THE TRIBUTES PAID to her husband on his death were very important to Daphne. She wanted his qualities both recognized and appreciated, and was not a widow who pushed aside condolences. Maureen Baker-Munton, who came down to help her with the shoals of letters which poured in, and who replied to many of them on Daphne’s behalf, was impressed by how carefully Daphne attended to the expressions of sympathy and by how many she replied to personally. But at the same time she was capable of seeing how absurdly inappropriate some of the letters were and, as after her father’s death, was not so grief-stricken that the farcical side of it all could not amuse her. One letter began: ‘I once met your husband forty years ago in the Post Office,’ she told Grace Browning, and another: ‘I must warn you that it won’t get better as the months pass, but worse.’ She could hear ‘Tommy saying sourly, “Why doesn’t the bloody woman go and cut her throat?”’
But most of the letters touched her and were a real comfort – ‘Such tributes! I feel like Lady Churchill.’ It mattered very much that a telegram had arrived from the Queen and another from Prince Philip, as well as several more from other members of the Royal Family. It mattered almost as much that those who had served with Tommy in the war and knew his worth as a soldier should write and say so – General Eisenhower and General Montgomery in particular. Some of the letters from ordinary soldiers impressed her greatly – she liked to think Tommy had been popular – and occasionally someone would catch the spirit of him with phrases like ‘He had the heart of a child’ and ‘A true knight, in the oldest sense’. The formal obituaries were all read and noted for length, prominence and tone, with comments scribbled across them. One newspaper headed its obituary with ‘Boy was a Giant’, and across it she wrote, ‘All these eulogies won’t bring him back. RIP.’ No, but they did console her, and her pride in Tommy’s achievements helped to sustain her.
Some of the letters surprised her with their warmth or perception. Paddy Puxley wrote, a kind letter from a kind woman whose life she sometimes thought she had ruined. And Philip Rashleigh, whom she had been determined to think of as cold and unfeeling, wrote movingly of how he had met her husband in 1945 and had been amazed by his ‘broad smile and most enlivening handshake and his very friendly welcome to a junior officer’. This sort of recognition of Tommy’s worth was important to her, but so was the realization of what his death would mean to her. Ellen Doubleday wrote that although Daphne had always been ‘a lonely soul’ she had had Tommy coming and going. Now, truly alone, adjusting would be hard. Ellen, of course, knew because she had had to adjust herself after her own husband’s death. She remembered how swiftly Daphne had responded to her need at the time, and was anxious to offer the same support to her friend now. But Daphne wanted to be by herself for the moment. The distinction between being lonely and alone was subtle and was causing her some difficulty. It was true, she had indeed always been a lonely soul, but she had liked it and had always resented the interruption of her solitary life. Scheming to get more time on her own had been one of the main preoccupations of her adult life and she knew she had resented bitterly those who thwarted this desire. But now she very quickly saw that what Ellen had said was true: there was a difference between being a lonely soul and being alone. She felt curiously adrift and wrote of being ‘suspended in time’, of feeling ‘weightless’ and also ‘not really here’. Some of this was due to shock, and some to the after-effects of jaundice, but there was also a slight feeling of fear. She had been married for nearly thirty-three years, and whatever the circumstances of that marriage, it had been a partnership. Now, it was over and she had to adjust to the change.
All her thoughts about widowhood were clear and sensible.1 One acquaintance wrote to her that she knew how she felt, because when her own husband died she had realized that ‘I was always his puppet, and now he is not pulling the strings any more I am still’. This seemed to Daphne a horrifying admission and one she would never think of making. She had never been a puppet and she was certainly not now ‘still’. She knew her life was not over and that grief had not made her feeble or apathetic. But she was shaken and knew that a period of stability was vitally necessary. People who urged her to go away at once for a long holiday annoyed her intensely, and she regretted having urged a holiday on Ellen after Nelson died. ‘At the moment,’ she wrote to Ellen, a month after Tommy’s death, ‘I am neither physically nor emotionally ready for a trip anywhere . . . I tire easily and would not enjoy travelling anymore than you wanted to go anywhere after Nelson died. My God, how you stuck me in Paris and Florence passes my belief. All I could think of was wanting to kiss your hands, and not only your hands. If anyone tried that on me I’d murder them! (But then that was always the case with me).’
Those who advised moving right away from her home annoyed her even more. Both bits of advice she felt instinctively were quite wrong. Her surroundings soothed her, she liked to walk where Tommy had walked and to sit where they had sat together. She felt his presence and had no desire to flee from it. It was precious. As for holidays, those would come, but not until she had more energy to organize them. She did not want to be among strangers, who could not understand, and therefore be obliged to make an effort for their sake. She was, she wrote to Foy, two months later, ‘settling to the emptiness . . . it does not seem so overpowering now the summer weather has come. I come and go about the house quite cheerfully and everything is “routes” after all. What folly it is when people up sticks at once when bereaved and take themselves to a different milieu. I wonder what they hope to find.’
What she hoped to find herself, eventually, was a greater freedom for her ‘No. 2’. In a questionnaire2 she had answered two years before, she had written beside ‘What are your unfulfilled ambitions?’ – ‘I would like to have climbed mountains and travelled a lot in remote places.’ Now there was no reason why she could not do both. Another freedom she wanted for herself was to be more of a grandmother. The grandchildren could come and make as much noise as they liked without her having to worry that this would annoy Tommy. This was something of a delusion – the noise had annoyed her as much as him – but she sincerely felt that her role as matriarch would now be more fulfilling. The fact that Kits and Olive were expecting their first child three months after Tommy’s death went a long way towards making the immediate future brighter. When Kits rang to announce the birth of Frederick Kevin du Maurier Browning in June, she was overjoyed. She didn’t feel up to travelling to see the baby, but Kits drove down with him and she paid him the highest compliment possible: he was just like Tommy. The beginning of a new generation of Brownings just as Tommy died seemed to her wonderfully significant, a passing of one life into another, a reminder that Jung’s biological continuity was what she believed in and must hold on to. She felt that Olive (now nicknamed ‘Hacker’) was a good mother and a good wife and her son was secure. All she worried about was his future prosperity – ‘Olive will soon be serving teas,’ she joked.
Then suddenly, just as she was announcing ‘I have adapted myself better than I had expected,’ an old anxiety resurfaced. There were four and a half years of her lease on Menabilly still to run and she had paid a deposit on the lease of Kilmarth, the dower house of Menabilly, but now Philip Rashleigh suggested to her that since the Kilmarth tenants had left, and it was empty, perhaps she would like to give up Menabilly and take up residence there herself, leaving him free to move into Menabilly. What Daphne herself wanted was a renewal of the Menabilly lease for fifteen years and permission to build a dower house in its grounds at the end of that. At first, Philip Rashleigh appeared to agree to the renewal of the lease if she gave up Kilmarth, but then it turned out this was not his intention at all: he wanted her to move into Kilmarth. Daphne asked him to come and discuss the whole matter, and gave a dramatic account of what transpired. ‘I said . . . “You do want to come to live here, don’t you?” Stiffly, he replied, “In the course of time, yes” (why not say “I can’t wait. It’s my life” as I would have done).’ She said she had then tried to discuss Kilmarth but he had said he was not prepared to discuss it. This enraged her – ‘This abrupt stiff-necked pomposity of his attitude so confounded me that there was nothing to be done.’ It was then suggested to her that the Menabilly lease could be renewed for seven years if she paid for the demolition of the wing which had been falling down for ages. She felt ‘further conversation was obviously as hopeless as when the Russians sat round the table at UNO vetoing every proposal. I even said to Philip, “This is being just like Vietnam or something,” – not a flicker of a smile in response.’ She took him to the door, ‘longing to plant a kick in his posterior’.3
Once again, she had a corner to fight and there was the same relish for battle, but with a difference. She was afraid she would end up with neither Menabilly nor Kilmarth, and this made her more cautious than the description she gave of the scene makes her sound. She also had a lever this time – the Kilmarth lease – and was determined to keep calm and use it. Since this might mean she would have to live at Kilmarth, she therefore had to consider the possibility seriously. During the earlier crisis over Menabilly in 1960–61 she had never allowed herself to think of living anywhere else – it was ‘a fight to the death’ – but now, especially in her changed circumstances as a widow, she was obliged to. There was considerable pressure on her from both family and friends to take Kilmarth. It was a much smaller house (though still large), much lighter and brighter and easier to look after than Menabilly, which at some point she would have to leave anyway. The lawyers for both sides met but the matter was still not resolved by the end of the summer – first she would think she was secure at Menabilly only to hear she was not, and this naturally played havoc with her already fragile emotional state. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Rashleigh case, prevarication was certainly very evident.
But the summer of 1965 was surprisingly happy all the same. Tessa came with her children, now ten and nine, and Flavia with her son, aged six. The Zulueta family were going through a bad time that year, with Peter de Zulueta’s drinking now so serious that Tessa was not optimistic about how long she could make her marriage survive. Both Pooch and Paul were seriously affected by this situation and arrived needing every bit of support and love a grandmother could lavish on them. Going to Menabilly, for Christmas and in August, were visits of tremendous importance to them, but invariably never quite came up to expectations. Daphne’s intentions as a grandmother were the very best – she felt for the children and wanted to make them happy and cherish them – but what she was able to offer in the way of emotional sustenance was very little. She greeted them, not with a hug but a peck on the cheek, because that was her way, and though she was gentle and kind, taking them for walks and telling them the names of flowers, she kept her distance and was critical. Pooch, unfortunately, was at that stage fat and plain, which her grandmother did not like at all. Nor did she like ‘the Zulus’ for being what she thought of as difficult and spoiled. For all her imaginative powers, and her own experience as a moody young girl, she did not seem able to put herself in Pooch’s position. Instead, she put herself in Tessa’s and was indignant at the way she was treated by her children – which was to say in a free and easy manner, in the modern way of which Daphne did not approve. There was no nonsense about children not eating with adults until they were twelve in the Zulueta household, nor any restrictions on roaring and shouting. The Zulus were ‘savages’ and she preferred Rupert, Flavia’s son, who was a model of propriety, ‘the most delightful thing in children I have ever struck’. He behaved impeccably – ‘not one grizzle, not one whine, not one faint whimper and no loud shouts either’. But even Rupert watched too much television in her opinion, and she was driven, in spite of her own addiction to television, to comment: ‘I think modern children have no imagination. It is all distraction or “What can we do now?”’ This in particular was unforgivable – to ask, on a wet day, ‘What can I do now?’ when outside there were the Menabilly woods to play in, was beyond her comprehension. But she tried to suggest things, controlling her irritation, and some of the suggestions were rich, coming from her. ‘How about trying out the Saturday evening meal on your own?’ she once encouraged Pooch, and gave her a recipe for ‘a really nourishing soup . . . bits of onion . . . bits of cabbage . . . drop of sherry’.
Filling her days like this was not, of course, going to be enough when the dreaded winter came, but she had no hopes of getting down to any writing. Once, her fallow periods had been intervals during which she felt quite happy, knowing they were necessary, but now they terrified her. ‘My imagination . . . is completely fallow,’ she wrote to Victor Gollancz, and though she acknowledged ‘emotional shock is bound to do this’, she wondered if perhaps it had not done more – perhaps it had dried her imagination up for good. The only way to test this was the time-honoured one of trying a holiday in the hope of stimulating it. So in September she went to Venice with her sister Jeanne. Leaving Menabilly took even more effort than it had always done and she recognized something superstitious in her reluctance. She had a feeling common to the recently bereaved, the dread of returning and finding the presence of the dead person has evaporated in their absence. But she managed to go, and enjoyed the two weeks, though she was depressed to realize afterwards that she had no burning idea for a new book to carry her through the winter.
At this point, John Sargent at Doubleday came up with the idea that Daphne should write a book on Cornwall, part history and part travel, which would be illustrated with photographs. The moment she realized Kits could take these photographs Daphne was extremely keen on the idea. Kits, by then, had become a freelance TV director and a photographer and he and his mother had formed a company – Du Maurier Productions – to make films. Kits had already made one film, the one about Yeats, for which his mother had written the script, and she thought it very good indeed. The Doubleday suggestion was an ideal project for both of them. It could be spread over several months during which Kits would come down and drive his mother round Cornwall while she researched the book.
It was the kind of book Daphne had never attempted before, but it appealed to her instantly. She loved Cornwall and, though she had absorbed a great deal of its history and had explored the county extensively, she welcomed the opportunity to learn more. The student in her responded to the background reading that would be necessary, and her imagination leapt at the chance to describe Cornwall in such a way that others would share her devotion. But best of all was the thought of spending so much time with her son, just the two of them working together. There could be no better antidote to the sadness following Tommy’s death and in addition no better way to relive some of the happiest memories she had of him which ‘might rid the system of sadness perhaps’. It was no good ‘turning into a hump-backed dowager like Queen Victoria’, but in spite of starting to read for the new book there were many bad moments that winter. The worst time was Christmas. Always a big festival in both the du Maurier and Browning calendars, especially with Tommy’s birthday on 20 December, when she had always decorated a small tree just for him, she could hardly face the prospect. The children insisted she must come to one of them, which she did not want to do, but finally agreed she would. She shared her time between Flavia and Kits and quite enjoyed it, though she was never entirely comfortable in anyone else’s home, not even her children’s. ‘Routes’ were so hard to follow when not at Menabilly and other people’s got in the way. But the house Kits had just bought amused her tremendously – she described to Foy how Tithe Barn (near Taplow) was the sort of house which ‘if passing in a car on a journey one would tap the glass to the chauffeur and say “Would you draw in here and we will stop for lunch?”’ It was, she swore, like ‘a road-side timbered steak house’ and it made her laugh just to see it. Coming back to Menabilly was bleak, especially since in spite of travelling first-class she had to stand in the corridor of the train – ‘What happens to old people who travel? It’s like prisoners of war going to concentration camps, and the corridors freezing.’
The rain that January got her down more than it had ever done and she felt in danger of succumbing to real depression. She had to walk her dog – Moray, another West Highland terrier – and so went out and walked, but the evenings were long. She did not like to watch television until after seven and, once it was dark at around five, was left with two hours ‘to fill in . . . passage-wandering’. Everything seemed to irritate her and she feared she was becoming old and grumpy. Even Esther going to a hunt ball somehow exasperated her and she commented to Foy that times had certainly changed if anyone could now go. She could find nothing to read – ‘I find myself so choosy about what I read and books get more and more lurid . . .’ – and even The Times was letting her down – ‘It is not so good as it once was, I think in a tiresome endeavour to be what is called “with it” – a phrase I detest.’
In this mood, the negotiations with Doubleday, which had preceded any mention of the book on Cornwall to Gollancz, led her into further trouble. She had failed to consult her agent, and Spencer Curtis Brown, discovering a contract had been made between Du Maurier Productions and Doubleday for world rights, was livid: ‘It is not at all a favourable contract . . . next time you feel an urge to sign a contract you should pause for thirty seconds and put it into an envelope to me first.’ He realized that ‘this letter sounds like an uncle writing to an inexperienced niece’, but felt she deserved it. Daphne accepted this rebuke as she accepted all rebukes – humbly, apologizing for her foolishness, and saying she hadn’t thought it mattered, because the Cornwall book wouldn’t have a big sale.
While all this was sorted out, and while she waited for the weather to improve so that she and Kits could start researching, Daphne began to seek the company she needed. ‘I get very sad when left to my own thoughts,’ she wrote, ‘and ordinary chatter does not help, but intelligent conversation does . . .’ But where was she to get this ‘intelligent conversation’ from, when she so resolutely cut herself off from all likely sources? She still limited herself to the occasional company of those local friends she had always had – Clara Vyvyan, Foy Quiller-Couch,4 Mary Fox, A. L. Rowse – and of her sisters and Noël Welch, but this by no means prevented life sometimes becoming tedious. So she turned to friendships conducted in letters, to talking on paper, as many a writer does, rather than take on the burden of new face-to-face relationships. She had always been good about replying to fans (so long as there was a stamped addressed envelope enclosed), but now she began to develop some of these correspondences into real friendships. If a fan caught her fancy, and especially if that fan were young, she was capable of writing with real warmth and interest. Perhaps the fan who best succeeded in capturing her attention and then affection was a young man called Michael Thornton, who first wrote to her as a schoolboy of seventeen, because he loved The King’s General. After the exchange of a few letters, Daphne let him visit Menabilly, and by the time she faced her first winter as a widow she had started treating him as a real friend. Nor did she simply want to use him as the recipient of her thoughts and comments but, on the contrary, showed avid interest in his career and problems and was tremendously sympathetic. She enjoyed getting his letters and replying to them: a small gap in her day was plugged – she had her ‘intelligent conversation’ through the post.
There were others with whom, from this point onwards, she established real contact even though she never met them. Many an aspiring writer who had timidly sent a story for her comment was amazed to receive proper criticism and advice. But, though devoting a couple of hours most days to this kind of communication helped her to feel busy – ‘I hate to be idle’ – it could not provide enough stimulation. It was hard for her to admit she was not as self-sufficient as she had always thought, and harder still to do something about it.
What she did, once the spring of 1966 had arrived, was to plan her first adventurous holiday since Tommy’s death. It was not really so very adventurous. She had been tempted for a long time by the idea of going on a Hellenic cruise and sent for the Swan brochure. She yearned so much for the sun and, having loved her short trip to Greece with Clara Vyvyan, she now booked berths for herself and Tessa on the SS Ankhara. The minute she had done so, panic set in. She would have to meet new people and it would be embarrassing – she dreaded it, and asked Tessa to write to the Swan people emphasizing that her mother was very shy and did not want to be known. She was also fussed about tipping – ‘Do ask . . . if one tips, and who . . . so embarrassing if one does the wrong thing. I would think one’s cabin steward or stewardess would qualify if no one else.’ By March, when Kits had begun to drive her round Cornwall, she was regretting the whole thing and told an old friend, also going on the cruise, to ‘look out for an apprehensive grey-haired woman in a black and white coat, tottering along the platform at Victoria’.5 She wrote to Foy that she couldn’t think why she had taken tickets, when she looked at the rhododendrons just coming into bloom. It even seemed dangerous to leave when nothing had yet been resolved about her wretched lease – she had absurd visions of returning to find she had been turned out – and she left for London feeling ‘low and depressed’.
Never in her life did a depression lift as quickly. Her letter to Foy after she returned home from the cruise could not have been more different – in her enthusiasm for the holiday she hardly knew where to start. ‘Tessa was wonderful,’ she wrote, ‘so friendly with everyone, and had I been alone I know I should have hidden in our cabin, but she dragged me from my shell and it was really the right thing to do.’ Even so, the dragging had taken some doing. The whole ship knew Daphne du Maurier was on board and curiosity ran high, but it was two days before she appeared from her cabin and, even then, she was shepherded and protected by the attentive Tessa. Only when she realized her privacy was being respected did she begin to relax and gradually become interested in the others on board.
It was unusual for her to take to new people immediately, but she took to Sir John and Lady Wolfenden at once and was quite excited at the thought of having made friends with them. Sir John was one of the lecturers on the SS Ankhara and Daphne responded eagerly to what she liked to think of as the ‘university atmosphere’ of the ship. It was exhilarating to sit and listen to such a clever man and afterwards to discuss what had been said, and to find her own tentative ideas well received. And there was another side to life on board ship which she relished. Dancing the evenings away with Sir John, she felt younger than she had done for years. He was not an especially skilled dancer, but not since she danced with Frank Price, more than a decade ago, had she felt such a sense of release. Then, of course, there were the visits on shore to places in Greece she had always wanted to see – ‘Delos was the highlight’ – and the pleasure of feeling the sun at last (though, in fact, the weather was not as warm as she had hoped, and she had to buy ‘a shepherd’s short white cloak to cope with it’). She returned to Menabilly feeling rejuvenated, and in her first letter to the Wolfendens told them that they had rescued her from apathy. When Ellen Doubleday came to stay in May, she was pleased to find her so buoyant: with Kits coming regularly to take his mother off to research their Cornish book, her morale was still high.
Her spirits were maintained throughout the summer which followed – a wonderfully hot summer in Cornwall, so that she could swim every day right up to the end of September. She was determined to change her ways and make sure she kept up her new friendship without depending, as she usually did, on the friends themselves making the running. She invited the Wolfendens to Menabilly, and when she went up to London – ‘the hermit is coming for five days’ – was anxious to take them out to dinner. In one letter she enclosed a clever, satirical ode to Sir John, who responded in kind, and there was a touching eagerness in her efforts to show how much she appreciated the warmth both Wolfendens had extended towards her. Not even the still unresolved question of the lease spoiled the summer, though she was beginning to see that she might have to move into Kilmarth. Even more surprisingly, she was getting out and about much more, because she had learned to drive again and was triumphant about it. Once Tommy had died, she could see that unless she wanted to be entirely dependent on taxis, or wanted to be quite cut off, she would have to drive again: with Kits’ help she began taking lessons. He had found for her a small automatic car to which she became greatly attached and in February that year she had taken her test in a state of intense nervousness. She thought the examiner ‘an old buffer in a squashed hat and mac’ who did not respond to any of her polite conversation. ‘This little car is called a DAF,’ she told him, but he answered crossly, ‘I know, I’ve seen heaps of them,’ but he had passed her none the less. She could now zoom off to Par to do bits of shopping, or go to visit Angela, or even, very occasionally, drive bravely to Dartmoor to see Jeanne and Noël. Her independence excited her – an independence she could have had at any time in the previous twenty-five years.
That was becoming the real question: how far did she want to take this new independence and sociability? She saw very clearly that she had to choose. If she wished, there was nothing to prevent her slamming down the portcullis and never letting anyone past it except her family. She no longer wanted to be as solitary as she had once been, not because she had suddenly changed her nature, but because she feared what would happen, or might already have happened, to her writing. She was almost sixty and saw her late middle age as a time when stimulus would have to be more deliberately sought out. People, not only places, were needed after all to work the magic, and becoming a recluse would be fatal. She still wanted long periods of solitude, but she wanted to be sure she could end them when she willed.
Here her three children played a vital role. There was in her attitude to her daughters as adults the same detachment as there had been when they were children. She was passionately interested in their lives and very fond of them, but not emotionally involved. As children they had found this a source of some sadness, but in many ways it was a great advantage to them now they were grown up. Nobody wants a mother who is possessive, who tries to run one’s adult life as she has run one’s childhood. Daphne kept in regular touch, welcomed them for holidays at Menabilly with their families, treated them to other trips with her alone, and was exceedingly generous with financial help (quite apart from their trusts). She asked very little in return and never tried to exert any kind of pressure because she had the power which money gave her. Her critical nature made her hard on them if she thought they were doing something of which she did not approve, but she was surprisingly sympathetic to most of their problems, except one. Both daughters, Tessa in particular, were discovering that their marriages were not a success; and towards the idea of divorce their mother was hostile. She felt that she herself had made her marriage endure and so should they, failing entirely to appreciate that the circumstances were quite different and that not everyone would think she had been right to cling to her own marriage. In spite of this area of profound disagreement, the company of Tessa and Flavia was precious to her now – she relied on them in the sense of being able to talk to them with absolute freedom, and, for a widow who had no intimate female friends of her own age, this was a great relief. She could mock and joke with them and had no need to pretend as she did with everyone else – there need be no façade. They knew, as no one else did, how violently she could express herself, how full of controlled rage she could be while seeming sweet and charming.
With Kits, of course, she was even freer. His mind and hers, she wrote, were the same in so many ways and never more so than over their book on Cornwall. His marriage had made no difference to this rapport, but what is fascinating is the way in which she had been able to let him go, just as she had always said she was determined to. She approved of Olive, seeing her as a stabilizing influence on Kits, and even as the stronger partner, and instead of resenting this she was relieved. She never tried to come between them or initiated any kind of contest for his affections. ‘My children’, she wrote that summer to Victor Gollancz, ‘make wonderful companions, all three of them – I am so lucky.’ That was what she most wanted, amusing companionship upon which she could rely, kindred spirits with whom she could truly relax. No friend, of however long standing, quite gave her that. But at the same time she did not want their companionship to turn into any kind of dominance. One of the first things she said after Tommy’s death was that she could see ‘I shall have to be careful my children do not take over my life’, in particular that they did not ‘try to push a companion on me, a sort of younger Tod’.6 She was absolutely emphatic that she wanted to go on living alone and, if possible, at Menabilly, however often her children pointed out its remoteness, its size and its general unsuitability, in their eyes, for a widow to spend her old age in.
But there was no chance of that. Philip Rashleigh had finally made up his mind: he wanted to move into Menabilly when the lease expired in another two years and had agreed that Daphne could have Kilmarth for life. She was forced to capitulate, or lose Kilmarth too – ‘My landlord has dealt his blow . . . I must take it as a challenge . . . it is a bit like the breakdown of a marriage without the finality of death or even the disturbance of divorce.’ She would move to Kilmarth, though she was horrified at the state it was in and by how much money she would yet again have to spend restoring a house she would never own. She anticipated she would have to spend ‘a fortune’ on essential building work, and then that her children would ‘bully me into getting new curtains’ and, even more outrageous, ‘central heating which is bad for catarrh’. It annoyed her that so many people kept stressing how much better off she would be in Kilmarth because it was not as big, was so much lighter and had better views than Menabilly, standing as it did high up on the cliff overlooking the sea. Even the lack of extensive grounds was presented to her as an advantage when to her it was a terrible drawback – where would she walk, except up and down an incredibly steep cliff to a beach which was not a patch on Pridmouth? Nobody seemed to realize that for her Kilmarth lacked the most seductive of Menabilly’s charms: its sense of mystery, its secrecy. Kilmarth was just a handsome house, lacking excitement. Nor could it ever become part of her in the same way as Menabilly had done. She would leave behind ghosts – her younger, happier self and Tommy. Hating all change as she did, she feared, too, the destruction of her ‘routes’. The wrench was one she could hardly bear to contemplate and she was frightened by the prospect of what giving up Menabilly would do to her.