TOMMY MADE NO attempt to plead any kind of mitigation or justification: he was bitterly and rightly ashamed and overwhelmed with remorse. When his family tried to console him – though it was difficult to find any basis for consolation, beyond a general compassion, for anyone so clearly at fault – he rejected their comfort. He wrote to Tessa, thanking her for her ‘sweet letter’ of support, that the worst part was the hurt he had done to other people and his sense of humiliation. It was ‘one of those things, at my age, I ought to have known how to avoid like the plague’. He explained that he had ‘not been drinking at all lately, but I had to go for a Civil Defence meeting and being weak-minded about that sort of thing, had a few whiskies with the result I felt like hell’. But he had got into his car, while knowing he shouldn’t, and ‘hadn’t a leg to stand on’ when he caused the accident injuring two others but not himself. The superintendent who had to book him ‘nearly passed out’ with embarrassment and it was all terrible. He felt, he added, ‘such a fool’.
Daphne’s reaction, as ever in times of crisis, was to accept what had happened as quickly as possible without wasting time on recriminations. She tried to get Tommy to adopt this attitude, and to calm down, but he couldn’t. His remorse at first surprised her with its violence – ‘he suffers most terribly’ – and then, as it went on and on, it began to irritate her. She felt the lengths he went to in his guilt and self-laceration were exaggerated and even a touch ridiculous. She wrote to Foy that he was ‘treating his crime as if he were Profumo and has resigned from every club and organization he has ever joined; if it were fifty years ago he would be leaving for darkest Africa under an assumed name’. This she thought absurd, and said ‘it makes the clubs he resigns from feel more embarrassed than he does’. Equally silly, in her opinion, were Tommy’s plans to keep a low profile – ‘He says that in future we must go to the boat . . . from the steps at Station Hill . . . and I can see so many difficulties getting to and fro that it would almost be simpler to end our days as Mr and Mrs Brown on the Continent.’ However dreadful the situation, and she certainly did not underestimate the harm done to the other motorists – she could not help seeing some grim humour in her husband’s melodramatic reaction. He could see none himself, and she became exasperated, expecting from him a more resolute outlook. She had been expecting some such incident and so was to a certain extent prepared, though when he hadn’t returned home she was ‘dotty with anxiety’, and when the police phoned almost fainted until she was assured he was alive and nobody else killed. ‘I have lived for a long time’, she confessed to the Agars, ‘in the absolute dread that something of this sort would happen, for although he is supposed to be TT . . . he does have a nip now and again.’1 But once he was home, and she heard that the people he had injured would recover, the agony for her was over. For Tommy it seemed just to be beginning, and Daphne was depressed by the prospect of him slipping back into the deep misery from which he had only recently hauled himself. Here was another crisis and she could hardly bear the aftermath.
What particularly annoyed her was that she suspected his remorse was more about ‘loss of face’ than anything else and she found it embarrassing that anyone should care so much what others thought. ‘Why’, she wrote to Foy, ‘must he mind so much?’ It had been the same, on a lesser scale, when he failed to get elected to the local council – ‘for him to take it seriously and be poorly because of it . . .’ She despised him for not being able to accept the blow (or, in this more serious case, the blame) and then rise above it, as she felt she would have done in similar circumstances. She licked her wounds in private whereas Tommy leaned on her and exhausted her with his emotional need. They were right back again to the tortured relationship of 1957 and this time she was not so disposed to be stoical. One of the first things that occurred to her after the court appearance was that he would now say they could not go to Kits’ wedding – ‘What price the wedding trip now, I ask myself?’ Even the logistics of getting to Dublin would probably be too much for him and he would say he was not up to travelling. If so, she was determined to go on her own.
In the event, Tommy’s sense of duty and family loyalty overcame his reluctance to be seen in public, even on the other side of the Irish Sea, and they both went to the wedding in January 1964, though Daphne described him as leaving Menabilly ‘looking as if he were going to the salt mines in Siberia’ – she wanted to burst out laughing at the mere sight of his face. Once they arrived in Dublin, where they had a suite at the Gresham Hotel (‘couldn’t have been bettered at the Savoy’), they went to meet Olive’s family whom Daphne liked at once, describing her parents as ‘thoroughly pleasant, honest-to-God respectable’. The Whites’ home was the kind of eye-opener to her that the married quarters of the Aldershot barracks had been – she could hardly credit how small the house was and how cramped – ‘the little front room crammed with sisters and relatives . . . and upstairs in the front bedroom, which the bride shared with her sisters (one bed). . . were all the wedding presents spread out, and the bridal gown and the bridesmaids’ dresses hanging on a single curtain rail. It was a most touching scene . . .’
The wedding itself was a sensation and she revelled in every minute of it. ‘The crowd at the scene of the church’, she reported, ‘might have been that which greeted the Pope in Jerusalem,’ and what tickled her was that all this excitement was for Olive, not for Kits, ‘being an ex-Miss Ireland Beauty Queen’. None of the large Browning and du Maurier contingent had ever seen anything like it and several, not anticipating the crush, arrived too late to get through it into the church to witness the ‘simple and sincere service held in the Presbytery (Kits not being a Catholic)’. When the newly married couple emerged, the cheering throng rushed forward with shouts of ‘God bless them’ and to Daphne’s delight the priest jumped on a wall and ordered them to part to let the couple through – ‘I thought of the raised eyebrows of Parson Coe of Fowey church’. The reception, at the Gresham, surpassed any other such event she had ever attended. The meal was ‘a test of endurance . . . I gave up at the turkey (having already eaten soup, fish and chicken pie)’. But the moment she loved best was when, after the usual speeches, ‘the priest suddenly said “Well, I won’t be giving you a sermon and I’ve earned me five pounds, so how would it be if I led you in a song?” and he burst into a rollicking ditty, something like a sea shanty . . . and the gist going something like this:
She’s the girl I do adore,
But before I tread the holy ground
I’ll have a drink once more, once more,
Ah, I’ll have a drink once more.’
The spontaneity of it all appealed to her and it was the only time in her life that she felt a social occasion was ‘over all too soon’.
The crowd was still waiting patiently outside the hotel when it was time to leave, and as Olive and Kits got into the car to go to the airport Daphne heard one woman remark, ‘Ah, she’ll never want for nothing no more,’ which, she commented, still laughing about this hours later, ‘knowing Kits and his extravagant ways, I am led to wonder’. The honeymoon alone was exotic – no mooring in Frenchman’s Creek in a little boat for Kits, but instead ‘he was off to California, Mexico and Jamaica’. Tommy, surrounded by so much flowing alcohol, looked ‘grimmer than when he stood guard at King George v’s funeral’ half the time, but she knew she’d smiled almost constantly for twenty-four hours and hadn’t ‘laughed so much for years’.
Once back in Menabilly, the laughing stopped abruptly. The January rain fell every day and, though she reminded herself that she could be ‘living in a back street in Manchester, so what the hell’, Daphne was almost as pulled down as Tommy. She watched him with misgivings, wondering if he was going to have another nervous breakdown – ‘he seems so jumpy . . . as if he were boiling up for something’. He himself wrote to Tessa that he didn’t know what was wrong with him but he felt like cutting his throat. Echo was proving too hard for him to sail on his own and he was thinking of facing facts and switching to a motor-boat. The only thing that would get her through the winter, Daphne felt once again, was to start on a new book, even though she didn’t feel like it and would have to exert every bit of willpower at her disposal to rise above Tommy’s depression and get on with it. The book she had in mind was a novel set in Italy and had arisen quite naturally, which made it all the more annoying that she now felt disinclined to work on it. Somehow, she felt she had missed the tide, though in the autumn, before Tommy’s accident, she had been all set to go.
The germ for The Flight of the Falcon was sown on a visit to Urbino with Kits, and on another holiday with Tessa during which she had seen an old woman asleep in the doorway of a church and had put some money into her hand. She intended it to appear to be a thriller but, in fact, to be an allegory. But when, after Kits’ wedding, she began to write she found it hardest to capture what had always come most easily: the atmosphere. She sat writing, wearing an extra jumper and fur-lined boots, and stared out at the rain falling in sheets from a sky dark at three o’clock in the afternoon, and she could not bring the warmth and sun of Italy into her narrative however hard she tried. It was rather like, she wrote to one friend, someone sitting in Urbino in the summer heat trying to conjure up Fowey from guidebooks. She had plenty of those – ‘I am surrounded by maps and picture postcards of my city Urbino, but it’s not like having a real glimpse . . . so I have to go carefully.’ She employed Joan Saunders, of Writers and Speakers Research in Fulham, to find out all kinds of details she felt would help, and pored over the newspapers, magazines and pamphlets duly sent to her together with information on university life there. Then she set out to concoct a modern story, which would be exciting and frightening, as counterpoint to the legend of the Falcon, a German story which had as its theme ‘the stripping of the proud, the violation of the haughty and the humiliation of the slanderer’. The allegorical meaning was to do with the Jungian idea of psychological predestination which had fascinated her for so long. She wanted to identify ‘that link with the past’ in which lost childhoods are part of one continuous pattern until the whole of life is seen as ‘an unending journey’.
It was a tall order and she knew it, but she no longer wanted only to entertain with straightforward stories. She wanted to communicate her own theories about life, but to do it in such a way that nobody would guess she was writing about her own emotional experiences. Any kind of realistic novel was out of the question – far too ‘waine’ (embarrassing) – and hence the allegory.
When she had finished it, at the end of May 1964, she told Victor Gollancz it was ‘good holiday fare’ but that it did not have ‘the depth of characterisation of The Scapegoat’. Victor, when he had read it, did not quite know what to make of it and thought it would need to be drastically cut. Meanwhile, in keeping with her declared determination to earn as much as she could ‘now I am on the slide’, Daphne had sent the novel to America to see if anyone would buy it for serialization before publication. It was ‘such a relief’ when Good Housekeeping offered $100,000 – but at a price. In a staggeringly critical and detailed letter Good Housekeeping requested all kinds of changes, including ‘the strengthening’ of one character throughout the novel and the writing of a completely new ending. Any author loathes this kind of substantial rewriting, but for $100,000 Daphne was quite prepared to oblige, and did so. Victor was in a panic about it all – Sheila and he both thought the original ending better – but the changes went ahead, with the first version retained in the British publication.
Daphne had wanted the novel to be published in December, an unusual time to publish a novel, especially by a ‘big’ author, but Victor persuaded her that January would be better. She was sure the critics would either ‘spit on it’ or else ‘be silly’. True to her new interest in such things, she had her own ideas about prepublication quotes: this time she wanted him to try Kingsley Amis – ‘I know you may smile and say “Nonsense, not for you”, but . . . the thing is I did a sci-fi story for him . . . and he was enthusiastic.’ Victor replied that Kingsley was ‘unpredictable’, but he would sound him out tactfully. Otherwise, all she wanted to be sure of was that she didn’t ‘clash with irritating big write-ups like Iris Murdoch or Nancy Mitford’. She didn’t, but nor did she get big write-ups herself. No one spotted the allegorical significance so far as she could see, and this made her even more contemptuous of the critics than she already tended to be. Unlike the disappointing reception of certain other novels – such as Hungry Hill – the less than enthusiastic response for this one did not disturb her. On the contrary, the American serialization rights and the fact that the Literary Guild took the novel when Doubleday published it made her consider it quite a triumph. She also felt that in some way she had scored over reviewers because they had indeed ‘missed the point’. So did almost everyone she knew who read it, but that made her more amused than depressed – it was quite a new experience to be thought obscure.
By the time The Flight of the Falcon came out, Tommy’s ill health was driving everything else from her mind. This time ‘ill health’ was not a euphemism either for alcohol-related problems or psychological ones. Tommy was in obvious agony from pain in his left leg and instead of being able to enjoy sailing in the newly launched ‘Yggy III’ he hardly had the strength to go out in her at all. By July he was ‘feeling like hell’ and Daphne reported that the trouble was ‘lack of circulation in the left leg’. The only exercise he could manage without pain was wandering slowly down the long lawn in front of Menabilly, his left leg dragging a little, looking at the flowers and deciding he liked best ‘the mass of daisies and buttercups which in their simple jollity and freshness outdo all the more sophisticated flowers’. Soon, even this walk proved too much for him and by August he was ‘laid up with a swollen foot’.
Both Tommy and Daphne had absolute faith in Dr Luther and refused to listen to their children’s advice to get a second opinion. In September, with Tommy now virtually immobile and in great distress, it was finally decided he should go into Plymouth hospital for what Daphne described as ‘a lombar symtorhectomy, which I can’t spell’.2 The operation ‘didn’t come off’. Tommy himself wrote that he just had to face up to the fact that he would have ‘a pretty useless left leg for the rest of my days’. He was obliged to use a wheelchair and was told that ‘short of . . . amputation there is no radical cure’. The sight of her once athletic, proud, strong husband in his wheelchair made Daphne feel ‘constricted about the heart’, but what astonished her and brought her nearer to tears was that in the face of very real physical suffering and disability Tommy showed such bravery. He seemed, she thought, ‘to have got some inner strength’. He himself explained in a letter to Tessa, ‘I have no grumbles as I have been blessed throughout my life with so many of God’s gifts that the loss of the use of a leg is a small thing’ – this from a man who loathed inactivity, who had been a champion sportsman, lived for sailing and hated to be dependent. What upset him most was that ‘poor Daphne has had a trying time’.
But it was a trying time she could cope with ‘so long as he is cheerful’. Then, she said, she could face anything. What she couldn’t bear were tears, depression, whole days without speaking, sulks and silences, groans of despair, and worst of all diatribes of remorse or self-pity. Tommy’s heroic acceptance of his fate this time touched and moved her and she tried her hardest to help him. Not once did she mention feeling restless and resentful because she could not write, and even the prospect of another winter trapped in Menabilly, getting on each other’s nerves, did not appal her in the way it had in previous autumns. Instead, she concentrated on their good fortune in having Esther running the house, and being able to afford any material comfort they needed. One of these was adequate heating. Menabilly had always been bitterly cold, but Daphne had never even thought of installing central heating, which seemed to her positively decadent as well as prohibitively expensive – far better to put on another jumper, wrap a scarf round one’s neck, pull a fur hat over one’s ears and wear two pairs of socks inside fur-lined boots. But now, in view of Tommy’s plight, storage heaters were installed – central heating was still going too far – and both of them were ecstatic, in a thoroughly childlike way, at the warmth this spread.
Another blessing was television. Daphne had begun to be a devotee of this medium in 1956, when she first had a television installed, and now that Tommy was obliged to sit still for long periods it became more important than ever – it was another ‘routes’, usually indulged in from seven till eleven in the evening. Tommy liked Grandstand, anything to do with sport and programmes like The Brains Trust, whereas Daphne loved anything with fast car chases and thrillers. There was no more settling down either side of the fire and reading – now it was on with the television and anyone staying in the house was simply assumed to want to watch too. If they didn’t want to, they could ‘lump it’, Daphne said cheerfully, and always warned friends before they came that this would be the case. All memories of being irritated that her grandchildren ‘do nothing but watch that wretched TV’ were forgotten and she was quite amused and proud of her own addiction to ‘honky’ programmes. Anyone telephoning during them was ignored and she often instructed friends ‘don’t telephone after seven as I shall be watching TV’. It made her interested in trying to adapt her own work for television, or have it adapted, and also in Kits’ plans for TV films. She spent the winter doing ‘nothing but scribble a draft script for a film about Yeats’ which she hoped Kits would make.
Somehow the two of them staggered through until Christmas and then the family, when they came to stay, saw at once that something would have to be done. There was their father, in obvious agony half the time, and their mother being stoical. As soon as the holiday was over, Tommy was finally persuaded by them to go to London to see a specialist. In the first week in January 1965 he was admitted to the Lindo wing of St Mary’s, Paddington, where his left foot was amputated. Daphne stayed at the Great Western Hotel next door and never left his side, except to go and visit Kits, who was living comparatively near, for an hour each day. She hated the hospital atmosphere, however kind the doctors and nurses, and when Tommy said he thought he would never get better until he was home, she quite agreed. But he was sixty-eight years old and had just had major surgery, so the alien environment had to be endured for a little longer. Sitting with him most of the day and evening she was struck by how wretchedly thin he had become and how drawn and weary his face. ‘Life has been hell,’ she wrote to a friend,’. . . I don’t know if I am coming or going.’ Her own weariness and distress were as nothing compared to the ‘hideous pain’ her ‘poor Moper’ had endured. He was worrying about never being able to sail again, in spite of now having a motor-boat, and not being able to drive. She assured him they would be able to adapt a car to his needs and had a friend search out a three-litre coupé, a green Rover, which could be duly altered.
Three weeks after the operation they went home together by train, travelling in a closed carriage with a nurse in attendance. It was a journey as different as possible from any other they had ever made across the Tamar Bridge – there was no whoop of joy this time or tossing of caps as they entered Cornwall. Instead, Tommy was sedated to help him stand the journey, and Daphne sat silent in the darkened carriage, listening to the sudden rackety noise as the train trundled on to Brunel’s bridge. The rain lashed against the windows and when they arrived at Par the afternoon was as dark as night. It was a sad home-coming, but there was relief, too, in being once more in Menabilly. Tommy continued to be brave but it was too much to expect. The ordeal of being fitted with an artificial limb hung over him and he was ‘very depressed’, wrote Daphne, ‘. . . and now feeling the psychological effect of the second operation’. At the end of February, he was taken to Plymouth to have the first fitting for his artificial foot, but she could not go with him because she was feeling ‘very much under the weather’. She thought it was ‘my usual spring bug’, but it turned out to be jaundice, and Tommy worried about catching it – ‘I’ve had quite enough illness and bed to last me a long time’. She stayed in her room, in bed, and he stayed in his.
They were both in a desperate plight. Daphne vomited repeatedly and had hardly the strength to lift her head from the pillow, while Tommy struggled to drag himself around, feeling wretched in every way. They were well looked after by Esther and two nurses, but neither seemed to be recovering. Neither ate nor slept much. Daphne wondered if she would ever walk again through the Menabilly woods to Pridmouth beach and in her mind’s eye saw the stormy sea and wished she could feel the spray on her cheeks – then, she might feel better. Thinking of Tommy, in an even worse state than she was, was an additional torment. On 10 March, he managed to scrawl a letter to his sister Grace telling her he had contracted bronchitis on top of everything else and commented sadly that ‘it would really be more dignified to fade quietly out’. He felt completely finished and even scribbling a few lines was too much – ‘it’s quite amazing how tired one gets just writing’. During the day, his mind seemed to wander and at night he alarmed the nurses by trying to sleepwalk. Daphne, when told this, remembered how his mother had become confused like this just before she died, and she had ‘an awful apprehension’ something was going to happen.
On Saturday night, 13 March, feeling a little better than she had done for three weeks, she got up and went through to Tommy’s room to say goodnight. He told her he dreaded the night because he could not sleep, and seemed particularly restless, but she was weak and tired herself and could only soothe his brow and promise him the nurse would give him a sleeping pill. In the early hours of the next morning she was wakened by the nurse, who said she was alarmed at General Browning’s condition and had rung for the doctor. Daphne went to him and saw at once that his face had changed. She bent over him and could not hear any breathing. The nurse tried to resuscitate him, but he was dead.
All three children came at once and afterwards she marvelled at how each of them had surprised her by demonstrating the very qualities she had not realized they possessed. Tessa seemed so tender and emotional, and it was with her that she wept; Flavia was calm and efficient, and she felt she could leave her to organize everything; and Kits, always appearing to live for the moment, just as she wanted him to, and to be flippant and full of life, was suddenly serious and talked immediately of preserving his father’s belongings. And in her staff, too, she knew she was fortunate – ‘My good Esther,’ she wrote,’ . . . and her husband and the Burts, it is rare these days to have people so devoted, like in the old days on an estate, sparing themselves nothing.’ To everyone’s surprise, she ordered a post-mortem, which showed ‘the clot entered his heart, also the arteries everywhere were poor, he could not have had many months ahead’. His sister Grace was given the fullest description of what she felt had happened and of her own state of mind. It was her firm belief, Daphne wrote, that ‘these things get handed down . . . I swear it is handed down . . . we are born with the particles in the blood that will finally predispose us to disease. I think this will be medically proved this century. More and more I go “off” the twentieth century “put everything down to psychology” thesis, and back to probably what the Greeks may have believed, chemistry is all important.’ Already, she had decided Tommy’s ‘bad bouts of gloom’ and ‘his tum throughout his life’, also his ‘urge to drink’, were all due to ‘physical and chemical’ reasons – ‘a deficiency of some sort’.
There was no grand funeral because Tommy ‘loathed memorial services, funerals, and the lowering into tombs’. He never discussed death ‘though he was a Christian and did not fear it’. Once, when she had urged him to say how he would like his mortal remains dealt with, he had said he would like a Viking’s funeral. This appealed to her and she was tempted to have his body put into ‘Yggy III’ and sent, all aflame, out to sea, but ‘I just can’t cope’. Instead, there was a very private cremation, which she did not attend, just as she had not attended her father’s funeral – ‘I can’t face it’ – and later she took the casket of ashes and scattered them round ‘Yggy I’, ‘at the end of the lawn, by my Hut, where the daffodils grow, and where latterly he used to sit in the sun, and it was a lovely day . . . and peaceful, and the dogs came too and cocked, which he would have approved of and laughed at, and it was all perfectly happy and somehow “routes”’.
But ‘routes’ had been changed forever, and she knew it. ‘We have been so much together latterly,’ she wrote, ‘since the retirement, that everything had become geared to him.’ She saw with frightening clarity ‘the thing of empty rooms, etc., etc., months ahead that in one moment have become without point’. What shocked her most was how shocked she found she was. Over and over in her novels and stories she had written death scenes, often with great zest, and yet nothing in her imagination had prepared her for the reality. No other death had affected her like this, not even her father’s or Gertrude Lawrence’s. The death of a parent, however young, seemed to her ‘in the natural order of things’ in the way that the death of a husband did not, and she had not witnessed Gertie’s death, so that it went on seeming unbelievable. She felt now that she knew ‘what suffering means’, and what she was suffering from was not only distress at the death itself but from guilt. Throughout the vicissitudes of her married life, and in spite of the breakdown of one side of it, she had always known she loved Tommy even when she appeared to despise him, or to be unbearably irritated by him. Now he was dead, a sense of waste as well as grief overwhelmed her – she could not bear to remember what a mess both of them had made of so many of their years together. ‘I have got to try and forget the last days,’ she wrote, ‘because the sense of loss is terrible.’ So was the sense of guilt, and the only way to deal with that was to concentrate on the good and happy times they had had. ‘I want my memories to go back to the time when he was well and strong,’ she wrote to Foy, ‘and I think they will.’
They did, with great and rather startling rapidity. Daphne exerted all the tremendous willpower of which she was capable in wiping out the pain and difficulties she had experienced in her marriage and bringing to the fore the happiness which Tommy had once brought her. She was soon seeing him in her mind only as the handsome guardsman who had swept her off her feet, and banishing forever the bad-tempered, complaining husband who shuffled around the house looking pathetic. She saw him even now in some heavenly yachting harbour waiting for her in Yggy and saying ‘Come on, duck, jump in, whatever kept you?’, and the thought made her smile and feel cheered. She didn’t want to be like Queen Victoria, and refused to wear all black – if she did, Tommy would ‘peer down from Heaven’, ask what on earth she had got on and say, ‘she must be mad’.3 This belief that he was somewhere waiting for her was the greatest possible comfort, but she found she couldn’t make any plans. ‘One’s job is over, and one has to begin anew,’ she wrote, ‘but how?’