One morning, Paddy Puxley looks at her with eyes that are no longer warm or welcoming, and Daphne finally understands, with pain and shame, that the time has come, in the spring of 1942, to leave Langley End.
There is only one place she can possibly go.
Fowey.
* * *
Readymoney Cove, that little creek she has always loved. Facing out to sea, a white, square cottage with a gray roof, and a garden filled with yellow roses, opening directly on to the beach. Daphne takes care of renting it and settles the children and the nanny there. The rooms seem cramped and dark after Langley End, and the kitchen is tiny. Daphne arranges her office in a long, almost corridor-like room. The girls protest that their new bedroom is regularly invaded by black beetles; apparently, it’s because the house used to be a stable.
Daphne adopts her usual defense to life’s vicissitudes: she writes, submerges herself in a new novel. No time for anything else; Daphne is like a workhorse wearing blinkers. Tessa, now almost nine, goes to school on the Esplanade, close to the house where Mo, Jeanne, and Angela are staying. That makes only two children in the house during the day, but it feels like more because of Kits’s fiery temperament. At eighteen months old, her son is an irresistibly impish little blond boy, idolized by his mother, and every bit as spoiled by her as Gerald was by Big Granny, which makes Muriel smile. It is Kits who, day after day, is covered with kisses, endlessly hugged, in a way that Daphne’s daughters never were. In her novels, the heroines love only their sons, passionately. Real life is no different.
The novel she is writing now is a family saga, Hungry Hill, a sprawling historical novel in the same vein as The Loving Spirit, which tells the story of five generations of an Irish family, the Brodricks. Enough of romance, of ladies and pirates, Daphne is moving up a gear; she wants to be taken seriously, wants the literary critics to finally show an interest in her. She delegates all domestic tasks to Margaret and the cook, Mrs. Hancock. She remains deaf to Kits’s screaming and does not leave her office before lunch. At teatime, the children are allowed to enter her lair and she reads to them the adventures of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Even Kits falls silent then, bewitched by the melodious voice of his mother and the voyages of those men in armor.
Daphne discovers that one of her childhood friends, Mary Fox, their former neighbor in Hampstead, has just moved to a house nearby, providing her with the ideal companion for her daily walks. During the fall and winter of 1942, Daphne works hard. She will not admit to anyone that the idea for this novel was inspired by Christopher Puxley: he often talked to her about his Irish ancestors, even showed her a few letters, enough to embellish the narrative structure and preserve a secret link with him. There is the distinct impression, during this time, that Daphne is rushing headlong to escape her everyday life, losing herself in the meanders of a dense story in order not to have to think about the sad letters her husband sends, weighed down with his military responsibilities, a man approaching his fifties who feels too old for this war and misses his family. She fears for Tommy’s life, now he is the Major General of the Airborne Forces Division and has been sent to North Africa for several weeks to help out with preparations for the Desert War.
With Ferryside having been vacated by the navy, Muriel, Jeanne, and Angela do all they can to organize a festive Christmas in spite of the wartime restrictions. They toast the publication of Angela’s fourth novel, Treveryan, “dedicated with much love to my sister Daphne,” the dark tale of siblings under a family curse, set in an elegant manor house by the sea. Kirkus Reviews judges the book better than its predecessors, even if the author “tends to overwrite her dialogue and overplay her hand.” Sales remain modest, but this does not worry Angela, who has already found the inspiration for her next novel.
Daphne’s morale is at its lowest point. Outside, it rains constantly. The final corrections of Hungry Hill seem to drag on forever. In February 1943, she is woken by the arrival of a telegram. Tommy, not long back from North Africa, has had a glider accident. In a panic, she rushes to his bedside at the air force base in Netheravon, Wiltshire, 125 miles from Fowey. Her husband’s knee injury is sufficiently serious that he is sent to Readymoney Cove for two weeks to recuperate.
The children had almost forgotten that their father smelled like a combination of lavender water and Woodbines, his favorite brand of cigarettes. When their mother brings him home, he is grouchy, agreeing only grudgingly to stay in his bed with his leg bandaged. When he is finally able to walk again, with the aid of a stick, Daphne and the children accompany him along the Esplanade and Tommy insists on saluting every G.I. who emerges from the huge American army base recently set up in the wooded hills behind Readymoney. The little port of Fowey is invaded by the American fleet, and civilians are no longer allowed to sail there. Tommy tells the children that, when the war ends, he will build a new boat and take the whole family out to sea. Listening to him, observing his gaunt face, Daphne realizes what a terrible mark the war has left on their lives: things will never be the same again. Even if Daphne’s life does not appear so very different from the way it used to be—visits with the children to see her mother at Ferryside, lunches with the Quiller-Couches, high teas with Clara Vyvyan in Trelowarren, walks with Mary Fox, writing, and proofreading—she has a husband who chose armed conflict as a career. Fearfully, she watches him leave again, stiff-backed in his uniform, his shoulders already burdened by the weight of the battles to come.
Hungry Hill is published on May 5, 1943. Daphne is annoyed by the book’s appearance: the paper is of poor quality, thin and transparent, like the pages of a telephone directory, and the letters are tiny. But Victor had no choice: the printers, too, are suffering from wartime restrictions. She waits eagerly for the reviews, allowing herself to hope that she will finally be accorded the eulogistic articles she so desperately yearns for, that she will be congratulated on the seriousness of her work, that she will at last read that Miss du Maurier does not write mere mass-market mush for lovesick girls. But not one journalist champions the book. Its structure is judged to be clumsy, unsubtle, its prose stiff and convoluted, the characters unappealing and lifeless. The Observer wonders a little maliciously if Miss du Maurier had intended to write her story directly as a screenplay, without any attempt to make it literary or novel-like. Even though the movie rights are bought by a production company, Daphne is cruelly disappointed. She remembers Q’s little warning: The critics will never forgive you for writing Rebecca. Her disenchantment is intensified by the dangerous nature of the missions Tommy is given in North Africa, by this war that seems never-ending. When Tessa and Flavia’s school is requisitioned by the American army, Daphne transforms her office into a classroom to educate her daughters. Helping Tessa (nearly ten) with her multiplication tables and Flavia (six) with her alphabet seems to her the best way of diminishing her own anxiety and disillusionment. The girls are thrilled by these unexpected lessons given by their mother, who goes from talking about the death of Joan of Arc (her favorite tomboy) to the devastation of the plague. She encourages them to turn some of Chaucer’s tales into theatrical productions. They are fascinated by her geography classes, which she embellishes with bizarre drawings on cards, and beg her for more.
One day in the spring of 1943, Daphne takes Tessa and Flavia for a walk with their aunt Angela and whispers to them that she is going to show them her house of secrets, her favorite place in the whole world, the mansion that inspired Manderley, in Rebecca. She leads them patiently along an endless, overgrown driveway and, just when the girls can’t bear it anymore, when they are hungry and thirsty, she finally points out the large gray house emerging from a red cloud of rhododendrons. The place is silent. The grass is waist-high. Confused, they watch their mother walk up to the house, her eyes shining, and caress the ivy-clad walls, touching her lips and her cheeks to the stone façade as if she were kissing it. This house is called Menabilly, she tells them, and no one has lived here for twenty years. It is the f
irst time her daughters have heard this name. Their mother pronounces it with the reverence of one in love, her voice soft and dreamy. For a long time, she sits in front of Menabilly, her face transformed by happiness. Tessa gets bored—she’s not interested in this house, she wants to go home—but Flavia watches her mother speaking in a low voice to Angela. Daphne seems filled with an intense joy.
Finally, it is time to leave. Daphne takes her daughters by the hand, turns around one last time, and offers a secretive smile to that abandoned house enveloped in silence. As they walk away through the undergrowth, escorted by the singing of doves, she is still smiling, because she knows, now, who the new mistress of Menabilly is going to be.
PART FOUR
CORNWALL, 1943
MENABILLY
It makes me a little ashamed to admit it,
but I do believe I love Mena more than people.
—DAPHNE DU MAURIER1
Fowey, Cornwall
November 2013
You want to go to Menabilly? Impossible. Visit it? You must be joking. See it? No one sees Menabilly. Menabilly is inaccessible. The Rashleigh family, who have owned the mansion since the sixteenth century, wish it to remain that way. I observe the property on Google Maps: the house appears, seen from above, a pale square surrounded by greenery, then the sea, very close, an emerald ribbon touching a rocky coastline. But this is not enough. I want to see it with my own eyes.
It is surprisingly bright, this late in the year, and the cool air smells of salt, grass, damp earth. Holding my map, I leave the Menabilly Barton farm and turn right toward the little beach at Pridmouth. The quiet footpath descends toward the sea, and I hear its murmur grow louder as I approach. The beach is scattered with large gray rocks covered with lichen, the same gray as the granite cottage that sits almost at the edge of the sand. The same cottage that inspired the one in Rebecca, a place of mystery and tragedy. Apparently, you can rent it by the week. It sleeps eight and is almost always booked up. To the right, a wooden footbridge climbs up toward a large red-and-white beacon that stands on the hill at Gribbin Head. To the left, an uneven road and a rusted winch. Daphne used to come here every day, with her children or alone, accompanied by her dogs, even in bad weather. In the summer, she liked to swim and sunbathe here. Going back up the path, I am aware of walking in her footsteps and I try to walk like her, quickly, with long strides.
Menabilly is only a few minutes’ walk from where I stand now, but as I have been warned, there are signs with STRICTLY PRIVATE in large letters on all of the high gates. I could, at my own risk, approach the house by that secret path that goes under the trees; I could ring the bell at the lodge, which is no longer abandoned as it was when Daphne first visited, and ask the guard if I could meet the owners. The Rashleigh family decided long ago not to give any interviews or information about their famous tenant, who spent nearly twenty-five years in the mansion. Since the publication of Rebecca in 1938, Menabilly has exerted a magnetic attraction over readers from all over the world, who continue to travel all the way to Fowey in the hope of being able to explore the property that was such an inspiration to the author. Like me, they find the way barred. So I must use cunning, if I want to get any closer to the house. There is, I have been told, only one path that allows the mansion to be seen from a distance. You must climb above the farm, walk along the coast, go past fields enclosed by wooden fences, climb farther up to Polkerris, and, at the junction, take a right, toward Tregaminion Chapel. The bright green pastureland that overlooks the sea is usually deserted, but when I pass a woman there, she greets me with a polite smile, which I return.
While I continue along my path, I think about the moment when I discovered Rebecca in English, at eleven. I read it several times. Then, at sixteen, I read the French edition, a gift from a friend. Translation by Denise Van Moppès, 1940. I immediately noticed that there had been cuts made in the French version; they were too significant not to be noticeable, particularly if you knew the original text as well as I did. Altogether, about forty pages had been removed.
From a distance, I see the clock tower of the little church. I am almost there. I can’t stop thinking about that translation. Daphne had a perfect understanding of French. Did she compare that edition with the original version? Did she realize just how many of her descriptions had been shortened? I discovered that the translator had, here and there, performed a disappearing act on the heroine’s reminiscences, her obsession with Rebecca, and her thoughts spreading into daydreams, all of Kicky’s influence. The rhythm of the book had been altered, losing much of the atmosphere that Daphne had so meticulously created. But what most upset me was the fatal diminution of two essential scenes, the first with Mrs. Danvers in the large bedroom in the west wing, stripped of its dramatic tension, and the second with Maxim, the climax of the book, that moment when the truth is revealed—what happened in the cottage on the beach where Rebecca used to go with her lover—of which an entire page of dialog is missing. I have not been able to find any trace of a correspondence between Daphne and her French publishers, Albin Michel, concerning the translation of Rebecca.
I reach the chapel and look southward, over the fence and the sheep grazing in front of it. There is no one else here. A golden light pierces the low-hanging clouds. In the distance, the roof of Menabilly’s north wing is just visible through the trees. I feel the same emotion I felt outside Cannon Hall. A little patch of roof is all I will ever see of the house that Daphne du Maurier loved so passionately.
* * *
Summer 1943. Daphne is thirty-six years old. Her royalty payments are pouring in, making her a wealthy woman, so much so that she starts to complain about the high rate of income tax she must now pay. She has no desire to buy dresses, cars, works of art. There is only one thing she wants to spend her money on, but it is not for sale. How unbearable, that vision of Menabilly, neglected, left to rot year after year. One morning, she has an idea: call her lawyer in Fowey, Walter Graham, to ask him to contact Dr. Rashleigh and find out whether it would be possible to perhaps rent Menabilly. It’s a long shot, obviously, and she doesn’t mention the idea to anyone else. She braces herself for a refusal. But, one week later, her lawyer gives her an unexpected reply: the Rashleighs agree. Mrs. Browning can live in Menabilly in exchange for a rental payment to be determined and subject to a contract that they will draw up. Jubilation and incredulity. The lawyer warns her that the house is in a deplorable state: the roof might collapse at any moment, damp has infiltrated the walls, but Daphne interrupts him: she is so moved, so happy, she has not felt anything like this since Kits was born three years ago. Her mother and her sisters attempt to dissuade her. She must be crazy: there’s no running water, no electricity, no heating; it’s impossible! While Tommy fights the war on the front, Daphne fights for Menabilly. Walter Graham enters into lengthy, ill-tempered negotiations with Dr. Rashleigh. After a great deal of hairsplitting, an agreement is reached. Daphne will rent the house for twenty years, and she will pay for all work carried out on it. Does this give her cold feet? Not at all. She manages to obtain some government aid for the renovation but finances most of it herself.
For the moment, she does not tell her children anything about this. They see her leave every morning with Margaret, armed with brooms, mops, and cloths. A stranger in a suit, carrying a large box filled with mysterious maps, spends several evenings at Readymoney Cove, shut up in the office with their mother. One day, pressured by their constant questioning, she finally admits that she is preparing a surprise for them and that they must wait patiently for it to be ready.
Dressed in pants, sweater, and boots, Daphne spends her days at Menabilly with her team: lawyer, bricklayer, roofer, plumber, electrician. Whenever she is told that something is not possible, Mrs. Browning becomes offended, then begs them, asks them, to see what they can do. The renovation takes six months, and Daphne is inordinately happy as she directs the building work. Electricity, water, and heating are installed, doors and windows are chan
ged, the roof is entirely replaced, dust and saltpeter removed, the walls repainted. And all this in wartime. It’s a miracle.
Menabilly comes back to life. The ivy is trimmed, and sunlight again enters the house. The long rooms regain their old nobility. Daphne feels overwhelmed by love. Is it wrong to love stone as if it were a person? A house that isn’t even hers, that she will never own. Does it matter? She lives here now, and she will for the next twenty years—a long time. She will be fifty-six then, she will be old; she will have time to get used to the situation. She has moved in her own furniture, recuperated from storage, and has bought new furniture, too, and in December 1943, the three dumbstruck children discover their new abode. On the doorstep, their mother announces with a dazzling smile: Welcome to Mena!2
“Mena” bears no resemblance to the abandoned mansion of the previous summer. The wooden floors shine once again, a fire blazes in the large living room hearth, the flowered wallpaper matches the fabric on the chairs and couches. The old rocking horse waits for them in front of the sparkling stained-glass windows. Stunned, the children walk through to the book-lined library where a baby grand piano stands on a white carpet and the wood-paneled walls are decorated with engravings of hunting scenes. They find their grandfather Gerald’s bronze bust and walking sticks, the caricatures drawn by their great-grandfather Kicky. They run up the grand wooden staircase, admire the portrait by Whiting of their mother and their aunts when they were children, with the little dog Brutus in Jeanne’s arms. On the second floor, they find long red-carpeted corridors, their parents’ bedrooms, and other bedrooms, most of which look out over the garden, and then their own room, a beautiful space, painted green, with images of Peter Pan pinned to the walls, and with three beds—a sight that makes Tessa cry, because she refuses to sleep with her younger siblings. Margaret firmly but gently puts an end to her tantrum.