Everybody believes that I am an invented person: Mrs Danvers. They say I’m a creation: ‘Miss du Maurier’s finest creation’, in the opinion of many. But I have my own story. I have a history and a soul. I’m a breathing woman.
I first met Miss du Maurier when she came to luncheon with my employer, Lord de Whithers, at Manderville Hall in the summer of 1936. Lord de Whithers married late and would never have expected to outlive his much younger wife, but she died of cancer in the winter of 1935, and since her death Lord de Whithers frequently gives way to those outbursts of ill-temper that afflict heartbroken men. Although these can be wounding, I feel great pity for him and do all that I can to keep Manderville Hall just as the late Lady de Whithers would have wished it to be kept.
Being the housekeeper, I would not normally (or not necessarily) be introduced to the luncheon guests, but Lord de Whithers sent for me on that summer’s day to ask me whether, after luncheon, I would be kind enough to take Miss du Maurier – whom he had met by chance at a garden fête – on a guided tour of the house.
‘Miss du Maurier is the authoress Daphne du Maurier,’ said Lord de Whithers, ‘and she seems to think that our beloved Manderville Hall might inspire her to write what I think these days is called a “fiction”.’
Miss du Maurier was seated in a brocade-upholstered wing chair. She sat so deep in the chair, holding her small glass of sherry and not moving at all when I entered the room, that the vision I had of her was shadowy, as though only part of her sat in the wing chair, and the rest of her were somewhere else. And – for reasons that I could not fathom at the time – this strange insubstantiality of hers affected me with instantaneous strong feeling, as though I were the one being called upon to bring her to wholeness and to an engagement with the world.
I told Lord de Whithers that I would be delighted to conduct Miss du Maurier upon a tour of the house, but I did not look again at the authoress. I turned and made my way towards the drawing-room door and Lord de Whithers said: ‘Thank you so much, Mrs Danowski. I suggest you come back at half past two when I will go for my little rest. You can, of course, include the west wing in your tour, if you wish.’
I closed the drawing-room door quietly, but waited a moment outside it, to hear what Lord de Whithers might say about me. His views upon the world are narrow, and in recent times, the things he says are often uncharitable. He has been heard to disparage my name, even inferring some instability of my character attaching to my Jewish origins. But on this occasion he didn’t mention me. All he said to Miss du Maurier was: ‘Forgive me for not doing the tour myself, my dear. Since my wife died, I’ve become prone to melancholy in the afternoons.’
The other thing that people believe about me is that I’m an arsonist – possibly a murderer. For how many people (the butler, the other servants, asleep in their beds) died in the fire that burned down the house Miss du Maurier renamed Manderley? We do not know. The book ends without telling us. All we see are the terrible flames lighting up the sky and the ash blown by the salt wind from the sea. Yet it is strongly inferred that ‘Mrs Danvers’ (as I was named by the writer) set the fire. Mrs Danvers packed up all her possessions, such as they were, and then she began her jealous burning. As the fire took hold, she slipped away, walking down the azalea walk known as Happy Valley, and was never seen again.
Happy Valley . . .
Miss du Maurier took this name from something I said to her later that day, about the beauty of the azaleas – when they are in bloom and perfuming the air – in the Manderville Hall garden. I said to her: ‘When I walk here on a fine spring day, I find that I am completely happy, and I know that this happiness comes from believing – counter to all that I know – that nothing bad will come my way while I am in this place.’
She told me that she understood such a feeling very well, that there were places in the world that felt like sanctuaries. But then she stole these thoughts, just as she stole my life.
My poor life. I live in Padstow in a rented room, with a view of the sea. I earn a small living from a needle-work enterprise.
I have a heart full of memory. I go for walks in the cold of winter, wearing a fur coat that was a gift to me from Miss du Maurier. I hold the coat close around my body.
Manderville Hall, on the south coast of Cornwall, was very large. It had been in the de Whithers family for no less than eight generations, and it was a great sadness to Lord and Lady de Whithers that they had no heir to leave it to. When the time came for His Lordship to die, which might not be far off, the house was supposed to pass to his niece, Miss Adelaide Waverley.
‘I do not really like to think about this,’ he once said to me, as he and I were going through some of his late wife’s books and papers in the morning room. ‘Manderville Hall needs to be inhabited, as I and my wife inhabited it – with our whole beings. But Adelaide will not do this. She is a careless girl. She could let it all fall to ruin.’
It was not my place to make any comment upon this observation, but I did remember the one visit that Miss Adelaide Waverley had made to Manderville Hall. She brought her own horse in a horse box. She spent most of each day riding about the park. She left her riding clothes strewn about her room, all stinking of leather and sweat, for the maids to pick up. She possessed a screeching laugh, which I found displeasing. When she departed, she left no tips for any of the staff.
I came to the drawing room at half past two, as instructed.
Lord de Whithers had already gone to his room, leaving Miss du Maurier alone. She sat on one of the window seats, staring out at the lawns. Her pale hair was lit by the afternoon sun. She turned and smiled at me and I saw that her smile made her beautiful.
‘You must think me a wretch,’ she said.
‘A wretch, madam?’
‘To make you do the tour of the house when – I don’t know – you might prefer to be sleeping, on this warm afternoon, or making a trip to the village.’
‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘I almost never leave Manderville Hall. I think of it as my home. Even on my days off, I often stay here.’
‘Do you? Well, I can understand that. It is one of the loveliest places I’ve ever seen . . .’
‘Lord de Whithers is happy for me to walk in the woods, or on the private beach. There is an old summer-house down on the beach, which nobody uses any more. And I enjoy sitting in there and listening to the sea.’
‘Oh, do you?’ said Miss du Maurier, springing up off the window seat. ‘I love the sound of the sea, too. How it sighs and whispers. I’ve promised myself that before I get too old to want to do it any more, I’ll spend a whole night by the sea, lying on the sand and looking at the stars. Have you ever done that?’
‘No, madam, I haven’t. But I will admit that one night I fell asleep in the beach-house, and when I woke up, I didn’t know where in the world I was, but I knew that I was one of the . . . How can I put it without sounding pretentious? I felt that I was one of the blessed.’
‘One of the blessed?’
‘I mean, one of those who can occasionally – and without necessarily wishing to do this – see and feel things very intensely. As I imagine you, as an authoress, might also do.’
She stared at me closely when I said this. Her eyes were large and clever, like the eyes of one who can see into the past and into the future. But her smile had vanished and I had the miserable feeling that I had uttered something impertinent and inappropriate to my position as Lord de Whithers’ housekeeper. But then, her look softened and she said: ‘Sometimes, strong feeling lays ghastly traps for the soul. Don’t you think so? Anyway, let’s begin on our tour. Where are you going to take me first?’
She had already seen the library and the drawing room and the dining room and the morning room and the hall, with its fine minstrels’ gallery and I didn’t think that she necessarily wanted to visit the kitchen or the servants’ hall, so I decided to show her the west wing. In my opinion, this was the most beautiful bit of the house, decorated with exquisite taste by the late Lady de Whithers, but hardly inhabited since her death.
Even when she was alive, Lord and Lady de Whithers occupied opposite wings of the house – he in the east and she in the west – like the kings and queens of old who kept each to their own apartments within their palaces.
I led Miss du Maurier up the west staircase and along the wide, carpeted passage to Lady de Whithers’ bedroom. In summer, I instructed the maids to keep the curtains closed, so that sunlight would not fade the magnificent French upholstery of the four-poster bed. Thus, the large room seemed dark when we went into it and rather cold. As I stepped to the window, to draw the curtains, I saw Miss du Maurier shiver. She pulled her cashmere cardigan more tightly round her body, and once again I was affected by very strong feeling – this time by a desire to protect the authoress, as though some imminent harm was going to come her way.
I let in the sunlight and called her to the window. ‘Do come and look at this view, madam,’ I said. ‘The sweep of the bay is so beautiful from here.’
Miss du Maurier came and stood by me and we gazed out at the sea. She was still trembling and I put my hand gently on her arm.
‘Are you cold?’ I asked. ‘I suppose it is always a little cool in this room.’
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. But there is something so extraordinary about this house – like no other house I’ve ever been to. It’s as if – and I know this is too, too foolish – I’ve seen it before in some wonderful dream. And in the dream, it didn’t belong to Lord de Whithers; it belonged to me.’
That was the first time that she used the word ‘belonged’.
I understand now, because of all that she appropriated, how important and how terrible was her use of this word. At the time, however, in Lady de Whithers’ bedroom, I made no comment upon it. She walked away from the window and sat down on the bed. She caressed the damask bedspread with her long, sensitive fingers.
‘I’m sorry that I never met Lady de Whithers,’ she said. ‘I feel that she must have been an exceptional woman.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘she was very beautiful, until she became ill. She wore the most wonderful clothes, bought in Paris. Some of them are still in the wardrobes here. Would you like to see them?’
‘Oh,’ said Miss du Maurier, ‘well, I would. Writers are terrible, you know, for wanting to peek and pry into things. We never know where inspiration may lie . . .’
I opened one of the wardrobes, which contained a great quantity of winter coats, among them some furs, which, in the long, cold winters at Manderville Hall, had often made me sigh with envy. The only coats that I possessed at that time were made of thin wool or gabardine and I knew that fur alone lends impenetrable warmth to the human frame.
I took out a long mink coat and invited Miss du Maurier to stroke it. Then, I took it off its hanger and Miss du Maurier stood up and I put the coat gently round her shoulders.
‘Isn’t it lovely?’ I said. ‘You were cold a moment ago, madam, and now you’re not cold any more, are you?’
‘No, I’m not. Not a bit cold.’ Then she laughed. ‘Look at us!’ she said. ‘We’re like naughty children, trying on things that don’t belong to us.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose we are.’ But then – perhaps because Miss du Maurier looked so strikingly pretty and vulnerable with the heavy fur draped about her shoulders – I ventured to say: ‘I know a little about good clothes, for my father was a tailor in Warsaw until the family left for England in nineteen twenty-three.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘a tailor! What a beautiful profession. Clothes that are made just for oneself and for no one else feel as precious as jewels. Don’t you agree? Or like friends, even, and when you put them on, it’s like slipping your hand in theirs.’
I smiled, in thrall to a sweet remembrance: how, when I was a young child, my father used to make me little dresses out of offcuts of tweed and grey flannel and how my schoolmates envied me these clothes, because they were heavy and lined and warm in our bitter winters. And I allowed myself to sit on the bed – a thing I would not normally ever do – and tell Miss du Maurier about these garments from my past. She stared at me with rapt attention, as though I, and not she, had suddenly become a marvellous teller of stories.
‘What a lovely thing,’ she said. ‘I can just imagine the dresses. Did he put a little lace or velvet on the collars?’
‘Yes, sometimes. Or silk, from a linings remnant. For he didn’t like waste. He used to say to me: ‘When you grow up, you must take care of things. And I suppose I never forgot this because here I am, a housekeeper, and this is where I’ve put my soul – into the care of objects and the well-being of the people they belong to.’
‘Well, I am sure that Lord de Whithers values you enormously. And the house is so immaculately ordered. I suppose you might be the best housekeeper of all time!’
She laughed when she said this and with the sudden movement of her body, the fur coat slipped to the floor.
‘Oh,’ she said, stooping to pick it up, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to let it fall. We’d better put the fur away. And perhaps we could go out into the garden, into the sunshine.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, taking the mink coat from her and replacing it on its padded silk coat hanger. ‘We can go wherever you like. Would you like to see the summer-house down on the beach?’
‘Yes, I would, very much. Is there a kettle there? Could we make a cup of tea?’
What I liked most about descending the steep pathway to the beach was the onrush of sound as one came nearer and nearer to the sea. From the west-facing terrace of Manderville Hall, although the view of the bay was very fine, the power of the ocean seemed muted, as though the house, in its lofty position above the steeply sloping lawns, would always dominate it and never be harmed by it.
Then, as you came down towards the sea, you felt the thrill of the harm that it could do. In my time at Manderville Hall, there had been drownings here: bodies which nobody recognised or knew, strangers in our world, whose last trespass had been upon our paradise.
When I told Miss du Maurier about these drownings, she said: ‘Oh, how extraordinary! People nobody knew. Somebody must have known them. Did detectives come?’
‘Yes, I suppose they did, madam.’
‘But none of them ever questioned you?’
‘Me? No. I’m only the housekeeper.’
‘But you might have seen or heard something.’
‘Yes, I might. But I shall tell you what else a housekeeper is, besides being a guardian of objects. A housekeeper is one who sees and hears everything, but pretends to know nothing. That is her role in the world, to keep everything closed and shuttered away within her.’
‘Oh,’ said Miss du Maurier, ‘is that really true? What a fascinating thought. And the role of the writer, of course, is to prise open those shuttered and closed places and see what lies inside them. I could be dangerous to you and you would not notice it.’
I did not know what to say to this, so I kept silent. We were standing near the place where the breakers came in and I, who knew the tides, could tell that in a few moments, we would not be safe there. But I didn’t move, or suggest that we move; it was as though I was challenging the water to come surging over our feet. It was Miss du Maurier who stepped back, just as a tall wave broke and came rushing upon the dry sand.
‘Do let’s go into the summer-house and make that cup of tea,’ she said. ‘And you can tell me about the tailor’s shop in Warsaw and why your father chose to leave it. You can tell me what a Polish winter was like. You can tell me who or what you love.’
‘Oh, I love no one,’ I said quietly. ‘I learned early, exactly as you said, that love lays “ghastly traps for the soul”.’
I knew that Lord de Whithers would get up from his rest towards half past four and that I should be back at the Hall by then, in case he sent for me. He was a fair but strict employer and seemed to expect the staff to be available to him at all times. It was as though he could not imagine us having any life beyond that of serving his needs.
Normally, I would respect his wishes. I knew that I was very fortunate to have a position in such a substantial house and I never wished to do anything to put my job in jeopardy.
But that afternoon, in the summer-house, I lost all track of time.
Miss du Maurier and I talked for a long while. She lay on the daybed where I had once dreamed away an extraordinary night.
Her head was on a cushion and she fanned out her fair hair till the cushion was almost covered by it. I sat on the hard, wooden floor, faded almost to whiteness by the salt air. We drank tea and smoked cigarettes from Miss du Maurier’s silver cigarette case.
And, then, without wishing it, I found myself caught in a vibrant reverie of the past, and I found that I wanted my revelations about this past to come out in a torrent, as though I believed that if they did, I might be liberated from my own history.
I told Miss du Maurier how my mother had died of consumption in the winter of 1923 and that her dying had been horrifying to witness – more horrifying than anything I thought I would ever know – and how, from that terrible day onwards, my father had become inflamed with the idea of getting away from Poland.
‘I can well understand that,’ said Miss du Maurier. ‘If a beloved person dies, it’s very hard to stay in the places they occupied.’
‘It was not only that,’ I said. ‘It was because he couldn’t conquer his fears for the future. He couldn’t deceive himself. He always looked things in the eye and never pretended that what he saw was not really happening.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Miss du Maurier. ‘I think I know what fears you’re talking about: the worst that one can imagine.’
I nodded. Then I asked for another cigarette and Miss du Maurier lit it for me, because she saw that my hands were trembling. She gave it to me and I took a long pull of the smoke and felt it stir in my blood and make me bold. And so it was that I poured out the revelation that the Danowski family, along with all the other Jewish families we knew in Warsaw, lived with the understanding that they were despised.
Miss du Maurier sat very still and regarded me with her tender blue eyes. ‘Was that how it felt,’ she asked, ‘that you were despised?’
‘Despised. Hated. These are the words. There are no milder ones to convey it. And they – we – we all knew that the day would come when we would be driven away, cast out from everything that was familiar to us, and that all that would survive of us would be our longing and our sorrow. And so my father brought me to England.’
Miss du Maurier said nothing for a moment. I smoked my cigarette. Then she brought her hand to her brow and said: ‘Mrs Danowski, I know this is very forward of me, but would you care to do me a charming little favour? I have a slight headache from the sherry I drank with Lord de Whithers at lunchtime. Would you kneel down by me, here, and stroke my forehead? I trespass upon dear women friends sometimes, to ask them to do this for me. They know I suffer fearfully from headaches and this always soothes them and makes them go away. Would you mind terribly? Men cannot do it; their touch is too heavy, you see. Even my husband, though he tries, it is never successful, and I have not been alone with a woman for a long time.’
I do not know exactly what time it was when I kneeled down beside her. I know the tide was in and the sea very loud and almost at our door. But I could not make myself think about anything that afternoon except the person who lay before me, the beautiful Miss du Maurier who had brought forth all the memories I had hardly ever spoken of, but who had also woken in me feelings I had not experienced since I was a teenage girl.
I did as she asked, stubbing out my cigarette, kneeling by her and putting my hand gently on her brow and stroking it. Her skin was smooth and soft and the perfume of her body heady and strong. After some while, I dared to put my face close to hers and whisper in her ear: ‘I cannot do this, Miss du Maurier, without wishing to do more . . .’
‘More?’ she said. ‘What more might one do? I expect you may have some wonderful suggestions?’
I could not answer her. I knew in that moment that I was her creature, that she could ask anything of me and I would do it. I felt as though I would be hers for the rest of time.
I put my arms around her and lifted her towards me. She was smiling her heartbreaking smile and did not pull away, but reached up and began to take out pins from my coiffure, so that my thick, dark hair cascaded around my shoulders and fell towards her face.
‘Danni,’ she whispered. ‘Can I call you Danni? For I think, if you spell it with an “i” at the end, that is rather a beautiful name.’
‘Call me anything you wish,’ I said.
I have never before set down what happened that afternoon in the beach-house. When, in the dusk, we walked out from there, I knew that I was transfigured. I would never again be the person I had been before.
And then we parted. We walked up to the house and she got into her car and drove away from Manderville Hall and I did not know whether I would ever see her again.
As I went into the servants’ hall, one of the kitchen maids, Patsy, came in and stared at me with a terrified look, as though she’d seen a ghost.
‘Whatever have you done to yourself, Mrs D?’ she said.
‘Done? I’ve done nothing,’ I replied. ‘Get on with your work, Patsy.’
But then I rushed up the back stairs to my room and looked at myself in the small mirror hanging beside my bed. My mouth was bleeding. And I realised I was clutching something in my hand, also spotted with blood. It was a gossamer-soft linen handkerchief with the initials DdM embroidered upon it.
As the days unwound towards September, unvarying in their routine, devoid of any word or any sight of Miss du Maurier, I began to pine like a dog. I cried in my bed. I walked about Manderville Hall with a slow step.
Often, I took out the embroidered handkerchief, which I had tenderly washed by hand in the mildest soap, and held it against my cheek. I considered sending it to Miss du Maurier’s house at Fowey. I thought I would send it with some short note asking whether I might be able ‘to cure you of a headache when next you suffer in this way’. But pride prevented me from writing.
I knew that I had to wait. I was Miss du Maurier’s servant.
I had to wait for her to send word to me.
And then, on one of my days off, a fine September afternoon, I decided to go down to the beach-house. I had not gone there since the afternoon with Miss du Maurier, not wishing to find myself alone in the place where I had been transfigured by another. But something drew me there on this day and I told myself that I might lie on the daybed where I had lain with her and dream my way into a solitary rapture that might still my feelings and let me return to being the person I had been before I laid my hand on her pale brow.
The sun glinted gold on a calm sea and as I neared the little cove, I saw a small motor boat pulled up upon the sand and anchored in the shallow water. I stopped and stared. This was Manderville Hall’s private beach and every soul who lived round about knew that they should not trespass there. I considered returning to the house to fetch Lord de Whithers, but I knew that he would be taking his habitual afternoon rest and I had no wish to disturb him. So I went on. People have often observed that, being very tall and dark, I have ‘an intimidating presence’ and I seldom feel afraid of an encounter – even with strangers who might be in the throes of some wrong-doing. My heart was beating a little fast, but on I went, down and down, rehearsing in my mind a firm but polite invitation to the owner of the motor boat to weigh anchor and depart.
On the dry sand, footsteps were visible, leading from the boat to the door of the beach-house. I stopped for a moment and looked at them, but could deduce nothing from them. Setting back my shoulders and walking with a firm step, I strode to the door and opened it.
Miss du Maurier lay on the daybed. She had covered her body with an old blanket Lady de Whithers had always kept nearby, and she appeared to be fast asleep. One arm reached down towards the floor. Near her hand was an ashtray with several cigarette butts in it, each one tenderly marked with her scarlet lipstick.
I stood quite still and looked at her. No angel in paradise could have appeared more beautiful to me than she appeared at that moment.
Very quietly, I slipped off my coat and kneeled down by the bed. Miss du Maurier sighed and opened her eyes and saw me and bathed me with her radiant smile.
‘Danni,’ she whispered. ‘Here you are. I came here on your day off last week, but you never appeared. Do you like my little boat? I’m rather good at navigating and using the tides, and luckily it’s not very far from—’
I put my hand on her mouth, then put my lips where my hand had been. And I felt, in the next moments, that her yearning for me had been as great as mine had been for her. And we were a long time at this wicked loving of ours, not being able to let go of it, but always searching for more, until we lay exhausted on the bed and the light at the window began to fade.
The motor boat had no running lights. Miss du Maurier at last stood up and adjusted her clothes and told me that she would have to leave, or be drowned in the dark.
‘Do not drown, madam,’ I said.
She came to me and touched my face. ‘I’ve asked myself if I should resist you,’ she said. ‘I know that I should. I know that we are terrible sinners. But, God forgive me, Danni, you are too strong to be resisted. So I shall not try.’
So began the great and only love affair of my life.
The beach-house was our hiding place, our refuge, the place where no other soul ever came. On Thursday afternoons (except for those when Miss du Maurier had to go to London on business or attend some military function with her husband), I would come down the steep path at two o’clock and see the boat pulled up on the sand and then I would see my own shadow going before me on the sand as I went to the door and opened it and my beloved called to me.
There was a darkness in it. The darkness made us faint with such great fear that sometimes all we could do was cling to each other and weep and I knew it was a darkness such as my father had felt when he decided to leave his country. He saw what Time might bring, and Miss du Maurier and I saw it. Though she confessed to me that she rejoiced in the ‘boy within her’ and was only truly happy when she gave that ‘boy’ his passionate rein, she also knew that the day would come when she would have to bury him again, put him back in what she called his ‘box’ or his ‘coffin’. ‘And then, Danni,’ she said, ‘we will have to part and never see each other again.’
She told me about her soldier husband, whom she admired, but whose embrace she only submitted to and did not like. But she venerated her own married state. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is what the world sees: that I am the wife of Major Browning. And what the world sees must not be obscured. I know you understand.’
I understood. But I didn’t wish to talk about this. One day, when Miss du Maurier was describing her life with Major Browning and her pride in his bravery and the sweet solitude he allowed her in which she wrote her books, I had a violent urge to put my hand on her pale neck and tighten its grip. I began talking in Polish. In this remembered language that she could not understand, I told her that I would kill her rather than allow her to leave me. And I heard her laugh. She laughed at my pain.
‘Danni,’ she said, ‘sometimes you look as though you could be very cruel, but of course this is thrilling beyond measure. I shall have to use it.’
A year passed. During that time, I was the fortunate recipient of many gifts from my lover, including a chinchilla coat, which I wear to this day, because I love it so. And, though I’m now cast out from Miss du Maurier’s heart, I still remember that only two people in my life truly clothed me with care: my father and Miss du Maurier. And it seems to me that in all the time when I was not clothed by them, I was naked and cold and my flesh knew only suffering.
Towards the end of that year, on a Thursday afternoon in September, when Miss du Maurier and I lay in each other’s arms on the daybed, I on my back and she above me, with her breasts and her thighs soft against mine and only the thin blanket covering us, I saw a shadow of a woman approaching the door of the summer-house.
I put my hand on Miss du Maurier’s mouth, to prevent her from saying a word. I stared at the door. On came the shadow, silhouetted against the slanting sun. And then we both heard footsteps, firm upon the sand.
The door was locked. We always took this precaution, making the summer-house appear to be as shuttered and empty as it had been after Lady de Whithers’ death. And the curtains to the small window were also drawn, giving to our sanctuary a soft and mellow light in which we both, to each other, seemed to be creatures of ravishing beauty. But these curtains were thin and I had never been certain that they fully concealed the interior of the summer-house.
Whoever it was who now stood at the door, rattled the door handle. Miss du Maurier buried her head in my neck and I held her fast against me and I could feel her frantic heartbeat betraying her fear. The door handle was tried again and the door itself shaken. Then the woman went to the window and tried to see through the drawn curtains. Her head moved this way and that, trying to find a tiny gap in the curtains. There was no gap. (As a housekeeper, I knew exactly how to close curtains and fold one side gently over the other at the centre, so that no gap existed.) But the head kept moving – as though the woman knew that something was occurring in the summer-house, and the notion that she could see us, even as indistinct figures shrouded in our blanket, made me feel faint, the more so because I now recognised who the woman was: it was Miss Adelaide Waverley, future chatelaine of Manderville Hall.
We could do nothing except lie still and petrified, clinging to each other. Neither of us dared whisper even a word. We were as terrified as soldiers hiding in a shallow bunker from an enemy who was about to blow our lives away. I could feel that Miss du Maurier was on the very edge of breaking down into sobbing and I clamped my arms more tightly around her.
I do not know how long we had to stay like this, cleaving together, aware of Death stalking us round and round. But at last, we heard the footsteps retreating and then fading to silence.
We got up and crept about the place, putting on our clothes.
We did not speak. I pinned up my hair, which was perfumed with my lover’s scent.
Later, in the blackest darkness, we walked out and went towards the boat. I looked up at the sky, to see if the moon was up to guide Miss du Maurier on her sea journey, but there was no moon.
‘Take care,’ I whispered. I touched her face, but she pulled back from my touch and only looked at me with sorrow and devastation, as though I were some animal she had inadvertently wounded. We pushed the boat out and she got into it and started the motor and drew up the anchor and I stood alone on the beach listening to the ticking sound of the engine and the slap of the water as she pulled further and further out into the bay.
What did I expect?
In my love for her, and with my knowledge of her world, I expected her to leave me for a while. I knew that one Thursday would pass and then another and another and she would not come to the summer-house. But I also expected that, in the end, she would come, that she would not be able to resist, that the ‘boy’ in her would not forever be confined in his coffin but start to long again for my touch. And so I waited for her. I waited and she did not come. As each week passed, I waited with a fainter and fainter heart.
I began letters to her, but did not send them. I lay in my little room, with my chinchilla coat wrapped around me, and I thought how my life in England, in the service of others more fortunate than me, and for whom I waited endlessly to know their will, had been, in its essence, a mistaken life.
So convinced of this did I become that, in the cold of February, when I at last admitted to myself that Miss du Maurier – in her terror of being discovered with me and of being shamed for this by the world in which we both had to live and breathe – would never return to the summer-house or seek me out anywhere, I went to see Lord de Whithers and told him that I had decided to leave Manderville Hall.
‘Leave?’ he said. ‘Leave? My dear woman, nobody leaves Manderville Hall unless they’re chucked out on their ear. Whatever are you thinking of? Where are you to find better employment in more beautiful surroundings than here?’
‘Nowhere, m’lord,’ I said. ‘I have been very fortunate at Manderville. It is something else.’
‘Something else? What d’you mean, Mrs Danowski?’
‘Well, sir, it is this. I have a little money saved. I am going to Padstow to set myself up in a small way . . .’
‘Set yourself up? What can you possibly be talking about?’
‘In a small commercial enterprise. I was taught to sew by my father who, as you know, was a tailor by profession.’
‘Yes. A Jew tailor. But I thought you had got beyond all that. I thought we had rescued you from that.’
‘Rescued me?’
‘From that Jew business. Because I’ve told you before, it’s best to forget all that – especially with the hardening of attitudes in Germany and so forth that we hear about now. Better to meld in. Let me remind and warn you. Far better to meld in here at Manderville, as you have done very well, and just put all that behind you.’
I was standing as straight and tall as I could in the drawing room, but now I felt a little dizzy and had to reach out and hold onto the back of a fragile Louis XVI chair upholstered in blue brocade.
‘I understand what you’re saying, Lord de Whithers,’ I said, ‘but the truth is that I am who I am and I will never be anyone else. Never. And, before it’s too late, I would like to try to run an independent life.’
Lord de Whithers began scratching his head. His look was now very severe. ‘Independent life!’ he scoffed. ‘Independent life? Do you know what on earth you’re saying? Do you know how much you’ve been protected here?’
‘Yes, I think I do, sir.’
‘Well then, how are you going to survive – without Manderville food, without Manderville light, without Manderville money and hot water and allowances for your clothes, not to mention the fresh air that you breathe and the freedom that you have to walk where you will in the park and by the sea and, most importantly, my willingness to overlook you origins? You tell me how.’
My dizziness was now so troubling, I thought that I might fall down in a faint. I clutched at the insubstantial chair. I knew that my voice was almost inaudible as I said: ‘I have been told that in Padstow, as in other towns, no doubt, in these times we are living through, there is a return to mending. People cannot afford new clothes as they did in the nineteen twenties, so there is a return to having old things made new by needlework. And I am very skilled at this, as your late wife knew. I used to mend Lady de Whithers’ underwear and petticoats if they had been inadvertently torn.’
‘Torn? Torn? What d’you mean? They were never torn. Torn by what or by whom?’
‘I don’t know, sir. But I am very skilled at what they now call “invisible mending”. And I have found a small shop to rent. I will take in old and torn things and try to make them serviceable by my skill.’
Lord de Whithers stared at me for a moment, then picked up his copy of the Daily Telegraph and resumed his reading of it.
‘What you’ve told me, Mrs Danowski, is all complete, unadulterated nonsense,’ he barked. ‘I can’t be doing with it. So either you must retract it all or you had better leave as soon as possible.’
The year I left Manderville Hall was 1937.
It was a cold February day, but before my taxi arrived, I went down to the beach and opened the door of the summer-house and went in.
I had cleaned and aired it after that last afternoon with Miss du Maurier, and yet it seemed to me exactly as it had been when we lay together on the daybed, and I longed to take a photograph of it, so that I would never forget it. I imagined myself old, staring at the faded picture and remembering that this place had contained all that I would ever know of love. Then I closed it and locked the door. I looked out at the bay and saw, far out, a small boat making its way round the headland on a calm sea. There were children in the boat and I could hear their laughter, carried towards me by the breeze.
My little enterprise, Danni’s Invisible Mending, located on Padstow high street, next door to a fish shop, was sufficiently successful to provide me with an income equal to my needs.
I had bought myself a solid and beautiful Singer Sewing Machine, with a foot treadle beneath the ironwork table.
I decided to position myself, with the machine, in the window – so that passers-by could observe for themselves how busy and industrious I was.
Some people entered the shop out of curiosity, to observe my skill close up. And one day the following year, 1938, a well-dressed woman came in and, smiling, said she had mistaken me for waxwork or a mannequin, because I sat so still.
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I am quite real. And I undertake repair work of all kinds. I’ve recently acquired an elasticated thread, made in France, with which I can repair corsets and girdles, if that might be your wish.’
This woman now stared at me. She was a tall and beautiful lady with a fox fur draped about her shoulders.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but your face is very familiar to me. Where might I have seen you before?’
I put down my work. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘For many years I was housekeeper at Manderville Hall and—’
‘That’s it!’ she said. ‘We came to a ball at Manderville when Lady de Whithers was alive. I remember you. You glided about everywhere, making sure that everything was just-so. And I said to Lady de Whithers, “Your housekeeper is clearly a marvellously committed person. I don’t suppose you’d lend her to me if I ever give a ball?”’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘And what did Lady de Whithers say?’
‘She said, “Certainly not! We rely on her absolutely. Without her, Manderville would descend into disorder and chaos.” But now you’re here. I expect poor old Lord de With misses you terribly.’
‘I don’t know, madam. I don’t suppose he does.’
‘Ah well, things change. Nothing lasts for ever. But they say Manderville Hall has been immortalised in a book, and I was just on my way to the library—’
‘Immortalised?’
‘That’s what I heard. This new novel, Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. She calls the house “Manderley”, but they say that Manderville Hall was really the prime inspiration for the setting. Who knows if that’s true?’
I sat very still. A shaft of pale sunlight came through the window and glinted on the black sewing machine. Then I said: ‘I met Miss du Maurier once. She came to lunch with Lord de Whithers. I thought she was a very beautiful person.’
The library told me that I would have to wait at least a fortnight to get a copy of Rebecca. The book had been hailed as Daphne du Maurier’s finest work and it was in great demand.
So I waited. I was not much in the habit of reading, for in all my life’s work I’d felt tired at the end of each day and I often fell asleep with a book in my hand. But I wanted to read Rebecca. I had the fanciful notion that, by setting the novel at Manderville Hall, Miss du Maurier might, somewhere in the book, contrive to send me a coded message, a message that revealed how strong and true her feelings for me had been.
But then I acquired the book.
My foolish thought about a ‘coded message’ only betrayed what a naïve person I was in my heart. For I soon enough discovered myself in the novel’s horrible mystery. Not ‘Danni’ who had been loving and tender, but ‘Danny’, the ‘black figure’, Mrs Danvers, with vampire’s eyes and a white face, like a skull; Mrs Danvers, who is ugly and diseased with jealousy and wears her dark hair piled upon her head; Mrs Danvers who tortures Mr de Winter’s young bride by invoking the beauty of his former wife, Rebecca, by opening a wardrobe in her bedroom ‘in the west wing’ and showing her Rebecca’s dresses and furs; Mrs Danvers, who – in her obsession with the drowned and beautiful Rebecca – never ceases to scheme and plot and lay traps for the hapless heroine, and who, at the end of it all, burns down the house and everybody and everything inside it.
I returned the book to the library. It was difficult for me to utter a word about it, but I did manage to tell the librarian that I had not liked it at all.
All of this happened a long time ago, before the war came and destroyed so many lives, and I have to tell myself that I am lucky to be alive and running my little mending business and to be the owner of a chinchilla coat.
But I know that I have been physically affected by Miss du Maurier’s decision to make a villain out of me. My skin is very white and dry and the bones of my skull are clearly visible beneath this white skin. I think I am probably frightening to look at, ugly in fact, as ugly as she made me in the book.
I examine my features for signs of evil. I ask myself whether, one day, I shall not take some bitter revenge upon Miss du Maurier, who stole my name and my soul and made me bad. But I doubt that I will, because sometimes I dream that, after I left Manderville Hall, she came once more to the beach.
I dream that she found the summer-house locked and shuttered.
I dream that she tried to peer in through the curtained windows, as Adelaide Waverley had done. I tell myself that she walked up to the house and waited until Lord de Whithers rose from his afternoon rest and then asked him whether she might see me. And of course Lord de Whithers told her that I was gone – gone without leaving any forwarding address.
I dream that it was this – this knowledge that she would never find me because I did not want to be found – that wounded her so deeply that she decided, in her novel, to turn me into a monster.
These things I dream, lying in my room, listening to the sound of the sea. But I will never know the truth of what she felt. I know only that the novel, Rebecca, has now been read by millions of people all over the world. And I am at the heart of it, the evil spirit of Manderley, the jealous destroyer.
Sometimes, I remember what the librarian said when I told him that I disliked the novel.
‘You’re in a minority,’ he sniffed. ‘Rebecca is a triumph, possibly a masterpiece.’