AT CLOUD’S HILL, Daphne had plenty of time to reflect on the progress she had made in trying to reform herself. She was not pleased with her reflections, confessing in a letter to Garth that when she looked back on her behaviour during Tommy’s weekend leaves over the past few months, she saw she had acted ‘like a sour old Army wife in an Indian hill station, who has a disapproving eye on all gaiety’. She had found herself jealous of Tommy’s response to the adoration of the eight unmarried daughters of a local family – known as the ‘Brigade Butterflies’, because of their attachment to the whole brigade – even though she knew perfectly well it was harmless. The Brownings both joked about these girls, du Maurier style, mocking them. But there had been one particular Saturday, just before she left Langley End, when she and Tommy had lunched with the family of the ‘Butterflies’ and she had been horrified at herself. There was ‘a lot of tennis afterwards, and poor Tommy thoroughly enjoying himself as a contrast to hard work, and because, of course, I could not play and felt I looked awful with my floppy clothes, I resented his enjoyment and gaiety amongst a troop of pretty girls . . . and was quite snappy and sour and horrid to him in the evening. I was most ashamed of myself and disheartened to think I could get like that . . . the whole incident quite depressed me.’
But that was not the whole story. What also depressed her was that she was beginning to prefer the company of Christopher1 Puxley to Tommy’s. Whenever her husband joined her at Langley End he arrived exhausted and bad-tempered, endlessly cursing the stupidity of everyone at the War Office and saying he had to do every bloody thing himself. He was unable to talk about anything but the war, which he saw, with reason, as going from bad to worse. Invasion was still a strong possibility, and he foresaw ‘a big boil-up in the East’ as inevitable. Christopher, by contrast, talked about ‘music and birds, and islands and things’. He was quiet, gentle, rather languid, whereas Tommy was noisy, energetic and so worried he had forgotten how to smile except when the ‘Brigade Butterflies’ were around. Christopher made her feel secure, Tommy made her feel threatened. She was ashamed that when Tommy went back to his brigade she was relieved. The house fell quiet once more and the strains of Christopher playing Chopin, ‘divinely’, wafted through the air. She lay on a sofa, evening after evening, listening to him play and studying him. He was a man who seemed somehow familiar to her, as though she had known him in another life, in different circumstances and company. His real name was Henry and he was two years younger than Tommy. In the First World War he had been in the Royal Navy and fought at the Battle of Jutland where he was wounded. Now he farmed and helped with Civil Defence, but had plenty of time to follow his passion for music and luxurious cars (he had a Bentley and an Alvis, both kept in immaculate condition). Clearly, he was wealthy and had the ease of manner to go with it. His was an ancient Irish family and he had a photograph of himself taken just before he married in 1920, standing before the ruins of Dunboy Castle at Berehaven, the ancestral home in Ireland, which had been burnt down in a fire. The more she got to know him, the more of ‘a menace’ he became.
Always used to analysing her own emotions, Daphne was a little afraid to look too deeply into her feelings for Christopher Puxley. It was a relief to leave Langley End and move to Cloud’s Hill for three months, even though she immediately missed the comfort and company it had afforded her. She did not mind that Tommy’s brigade had now moved out of the area, and that he was somewhere near Ramsgate – ‘better for him to be out of sight and hearing’. She preferred to be on her own for the birth with a woman doctor in attendance, which greatly pleased her – she did not like male doctors to assist at childbirth.
In the event, the doctor did little assisting. The birth of her third child on 3 November was easy – ‘only half an hour and the doctor hadn’t time to get her rubber gloves on’, she wrote to Tod – and the happiest. ‘I have done it at last . . . a son!’ Her air of triumph was blatant – ‘For seven years I’ve waited to see “Mrs Browning, a son” in The Times.’ He was to be called Christian, the name written on the cupboard doors of the nursery so long ago, after Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress (like Flavia his name came from one of his father’s favourite books). His given names were Christian Frederick du Maurier, after his father and to keep faith with Gerald. And Gerald was very much part of the euphoria which filled Daphne, not only because this was the grandson he, cheated of a son, had wanted, but because of that long-remembered wish, so disturbing at the time, that one day he would like to come back as her son. Right from the moment of birth she was saying that Christian looked like Gerald, seemed like Gerald, and would undoubtedly grow up to act like Gerald. Tommy, to whom she saw no resemblance in her son whatsoever, amused her by ignoring this prediction and promptly entering his day-old son for his regiment for the year 1960.
Margaret, the children’s nanny, who had seen Mrs Browning with Tessa at six weeks old and Flavia at birth, was astonished by her behaviour this time. This baby was treated quite differently. Mrs Browning could hardly bear to have him taken from her arms to be put into his cradle. Far from not wanting to do much for him, she wanted to do everything. The girls noticed too – at seven and three they were aware that their new brother received all the cuddles and kisses which had been rare in their own young lives. But they were drawn into all the adoration and, instead of exhibiting signs of resentment and jealousy, were surprisingly happy to accept that their mother felt towards Christian what she had not seemed able to feel towards them. There was no doubt in the minds of anyone who saw Daphne then that she had at last been given her heart’s desire.
But within a month, in spite of her passionate love for her son, Daphne found herself in the grip of a depression worse than those that had followed the births of her daughters. She could not understand it. She had had an easy birth, had been given the son she craved, and yet by the end of November she felt very low. She tried to tell herself it was because of the dark days, and her worry about Tommy who was on the south-east coast, but she knew it was more than that. She felt distressed about herself, about her own worthlessness, and wrote to Garth that, when she turned ‘the old searchlight’ on herself, she did not like what she saw. There was, about all her letters to Garth, a pious tone, most unlike the tone of any of her other letters, and it was obvious she was telling him what she thought he wanted to hear. Just as, in the company of different people, she automatically adapted her outward behaviour to suit them, so in her letters she adapted her style and sentiments. But, nevertheless, she was genuinely a little ashamed of herself. She had not in any way betrayed Tommy and yet she felt she had been somehow disloyal in thought. When he dashed home to see her he looked so worn and harassed and she felt guilty that this had ever annoyed her. She came to the conclusion that her depression arose from self-pity and that since she had no reason to feel sorry for herself, in fact quite the reverse, she must take herself in hand and conquer it. The only way she knew how was through work – she needed ‘the mental exercise to keep me going and it is fun, you know, creating a story and incidents and characters . . . and [I] thump away in the world of imagination’.
She found as she lay resting, thinking about how hateful the war was, that her mind flew to the past, to another, quieter age when there were no bombs, and also to Cornwall, where she yearned to be, out on the sea in Restless, the sailing ketch which they now had, as well as Ygdrasil, with Tommy at the helm. Into her head came a vision of ‘storms, and battles, and the sea, and the hulk of a pirate ship lying at anchor in Frenchman’s Creek’. There was a pirate, who would try to tempt away a wife who no longer loved her husband. She wrote to Foy that this war was ‘beyond me’, and she wanted to escape into another world. But in that other world, she knew before she began that she would be struggling with emotions she felt in this troubled one. In her vision, the pirate bore an uncanny resemblance to Christopher Puxley.
In December, just before Christmas, Victor Gollancz came to lunch and was excited to be given an outline of what Daphne’s new novel would be about when she had time and strength to write it. She had her suspicions about how he came ‘to motor fifty miles out of his way’ to drop in on her, and joked to Garth that she would not be surprised ‘if he were a really bad spy and ought to be watched’. He was, she observed, ‘a long way from being changed or saved’ according to MRA principles, to which she herself still adhered. ‘I keep finding I am never grateful enough to God,’ she told Garth and, though she had taken his advice and now had a notebook in which to write down her thoughts, she found they were all of a practical nature – ‘nothing revealing or stupendous’. She concluded ‘that, as probably one of my worst faults is vagueness about practical things, and a sort of general inefficiency about anything that does not interest me (forgiven hitherto by my family and excused by myself as “artistic temperament”), this is where I must first check myself’. Her attempts to do so were valiant and also comic – exactly the sort of thing the du Mauriers would traditionally mock. Since Margaret’s migraines had returned and Prim, the nursemaid, could not do everything, Daphne had to look after her children in a way she had never done before. She was quite unable to resist the invitation to return to the Puxleys’ home at Langley End when her tenancy at Cloud’s Hill ended in January 1941.
The moment the Browning entourage settled in again at Langley End, where there were also two other evacuee children, both girls developed measles and Margaret succumbed to a particularly virulent form of influenza; in spite of Prim’s help and the support of Paddy Puxley, Daphne wrote to Grace Browning that ‘My life is slightly mad . . . after washing out bedpans and coping with the measled ones I rush . . . and minister to Christian . . . and when I have turned him upside down, pinned his nappy on wrong . . . I hurl him into his cot and find Flavia wanting to put on a party frock . . . I chuck her a doll to play with and then rush to the privacy of a room alone and hammer upon my typewriter at Frenchman’s Creek, my new book, and I am lucky if I get a page written.’ (The life of many a woman writer, but not, until then, one within Daphne’s experience.) She wrote with what sounds like a most uncharacteristic smugness to Garth: ‘I am very grateful for being given the power to deal with all these little domestic worries and I am sure it has been a discipline. I’ve always shirked responsibility before. Now I find I can bear it. I seem to know the children more through looking after them . . . God is testing one out on those little points.’ As well as knowing the children better she was also involving them in her writing for the first time. Tessa and Flavia were thrilled to be told about the story she was engaged on and loved being told each evening where their mother had got to and what was going to happen next.
Halfway through Frenchman’s Creek progress was halted because Margaret, when she recovered from flu, was, according to Daphne, ‘only functioning four days out of seven’. Margaret herself wrote to Garth that she didn’t know what she would do ‘without Mrs Browning . . . she is a saint living, creating a spirit of peace everywhere she goes and I just live for ten o’clock at night when everything is finished and she sits by my bed and we have our quiet time together, and all the day’s worries are smoothed away and there is a most wonderful atmosphere’. Garth responded by sending Daily Readings to help in these quiet times and Daphne, writing to thank him, remarked, ‘it is awfully hard to go on slowly and be cheerful . . . but I have been so stubborn and selfish’. Now she could no longer enjoy the luxury of being selfish. While Margaret suffered her migraines, Daphne was up twice in the night with Christian and then for good at six in the morning. She was so tired she felt like a zombie and wrote to Tod, ‘Having tied napkins on my son day after day for two months there is nothing I would like to do so much as lie on my back in the sun and eat cherries’ – the sentiments of every woman in wartime England, as Daphne perfectly well appreciated. It made her feel a certain solidarity with mothers everywhere to share something of the average load and quietened her discontent that she could not get on with her novel. She was reading Angela’s third novel, The Little Less, at the time, a story with a lesbian theme, which she thought not suitable for Nanny. She had ‘a bit of fun’ out of the book but came to the conclusion that Angela should write short stories, not novels, because The Little Less ‘is so much more a series of episodes than a continuous novel’.2
There was some satisfaction in leading such a typically hard life, even within the privileged setting of a Lutyens house with servants, and satisfaction, too, in responding to a request that she should further the MRA cause by making a broadcast to America with Peter Howard.3 The effort this cost her was considerable. She came to London on 10 March, running the risk of air-raids, and broadcast from an underground shelter.
She then went back to Hertfordshire and collapsed – she had the same influenza, it was thought, which had debilitated her children’s nanny. But after a week of high temperatures, the doctor diagnosed a severe chill on the lungs which developed into pneumonia. She was saved – ‘it was nearly all over with your old Daph’, she wrote to Tod – by the M & B drug.4 But she was very ill for another month and at the end of it described herself to Garth as ‘so fagged . . . rather like someone who has been up all night at a bottle party’.
She also read into her illness an almost spiritual significance. ‘I don’t know if I told you, but just before getting ill, when Flave and Nanny, and even little Christian, were smitten again with colds, I said to God, “Now, please, let me take it all – all the pain, all the suffering, all the unhappiness, and let the children have no more” – and the day after I woke with a temperature (and the children have been OK since!).’ She was feeling ‘stunned’ and ‘unable to feel things, which I think may be part of God’s plan, as though, having perhaps been rather pleased with myself for having coped all through the winter with the children and Nanny and all that, God now lets me see what it is like to be unable to cope, to be plunged, as it were, not exactly into depression again, but into a great void’. She lay in bed, weak and lethargic, ‘looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope, the world itself and the people on it being very small and ant-like, and all their activities a little futile’. She vowed that if she were told that Hitler had reached the next county, she would merely yawn. Her mind centred on an island, the island of her dreams ever since J. M. Barrie had inspired her with the notion, an island just surfacing from the sea. She drew a picture of it for Garth, with the sun behind the island and a boat sailing towards it and signed it ‘My dream island which will never come at all’.
By the time she was recovered sufficiently to come downstairs it was April and spring had arrived. She was still very weak and frighteningly thin and pale. At the end of each day she was so exhausted that Christopher Puxley had to carry her up to her bedroom, cradling her easily in his arms. But sometimes she stayed in the drawing-room, covered with a rug, and after Margaret had taken the children to bed and Paddy was seeing to the two evacuee children, Christopher would play the piano for her, especially her favourite piece, Chopin’s 24th Prelude. It was suddenly warm and the scent of lilac drifted through the open window . . . Margaret, driven to exasperation by the very music Daphne loved, could not always resist coming down from the room used as a nursery, which was directly over the piano, and complaining that the children could not sleep. She sensed, as every adult in the house did, an atmosphere between Mr Puxley and Mrs Browning, whether Mrs Puxley was there or not. On the surface, everything was innocent, a host and friend amusing a guest who had been ill, but under it there was a highly charged intensity.
This atmosphere went into Frenchman’s Creek, which Daphne resumed writing in May. She wrote quickly, keeping to her vow to make this a purely escapist novel – ‘a romance with a big R!’ she wrote to Victor. By Whitsun she told him she had done 60,000 words and that it was ‘lightish, you know’. But under cover of this ‘lightish’ tale, with its lyrical descriptions of the Helford river, was something tougher. The heroine was Dona St Columb, a woman of thirty who felt ‘a sudden boiling up of resentment against the futility of her life’. Like so many du Maurier heroines, she wishes she had been a man and has even once dressed up as one to take part in an escapade. The pirate, when eventually she meets him, is no ruffian. Jean-Benoit Aubéry is sophisticated, handsome, educated and even artistic.5 She realizes she is in love, that ‘a glow hitherto unknown to her’ has spread through her body. There is a great deal of rollicking schoolgirl fantasy in Dona’s expedition with the pirates, but the aftermath is deadly serious. She wakens on board the pirate ship naked and asks Aubéry what she can do until her clothes are dry. ‘In France,’ he replies,’ . . . there is only one thing we could do’: he unscrews her ruby earring, and we are given to understand that they make love. Dona is happy at last – she has never felt such joy. Yet at the same time, she knows her marriage is not really threatened – ‘women are more primitive . . . for a time they wander . . . and play at love . . . but instinct is too strong . . . they must make their nest’. There is never any doubt that Dona will let her pirate go and return to her husband – ‘the Lady St Columb will become a gracious matron’.
Daphne finished the novel in early July and wrote to Grace that Victor Gollancz was delighted with it. All that was worrying him was where he would get the paper to print it on. The paper shortage was acute, but he wanted to bring it out the following month ‘in case of a blitz in late summer’. With the phenomenal success of Rebecca as an indication, he was going to have a first print-run of 50,000 copies this time, but to do so would take some ingenuity, and while he wrestled with the wartime paper problems Daphne struggled with the task of defending her escapist novel to her MRA friends.
Garth was trying to persuade her to do some more stories but, though she promised to think about it, she was beginning to believe he had mistaken ideas about her. It was, she wrote, ‘all right for Lord Elton and Herbert Agar to feed the hungry sheep’ but for her own part she felt ‘you have still . . . got to keep the novelists whose job it is to tell a story and entertain (I don’t mean entertain in a vulgar fashion, but to tell a story – you know what I mean). Novelists who try to do moral uplift always go astray, it’s not their forte . . . I am all for being ruthless with trashy authors . . . but I still think people like myself may be capable of creating good and interesting stories about the human character without becoming sort of Winston Churchills.’ This was very near to admitting she had had enough of writing to suit MRA purposes. She had, after all, made sure Dona did not go off with her pirate, but instead went back to her husband, which she felt should satisfy Garth. But she did not close the door entirely to the idea of contributing in the future to the MRA effort, and she was still in favour of the movement, though ‘the brave new world seems distant, Armageddon rather heaven’.
Meanwhile, Tommy was back at Langley End and once more disrupting the happy atmosphere of piano-playing and discussions about fantasy islands. He was more tired than ever and looked strained. Daphne wrote to his sister Grace that ‘when this war is over all the men will look 200’. (Except, of course, Christopher Puxley, whom excessive exercise at the piano had not aged.) He told her she was leading ‘the cushiest war life of anyone in the country’ and she was bound to agree. Now that Nanny was better, except for the occasional migraine, and the children under her care, Daphne lay in the sun, her new novel about to be published, and felt remarkably well. But she was tense when Tommy was there and was glad to go with him on a boat trip up the Ouse, so that she could be with him away from Langley End. It rained all week but they both enjoyed it, and by the time Tommy had to return she was more confused than Dona St Columb had ever been. She knew she loved Tommy and her sense of duty was powerful – her marriage, and the preserving of it, meant everything to her – but she also knew she was infatuated with Christopher and that she was happier with him.
By late autumn this infatuation was causing at least two people at Langley End great concern. Margaret was well aware of what was happening, but was in no position to articulate her alarm. She adored Paddy Puxley – who alone seemed oblivious – was fiercely loyal to Major Browning,6 and loathed Christopher Puxley. There was a feeling of apprehension in the house, but Daphne either failed to pick it up or ignored it. What, after all, was she doing that was wrong? She was not technically unfaithful. So far, her obsession with Christopher had led only to being embraced and kissed and she felt their closeness was more emotional, even psychic, than physical. She was bewitched, entranced but not passionately consummating their relationship, though she was aware that she felt detached from her husband, which she thought might be nature’s way of helping wives survive this war. Even when Tommy was with her she felt remote from his concerns. The trouble was, she didn’t understand half the things he talked about, and some of the tasks allotted to him were so secret he couldn’t talk about them anyway. But she knew, all the same, how very important Tommy was becoming and what a Herculean task he had just been given in October 1941. The War Office had asked him to undertake the formation of airborne troops who could land by parachute, and at the same time to train infantry troops to land in gliders. Somehow, these two independent formations were to be moulded into what would be known as the ist Airborne Division, and it was to be ready for action within a year. As commander of these new paratroops Tommy was now raised to the rank of Major-General and a great deal rested on the success of the whole daring venture. It was a test not just of his powers of leadership but of his ability to undertake a prodigious amount of organization, involving training 10,000 men, equipping 800 gliders, and overcoming the formidable problems of getting all of them in the right place at the right time in all kinds of weather conditions. The necessary liaising with the Royal Air Force called for considerable tact, and the studying of maps and photographs involved in all the reconnaissance work for the greatest concentration. It was very little wonder that, carrying a burden like this, he arrived at Langley End for his brief leaves utterly exhausted. He was working a minimum of fourteen hours a day, every day. He explained to his wife that the role of the Airborne Division was potentially crucial, which she accepted. But the very importance of Tommy’s work left her feeling peripheral to his life. She knew this was foolish, knew she was vitally important to him, but it frightened her how rapidly a gulf seemed to be opening between them.
From this appointment onwards, Tommy’s leaves grew shorter and fewer, and sometimes he did not even take them, though he desperately wanted to, because of all the work to be done. By the spring of 1942, Daphne was more involved than ever with Christopher and still Paddy noticed nothing. But others did and now one of them decided to act. Grace Browning, who visited Langley End from time to time to see her sister-in-law and the children, received a letter from Margaret asking if she could meet her in Hitchin; she had something she wanted to discuss. Margaret cycled to Hitchin to have tea in a café with Miss Browning and confided that she was worried and upset because she suspected something was going on between Mr Puxley and Mrs Browning. Miss Browning, greatly troubled, said that if it was true she hoped her brother never found out, because if he did he would never forgive his wife, whom he adored. But before Tommy had a chance to discover what his wife’s feelings were for Christopher Puxley, Paddy Puxley at last did so. One day she found her husband and Daphne in each other’s arms and was stunned. She merely told Daphne she had thought she was her friend and left the room where she had found them. Her evident distress and the bitterness of her only remark were worse than any violent anger or hatred. There were no scenes, but clearly Daphne could not go on living at Langley End. Everyone was intent on behaving in a civilized manner, and in keeping their various emotions concealed from children and servants, but plans already formed were hastily put forward. Instead of going to Fowey in June, for the summer, Daphne went in April, for good.
In a letter to Garth Lean, Daphne said that after ‘many probings and thinkings’ she was moving to Fowey ‘to sort myself out’. The reasons she gave him, and everyone else, for leaving Langley End were that she felt she and the children were ‘becoming a burden’ and that she was particularly concerned about ‘poor Paddy . . . who is working day in, day out at war work’. If she were out of the way ‘things would be easier’. She wished more than ever that she could be ‘in a little hut on a little island’, but since she could not, Fowey was best. She could not go to Ferryside, which had been requisitioned as a naval headquarters, and did not in any case think it feasible to land on her mother and sisters, so she rented number 8 Readymoney Cove, which had originally been the old stable and coach-house for Point Neptune House, built for the Rashleighs of Menabilly. It is a large cottage with a pretty garden right on the little beach, but compared to the Lutyens house Daphne had just left it was small – there were a lot of people to fit into a fifth of the space they had previously occupied. But the advantages of being in Fowey once more far outweighed the disadvantages, though settling in proved a little difficult and was not helped by the continual rain. The girls, especially Flavia, pined for Paddy, but their grandmother and aunts were nearby and soon the attractions of living by the seaside, even in wartime, softened their sense of loss. Tessa, aged almost nine, started school at St David’s, along the esplanade, which she loved, and a Mrs Hancock, soon known as ‘Hanks’ (sister of the wife of George Hunkin, the boatman, who had been Tommy’s best man), came each day at 2.30 to cook: soon a routine was established and Daphne saw that she could, if she wished, begin another book.
The book she had in mind was a novel about Christopher Puxley’s family. This was disappointing news for Garth Lean, who had never given up hoping either for some more stories or a play Daphne had hinted was taking shape about a group of people in a waiting-room all beset by moral dilemmas. But she wrote to him that everything had changed since Come Wind, Come Weather – ‘I have been through many varied processes of thought.’ She looked at some more true stories Garth sent her, but her verdict was ‘in all honesty . . . I do not feel that I am qualified to do them’. Most revealing was the reason she gave – ‘not being prepared to stick to standards myself, how can I write saying it is the answer?’ Instead, she wanted to write what she called ‘my saga novel’.
‘Start saving paper,’ she wrote to Victor Gollancz, adding that her new story was going ‘to be endless, full of birth and death, and love and disaster’. The basis for it was the Puxley family history, about which Christopher had told her. He had also supplied her with a dossier of family letters of which she made even more use than she had of the Jane Slade letters in her first novel and the du Maurier ones in the two books about her own family. John Puxley, Christopher’s grandfather, became Copper John in her new novel, which she called Hungry Hill, and she used some of his letters verbatim at various dramatic points. In a blue exercise book of George du Maurier’s, half-filled with his writing, she made lists of ‘translations’ – real place names from the Puxley history to be converted into invented ones. By August, she was ‘working away like one possessed’, and felt that this would turn out to be her longest book, ‘probably longer than Gone With the Wind’. Hungry Hill was the first of her novels to be truly historical, depending as the plot did on a real history before her imagination came into play.
Daphne herself saw it as a reaction to Frenchman’s Creek, about which she was dismissive, endlessly referring to it as ‘frivolous’. Hungry Hill was to be solid, wide in scope and rooted in reality. It begins with Copper John, the mine owner, and his relationships with his children. The feud between Copper John and a dispossessed Irish family is dramatic, and the first quarter of the story has tremendous momentum. But in the next quarter, as Daphne was obliged to invent a little more, the momentum falters and by Book Three it becomes melodramatic. Soon it disintegrates into a series of births, deaths and improbable unions, wandering far from the original Puxley history. Book Five is sentimental until the epilogue, in which Daphne writes a moving and convincing account of the family home in flames and the return of a descendant of Copper John in modern times.
The work Daphne put into this long novel was prodigious. She finished it in November and then started going through it, making cuts – ‘I adore cutting’ – before sending it to Victor in December. ‘Here you are,’ she wrote, ‘and the whole damn story is true, by the way, with a few embellishments.’ Alarmed, Victor promptly sent it to be read for libel, but when told this, Daphne changed her mind about the truth and said there was nothing to worry about, because ‘the story is a blend of fact and fiction, and all the people concerned are dead’.7 The paper shortage was still acute but, though he urged her to tell no one, Victor said he was going to print 100,000 copies using most of his paper ration and therefore severely restricting the number of other books he could print. This was a tremendous act of faith and acknowledged by her as such – Victor’s enthusiasm and wholehearted backing, especially in difficult times, meant a great deal to her. But though she was open with him about the source of her material, she was secretive about it to others, because she did not wish to draw attention to her connection with Christopher Puxley. There she was, writing furiously about his family history, while he was still in love with her and coming down to Fowey to see her. He did not, of course, stay at Readymoney Cove, but at the nearby Fowey Hotel, and she would slip out, taking a picnic with her, to meet him on the cliff top.
They would go to the Watch House, though it meant entering a wartime restricted area. For £5 a year she had rented this tiny stone and slate building perched sixty feet above Watch House Cove between Polruan and Polperro. It had once been a coastguard’s hut, and there were steps dug into the cliff leading down from it to the cove. There she and Christopher could be absolutely safe from any possibly prying eyes – the nearest road was a mile away and the only other building visible was the tower of a distant church. Nothing could have been more romantic or made the war seem further away. She and Christopher would lie there, in the little twelve-by-twelve foot room, the door open to the sky, hearing the screeching of the seagulls as they skimmed the waves which crashed endlessly against the foot of the cliff.
Daphne loved the thrill of these secret assignations and stifled feelings of guilt by assuring herself that Christopher was only a friend. How much of a friend and how much of a lover was something about which she liked to confuse her close friends, and she went on doing so all her life. On the one hand, she would say she was in love with Christopher, that his ‘spinning’ (code for preliminaries to love-making) was ‘divine’, and, on the other, drop heavy hints that the affair had never been consummated because Christopher was impotent. In her own mind, so long as there was no actual intercourse, there was no betrayal of Tommy. The love-affair she spoke of was not an ‘affair’ in the sense others used the word, and was therefore, in her opinion, innocent.
Whatever the truth, it was certainly the case that Daphne, like Dona in Frenchman’s Creek, was allowing herself only to ‘wander for a bit’. She always intended to remain anchored to her husband and never encouraged Christopher Puxley to imagine otherwise. But Christopher himself did not receive this cruel message – he went on hoping, went on visiting her and ‘spinning’ with her, knowing he had broken his wife’s heart. The knowledge that she was responsible for this suffering made Daphne feel guilty and miserable and she wrote to Garth Lean that she was ‘trying to help someone very dear to me, who is going through the depths of despair. We have prayed together, and I am hoping that it may be a beginning of the first tiny step in a new life – for me too, perhaps.’ She told him that she had had a shock, but that ‘I always said that a shock is the only way of bringing Daphne to her knees, didn’t I?’ She went on to describe a book she had been reading which was relevant to ‘my despairing one’.
The book was C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, published in 1940, as part of a ‘Christian Challenge’ series. It was what he had to say about human love in the course of his argument on the problem of pain which fascinated Daphne. ‘Love is more sensitive than hatred to every blemish in the beloved,’ he wrote, ‘[and] Human Love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty – of a want, or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed goodness in the beloved which the lover needs and desires.’ This made Daphne think that perhaps there was something Tommy could not give her of which she felt the lack, a lack Christopher could supply. If so, perhaps she need not feel guilty and ashamed? But C. S. Lewis also had this to say: ‘The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads.’ Shame led her to feel pain for Tommy and for Paddy and even for Christopher, and the final part of this book warned that ‘pain provides an opportunity for heroism’. The heroic role for her was to stop seeing Christopher.
It was not one she assumed. She felt too exhausted to be heroic. Hungry Hill – ‘not a trifling affair after all’ – left her drained and she suffered from a kind of completion depression very similar to her post-natal depressions. The fact that Margaret was also depressed and once again incapacitated by migraines made things even worse. Margaret’s health was now a permanent worry and had been for a year. Before they left Langley End, Daphne had insisted she should go into hospital for a week to have ‘every test under the sun’. The doctors had reported that there was nothing organically wrong, but that Margaret was ‘run down and nervey’ and needed rest. Anxious to be sympathetic and caring, Daphne had despatched her to Fowey to enjoy a month’s recuperation before the rest of the party joined her. This proved beneficial at first, but by late 1942 ‘Nanny’s heads’ were appalling and when she succumbed there was chaos. Daphne wrote to Garth that Margaret, even when she didn’t have ‘a head’, was ‘weepy and feeling rotten and down in the dumps’. She had tried ‘reading from the Bible to her, after finishing Christian at night, and talking quietly and trying to get her to realise that by resigning herself the power will come from God. She is so inclined to rely just on me talking to her and getting rather sloppy and sentimental about it, which I feel is absolutely the wrong end of the stick.’ She felt exasperated but swore, ‘I do want to help her, but I do not want to have to sit and hold her hand.’
Her mood crept into what she described to Tod as ‘a very cynical short story, called “Happy Christmas”’,8 about a refugee couple being treated as Mary and Joseph were. Her own Christmas was not happy in spite of the valiant efforts of her mother and Angela to make Ferryside (reclaimed from the Navy) festive. Tommy was not home for it. Instead, he had ‘flown to North Africa . . . I hate him going out into it all’. The New Year of 1943 found her depressed and weary of counting her blessings. She knew she was lucky to be so comfortably housed, lucky never to be short of food, lucky not to have been bombed, lucky to have her husband still alive, but she did not feel any happier for all this. The only thing that cheered her up was her son. He was her absolute delight, an enchanting cherub of a child whom, at two, she judged not only intelligent but talented and perfect in every way. She had his destiny all planned out: he was to be a man-about-town and a charmer – ‘heaven help any woman who crosses his path in twenty years’ time’.
The news, in January, that Tod was in hospital confirmed Daphne’s feelings of imminent disaster. She was having an operation, and Daphne begged to be allowed to pay for her to convalesce at a comfortable hotel. She was worried about Tod’s fate once she had recovered: her millinery venture had failed and she was surely too old to be a governess. Tod felt the only alternative was to become a companion, and so Daphne, at her bidding, wrote her a glowing reference, describing her as a ‘long-standing friend’. She wondered, though, if after the war anyone would be able to employ companions or any other kind of servant – ‘we shall all have to live like Australians’. Tod recovered well but still Daphne’s sense of foreboding continued.
Then, in the middle of February, she heard that Tommy had been in a glider crash: it had come at last, the phone call she had always dreaded, the knock on the door she had imagined, heralding the end of her run of luck.