SEPTEMBER TIDE RAN in London until the beginning of August 1949, giving Daphne ample opportunity to get to know Gertie better and to become as infatuated with her as she was with Ellen, though in a quite different way. If part of the attraction Ellen held for her was to do with wishing she were her daughter (though a daughter who would have liked an intimate relationship of another kind), part of the attraction Gertie exerted was to do with Daphne wanting to be her mother. From the moment Gertie had arrived to begin rehearsing the play the previous September, Daphne had fussed and fretted over her health and welfare in a thoroughly maternal way. She worried in her letters to Evie Williams, Gertie’s English secretary, about the star being tired, having a cold and not being cosseted enough. She continued to do a great deal of cosseting herself, endlessly arranging cars for Gertie when the management would not, and seeing that all the tributes to stardom Gertie had been used to – flowers in her dressing-room, flowers in her hotel bedroom, champagne after the show – went on being readily available. She saw that, whatever her outward demeanour, Gertie lacked confidence and needed constant reassurance, which it became Daphne’s role to give her.
But there was more to Daphne’s obsession with Gertrude Lawrence than merely being attracted to her exuberant personality or wanting to take care of her. Watching her play Stella, hearing her speak the lines written for Stella with Ellen in mind, many of them poignant and emotional because of Daphne’s feelings for Ellen, was a deeply unsettling experience. Daphne stressed again and again to Ellen how unlike her Gertie was, so much so that at first she found it almost offensive that Gertie should attempt, in the guise of Stella, to play Ellen at all. But as rehearsals went on, Gertie began sometimes to catch the spirit of the part, and then Daphne felt confused and disturbed. A dangerous transition seemed to be taking place – Gertie, on stage, could become Ellen for minutes at a time. Daphne found herself staring at a fantasy love-affair on stage which she had created, and the actress embodying her fantasy became confused with the woman who had inspired the role. Inwardly, Daphne was moved by Gertie on stage while outwardly, off stage, she went on telling Evie Williams she simply wanted to look after her.
It was a role which she assumed at first with some amusement, constantly remarking in her letters to Ellen that she could see right through Gertie. She knew perfectly well that the star gave ‘everyone hell’ backstage, but ‘cooed like a dove’ should Daphne come to see her in the play. Then her acting was impeccable, but when the author was not present it disintegrated sometimes into near farce or went over the top into melodramatic tragedy. Daphne decided that Gertie was ‘fundamentally lonely’ and by no means as happily married as she professed. She also thought Gertie would ‘never be adult, which is why I find her so fascinating’. She told Ellen she got ‘a lot of fun out of spoiling Gertie’ and part of the fun was in allowing herself to be swept along in Gertie’s wake and sharing her social life. She let Gertie take her to lunches with Noël Coward and even went with her to Noël’s house near Dover to spend the day with him and his friends. She was amazed at how much she enjoyed it all – the endless repartee, the laughter, the whole slightly risque atmosphere she remembered from her father’s day. It was easy to be amusing in return, to sit back and drink and smoke, and swop anecdotes with these lively, clever people, and she now came up from Cornwall to London with remarkable frequency.
This was pleasant for Tommy because, apart from having his wife with him, it meant she was available to accompany him to royal functions. She enjoyed some of these occasions more than she normally cared to admit, describing to Ellen how the sight of the Queen dancing in a crinoline at a ball had been ‘quite beautiful’, and the whole occasion ‘a lovely sight, women in tiaras and glittering gowns’. She herself had ‘my little diamond coronet affair pinned on the side of my head and Tommy’s Indian Stars across the bosom’ and was wearing the kind of dress she never wore – ‘off-the-shoulder . . . a sort of dusky pink, with clinging folds’ – and knew perfectly well that she looked stunning. Gertie had made her ‘borrow the frock from Molyneux’, the smart dress designer of the era. The idea of trading on her name and her royal connections to borrow a dress to wear at a Buckingham Palace ball had never entered Daphne’s head, and she was half appalled at the idea. But the bold Gertie had told her not to be naïve – Molyneux would be glad to oblige, knowing who the dress was for and where it was to be worn – and marched her off to the couturier’s herself. She also chose the dress, scorning Daphne’s own preference for either a simple white or blue gown which revealed nothing. Once she saw the transformation in her appearance, Daphne appreciated at once what Gertie could do for her, though not, at that stage, as much as Ellen could.
What both women had done for her, apart from enriching her personal life, was to inspire her to write. Almost as soon as September Tide was safely launched Daphne was busy writing a new novel which had arisen out of her recent involvement with the theatre and actors. In spite of whirling about with Gertrude and attending social functions with Tommy, she got down to The Parasites in February 1949. This was the first book she wrote in a wooden hut which she had had erected in the grounds of Menabilly, well away from the house. The roof of the house was being mended and this caused such loud and constant noise that she found she was distracted. ‘It is ideal,’ she wrote to Ellen, ‘it’s at the end of the stretch of grass here, that looks down at the far end at the sea . . . curiously enough, it’s just a few yards from the place I’ve wanted always for my grave.’ She shut herself up to write for so many hours a day (six, in three sessions) that she couldn’t sleep because she didn’t get enough exercise – ‘my mind gets too awake . . . I have to resort to red pills which never make me wake up fresh.’1 Yet The Parasites was one of the easiest novels she ever wrote and, unlike all the others, written without any detailed preparation. ‘The whole thing’, Daphne wrote to her editor at Gollancz, Sheila Bush, ‘was rather drawn from the subconscious spread with fiction, and when one lets oneself go like that it’s quite often a purge for the author but a headache and nuisance to everyone else.’ What she was purging herself of was guilt about what she had allowed to happen in her life.
In the novel she took on the persona of all three main characters, who were created to represent different facets of herself. Maria, Niall and Celia, ‘the three people I know myself to hare been’, are the children of ‘those dreadful Delaneys’, a stage couple. It is a contemporary story of a theatrical family, full of stage atmosphere and freely admitted to be highly reminiscent of Daphne’s own background. Maria is an actress, Niall a popular composer, Celia an artist and they are all accused by Charles, Maria’s husband, of living in a world of fantasy and of being parasites. The story is told in a complicated way, alternating between past and present and between first-person narration and third-person description, so that often it is extremely confusing – nothing could have been further removed from Daphne’s usual style. But what begins to dominate the novel quite early on is the relationship between Maria and Niall, who are actually stepbrother and sister, and their love for their father, who is closely modelled on Gerald du Maurier. Papa Delaney cries a good deal and says ‘You’re all going to leave me one by one’ and is furious when Maria is kissed. His marriage, Maria observes, may not be as happy as everyone thinks – ‘adoring a person doesn’t mean you’re happy’ – and fairly soon his wife is killed off (just as the wife and mother in The Progress of Julius is disposed of).
Maria’s own marriage to the boringly dutiful Charles is also suspect and here Daphne purged herself of many of those feelings which had already gone into her two plays. Her husband, Maria suspects, only ‘loves the idea he once had of me’ and doesn’t really know ‘the closed shell’ that is her mind. She thinks he got her character ‘wrong from the start’ and has never realized ‘she’s a chameleon’. The ‘tragedy of life’, she sees, is not that people one loves die but that ‘they die to you’. She knows she should not have married, nor should she have had children, because she knows too that she hasn’t loved them enough. But the thought of giving Charles the divorce he wants angers her – ‘the part of an injured wife was one she had never played’. It becomes vitally important that if Charles does divorce her (she has been unfaithful) ‘nobody must know that I feel anything, that I mind’. She knows ‘he does to me the thing I have done to others’ and sees herself as being punished – ‘he makes me look a fool . . . it serves me right’. Meanwhile, Niall, whom she really loves, sails out to sea and deliberately sinks his boat, which if, as Daphne claimed, Niall was only a facet of herself, means that a kind of suicide of some part of her takes place.
What is interesting and different about The Parasites, apart from the autobiographical element, is its humour. Daphne was certainly not thought of as a witty writer, though in her own life she more often made people laugh than anything else, and relished the absurd, but in this novel she showed she was perfectly capable of satire and even slapstick. There is a scene in which the Delaneys have a country house weekend in which the father behaves insultingly and a farcical situation develops, and here Daphne displays a talent for humorous writing not visible anywhere else in her work. She laughed while writing much of it and enjoyed highlighting the ridiculous. But for du Maurier enthusiasts at the time it was a difficult novel to accept. Where was the mystery, the exciting plot, the feeling for landscape which they had come to expect? Why was it so complicated? Where was the simplicity of style they looked for? She herself agreed ‘a lot of that book is a strange mix-up of the things and feelings I went through . . .’ and was rather amused by what she described as ‘a sort of embarrassment’ she felt about it. But in spite of this feeling that The Parasites was perhaps more revealing than she had intended, she had no large ambitions for it – the critics this time would not be able to disappoint her in the way they had over Hungry Hill and The King’s General.
This was just as well because the reviews when they came were ‘dingy’ and she felt she had let Victor down. He had adored the novel and not only printed 100,000 copies, but assured her it was her best book yet ‘with a real chance of permanent survival’. His fury with the harshest of the reviews, by John Betjeman, went into a letter marked ‘not sent’. He wrote to Betjeman, in defence of Daphne, that never in twenty-seven years of publishing had he ever complained to a reviewer, but his review in the Daily Herald was inexcusable. He didn’t object to Betjeman’s right to say he didn’t like The Parasites – ‘all your colleagues agree with your estimate’ – but some facts were wrong. He had picked out ‘harmless sentences as dull and obvious’ yet his own first paragraph had been ‘a piece of intellectual dullness’. It was ‘stupid’ to suggest Daphne wrote ‘to titillate the public and secure sales . . . at this point my gorge rose . . . it is bloody rubbish to suggest Daphne senses the public mood and adapts to it accordingly.’ With such a publisher as a champion it is no wonder Daphne felt she needed no other defender.
Her own attitude to the critical reception of her books nevertheless hardened from this time onwards. Never again was she going to leave herself vulnerable to scathing reviews and the dejection which came from not living up to high expectations. But more dangerously, a paranoid edge began to creep into her reactions to the way in which her novels were received – she was coming to believe that, as ‘Q’ had unwisely encouraged her to think, she never would be forgiven for being a bestseller: the critics had it in for her and that was that. This became a protective device in the most obvious way and she clung to it. But as far as The Parasites went, she was bound to admit that nobody except her publisher and Gertrude Lawrence really seemed enthusiastic.
During the writing of The Parasites, in the spring of 1949, her epistolary friendship with Ellen deepened all the time, and even though they addressed serious matters and profound issues, there was always an underlying humour and even gaiety about their letters. This, more than anything, was what Ellen and all her family appreciated most about Daphne – not just her interest in them and concern for them, but her ability to see humour in almost every situation, often at her own expense, without being heedlessly flippant. She liked to tell Ellen amusing anecdotes about Gertie, such as relating how Gertie had been invited for lunch with George Bernard Shaw and was in a panic as to how she should behave. ‘He was a man of routine, she understood, and went to bed every day at two o’clock. “Go upstairs with him,” I told her, “and he’ll live till 99.” Trills of girlish laughter and coos of delight . . .’2 Then there was the great interest in each other’s children she and Ellen had. They swapped concern and stories about them in affectionate, gossipy letters. In a way Gertie was at first like another teenager and Daphne could feel herself being influenced by her. But Gertie knew more than any teenager did. Once, Daphne had corresponded with Ellen about one of Ellen’s daughters, to whom she herself also wrote – as she did to all Ellen’s family – and had become fascinated by the young girl’s reported references to the difference between ‘necking’ and ‘petting’. She wrote that she’d asked Gertie to clear up the mystery, and when Gertie had made the distinction, in a few succinct words, she’d asked which she indulged in herself. Gertie was scornful – ‘she said she did not do either, she preferred doing what happened naturally.’ Daphne was not disposed to press on with this conversation, but speculated that she ‘took this to mean honest-to-God-between-the-sheets, as my Daddy would have called it. Such a good expression, I always think.’ Soon after her enlightening chat, a postcard arrived from Gertie:
Women are like geography:
From 16 to 22, like Africa – part virgin, part explored.
From 23 to 35, like Asia – hot and mysterious.
From 35 to 45, like the USA – high-toned and technical.
From 46 to 55, like Europe – quite devastated but interesting in places.
From 60 upwards like Australia – everybody knows about it, but no one wants to go there.
Daphne thought this very funny, and enjoyed pointing out to Ellen that while she was ‘in the devastated class’, Daphne herself was ‘still high-toned and technical’.3
But, however high-toned, she had nobody with whom to be technical. She was still obsessed with Ellen, telling her how she dreamed about her almost every night. But by the summer of 1949 she found photographs, telephone calls and letters not enough – she wanted to be with Ellen and proposed, at the end of May, coming to Barberrys for a whole month on her own if Ellen would not come to her. She also knew – ‘my radar tells me’ – that Ellen was once more in great need of support. Nelson had died in January,4 which marked the end of a heartbreaking year for her, during which she had strained every nerve to make his last months happy, and also the end of a powerful partnership. Ellen suffered and Daphne, sensing her suffering, wanted not only to write letters of consolation – which she did, letters full of tenderness and touchingly expressed distress for her – but to be with her, able to put her arms round her and shelter her.
In June, Daphne did indeed go to her, in a state of great excitement – ‘terribly and deeply happy about coming’. The visit was only a qualified success. ‘I suppose I did come and stay a month?’ Daphne wrote afterwards. It had all been ‘like a dream’ and not always a pleasant one. There had been too many people around Ellen, making calls on her time, and Daphne, ever possessive, had not had her to herself enough. What she wanted was to go to Italy with Ellen, just the two of them, maybe to Florence, where she need share her with no one and they could be really alone.
Ellen, although professing eagerness, stalled throughout the rest of the summer, writing that she felt lethargic and didn’t think she could make the trip until the winter. This displeased Daphne, though she was perfectly sympathetic towards Ellen’s ‘battle fatigue’ after the hard year she had had, and she became increasingly restless. Gertie had gone back to America, which made Daphne still more frustrated – all the fun she had been having stopped abruptly. Nor did she have any work on hand, because she had finished her new novel, The Parasites, before she went to visit Ellen and had no other ideas. Her days were taken up with sunbathing and swimming – she announced she was developing such muscles she would soon look like a Channel swimmer – and trying to be nice to Tommy when he came down to Cornwall. Ellen had ordered her to do so, instructing her to walk straight up to him and give him a big kiss when she landed after her return flight from America. She had been determined to try to follow this advice, since she felt permanently guilty about her husband, but at the airport Kits, wearing his first pair of long trousers, had walked boldly past the barrier and kissed her first. She was so thrilled she forgot about Tommy. ‘It shows’, she remarked, admiringly, to Ellen, ‘how he is going to attack life and women – that’s why Daddy had such a good time.’5
She tried hard, that summer, to have a good time with her own family, while yearning partly for Ellen and partly for Gertie, without whom she now felt incomplete. There were many times when she appeared to succeed. This was the summer of South Pacific and Tommy brought records of the show’s songs down to Menabilly. Daphne loved them – she and Kits danced to them while Tommy played his drum and the girls sang. At times like this she felt she had succeeded in creating a happy family, describing to Ellen what fun these sessions were and how hilarious it was to see Kits ‘whirling around looking like Nijinsky with his long hair, singing: “I’m in love, I’m in love . . .”’6 She was light-hearted and carefree at such moments, and again jogging round the countryside in a trap pulled by Flavia’s pony, or on the boat Fanny Rosa (so long as Tommy was not being bossy). There were picnics and long walks, and endless hours sitting cross-legged on the lawn, chatting the day away with whoever was there. Prince Philip came down for some sailing and, though she fretted as usual about the responsibility of being hostess, she clearly enjoyed his company and thought the visit ‘a terrific crumb’ (boast). What everyone saw was a very attractive woman looking younger than her forty-two years, tanned, blonde, always laughing, with her eyes as well as her mouth, someone confident and at ease with herself, in the prime of life.
It was a false picture. Her frustration by the end of August was raging and when Ellen once more put off the trip to Italy, which they had both been planning for a year, she announced that she felt ‘suicidal’. It gave her a kind of grim pleasure that no one could possibly guess – ‘I am so used to hiding my real feelings.’ It was, she wrote to Ellen, ‘a hell of a blow, beloved’,7 but she tried to understand the reasons, and encouraged Ellen to try to explain how she felt. Then Ellen confessed that, apart from the lethargy which had overtaken her after the emotional exhaustion of the last year, she also felt that to go to Italy with Daphne would be ‘just running away and escaping’. She thought she should stay at home ‘and pick up the pieces’, but at the same time was anxious that Daphne should know that if her need to get away was urgent, then she would come. In reply, Daphne wrote a spirited send-up of an International Bureau of Advice letter which Ellen and her whole family thought so funny that it changed Ellen’s mind. She decided that being with Daphne, receiving from her what she once called ‘the oxygen of laughter’, would revive her more than anything in the world.
But Daphne had been genuinely angry with Ellen, all the same – ‘You will never know the state of rage and fury I have been in for the past fortnight’ – and her anger exploded when Ellen was tactless enough to say in one letter that she had felt guilty about not having written sooner. ‘Christ, who do you think I am?’ wrote back Daphne. ‘Do you think I have no pride?’8 She hated to feel Ellen was in any way patronizing or indulging her, and even more that Ellen was clearly not as desperate to go on holiday with Daphne as Daphne was for her to come. But a promise was finally made that Ellen would come at the end of September, which tided her over the desolation of Kits at last going away to prep school.
She had always accepted that, although it was all right for daughters to be educated at home, sons must follow the traditional path. But she dreaded Kits following it – ‘What shall I do without him?’ she wrote and then added that she knew she must do without him because it wasn’t good for a boy to be so dependent on his mother. She had, too, a deep-seated fear that by her excessive adoration of him she might ‘turn him into a homo’, as she put it, whereas she wanted him to be a ladies’ man like Gerald. She relished the thought of him breaking women’s hearts in a few years and commented once in a letter to Ferdy that ‘he kisses divinely, just like Gerald’. Her love for Kit was so intense that if anything happened to him she was distraught, whereas if anything happened to the girls she was sympathetic but cool and largely unmoved.
The holiday with Ellen, soon after Kits left for West Downs, was a disaster. The two of them met in Paris, then went on to Florence. Instead of bringing them closer, being alone together in a foreign country simply revealed how unalike they were. Daphne liked to walk everywhere, loved hanging out in ‘honky’ (vulgar) bars, hated shopping and loathed talking to anyone else in the hotels in which they stayed. Ellen, on the other hand, hated walking, liked discreet, sophisticated restaurants, liked to shop and was interested by her fellow guests. But worst of all was Daphne’s failure to win Ellen over to any kind of real intimacy. Although Ellen could not have made it plainer that she had not a ‘Venetian’ feeling in her body, Daphne had always hoped that, when they were truly alone, her love for Ellen would be reciprocated in some tangible form. All she received from Ellen was the endurance of ‘one kiss which lasted about forty seconds’.
The interchange of letters after they had parted and Ellen had returned to New York showed a new and bitter Daphne (though, as ever, the bitterness was leavened with humour – there was always a funny side for her). She called these frank letters ‘brandy and gin letters’, admitting she only had the nerve to write them because she was ‘under the influence of a stiff drink’. In one of them, she replied to what she described as two wounding accusations Ellen had made – one, that she lacked perception, and two, that ‘I lack humour in your presence’. These were the two qualities in which Daphne most prided herself and which she thought Ellen had valued most in her, and of the two the alleged lack of humour stung most. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she replied, ‘I am shaking with silent laughter most of the time, but you are probably not aware of it. The greatest heaven in the world is when two people can laugh together. We have got near to it at times. Not near enough. Besides, my sense of humour is rather warped. Almost the highest peak was reached when you sat on the side of your bed in Florence, with tears running down your face, saying, “Maybe if I changed my hormones I’d feel different.” It was so goddamn funny that when I think about it now, in the middle of the night, I become hysterical.’9
In another letter, replying to Ellen’s complaint when they parted that she couldn’t smoke on board the returning ship because cigarettes were all ‘in bond’ and therefore unobtainable, Daphne told her quite viciously to ‘try loving someone who has been in bond two years and is likely to remain so for another twenty’. She didn’t know what this might drive her to – ‘What happens to the waters of the Arno that are pent up behind a dam and can’t get to the sea they crave?’10 A madhouse or a monastery was the only solution, though in her darkest moments she fantasized about drinking a whole bottle of brandy and going down to the Place Pigalle to pick up a prostitute then shooting herself afterwards – ‘Because I would be so revolted by myself. Being fastidious. Which I am.’11 As soon as she’d written this letter she followed it with a letter of apology and, by good luck, Ellen got the second letter first. But she was still angry with Daphne and took the chance to reiterate what she had said from the beginning of their friendship: she had nothing against ‘Venetians’ but she was not so inclined herself and insisted on living her life how she wanted to, without being made to feel guilty because she was thwarting Daphne.
This plunged Daphne into a state of depression, though she accepted Ellen’s ultimatum. The ‘autumn glooms’, which always made her melancholy, were particularly bad that year. It seemed to her that, ever since meeting Ellen, she had become ‘more and more what you do not want’. It upset her to think how ‘blundering and hopeless’ she had been, she who was ‘king of advisers and rather good at it’ to others. She felt she had made a mess of her relationship with Ellen and become a burden to her. Ellen was swift to deny this and to emphasize that Daphne had been a rock during two of the hardest years of her life, a friend without parallel whom she, and her whole family, valued beyond all others. Some kind of equilibrium was restored but not entirely to Daphne’s satisfaction – something had gone out of her feeling for Ellen since their holiday.
She could not help but contrast Ellen’s affection for her with the far more urgent and freely expressed need of Gertrude Lawrence. Gertie was writing her ‘ecstatic letters’ about The Parasites – she wanted to play Maria in a stage or film version – and begging her to come and have fun with her in Florida. There was no intellectual exchange of ideas in any correspondence with Gertie, as there was with Ellen, nor even the same intelligent, clever teasing, but Gertie’s letters were slapdash and funny and appealing, and when she read them Daphne found herself less lonely.
It was, she realized, a strange kind of loneliness from which she sometimes suffered – not the loneliness which comes from having ‘loved but lost’ but rather from ‘feeling the loneliness of a loved one never known’.12 She felt there was an experience of loving and being loved that she had never attained, and it had nothing to do with sex. It was to do with being perfectly in tune with someone, which might involve the body, it was true, but was more to do with the fusing of mind and spirit. ‘You will say I get this with my husband,’ she wrote to Ellen, but she did not. ‘I don’t want a man . . . waiting for me . . . because that would not be the answer . . . nothing is more amusing than to have fun with glamorous or menacing men, but that’s a diversion, it’s not home . . .’ So what was ‘home’? It was ‘a kind of peace’, a peace she recognized, from his letters13 (which she was at that time reading), that her grandfather George du Maurier had found with his wife and even Gerald with Muriel, in spite of apparent evidence to the contrary; but she had never found it. She felt she had tried, with Tommy, but had failed, and now she had ‘gone back to nature’. It was her belief that ‘what is strongest in you comes out in the middle years’.14 She couldn’t help wondering if ‘other writers, or artists have felt the same, women, I mean’. Mixed up with her theories about reverting to nature was the conviction she had expressed to Ellen before – that in being so career-minded she had somehow gone against nature and reaped the consequences. ‘I think one has to choose, you know. Either to create after one’s fashion, or be a woman and breed. The two don’t go together and never will. Maybe there should be a rule against women who work marrying. They can’t have it both ways.’15
Ellen was rightly worried by Daphne’s increasingly distorted view of her life and tried to console and put an alternative, more attractive hypothesis forward. But what saved her friend was what had always saved and rescued her: the very work she saw as fatal to her human relationships. In Florence, Daphne had felt the first faint stirrings of a novel about a woman, a widow like Ellen, who would have many of Ellen’s characteristics and even look like her: the point of the novel would be that this woman was the source of great torment to others. She made it plain to Ellen that she was the inspiration for the heroine, just as she had been for Stella in September Tide, and this would be another secret between them. ‘I may add,’ she wrote, ‘the woman will be a widow. And I don’t want a libel case on my hands.’16 By the summer of 1950 she was ‘brewing hard’ about the woman, whom she had decided to call Rachel – ‘a cold-blooded bitch’ – and by the autumn had the novel all planned out in a notebook. But before she began to write, she paid another visit to New York, in November, this time to see Gertie as well as Ellen – Gertie, who had written ‘hectic’ letters and longed for her to come down to Florida and bask in the sun with her.
Daphne was well aware – she was always well aware – of exactly what she was doing, but so was Ellen. No matter how deep their mutual regard for each other, neither of them could pretend there was anything but a limited future to the development of their friendship. Daphne’s need for something else was painfully evident and, though she visited Ellen first, it was to Gertie that she was increasingly drawn. She feared Ellen would be jealous – and if she were, a postcard17 from Gertie thanking Ellen for ‘loaning Daphne to me’ did not help – but she could not stop herself. She was drawn to Gertie like ‘an alcoholic and must get to the bottle or bust’. In Florida, in the sun, she and Gertie were ‘like two silly schoolgirls’, playing games in the sea, cavorting on the beach, laughing and shrieking and losing all inhibitions. Gertie, unlike Ellen, was not inhibited about any kind of sex. Never for one moment did Daphne think of her as one of the despised ‘L’ people; she regarded her as simply able to respond to every kind of love. Later, she was to lay responsibility for what had happened at Ellen’s door: if she had never met Ellen she would never have written September Tide, and Gertrude Lawrence would never have come into her life. But this train of thought went further: if Ellen had not shut her out – ‘if there had been no iron curtain between us’ – then she would ‘never have left Barberrys, so it was just as well for the Browning family you fenced yourself in’.18
She could hardly tear herself away from Gertie to return to the Browning family but, having done so, she plunged herself immediately into the writing of My Cousin Rachel. Even though it was bitterly cold, she went to her hut at 10.15 each morning from the middle of January onwards, wrote until 10.15, broke until 3.15 and then continued to 7.15. She had an oil stove and an oil lamp in the flimsy hut, through which the wind whistled all day long, and she wore two sweaters, a sheepskin waistcoat and had a rug over her knees. Every now and again she drank black coffee from a thermos.
Her story was about jealousy and unfounded suspicions, and she told Ferdy it was going to be ‘rather sinister and a bit creepy and you will never really know whether the woman is an angel or a devil’. She first wrote a complete draft in pencil in a small red account book. The first few pages, which she wrote out in full, came to her in a rush, then she made notes for another twenty-three chapters, outlining the plot and experimenting with bits of dialogue. These went into the final version almost intact, though expanded, and the new writing was devoted to the interior monologue of the narrator, Philip, the counterpart to the heroine of Rebecca. She was excited from the beginning, knowing she had a good plot and that the sense of atmosphere with which she had made her name was powerfully present. This time, she wanted to explore jealousy from the man’s angle, and to show how simple it is for a woman to manipulate a man. Technically, Rachel is yet another female victim – after all, she loses her husband, loses Philip and in the end loses her life – but she is really the stronger of the two. Philip is driven almost to madness by her and not for a second does he dominate her.
As usual, Daphne worked hard at concocting a thrilling plot, wanting readers to be in suspense right up to and including the end, but buried in this complicated tale was the same fascination with what jealousy could do to people as there had been in Rebecca. The difference is that this time a man is jealous and ‘a man’s jealousy is like a child’s’ says Rachel – open, obvious, easily dealt with. He is ‘ridiculous . . . like a sulky schoolboy’ and so is his interpretation of what making love means. When she lets him make love to her, one night only, after he has presented her not just with the family jewels but with a document making over his estate to her when he dies, he sees this as ‘a pledge of love’ meaning she will marry him. She sees it as nothing of the sort: it was simply a thank-you and had no other significance. Philip’s innocence, his naïvety and his sense of honour seem absurd to her. Implicit in this is her belief that all men are absurd, always making so much of a simple bodily transaction. Whereas Philip wonders ‘what can be worse’ than infidelity, to Rachel that kind of infidelity is nothing.
By April 1951 Daphne had finished the novel and immediately planned to return to Gertie, who had been writing her ‘mournful’ letters. She had also sent snaps of the two of them in Florida ‘with incriminating things on the back’. She didn’t tell Ellen what these were, but reported that Tommy had looked at the snaps and been very silent afterwards. In July, once My Cousin Rachel was in production – with Victor Gollancz ecstatic, recognizing that this was ‘du Maurier bang on form’ and another bestseller assured – she went to America again, this time mainly to see Gertie.
The situation between Ellen and Daphne was now delicate. Ellen was annoyed by Daphne’s relish for conspiring and plotting unnecessarily. For example, Daphne wrote, in June, saying she wanted to come to Barberrys without Gertrude, but didn’t want to admit this to Gertie. Would Ellen ring her up and say the house was going to be full up and Daphne would have to sleep on a sofa, so it would be better if Gertrude came later . . . ?19 Ellen knocked this scenario on the head immediately and told Daphne sharply not to start creating dramas. This passion of hers for ‘keeping people in compartments’ was absurd – there was absolutely no reason why they could not all be together in a perfectly civilized way.20 If Daphne couldn’t bear this and decided not to come at all, then Ellen would be hurt, but she was not going to pander to Daphne’s whim. So Daphne was obliged to go to Ellen’s with Gertrude and didn’t enjoy this situation at all – not that Ellen saw the situation as such. Daphne could not help contrasting Gertie with Ellen, or observing Gertie through Ellen’s eyes. In some ways it was a relief to return home.
But once at home, she was discontented. Tommy was ‘in a stinking mood’ with her and she was horrible to him in return – so horrible that her children had for once taken his part and urged her to be nicer to him. Instead, she consoled herself with a younger man, called Frank Price, whom she had met at Ellen’s and then again in Paris. Frank worked for Doubleday, and was charming, clever and fun. He looked, according to Daphne, a bit like Danny Kaye, but also slightly as she imagined ten-year-old Kits would look when grown up. But what had really drawn her closer to Frank, even before her visit to Gertie in Florida, was the discovery that he too was attracted to both sexes – ‘We both freely admitted to each other mutual Venetian tendencies.’21 This made her feel safe and comfortable with Frank and she encouraged him to kiss her ‘on the roof of the Tour d’Argent in front of all Paris’. She admitted to an alarmed Ellen – alarmed at what this would do to ‘Frank’s already outsize ego’22 – that from kissing ‘we advanced somewhat further’. But to Ferdy, remembering her reaction over Carol Reed, she wrote that her behaviour with Frank had been ‘quite correct’ and he was just a ‘someone’ whom it was ‘fun to go around with . . . harmless and intelligent’. Now, back from New York and missing Gertie, she had Frank to stay while Tommy was in London. They ‘lay on the sofa until 2 am and kissed’ – and she didn’t care a bit if Tommy suspected anything – there was ‘no harm in it’ and she was always careful to behave if the children were around. The thought of Frank boasting and starting gossip did not perturb her – she knew there was gossip about her anyway.
When Frank left, she felt she was ‘in a vacuum’. She found herself thinking over the good time she had had with Gertie and the fun with Frank, and wrote to Ellen that she would like to hear an argument, really well put, between two scientists on the merits of ‘Cairo’ (men and women) versus ‘Venice’. She thought that ‘Venice’ would win for her, because she felt much more confident and assured, as though she were a pilot in an aircraft.23 It disturbed her to acknowledge this – ‘Oh God, I don’t know’ – and she was back to crying, ‘truly, truly I should have been born a boy. Don’t you think?’ But all the same, preferring ‘Venice’ to ‘Cairo’ did not make ‘Cairo’ necessarily repugnant: she told Ellen, with what reads like a show of bravado, ‘I seem to have fun either way.’ She then made a veiled allusion to Ellen’s possibly having thought, wrongly, that she was interested in another woman, apart from Gertrude. She wanted Ellen to know it was not true. Ellen was irritated that Daphne could imagine it mattered either way and told her to ‘get this Venetian chip off your shoulder’, while reminding her that she could ‘go to Venice with whoever she pleased’24 with her blessing. Daphne was outraged by this and replied, ‘I glory in my Venice, when I am in a Venice mood, and forget about it when I am not. The only chip is the dreary knowledge that there can never be Venice with you.’25
Nor was there any with anyone else for the next few months, though these were happy ones on the surface. My Cousin Rachel, published in July 1951, was a tremendous success. So far as readers and publishers were concerned, this was the Daphne du Maurier they wanted, bang on form. Victor’s first print-run was the largest ever: 125,000 copies – but even that was not enough. This was, in the first year, a bigger run-away bestseller than Rebecca had been in a comparable period – My Cousin Rachel was reprinting to the tune of 25,000 copies within three months. Even the critics (with the exception of Marghanita Laski, who upbraided the author for her bad grammar) applauded. Daphne had gone off to New York again and wrote defensively to Victor: ‘If anyone gives me a good review let me know.’ When Victor passed on all the excellent reviews, she was amazed, especially by the Guardian – ‘. . . it is in the same category as Rebecca . . . but is an even more consummate piece of story-telling’ – but determined to be cautious. ‘Many thanks for the reviews,’ she wrote, ‘. . . but I never will be a critic’s favourite.’ She was not going to let her defences down again.
In her own life she was busy building them up even higher too. She had another meeting with Frank, this time in London, and she derived some curious satisfaction from feeling she had put him in his place. They had had lunch and were walking through Mayfair hand in hand when Daphne suddenly saw Carol Reed. ‘“Oh!” I said, “there’s Carol. I must go after him.” “What do you mean,” said Frank, “you can’t leave me like this.” “I can and I will,” I answered, “see you in Paris sometime,” and without a backward glance I ran about twenty yards . . . after Carol and tapped him on the shoulder. “Daph, darling,” he said, and holding hands we walked away together . . . and spent the whole afternoon . . . having a wonderful heart-to-heart. Frank flew back to Paris but on what sort of hard chair I don’t know.’26 Nor, as she made plain to Ellen, did she care. She even encouraged Ellen to tell this story to those in the Doubleday office in New York, because she knew they would relish it. ‘I guess it’s the first time he’s been left flat, standing in the street.’
It was this side of Daphne – the spontaneous, the slightly cruel, the outrageous – which came to the fore that winter while she wrote a new collection of short stories which were a completely new departure. These were strange, morbid stories, in which deep undercurrents of resentment and even hatred revealed far more about Daphne’s inner fantasy life than any novel had ever done. (‘All those stories have inner significance for problems of that time,’ she later wrote.) They included a novella, ‘Monte Verita’, which completely bewildered Victor Gollancz, who commented: ‘I don’t understand the slight implication that there is something wrong with sex.’ This novella is about a woman, Anna, who is mesmerized by a mysterious sect who live in a secret world in the mountains in Central Europe. She joins them and disappears. The whole point of the story is that in her ‘Monte Verita’ Anna has found a spiritual happiness she could never find with her husband or any man. Sexual love between a man and a woman no longer means anything to her, and all the young women who became part of her sect are now saved from ‘the turmoil of a brief romance turning to humdrum married life’. What disturbed Victor most was that in the first version Anna, once she is safe in her Monte Verita, turns into a man. At Victor’s insistence, Daphne changed this and Anna remains a woman but, as he had picked up, the general drift of this highly metaphorical story is that there is something wrong with sex between men and women – it spoils relationships, it drains energy, it gets in the way of self-fulfilment. Written by a woman who was in the middle of her first love-affair with another woman for twenty years, it seems strikingly significant.
The title story, ‘The Apple Tree’, seems even more so. It tells of a man who, after his wife has died, notices an apple tree, which has never borne blossom or fruit, suddenly flourishing. He becomes convinced that the tree represents his wife, whom he never really loved because ‘she always seemed to put a blight on everything’ and because they had lived ‘in different worlds . . . their minds not meeting’. All his efforts go into trying to destroy the tree, but in the end, when finally he has hacked it into logs and given it away, he trips over its root and is trapped in the snow. It is very hard to decide quite how Daphne intended this story to be read: is the hatred of the man for his dead wife justified, or does he get his deserts? Or is the whole story meant to damn marriages in which true minds do not meet – as in her own, according to her confession to Ferdy? Later in life, Daphne said that ‘The Apple Tree’ was based on feelings about Paddy Puxley, but it seems far more convincing that the resentment which fuels it stemmed from her feelings about her own marriage. Whatever the origin of ‘The Apple Tree’, it was all of a piece with the volume’s general theme of sex as trouble, in one way or another, of the sexual urge causing violence and even murder.
Two of the other four stories very forcibly emphasized this and have a distinctly nasty tone to them. ‘The Little Photographer’ tells of a rich woman on holiday who has everything she wants except a lover (her husband is not with her). She finds herself wanting to have a love-affair, as long as it can be ‘a thing of silence’ with a stranger, so that it is just sex and nothing more. She sets her sights on a crippled photographer whom she meets while working on a cliff. She asks him, ‘Why don’t you kiss me?’ and he does, which gives her a delicious furtive sense of excitement – ‘What she did was without emotion of any sort, her mind and affections quite untouched.’ But eventually sex with the photographer becomes a boring ritual. One day she doesn’t turn up. He is distraught and says she is his life, he cannot do without her. He tells her she is wicked when she offers him money to go away, and she pushes him over the cliff. Her husband arrives to take her home and she thinks she has got away with both the love-affair (in which there was no love) and the murder, but on the last page it is made clear that she will not do so and will be condemned to a future life of guilt and blackmail.
All the details of the plot in this unpleasant story are incredible, but the atmosphere is convincing. The coldness of the woman, her contempt for the poor photographer, her ruthlessness – all these repel but fascinate. The woman’s ideal, ‘passion between strangers’, sex as something to discard, is ugly but argued with such conviction that the attempt at the end to make her pay some sort of price seems weak. Another story, ‘Kiss Me Again, Stranger’, has an even more brutal view of sex. A young mechanic picks up a cinema usherette. They go into a cemetery and she tells him to kiss her but that she likes him silent. He feels himself falling in love with her and starts fantasizing about their future together. He leaves her reluctantly and goes home. Next day he reads about the murder of an RAF man and realizes that the murderess was his girl. The plot is totally unbelievable, but once again the atmosphere is not.
After such macabre happenings, the other two stories in this collection come as a relief, although here again, in one of them at least, there are autobiographical connections freely acknowledged by the author. ‘The Old Man’ is a simply told story which turns out to be a spoof. The old man is described as big and strong. He lives by a lake with his wife but has driven his children away, so he can be alone with her, ‘which is what he has always wanted’. In the last three lines it is revealed that the old man is, in fact, a swan. Often, after she had written this story, Daphne would refer to Tommy as ‘just like “The Old Man”’ – wanting her to himself, jealous, she believed, of the attention she gave her children, especially Kits. ‘But that is not the whole significance of the story,’ she commented. ‘The real significance is that Moper [Tommy] must not kill his only begotten son but kill the petty jealous self which is his hidden nature, and so rise again.’ This, she thought, ‘is the truth behind Christianity and all the religions’. But the story she liked best, and which ‘just came bubbling out’, fitted into no pattern. ‘The Birds’ is a wholly atmospheric story, beautifully paced and unmarred by the intricacies of plot which sometimes spoiled Daphne’s original ideas. The tension of birds attacking humans in hordes is sustained throughout. The birds themselves, shuttling on window-sills, pecking at glass panes, swooping in from the sea in millions, are horrifyingly real. ‘“The Birds”’, wrote Victor Gollancz, elated, ‘is a masterpiece.’27
The whole collection thrilled him, but he was firm in telling Daphne that he did not at all like two other stories she added – ‘No Motive’ and ‘Split Second’. She was, he told her, ‘one of the few authors . . . with whom I can be frank’. ‘No Motive’ jarred on him and ‘Split Second’ was poor. Daphne, as ever, accepted his judgement and dropped these two stories. She told him he really was ‘the only publisher in the world’ even though she was ‘a tinge sorry’ about ‘Split Second’. He was ‘dynamic, exuberant, tender, intolerant and the only publisher for me’. Victor responded that she was ‘beautiful, adorable, gracious, charming and good’. This was indeed the high-water mark of their relationship as author and publisher. But Victor warned her that even though he loved the stories she must brace herself for shocked reviews – the violence in them would be noted and probably found abhorrent coming from the pen of the ‘romantic’ writer she was supposed to be. He was, on the whole, right. Nancy Spain in the Daily Express in particular was revolted by the stories and attacked the author. Victor replied to her in a storming letter which this time he sent, only to be soundly told off by Nancy Spain in turn. Her review, which he had called ‘low-down’, was, she wrote, perfectly accurate – the stories were ‘all concerned with malformation, hatred, blackmail, cruelty and murder’ and he shouldn’t object to her saying so. Anyone writing such stories was surely sick.
Daphne’s own response was to ask who Nancy Spain was and then to dismiss all the reviewers as ‘nearly always indifferent writers who can’t make a living from their own books and are forced to make a living through shoddy journalism . . . kicking at writers more successful than themselves is probably the only thrill they ever get’. Victor was, in fact, doing her no favours by encouraging her to take this attitude, so that soon she was no longer able to detect genuine and potentially helpful criticism. But it was a pity this collection did not merit more attention, and that it was ‘The Birds’ which monopolized any attention it did get, because it was a huge improvement on Daphne’s previous short stories of her early years.
Not only were these new stories better written, they also showed a shift in the balance of power between the sexes which she had been working out for some twenty years now in her novels. The women were no longer pathetic and exploited, the men no longer always powerful and dominant. Now, women were often in control and making men suffer. Women had become quite vicious creatures, perfectly capable of tricking, and even killing, men as they had been tricked and killed in the early stories. Daphne’s friends and family were rather taken aback at this strain of brutality she displayed, but she was unrepentant and talked cheerfully of ‘my macabre tastes’ without seeming to fear any significance being read into them. But this collection was highly important: it represented a change not only in Daphne’s style but in her subject-matter – her ‘macabre tastes’ at last were acknowledged and given an outlet, reflecting the confusion of her inner self.