AFTER THEIR FIRST meeting the two families began to see a great deal of one another, though mainly when Arthur was out at work. Everyone knew of the association and began to speak of the Barries and the Davieses in the same breath. Barrie and his wife would walk the boys home from the park almost every day, Mary Ansell befriending Sylvia while her husband continued his fun and games with the boys upstairs in the nursery.
At the start Sylvia seems to have treated him a bit like a useful second nanny, who would keep her children amused for hours on end. As for Mary, Sylvia enjoyed her company at first. There was a shared interest in interior design, and there is no doubt that the friendship helped pave the way for what happened next. But it is clear that Mary knew nothing about Peter Ibbetson, and it is likely that Barrie didn’t at first appreciate just how deeply Sylvia herself was caught up in Peter Ibbetson. This came out between them over the ensuing months and strengthened their bond considerably.
Sylvia had been her father’s model for the Duchess of Towers. Indeed, she had a spiritual life that owed everything to her father’s psychic ability and to the close relationship they had enjoyed with one another.
When Sylvia’s third son, Peter, was researching a history of the family he caught wind of this and wrote to Sylvia’s close friend, Dolly, about it.
Dolly tried to guide Peter to it without betraying Sylvia’s confidence: ‘Always [Sylvia’s] reserve about what she cared about was very strong. She had an inner life of her own, which is what gave her her great interest.’
This was typical of the du Mauriers. There was an unspoken rule in the family, where fun and laughter were paramount, never to tax people with anything too deep. ‘One must never be au serieux about anything,’ observed Sylvia’s sister Trixy’s husband, Charles Hoyer Millar. ‘The family in general had a rooted dislike to serious topics of any kind, at all events in the presence of each other.’ Deep thoughts were not avoided, however. On the contrary, there were special words for them in their vocabulary, like ‘main talks’ or ‘psychological politics’. Deep thoughts were in fact at the heart of what the du Mauriers were about.
Chief among these were psychological and supernatural matters. Daphne couldn’t keep quiet about them in her fiction, and once spelled them out in her non-fiction, writing in The Rebecca Notebook:
There is a faculty among the myriad threads of our inheritance that, unlike the chemicals in our bodies and in our brains, has not yet been pinpointed by science, or even fully examined. I like to call this faculty ‘the sixth sense’. It is a sort of seeing, a sort of hearing, something between perception and intuition, an indefinable grasp of things unknown … The phenomena of precognition, of telepathy, of dreaming true, all depend upon this sixth sense, and the therapeutic value of hypnosis, still in its infancy, depends upon it too.
It was almost all too much for Dolly not to mention in her diary something about her paranormal beliefs and skills, though characteristically they had been told to her in absolute confidence: ‘Sylvia couldn’t talk about things she really felt to those who were not very close to her. She had an inner life of her own, & was to me always interesting.’ The entry for Sunday 15 October 1892 reads: ‘Talked a good deal with sweet Sylvia, who told me a good deal about her family etc.’ There then follows instructions about how to hypnotise someone, clearly copied down after Sylvia had described the process to her:
Place yourself before the subject with your thoughts concentrated on the effect you wish to produce, you tell him to look at you steadily and think only of sleep. Raise your hands with the palms towards him, over the crown of head and before the forehead where you keep them for one or 2 minutes, & move them slowly down to the pit of stomach, without touching subject, at a distance of one or 2 inches from body, as soon as hands reach lowest part of the stroke you carry them again in a wide sweep with outspread arms over subject’s head. Repeat same movements for 10 minutes.
The truth was that Sylvia’s secret inner life made her who she was, the Sylvia she shows us in the dreamy photographs that Barrie took, her undemonstrative moments, as if she was away in another world, which she was when the mood took her.
Wrote her son, Peter, ‘People of both sexes told of the indelible impression she left with them of something rarer than mere charm, and deeper than mere beauty.’ Arthur’s brother, Crompton, ‘as a rule pretty reticent, once, shortly before his death, tried to talk about her to [Peter’s wife] and me; and it was as if he spoke of a being of more than earthly loveliness’.
It was this ‘more than earthly’ aura that Peter was referring to when he wrote that he suspected Sylvia inherited ‘a good deal’ from her father, which made her anything but ordinary like her mother (du Maurier’s wife, Emma, had done everything in her power to dissuade her husband from meddling in the paranormal).
This, Sylvia’s most beguiling feature, brought her ever closer to Barrie as bit by bit it emerged how bound up she and her father were together, both in life and in the writing of du Maurier’s books.
The physical similarity between Sylvia and the dream duchess in Peter Ibbetson is striking, and although the hypnotic heroine of du Maurier’s second novel, Trilby, had been loosely based on a seventeen-year-old girl named ‘Carry’ who had been hypnotised on many an occasion by du Maurier as a young man, Sylvia had modelled for the illustrations of Trilby in the book.
Barrie became fascinated by the way du Maurier had captured Sylvia in book form as an artist might capture his subject on canvas. And, in his desire to win her over, he now captured Sylvia in an autobiographical novel he was writing.
Before they met, the two main characters in his novel Tommy and Grizel had been based on himself and his wife, Mary Ansell. After meeting Sylvia he had been so affected that he’d floundered with the writing of it and made the decision to follow du Maurier and model Grizel on Sylvia instead.
When Bernard Partridge came to illustrate the characters in Tommy and Grizel for publication in Scribner’s Magazine, Barrie told him he could give him a real-life model for one of them. ‘Mrs Llewelyn Davies, whom she is meant to be a bit like is willing to sit to you for this and she has some idea of the dressing too. If you like this idea would you communicate with her about it?’
The physical similarity of Sylvia and Grizel is clear in the text. Just as du Maurier gave Sylvia’s nose to Mimsey in Peter Ibbetson and described it as ‘rather tilted at the tip’, so now Grizel has Sylvia’s ‘tilted nose’. Grizel’s gray eyes are also Sylvia’s – ‘unusually far apart, [which] let you look straight into them and never quivered, they were such clear, gray, searching eyes, they seemed always to be asking for the truth’. Diana Farr observed that ‘perhaps Sylvia’s most remarkable feature’ was her ‘eyes, set wide apart’. Meanwhile, Dolly wrote at this moment in her diary, ‘Sylvia has got one of the most delightful, brilliantly sparkling faces I have ever seen. Her nose turns round the corner – also turns right up. Her mouth is quite crooked.’ In Tommy and Grizel Barrie gives Sylvia’s characteristic mouth to Grizel too:
She had an adorable mouth. In repose it was perhaps hard because it shut so decisively, but often it screwed up provokingly at one side, as when she smiled or was sorry or for no particular reason, for she seemed unable to control this vagary, which was perhaps a little bit of babyhood that had forgotten to grow up with the rest of her.
Not to have grown up completely was the greatest thing – for the time of childhood is the unforgettable emblem of the bliss to which Peter Ibbetson aspired when dreaming true. Childhood is a time when what is dammed up later flows off without restraint, when things ‘go of themselves’, when there is no need to do this thing or that thing or find a way, or achieve a result.
And it was the little bit of the child left in Sylvia which soon crystallised in Barrie’s mind his most famous idea. ‘Genius is the power to be a boy again,’ Tommy announces in the novel. Tommy had made up his mind. He was going to write a book of his own about a boy –
a reverie about a little boy who was lost. His parents find him in a wood singing joyfully to himself because he thinks he can now be a boy for ever; and he fears that if they catch him they will compel him to grow into a man, so he runs farther from them into the wood and is running still, singing to himself because he is always to be a boy…
The moment he conceived the idea he knew that it was the idea for him.
So much a feature of the lives of Sylvia and her boys was Mr Barrie now that in the summer of 1899 he thought nothing of showing up uninvited at Rustington-on-Sea on the Sussex coast where Sylvia, Arthur and the boys were holidaying. Dolly Parry’s family owned the Mill House there, which was really no more than a cottage, but right on the shore, ‘an enchanted place,’ Peter Davies recalled, ‘with the windmill in working order and lofts and sacks of flour to play about among.’ For the past eight years, this had been a more or less regular occurrence.
Barrie took his camera with him and turned out to be quite the little photographer, taking pictures on the beach of the boys as they changed from their bathing costumes, with Sylvia – towels swirling around her in the wind – drying and dressing them.