Kilmarth, Par

November 2013

Daphne du Maurier’s last house is easier to reach than “Mena.” It is not hidden in the heart of a forest, but to the west of Menabilly, atop the cliff that overlooks the little port of Polkerris and the bay of Par, by the side of the road leading to the village of Twyardreath (pronounced tower-dreth). Its name is Kilmarth, Cornish for “horses’ ridge” or “Mark’s retreat.” It is a manor house in gray slate, handsome and austere, protected by a high gate.

Ned, one of Daphne’s grandchildren, explained to me how much the house had been altered and extended. It bears little resemblance to the place he knew when he was a little boy, when his grandmother, Track, lived there. Twenty years ago, the current owners, who are passionate gardeners, had a swimming pool and a tennis court built there, as well as some water pavilions that are now internationally renowned.

The new mistress of Kilmarth told me that living here is source of daily happiness. Her friends even call the house the Kilmarth sanctuary. She has not sensed Daphne’s presence within these walls, but since she moved there, twenty years before, one of her dachshunds never wanted to enter Lady Browning’s old bedroom. It was only when the floorboards were covered with a carpet that the dog felt able to go into the room. Asked about this, Kits, Daphne’s son, replied with his usual wit that it must be a dispute between the dachshund and the ghosts of his mother’s Westies.

Kilmarth is the house on the water, turned toward the light and the open sea. The waves, omnipresent, seem to lap at the door, a constant reminder of the sea that Daphne loved so much and where she would swim every day, weather permitting. It was here, outside this manor house, that she took her daily walks, along cliffs thick with grass, gorse, and heather, followed by a trotting Westie. At Kilmarth, the house on the strand, Daphne communed with nature and the sea. The view over St. Austell Bay cannot have changed very much in the last twenty-five years. The brisk, salty wind blows the clouds through the sky, revealing the pale November sun. It is as if Daphne stood beside me, one of Tommy’s old caps covering her white-haired head. I know she never missed a chance of bird-watching, that she could identify curlews, goldfinches, and yellowhammers, that she used to watch out for cormorants and kingfishers. Climbing the steep slope that she nicknamed Thrombosis Hill, she would admire the trees, the Moorlands twisted by the power of the wind into the shapes of strange, disheveled witches, and the curious conifers with thorny branches, monkey puzzle trees, standing out proudly against the stormy sky.

My pilgrimage ends here.

*   *   *

July 1969. Leaving Menabilly. It has been four years since Tommy died, on March 14, 1965, four years during which she held on, four years of the Rashleighs’ prevaricating. The agreement had been vague, imprecisely worded, and she took advantage of it: they couldn’t demand she leave, she had just lost her husband, it would have been inhuman. But now, in June 1969, Daphne knows that she no longer has a choice. The renovation works at Kilmarth were finished long ago: everything is ready; the new house awaits her. The problem is that she cannot, does not want to, leave.

Over the past few weeks, most of the furniture has been moved, bit by bit, to Kilmarth, in the van belonging to her faithful handyman Mr. Pascoe. Daphne’s children have helped her with this testing move, as have Esther, Oriel, and Tod, who is remarkably energetic for a woman in her eighties. But Daphne finds it impossible to choose a specific day for her departure; she cannot bear to say that this night will be her last at “Mena.” While preparing to leave the nest, Daphne has spent hours in the large, empty living room, listening to the silence of the manor house, like a huge hollow shell, its walls containing the shadowy ghosts of her past. She saw herself again, forty years ago, a young girl fascinated by the abandoned mansion, face glued to the dusty windowpanes, then as a mother, triumphantly taking possession of the house in 1943, so proud and happy to be the mistress of Menabilly, the only one in her family to feel so bewitched by it; she thought of her marriage, weakened by the repercussions of the war and Tommy’s painful return.

Daphne will never forget that gloomy March morning in 1965 when the nurse came to her room to fetch her. She had written so much about death, had constructed so many scenes in her books around it, but in that moment she found herself face-to-face with the dreadful reality of it, and it overwhelmed her. When she entered the room, Tommy had just enough strength to turn his face toward her. He was pale and barely recognizable, and at that very second death seized him. The last thing Tommy must have seen was his wife looking at him with her blue eyes. And then, panic. One of the nurses called the doctor, while the other one gave Tommy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Daphne tried, too, again and again, but she was aware, even while she was blowing between his cold lips, that it was no use, that Tommy’s wide-open eyes, those beautiful green irises, had become glazed and lifeless. She held her dead husband in her arms and knew that her Boy was gone forever: the father of her three children, the man she had said “I do” to thirty-three years before, in the little chapel at Lanteglos. At last the doctor arrived, but it was too late. Daphne stood at the bedside, in silent horror, remembering her idiotic words of the night before, promising him he would fall asleep, and she wondered what would have happened if she’d stayed there all night to watch over him. Would it have changed anything? Might she have saved him? She should never have left him alone. She should never have gone to her own bed.

They’d had to call the children, right away, in spite of the early hour. Tessa had gone with her ten-year-old daughter to her new school in Berkshire: she was on the road, and Daphne had to leave a message for her with the headmistress. Daphne felt as if part of her brain was on automatic pilot, while the other part was numb, stunned. The automatic part asked the doctor to perform an autopsy to confirm the diagnosis of coronary thrombosis. The numb part, submerged by emotion, was already thinking about the obituary she would have to publish in the Times. She knew that Tommy wanted a simple, family-only ceremony, no mass, a cremation (which she would not attend), and no gifts or flowers—just donations to the Royal Air Force, his beloved “paras,” his heroes, the glider pilots. On January 11, 1966, Daphne wrote to Mlle Verrier, the owner of the hotel Les Glycines, in Saint-Christophe-sur-le-Nais. She typed her letter in French. Alas, I have had a terrible year. My dear husband died last March, after suffering with bronchitis and two operations. He suffered so much, and he was so brave. Now I am adjusting to my new circumstances, and my health is good. I am still here at Menabilly with the two dogs, who love me so faithfully. How is your little dog?

Before leaving Menabilly for good, Daphne walked slowly through the empty rooms, stroked the bannister of the staircase with her hand. Everything had been packed up, but her life was still here: she could feel it, fluttering around, like a moth in search of the light. She remembered her final Christmas here, spent alone with Angela, her final birthday celebrated at “Mena” in May with Tod, Kits, and Hacker. She walked up the steps, caressed the walls, looked at her bedroom, where she once wrote with such frenzy and desire, where she dreamed, imagined, constructed imaginary worlds in her mind. In a distant future, perhaps one of Menabilly’s inhabitants would pick up what she had left behind her there, those tiny particles of inspiration that clung to the walls like a secret magic spell.

Leaving “Mena.” Walking out of the front door for the last time. Pretending that she was just going for a walk with her dogs on the beach, persuading herself that later she would return, whistling, and drink a cup of tea in the library while she read her mail or the newspaper. Closing the door, hearing its inimitable creak, feeling that thick, so-familiar handle in her palm. Not turning back, never turning back. Not looking at the façade, striding quickly away from those walls, within which she had spent twenty-six years of her life, those walls that had given birth to so many books, that had witnessed Tommy’s last breath. It was here, she knew, that she had been happiest. To leave “Mena” … was to die, a little bit.

*   *   *

How strange it is to think that this short driveway, this white gate, this square, unshaded house with its slate façade, is her home from now on. These few steps, this porch, these potted plants arranged by Tod, this entrance decorated with Tommy’s bow and arrows and Gerald’s baroque walking sticks, this really is where she lives now. The living room is to the right of the hallway, the dining room and library to the left. When all the doors are open, it gives the impression of being a long single orange-carpeted room, a bit like Menabilly, but more brightly lit. Daphne is proud of the neat, welcoming, modern kitchen, the domain of her dear Esther, given that her own culinary talents are still nonexistent. Last year, in October 1968, Esther lost her husband, Henry, to hepatitis, at only thirty-six, an event that upset Daphne, attached as she was to her able young housekeeper. Now Esther lives with her son in the neighboring stables that have been converted into a cottage.

At Kilmarth, Daphne has had a separate wing renovated for her grandchildren, where they will be able to make as much noise as they like, unheard by their grandmother. In the large vaulted cellar, Daphne has created a small private room, a sort of personal chapel. She likes to go there, alone, to meditate. There is a rudimentary altar, a crucifix, some ecclesiastical relics, and each week Daphne puts out fresh roses. There is much work to be done in the garden: flowers to plant, brambles to remove. The hull of the Yggy is on the lawn and will be repainted next spring.

This is a big change for a sixty-two-year-old, and it is not easy to adapt. She misses her “routes”* and must find new ones. Daphne feels disoriented, wandering between the worn, old furniture from “Mena” that looks as lost as she is in this sunlit, brightly colored décor, among these brand-new carpets and chintz curtains chosen by Tessa and Flavia. She likes to stroll around the lawn, the air full of butterflies, and watch the sun set from an old summer cabin built by her predecessors, including a lady from the previous century who apparently used to raise peacocks. But the place where she feels happiest is her bedroom, like the bow of a ship looking out on the sea through two large windows. Daphne has stood there every night, from her first evening, admiring “her” view, soothed by the immensity of blue spread out before her, by boats passing in the distance.

Daphne hears Esther making lunch downstairs, in the kitchen. What would she do without her? When Tommy died, Esther helped her reply to the hundreds of letters she received from all over the country. Maureen came to give a hand, too. The death of Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning was announced on the BBC, and there were numerous tributes. The queen and her husband sent a letter of condolence, as did General Eisenhower and Admiral Mountbatten. Messages of support came in a flood, from the Grenadier Guards, Tommy’s former regiment, from the airborne troops that he founded, and from a mass of people unknown to Daphne who had been fond of her husband. She sees herself again, at “Mena,” faced with these heaps of mail, simultaneously troubled and amazed by these expressions of sympathy. Some letters came as a surprise, like the one from Paddy Puxley, Christopher’s wife, whom she had not seen since 1942, and an unexpectedly warm letter from Philip Rashleigh, heir to Menabilly. The only good news in that terribly sad spring, marked by the scattering of Tommy’s ashes in the garden near her hut and some daffodils, a flower he loved, was the announcement that Hacker was pregnant. Now Frederick is nearly four, and his little brother, Robert, was born in 1967, another source of joy. Those little wheat-blond Brownings are Daphne’s delight, and she was traumatized by the car accident they had last November near London, caused by a reckless driver, when their nanny was at the wheel. Thankfully, they all recovered.

Four years without Tommy already. But the next one, 1969, her fifth without him, will also be her first at Kilmarth. Perhaps the most difficult. She doesn’t know yet. Her new guests will soon be here: Oriel is expected in a few days; she will sleep in the pink bedroom, in the four-poster bed that used to belong to Gerald. Tessa will come with her teenage children—Marie-Thérèse, known as Pooch, who is fourteen, and Paul, thirteen—but without her ex-husband: the divorce was finalized last year, in 1968. And then it will be Flavia’s turn, accompanied by her ten-year-old son, Rupert, not forgetting the youngest grandchildren, Kits and Hacker’s little blond boys. These guests will bring noise, life, animation, and goodness knows Daphne needs all of that.

At Kilmarth, when she goes for walks by the seaside, Daphne often thinks about the article she wrote on death and widowhood one year after Tommy passed away, which appeared in several newspapers and magazines, including the April 1966 issue of Marie-France. A few passages from it come to her mind as she walks. I would say to those who mourn, and I can only speak from my own experience, look upon each day that comes as a challenge, a test of courage. The pain will come in waves, some days worse than others, for no apparent reason. Accept the pain. Do not suppress it. Never attempt to hide grief from yourself.2

Tommy loved this house more than she did. He would have liked to grow old here, beside her, facing the sea. Daphne learned to tame her feelings of loneliness, helped by her daughters’ tenderness and Kits’s newfound maturity. Very quickly she decided she wanted to go forward alone, not to depend on her children. But she remembers some difficult moments, when she looked through Tommy’s belongings, his coat still hung on the chair, his hat in the entrance hall, his gloves, his walking stick, his sailing magazines. She found only one way to diminish her pain: taking possession of Tommy’s things, touching them, appropriating them. She put on his shirts, sat at his desk, used his pens to reply to those letters of condolence. For a year, she wore nothing but black and white. But it was the evenings without Tommy that were the worst: she remembered the ritual of the herbal tea, the few lumps of sugar handed out to the dogs, the brief prayer that Tommy used to recite every night. She often found herself in tears, she who had so rarely cried in her life, even as a child.

When Daphne thinks about Tommy, as at this precise moment, the sun above Kilmarth shining in her eyes, the blue sea filling her field of vision, she likes to believe that he is content now, that he has found his parents again, his war buddies, that he is no longer suffering, that he is at peace.

*   *   *

And writing? All those people who, when her husband died in 1965, whispered their commiserations to her—but you’re not alone, you have your books3—she felt like slapping them. As if she had a magic wand that would conjure up imaginary characters: the perfect antidote, or so they believed, to the desolation of grief. Before she could start writing again, she first had to get used to solitary life. Driving again, for example—she has a little red automatic DAF—gives her an extraordinary feeling of freedom. Thirty years since the last time she sat behind the wheel! Kits encouraged her to take driving lessons and she forced herself to go along with it, but once she got the hang of it again the adventure felt like a victory. She liked to visit Jeanne and Noël in Dartmoor, Angela at Ferryside, and to do the grocery shopping herself for the first time since her youth.

Menabilly seemed vast without her husband. Daphne accepted visitors, in order not to feel too alone. Ellen came in May, soon after Tommy’s death. It was a joy to see her again, but Daphne couldn’t help noticing that her once-beloved friend had become rather placid. And to think that this dignified seventy-something who now lived in Honolulu and politely sipped her Cointreau Blanc before dinner had, twenty years ago, been the dazzling center of her universe! Mrs. Doubleday had really taken to the effervescent Esther, offering her a golden brooch set with a fragment of lava from Hawaii. Ellen felt sure that Daphne would be happy at Kilmarth, that she could turn it into a dream home. Daphne listened to her and took comfort in her words, but in truth, it was still too early to leave Menabilly. And too early to start writing again.

What a shock she got, in September 1965! Kits had taken some pictures of her, and then a professional photographer came from St. Ives for another session. When she saw the photographs, Daphne wrote to Oriel: Poor Track looks just like an old peasant woman of ninety, far older and more wrinkled than Lady Vyvyan and I nearly cried when I saw them. I know I am lined, but I had not realized how badly! Kits told her unceremoniously: You must realize you do look a lot older than fifty-eight in real life. And he was right. Was it Tommy’s death that had aged her so suddenly? No, she had already noticed the wrinkles six years before, when she did the Marie-France photo shoot. The only way to treat it is to think I’m a throwback to old glass-blowing provincial aïeux,* peasants wrinkled by forty and bent, in shawls, carrying pails of water to the cows!4

Life after Tommy flowed along gently at Menabilly, in between visits from family and friends and the books she read. Daphne loved Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death, a sensitive book that reminded her of her own mother’s passing away. She took her first post-Tommy trip in September 1965, visiting Venice with Jeanne. And she tasted happiness at the Hotel Monaco, in the company of her discreet, kindly sister. She was fascinated by the secret recesses of the Serenissima, the ballet of gondolas, and the palaces on the Grand Canal. But it seemed inconceivable that she could start writing another book, particularly after the poor sales figures of The Flight of the Falcon, which Victor told her had shifted barely twenty thousand copies. And now there was this new novelist everyone was talking about, a certain Mary Stewart, who was encroaching on her territory with novels full of dark suspense. Enough to discourage her from returning to work.

During the rainy Christmas of 1965, Daphne had an idea. Not really a novel, but a way of getting back into writing via an album conceived around her love of Cornwall. She would write texts illustrated by Kits’s photographs (her son was now head of a small company they had founded together: Du Maurier Productions). The two of them had already worked on the script of a film commemorating the centenary of the Irish poet Yeats. After long negotiations, Daphne’s publishers gave her the green light. This project allowed her to give free rein to her passion for Cornwall, describing how inspiration born on this rocky coastline had given birth to almost all her books. She also gave her (sometimes virulent) opinions on the negative effects of tourism, despoiling the beauty of the region’s beaches, and her contempt for those who pollute the countryside with no respect for nature. In a letter to her Cornish writer friend Leo Walmsley, she wrote: I get spasms all over when I walk down to Pridmouth, hoping for a quiet swim and find hordes of people playing transistors.5

For three weeks, she and Kits roamed the region, going down to the Lizard peninsula in the south, following Mary Yellan’s footsteps northward through Bodmin Moor, not forgetting the excursions Daphne took with Tommy around the legend of Tristan and Iseult. In the evenings, they would sit by the fire in a roadside inn, Kits with a beer, Daphne with a whiskey, a map unfolded between them, to plan their next day’s trip, and Daphne would tell Kits the tales and legends connected to each place. For her, this was the best possible way to get back in the saddle, in the company of the one person able to infect her with his love of life and make her laugh. That journey with Kits brought back childhood memories, a long-ago vacation at Mullion Cove when she was a little girl, a place that she found changed for the worse: packed beach, litter everywhere. She finished writing the book, a genuinely pleasurable experience, in August 1966, but Daphne suspected that it would be a long time before she would be able to write another novel.

As for Angela, she was publishing a book at that moment: her second autobiography, Old Maids Remember, and the few reviews she received were lenient. The Western Mail wrote: “Miss du Maurier has a strong personality and decided opinions. She enables us to answer her out loud, manages to spark a conversation instead of a monologue.” Behind Angela’s sparkling wit, though, lurked real emotion. Daphne and I shared secrets and still do. Daphne enjoyed reading these alphabetically ordered memoirs, with their superficial-seeming, lighthearted chapter titles: “A for Age,” “B for Beauty,” “H for Hotels,” “J for Jealousy,” “P for Parents,” “S for Sisters,” “T for Theater,” et cetera. It is true I do not mind getting older. But I hate the word sixty.6

*   *   *

The summer storms at Kilmarth are even more spectacular than those at Menabilly. The wind howls around the house, the frothing waves smash against the cliffs, the thunder rocks the foundations, and lightning streaks over the raging sea. Daphne is not afraid: she has always loved seeing nature in the raw and stands at her window like a captain at the helm, her Westie at her feet.

On her bedside table lies the envelope she received this week, stamped with the royal seal. To her great surprise, Daphne was named Dame Commander by the queen for her services to literature, one of the highest British honors. On July 23, 1969, she is expected in London at a ceremony to receive her insignia from Elizabeth II. Family, friends, and readers applaud this consecration, but Daphne remains somewhat detached from it. First of all, that title, Dame, is laughable, and Dame Daphne even more so. Nico Llewelyn Davies, her cousin, admits to her that he almost choked on his boiled egg when he read the news in the paper, which makes her chuckle. Tommy and Gerald would have been so proud of her, as both Alec Guinness and Lord Mountbatten tell her in letters. Will she use this new title? Absolutely not. But, deep down, Daphne feels gratified. As she is by the critical welcome given to her latest novel, The House on the Strand, inspired by her new home, Kilmarth.

It all began in 1966, when Daphne visited the house with her architects to plan the renovation works. She was interested in the history of the old building that overlooked the sea and knew—through Mr. Thomas, of the Old Cornwall Society—that the foundations of Kilmarth dated back to the fourteenth century and that merchants used to live here in the Middle Ages, including a certain Roger Kylmerth, in 1327. She learned of the existence of an infamous old monastery located nearby, at Twyardreath, run by French monks of dubious morals. The memories held in those walls fascinated her, even if not quite so intensely as they had at Menabilly. The previous tenant was a fairly well-known professor, named Singer, and in the cellar where he carried out his scientific experiments, she found some macabre remains: animal embryos preserved in dusty jars, among them a calf with two heads and other oddities. The more she went to Kilmarth to oversee the renovations, the more strongly she scented a new novel intertwining past and present through this house, which, though it lacked Menabilly’s magnetic mysteriousness, did intrigue her all the same. She didn’t start work at once, though, preferring to let the book develop slowly in her head.

Tessa insisted on taking her mother on a trip in the spring of 1966, because Daphne had not left Menabilly since her vacation in Venice with Jeanne. They chose Greece, where Daphne had gone with her dear friend Clara Vyvyan in 1952. Tessa had to be patient and tender with her mother, because the thought of seeing so many people, so many strangers, on that boat panicked Daphne in advance, turning her back into the shy young girl she used to be. She feared she would quickly grow weary of people, but with Tessa’s support—and aided by the fact that everyone aboard knew the famous novelist was among them but that her privacy must be respected—Daphne ended up enjoying herself. She met a couple she liked very much, Sir John and Lady Wolfenden, and even did some dancing, something she had not done for years and years. The highlights of the trip were the visits to places she had always wanted to see, such as Delos, and Daphne came home tanned and relaxed.

Some sad news awaited her at Menabilly in August 1966: the death of Fernande Yvon, at seventy-three. Ferdie had been at the American Hospital in Neuilly, near Paris, for months, bedridden with bouts of pleurisy and bronchitis. Tessa, who saw her regularly and felt a great affection for her, went to visit her the previous year. She had lost weight and her hair had turned gray. Ferdie had waited in vain for Daphne to pay her a visit; they had not seen each other in over a decade. At the announcement of her death, Daphne felt sad, but no more than that. It was as if Tommy’s death had hardened her. She spent a few days thinking about Ferdie, her infatuation for her, the friendship that had lasted forty years. She remembered their complicity, their tenderness; she remembered Camposenea, La Bourboule, Trébeurden, “Les Chimères,” but the page had been turned now. Fernande Yvon was gone from her life. When Daphne learned through the notaries in Mesnil-Saint-Denis that she had inherited Mlle Yvon’s furniture, Daphne gave it all to Tessa, in the name of the love that her eldest daughter had for France.

Another death marked Daphne’s life with the same fleeting sadness—that of Victor Gollancz, on February 8, 1967, following a sudden illness. There too, a chapter ended after thirty-three years of her life. Her editor, though in many ways the architect of her huge success, had annoyed her in recent years, always insisting on flashy ways of publicizing her books, which she considered vulgar and detrimental to her literary reputation. All the same, she knew she was losing an important mentor and a loyal ally. She would never forget that letter, dated October 21, 1935, in which Victor wrote to her that he was absolutely thrilled by Jamaica Inn. Who could take the baton from Victor? Who would be able to understand her, this shy, complex novelist? Victor’s daughter, Livia Gollancz, had taken over the reins of the publishing house after her father’s death. It was she, in the summer of 1967, who published Daphne and Kits’s book on Cornwall, a very personal work that, even though it had a print run of only seven thousand copies, was received favorably by press and readers alike, won over by this original hybrid of literature, travel, and history. Kits had decided, after this success, to make a film, financed by Du Maurier Productions, another chance to collaborate with his mother.

The House on the Strand was the last novel Daphne wrote at Menabilly, in her hut, between 1967 and 1968. It featured her future home, Kilmarth, probably in an attempt by her to come to terms with her new abode through the intermediary of writing. She threw herself into the book with the same appetite she had felt when writing The Scapegoat, ten years earlier. Again, it was her masculine alter ego, Eric Avon, who spoke in the first person, through Dick, a name she had already used in her second novel, I’ll Never Be Young Again. As she admitted to Oriel, I can think much better as an “I.”7 At the start of the book, Dick Young, a biochemistry professor, moves alone into the Cornish home of his colleague the respected Magnus Lane, in order to carry out a few secret experiments as a voluntary guinea pig for a revolutionary new drug invented by his friend. The drug in question is an illegal substance that will allow its user to be transported into the past, the side effects of which remain unknown. During his first trial of the drug, Dick finds himself in the Middle Ages. Is it a hallucination? Reality? Quickly addicted, Young cannot live without these spatio-temporal journeys that encroach on his everyday life. What he sees and understands of the fourteenth century takes on an outsized and disturbing importance in his mind.

While researching the book, Daphne went out to explore the pastures and farmland around Kilmarth in her little red car, armed with binoculars. I am sure people think that I am a spy, she wrote to Oriel. It’s so childish, really, and so like the games I used to play on Hampstead Heath, when I was a child! On revient toujours à ses premiers amours.*8

Through studying maps and documents, Daphne realized how much the landscape had been transformed in recent centuries. The water level had varied, the courses of streams and rivers changed. To make her hero’s wanderings plausible, she had to attain a perfect knowledge of the medieval topography and to call the villages and hamlets by their old names. Married to a stern, controlling American woman, Dick has trouble making her believe that he is simply working at Magnus’s house. He just can’t stop, Daphne explained to Oriel, and his wife can’t think what is the matter with him, and imagines he is drinking, or has some woman on the side.9

Daphne made progress on her novel, feeling certain that what she was doing was genuinely original. Her research in the parish archives had provided her with precious documentation regarding families from the Middle Ages, with surnames that inspired her: the Champernounes, the Kylmerths, the Bodrugans, and the Carminowes. As she did with The King’s General, Daphne merged history with fiction, with brilliant results. All the themes that most interested her were brought together here: psychology, scientific advances, the weight of history, and her grandfather Kicky’s beloved “dreaming true.” Sheila, her faithful editor, came to see her at Menabilly as Daphne was finishing the novel, in the early summer of 1968. Together, they visited the lands around Kilmarth, Daphne wearing her cap and holding her walking stick. Sheila was impressed by her vigor and the extent of her knowledge. The other unforgettable event of that summer was the famous ceremony in honor of Tommy, in Aldershot, Hampshire, by the Parachute Regiment. Daphne went, accompanied by Tessa, Kits, and Hacker. Three parachutists landed precisely at Daphne’s feet, and one of them presented her with a bronze statuette, of which she would remain very fond.

At the same time, Daphne was visited at “Mena” by her late editor’s widow, Ruth Gollancz, a dignified and perceptive sixty-eight-year-old woman. The two women talked about grief. Daphne wrote to Oriel: Ruth said she understood that thing of feeling out of things, she does find Victor’s friends rather cliff* her. But she is nobly turning to new interests, and goes to lectures and classes, things she never did before, which is wise.10 Exactly what Daphne herself learned to do by leaving Menabilly.

*   *   *

Daphne at last gets her bearings at Kilmarth in August 1969. She described her handover to the Rashleighs in a letter to Oriel in April: Philip Rashleigh and his mother came to lunch and I showed them all around Mena. Poor Philip, waine* and shaking with nerves, but the little mother rather sweet and frail. Very nice letter from them both afterwards. So it shows it is right to turn the other cheek.11 Now, however, passing the gates of “Mena” is like passing a gravestone, giving her a gloomy, oppressive feeling, and Daphne finds it a relief to get home to the light-filled welcome of Kilmarth.

The House on the Strand is published to great acclaim. Good Housekeeping magazine writes of Daphne: “She’s a virtuoso, she can conjure up tragedy, horror, suspense, the ridiculous, the vain, the romantic.” The New York Times goes even further: “The House on the Strand is prime du Maurier, she holds her characters close to reality, the past she creates is valid, and her skill in finessing the time shifts is enough to make one want to try a little of the brew himself.” The English edition bears a cover illustration by Flavia Tower, which adds to Daphne’s pride, and the book goes straight into the bestseller lists, another satisfaction.

From that first bright summer, Daphne has the impression that Kilmarth is embracing her, softly and compassionately. She begins to love this house. Will she be able to write here? And where will she write? There is no hut, and the little summer cabin will never be warm enough in winter. Difficult to find a spot where she will be able to sit and work when the urge returns. She doesn’t think about this for the moment, however, welcoming her grandchildren in August and remarking ironically to Oriel that the “Zulus,”* the teenagers, do not know what to do with themselves. They have their bikes here, there are plenty of buses at the top of the hill going to Fowey or Saint Austell, but all they ever do is lie on their beds and listen to pop music! A book is never opened, sailing bores them, walking bores them, so one is really rather defeated.12 In the late afternoon, once she is alone, Daphne reclines on an old blanket near the wall, at the bottom of the garden, toward the sea, and she is overcome by a feeling of peace and freedom. Watching a plane move across the blue sky, she feels completely happy for the first time in a long while.

She agrees to an interview in the English magazine The Lady and poses proudly in her new kitchen and in the garden. Each morning, she replies to all the letters she receives on her Adler typewriter. Esther helps her sometimes. Mail comes from all over the world, and Daphne reads and responds to each and every letter. Although she never does book signings or bookshop appearances, she enjoys this contact with her readers. Sometimes, her fans, as she calls them, come to Kilmarth to get a book signed. Esther opens the door to them, and Daphne signs the book inside the house, often without seeing them. It happened at “Mena,” too: her bolder readers, ready to do anything to catch a glimpse of their favorite author, would regularly ring the doorbell. She smiles sometimes, thinking of how the Rashleighs must react, confronted with this flood of unexpected visitors bearing books.

While tidying up her papers after the move, Daphne comes across her private journal, that old black notebook she received as a Christmas present in 1920, and the others, all filled with her cramped handwriting. She takes the time to reread them. So naïve, she writes to Oriel, and in the middle of it I had this awful thing for my cousin Geoffrey, aged thirty-six.13 All the same, reading this journal affects her much more than she admits. A lot of it is devoted to Fernande Yvon and those secret, intense moments they shared between 1925 and 1932. Daphne does not want her family, her friends, never mind her millions of readers, to find out about those pages. For now, she puts the journal away, promising herself she will find a solution to ensure it is not read by anyone for a long time to come.

The year 1970 begins. Daphne feels optimistic: I like the sound of the 7 next to the 0.14 Tessa gets engaged to an elegant man in his forties with lively blue eyes, named David Montgomery, son of the famous “Monty,” General Bernard Montgomery, an army comrade of Tommy’s. Daphne finds him charming, if a little too chatty. Perhaps he is just trying to make a good impression on his future mother-in-law? Their wedding is set for the beginning of the year.

Daphne settles into her new “routes,”* with friends coming over for lunch, including the historian Alfred Leslie Rowse, a St. Austell neighbor. He has a soft spot for her, which provides her with a pleasant distraction. He invites her to his own house in return, but Daphne refuses to leave Kilmarth, prompting him to nickname her Madame Non-Non, a moniker that makes her laugh. She is as close as ever to her sisters and helps both of them financially. She talks to Angela, at Ferryside, every single day on the telephone. Jeanne she sees less often, but they remain in regular contact. She also watches over her aunt Billy, her mother’s sister, who is aged and sick and has recently moved to the region. Daphne helps to find her a house and pays all her medical bills. Behind the wheel of her little red car, Daphne drives at such speeds that her son dubs her “the Niki Lauda of Cornwall.” Her letters to Oriel retain their mordant wit, as with one recounting a morning she spent at the hairdresser’s: I tried on a curling, rather menacing* wig, and God, I looked such a fool! You see, it didn’t go with one’s age and it gave me quite a shock! And then, one of the girls came whisking through and saw me, and I felt such an ass. I bet she said to the others afterwards, “I saw Lady Browning trying on one of the wigs, I wonder if she wants to make herself look younger.”15

It rains constantly throughout January and February. When she is asked to contribute to an album celebrating Prince Philip’s fiftieth birthday, Daphne agrees. Her text, “A Winter Afternoon, Kilmarth,” describes a Cornish walk in terrible weather, with massive clouds, driven by some demon force, reminding me of a rather too elaborate production of Macbeth, before evoking her own outfit for braving the elements: Dressed like Tolstoy in his declining years, fur cap with ear flaps, padded jerkin and rubber boots to the knee, I venture forth. Moray, my West Highland terrier, taking one look at the sky, backs swiftly into the porch, but brutally I urge him on.16

Daphne enjoys writing a spirited, funny little essay like this, working on it for several days in a row. She portrays herself, facing the sea, watching the ships trapped in the bay by the raging storm, and tells how she lifted her arm, not in salute, but to protect her eyes from the hail. When she has finally battled through the gusting wind to reach her home, she is greeted by black, foul-smelling smoke. The fire in her hearth has died, and she must spend the rest of the evening wearing sunglasses to prevent her eyes from watering. Going up to her bedroom, followed by her dog, who is terrified by the screaming of the wind outside, Daphne senses that she is unlikely to have the most tranquil of nights. And indeed, as she starts to read the newspaper in bed, an ominous drip … drip … wets her pillow. I look up to the ceiling, and perceive, all complacency gone, that a row of beads, like a very large rosary swinging from a nun’s breast, is forming a chain immediately above my head and fast turning into bubbles.17 The only solution is to risk a hernia by dragging her bed over to a dry corner of the room, watched by the incredulous, half-asleep Moray. And all of this in front of the portrait of Tommy in his military beret, spryly smiling.

Daphne writes the text in the living room, as she has no separate office. Should she work here in the future? It’s not ideal for writing a whole book, and the question is especially urgent as an idea has finally been “brewing”* within her since late March. She wants to write something set in Venice, which left a strong impression on her during her visit with Jeanne five years before. After the comic article, it is once again darkness that draws Daphne in—a terrible darkness to which she submits with rediscovered enthusiasm. It’s rather a nanny* story, very psychic,18 she tells Oriel. And so, sitting in the living room, looking out at sea, with a bouquet of dazzlingly yellow daffodils beside her, Daphne begins writing “Don’t Look Now,” the most terrifying short story she has ever written.

What keeps luring her into such black depths? The more morbid her work becomes, the more she pleasure she takes from it, just like when she was a young girl writing her first stories. With other people she puts on a show of carefree cheerfulness, smiling prettily, laughing infectiously, but in front of her typewriter she mines her inner darkness, the part of her that only ever comes out in her books. She has always made this choice, and she will stick to it. She would rather frighten her readers, give them the shivers, disturb their sleep, than produce something bland, easy, obvious, forgettable.

So she draws on the inspiration provided by the two old ladies in Menabilly’s Southcott cottage, twenty years before, and turns them into sisters, strange witch-like women, one of whom is blind, with milky, horrifying eyes. She invents a couple who have been through a terrible tragedy, the loss of a young daughter to meningitis. And she sets the story in Venice, the hidden Venice, with its crumbling old façades, its damp cul-de-sacs, its black gondolas like coffins. John and Laura thought they could forget the cruel past by coming here, but a chance meeting with the sisters in a restaurant by the lagoon will plunge them into the worst of nightmares. The blind sister has psychic powers, and she manages to convince Laura that she “sees” their daughter. The story ends with a terrifying, spine-chilling climax.

And yet, while her mind is busy with the macabre and the violent, Daphne is also planning a trip to Crete with Kits and Hacker, set for just after her sixty-third birthday in May. She has time to go shopping, as she tells Oriel, for a three-quarter length camel coat and a new shoulder-length bag and to see an optician for a checkup: Nothing wrong with my eyes, what a relief, didn’t even need my glasses changing. It’s so waine* going to the oculists, because they peer so closely into one’s eyes, one dreads having bad breath.19

The vacation in Crete is very welcome after a gray, rainy winter. In the fishing village of Agios Nikolaos, at the Minos Beach Hotel, she is recognized by two English fans—young Martyn and his aunt Bernice. Daphne likes them and invites them to go with her, Kits, and Hacker on a boat the next day to the islet of Spinalonga. Back in Cornwall, she settles down to work again, imagining a short story set in the glorious sunny landscape that she has just left. The title: “Not After Midnight.” Here again, the tale is rather dark, with a plot just as tragic as the one set in Venice. A lonely teacher, on vacation in Crete, is caught in the evil clutches of a shady American couple. The ambiguous denouement leaves her friends and her editor dissatisfied. Shouldn’t she rework it? Doesn’t matter: she is already working on another story, this time about a disastrous trip to Jerusalem made by a group of English tourists, where each one will face grim attonment. The most disturbing of her new stories is probably the one in which a young actress, after the sudden death of her father, is confronted with a particularly sordid truth. Tod, after reading this collection, exclaims: My dear, I didn’t like the first one at all, most unpleasant.20 Not that Daphne minds: she has once again successfully blended the subtle and the sinister, her trademark in the eyes of millions of readers.

On August 17, 1970, Kits and Hacker’s third son is born—Edward, known as Ned. I do love boys!21 Daphne admits to Oriel, and this joyous gaggle of lads—her grandsons, her godson Toby, and Esther’s son—playing cricket on the lawn, begin to inspire her for a future book. Something amusing, for a change, a comic novel. Because it’s true that Daphne is humorous in real life, even if many people don’t realize it due to the horrifying nature of some of her books. Watching the boys make a racket, Daphne smiles, imagining a novel in the style of The Parasites, which she believes was widely misunderstood on its publication in 1949. She feels like taking that risk again, like changing her tune completely. She’s had enough of readers who are still writing to her about Rebecca, thirty years after its publication. She wants to get rid of that damned Mrs. de Winter, once and for all, and let her take Maxim and his silly new wife and that horrible old Mrs. Danvers with her!

*   *   *

Daphne chooses a large sweater with a pointed collar, in blue, her favorite color. She went to the hairdresser yesterday, and her white hair looks glossy and perfectly styled. No foundation or lipstick, as she suspects the TV people will provide her with a makeup artist who will apply a cloud of powder to her face. She doesn’t change her jewelry, wearing only her wedding ring, the blue-green cameo ring she wears on her right hand, a gold bracelet, and her watch. She is not going to transform herself into someone she’s not, even if the BBC is coming to Kilmarth for the entire day to film the first TV interview of her career. She prefers to stay true to herself. The hook is the recent publication of her short stories, with another illustration by Flavia on the cover, which has been well received by critics and readers alike. In another coup for Daphne, the British movie director Nicolas Roeg has bought the rights to “Don’t Look Now.” Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie have been given the principal roles and the film will be shot in Venice.

Esther has scoured the house from top to bottom, because Daphne has given the team the go-ahead, for the first time, to shoot the inside of her home. Kits encouraged his mother to agree to the interview, and she accepted, asking in return that the channel broadcasts one of her son’s films in the near future. While she waits for the arrival of the journalist—Wilfred De’Ath, a young man of Kits’s age, likable if rather pompous, whose finest hour was interviewing John Lennon, and with whom she already gave a radio interview a few years before—Daphne feels nervous, ill at ease. What a terrible idea, letting these strangers into her home. When she had been filmed at Menabilly, in the early forties, she had refused to let them inside. But now, she knows, everything is changing in the world of books. An author no longer sells on her name alone; she must be seen, her voice must be heard. How long ago it seems that she told her friend Foy that writers should be read but never seen or heard.

Daphne glances through the window and sees three cars arrive outside the gate. Thankfully, the weather is good, on this day in July 1971. Taking a deep breath, she goes out onto the front steps to greet Wilfred and his team, wondering why on earth there are so many of them. She must learn to forget the big man holding a camera on his shoulder, filming every movement she makes, as she shows them into the house, pointing out Gerald’s walking sticks, Tommy’s arrows, telling Wilfred, I wanted it to look like Menabilly as much as possible. In the living room, a glass of Dubonnet in hand, she tries to act naturally, to blot out the microphone, the lighting, and concentrate on the journalist’s questions. No, I’m not lonely, and the children are always ringing up. I’d be far lonelier if I had to live in London. Her blue eyes are veiled with irony when Wilfred asks her if she thinks she will write many more books after the age of sixty-four, if she is not already past her peak. Obviously, what one writes today isn’t as fresh as it was when I was twenty, one goes through different phases, but I’m not aware of an awful decline or aching bones. She will prove this a little later, when she leads Wilfred along the cliff top at an energetic trot with her Westie Moray. The young journalist lags behind and looks out of breath while she gambols lightly, walking stick in hand.

Every last nook and corner in Kilmarth is filmed: the staircase featuring the drawings of George du Maurier, Daphne’s bedroom with “her” sea view, Tommy’s teddy bears sitting on a shelf, the engravings of Mary Anne Clarke, her scandalous ancestor. The camera follows them into the little private chapel in the vaulted cellar of the old house, then into the archive room, where Daphne shows them the original manuscript of Rebecca, with its legendary opening sentence. Then Daphne is seen in front of her desk in the living room, face concentrated and unsmiling as she types, as if she were all alone in the world.

The interview seems to go on forever, but Daphne plays the game, remaining patient, replying with humor and kindness, occasionally bursting into laughter, lighting cigarette after cigarette. No one could imagine how it exhausts her to talk about her work, about her literary tastes from childhood (Beatrix Potter, Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield, de Maupassant), but also about her everyday life, her solitary dinner on a tray in front of the television, which she watches assiduously every night. Her voice remains melodious and gentle, not changing even when she deftly argues against the “romantic novelist” label the journalist applies to her. There is more laughter when he asks her if she is wounded by her lack of critical recognition: It would be wonderful getting reviews saying you’re Shakespeare, but I’m happy enough. She remains guarded, even as she leans back on her cushions as if she’s entertaining her best friends, one foot balanced nonchalantly on the couch, cigarette stuck between her lips, like a sort of protection. She describes, with obvious awkwardness, her fascination for incest: I don’t mean bed incest, I mean this thing of sons looking for their mothers, daughters looking for their fathers.… Her face relaxes when Wilfred asks her what job she would do now if she hadn’t been a writer. Another exuberant burst of laughter. Archaeologists, perhaps, digging, you see! If I’d had the brains, a doctor, or a chemist, to do with genetics, you see, family again. Finally, they leave. It is time to savor a well-earned whiskey, to collapse in front of the television, not to have to think about anything. Now she must wait for the show to be broadcast the following month, and Daphne knows that, when the moment comes, she will feel as if the whole of Great Britain is poking its nose into her bedroom.

For now, she is making good progress on a new, and very different, novel, with which she is rather pleased: the fantastical tale of an old, eccentric lady, inspired by Gladys Cooper—the du Maurier family’s actress friend, to whom the book is dedicated—but also by Daphne herself. Mad (short for Madam) lives by the sea in a large house surrounded by a horde of adopted boys, bearing a startling resemblance not only to Barrie’s Lost Boys but also to Daphne’s own grandsons. She has given free rein to her inspiration, admitting to Oriel that she felt like taking the mickey out of everything,22 her writing drifting into the realms of the absurd and the burlesque. The plot features England being unexpectedly invaded and annexed by the United States, then the fierce anti-American resistance born in the depths of this lost corner of Cornwall, led by the incorrigible grandmother and her tribe. It is a much more personal novel than it appears, and beneath the acerbic parody of a belligerent Peter Pan embodied by the indomitable Mad—whose clothes are a mix of Mao Tse-tung and Robin Hood—and Emma, her granddaughter, as a sensible, reasonable Wendy, the reader can sense Daphne’s visceral attachment to Cornwall, shown in the real world by her joining the local independence movement, Mebyon Kernow, in 1969. Mad is an authentic du Maurier heroine: rebellious, audacious, in the lineage of Dona St. Columb and Honor Harris, only forty years older.

This is the first novel Daphne has written in her living room at Kilmarth. When the book, titled Rule Britannia, appears in January 1972, readers and critics are left baffled. What is du Maurier playing at? Her anti-Americanism appeared more discreetly through Stoll, the repulsive drunkard in “Not After Midnight,” and Vita, the young scientist’s persnickety wife in The House on the Strand, but why should she exhibit it so brazenly in this novel? Why has she suddenly turned so satirical, so political, so vulgar? The first word pronounced by Ben, the last adopted son, a little black boy three years old, is “Sh … sh … sh … shit!” In this dystopian novel, Daphne caricatures an England unwilling to become part of Europe, where prices soar and the government is so helpless and incompetent that it has to ally with the United States to form a new country, USUK, pronounced you suck, which doesn’t leave much to the imagination regarding the author’s standpoint on these fictional events. The reviews are awful, with The Economist reproaching Daphne for having isolated herself to the extent that she no longer has any idea what the modern world is like. The Saturday Review of Arts says it is “difficult to tell whether this novel is written with irony or genteel paranoia.” One headline reads: “Yankees Go Home, Roars du Maurier.” Her fans are disappointed, shocked, lost. Where has the magic of Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel gone?

Daphne accepts this negativity. Though widely misunderstood, this novel, Rule Britannia, enabled her to express her personal opinions. On the other hand, she is irritated by Tod’s remark—My dear, I don’t like that character called Madam, she orders everyone about too much!23—and by a letter from her friend Frank Price, who absolutely hates the book and tells her so in great detail: the plot is weak, the humor pale, the characters unconvincing, and the dialogue hollow. According to him, Daphne’s editors did not have the courage to tell her just how bad the novel was. Moving on, Daphne enjoys a pleasant summer, swimming, walking, being with her family and friends. She meets Veronica Rashleigh, Philip’s new wife, with whom she becomes friendly, and who allows her to walk around Menabilly whenever she likes. She goes on vacation in Dordogne for a few weeks with Kits and Hacker, her faithful traveling companions, her son behind the wheel, her daughter-in-law in the backseat, organizing the logistics of the trip. Daphne’s only sadness that summer is not the poor reception given to Rule Britannia, which she is able to rise above, but the divorce of Flavia and Alastair, after fifteen years of marriage. Her trip to Provence comes as a breath of fresh air, my old rusty French tripping from my tongue,24 and she tells Oriel about their stopover in Cap d’Ail at the sumptuous villa belonging to her old Camposenea friend Doodie, kitted out in a pink Chanel suit and high heels: I doubt if she has ever worn trousers in her life!25 Doodie has become very posh and proper, serving them grilled fillets of trout, raspberries, and Vouvray wine. Later, Kits makes his mother laugh, as always, by saying that he thinks Doodie ought to organize orgies in her gloomy living room, with its décor straight from an Agatha Christie novel.

*   *   *

She still has no ideas for a new novel. Daphne waits patiently, but nothing comes. She has to start work again before the start of winter, she must find something, make some progress. Another biography, perhaps? Maybe that would rehabilitate her after the unfavorable reaction to Rule Britannia the previous year, help win the critics back over to her side? Her last biography, on Branwell Brontë, came out twelve years ago, in 1960. Writing about another person would allow her to maintain her precious “routes,”* would give meaning to her life, keep her going. In a letter to Foy, she confesses: One of the reasons I have a dog is that I have something to get up for, to take him walking.26 But, even more than her Westie, she knows that it is the prospect of a book to write that truly provides her days with a structure. Before, ideas used to come on their own; now, she must seek them out.

She starts to wonder about people whose lives would require her to embark on some long, fruitful research and ends up thinking about the Bacon brothers: Francis, the scientist and philosopher, born in London in 1561, and his elder and less illustrious sibling Anthony, born in 1558. Why the Bacons? Not much is known about their lives, certain aspects remain in the shadows, and this time, in contrast to the more psychological approach she attempted with Branwell Brontë, Daphne wants to build her book on solid research, in order to unearth new evidence and facts. Most pressingly, she must hire assistants who will meticulously search through all the documentation relating to the Bacon brothers at the London Library and Lambeth Place Library. Daphne closely examines everything she receives in the mail, dissecting the brothers’ childhood, the deaths of their elder sisters, their relations with their demanding, erudite mother, their education at Cambridge. She is interested in Anthony, who spoke fluent French—always menacing, as she tells Oriel. Her assistants get their hands on documents that prove Anthony spent twelve years in France as a spy for the Elizabethan government. I am now happily settled in for winter, surrounded by heavy-going books on Bacon and trying to make notes,27 she writes excitedly to Oriel in November 1972.

The following spring, while she continues to go through the discoveries concerning the Bacon brothers, Daphne invites Martyn Shallcross for lunch, the young man she met in Crete three years before, and with whom she has stayed in touch by mail. During the meal, served by Esther, the telephone rings several times. I don’t do personal appearances, Daphne says into the receiver, rather irritably. Why can’t they get the vicar’s wife or someone else, to open the fête?28 Now she has found the central theme of her book, Daphne gets down to work with a formidable energy that comes as a relief to her children and close friends. Her letters to Oriel testify to her fervor: Surrounded with books from the London Library, and am getting more interested in Anthony than in Francis, even, and with secret spies in France.29 Her team of bloodhounds tracks down a significant family secret in the departmental archives of Tarn-et-Garonne. During the summer of 1586, Anthony Bacon was accused of sodomizing his young page, Isaac Burgades, and arrested in Montauban. In September 1586, Henri IV personally intervened, at the last minute, to save the young Englishman from execution—a story that never filtered back to England, his homeland, but which pursued him internally throughout his life. Daphne does not deny her subject’s homosexuality but does refute the charges of cruelty and barbarism heaped on him. A shrewd observer of the world that surrounded him and an amateur poet, suffering with poor health and spiraling debts, Anthony remained one year longer in Montauban and Bordeaux, where he grew close to the philosopher Michel de Montaigne, before he was able to return to England. Another major breakthrough: Daphne’s researchers succeed in locating, for the first time, Anthony Bacon’s gravestone, in St. Olave’s Church, on Hart Street, in London.

In early August 1973, Daphne receives a letter from her French publishers, Albin Michel. Rule Britannia is in the process of being translated—by Maurice-Bernard Endrèbe, who already translated The House on the Strand, following the death of Mme Butler in 1968. The translator would like to be given the references to various Wordsworth poems quoted by Daphne. It is Daphne herself who responds to this request on August 8, in French, cutting out the middleman of her French agent. Thank you for your letter, and please excuse my poor French. Unfortunately, it will be quite difficult to find the exact verses of Wordsworth’s poems, because I mixed them up, a few lines from one poem, a few from another. They are all taken from Miscellaneous Sonnets. My word! What a lot of work! You have my sympathies! P.S. In England and in the United States, no one seems to have understood that my novel Rule Britannia is FOR Great Britain’s entry into Europe.30

That same month, Daphne goes off in search of Anthony Bacon’s traces in Aquitaine, along with Kits and Hacker. They go from Bordeaux to Agen, then to Montauban, up to the châteaux of the Loire, and, while in the region, pay a visit to Chérigny, where Kits takes a picture of his mother in front of the Le Maurier sign; Daphne particularly enjoys this part of her pilgrimage. Back at Kilmarth, Daphne gets down to work again, interrupting her flow of words only to attend a preview showing of Nicolas Roeg’s movie version of “Don’t Look Now” in London. For once, she is favorably impressed by the film adaptation, which mirrors the intensity of her story, all the way to its dreadful climax in the confrontation of two worlds, the rational and the superstitious. The color red recurs like an insidious refrain, and Venice is shown in its little-known autumnal aspect, sunk under rain and bereft of tourists, who all left with the warm sun.

When it is released, the movie is a huge success, receiving rave reviews from critics. Daphne writes to Nicolas Roeg in October 1973: Dear Mr Roeg, I must add my congratulations to the hundreds of letters and telephone calls you are surely receiving for the success of your film. At the end of her note, she writes jokingly: And please, one of these days, find another of my short stories to screen!31 The movie’s producers judged it prudent to show Daphne the American version of the film, which did not include a torrid sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. Kits says one sees EVERYTHING, Daphne laments to Oriel. A pity about the sexy bit, though, so unnecessary.32

Winter arrives, bringing rain and gray skies, and Daphne’s morale collapses. The writing of the biography does not give her the pleasure she was hoping for, and she is weakened by a bout of bronchitis. In 1974, she receives a copy of the book A Bridge Too Far, by Cornelius Ryan, a meticulous Irish journalist and author, known for his books on World War Two, The Longest Day and The Last Battle, published in 1959 and 1966 respectively. In 1967, two years after Tommy’s death, Daphne had replied to the author’s questions regarding Operation Market Garden. She had made clear that she knew nothing about that event at the time, that Tommy had barely mentioned it to her. She did say how badly affected her husband had been by the loss of his men. Reading the book, she notes that the author has quoted her accurately. What worries her most, however, is that a movie of the book will be made by the British director Richard Attenborough. She, more than anyone, knows how far screenplays can diverge from the books they are based on. She writes to Attenborough, requesting that he send her the script when it is finished.

A series of deaths increases her sadness, beginning with the loss of Christopher Puxley to cancer, then, later in the year, of her aunt Billy, at ninety-three. When Daphne finally manages to finish her biography, Livia Gollancz informs her that it will not be published until September 1975, more than a year away. Daphne is perplexed. Does this mean that her publishers don’t like the book? Otherwise, why delay its publication?

A gray summer does not help matters. It is too cold to go swimming. The only ray of light comes with the birth of Kits and Hacker’s first daughter, Grace, in June 1974. Though she doesn’t know exactly why, Daphne has the strange impression that this sadness is here to stay, that it won’t be easy to get rid of. The du Maurier family’s long black ribbon, which so affected Kicky and Gerald, is unfurling now between her fingers, wrapping itself around her wrists, as if to more fully imprison her.

*   *   *

When her biography of the Bacon brothers, Golden Lads, is published in the fall of 1975, the reviews are mostly favorable and only Kirkus Reviews judges the work “meandering” and “a shade dull.” It doesn’t sell much, but it does draw congratulations from Arthur Leslie Rowse, as well as some other well-known historians, impressed by the author’s scrupulous research. Daphne now begins a new biography—of Francis Bacon alone, beginning after his brother Anthony’s death in 1610. She believes there is still much to say about this man who was a writer, lawyer, philosopher, scientist, politician, and friend of William Shakespeare. Gollancz would have preferred a novel, and so would she, in truth, but fiction must wait a while longer. She has no ideas, no inspiration. Given that she still possesses all the documentation, it makes sense to continue writing about Francis, the younger brother, even if, deep down, the idea of this book does not really thrill her.

Every morning, Daphne replies to her letters before laboriously working on the Bacon biography. A fifteen-year-old reader named Julie, who dreams of being a writer, writes to her regularly. Daphne sends her a photograph of Kilmarth, explaining how the house inspired her novel The House on the Strand, and wishing her good luck with her exams. In a following letter, she includes a signed photograph of herself on the beach at Par. She must also reply, and this is less amusing, to those irritating letters about Rebecca, which never seem to have stopped arriving, asking her to explain the ending and why she didn’t give the second Mrs. de Winter a name. Even Agatha Christie, whom Daphne admires and with whom she exchanges a few letters, asks her this dreaded question.

The book about Francis Bacon, The Winding Stair, is published in January 1976. “Trivial pablum” is the brutal judgment of Kirkus Reviews, while the Observer is not much kinder. Thankfully, the Sunday Times reviews it positively, as does the Yorkshire Post. But this second biography does not have the power of the first one, and sales remain poor. Daphne suffers another humiliation when her French publisher, Albin Michel, suggests turning the two books into a single volume, a project that requires considerable cutting. Her German publisher wishes to condense the two books, too. This means the loss of more than a hundred pages, resulting in a book of 350 pages. Daphne has no choice. She writes to her agents to accept this proposal, but the cut pages leave her desolate.

It is in this gloomy context that Daphne starts dreaming up her next book. In 1977, the following year, she will turn seventy. Time for her to write her autobiography? Until now, she has always refused. But she is obsessed by her dearth of inspiration for another novel. What if Rule Britannia was her last work of fiction? She doesn’t even dare think about it. Since The House on the Strand, the voice of Eric Avon has fallen silent. So often in the past, Daphne had relied on her masculine alter ego for inspiration. I’m still passage-wandering re: work,33 she complains to Oriel. And so, as she has to write, she may as well write about her own life. To sate the appetite of the legion of Daphne du Maurier fans, Gollancz publishes a selection of her short stories, but none of them are new.

Writing about her life. What an idea! It is torture to dwell on her past, and Daphne doesn’t know where to start. Wouldn’t it be a terrible “tell-him”* to recount her life? What if she told it through the houses she had loved? She could begin with Cumberland Terrace, Cannon Hall, describe the inspiration she had drawn from Milton in her portrayal of Manderley, then Ferryside and Menabilly. She would talk about her first stories, how she wrote them, how she came to be published. Sheila, her editor, encourages her down this path, but Daphne is not convinced. Somehow, though, she sticks to her task during the icy winter that settles on Kilmarth, wrapped up in several sweaters, fur boots on her feet. She must look through her journal again, for the first time in six years. She does so with a certain amount of consternation, drawing on it for the construction of her account but toning down large parts of it. Now she knows what she must do with this journal: she will create an embargo on those pages; she’ll talk to the husband of Tommy’s former assistant, Bim Baker-Munton, about it, as he is in charge of her estate. There will be a fifty-year wait after her own death before anyone is allowed to read this private journal.

*   *   *

In the spring of 1976, while she is still struggling over her memoirs, Daphne receives a first draft of the screenplay for A Bridge Too Far by Richard Attenborough. She is alarmed: just as she feared, Tommy is shown in an unflattering light, as a phlegmatic dandy bereft of charisma, who washes his hands of the consequences of the armed intervention. He will be played by Dirk Bogarde, an actor she considers unmanly and not at all like her late husband. The script takes liberties with the book, cutting out many of the key characters and leaving Tommy to take the blame for the carnage that resulted. Outraged, Daphne immediately calls Attenborough to voice her concerns. The director attempts to reassure her, but Daphne is not fooled. She waits anxiously for the film’s release, scheduled for June 1977.

One morning in May 1976, she returns from the hairdresser’s, turns on the radio and is shaken by the news she hears. Sir Carol Reed has died suddenly at his home in London. The day before, Daphne had written about him in her memoirs, describing their close relationship, their shared laughter and tenderness. She is stunned by this strange coincidence. Later, Kits tells her about the emotional ceremony at the church in Chelsea. Another death saddens her, too—that of her adored Westie, Moray. She even asks the doctor if it is normal for her to feel so devastated, even gaga, after the loss of her dog. In August, she spends several days with her sister Jeanne, in Dartmoor, and enjoys her intellectual discussions with Noël, Jeanne’s poet partner. They cannot take their usual walks, however, because Britain has been hit by an unprecedented heat wave in that summer of 1976.

Daphne has made reasonable progress with her memoirs. Enough for her to think about taking a trip with Kits and Hacker to Scotland in October. Well you never know, I might get inspired by old Scotch ancestors!34 she writes to Oriel. But, despite spending nine days in a wild, mountainous setting, between the Highlands and the lochs, the ruins of an old castle, inspiration does not come, as if the mechanism was somehow blocked. Back at Kilmarth, she is overcome by melancholy. It’s those damned memoirs, Daphne feels sure. She’s only written about a hundred pages, but it is such a struggle. To her mind, Angela’s autobiography was so much better, full of humor and lucidity, whereas her own account seems dry, stiff, and grinds to a halt at the moment she marries Tommy. Impossible to go any further. She wrote about Geoffrey, of course, and about Fernande, too, but she didn’t reveal everything. Her secrets remain secret. But the act of looking behind her, stirring up old memories, as her father did constantly, has tipped her over into depression. She cannot stop thinking about those distant reminiscences, about her childhood, her parents, her youth, all her friends who have passed away. She misses Tommy. Loneliness oppresses her. And winter only intensifies her torments, especially as she no longer has Moray to go for walks with her. Already she dreads the next year, when she will turn seventy. Her publishers want to organize a large party in May, to celebrate her birthday. She refuses: it’s out of the question. However, she is going to have to agree to several interviews to publicize her autobiography in the spring of 1977. For the first time in her life, as her birthday draws closer, Daphne has a few health problems; her doctor diagnoses gallstones. She must follow a special diet, which makes her lose fifteen pounds, leaving her weak and sensitive to the cold. Even the arrival of two puppies, Mac and Kenzie, is not enough to put her back on an even keel.

It is in this fragile state that she submits once again to the arrival of a TV team at Kilmarth, though this time she is reassured by the fact that Kits is the director. The journalist, Cliff Michelmore, is someone she likes, a warm, well-known, and respected man. Kits is in charge of the choice of music, and he includes some of Daphne’s favorite tunes, including Charles Trenet’s “La Mer” and “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte” by Ravel. The show’s title is Once Upon a Time: The Make-Believe World of Daphne du Maurier. Supported by her son, Daphne forces herself to appear cheerful. She wears a pink sweater and cardigan, a gold brooch, and beige pants. She looks frail, in comparison with the 1971 interview, when she was full of energy, her figure rounder and her gait triumphant. But her voice remains lively. Kits begins the program with her spirited voice, speaking over Charles Trenet’s mellow singing as the screen shows the approach to Fowey from the sea. I suppose I was born into a world of make-believe and imagination, I take after my father, Gerald, and my grandfather George. I was always pretending to be someone else and my father would say, “Don’t take any notice; she’s acting, she’s always acting!” Daphne sits in her living room for an hour and discusses her books, their movie adaptations, and her youth. A few images show her at the helm of a little fishing boat in Fowey Bay. The tone of the conversation is light and pleasant. The only time her voice becomes firm, almost stern, is when she exclaims, I am NOT a romantic novelist, and the only romantic novel I ever wrote, and I do admit it, was Frenchman’s Creek. She keeps smiling, albeit in a rather strained way, when her most famous novel is, inevitably, mentioned. Apparently, Rebecca is the favorite of every reader of my books, I never knew quite why. She stares wearily into space. Rebecca, Rebecca, always Rebecca …

Soon after this, Daphne agrees to an interview with a highly respected journalist from The Guardian, Alex Hamilton, a man in his forties who travels from London to Kilmarth in order to meet her. Over lunch, Hamilton notices that the novelist barely touches the delicious meal (lamb, roast potatoes) prepared by pretty, dark-haired35 Esther, but that she has a second helping of lemon meringue. Her favorite object, placed on the dining room table, is the bronze statuette that the parachutists gave her in 1968, in memory of Tommy. Hamilton remarks that her voice seems younger than her appearance, and when she stands up to look after the dogs, he notes her lively, alert movements. She admits to him that she probably ought to stop calling her father Daddy, now that she is in her seventies. Why not simply Gerald?

The journalist brings up Daphne’s two youthful crushes, as depicted in her memoirs: her cousin Geoffrey and the headmistress of her French boarding school, Fernande Yvon. Daphne visibly hesitates. What was her connection with Fernande? A little like a girl in search of a mother. She does not disapprove of physical relations between women, she is tolerant and always has been, but for her, it is merely a pale ersatz, a youthful pose. She admits she has never been a “sexy” person. Everything she repressed was used for writing her novels. Her most personal book? The Parasites, not one of her better-known novels. She was all three characters at once. Hamilton returns to the subject of her marriage: Was it difficult to reconcile her career as a writer with her husband’s increasingly eminent positions? She smiles and says that when they first got married, Tommy would mock her excessive love for her family, that famous French blood of which she was always boasting. But he was proud of her novels, telling her each time, I say, Duck, I’m on chapter fifteen, and it’s really jolly good, and yearning to give a good hiding to any journalists who gave her a bad review. There is only one thing she dreams about, she admits to Hamilton: being able to ask Tommy, up in heaven, if he found it unbearable, their marriage, with her writing in Fowey and him only there for the weekends, and whether she’d bitched up his career.…36

Daphne agrees to one last interview for BBC Radio 4’s famous show Desert Island Discs, presented by Roy Plomley, where guests talk about their life through their favorite pieces of music. Plomley goes down to Kilmarth to record the show. Although Daphne’s voice does not betray the fact, ringing out clear and self-confident and full of good humor, she finds it trying to reminisce about the music of her past. Each melody brings memories surging back, accompanied by a dreadful, gut-wrenching rush of nostalgia, as with the overture to the play of Peter Pan, which she cannot hear without tears welling in her eyes, without seeing her father on stage again. When Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is played, it is Menabilly she sees, its mystery, its enchantment. Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” brings to mind Christopher Puxley’s long, slender fingers, while “Shall We Dance?” (from the musical comedy The King and I) conjures Gertie’s pink crinoline. “Plaisir d’Amour” evokes Fernande’s green eyes, and “You Were Meant for Me” (from Broadway Melody) the kisses of Carol Reed. You’re not writing anything at the moment? asks Roy Plomley. No, not at the moment, I’m too busy training my puppies. Dame Daphne’s laughter at this moment sounds a little forced.

Finally, the interviews are over. Daphne will never again talk about those memoirs, which she regrets writing. All they brought her was bitterness, and to make things worse, the book—titled Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer—is not well received by the press. “She is a far better novelist than journal-keeper,” says the critic from Kirkus Reviews. Even her French publisher, Albin Michel, though generally keen on her recent works, refuses the book, after a negative reader’s report written by Daphne’s translator, Maurice-Bernard Endrèbe. What a cruel disappointment,37 he writes to Mme Pasquier, assistant to Francis Esménard, who succeeded his father as the head of the publishing house. Daphne wonders if it has not been a fatal mistake, dipping her lips in the chalice of the past.

The phone call she receives, one morning in June 1977, from a journalist friend sends her into a fury. He attended a preview of Attenborough’s film, and the Browning character played by Dirk Bogarde is disastrous for Tommy’s reputation. In Cornelius Ryan’s book, Tommy pronounced his famous phrase—that Arnhem would be a bridge too far—when giving his opinion to Montgomery during the first meeting to decide on the plan to seize the five bridges over the Rhine. But in the movie, Dirk Bogarde speaks this line after the tragedy of Arnhem, with an insensitivity that Tommy’s friends and colleagues consider despicable. When she read the script, Daphne had demanded, in her phone call to Attenborough, that he put this line back where it belonged chronologically, at the beginning. But her wishes had not been followed.

Indignant, Daphne writes to her friends in high places, asking them to boycott the film, which she refuses to see. She is not the only one to regret the cruel and unfair representation of her late husband. Other voices are raised, letters sent to the Times, and the controversy rages. Daphne herself writes in the Times on October 1977, and Brian Urquart, Tommy’s former intelligence officer, writes to her personally to say how shocked he is at the appalling portrayal of Lieutenant General Browning in the movie.

This movie, which she would never watch, and the harm it does to her husband’s reputation, becomes her obsession in late 1977. She can’t stop brooding over it, and her friends and family are unable to reason with her or comfort her. After all those painful months turning back time to write her memoirs, this is the coup de grâce.

*   *   *

Good morning, Lady Browning!38 Esther opens the door, then the curtains. It is an August morning in 1981 and the weather is beautiful. Daphne opens her eyes and sees the sunlight pouring into her bedroom. The smell of coffee fills the air. Esther goes downstairs, leaving her alone. For four years now, Daphne has been balanced precariously like a fragile tightrope walker, clinging to her “routes”* even though there is no book in the works. The typewriter remains silent: no more novels, and no letters either. It is Esther, now, who replies to Daphne’s fan mail, with Daphne sometimes scrawling her signature or a few words at the foot of the page. She doesn’t read much—a Jane Austen novel occasionally and the newspapers and magazines scattered all over the living room. It is the telephone that has become vital to her. The calls come at the same exact times, in accordance with Daphne’s wishes. At nine in the morning, every day, Angela phones, from Ferryside. Oriel calls at 7:15 on Sunday evening. Each family member has his or her own time slot. These strict routines fill the void that her life has become since 1977. Her appetite has diminished, she has lost even more weight. She still takes the dogs for walks, but no longer with the same enthusiasm. Once a week, she tours the grounds of Menabilly. Her long winter evenings are filled by watching television. Nothing else.

She turned seventy-four in May. Nine years have passed since the publication of her last novel, Rule Britannia. Her mind is arid; not a single idea grows there. It is unbearable. Every writer’s worst nightmare, the situation they all secretly fear, is now Daphne’s reality. Daphne, who never lacked imagination; Daphne, who would lock herself in her hut with a novel all day long, as if the book were a lover, the very substance of her life. What remains of that secret passion, that fever? Hell. Her friends and family look at her compassionately, while other people watch with curiosity and pity. And all those imbeciles who try to give her ideas, as if that would help drag her from this pit! Even her friend Alfred Leslie Rowse has been at it, suggesting that she write a book about her dogs. Something seems to have died inside her. That flame that made her live, that urge which drove her on, it is gone. Forever.

Daphne stands in her room, looking out the window. Her breakfast, brought up by Esther, is still on her bed. Untouched. She should be outside with her dogs, enjoying the sunshine, the sea. But she no longer feels like it. She no longer feels like doing anything. On her bedside table are all those medications prescribed by her doctor, which she swallows obediently every day, those pills with their complicated names. The only one she can remember is Mogadon, the one that makes her sleep; the others are for her “nerves” or for her “melancholy.” Since she started taking them, she has had dizzy spells, and she often has to lie down in the middle of the day. At night, even with Mogadon, it sometimes takes her a long time to fall asleep, and the waiting is unbearable.

A woman came to see her recently, a psychiatrist, a kind woman and a capable doctor, good at listening. But what could she do to help her regain her desire to write? And to think that, twenty years ago, Daphne had trotted out poems for her grandchildren, like those she wrote in a few minutes for Paul, a copy of which she recently found in a drawer.

Paul Zulu, an unlucky lad,

Was sometimes happy, sometimes sad,

He never knew–which made him vex’t-

What frightful thing would happen next.

Chicken pox, jaundice, tonsils, ‘flu,

He had the Lot, and measles too.

He swallowed pennies, burnt his bom,

And fell into a goldfish pond.

So many troubles, I declare,

Would even make an angel swear.39

Her grandchildren … She is only interested in the young ones now. The teenagers no longer amuse her.

What did she tell that psychiatrist? The two deaths that had deeply affected her: Frank Price in December 1977, just after the Bridge Too Far ordeal, and then her dear Ellen, in April 1978. And that trip to France in the fall of 1979. It still makes her shudder now. Oriel had convinced Daphne to pay her a visit. As she packed her suitcase, Daphne had thought that her friend was right: it would do her good to go back to the country she loved so much, it would clear her mind. The journey she had to make terrified her, but she was too embarrassed to mention this to her friends and family, so she simply asked Oriel to pick her up at the airport. But when she landed at Roissy, her friend was not there. Panic took hold of her, and Daphne had to sit down, frightened, out of breath, heart pounding. A couple noticed her state of distress and offered to help her. Daphne was so upset, she couldn’t speak. Her mouth was dry, she was close to fainting. At last Oriel appeared: the arrival boards had signaled the wrong gate, that was why she was late. It took Daphne a long time to calm down. The rest of her trip went well, however: Oriel took her to Chartres, Alençon, and Lisieux, in the footsteps of Saint Thérèse. She had regained her dark sense of humor and took obvious delight in speaking French. But behind the smiles, Oriel could tell, that tension never seemed to leave her.

And the death of her little red DAF, after fifteen years of good and loyal service … that had put her into such a state! No, Daphne did not want to hear anything about getting another vehicle. No matter how hard Kits tried to find one, the truth was that that model was no longer being made. In the end, she had to settle for a Ford, which she considered unbearable. Just after this problem with the car, she had idiotically fallen down the stairs, last month, probably because her pills give her dizzy spells. She didn’t break anything, but she spent three weeks in bed in the hospital at Fowey. When she came out, she felt numb, her limbs stiff, her morale low.

The sun shines in a cloudless sky, but Daphne doesn’t see it. How can she survive, if she can no longer write? Her publisher brought out a new collection of short stories last year, but they were all old, things she wrote in her youth. They must have realized that she will never produce any more novels. She didn’t tell them that, but they know. Livia Gollancz suggests publishing her notebook for Rebecca, the one she used during the trial, in 1947, as well as some articles Daphne wrote for the press, about ten years ago. She has to agree, for fear of running out of money, her biggest worry. She has given so much to the people around her: she helped her sister Jeanne buy her cottage, contributed toward her grandchildren’s school fees, and all three of her children have investments that she made on their behalf. What will she have left if she stops publishing books? So she says yes to Livia Gollancz. Are her readers fooled? Are they waiting for the new novel from the great Daphne du Maurier? The one that will never come?

Daphne watches the waves crash against the cliff. She opens the window, breathes in the salty sea air. That makes her feel better, for a few moments. But the pain returns, throbbing. A novelist who can no longer write is a being without life. One of the walking dead.

Daphne’s gaze wanders over to the medications on her bedside table. In her last letter to Oriel, in January, she wrote, hypocritically: Otherwise feel OK, and sleeping well, with Mogadon tablets.40

It only takes a second. A few Mogadon pills in the hollow of her palm, which easily finds its way to her mouth. A mouthful of water, and it’s over. She lies on the bed and waits. But instead of calming her, this action sends her into a panic. She feels like she’s suffocating, gets to her feet, paces the room. She hears the front door bang, Esther’s quick footsteps back from buying groceries. Daphne goes out to the top of the stairs, calls her housekeeper’s name. She’s done something stupid. They must call the doctor, right away. In her ears she hears the muffled thud of her heartbeat. Before her eyes, a thick fog blots out all light.

*   *   *

Every evening, after her tea, she rolls the little rubber ball along the living room floor for her dogs. Again and again, she watches Mac and Kenzie rush over to bring it back to her. In the background, her favorite songs are playing on a tape made by Kits: “Stardust” by Nat King Cole, “For the Good Times” by Perry Como, “Nice and Easy” by Frank Sinatra. The music does her good. Always those damned pills to take every morning, noon, and evening, and those damned nurses always there, watching her. She doesn’t want to talk to them, has nothing to say to them. She hides behind her newspaper, turns the volume up on the television, pretends she’s alone.

The fog is still there. It spreads around her, soft and oppressive. One night, she doesn’t remember when, Esther invites a famous television presenter whom she likes, Val Doonican, to Kilmarth. He’s passing through on his way to Fowey. Daphne never misses his appearances on TV. It makes her smile to see him in real life. Then she forgets. She forgets everything. Her memory is a jigsaw puzzle, with pieces missing. They vanished in the fog. It ate them, one by one, and slyly, it is now eating her, from inside. The only way to stop it, to defend herself against the encroaching fog, is to create new “routes.”* Each morning she decides on her plan for the day, and sticks to it, come what may. Her schedule doesn’t vary much. Every day, she goes for a walk on the beach at Par. On Mondays, she walks to Menabilly. The next day, she visits a neighbor, Mary Varcoe. On Saturdays, she goes to see Angela at Ferryside. All of this at the set time, accompanied by a nurse. If a TV program finishes after 10:30, Daphne turns it off anyway. Who cares what happens next? Crosswords kill time, which is good. The sofa cushions have to be placed in a certain order. Often, Daphne gets angry. Nothing is going right. If her “routes”* are not respected by other people, if her meal is more than five minutes late, she screams, has a tantrum. Everything makes her furious. She is given more pills to calm her down, and the fog grows thicker. Sometimes she wants to fight against it. She hates it. It stops her remembering. It has destroyed everything, sucked it all up. But at other moments, she succumbs to the fog like a drug, so she can have peace, not have to speak anymore, not have to respond.

On good days, when Daphne feels in top form, she peppers Oriel with questions, eager to take control of her memories again. Tell me, did I write Gone with the Wind, or was it someone else?41 Daphne notes down what she has forgotten on sheets of paper, trying desperately to remember. When she succeeds, a rare joy lights up her face. Her favorite moment, the only one that gives her any pleasure in these long, awful days, is the glass of whiskey she is allowed each evening. No more cigarettes; she stopped smoking a while back. The fog lifts during that moment, her head feels less empty. She likes to evoke the past, little by little. One evening, Oriel asks her if she misses writing. Daphne shrugs, looking glum, and says that she doesn’t miss anything anymore.

The only place where Daphne feels good is in her little basement chapel. She likes the smell of damp and mold down there. She kneels down, closes her eyes. God? Prayers? Not really, just the serenity of old walls, an unexplained and comforting mystic presence, as if someone is embracing her. Tenderness … it seems so long ago. She no longer knows how it feels. To give it, or to receive it. And love? Love is so distant. Passion, kisses, all that was in another life. When her family comes to visit her, it makes her happy, but not in the same, jolly way it used to. She remains taciturn in their company, leaves the table in the middle of a meal. Even Angela finds that conversations with Daphne lack liveliness now.

She approves of one of her nurses more than the others. Margaret. She enjoys conversations with her. With Margaret, she doesn’t coldly order her to put another log on the fire or to make her bed. Margaret is from Yorkshire, and she is a fan of the Brontë sisters’ novels. The fog has taken all Daphne’s books, but not Wuthering Heights, which she is able to discuss in detail with the young nurse. One evening, after playing ball with the dogs, Margaret starts dancing to Nat King Cole’s “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” Daphne admires her, astonished, then suddenly she gets to her feet, too, so thin and frail, and she begins to turn around, swept along by the music, a smile on her lips. She had forgotten what a pleasure it is to dance. She abandons herself to it now, happily, but a few days later she tells Margaret that she doesn’t want to dance anymore. Ever.

The fog is voracious. It has gobbled up all her memories. Now it takes possession of time, stretching and condensing it at will, leaving her disoriented. The weeks and months blur together, as bland as one another. Daphne abhors that blandness, but there is nothing she can do about it. The years slide past and she doesn’t even see them, just wearily succumbs to the passing of time. Her dog Mac dies, and her sorrow deepens. With Esther, she goes to visit Tod, now ninety-five, in a nearby retirement home. Tod is thrilled to see her, but Daphne doesn’t open her mouth. She stays only twenty minutes. Inside her, everything is turning dull. No matter how rigid the “routes”* that structure her days, Daphne is losing her taste for life. If this is what life is, she’s had enough of it. No more appetite, no more urges, no more desire. No more books either, even if one last anthology of old short stories is published by Gollancz in July 1987. Her walks on the beach at Par grow shorter and shorter. For a long time, Daphne put on a brave face with Kits, managing to laugh with him, as she did before, but now, she can’t pretend anymore. She’s had enough of pretending. She wants the curtain to fall. She wants to bow out.

*   *   *

Don’t eat anymore. It’s as simple as that. Hide her food without them knowing, in her napkin, in the pages of a book. Give bits of food to the dog, on the sly, all of this right under the noses of her nurses, Esther, her daughters. Chew it up, keep it in her mouth, then spit it back into her hand, into a handkerchief, into a cup, as soon as their backs are turned. No one suspects a thing. The fog has won. It encloses her in its impenetrable cloak, and Daphne can see nothing but that thick gray mist. The weight falls off her. She’s just skin and bones now, wrapped up in sweaters because she is always cold. The nurses want to force-feed her, give her small snacks, but Daphne keeps her mouth firmly shut and shakes her head. They try to trick her, to threaten her: no more whiskey for Lady Browning tonight if she doesn’t finish her meal. But Daphne has made her secret decision. She will not eat anymore.

In the spring of 1989, aged eighty-one, Daphne stands on the bathroom scales and the nurses see that she weighs only eighty-four pounds. Her eyes have lost their sparkle; her smile has vanished. Does she know the effect she is having on her loved ones? Sometimes, from her bedroom, she will see Flavia’s car, motionless on the path in front of Kilmarth’s gates. Her daughter, hands gripping the wheel, petrified. What is she doing? Daphne doesn’t realize that she is working up the courage to face the skeletal ghost that her mother has become. One morning, Margaret, the kind nurse, comes back. What is she doing there? Daphne does not know, either, that her friends and family called the nurse out of desperation, hoping that her presence would do some good to Lady Browning, whose emaciated appearance appalls everyone around her. Margaret does calm her down, but Daphne still won’t eat.

On Sunday, April 16, Daphne asks Margaret to take her in the car to the beach at Pridmouth. This request comes as a surprise—Margaret knows how obsessive Daphne is about her rituals—but she obeys, in spite of the rain. Slowly, holding tightly to the young nurse’s arm, wrapped up in a winter coat, Daphne walks down to the beach and looks out at sea for a long time, without a word, shivering in the cold wind and rain. She observes the waves, the remains of the Romanie, still there after fifty-nine years. Suddenly her voice rises up over the whisper of the waves, a remarkably strong voice coming from that feeble, fleshless body. She would like to go to Menabilly now, at once. Margaret can hardly believe it. On a Sunday? Menabilly is her Monday outing. But Lady Browning is so determined that she doesn’t dare refuse her. Slowly, they walk back to the car, then Margaret drives along the long, winding driveway that leads to the manor house. Still leaning on Margaret’s arm, Daphne walks across the lawn outside the house, then to the place where they scattered Tommy’s ashes. Her face is impassive. Impossible to tell what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling. The rain has stopped and a ray of sunlight caresses the façade of “Mena.” Margaret feels Daphne’s hand trembling under her sleeve. Back at Kilmarth, Daphne does not speak again, except to make a phone call to Oriel, as she does every Sunday evening, at 7:15 pm precisely. The conversation lasts a little longer than usual, and Daphne’s voice sounds assured, almost normal. When will Oriel come to see her? In ten days, her friend promises.

The next day, Monday April 17, there is another unexpected demand from Daphne: she wants to go see Angela at Ferryside, right away, whereas this is normally something she does on Saturdays. Margaret complies, troubled. The steep staircase at Ferryside is difficult to climb. Daphne takes it slowly, carefully, still with that same extreme determination. A kiss on her sister’s cheek, a few words, and the visit is over. In the middle of the afternoon, Daphne calls Oriel again. Her friend is startled to hear from her. They have talked only on Sunday evenings for years now. Oriel asks her if everything is all right. Yes, I just wanted to speak to you. Oriel senses that something unprecedented is happening and tries to reassure her by repeating that she will be there soon. Daphne nods, then pronounces this strange phrase: Are you writing? You must, it’s the only way! And before saying good-bye, Daphne whispers, I went down to the chapel today, and I said a prayer for you.42

On Tuesday April 18, around 10:00 pm, Daphne climbs slowly upstairs to her bedroom. Margaret helps her get ready for bed, then withdraws. Lying in her bed, Daphne closes her eyes, listens to the distant murmur of the sea, the sea she so often described in her books, and which is singing her to sleep now. The night stretches out in front of her, long and dreaded, despite the Mogadon that makes her feel sluggish. And yet she has done it, what she wanted to do, these past few days: she has said good-bye to the places she loved, to her dear sister. Eyes shut, Daphne sees herself again at “Mena,” walking from room to room, and the woman who is reflected in the windows, in the mirrors, is herself at forty, the mistress of Menabilly, self-assured, swaggering, the writer who has inspired the whole world, who has sold millions of books, invisible but famous, the writer who will be eternal, because of one novel in particular. On Sunday, when Daphne went to the beach, in the drizzle, it was Rebecca she saw in front of her, black hair blowing in the wind, dressed in her trench coat, a handkerchief embroidered with the intertwined initials R de W stuffed in the bottom of her pocket, its fabric stained with red lipstick, perfumed by her azalea scent. When Daphne had gone in the car with Margaret up the long driveway to “Mena” it was once again Rebecca who opened the gates of Manderley to them, with that triumphant smile that Maxim, her husband, so feared. Rebecca is the one to blame for all those critics who haven’t taken her seriously for the last fifty years, because she sold too many books, because they saw her as a storyteller rather than a writer. It is Rebecca’s fault that she was labeled with all those adjectives she hated: “romantic,” “Gothic,” “sentimental.” One would think they had never read any of her books, that they knew nothing about the darkness of her fictional world. But can she really hold it against that paper heroine who brought her so many readers, such glory? Perhaps the time has come for her to make her peace with Rebecca de Winter.

Through her closed eyelids, Daphne discerns the grounds of Menabilly in the spring, when the rhododendrons dazzle the surrounding greenery with their incandescence. The children are playing on the lawn, Tod is ringing the bell for lunch, and Tommy, at ease, cigarette between his lips, is looking up at the swallows flying above the treetops. It is good to see herself as a young woman again, beautiful, smiling, to feel the sunlight on her skin, to inhale the wooded smells of Menabilly’s grounds. The dreamer is all-powerful; her gaze is a colored kaleidoscope that snubs the present: that poor body stretched out on the sheets, that clinging fog that has been suffocating her for the last ten years. The long black ribbon comes loose, releasing her bound hands. The images rush past: her hut, her typewriter, her own fingers moving rapidly over the keys, the blank page filling with words. It is impossible to imprison a dreamer, because a dreamer can walk through walls, unlock doors, cast aside the weight of the years. The dreamer can do anything—Kicky whispered it to her. The dreamer is free.