Daphne has planned everything for Tommy’s return during the New Year holidays, down to the smallest Christmas decorations. Her mother and sisters are openmouthed with admiration. How did she do it? Daphne wonders, seeing her family united in front of the Christmas tree, in this house she loves so much. She believed in it, she wanted it, she got it. But she must admit that she’s exhausted now. She will need twice as many servants to look after the children, the housekeeping, the cooking, the garden. There is always a fire to be lit, a child to be watched over, an object to be repaired, wood to be chopped. Daphne manages to find a retired schoolteacher from Tywardreath, who comes by taxi three times a week to give Tessa and Flavia lessons. Will she soon be able to think about a new book? She will have to get back in the saddle after the half failure of Hungry Hill, which did not sell as well as Victor had hoped. She feels like writing a few short stories, perhaps a play, while she waits for the idea of a novel to start “brewing.”*
Daphne orders new stationery for her correspondence with a simple letterhead that makes her swell with pride: MENABILLY, in red letters, and to the left a winged crown, the Browning family coat of arms. From January 1944, in her new house, Daphne remains faithful to her “routes.”* The maid, Violet, wakes her at nine o’clock with the breakfast tray: coffee, and toast with honey. The children come in to give her a kiss and a hug, and at ten she starts work, sitting behind the desk in her bedroom with its faded wallpaper decorated with white roses. She uses a new typewriter, a portable Underwood Standard. Kits (four) is the only one allowed to stay with her while she writes. This is unfair to Tessa and Flavia, but that’s just how it is. He plays with his collection of lead Indians until Margaret comes to fetch him without disturbing Mrs. Browning. Daphne does not stop writing until one o’clock, when she always eats lunch alone. At two comes the children’s favorite moment, when the four of them go for a walk. In good weather, they head down to the sea at Pridmouth and play games around the wreck of the Romanie, the remains of which are still there. If it rains, they explore the mysteries of the forest. Carrying a long stick, wearing her jacket, pants, and boots, Daphne guides them, tirelessly energetic. She always pauses to chat with Mr. Burt, the handyman and part-time gardener, who works hard, armed with a scythe, accompanied by his dog, Yankie. A quick stop to let Kits play on the swing, and then it’s time for tea.
Daphne sips her China tea alone in the library, then goes back to her room to work, until it is bathtime, when she sometimes takes over from Margaret. The children’s bathtub is high and deep, with ball and claw feet. The water used for washing comes from pumping a distant pond, located near the gates that lead to the house. It is supposedly filtered, but it always looks greenish and leaves marks on the enamel, as well as in the children’s blond hair, which amuses them no end. After their supper, Tessa, Flavia, and Kits come in to kiss their mother, in the library where she reads the newspapers near the fire, with the old gramophone playing a Rachmaninoff tune. She changes her clothes for her solitary meal, wearing a long embroidered jacket with velvet pants and a silk blouse.
The children’s bedtime takes a while; Kits does not like the dark—they have to light a little night-light—and the girls are scared, because Mr. Burt told them about a ghost, a lady in blue who roams the empty bedroom next to their father’s walk-in closet. And then there are the rats, which have never left the attic and which, all night long, make noises in the ceiling above their heads. And that’s without even mentioning all the bats that fly around outside the window at sunset. When the children complain to their mother about this, she invents such funny stories about bats and rats that they end up laughing with her and making the best of the situation. Their mother’s new nickname is Bing, inspired by her beloved dog, Bingo, her faithful companion at Ferryside.
Besotted with Menabilly, Daphne is able to bear the coldness of the house in that first winter, unlike the children and Margaret. With its high ceilings, the house is almost impossible to heat, and the corridors are always freezing. The children get ear infections and chest infections, but Daphne’s morale never wavers, especially with spring just around the corner. She looks happier than she has ever been. Her dream has come true: she is the mistress of Menabilly. Does she suffer from Tommy’s absence? Of course, but she has built herself an enchanting and exclusive refuge, sheltered from everything, and that is enough. Spurning the dark heart of the war, Daphne locks herself away in her imaginary world, where she reigns like an empress over her characters. Nothing else matters.
American soldiers regularly discover the path to Menabilly and ring at the door of the mansion, a copy of Rebecca in hand. Is this where the great novelist lives? Daphne forgets how famous she is. She is intimidated by the prospect of meeting her readers, and prefers to hide on the parapet that surrounds the roof, leaving ten-year-old Tessa to answer the door to unexpected visitors. A tried-and-trusted speech: Daphne du Maurier is out, and she won’t be back until evening. Undaunted, the G.I.s come back the next day, with their books to sign, and sometimes Daphne yields, smiling at them and tracing her name on the flyleaf of their books.
While Daphne retreats into her bubble at Menabilly, Tommy becomes a lieutenant general at forty-seven years old, the commander of the 1st Airborne Division. In the spring of 1944, vast preparations are secretly in progress for D-day. Husband and wife see each other briefly in May. Every morning, Daphne writes to him, and the mailman brings her several letters each week in return from Tommy. The envelopes are stamped with the Browning seal and the missives invariably begin with My own beloved Mumpty. The words are scribbled in haste and signed Your devoted Tib, with all the love a man’s heart can hold,3 with Xs for kisses, sent by the eight favorite teddy bears that the lieutenant general still takes everywhere with him.
The entire coastline, from Exmouth to Falmouth, is tense with excitement and nerves on the eve of the Normandy landings, of which Daphne and her family know nothing, but which they all hope for. She imagines how hard her husband must be working during these crucial hours. The authorities ask Mrs. Browning to organize a top-secret lunch at Menabilly for about sixty American war correspondents who are in the region incognito. Under a shroud of secrecy, Muriel, Jeanne, and Angela help her to host the lunch. Her own cook, the nanny, and the maids have been sent out on a picnic for the day, so they do not suspect anything. Menabilly is invaded by an efficient American team led by a chef who prepares a festive meal in a battery of saucepans and platters bearing the insignia of the U.S. Navy. It is a great success, which must never be spoken of.
On June 6, 1944, Angela and Jeanne call their sister, feverishly excited: while they were taking care of their tomatoes for the Women’s Land Army, they noticed that, by evening, there was not a single American ship in the bay. Daphne spends her days listening to the radio, on the alert for anything concerning the airborne divisions, the ones that are supervising Tommy’s men in Normandy. She knows how furiously her husband is working to fight the Nazis and their allies, and even if the first reports of the landings are positive, he is not out of danger yet.
In September 1944, Daphne’s anxiety is at its height. Tommy is a key element in the preparation of the biggest airborne operation of the war, code-named Market Garden. Conceived by General Bernard Montgomery, its objective is to parachute Allied divisions behind German lines in order to capture strategically important bridges that will enable the ground troops to enter Germany. The most remote target is the city of Arnhem, Holland, situated on the Rhine. Not everyone is convinced of the soundness of the idea behind this massive operation. Tommy publicly expresses his doubts to General Montgomery: We might be going a bridge too far, sir.4 The battle rages for nine days, the Germans resist, and strategic mistakes put the operation in peril. On the bridge in Arnhem, the order is given for the Allies to withdraw. Seventeen thousand soldiers are killed. When he returns for a leave, in October 1944, Tommy is exhausted. A luxurious weekend with his wife at Claridge’s in London is not enough to soothe him, and Daphne realize
s just how psychologically scarred her husband is by that defeat. What kind of a man will he be by the end of this war, when he used to have nightmares, as a young man, because of what he experienced in Gauche Wood? Will he ever be able to vanquish the demons of Arnhem?
In November, a gala evening is organized at the Troy Cinema in Fowey in honor of the movie adapted from Frenchman’s Creek, directed by Mitchell Leisen. Daphne, looking glamorous in a long dress, attends with her mother and her sisters. She dislikes the Californian Technicolor sunsets, so far removed from the Fowey estuary, and suppresses a shudder of disgust at Joan Fontaine’s red wig. But, despite the extravagance of the costumes, which she disapproves of, the film is quite well done, and she is happy to learn that the book is selling again as a consequence. Victor knows that Daphne is finishing a play; he would have preferred a novel, and she promises him one for next year. The play, The Years Between, tells the poignant story of a colonel who disappears at sea and whose widow, Diana, overcoming the ordeal, manages to forge a new life, falling in love with another man. Then it is that her husband, whom everyone thought dead, returns. Daphne tried to give a glimpse of her happy isolation at Menabilly, that selfish well-being she feels, far from her husband, that no one would ever be able to understand or accept. In December, the play is staged at Wyndham’s, her father’s old theater, and it proves a success.
One December morning, Daphne receives a letter from her French editor, Robert Esménard. Dear Madame, Delighted as I am that the mail is now being delivered once again between our two countries, I hasten to enter back into correspondence with you in order to keep you up to date on the distribution of your works in France. Our publishing house did everything it could to ensure the successful publication of Rebecca. As you surely know, the representative of Curtis Brown in France has given me a general option on all your productions. I would like to express here, once again, the esteem I feel for your wonderful talent.5 More good news accompanied this letter: the release of French royalty payments, which had been frozen during the war. Since its first appearance in France, in 1940, Rebecca has sold five hundred thousand copies, and it is still selling.
At the end of 1944, an even greater distance is put between Mr. and Mrs. Browning: Tommy is appointed Lord Mountbatten’s chief of staff in Ceylon, in southern Asia. Daphne is saddened by his departure, but her next novel is “brewing”* nicely; this will be the first book she has written in Menabilly, and she is eager to get started.
* * *
She will write the history of the mansion, using what happened within these walls during the English Civil War, between 1642 and 1649, a series of conflicts that led to the fall and then the execution of Charles I and the establishment of a new regime, the Commonwealth. Daphne will return to that tormented period in Menabilly’s past and excavate the legend of the mysterious walled-up room and the skeleton of the Cavalier dressed in a royalist uniform. Full of hope, she sends a letter to William Rashleigh, the family heir, who lives near Plymouth. Could she have access to documents, private letters? He refuses, but Daphne is undeterred and tries his daughter, who is better disposed. Miss Rashleigh gives the author the family tree and files relating to the years that interest Daphne, a mine of information that delights her. The Cornish historian Alfred Leslie Rowse, a friend of the Quiller-Couches, also provides some primary source material. For several weeks, Daphne immerses herself in history books, pores over letters, examines maps, sketches out the novel’s structure. Victor is relieved to learn that she is writing again; Daphne is his flagship author, his biggest earner, with advances of three thousand pounds per book and royalties of 25 percent. She promises him she will finish it by July 1945.
On a night with a full moon, just after Daphne has begun writing the novel, she stands close to her bedroom window and thinks she hears the muffled thunder of hundreds of galloping horses; she makes out the clinking of harnesses and the animals’ panting breath, as if a whole army were encircling Menabilly. She opens the window and leans out to observe the silent garden. Nobody there. The next morning, she tells her children about this strange sensation and they listen, wide-eyed.
Her new heroine is Honor Harris, a young royalist who truly existed, and the story begins in 1620 when she is only ten years old. Even at that age, she is already a compelling character with a bold, insolent temperament that stimulates Daphne’s imagination, a tomboy in the same swaggering, fearless vein as Janet Coombe, Mary Yellan, Rebecca de Winter, and Dona St. Columb. Her older brother Christopher has just married the fiery Gartred Grenvile. The Grenviles are one of the most powerful families in Cornwall. Ten years later, Honor’s destiny is dramatically altered, and it is Gartred’s younger brother—the irresistible, impetuous Richard Grenvile—who is the cause.
Locked away in her room, Daphne leaves the care of the children and the house to migraine-stricken, overworked Margaret. What a bore, all these material necessities, when the only thing that counts is Honor Harris. Things get done without Mrs. Browning—shopping, cleaning, cooking—so why should she take care of all that, when there are others who can do it? She no longer drives, has not been behind the wheel of a car since her wedding day, and she doesn’t miss it. No one disturbs her. No one dares. From time to time, she gets up from her desk (who could imagine that just writing for hours on end would cause such pain to one’s entire body?), stretches her numb legs, massages her stiffened fingers. Standing up, leaning against the window, she smokes a cigarette and looks out toward the slim blue line of the sea, lost in her thoughts. She does not see the children playing at the edge of the woods, nor Mr. Burt, the gardener, hard at work; she is in the seventeenth century, amid the murderous violence of the revolution, she hears the crowd shouting, the cannons booming, the crossfire of muskets; she sees the sack of Menabilly, bastion of royalists, the furniture on fire, the torn clothes, the smashed mirrors. She sees the secret room, impossible to locate, buried somewhere in the mansion that she has searched so many times in vain. She will recount, once again, her love of Cornwall, the sea, the violence of storms, the scented rain, the wind that sweeps everything before it, and her passion for this house, stronger than anything she feels for man, woman, or child. She will describe the war, how it changes the course of a life, describe the agony of waiting suffered by women who are not at the front but who feel it in their flesh just as men do, who hide fugitives, surrender to invaders, protect children and houses, heal wounds, but who, like Honor, hold their heads high, with faith in the future. Daphne mixes the insurrections of 1648 with what she understands of the current global conflict and the complexity of military strategies, she who has a husband fighting in the thick of the action. The book is dedicated to him, in fact, and its title is The King’s General.
On May 8, 1945, the day after Germany’s unconditional surrender, Daphne, her mother, and her sisters listen to the radio as the Allied governments announce the official end of the war in Europe. This does not mean that Tommy will be coming home, however; he is still kept abroad by his military career. When Daphne thinks about his return, she is torn between joy and fear: How will they pick up the threads of this marriage weakened by his long absence? How will she explain to him that she has become attached to her solitude, that she now likes nothing more than writing, alone, in Menabilly, following her “routes,”* surrounding herself with silence? Daphne unearths an old military redingote that used to belong to Tommy and puts it on for her lone dinner in the library. With her blond hair now showing hints of silver, Daphne looks feminine, beautiful, but suddenly formidable, as if that purple and gold jacket accentuated a previously concealed power. Sometimes, late, as night is falling, Flavia and Kits stealthily descend the stairs to spy on her while she dreamily plays a few chords on the piano. To them, Daphne seems dazzling and unreachable. In the end, they go back upstairs in silence and slip into their beds without waking Tessa.
Daphne finishes the book in July 1945 and sends it to Victor, highly satisfied, who plans to publish it in a blaze of publicity (the war
is finally over!) with a print run of seventy-five thousand copies in 1946. Despite the tiredness she always feels after completing a novel, Daphne must manage her household. Flavia has broken her arm, falling off Mr. Burt’s pony, and Margaret is again tormented by migraines. Poor Mrs. Hancock, who does all the cooking for the family, cannot do everything on her own. For a while now, Daphne has had an idea in mind, and she can’t stop thinking about it. Why not try it? It would, after all, be the perfect solution. Yes, she will ask Tod, dear Tod, her favorite governess, to come and work at Menabilly. Daphne and Tod have remained close over the past twenty years, writing to each other on a regular basis. Tod has already met Daphne’s husband and their three children. She must break the news gently to Margaret, who has been in the Brownings’ service since Tessa’s birth, explaining to her that Tod will not be replacing anyone but will take care of the children’s education. Tod is not certain that she can start work for Daphne straight away, however, as she is under contract with her current employers, an aged couple in Yorkshire.
One night in September 1945, while they are in bed, the children learn from the beaming Margaret that the war is officially over, and they rush downstairs to the library and noisily announce the good news to their mother. She looks up at them, puts down her newspaper, and responds with unexpected severity: Yes I know it is, go back to bed this instant.6 Crestfallen, they troop back upstairs, baffled by their mother’s strange attitude. They are waiting for just one thing now, the return of their father, but that is not going to happen immediately: Tommy must first go to Singapore, where he will oversee the demobilization of hundreds of thousands of men.