by the similarity between the words “star” and “starling.” I do wonder how a translator of Mme Butler’s professional reputation could have allowed such a gross error, particularly as the scene in question takes place in broad daylight. As the author wrote to me, her readers must wonder what stars are doing in the sky over London on the morning of the Duke of York’s funeral!41 Daphne was able to spot this error because she speaks fluent French. Now that her novels are published in over thirty languages, however, Daphne knows that she must trust her translators, as she isn’t able to read all those other languages to search for any inaccuracies. She learns through her agent that Mme Butler has translated Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Koestler, and Henry James, that she is highly respected in the profession and also publishes her own novels under her maiden name. Albin Michel hastens to correct Mme Butler’s mistake, but the translator herself does not write an apology to the author.

*   *   *

Daphne gives advice to Flavia and Oriel, who have become thoroughly Parisian. Dress warmly, even to go to the Louvre. Don’t wear stiletto heels, because they slip on the frozen sidewalks. Don’t walk alone in the Bois de Boulogne (when Daphne did it, twenty-five years ago, she had the terrifying Schüller, Ferdie’s German shepherd, on a leash, to discourage any aggressors). Learn to use the Metro, not easy to begin with. Get in touch with Doodie (Daphne’s childhood friend, an amusing and welcoming woman, now the highly chic Comtesse de Beauregard, who lives on Rue Barbet-de-Jouy).

Daphne is now a grandmother, at the age of forty-eight. Tessa gives birth to little Marie-Thérèse on February 15, 1955. Watching her daughter breast-feed, Daphne cannot help feeling moved. She remembers Tessa’s birth, twenty-one years before, recalling her disappointment because the baby was a girl. Tessa does not seem at all disappointed by the sex of her child, however; on the contrary, she radiates pride. Kits catches measles in April, and Daphne is at his bedside in “Mena” when she learns by telegram that Fernande has been hospitalized in Rambouillet. Poor Ferdie: she demanded that Lady Browning should be personally informed. Daphne can’t do much, from where she is, and her son is her priority. In a letter to Oriel, Daphne gives her the phone number for the house in Mesnil-Saint-Denis and asks her to call to find out more. Yes, this is cowardly. Ferdie will always remain in her heart, but for a while now Daphne has been irritated by her friend’s detailed accounts of the difficulties and rivalries she is facing in the mayor’s office at Mesnil. Flavia and Oriel obediently visit Mlle Yvon during her convalescence in her house in Yvelines, bringing her avocados, which she adores. Ferdie, in her sixties now, weakened and bedridden, would have so loved to see her Daphne again. Thirty years earlier, Daphne would have been at her side, holding her hand. Will she see her again one day soon? In May, Daphne celebrates her forty-ninth birthday quietly at home with her family, and remarks that her daughter Tessa is a wonderful mother to her baby, completely unlike Daphne at that age. Summer passes peacefully. Tommy’s assistant, Maureen, marries a very nice fellow, Baker-Munton, nicknamed Bim, who becomes another close friend of the Brownings. In a letter to Victor, who is impatient to know when her next novel will arrive, Daphne replies frankly: Everything I write comes from some sort of emotional inner life and the ordinary emotions are absolutely stagnant in me these days, so the unconscious has just got to work on its own, I can’t do anything about that.42

Not until September 1955 is Daphne able to start planning her journey. Because she doesn’t drive, the trip is complicated to organize. In the end, it is her sister Jeanne and Jeanne’s partner, Noël, both experienced drivers, who accompany her to France. Daphne possesses a few documents—letters, birth and death certificates—that she used when writing her biography of the du Mauriers in 1936, as well as the famous engraved crystal tumbler, passed on to her by Gerald. Her first task is to find the Angevin forebears of Louis-Mathurin Busson du Maurier, Kicky’s father, born in London in 1797. His father was French, a master glassblower, originally from Sarthe.

Daphne has marked on a map some former glass factories: Coudrecieux and Chérigny, in Sarthe, and Le Plessis-Dorin, in Loir-et-Cher. In the Forest of Vibraye, she finds a place where the soil consists of a very fine powder of ground glass, which she touches with her bare hands. Afire with excitement, on her hands and knees, she calls out to Jeanne and Noël: her ancestors’ former glassworks must have been here! A police van passes by chance in this remote area and stops. Two suspicious gendarmes ask the ladies what they are doing there. Daphne’s perfect French allows them to avoid an unpleasant situation. For a week, they stroll through villages full of stone houses in Sarthe, in search of the ruins of glass factories. In the grounds of the Château de Chérigny, in Chenu, nothing remains of the factory. Intrigued by Daphne and Jeanne’s surname, the owner of the château points out a small farm nearby called Le Maurier—perhaps that is a clue? Not to mention the Château du Maurier, in La Fontaine-Saint-Martin, a few hours by road from there. Following his advice, the three women go to the farm, then to the château. Daphne is puzzled: in Peter Ibbetson, Kicky always talked about a château, but according to his granddaughter’s research, none of their ancestors were born in the Château du Maurier. Later, Daphne makes a major discovery while ferreting through the local registers. A certain Robert-Mathurin Busson du Maurier, master glassblower, was born in September 1749 on the humble farm of Chenu, at the place known as “Le Maurier.” Her great-great-grandfather!

At the Auberge du Bon Laboureur, in Chenonceaux, where they spend a few nights, Daphne announces to Jeanne and Noël that, despite this fascinating news about the forebear born on a farm, rather than in a château (how Kicky would gasp, if he knew!), she does not have the strength, or the desire, to dive into the paperwork, the work she did on Mary Anne being too fresh in her memory. She will have to hire several assistants to do more in-depth research. There is so much still to find out: dates, places, clarifications. It is no longer a question of inspiration, but of documentation, which she finds discouraging. Noël and Jeanne, the poet and the painter, just as dependent as Daphne is on inspiration and their own whims, fully understand and support her.

The beauty of the Angevin landscapes, the autumnal colors, the châteaux and manors, the scenes of daily life in these villages will seep into the pages of a future novel. This arrives sooner than expected. Toward the end of their stay, in an animated market square near Le Mans, Jeanne and Noël notice that Daphne has stopped in her tracks; she seems magnetized by a stranger who is getting out of a car. Jeanne elbows her: Why is she staring at that man like that? Who is he? Daphne comes out of her trance: she was convinced, for a few moments, that it was a man she knew, a friend of Tommy’s. She would have staked her life on it. During dinner, Daphne is strangely silent, with a dreamy look on her face. Jeanne watches her mischievously, and asks if Bing isn’t seriously “brewing”* since seeing that man. Daphne laughs: she hasn’t stopped thinking about it, she has an idea, a starting point, and it feels so good to be inspired at last, to think of nothing but that. Jeanne and Noël press her: What exactly does she have in mind? Daphne looks out of the window, toward the old town of Le Mans, the lights on behind curtains, the darkening sky, the footsteps echoing through medieval alleys. She sips a mouthful of wine and tells them that it will be the story of a man who, one day, by pure chance during a trip, meets his double, a man who looks exactly like him. No one can tell them apart.

At last! Surrendering to the enchantment of a novel that takes over her life, thinking about it day and night, taking notes at any moment, in her bath, with wet fingers, on soaked paper, never mind, a few words scrawled urgently, important, essential, because, as in “Hansel and Gretel,” these scraps of words form a secret path that will lead her to the book she wants to write. And that’s it: she locks herself away in her hut, concentrates on her story, and everything else, as usual, fades away. She imagines an ordinary Englishman, tired of his daily grind, who during a trip to Le Mans meets his doppelganger in a bar: an Angevin count, Jean de Gué. Manipulated by his false twin, who slips a sleeping pill into his glass, John wakes up the next morning in an unknown hotel, dressed in the count’s clothes, with the Frenchman having vanished into thin air. A chauffeur is waiting downstairs to take him to the château that belongs to the de Gué family. John discovers that he is the head of a vast domain and a glassworks on the verge of bankruptcy due to spiraling debts and mismanagement. His personal life is even more complex: an old mother addicted to morphine, a pregnant, sickly wife, a precocious daughter, and two mistresses, his calculating sister-in-law and a highly perceptive beauty who lives in the village below the château. No matter how much John explains the truth of what has happened, no one believes him. And so he is obligated to live the life of Jean de Gué, a cunning, deceitful, and selfish man, with a shady past as a collaborator. When he realizes that he is trapped in the skin of such a reprehensible character, John does his best to improve the man’s image and rescue the family business. But nothing turns out the way he hopes it will.

Daphne is proud of this book, The Scapegoat, finished in June 1956, written in six months with such intensity that she is driven to bouts of fever. In March, she asked Oriel to send her a missal. Someone has to die soon in my book, and I feel I must have a French missal before she does so I can feel myself at her funeral. Don’t go to any expense, any shabby little book will do, actually the shabbier the more I shall like it!43 Publication is not set until March 1957, but Daphne already feels the need to write to Victor, ordering him not to make his usual boasts about Daphne du Maurier’s phenomenal sales figures, because she believes this makes the literary critics hostile or indifferent toward her. In a letter to Oriel, Daphne makes fun of her editor: I’m sure if he said “This book has sold no copies and nobody who has looked at it can understand a word,” the critics would be nice, for once!44 Victor Gollancz’s commercial methods, though responsible for helping build her fame, now annoy her. Daphne would prefer a quieter, subtler approach and plans to send her book to writers she admires. Why not André Maurois, for example (whose Olympio: The Turbulent Life of Victor Hugo she has just read in French), given that the story takes place in France? She senses that, after twenty years as a published author, she needs other ideas to support her novels; she can no longer depend exclusively on the bedrock of her faithful readership.

John, the central character, expresses himself in Eric Avon’s voice to produce a dense, dark, tense, and ultimately pitiless novel written in sober, simple prose. It is a tale about duality, a theme that has fascinated Daphne since her childhood, since she realized her father was capable of playing evil Captain Hook and kind Mr. Darling in the same play. She already touched upon the theme with Maxim’s two wives: the diabolical Rebecca and the angelic second Mrs. de Winter, and in My Cousin Rachel, whose heroine is either a saint or a poisoner. But this time, Daphne adds what she has drawn from her journey across the Channel, a French touch of which she is very proud. She hopes that the complexity of the narrative structure will finally procure her the respect and recognition of those critics who have, up to now, pigeonholed her simply as a popular novelist devoid of literary caliber.

When the book is published in the spring of 1957, Daphne’s hopes are fulfilled. For Kirkus Reviews, it is “faultless.” Nancy Spain, the Daily Express journalist who was so scathing in her review of Daphne’s short story collection five years before, is full of praise, as are the Spectator, the New York Times Book Review, and the Daily Telegraph, who even compare her to Henry James. In France, Albin Michel has the book translated by the inevitable Mme Butler, tasked in writing to review a number of suggestions, as the literal translation of the English title will not work. A letter from Michel Hoffman, Daphne’s agent in Paris, describes Lady Browning’s anger at the French title suggested by Mme Butler. Lady Browning asks me to tell M. Esménard that she is extremely disappointed by his choice, and that she finds John et Jean weak and puerile. It is a title, she says, for a children’s book. Furthermore, Mme Daphne du Maurier believes that, for France, the title is even more important than it is for England.45 Robert Esménard does not wish to risk upsetting the most famous English novelist on his roster, so he chooses the literal translation of The Scapegoat: Le Bouc Emissaire. Daphne is relieved. Another source of happiness: Alec Guinness, one of her favorite actors, has been approached for the role of the Comte du Gué, and the screenwriter Gore Vidal is already at work on the screenplay. The icing on the cake is a letter from André Maurois complimenting her on the novel.

Amid such joy, who could guess that 1957, the year Daphne du Maurier turns fifty, would turn out to be one of the darkest of her life?

*   *   *

She didn’t see it coming. Not at all. Except perhaps in those recurring dreams of a sea at high tide, those terrible anxiety dreams where she swims vainly against the water as it floods back and submerges her. In the private clinic of Lord Evans, the queen’s personal doctor, Daphne waits, biting her nails as she did when she was a little girl, her stomach full of butterflies.

Monday, July 1, 1957. Another date engraved in her memory. The telephone had rung late at night. It was Maureen, Tommy’s assistant: Daphne must leave Menabilly, come as quickly as possible to London, Sir Frederick was sick, very sick. In the train, Daphne watched the landscape move too slowly past the window. She had not told anyone: not her children, nor her sisters, nor her aging mother. She is waiting to get a grasp on the nature of the problem. What had Maureen said, exactly? That Daphne’s husband was suffering from nervous exhaustion, that he’d been hospitalized in a clinic near Harley Street.

Only in the waiting room does Daphne remember the tiny warning signs, picked up three years ago during Tessa’s wedding, during the party at the Savoy. She had not wanted to see them. She had taken refuge in her books, her glorified “Mena.” And yet there had been happy moments for Tommy and her, like the birth of Paul, Tessa’s son, in April 1956, and Flavia’s wedding, two months later, at the tender age of nineteen, with a captain in the Coldstream Guards, Alastair Tower: a church ceremony at St. Peter’s, near Eaton Square, Flavia looking divine in white tulle, wearing Daphne’s pearl tiara. And not forgetting her fiftieth birthday, celebrated last May. And that trip with Tessa, also in May, to Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in France, just the two of them, Tessa driving the car they had rented at the airport in Nice, and that charming hotel, La Résidence, in the hills, and that man who had called out to them while they were walking, they are such pretty young ladies—can he accompany them?

Daphne gets to her feet, looks through the window toward Weymouth Street. Big Ben tolls three o’clock. Why did she insist on her desire to be alone? Isn’t it her selfishness that is to blame for scuttling their marriage? Now she must face up to the truth, accept her share of the responsibility. She remembers the recent, irrepressible desire to paint that she hid from those around her, those garish, clumsy canvases that she produced, unbeknown to everyone, in her hut. She had felt obligated to surrender to her urge, buying materials in secret so she could reproduce in paint what she saw in her mind, most often vast expanses of reddish earth.

At last a nurse comes to fetch her. Daphne follows her through a warren of white corridors. Her husband is lying in bed, his face emaciated and exhausted, his body all skin and bone, looking suddenly ten years older. Tommy starts to sob. Daphne is dismayed: Boy Browning doesn’t cry. At a loss, she sits beside him, holds his hand, tries to comfort him. She questions him gently, but he doesn’t reply. He looks like a broken man. All Daphne can do is console him by repeating that she is there, he can count on her, she is his wife, she will look after him. He has, undoubtedly, worked too hard, driven himself to exhaustion. He must rest now and he will be fine, she is sure of that. In the meantime, they’ll have to see if they should cancel the party for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, planned for July 19 at “Mena,” for close friends and family only. Tommy has not spoken a single word. His gaunt cheeks are streaked with tears. Before she leaves, Daphne talks with the doctor in his office. It is a nervous breakdown, aggravated by Sir Frederick’s alcoholism and the poor state of his liver. Tommy will have to spend several weeks at the clinic and follow a treatment. Lady Browning can come back the next morning. Until then, no visits.

Stunned, Daphne heads for Whitelands House. It is hot and humid, this July day. She opens the windows wide to air the apartment. Why this sudden collapse? She knows how fragile her husband is, has not forgotten those nightmares he’s had since the beginning of their marriage, nor his psychological state after the loss of so many of his men during the disastrous Operation Market Garden, in 1944. But why now? What happened in the last few days? No matter how hard she searches, she can find no answer. Was he more “mopey” than usual? She didn’t notice, if so.

The sound of the telephone startles her from this reverie. A strange woman on the other end of the line. She doesn’t introduce herself and speaks in a jumbled rush, never taking a breath: she has been Sir Frederick’s mistress for more than a year, she loves him; she is worried about him; he collapsed because he could no longer bear living a double life and succumbed to the temptations of alcohol. All of this is Lady Browning’s fault.

Devastated, Daphne hangs up. She wants to throw up, and her legs give way beneath her. She collapses in a chair, her head in her hands. Tommy, unfaithful. Her Boy, in another woman’s arms. She looks at the unmade bed and disgust overwhelms her again. How many times has that woman come to this apartment? How many times has “Cairo”* taken place in this bed? Tears well in her eyes, and she lets them fall. Who is she, this mysterious woman? What is she like? Brunette, blonde, younger than her? Pretty, sensual, funny? Probably some toady whom he met in his amateur ballet circles, those shows she wouldn’t go to with him, out of boredom, indifference. Never has Daphne felt so humiliated, so hurt. What a fool she was, what an idiot, not to have suspected that this might happen, not to have understood that Tommy felt abandoned during those long weeks here, alone in this gloomy apartment that she hates even more now. And the separate rooms that she insisted on for the last ten years. What an imbecile! Racked with pain, she imagines her husband’s hands on the strange woman’s body; she sees them kiss, caress, flesh bared. Unbearable visions.

Daphne is trembling less, but the nausea and the dizziness still trouble her. And what about her? She too cheated on her spouse. She was not a faithful wife. Did he suspect? Did he suffer because of it? She thinks again about the day Tommy read those words that Gertie had scrawled on the backs of the photographs taken in Florida. Guilt overwhelms her. It must have hurt Tommy so much. Daphne cries again, submerged in sorrow and shame. How can she speak to him about all this? What can she say? She paces the little apartment, her nerves raw.

There is only one thing to do. Write to him. That is all that is left to her now, her pen. Words on paper. Tell him everything, the truth, and don’t wait another second. Daphne sits at Tommy’s desk and, for a laborious moment, nothing comes. Then she forces it, and it’s as if a dam bursts under the pressure of her writing: everything surges out, everything she has to reveal. It is all her fault, the sadness that he has endured for years. She cheated on him with Christopher Puxley and she hates herself for it, as she does for her obsessive passion toward Ellen and then Gertie, both linked to writing. It is a very long letter, stained with her tears, which she concludes, despite herself, on a determined tone: they must overcome this crisis; they must get through this ordeal, they will do it, they love each other, don’t they? In spite of taking a double dose of sleeping pills, she spends a restless, infernal night.

The next morning, looking tired, Daphne takes a taxi to the clinic. Tommy is in the same state as yesterday, his green eyes filled with tears as soon as he sees her. He remains silent. Daphne cries with him, squeezing his hand as tightly as she can. She looks at his withered, handsome face, caresses his large, noble forehead, whispers to him that she loves him, that she will always love him. She forgives him, he must forgive her, too; they will find a solution, they have to. She slips her letter into his hand and, after one last kiss, leaves the room, leaves the clinic, as fast as she can, phones her friends and family, returns to “Mena” to gather her strength.

In the train that takes her to Cornwall, Daphne realizes how hard she is going to have to fight—not for herself, but for a loved one. For the first time in her life.

*   *   *

Taking refuge in the calm of her hut, on July 4, 1957, Daphne writes a long letter to Maureen Baker-Munton, Tommy’s assistant, one of the few in the inner circle to be aware of the real reasons behind Tommy’s moral and physical collapse. To the others, Daphne has given the “official” version: Sir Frederick is overworked and needs rest. To Ellen, her great epistolary confidante, she does not say very much, failing to mention her husband’s infidelity. The wedding anniversary party is canceled. Daphne confesses to Maureen that the only things keeping her going are swimming and spending time with her increasingly fragile mother. It was like being faced with a great jigsaw puzzle, or a pack of cards, and trying to fit the right bits into the right squares, and get the suits of cards right. Each of her books reflects part of her, she admits, and The Scapegoat is the story of her and her husband. We are both doubles. So is everyone. Every one [sic] of us has his, or her, dark side. Which is to overcome the other? Can Moper, and can I, learn from this? I think we can.46

Covent Garden is the code name Daphne gives to her husband’s London-based mistress, a woman who mingles with ballet circles, Boy’s passion. But what should she think about that young woman who works in a shop in Fowey and whom Tommy has regularly taken with him on boat trips since last summer? At the time, Daphne paid no attention, mocking the shopgirl’s infatuation with her husband and cruelly baptizing her Sixpence as if to emphasize her humble origins. Daphne suspects her husband must have had an affair with her, too, and her paranoia goes up a notch. Even her heroine Rebecca returns to haunt her: Tommy could go mad with jealousy like Maxim de Winter, lose his mind, and shoot Daphne because she made the mistake of prioritizing her writing over her marriage. The evil in us comes to the surface, she writes to Maureen. Unless we recognize it in time, accept it, understand it, we are all destroyed, just as the people in The Birds are destroyed.47

After three weeks in the Weymouth Street clinic, where he is given electric shock therapy and massive doses of antidepressants, Tommy is taken by car to Menabilly in late July by Daphne’s cousin Peter Llewelyn Davies, whom she trusts. The doctors consider Tommy to be sufficiently recovered to start work again after a month’s vacation. Sir Frederick will need the permanent support of his wife, and he must not touch a drop of alcohol. Daphne waits for them, apprehensive. When Tommy emerges from Peter’s car, he looks stooped and dreadfully pale. He is also markedly silent. Is he really cured?

It is a stormy, rain-lashed summer. Tessa arrives with husband and children in tow, followed by Flavia and her new spouse, then the beaming Kits, the only one who can give their mother her smile back. At nearly seventeen, he is a handsome, mischievous prankster, the spitting image—according to Daphne—of Gerald, the grandfather he never knew. It is a blessing to have the house filled with the sound of children’s laughter, in spite of the bad weather. Daphne devotes herself to the little ones, showing herself to be a patient, attentive grandmother, reading them stories, taking them to the beach. The children call her Track or Tray, after the funny nicknames given her by Kits, when he was small. Their grandfather is Grampy.

Tommy continues to be a serious concern. He has never stopped secretly drinking and spends a lot of his time in front of the television, which Daphne bought in 1956. She describes him to Oriel in a letter as being like Kay, hero of the story that frightened her so much when she was a child, The Snow Queen. Moper is like the little boy with the sliver of glass in his eye, seeing reality through a distorted lens. But for Daphne, too, this is a turbulent period. She frightens Oriel with a few incoherent phone calls, whispering to her that a major attack is brewing in London, that unknown people want to harm the royal family, that she must avoid public places, no longer take the Tube. Oriel does not know how to react to these unexplained anxieties. It is Kits, with his clownish personality, who ends up poking fun of his mother and making her aware of her ramblings. She should just write a novel, instead of bothering them with her nonsense!

At the end of summer, Daphne agrees to spend more time in London to be close to her husband when he returns to Buckingham Palace. The doctors have made her understand that he is no longer in a fit state to be left alone. It is a painful choice, as she hates the capital and that apartment, which she nicknames the Rat-Trap. Moper seems better and more cheerful, she writes to Oriel. But he’s still what I call very “quiet”, and one doesn’t know if he’s just plain tired or has things on his mind. I know I am doing the right thing.48 It isn’t easy to give up Menabilly. It also means giving up writing, solitude, and freedom. Daphne also suffers from having to dress like a city dweller, in suits and high heels. One day, unable to bear the hat she is wearing anymore after returning from a cocktail party, she throws it in the Thames, watched by dumbstruck passersby.

Daphne has not written anything since the publication of The Scapegoat. In a letter to Oriel, she confesses: No, I have no writing plans at the moment,-can’t, but there is always Bramwell waiting, and after what has happened lately, I should say material for a dozen ’tec or crook novels!* I told old Victor work was on the way, but I could do nothing at the moment, because my family life was a bit disorganized with being backwards and forwards to London. I didn’t go into details, and did not say Moper had not been well.49

Since July and the crisis she is going through with Tommy, Daphne has not felt at ease, as if a dark cloud were hovering just above her head. She still dreams of the high tide swallowing her and wakes up each morning with her stomach in knots. And then, at the end of November 1957, the news comes that her mother has passed away. After lying in a coma for several weeks, Muriel finally dies at Fowey, nearly eighty years old, after seven years of illness. Already afflicted by what she is suffering with her husband, Daphne is deeply upset by the death of her mother, to whom she had grown closer in recent years. Muriel had mellowed with age, finding a way to show her tenderness toward the daughter who was always Gerald’s favorite. After a private funeral in Cornwall, Daphne and Angela take her urn to Hampstead, to the little cemetery where the du Mauriers lie. Though upset, Daphne manages to say her farewell to Lady Mo, whose Narcisse Noir perfume still lingers in the air at Ferryside.

The traumatic events of the last six months have exhausted Daphne. I don’t know who I am, she writes to Oriel at the year’s end. I can cope when I am here, but once home, it’s such torture to come back to the Rat-Trap. I always seem to be in a train. Moper’s physical self is better, but I don’t think his mind is all right. I dread him getting into the hands of the psycho boys again.50 For Daphne, Tommy-Kay still has the fragment of glass in his eye, and that scares her. He is not as he was before. In London, he spends hours sitting at his desk, methodically filing his papers, and when he finds himself at “Mena” he seems at a loose end, silent and preoccupied. Daphne wonders how she will hold up if things stay as they are. She is overwhelmed by melancholy. Perhaps she should have chosen to live with Tommy in London after the war ended? If she’d done that, might she have avoided this situation? Would she have been able to write The Parasites, My Cousin Rachel, Mary Anne, The Scapegoat, her short stories and plays, away from “Mena”? She feels incapable of working in the Rat-Trap. Her artistic output here consists solely of strange paintings, always produced in secret, when Tommy is at the palace. My only pleasure is to paint the horrible view from my bedroom at the flat, all strident and screaming, because of my hate, with glaring chimneypots and those awful Power Station Battersea things, belching evil smoke. Bing’s paintings are very out of proportion, like paintings done by madmen. (Perhaps I am!)51

Since her mother’s death, she has had no more “Robert.”* A strange, hesitant sensation, like being in limbo, a feeling she detests. Her life seems less intense, more nebulous, without the lure of a new “peg”* to excite her. Is this what it is to be in one’s fifties? A dreary, arid plain devoid of fermentation, and the prospect of living with a husband in decline, soon to be retired, driven to drink, not forgetting the depressing spectacle of those once-radiant Llewelyn Davies cousins transformed into potbellied, gray-haired whiners? And she herself must now note the spread of wrinkles in the mirror, must sigh over her white hair. How distant it seems, her ebullient youth! What does she have left? Her sense of humor, thank goodness, most often resurrected by Kits, the only person capable of making her laugh hysterically. Bitterly, Daphne understands the melancholy her father felt as he aged; she sees him again in Cannon Hall moping around in front of his bedroom window, looking out at the view of London he loved so much.

The short stories hatched from this discontent, published in 1959, are as disturbing and troubling as those that appeared in 1952; this time, they do not explore the characters’ relationship with death, but the meanderings of madness and the unconscious mind. Daphne abandons herself to them, convinced that if she does not get them down on paper she will lose her mind. Writing becomes her life jacket, her way of fighting against paranoia and the anguish that has invaded her life. In fluid, often chilling prose, wavering between dreamlike fancy and pitiless introspection, each text highlights a breaking point, and that is what Daphne titles the collection: The Breaking Point. Daphne writes the stories in London, at the Rat-Trap, and at “Mena,” taking refuge in her hut. “The Blue Lenses” describes the terrible side effects suffered by a patient who is given temporary lenses after an eye operation. When she wakes up, the vision she has of other people is terrifying. “The Chamois” explores the intimacy of a marriage in crisis during a hunt in Greece, so subtly disguised that even Victor doesn’t guess it is about the Brownings. An amateur painter tips over into murderous insanity; an old man falls for a young waiter on vacation in Venice, leading to disaster; a girl becomes a woman one stormy night and loses the key to her childhood. Even if some of the themes are familiar—psychological duality, the blurred border between reality and imagination, rich animal symbolism—Daphne opens the door for the first time on the unknown by using mystical and supernatural elements. She boldly explores this new vulnerability, like a submarine plumbing the dark depths of the ocean, as if these stories were shields to keep madness at a distance, confining them to the safety of pages in a book. Writing as the ultimate protection, a guardrail.

*   *   *

Is it a good idea, this trip? One year after the crisis of July 1957, Daphne and Tommy go on vacation together in France, to witness the filming of The Scapegoat in Sarthe, near La Ferté-Bernard. The director is Robert Hamer, an Englishman who already worked on Jamaica Inn. The casting is impressive: Alec Guinness, Nicole Maurey, and Bette Davis, in the role of the elderly mother. It is the first time Daphne has visited a movie set, and she is awed by the sight of all these actors, set managers, technicians, all here because she wrote a novel. But her enthusiasm does not last long, because she realizes how far the screenplay has strayed from the book. The atmosphere between Bette Davis, acting like a diva, and the rest of the cast is turbulent. Annoyed and disappointed, Daphne writes to Ken Spence, Tommy’s godson and Tessa’s ex-boyfriend, who has become a close friend: Not one word of mine in the screenplay, and the whole story changed. I think it will be a flop.52 Their vacation is a flop, too, with Tommy lost in sadness and silence. Is this how the rest of their life together will be: dark, morose, apathetic? What happened to Boy and Bing, hair blowing in the wind as they sailed on their boat, magnetized by their love of the sea? This melancholy, sixty-something man is her husband, the man she will have to learn to live with again, because the plan is for Tommy to leave Buckingham Palace and retire to Menabilly. The prospect fills Daphne with dread.

And yet there are happy moments, as when Kits, eighteen years old and just out of Eton, decides, with the support of his parents, to attempt a career in the cinema, beginning with an internship on the shoot of the new Carol Reed movie, Our Man in Havana. After that, young Kits will move into the London apartment with Tod, who will look after him. To celebrate this new departure, Daphne gives her son a camera, which he uses to shoot a short film at “Mena.” Tommy plays the bad guy and particularly enjoys murdering Tod. Another moment of happiness: the news of Flavia’s first child, due in August 1959. The new housekeeper at Menabilly is Esther Rowe, a twenty-eight-year-old brunette, lively and cheerful, always smiling, with a strong Cornish accent. She it is who takes breakfast in bed to Tommy and Daphne, who prepares their lunch, keeps the house clean. Mother to a little boy, she lives with her husband, Henry, in a cottage on the Menabilly estate. She is the house’s ray of sunshine. When, one day, Tommy finds her energetically scouring the kitchen stairs, he tells her off, remarking that slavery was abolished long ago!

Daphne agrees to take part in a long interview for a French magazine, Marie-France, due to be published in late June 1959. The article is set to be at least eight pages long. The journalist, Françoise Perret, is given permission to meet Daphne at Menabilly, along with her photographer. This is a rare privilege, as Daphne generally does not give interviews, hates telling journalists about her life. She has a reputation as a recluse, which she quite likes. But this proposal wins her over because the magazine is synonymous with France and the prospect of speaking French with Mme Perret seems a pleasant diversion in a trying time.

The interview lasts an entire afternoon. In front of the lens, Daphne relaxes, bursts out laughing, cigarette in hand, dressed in faded jeans, a white shirt, and a coral-pink cardigan. The photographer immortalizes her in the living room, on the main staircase beneath the portrait of Gerald that Daphne loves so much, and then, as it is a sunny day, outside in the garden, near her hut, where the relic of the hull of Tommy’s first boat, the Yggy, lies. The novelist admits with a laugh that she doesn’t know why her heroes are so tortured, because she herself is very optimistic. Maybe she is too happy? Has life been too generous to her? She talks about her childhood, about her adored father and his death in 1934, still the most terrible ordeal of her life. She mentions the positive influence of Tod, who is there for the interview, and divulges her love of Cornwall and Menabilly, which she must leave one day, because the lease comes to an end in three years’ time, in 1962—a tragedy for Daphne, who would love to be able to die within these walls. She won’t know how to live, she insists, away from Menabilly. She remembers her romantic first meeting with Tommy in Fowey, just after the publication of her first novel, The Loving Spirit, their private wedding ceremony, the simple blue suit she wore that day. All the things she has never told to any journalists she reveals now: her writing process, the long daily walks that allow her to think, the six hours a day she spends writing in her little wooden hut, her need for solitude, the fictional characters who come to meet her. She takes five days to write a short story, one year for a novel. As soon as a book is finished, she forgets about it, she explains, detaching herself from it and never reading it again.

Unabashedly, Daphne talks about her age—fifty-two on May 13—and the pleasures of being a grandmother. She describes her three children, of whom she is proud. She even talks about the pictures she paints secretly in her hut: I know my painting is really bad, but that’s all right. I need to paint what I love, to relax. In conversation with this Parisian lady, Daphne is only too happy to talk about her roots in Sarthe, her pride, and her family’s artistic heritage—her novelist grandfather, her actor father, her painter sister, her son beginning a career in the cinema. The quality she most values? A sense of humor! Another? Intuition. And the journalist’s final question: Why did she say yes to Marie-France when she has refused to speak to so many English magazines? A mischievous smile: because she hates them. They pigeonhole women, only talk about little feminine preoccupations. A man can read Marie-France, he can find something that interests him in it. Women’s magazines in England are unreadable for men. She is not a feminist but considers herself, quite simply, on the same level as men. Will there be a new novel soon? Daphne’s blue eyes cloud over. She doesn’t think she will write another novel. Stories, a biography, yes, probably. But who knows? Perhaps on some solitary walk, her fertile mind will be intrigued by an old mansion, a mysterious path, an enigma … Françoise Perret and her photographer leave with more than enough material for an article that Daphne is impatient to read.

As Daphne predicted, Tommy’s retirement from the service of Prince Philip in May 1959 is an ordeal. Tommy struggles with his new status, feeling useless and elderly, and tells his godson Ken Spence that he worries he is a burden to Daphne, who is so strong and courageous. His wife never complains, always smiles; she seems to take everything in her stride. In private, however, Daphne is full of doubts: Is Tommy still seeing Covent Garden and Sixpence? Will he ever come out of his spiral of depression? He only ever looks happy with his grandchildren or on his boat, which he spends hours navigating.

Robert Hamer’s movie version of The Scapegoat is a flop, both critically and commercially. The New York Times Film Review regrets that “Daphne du Maurier’s dazzlingly cunning puzzler is now a stately charade: handsome, curious and untingling.” Apart from Rebecca, she has been unlucky, Daphne laments, when it comes to movie adaptations of her books. She has not enjoyed any of the others. What will Hitchcock make of her short story “The Birds”? It is more than seven years since he bought the film rights. Given the coldness between them, she fears the worst.

But, in the summer of 1959, there are far worse things in Daphne’s life than a bad movie. One evening, she finds Tommy lying in bed in his room, his service revolver in hand. Ken Spence, his godson, had found him in the same posture a few months before in London and had talked to Daphne about it, but to see him like this, his face ravaged by suffering, holding the pistol, is a terrible shock for her.

This is the point of no return. I just know I have to give, and give, she writes to Oriel. I’ve been right down in the depths of horror. I cannot write a long letter because at this moment part of Tommy’s cure is for me to do everything I can for him, be with him.53 Doctors, nurses, antidepressants … Daphne makes sure that her husband has everything he needs. She knows she is not alone; she is surrounded by her children, her sisters, her friends.

How ironic that that issue of Marie-France should come out now, with her looking so serene under a headline that makes her shiver: “Obviously Happy.” Françoise Perret describes her as “the most secret and most famous novelist of our age, who receives letters from all over the world,” and sketches her in a few words: “Very slim, white hair cut short, face of a young girl, snub nose, small but determined chin. And blue eyes, bluer than any I have seen before.” Daphne thinks she looks older than her fifty-two years in the photographs: her skin is lined, and her tightly permed hair makes her look like an old granny. But who cares! It is horrible to see these images of her looking so cheerful when she is going through hell. The magazine is filed away on a shelf and forgotten.

Now Tommy is at home full-time, on medication and still fragile, Daphne dreams of fleeing Menabilly for a breath of freedom. Rather a surprising reversal, as for sixteen years she has found it unbearable to be away from “Mena.” The few trips she makes require organizing very precisely with Esther, the presence of a nurse, and the help of close friends who take turns looking after Daphne’s husband while she is away. Thankfully, Tommy has decided to write an account of Queen Elizabeth’s life, between her wedding and her ascension to the throne, with the cooperation of Buckingham Palace, so at least that will keep him busy for a while.

In the fall of 1959, there is only one person who can save Daphne. A tormented poet, harmed by alcohol and fits of madness, solitary and misunderstood, overshadowed by his famous sisters, and dead at thirty-one.

Branwell Brontë.

*   *   *

To follow him into his downward spiral, in order to escape her own, to understand and explain the nature of his decline. This is Daphne’s aim when she heads back to Haworth, in Yorkshire, in December 1959. She is accompanied by Tessa, a good driver and ideal traveling companion. They have dealings with Mr. Mitchell, a fastidious man who runs the “Parsonage” museum, where the Brontë family once lived. I nearly died from his endless “Tell-Hims”*!54 she writes to Oriel. But this is the price that must be paid when you want to narrate someone’s life, going into the tiniest details, casting your nets wide, leaving no stone unturned. They also go to the Black Bull Inn, the three-hundred-year-old pub where Branwell first began drinking to excess. Daphne wants to write a real biography, rigorous, perfectly documented, that will reveal everything about the little-known Branwell, a book that at last will show his talent, a book that will stand the test of time. No one has ever written about him before. She will be the first. Daphne must travel frequently to London and Yorkshire for her research, the ideal excuse for getting away from “Mena” from time to time. John Symington, editor of works on the Brontës’ youth, is thrilled at the prospect of helping the famous novelist to complete her project.

Daphne has already made quite a lot of progress when she learns through the press that a famous and respected biographer, Winifred Gérin, a specialist on the Brontë sisters, is also working on a book on Branwell. Panic and consternation. This is very bad news, according to Victor, because if Daphne’s book on Branwell is published after Miss Gérin’s it will effectively be stillborn. Daphne must pull out all the stops in order to finish it as soon as possible. Miss Gérin, already the author of a highly acclaimed biography on Anne Brontë, will be favored by the press, and Daphne has no illusions about this. My novels are what is known as popular, and sell very well, she writes to John Symington, but I am not a critic’s favourite, indeed I am dismissed with a sneer as a bestseller.

During the months that follow, Daphne works assiduously on her text. Each time she discovers that her rival is studying the same clues as her, she grows enraged. Don’t tell Miss G!55 she orders Symington as soon as she comes upon a new scent. She has never been in this kind of delicate situation before and begins to see the writing of this book as sort of fierce single-handed combat. And yet the fact remains that this competition galvanizes her: the book occupies her mind completely, allowing her to devote herself to Tommy in a more detached and patient way.

Finishing the book in March 1960, Daphne sheds a few tears as she rereads the final part, recounting the tragic end of the only Brontë son. She is proud of the completed work, of having been able to retranscribe the brilliant and ambidextrous teenager’s youthful writings, unpublished tales of Angria and Glass Town, the imaginary worlds he created with Charlotte, Emily and Anne’s response in the form of Gondal, as well as many poems and articles that she managed to unearth. Branwell was also a painter, but few of his canvases remain, apart from the best known, that of his three sisters Anne, Emily, and Charlotte, in which he painted himself and then painted over it, leaving only a vague silhouette. Daphne reveals his early addiction to alcohol and opium, his inability to deal with reality, his retreat into the world of imagination and fantasy. From his childhood, affected by the deaths of his elder sisters Elizabeth and Maria, subjected to the moralizing sermons of his father, the Reverend Brontë, Branwell forged his own personal hell that Daphne explores discerningly. Despite his prolific talent, he will never find success, discredited by his own family and outshone by his sisters. Every profession he attempts—portraitist, tutor, accountant—ends in failure. At twenty-eight, Branwell falls in love with a married woman fifteen years his senior, who also happens to be the wife of his boss, Mr. Robinson. The scandal has far-reaching consequences. But as Daphne suggests, might there not also have been a furtive, shameful episode with Edmund, the Robinsons’ young son? Three years later, Branwell dies—of bronchitis, officially. His work will be forgotten, next to the immense literary success of his sisters. Daphne succeeds in bringing back to life this short, bespectacled young man with his thick, red hair and his aquiline nose. The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë will be published in October 1960, just ahead of Miss Gérin’s, which is set for publication the following year. As she waits for her book to appear, Daphne congratulates herself: thanks to poor Branwell’s torments, she has survived her first winter at Menabilly with the retired Tommy, something she wasn’t sure she would manage. And she has an amusing adventure to look forward to: a trip to Italy with Kits, for three weeks in June. She is thrilled by the prospect.

Her joy is short-lived. On April 5, 1960, Daphne learns about the suicide of her cousin, and Angela’s editor, Peter Llewelyn Davies, at sixty-three. Peter had seemed sullen and depressed for a few months before this, Daphne knew, devoting all his time to gathering and filing personal documents in a collection of letters that he ironically nicknamed The Morgue. His family had suffered a series of tragedies, with the deaths of his parents, both of cancer, then the loss of two of his brothers: George at the front and Michael, who drowned in mysterious circumstances in 1921. Daphne got along well with her cousin, ten years her senior; they would regularly meet for lunch in the stucco-and-mirrors décor of the Café Royal in Piccadilly, where they would talk about their parents, Gerald and Sylvia, brother and sister, and Kicky, their legendary grandfather, who died at sixty-one, whispering in French, If this is death, it’s not very cheerful. Their conversations ceaselessly revisited the past and their childhoods. The day of his death, Peter had gone for a drink, alone, at the Royal Court Hotel, then went straight off to throw himself under a Tube train at Sloane Square. He did not leave any message for his wife and children. The next day’s newspapers were full of headlines that Daphne found in dubious taste: “Peter Pan Killed by London Subway Train” and “Peter Pan’s Death Leap.” Poor Peter! He could no longer bear being asked about Barrie, his guardian, or about Peter Pan, who haunted his youth, just as he haunted Daphne’s. For him, Barrie’s play was that terrible masterpiece, which pursued him and his brothers throughout their lives. Barrie even admitted in 1928 that he had created Peter Pan by rubbing the five brothers together like sticks, the way early humans made fire. Each time the press mentioned George, Jack, Nico, or Michael, one of the Lost Boys, it was always with reference to that damned Peter Pan. George went to war in 1914, and it was “Peter Pan Joins the Army. Michael in 1919: “Peter Pan Fined for Speeding.” Nico’s wedding in 1926: “Peter Pan Gets Married.” And when Peter set up his own publishing house: “Peter Pan Becomes a Publisher.” Sickened, Daphne does not read any of the obituaries. Peter’s suicide affects her very deeply. What drove him to throw himself under that train? Reading those moving letters, with all their mentions of death? Or simply the du Mauriers’ black ribbon, handed on to Peter by his mother, Sylvia, the hereditary gift of melancholy and sorrow that ran through their veins? Two weeks later, Daphne looks visibly lined and grief-stricken as she inaugurates the blue plaque fixed to the house where George du Maurier lived, on Great Russell Street, in London: an event that should have been a celebration reduced to a brief ceremony, no press, no speech, in spite of the presence of Ellen Doubleday, who has flown over for the occasion.

The best cure for this sadness is Italian sunshine and Kits’s irrepressible good humor. Venice and Rome in his company proves simultaneously exhausting and relaxing. Daphne’s son has no interest in culture or tourism; what he likes best is driving his sports car around at top speed, shopping, and people-watching while sitting tranquilly on a café terrace, like his grandfather Gerald. Kits makes his mother weep with laughter with his imitations of Italian accents and “Witherspoons”*-style English tourists. Daphne returns to “Mena” reinvigorated, ready for the publication of her biography of Branwell Brontë. She notes that Nancy Mitford is publishing a novel in the same week, Don’t Tell Alfred, the last volume of a highly successful trilogy, which discourages her, particularly as Victor is being unusually prudent, printing fewer than ten thousand copies of her biography. A disappointment for Daphne, who gave everything for that book. She could never rival the mastery and experience of Winifred Gérin, but her solid research and the finesse of her psychological approach are points in her favor. The book is well received, the reviews positive, but sales remain disappointing. One slight comfort: her friend Alfred Leslie Rowse, the eminent historian, believes it is her finest book.

*   *   *

Dear Monsieur le Vicomte,

I wanted to thank you for you great kindness in receiving me at the Chateau de Chérigny last Monday, and in allowing my son to take photographs of the old glass factory. It was a great pleasure for us to see “Le Maurier,” and to contemplate the same scenery and landscape that our ancestors must have known so well more than two hundred years ago.

On April 22, 1961, Daphne writes to Viscount Foy, owner of the Château de Chérigny, in Sarthe. She has just taken a trip with Kits in France, a badly needed breath of fresh air. Her twenty-year-old son does not speak a word of French, unlike Tessa, but this family pilgrimage amuses him, and he takes dozens of photographs, including one of Le Maurier farm, which Daphne will use as a Christmas card later that year.

While she is still savoring this trip, Daphne is shaken by some unexpected news. With the death of old Dr. Rashleigh, “Mena” has been inherited by his nephew and heir, Philip. Until this point, Daphne had closed her eyes to the end of the Menabilly lease in 1962, knowing that she has been living in the manor for seventeen years as if it belonged to her. What will she do if Philip Rashleigh, who is only in his thirties, wants to move in earlier than expected? Leaving “Mena” is unthinkable, and yet she knows she must prepare herself for it. To overcome her anguish, Daphne agrees to a proposed book idea from her old friend Foy Quiller-Couch, who suggests she complete Castle Dor, Foy’s father’s unfinished novel, an adaptation of the legend of Tristan and Iseult, which ended abruptly at chapter 17 when he died in 1944. This literary challenge is an honor, and Daphne only hopes she is up to the task, in terms of the great Q’s style and prose. She is bewitched by this project, which is extremely time-consuming, and even manages to rope in Tommy, as fascinated as she is, to help her research it. Q’s novel has its roots in the Cornish fable by the medieval poet Béroul, a tragic love story set in the Castle Dor, a glorious Iron Age fort, of which only a few ruins remain, just above Fowey. Equipped with old maps and binoculars, the Brownings go for long walks in the footsteps of Tristan and Iseult. Esther, the new housekeeper, watches them leave “Mena,” thinking how elegant and classy they look, how slender and tanned and energetic. Tommy is interested in strategies of war, in battles, in troop advances on land and sea. His knowledge is of great help to Daphne, who is able in this way to rebuild the setting of another age. When the book is published in 1962, by J. M. Dent, Arthur Quiller-Couch’s old editor, the reviews are kind, although the book is generally regarded as an exercise in style rather than a novel in its own right. Sales figures remain undisclosed. The only positive aspect Daphne is able to draw from this is the feeling that she has not betrayed Q. She has also grown closer to her husband, even if there are still painful moments, such as the evening in September 1961, described in a letter to Oriel: I’ve had a frightful time with Moper again. Another frightful bout came on, so bad, I could hardly get him to bed.56

Tommy has started drinking again. The only way out is hospitalization, a round of treatment, and then a nurse at home. Adding to this weight are the endless negotiations between Philip Rashleigh and Daphne’s lawyer regarding the Menabilly lease. The Rashleigh heir has every intention of getting his family mansion back and Daphne realizes, to her chagrin, that her days at “Mena” are numbered. Her loved ones are more philosophical, quietly suggesting to her that the moment to find another house—smaller, more practical—has perhaps arrived. Daphne does not want to hear it. “Mena” is her muse, her inspiration, her passion. It is unimaginable for her to write anywhere else. She will fight tooth and nail to extend the lease, she will talk to the press about it, she will kick up a fuss. She refuses to be expelled without a fight. In a letter to Oriel, Daphne confides her secret method, the source of her well-being: she imagines that she is being mentally transported to Paris, to the traffic circle at the Champs-Élysées, that junction she loved so much, and that she is watching the faces of the passersby as she used to do at nineteen. But a new novel will be the key to her happiness, and at last it is to France that she looks for it.

Dear Mademoiselle,

I was enchanted to receive your very friendly letter, and to hear your news.

It is May 27, 1962. Daphne types a two-page letter in French to Mlle Marguerite Verrier, proprietor of the Les Glycines hotel-restaurant in Saint-Christophe-sur-le-Nais, in the Indre-et-Loire département. She had spent a few days with her sister and Noël there in 1955 and began a correspondence with Mlle Verrier, a woman her own age with a lively personality, who was interested in the research Daphne was carrying out to find her ancestors. As the old Underwood does not have any keys that would allow her to type French accents, she adds them by hand, in blue ballpoint. She politely asks Mlle Verrier for her help in obtaining further information about her family, in particular Mathurin Busson, born in 1720 in Coudrecieux, in Sarthe, and his wife, Madeleine Labbé, born in 1725 in Saint-Christophe-sur-le-Nais. These are the parents of Robert-Mathurin Busson, born at Le Maurier, in Chenu, on September 7, 1749.

I want to know so desperately how my Bussons lived, Daphne writes to Oriel, instead of being content to “Gondall”* them. I’ve been looking into my grandfather’s Peter Ibbetson again, and it’s queer how he had these same feelings about forebears that I have,-an almost agonized interest. I can’t think how he did not go out to Sarthe and find out about them truly, instead of “Gondalling”* them, because he got them wrong, making them aristocrats instead of bourgeois, I s’pose a natural Victorian reluctance to be a bit “honky”*!57

The French literary agent Michel Hoffman has found Daphne a Parisian student to do further research for her—a Mlle Fargeaud—but Daphne knows how precious Mlle Verrier’s aid could be, particularly as she is in situ at Saint-Christophe. She had been so welcoming, and Daphne had appreciated the comforts of the little hotel with its terrace under the wisterias, and the moving visit to the twelfth-century church, under whose vaults her forebears Mathurin Busson and Madeleine Labbé had walked ceremoniously, on their wedding, September 18, 1747.

Despite her very real worries about Menabilly, Daphne decides to begin The Glass-Blowers, her next novel. She is excited by the prospect of writing about her unusual great-great-grandfather, Robert-Mathurin Busson, the one who was born on the little Le Maurier farm, seven and a half miles from Saint-Christophe. She recalls perfectly this building with its pale walls and steep roof, surrounded by green fields, a stone’s throw from the Château de Chérigny. Robert-Mathurin is the family’s adventurer, the gambler, the black sheep. Like his father, Mathurin Busson, he becomes a glassblower and engraver of crystal, but Daphne knows from his letters to his sister, Anne-Sophie Busson, maiden name Duval, unearthed from Kicky’s archives, that he was a pretty boy, blond with blue eyes, with a turbulent life.58 A flamboyant, novel-like character, who first marries a Parisian woman, Mlle Catherine Fiat, and becomes the young manager of a glassworks in Loir-et-Cher. His excessive spending and his taste for luxury precipitate the company’s bankruptcy, and he moves to Paris, where he opens an art and crystalware boutique near the Arcades du Palais-Royal, at 255 Rue Saint-Honoré. It is here that his first child, Jacques, is born and here too that he loses his wife, who dies in childbirth. But Robert-Mathurin’s lifestyle is not moderated by his becoming a widower; on the contrary, he marries a second time, in 1789, as the revolution is rumbling in the background. His bride is Marie Bruère, from Dourdan. The boutique collapses beneath the weight of its debts, and the couple disappears soon after their wedding in order to escape their growing financial troubles. They go to London, where six children will be born between 1791 and 1800.

And this is the detail that so amuses Daphne: Robert-Mathurin Busson decides that it would be more distinguished, in this new English life, to be called Busson du Maurier, in secret tribute to the farm in Chenu where he was born. Of course, he leads people to believe that his family owned a château, a glassworks, and lots of land and that he lost it in the revolution. His children bear this new aristocratic-sounding surname, but only two of them will have a descendant: James, born in 1793, and Louis-Mathurin, born in 1797, Kicky’s future father. Daphne makes other discoveries concerning her strange great-great-grandfather. In 1802, Robert-Mathurin decides to visit France, briefly, but on the boat there he swaps his identity papers with a man who dies during the crossing. His wife, who has remained in London, thinks she is a widow, and the young children mourn their father for a long time, because he has simply invented a new life for himself, in Tours, where he founds a school and where he dies, in 1811. Now Daphne understands why Gerald’s grandfather, Louis-Mathurin Busson du Maurier was convinced that his father was an aristocrat from Sarthe. A legend transmitted from Kicky to Gerald, along with the crystal tumbler, then from Gerald to his own daughters. Daphne remembers the distant stories of châteaux and aristocrats that her father used to tell her at Cumberland Terrace, when she was a little girl. And to think that their real surname is simply Busson!

Daphne constructs her novel around this irresponsible yet somehow endearing protagonist, Robert-Mathurin Busson. In this account, it is Robert’s sister, Sophie Duval, who tells her young nephew Louis-Mathurin, the truth about his vanished father: that he was not an aristocrat who fled from the threat of the guillotine and took refuge in England. No, he was an ordinary man, from a family of artisans, ruined by debt and delusions of grandeur. It is not the tragic trajectory of the revolution that interests Daphne here—in spite of her precise, masterly descriptions of the Vendée uprising, the massacres of the Terror, the gratuitous acts of violence, the sufferings of the people—but the daily life of a family: her family, the Bussons. She feels convinced that she owes them so much, these Sarthe ancestors, this clan united by the love of family and land, by their respect for nature and tradition. And to that scatterbrained great-great-grandfather of hers, who built castles in the air, she probably owes her overflowing imagination, her youthful rebelliousness, and her love for France.

I think it’s quite good, not wildly exciting or suspense-making, but rather nostalgic and mellow, she writes to Oriel upon finishing the book in June 1962. I hate the idea of it being put into a garish yellow cover and boosted as the story of a Revolution, which only comes into the middle part. It’s the story of a family, plain and simple, written with compassion.59 Passion and fever seem to have been removed from her writing—through a lack of “peg,”* perhaps? Is it possible that as she gets older those “pegs”* no longer have the capacity to overwhelm her mind with such tumultuous fervor? Sadness and resignation.

The Busson du Mauriers beat a retreat from Daphne’s mind when Tommy announces that Elizabeth II will come to take tea at “Mena” on July 23, 1962. Action stations! This is even worse than the visit of P.P. twelve years earlier. The queen will come from the royal yacht, moored at Fowey, with her bodyguards, her chauffeurs, her entire retinue. How shall we manage? Daphne writes to Oriel. It’s ruining my summer! Piffy says I ought to do up the house, but really, one can’t!60 Every detail induces panic: to wear or not to wear a hat, which dress to choose (she no longer fits in the most elegant ones), and what to serve at this royal tea? Daphne loses her head, so it is Tommy who takes charge of everything, with military precision. Lady Browning’s only task is to arrange flowers in the twenty-eight vases, and even that exhausts her.

The weather is good for the royal visit. The young queen, dazzling in white, descends from the Rolls-Royce outside the manor. The silverware shines, and an opulent feast is spread out on the dining room table, but though the queen does accept a cup of tea, she will not touch a single salmon and cucumber sandwich, to the disappointment of all. Angela, wonderfully chatty and adept at conversation, entertains the monarch, even making her laugh, while Daphne is paralyzed by nerves, just like the gauche second Mrs. de Winter. Thank goodness for Piffy: you can always count on her in difficult moments. Despite her ongoing lack of success, Angela is working on her eighth novel, The Road to Leenane, which takes place in Ireland, where she recently went with a friend. Angela radiates good humor and joie de vivre, despite a few minor health concerns. As for Jeanne, even the visit of the Queen of England is not enough to tempt her from home. Bird plays the recluse in her Dartmoor cottage with its thatched roof, where—between a few glasses of very good wine, the music of Bach, Mozart, and Chopin, a vegetable garden that she tends enthusiastically, five horses, seven dogs, and an indefinite number of cats, chickens, and rabbits—she devotes herself to her art, in the company of her partner, Noël. She moves her easel around the house, wherever inspiration takes her, and Noël has learned not to disturb her.

Some good news arrives: Philip Rashleigh finally agrees to let the Brownings stay at Menabilly for a few years longer, to Daphne’s great relief. Even though Tommy tells her she is just delaying the inevitable, Daphne refuses to accept that she must, one day, leave her beloved home. The owner suggests they rent the little manor, Kilmarth, located on the grounds of Menabilly, with a view of the sea and St. Austell Bay. Tommy would be happy with this, but Daphne digs her heels in. Absolutely not! Not now!

Moper is enjoying a more peaceful period, in the summer of 1962. He continues to sail the Jeanne d’Arc, as well as a faster and more mobile boat, the Echo. He renews his interest in photography, taking out an old camera that he brought back from Asia. His three grandchildren entertain him, despite the ruckus they make. His favorite seems to be the youngest: Flavia’s three-year-old son, Rupert. As for Daphne, her editor’s announcement that the Times Literary Supplement is preparing a long profile on her for October both thrills and terrifies her. Daphne is still pained by the lack of critical recognition for her work, twenty-four years after Rebecca. The article, written anonymously, as is often the case in that newspaper, is something of a mixed bag: while the author finds remarkable qualities in Rebecca and The Scapegoat, he mercilessly slates Daphne’s historical novels: “Miss du Maurier’s historical sense is execrable.” Victor is vexed, Tommy furious, but Daphne, surprisingly philosophical, is consoled by the article’s positive conclusion: that it is time to stop underestimating her work. Critics who persist in demeaning her novels as “a glossy brand of entertaining nonsense”—to quote Ronald Bryden in last April’s Spectator in his scathing article “Queen of the Wild Mullions”—are simply wrong.

But the harm is done. The label has stuck, to Daphne’s dismay. Younger, more modern novelists like Iris Murdoch and Ivy Compton-Burnett are treated as serious authors, but not her. Perhaps she has become outdated, old-fashioned? She remembers an anecdote told her by her friend Clara Vyvyan, who was complaining about her books’ modest sales figures, in spite of the critical acclaim they received. Her editor told her: No one sells nowadays, not even Daphne du Maurier!61

*   *   *

When The Glass-Blowers appears in the spring of 1963, the press either ignores it or treats it as a dull historical romance. Kirkus Reviews considers it well below Daphne du Maurier’s usual standards, and sales are poor, too. Even the naturally optimistic Victor is disappointed. The best remedy for Daphne’s disillusion is to go off to Italy with Tessa, who is herself going through a difficult period with her unfaithful, alcoholic husband. At nearly thirty, she is a mature, intelligent young woman, and Daphne enjoys this trip with her eldest daughter, knowing that Tommy is being well looked after by Esther, at Menabilly. Once again, it is Tessa who drives, as soon as they land at Rome airport, and Daphne who reads the map. They spend four days in the capital before heading for the wonders of Perugia: its large square, its palace, its cloisters, its cathedral. The city is full of rowdy students in costumes, an entertaining spectacle for Daphne, who loves sitting in cafés and watching them. Mother and daughter laugh together like young girls at the hotel, where Daphne discreetly mocks the English tourists, inventing fantastical stories to amuse Tessa. Then they go to Urbino and are fascinated by its medieval alleyways and impressive castle. If only this agreeable trip could give birth to a new book! Surely there is a story to be told about Urbino, its university, its ducal palace.… She takes a few notes: a professor, a family secret, a tragedy linked to the city’s history, a murder, a mystery, two brothers who lose touch with each other … Daphne feels sure she is on to something, and she burns with the desire to write about Italy.

Back in England, Daphne sees Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of her short story “The Birds,” which received an ovation at the Cannes festival. The movie was shot in the San Francisco area, at Bodega Bay, with Tippie Hedren, a blond newcomer, in the central role. Hitchcock radically changed the plot, a fact that Daphne deplores even if she is impressed and frightened by the special effects. The viewer must wait over an hour to see the birds’ first attack. Nevertheless, the film is an international success. Daphne, however, is irritated that her name is so rarely mentioned in interviews with the director. Hitchcock has adapted three of her stories in twenty-four years but has never paid tribute to her and has tended to minimize or even denigrate her work.

Daphne’s morale is bucked up by the announcement of her son Kits’s wedding. At twenty-two, he has fallen madly in love with an extra he met while shooting Carol Reed’s latest movie. Olive White is eighteen, the daughter of a plumber, the former Miss Ireland 1961, a model and TV presenter, and Kits finds her terribly “menacing.”* She is not a fool and reads Yeats!62 he writes to his mother. When she meets her son’s fiancée at Menabilly in the summer of 1963, Daphne immediately feels reassured. Tall, blond, serene, and charming, Olive is an instant hit with her future parents-in-law. She has never been to Cornwall before and is impressed by the house when she arrives at night, by the endless-seeming number of gates that must be opened and passed, the long driveway, and Sir Frederick and Lady Browning waiting for them on the threshold. Olive has read Jamaica Inn but still has no idea just how famous her fiancé’s mother really is. The next morning, Olive discovers the garden, the path to the sea, and falls in love with Menabilly. She feels at ease with Daphne, who is cheerful and amusing and shares Kits’s ironic, facetious sense of humor. The wedding is set for January 1964, in Dublin, Ireland. Daphne has a few concerns. Aren’t they a little young to be getting married? Olive is Catholic and Irish, which seems an added complication, and Kits still does not have a secure job. But he is absolutely determined to marry his beauty queen, come what may.

In the run-up to the wedding, Daphne must deal with another crisis involving Tommy, who is still in thrall to alcohol. She tries to show herself patient and understanding, and Tommy, racked by guilt, confesses his drinking: he knows he shouldn’t do it, but he can’t help himself, it is beyond his control. And he is back in the downward spiral. This tension is eclipsed by the shock of President Kennedy’s assassination, on November 22, 1963. Daphne and her husband sit in front of the television, too stunned to finish their dinner. He was one of the few leaders for whom I had an enormous respect, she writes to Oriel. I can’t tell you how it has moved me, and Moper too.63

One December evening, Daphne waits for Tommy at Menabilly, glancing constantly at her watch. She has been worrying for hours now; her husband was supposed to return from a meeting with his army buddies, an event he had been dreading. The telephone rings, and as she picks up she has a bad feeling. It’s the police. There has been an accident: Tommy lost control of his Alfa Romeo and two people were injured. Later, when he gets home, distraught and ashamed, escorted by a police officer, Tommy admits that he drank a few whiskeys for Dutch courage before the meeting, unaware of just what a bad mix alcohol makes with antidepressants. The victims are not seriously hurt, but Tommy feels humiliated by his arrest and the trial that follows. Two days before Christmas, accompanied by Tessa, he appears in front of the judge at Truro and is found guilty of drunk driving. He must pay a fine of fifty pounds, as well as the victims’ medical bills, and his driver’s license is confiscated for six months. Mortified, Tommy hides out at home, refusing all invitations and giving up all his club memberships. He admits to his wife that the thought of going to their son’s wedding frightens him more than the idea of returning to the Battle of the Somme in 1914 did. Daphne manages to reason with him, and they are both thrilled by the warm, spontaneous wedding celebration. Daphne tells Oriel all about it in a letter: It was much more fun than the girls’ weddings. I thought I might feel triste,* because of being so silly about Kits, but I didn’t a scrap and felt thoroughly gay the whole time! The wedding itself was simple and nice, outside the crowds were incredible, like waiting for the Beatles, Olive being an ex Miss Ireland and on Irish TV, is of course well known.64 Even newspapers in America report on the wedding of the famous British novelist’s son and an Irish beauty queen. At the reception, in Dublin’s Gresham Hotel, Daphne and Tommy are swept away by the contagious good cheer of the other guests and the lusty renditions of traditional Irish songs.

After the excitement of the wedding, it is time to start writing again. Enough note-taking: she must dive into the book, her fifteenth novel. That figure amazes her. Fifteen, already? Urbino becomes her home away from home. She goes there every day in her imagination, while sitting in her hut. For hours, Daphne studies maps and postcards of the city. She knows this will almost certainly be the last novel she writes at Menabilly. At Easter, the young newlyweds come to spend a weekend with them and Daphne is blown away by the sight of her Kits as a husband, looking so happy. She is convinced he will make a wonderful father. Kits has never liked his wife’s first name very much and thinks her middle name, Ursula, is even worse. During their honeymoon, he made fun of Olive with her curlers in her hair and her scarf tied over her forehead, giving her the appearance of having horns. According to Kits, she looks like Hacker, a delightful goat in a children’s TV series. So, no calling her Olive anymore. From now on, everyone names her Hacker, even Daphne and Tommy. Daphne makes good progress on the book: forty thousand words done already, a very good start. Daphne worries about inaccuracies regarding Urbino: If ever it gets translated into Italian, I will be stoned,65 she writes to Oriel. Tommy seems better, but there remains a deep-lying sadness within him, which Oriel notices during a stay at “Mena.” He has not touched a drop of alcohol since December and is devoting himself to finishing his new boat, Yggy III.

In June 1964, having practically finished her novel, Daphne, goes to Italy with Kits and Hacker and returns to Urbino. This is a happy trip, sunny and easygoing. She is relieved to discover that her descriptions of the city, which she nicknames Ruffano, were not inaccurate after all. The only source of vexation is her editor, Victor: that ignorant old man66 has a tendency to consider her new novel a “thriller,” whereas for her The Flight of the Falcon is much more than that. It is an Italian and political tragedy of two brothers turned enemies, separated for decades by the war, both persuaded that the other is dead, who see each other in Ruffano, their childhood home, amid conflict and blood. The story is told in the masculine voice of Eric Avon: it is one of the brothers who narrates the novel—Armino, the younger brother in the shadow of the older, more powerful and tortured brother who bears some resemblance to Svengali, Kicky’s antihero. Their mother is a scandalous seductress defeated by cancer, reminiscent of the venomous Rebecca. Armino was hoping that, by returning to the city where he grew up, he would be able to rediscover his roots and find inner peace and was not expecting the climate of violence and terror that his brother, Aldo, has brought to this small university city haunted by an old, macabre legend. In this harsh allegorical novel that explores the destructive effects of excessive ambition, Daphne drew inspiration from the connections and invented rules of childhood. The book’s publication is set for January 1965.

In the meantime, Daphne passes the summer peacefully at Menabilly, giving Oriel some advice on writing and spending time with her grandchildren. She adopts a new Westie, Morray, as a companion to the dog she already has, Bib. Tommy insists on visiting Kilmarth, the house offered them by the Rashleighs; it is near Polkerris, with a view of the bay. Daphne is forced to admit that it is a beautiful place, but—unlike her husband—she cannot see herself living here at all. Tod, still lively if somewhat deaf at eighty years old, has moved to London, an elegant apartment near Battersea Park. When the Daily Express suggests an article about her life as governess to the du Maurier children, Miss Waddell takes offense and replies that she has no intention of seeing her name displayed in the papers.

In September, Tommy’s state of health suddenly deteriorates. During the summer, he’d suffered pain in his left foot, preventing him from enjoying his new boat, and he had been bedridden, in agony. In mid-September, Tommy is hospitalized in Plymouth; a blood clot is diagnosed, and he undergoes an operation. Ever since his glider accident in 1943, the flow of blood to his left leg has remained weak. After the operation, Daphne is alarmed by his waxy complexion and the fever that does not seem to diminish. He is still in pain, and the doctors explain to Daphne that the only solution is amputation. She firmly refuses. Her husband would never get over it. They must increase his morphine dose and pray that he gets used to the pain. When Tommy returns to “Mena,” there is a wheelchair waiting for him. He reacts with great dignity and never complains. He’s very plucky. I help him dress and undress, he’s not wandery or dopey, although awfully fatigued after bouts of pain, she writes to Oriel. I do get tired, but it’s not the angry fatigue of the days when he drank, I have so much more sympathy now, and somehow it’s less tiring. It’s draining, yes, and I suffer every time I watch him suffer.67

Tommy finds the strength to write a short note to Oriel in November 1964: Thank you so much for the card and news, and was glad to hear you are having lovely weather. Here, thank goodness, it has been the mildest November ever, I should think, so I have been able to get out quite a lot in my electric chair. Apart from the old foot, Bing and I are flourishing, though the former had had a pretty trying time with a semi-invalid on her hands for three months. She has certainly been wonderful and very patient. We have got the whole outfit coming down for Christmas, which with my disabilities, will be a rather major operation, but still all very good fun.68

Daphne’s new novel is published in January 1965 by Gollancz and Doubleday. The Flight of the Falcon does not fare well with the critics. The New Yorker goes so far as to call it “this extraordinarily dull book.” Daphne remains impervious to these articles. The novel vanishes without a trace, but she doesn’t care because, in this gloomy January, all that matters to her is Tommy’s health. Tessa, Flavia, and Kits, shocked by their father’s condition at Christmas, had begged their mother to have him hospitalized again. This time, the doctors’ verdict is irrevocable: Tommy’s left foot must be amputated or he will lose his entire leg to gangrene. The operation takes place on January 14, 1965, in London. Tommy is sixty-eight.

While still recovering, Tommy is taken back to Menabilly by Daphne in early March. Two nurses have been hired to watch over him, Esther is at his beck and call, and his children are never far away. Daphne, exhausted, falls sick in turn, immobilized for two weeks by jaundice. Tommy catches bronchitis and grows weaker every day. Why is it that a sudden doom descends on people in a flash? she writes to Oriel. I don’t know when I shall be strong enough to cope. How I long for the spring.69

Drained and emaciated, Daphne tries to gather what little energy she has in order to support Tommy, who is becoming ever sicklier now his bronchitis has turned into pneumonia. She manages to get out of bed and walk to his room, at the end of the corridor, to see him. Her handsome Boy is no more than a shadow of his former self, and tears spring to her eyes when she hears him speak. He is afraid of the coming night; he knows he won’t sleep and he can’t stand it anymore. She comforts him as best she can—tells him he’ll fall asleep eventually—but she feels so fragile herself when she whispers these words to him. She knows, with infinite sadness, that Tommy will never be able to drive again, never go out in a boat again. Everything he liked doing best, everything he was so good at doing … it is all just a distant memory. She kisses him good night and leaves his room.

They wake her at dawn. Lady Browning must come immediately. It is still dark on this March morning when she grabs her bathrobe and follows the nurse down the long, red-carpeted corridor. She walks slowly, with dread in her heart. As soon as she sees her husband’s face on the pillow, she knows.

Tommy is leaving them.