JAMAICA INN WAS intentionally a melodramatic tale, in the manner of R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and, as Daphne had promised, full of smugglers and stirring, mysterious happenings. She wanted the atmosphere of Cornwall to be impressed upon every page, and it was. She wanted to excite her readers with a plot full of suspense, and she succeeded. This was no saga novel, slow, always edging towards fantasy, like The Loving Spirit, but a tightly plotted thriller containing some ingenious and unexpected twists. The writing showed a new tautness, and that sense of pace for which she had always striven was finally there. It had not been arrived at without a great deal of hard work – the structure of this Gothic tale was firmly put in place before she wrote a word. Beside these successes – of plot and atmosphere – the failures did not seem to matter, but they were there, to be exposed in all its subsequent dramatizations.
The characters, with the exception of the heroine, Mary Yellan herself, and the sinister Vicar of Altarnun, are dangerously near to caricature, particularly the all-important Joss Merlyn. He is, rather unfortunately, compared within one paragraph to a horse, a gorilla and a wolf and described as being not only nearly seven feet high but having fists like hams. In a similar way, much of the dialogue verges on the ludicrous, especially between Mary and her Aunt Patience. This only has to be spoken aloud to destroy the atmosphere of menace which is captured so easily in the written word and communicates itself to the solitary reader. But what is more interesting than the story itself, and what cannot be spoiled by any clumsiness of characterization or conversation, is the subtext to this tale of adventure. In her delineation of Mary Yellan and her plight Daphne was entirely consistent with her aim in all her previous fiction: to demonstrate the unevenness of the relationship between the sexes, to show the man as brute and the woman as victim. And this time she took the theme further.
From the first chapter Mary is a victim, first of circumstance and then of her uncle. She is full of ‘gallant courage’, but is told a girl cannot live alone and must have, after the death of her mother, the protection of a man, her uncle. Right from Mary’s first meeting with Joss his brutality revolts her. ‘Had she been a man’, we are told, she would challenge him, but as a woman she cannot. She is disgusted by her own weakness, but even more so by the terrified subservience of the pathetic Aunt Patience who makes her see women are ‘fools . . . shortsighted . . . unwise’. The more spirited Mary tries to be, the more helpless she feels as a woman, and when her uncle says admiringly ‘they ought to have made you a boy’ she wishes bitterly they had. But what disturbs her most is the feeling that she is becoming attracted to Jem Merlyn, her uncle’s brother, who, though not a brute, is a ruffian and as dominant as his brother. Mary, though she has ‘no illusions about romance’, knows that there is ‘something inside her’ responding to Jem – ‘Jem Merlyn was a man and she was a woman’ and that was the way of things.
Mary’s despair over her own sexual urges is matched by her consciousness of what Joss can do to her if he wishes. Violence is everywhere – this is above all a violent and turbulent novel both in the brilliant landscape descriptions and in the emotional intensity generated – and she senses it. Joss lays a finger across her mouth, he bends her wrist, he tells her he could have ‘had her’ the first week she arrived at the inn, his mouth hovers over her, but he says he will resist ‘riding away with you to glory’ because he has a ‘soft spot’ for her. More and more Mary becomes aware that sexual attraction is the ruin of women.
Even nastier is the shock for Mary when she discovers, late in the novel, that the seemingly gentle and kind Vicar of Altarnun has in the drawer of his desk hideous caricatures: no man can be trusted. When the vicar forces her out on to the moor, she is ‘degraded’ by his eyes. Her disgust only pleases him. Everywhere she turns Mary is leered at and treated as being of no account. Men, and what they do to other men – the scene in which an idiot boy is stripped naked and whipped is one of the most powerful in the book – sicken her. And yet, at the end of the story, she cannot resist Jem’s invitation to share his life, ‘because I must’. She is a woman saved, a woman believing herself to be in love, but a woman beaten, left with no option, capitulating without joy on the basis of hope, a woman following the dictates of heart and body but not mind. It was a deeply pessimistic view of a woman’s life.
The novel was reviewed as a Cornish tale of smugglers and villains with great emphasis on the sense of atmosphere. The definite feeling among the critics was that it was all ‘jolly good fun’ and ‘an exciting brew . . . just the thing for a late evening’s reading’. It sold very well at once, with Gollancz reprinting on publication.1 Within three months Jamaica Inn had sold, in England, more than all Daphne’s first three novels put together and had become her first big commercial success. Naturally, Victor wanted more, as soon as possible, more of the same, and urged her to give him another novel quickly. But she had also signed a contract with him, a month before she signed one for a novel, for another work of non-fiction. This she had put aside when the idea for Jamaica Inn came to her, but now she turned to it and suggested she should first write another biography, in the style of Gerald, about her grandfather George du Maurier. Victor would much rather have had another novel, but he was wise and sensible enough to encourage his young author to follow her own inclination. So Daphne began researching material for what became The Du Mauriers, looking out family letters and searching for birth, death and marriage certificates, but just as she had gathered together enough to make a start, the news she had dreaded came through: Tommy’s battalion was posted to Egypt and this time it was no rumour.
For the last three and a half years Daphne had got away with only playing at being an army officer’s wife. She performed as few duties as possible and, beyond writing letters to try to better the conditions of those poor wives she had seen in the married quarters, she did not involve herself in the life of the regiment, social or otherwise. But when, early in 1936, it was confirmed that Tommy’s battalion was indeed destined for Egypt she realized at once that she would be trapped in the kind of situation she dreaded. Once in a foreign country she would have to live cheek by jowl with the rest of the officers’ wives, she would be unable to escape to Cornwall and would become more prominent, especially since Tommy had been promoted and she was now the wife of the commanding officer. She would also have to learn to run another household, with foreign servants, whose language she could not speak, putting her at an even greater disadvantage. There was absolutely nothing she looked forward to about this posting. It was no good friends and family envying her the opportunity to see some other part of the world – if she was going to travel, she wanted to do it on her own and not be transported with a two-year-old child to a way of life she detested the thought of.
But her feelings of dread did not for one moment cause her to consider not going with the regiment. It was her duty, the first real test of herself as an army wife. She loved Tommy and, though she suspected she would not be as miserable without him as he would be without her, she too could not have faced a long parting. She duly sailed with Tessa and Margaret, her nanny, in March 1936 on the SS Cameronia. At least the voyage was pleasant, with the sea calm, the breezes invigorating and the Captain not only very civilized but a reader of Conrad. Life on board ship was more endurable than she had expected and also more dramatic. A woman who maintained she had not known she was pregnant gave birth one night and Daphne, together with all the other women, was asked by the ship’s doctor if she could sew some baby clothes. She couldn’t, of course, never having plied a needle in all her twenty-eight years,2 but she did visit the new mother and tried to be supportive in a vague kind of way. As ever, what ordinary women had to go through, and the fortitude with which they accepted their fate, astonished her. Repeatedly, such events reminded her of how privileged she was and she scolded herself for not always remembering this.
Once in Alexandria all awareness of being lucky left her. She hated it from the moment she arrived. The house the Brownings settled into, 13 Rue Jessop, was thought quite beautiful by the subsequent occupants,3 but Daphne rated it merely as ‘nice’ and damned the garden as ‘little better than a cat run’. There was an excellent housekeeper called Hassan, so she had none of the domestic worries she had anticipated, but she did not feel comfortable. Hassan would appear each morning to be given his orders and she had no orders to give, simply wishing he would do whatever was necessary. Tommy was extremely busy, eagerly planning manoeuvres in the desert for his troops, and Tessa settled down very happily with Margaret who took to Egypt at once. This left Daphne with plenty of time to herself, but instead of relishing this happy state of affairs it only increased her restlessness. What was the point of having so much free time if she couldn’t go for long walks? In Alexandria, quite apart from the heat and dust, she found walking was impossible. There was, she reported to Foy, ‘nowhere to walk’, and when she tried she exposed herself to ‘natives who were doing their toilet and worse’. She swore ‘every other person is blind or has a limp or sore’ and, though she said defiantly that she knew very well how this judgement made her sound, she was convinced ‘the natives are dirty’. She tried to fight what she knew was mere prejudice but failed – ‘I can’t help thinking the natives are filthy and never really clean.’ She made no attempt to learn to speak the language but at the same time complained bitterly that ‘the creatures don’t speak English’.
It was not only the natives she despised – she loathed the English out there too. She condemned them in one sweeping generalization as ‘horrible Manchester folk’. The place was ‘full of gossip’ and the main pastimes were cocktail parties and charades – ‘it is ghastly’. She described to Angela ‘the cocktail party in the mess . . . God knows what it cost, as there were about 350 guests and everyone drank champagne cocktails’. Though commenting that she supposed she would get used to it all ‘in about a month’, she did no such thing. By the second month her hatred for the whole of Alexandria was more violent than ever. ‘Imagine’, she wrote to Foy, with an exaggeration not meant to be amusing, ‘the sham buildings at Wembley suddenly planted in a very dreary sea-side resort like St Leonards-on-Sea that by some unfortunate chance had been invaded by half-castes . . . it is entirely lacking in charm, much as the outskirts of Southampton lack charm.’ Savagely, she sneered at those ‘who talk about the glamour of the East’. There was no glamour. Even the seafront reminded her of ‘an inferior Blackpool’ (though she had never set foot in Blackpool). Grudgingly, she admitted it was pleasant swimming, and that, once they had procured a boat, some Sundays spent on it were quite enjoyable, but these were not to be compared with the bliss of sailing Yggy out of Fowey harbour. The only people who made social life tolerable at all were John and Karen Prescott (Tommy’s old friend, who had taken him to Fowey, and his wife) and two other couples, the Deakins and the Agars (who were a Royal Navy officer and his wife). These six people had no idea Daphne was as miserable as she was, but then it was difficult to guess. In her head she might rage and fume and hurl abuse at Egypt, and in her letters there was some outlet for this, but to the world at large she presented a perfectly calm and composed front. A little aloof, perhaps, until one got to know her, but then she was known to be shy, and known also to be a writer, rather an exotic creature in that setting. Clearly, she needed to set herself a little apart, be a little retiring, in order to get on with it, and this was allowed.
What she was getting on with was The Du Mauriers, regretting she had ever started on it. She had asked Victor Gollancz for an extension of time to write the book before she left England and now tried to get down to it. It proved harder than she expected. The temperature in the room where she wrote was over 80ºF even in the morning and by the afternoon, in spite of keeping the shutters closed, it had climbed to nearly 100ºF. Everyone else, she wrote to her publisher, simply lay about gasping, but she was doing her best to work. By July, she was afraid her simple family history was ‘developing into a sort of Forsyte Saga’ and also afraid, though she did not tell Victor Gollancz this, that it was getting into a muddle. She had started off ‘writing it like Gerald, so that it reads like a novel’, but had then become so absorbed in all the old letters she had found – ‘a miracle I came across them’ – that she was afraid she was becoming bogged down. Her instinct was right. The book is divided into five parts, beginning with the story of her great-great-grandmother Mary Anne Clarke, mistress of the Duke of York. All the facts were real, but the dialogue, and much of the background action, is imagined and this time the clash between fact and fiction caused her to feel uneasy. In Gerald she had made up nothing, essentially, but in The Du Mauriers, because the characters were not known to her, she sought to bring them alive by inventing situations which were sometimes hard to marry with the facts. It became ‘a grind’ to write, the weather grew hotter, and she began to feel positively ill, sitting sweating over her typewriter, hour after hour, in the appalling heat of August. The rhythm of the finished book reflects the dogged determination of how it was written – against the grain, with none of the confidence she had felt with Gerald. Finishing it at the beginning of September, she wrote to Gollancz: ‘I am pleased to say the du Mauriers have had enough said about them . . . done about 100,000 words . . . I feel it is something of a tour de force to have written it in an Egyptian summer.’ She couldn’t decide how it had turned out – ‘too dog-tired to think at all’ – but hoped she had produced ‘the sort of fat leisurely book that people enjoy reading during winter evenings over their knitting . . . talk of nostalgia, I’m bulging with it’.
When the manuscript had been sent back to London with the Deakins, who were going on leave, Daphne was more than ordinarily exhausted. She was thinner than ever, but could not eat because she felt sick. Now the book was finished, she had no energy, and especially not for the lively three-year-old Tessa, who she reported to Foy was ‘rather too much in evidence’. Listlessly, she lay on her bed, longing for England – not only Cornwall, but all of lovely England. ‘I had never realised I liked England so much,’ she confided in her mother. Her ‘longing for Fowey’ was ‘so intense it is a pain under the heart continually’. She dreamed of Cumberland too, remembering the greenery and rushing streams and still, dark tarns, and even of Oxford Street, which she had always hated, but for which she now had ‘a vivid affection . . . the rain, and the jumble of buses’. Great waves of depression swept over her when she woke up, and she told her mother never would she have believed ‘mal du pays could be so bad’. Finding a description of the plant Daphne in a book one day, she was struck by how it applied to herself: ‘The Daphne loves its roots in the shade and its head in the sun . . . it is very short-lived in hot dry soils.’ Well aware of how all this sounded she vowed, ‘If I go on much longer I shall burst into tears of self-pity.’ One thing was certain: after this posting was over she was never going to go ‘east of Looe, or west of Par again’.
Naturally, Daphne’s extreme listlessness, her increasing pallor and her lack of appetite had all been noticed and were causing concern. Margaret, under the pretence that Tessa’s prickly heat rash needed examining, asked for the doctor to call and, when he obliged, wondered if he would just cast his eye over Mrs Browning, about whose condition she had her suspicions. These were proved correct: Mrs Browning, the doctor reported, was definitely pregnant. Going into Mrs Browning’s room, Margaret found her lying face downwards, sobbing into her pillow. She refused to believe it was true – she did not want another baby and had done everything possible to prevent becoming pregnant. It was treated by her as an unmitigated disaster – ‘The worst!’ she wrote, dramatically, to Tod, ‘another infant on the way!!’ The only consolation was that now she had an excuse for going home to England, ‘because nothing will induce me to stay here and have it’. She felt so ill, unlike the first time, and dreaded to think that ‘because the baby started when I was thoroughly run down it will be a mingy, awful thing with yellow skin’. It would turn out, she was sure, to be another girl and not the son she longed for – ‘a fretful, puking daughter with Egyptian colouring, born complete with tarbrush’. She would keep ‘a bucket . . . handy for such an eventuality’, she joked, gloomily. Tommy, trying to cheer her up by predicting it would be twin boys this time, only made things worse. If by some miracle even one boy emerged, she told her mother, that was the only thing which would ‘compensate for this awful blow’. All she could eat was the occasional cream cracker – nothing else would stay down. Clearly, she needed to escape the fearful heat, both for her own sake and the baby’s, so a holiday in Cyprus was quickly arranged in mid-September.
This interlude was a great success from the minute she and Tommy and Tessa and Margaret boarded the ship to take them to Cyprus. They stayed in a good hotel up in the mountains and she was invigorated by the sharp air, so different from the dusty heat of Alexandria. She even climbed Mount Olympus in spite of feeling sick, and in the evenings she read Mrs Gaskell. Slowly, she managed to adjust herself to being pregnant again and, if it had not been for the necessity of returning to Alexandria before going to England, she felt she could now cope. But Alexandria was even worse than it had been before, when they returned at the end of the month – ‘a nightmare’, she vowed to Tod, ‘I didn’t know it was possible to hate a country with such intensity’. All that kept her going were plans for her return home to ‘an English winter, fogs and all’. Told that all the ships might be full of people going back for the coronation of Edward viii, she was in a panic until Tommy had secured berths for her, Tessa and Margaret. She utterly confused her mother with complicated arrangements about where she would have her second child. She did not want to go into a home – ‘I have a grim antipathy for Homes’ – but instead instructed Muriel to rent an apartment in Queen Anne’s Mansions4 and to wire in code when she had found out the price. ‘SAGDA’ was to mean ‘terms too high’ or ‘ADIPB’ to read ‘anticipate much difficulty’.
By November, with all her plans made, and with the weather cooler, she was much happier. She stopped being sick and was greatly cheered by Victor Gollancz writing to say that he was delighted with The Du Mauriers and was going to print 10,000 copies, the same as for Gerald, with every anticipation of doing as well with it. At last, well enough to visit Cairo, a long-awaited treat, she found it no more enticing than Alexandria – ‘like Hammersmith Broadway . . . and the Bazaar an inferior Burlington Arcade’. She had also seen the Pyramids, which, she wrote to Tod, were ‘just like a couple of slag heaps, my dear, on the Great Western Road’. Not only could anyone who wanted it have Egypt, they could have ‘the whole Eastern hemisphere’, and she swore she had persuaded Tommy to retire if he was ever sent to India.
With a prejudice against a whole country and its people as violent as Daphne’s, there was obviously no hope of her ever learning to adapt, and nor did she try to. It was no joke of hers to say she had no intention of enduring another foreign posting – she meant it. After this second baby was born, she planned to return with Tommy to Alexandria, when he in turn had finished the three months’ leave he was due to have in May, and see his term there out, but as far as she was concerned there must be no more foreign postings. The thought that this might stand in the way of Tommy’s career did not seem to occur to her – she swore that, although Tommy loved his work out there, he hated Egypt too, and that his own health suffered. He had had bouts of stomach trouble and complained of lumbago, and she was convinced that he would not be fit until he was home. Bracing him to bear her departure, which he dreaded, she tried to look ahead to the next happy summer in Fowey. This comforting vision was marred only by the thought of the second baby. Her heart sank when she contemplated managing two (though in fact she had done very little managing of the existing one).
Margaret went to Cairo for a weekend off just before Christmas, leaving Tessa to be looked after by her mother, who found it all ‘rather exhausting’, though she admitted Tessa was ‘very well behaved while nanny was away’. Her little daughter was a mystery to her. Right from the moment of Tessa’s birth she seemed to concentrate on stressing how different she was from herself – she was ‘all Browning’ and ‘more like Angela than me’. Even when she was reporting Tessa’s cleverness it was only to disapprove and say how she ‘disliked precocity in a child’. Any show of independence and her daughter was ‘vilely headstrong and disobedient’, an opinion not shared by her nanny. When Tessa started dancing classes and insisted on a pretty frock to dance in, her mother professed to be horrified by her love of clothes. Looking after her, on the rare occasions when she did so, she was moved to comment to her mother, ‘I shall never be a real child lover . . . looking after one is just a grind, I think.’ Looking after two did not bear thinking about.
Yet she was not exactly the cold, remote figure these remarks might suggest. Always gentle, always kind, she was, from a young child’s point of view, a very attractive mother to have. She had a sense of fun, which small children relished, and an imagination which appealed to them. The distance she felt between herself and Tessa was not shared by Tessa, at that stage. But, unconsciously or not, she was extending the kind of treatment to Tessa which she herself felt her own mother had dispensed, and it had hurt her greatly. Then, she had thought it somehow her mother’s fault; now, she acted as though it were Tessa’s. There was no Gerald this time to complicate matters – though Tommy loved his daughter, he did not have even remotely the kind of closeness to her which Gerald had once had with Daphne. But over and over in her letters Daphne talked about the three-year-old Tessa as though she were observing a fascinating but strange being who had little to do with her. She was repeating the history of a relationship, copying her own relationship with her mother as it once had been. It was as though she wished to make Tessa suffer as she had suffered, which for a woman of such imagination, sensitivity and self-awareness was extraordinary. But, in fact, because Tessa was temperamentally very different, the damage was not as great. Tessa was emotionally much better able to stand her mother’s remoteness than Daphne had been able to accept Muriel’s.5
Quite deliberately Daphne made plans to separate herself from the new baby even before it was born. She was going to leave both children in England when she returned with Tommy to Egypt the following July. It would, she wrote, ‘not be worth carting them out’, and they would be much happier with their nanny at home. This was a perfectly sensible decision, one made by many army wives whose husbands served in hot countries, but it was an indication that this time Daphne would not even allow herself to think of being unable to leave a three-month-old baby. She had had enough of intrusive emotional bonds. Her father had attempted to bind her with them and now her husband did the same, or tried to, and she was set against children adding to the constraints she felt. But the reality of parting from Tessa proved harder than she had anticipated, and surprised her.
On 16 January 1937 she sailed for England with Tessa and her nanny. Margaret was going to take Tessa to her own home while Daphne went on alone to Fowey, so she left the ship at Tilbury, leaving Daphne to disembark at Plymouth. Saying goodbye to her daughter, and watching her being taken off by Margaret, distressed Daphne more than she had ever thought possible. It was, she reported to her mother, ‘agony’, and told her more about herself than she dared admit. Would Tessa be happy? Would Margaret be fit enough to look after her (she had been feeling ‘out of sorts’ lately)? Instead of feeling relieved by her little daughter’s departure she only felt guilty and worried.
Once at Ferryside, the anxiety lifted. Margaret wrote, saying all was well, and being back in Cornwall lifted Daphne’s own spirits immediately. She went for her beloved cliff top walks, blessing the rain and fog and luxuriating in the strong, cold winds which made others shiver. She was just so intensely happy to be home and pushed out of her mind the awful reminder that she was not home for good. It did occur to her that she could use the new baby as a reason for not returning to Alexandria in July, but she rejected this dangerous temptation. Tommy was wretched without her and his letters, full of his depression, touched her. She could not desert him and must go back to ‘that vile place I hate’. She stayed until March in Fowey, loving every day of it, and observing the publication of The Du Mauriers from a distance. In Cornwall she felt remote from the book’s reception and, because she thought it pretentious to subscribe to a press-cuttings agency, and even worse to buy extra newspapers or magazines, she was not sure whether the book had been a success. The answer was that critically the book had nothing like the reception of Gerald – no reviewer was really enthusiastic – and from the sales’ point of view it was a slow starter. But ‘Q’ liked it, and so did all the family, and Tod and Ferdy, so Daphne felt her efforts had not been wasted. Once the baby was born she would start thinking about another book, but she wrote to Victor Gollancz that ‘I don’t intend doing any work until August . . . suppose you want a novel . . . I would like to do a funny one about Empire society . . . but on the other hand might go to the opposite extreme and write rather a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower . . . Psychological and rather macabre.’ But first the ordeal of giving birth had to be endured again.
To her relief, it was not so terrible. ‘The child literally whizzed out,’ she wrote to Tod, after the birth on 2 April. It was another girl, but to her own surprise she found ‘I didn’t mind nearly so much about it not being a boy. Third time lucky?!’ To another friend she confided that since ‘the child’ had arrived so easily, she could be forgiven both for being a week early and for being a girl. Tommy, who arrived back in England in May, was ‘in the seventh heaven’ at it being safely over and the baby not the undernourished scrap they had anticipated, but a healthy, pretty baby. It was he who chose the name – Flavia, ‘heroine of one of his favourite books, The Prisoner of Zenda’. Within days of Flavia’s birth her mother had decided she was quieter than Tessa and not as robust. This helped Daphne keep to her original decision to leave both children in England when she returned with Tommy, and she went ahead with arrangements for Margaret to look after them both at Rousham, her mother-in-law’s home, where her sister-in-law Grace could act as guardian. The three months of Tommy’s leave flew by, but ‘like everything one looks forward to enormously’, she wrote to Tod, ‘hasn’t come up to dreams’. It had proved impossible to shut out of her mind the thought of returning to Egypt and she was once more experiencing a mild post-natal depression, not helped by the imminent sale of the Cannon Hall cottages. Her mother and Angela and Jeanne were to live full-time at Ferryside and ‘some shilling [disappointing] people from Kensington’ were looking round the cottages, while she and Tommy were once more living there.
On 30 July, the Brownings returned to Egypt and Daphne tried to settle at once, in spite of the heat, to writing her new novel, the ‘psychological and rather macabre’ one. By the end of September she was obliged to report to Victor Gollancz that she was ‘ashamed to tell you that progress is slow on the new novel and there is little likelihood of my bringing back a finished MS in December’. Progress had actually been worse than slow – ‘the first 15,000 words I tore up in disgust and this literary miscarriage has cast me down rather as I have never done such a thing before and hate going over the ground again’. She tried to blame the weather but knew this was not a good excuse, because of having written The Du Mauriers the year before, ‘though how they found their way onto my typewriter . . . heaven knows’. Sitting staring at this same typewriter, with the heat making even her fingers perspire and stick to the keys, she experienced a feeling of panic. What if she had lost the ability to write at all? All she had was a provisional title, Rebecca, 15,000 words in the waste-paper basket, and her notes. These read: ‘very roughly the book will be about the influence of a first wife on a second . . . she is dead before the book opens. Little by little I want to build up the character of the first in the mind of the second . . . until wife 2 is haunted day and night . . . a tragedy is looming very close and crash! bang! something happens . . . it’s not a ghost story.’ But she could not at first think what the crash and bang would be, or even the ‘something’ that happened. Instead, she found herself fantasizing about Cornwall and in particular about Menabilly. It sustained her in the terrible heat to wander in her daydreams through the woods around Menabilly and to hear the sea pounding in her ears. The story took on a hallucinatory quality from the first, long before she had worked out the details of the plot – the unnamed heroine’s interior life was what became important.
Meanwhile, struggling to get over her ‘literary miscarriage’, she was finding this second Egyptian experience had something to recommend it. In November she went with Tommy on a trip down to the Libya border and was mesmerized by the beauty of the desert. Here, at last, she could feel the ‘magic of the East’ whose existence she had denied. They camped – ‘sleeping under an umbrella’ – and got up at dawn, with stars still in the vast sky, ‘to make a hearty bacon and egg breakfast at sunrise’. She adored it – this was exactly how she wanted to live, far from other people, like nomads. She wrote to Grace that she was now, like Tommy, ‘desert mad . . . I didn’t know I had it in me’. It gave her an ambition: she wanted to ‘cross the Andes with a pack on my shoulder’.
Instead, she returned to Alexandria for another month to try to make some headway with Rebecca. Victor Gollancz was chasing her and wanted to announce the book in his next catalogue. She had signed a three-book contract with him and he was eager to see the first fruit. But, though she applied herself diligently, she still found she had not accomplished much. Partly this was because she was not sleeping well and had not the psychic energy she needed to write. After Flavia’s birth she had resorted to sleeping pills and wrote to her mother that she always kept ‘half a medinol’6 beside her. Then there was the socializing in which she was obliged to take part. Tommy’s battalion was ending its tour of duty in Egypt and there were endless farewell parties, which she hated but could not always avoid. No one who was at these functions knew how much the young, pretty, demure and shy-looking commanding officer’s wife inwardly raged at ‘the effort of talking . . . I don’t know how people stand it’. Nor did they realize the effort any kind of entertaining in her own home caused her. She had servants and needed to do nothing except give orders but this, as ever, was precisely the trouble: she couldn’t. Tommy, who liked a well-run house, was exasperated and, she wrote dismally to her mother, ‘says even the best servant would go to pieces with me’. Her feelings of inferiority in this respect, and of being intimidated, went straight into the character of the second Mrs de Winter. She herself felt an outcast, an outsider, someone who did not fit in and was aware of it. She began to imagine what it must be like to feel as she did, but to have a social background, and a marital one, which would make those feelings even more acute. More and more her theme came to be not simply one of how jealousy motivates people but how feelings of isolation distort reality.
By the time she and Tommy sailed for home in mid-December, she had completed only a quarter of the novel and wrote to her mother just before leaving that ‘I haven’t been able to get going properly over here’. She was worried that the reunion with her children and settling down in a new home would further prevent her from working, and Victor was snapping at her heels. This was one of the reasons why she intended to go down to Ferryside for Christmas without the children. Her mother was shocked to be told this – surely, when she had not seen her children for almost five months and would be with them only ten days between landing and coming to Cornwall, surely she could not leave them behind, especially Tessa, who would realize what was happening? But Daphne could and would. She was defensive but determined. Tessa, she wrote, was ‘just too young to join a communal life of grown-ups’ and Muriel clearly did not appreciate ‘what a handful she would be’. There would be no peace – ‘it means meals together and being in the big room all the time, no sort of nursery existence, and you will think me ridiculous perhaps, but I do not think it is right until she is 6 or 7 to be taken away to stay like that. You will say she is no trouble, she is advanced for her age, but that is more or less my point . . . I do so dread her becoming too precocious and for the next few years want her to lead as quiet and nurseryfied an existence as possible.’ She was anxious her mother should not think her ‘a brute . . . or unkind’ which would make her ‘very unhappy’. Muriel, who had had three children, was told that she probably did not realize ‘what a strain’ Tessa would be. And besides, if she came with them, ‘I should get no work done’.
So Tessa and Flavia stayed with their nanny, and Daphne and Tommy had a relaxing time at Ferryside. Angela was about to have her first novel published – The Perplexed Heart – and there was that to celebrate as well as Christmas. Progress on Rebecca went better, but once more had to be put aside while the Brownings moved into a new house. It was called Greyfriars and was at Church Crookham, near Fleet, in Hampshire, near where Tommy was now stationed. Daphne loved the beautiful old house immediately, but reunited with her children found settling down difficult. Like many writers, she found domestic disruption the hardest thing to handle – she could not concentrate while everything was not orderly and organized, even if she did have servants. She needed to have a set routine, to feel that everything ran smoothly, everything was comfortingly familiar, before she could enjoy the peace of mind she needed to write. Eventually, it came. By the beginning of March she was writing at a tremendous pace and enjoying herself, though she was a little unsure of what she was producing. ‘It’s a bit on the gloomy side . . .’, she wrote to Victor, ‘and the psychological side7 may not be understood.’
By April she had finished it and sent it to Victor – ‘here is the book . . . I’ve tried to get an atmosphere of suspense . . . the ending is a bit brief and a bit grim.’ It was, she warned, certainly too grim ‘to be a winner’. Victor gave it to his senior editor, Norman Collins, telling him to read it at once – ‘it ought to be looked at for the possibility of turning it into this year’s Cronin’. Norman Collins read it in two days and reported back euphorically: ‘The new Daphne du Maurier contains everything that the public could want.’ Daphne had been wrong: she, and Gollancz, had their winner.