Sitting in her hut, impervious to the rest of the world, Daphne writes in a fever, devoting herself to perfecting the character of Rachel, the enigmatic heroine with the name that is at once soft and harsh, a woman as charming as she is disturbing, the twin sister of Ellen Doubleday down to her composed voice, her dancer’s gait, and her velvet-brown eyes … this Ellen-Rachel is the most complex, most inspired, most personal “peg”* of Daphne’s career, her greatest secret. Not forgetting Florence and the golden light of that disastrous trip with Ellen. This is how novels are nourished—on their authors’ passions and obsessions, all those things that cannot be exposed overtly to the outside world for fear of appearing insane, all those things that idiot judges and lawyers have never even imagined or anticipated, all that is woven in a writer’s soul: fragments of truth and fantasy, a personal clay molded and fired at will in the twisting curves of a labyrinth of intimacy forbidden to visitors and onlookers.
Philip is bewitched by Rachel, as Daphne was by Ellen: possessed, hypnotized, to the point of losing sleep, to the point of banging his head against walls, swept away by a hurricane of emotions that rages within him. The way her story slowly tightens its grip, each sentence polished to a shine, gives Daphne an intense pleasure that she hasn’t felt since Rebecca. The fate she reserves for Rachel is chilling. This novel will, she knows, satisfy her publisher and her readers, stamped as it is with the peculiar brand of subtle psychological horror that has contributed to her fame.
Meanwhile, in France, it is once again Mme Butler, alias Denise Van Moppès, who translates The Parasites—a little too hastily, apparently, as in April 1950, Albin Michel ask her to review her translation very seriously. While her younger sister is busy writing, Angela publishes her sixth novel with Peter Llewellyn Davies, Reveille, a family saga with political overtones. There is not a single review in the press upon publication. At forty-six, Angela feels the time has come to write her memoirs, and it is at Menabilly, in the living room, while her sister is finishing her novel fifty yards away at the end of the garden, that Angela embarks upon the story of her life. As for Jeanne, while she is traveling with Dod Procter, a renowned artist belonging to the St. Ives movement, she meets Noël Welch, a petite, intense-looking, thirty-year-old brunette who writes poetry. There is electricity between them, instantly. Jeanne is distancing herself from Fowey, from her sisters and mother. She is the most reserved of the three, Muriel’s favorite, the baby of the family who now wants to break free, leaving her older sisters to look after their aging mother at Ferryside.
Tessa, sixteen, is interested in France and her ancestors, and her command of French, taught to her by Tod, is good. Relations between Tessa and Daphne have grown close; in her letters, Tessa confides in her mother, telling her about the spark she feels for Ken Spence, Tommy’s godson. My darling Bing, I was so menaced* by him I didn’t know what to do! My God, it’s so wonderful to be able to tell all this to one’s mother, I must be the only person in the world to do so! But don’t tell anyone!27 Daphne tears herself away from her novel, deciding to take her eldest daughter to discover Paris in June 1950. She has arranged things with Fernande; after a few days in the capital, they will go to her house in the Yvelines, about twenty miles from Paris, where Tessa will spend the summer, under Ferdie’s care. Tessa has never taken a plane before, and she is perturbed at seeing her mother look so tense during the short flight, eyes closed, as if this were her final journey. Daphne and Tessa are welcomed to Paris by a charismatic young American man, Frank Price, who runs the Doubleday office in Paris and is thrilled to be able to show Tessa the City of Light. Frank lives in a large apartment on Rue de la Faisanderie, in the 16th arrondissement. He offers to put up Lady Browning and her daughter there—why go to a hotel when they can stay with him? They accept. Tessa suspects her mother is rather “menaced”* by the charming Frank. He is funny and clever and looks a little like the young actor Danny Kaye. Frank takes them out to dinner at the Eiffel Tower, where Tessa tastes côte de boeuf in Béarnaise sauce for the first time. After that, they go to the bar at the Ritz and then a nightclub in Montmartre. Frank tells the teenage girl, moving rather stiffly on the dance floor, to relax. In Paris, Daphne seems to come back to life: she is laughing, rejuvenated, and easily mistaken for her daughter’s elder sister. The apartment on Rue de la Faisanderie, a short walk from the Bois de Boulogne, is magnificent, with its high ceilings, its crystal chandeliers, and a succession of rooms with communicating doors. A few days later, they go to see Fernande, who lives in Mesnil-Saint-Denis with her mother, an old lady who does not speak a word of English and whom Daphne calls Maman. When Tessa returns at the end of August, in time for Fowey Regatta, which she refuses to miss, her French is as good as Daphne’s. She is delighted by her first taste of France and talks about it constantly. Fernande and she went to see Manon Lescaut at the Opéra, and there is nothing more beautiful than Paris at night. Daphne smiles at the thought that Paris has cast a spell over Tessa, too; Kicky would be proud of his great-granddaughter’s accent.
* * *
My Cousin Rachel is published in July 1951, with a first print run of 125,000 copies. To Daphne and Victor’s joy, it is as resoundingly successful as Rebecca. The critics are unanimous: Daphne du Maurier, at forty-four, is at the zenith of her literary powers. “Spectacular, surprising, masterful,” announces the magazine The Queen. The review in The Guardian is even better—“It is in the same category as Rebecca, but is an even more consummate piece of storytelling”—while the critic from Kirkus Reviews raves: “A gifted craftsman, and spinner of yarns, Daphne du Maurier excels herself.” The ambiguous ending, a method already used in Frenchman’s Creek and Rebecca, and which can leave some readers frustrated, does not seem to disconcert anyone this time. Whether Rachel is a poisoner or not, readers still love her story. The movie rights are sold for fifty thousand pounds sterling in the same month the book first appears, and Richard Burton, a rising young star, is cast to play Philip Ashley, with the beautiful Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine’s sister, in the role of Rachel, directed by Henry Koster. An article in the News Chronicle names Daphne as the best-paid novelist in the country. As her royalties increase, however, so does Daphne’s generosity: she is never hesitant to help her friends and family financially. Even Margaret, her former nanny, benefits from Lady Browning’s munificence to open a little shop.
Still basking in the glory of Rachel, Daphne goes to London in September 1951 to attend a literary cocktail party given by Ellen at the Ritz. Although she rings the bell for Mrs. Doubleday’s suite, no one answers. A young woman in her twenties is also waiting on the doorstep. Tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, she introduces herself as Oriel Malet, a writer published by Doubleday. In contrast to her womanly curves, she has a voice like a little girl’s. As the two of them wait in the luxurious corridor, Daphne makes the young brunette laugh with her ironic remarks. They discuss literature and Paris, because Oriel is a Francophile and her godmother is the French actress Yvonne Arnaud. Oriel did not recognize the famous Daphne du Maurier, but she is already under the spell of this distinguished forty-something with her pretty, suntanned face and her scathing wit.
When Ellen arrives, late, with a cohort of guests, followed by waiters bringing petit fours, flowers, and champagne, Oriel at last realizes—to her stupefaction—who this mysterious, acerbic blond woman actually is. The author of Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel! The guests chat, glasses in hand. There are other writers here, plus journalists, and that tease Frank Price. In a few recent letters to Fernande and Ellen, Daphne admitted “spinning”* with Frank, whom she saw again in Paris and London in the spring of 1951. Nothing too serious, just a few kisses, one of them in the restaurant La Tour d’Argent, in front of a magnificent view of Paris, but also in front of all the other customers. Was she testing out her seductive abilities? Either way, she behaved like a teenager and is faintly ashamed of her behavior now.
After a glass of champagne, Daphne sneaks out and finds herself face-to-face with
the intimidated Oriel Malet in the elevator. She is interested in this young woman with intelligent eyes and invites her to get something to eat at her apartment in Whitelands House before she catches her train back to Cornwall. While Daphne packs her suitcase, Oriel admires the photographs of dogs, boats, and children, particularly one of a mischievous-looking blond boy: One’s son, it’s my French blood, I expect!28 She thanks Oriel for coming to keep her company that night, as Kits went back to boarding school that very afternoon and she had been dreading the empty apartment. After a quick supper, Daphne and Oriel say good-bye. This is the beginning of a long friendship and a rich epistolary correspondence. But on board the night train that takes her back to Fowey, Daphne does not think about that meeting, even less about her son, alone in his dorm, nor of Ellen or Gertie, her usual obsessions. Something dark and sinister is hatching inside her: a collection of short stories that she already knows will shock her family and friends, her readers, the press.
She has to get this darkness off her chest, no matter what. She mustn’t be afraid to explore the extreme, to offend people, to shock them. It’s like those gray hairs she’s getting—why dye them? Why pretend? It is time to put blondness, softness, behind her. What emerges on paper is morbid, disturbing. Sometimes, Daphne stops herself when she is in full flow and smiles pensively as she looks at the photos that Gertie mailed her, snapped during another trip Daphne took to Florida: two figures in bathing suits on the beach, laughing, entwined, brazenly beautiful. On the backs of the pictures, Gertie scrawled a few libertine phrases that Tommy unfortunately saw one morning, Daphne having stupidly left the photos on the desk in the library. Cup of coffee in hand, cigarette dangling from his lips, he had put the photographs back without a word. After that, Daphne hid them away in her hut, to have them close to hand, so she can admire the blue sky and Gertie’s impertinent smile and dive once again into the torments of her poor, mistreated characters.
Oriel Malet, recovering from a motorcycle accident, comes to spend a few days at Menabilly in October 1951, on Daphne’s invitation. One morning, they are crossing a straw field with Mouse, near the farm in Menabilly Barton, and they see dozens of birds circling in the sky. Daphne tells her friend she has always loved birds, just as her father did. Gerald used to watch them with binoculars, for hours: I’ve often thought how “nanny”* it would be if all the birds in the world were to gang up together and attack us.29 Oriel feels sure her friend, whom she now calls Bing, has found a subject for one of her short stories. Daphne imagines incomprehensible attacks by sparrows, robins, quails, thrushes, larks, metamorphosed into killers of human beings. Storks, partridges, and seagulls join this murderous flock, descending on houses, smashing shutters and windows with their beaks, swooping down chimneys to peck out the inhabitants’ eyes. Is climate change to blame for these violent attacks? No one knows. The authorities are powerless, and it’s every man for himself. One brave farmer, Nat, barricades himself in his house with his family while around them, chaos reigns. The story ends in a crepuscular atmosphere, with no hope for the future. Oriel thinks it brilliant, and terrifying. She will not be the only one.
Even though Daphne’s stories are set in peaceful locations—the Côte d’Azur, Hampstead, Cornwall, the Alps—the ambience is instantly suffocating. In “The Apple Tree,” a widower is obsessed by a small tree that reminds him of his dead spouse, whom he never loved. Nature will avenge itself pitilessly on him. In “Monte Verità,” Daphne chooses, somewhat perversely, the name of her editor, Victor, for the narrator of a symbolic story that touches on sects, sexuality and moonbeams. My next story—I hope to get on with it when the dreary cold goes—is one you will hate, Daphne writes to Oriel about “The Little Photographer.” About a sensual, rather foolish woman, who through idleness, lets a honky* man from a shop make love to her, and then when he begins to get serious, she gets frightened, she only meant it as a pastime, but I shan’t tell you how it ends.30 The sordid one-night stand between the rich Marquise and the young disabled man is horribly cruel, but Oriel doesn’t hate it at all; on the contrary, she loves it and asks for more. “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” narrates a macabre fling in a cemetery between a bloodthirsty movie-theater usherette and a naïve mechanic, and “The Old Man” reveals a family secret, its final sentence leaving the reader stunned.
While Daphne mercilessly plumbs these murky depths, Angela publishes her memoirs, still through their cousin Peter Llewellyn Davies. The title is ironic: It’s Only the Sister. The book retraces her childhood, her career, her beginnings in the theater, her love of the opera, her travels, her books. Her prose reflects her personality: chatty, sparkling, full of humor. There are generous extracts from letters written by Daphne, an unexpected gift for her younger sister’s innumerable admirers. Family photographs complete the package. For once, this publication is greeted with a warm welcome, and Angela’s spontaneity and wit are certainly a big part of that. But it does now seem impossible for Angela, nearly fifty, to ever escape her sister’s shadow. The same is true for Jeanne, despite a few prestigious exhibitions.
It is early 1952 and My Cousin Rachel is about to be released in the United States, when Ellen Doubleday suggests that Daphne come to New York to promote the book. Why not ask Oriel Malet, who is also bringing a book out, to accompany her? The two novelists take a night flight in first class, their tickets paid for by their publishers. Oriel, who has never visited America, is very excited. As for Daphne, despite her fear of flying, she is secretly thrilled at the prospect of seeing, in that same country, that same city, the two women who are more important to her than any others. It is simultaneously an ordeal and an exultation to find herself with Ellen again, as serene and distinguished as ever. Daphne’s passion has dimmed now, even if her feelings for Mrs. Doubleday retain traces of their former wild intensity. Daphne’s suffering is less, though, as if the fact of having bumped off Rachel Ashley on paper had, thanks to the “Ellen peg,”* been enough to dull her ardor. What remains, after that, is a solid friendship. It is also a joy to see her beloved Gertie again, filling Broadway theaters for the past nine months alongside the Russian-born actor Yul Brynner in the musical comedy The King and I.
One evening, Daphne and Oriel go to the St. James Theatre on 44th Street to watch Gertie in the role of Anna, the English governess hired by the King of Siam. It is a breathtaking performance. Gertie twirls through sumptuous sets in ball gowns designed by the ultra-fashionable Irène Sharaff, and the duo she forms with the charming Brynner, who has shaved his head to play the Eastern sovereign, is a delight. At the show’s best moment, the famous song “Shall We Dance?,” Anna, dressed in a voluminous pink satin crinoline, teaches the king how to dance the polka, and the couple pirouette at vertiginous speed like spinning tops. Daphne is frightened, gripping tightly to her armrests. As the curtain falls and applause rings out, her Cinders looks suddenly exhausted, withered: Is she overdoing it? The play lasts three hours, and she sings and dances throughout—and she’s been doing it eight times per week since March 1951. Not only that, but the famous prink crinoline weighs more than seventy pounds, Gertie later admits a little boastfully.
When they are alone in the apartment belonging to Gertie and her husband, Daphne notices how unwell her friend looks; she hadn’t detected it under the thick stage makeup. Numbed by a torpor that is alien to her, Gertie admits to Dum that she has had a few medical exams, but that the doctor hasn’t found anything. Curled up in front of the TV set watching bad soap operas, Gertie seems lonely and fragile, and Daphne, unsettled, feels an urge to protect her. Sometimes, the old Gertie bursts back into life, to Dum’s joy, as one evening when their limousine, stuck in a traffic jam, is passed by some lout, and Gertie lowers the window to yell, Fuck you, we’re in a hit!31
During their stay in New York, and when Daphne’s busy schedule allows it, she and Oriel visit the Frick Collection and the Cloisters museum and go for brisk walks around Central Park. My Cousin Rachel is acclaimed upon its American release, and the book sel
ls just as well as it had in Great Britain. Here too, Daphne du Maurier tastes triumph, thirteen years after Rebecca. Now it is time to return to Europe, to Menabilly, where Daphne must finish the short story collection, which Victor plans to publish in the spring. On the return flight, she thinks about Gertie, incandescent in her pink dress. Gertie, her ray of sunshine, to whom, as she was leaving, she gave a heart-shaped brooch. They will see each other again soon, very soon. So why, then, does she feel this pang of anxiety? When she gets back to Menabilly, Gertie still haunts her thoughts.
* * *
As Daphne no longer drives, it is Angela who takes her to London, one cold February day, to meet up with Tessa. Arriving in the capital, Daphne notices that all the flags are at half-mast. Intrigued, she asks a sad-looking shopkeeper for an explanation. The king has died in his sleep. The highly sensitive Angela begins to weep, while Daphne is rendered speechless. George VI was only fifty-six, one year older than Tommy. Daphne thinks about her husband, who has been in Africa for the past few days with Princess Elizabeth and her husband. Tommy will have to escort the new Queen of England, twenty-five years old, back home, on this day of bereavement: February 6, 1952. Does the Princess at least have something dark to wear in her suitcase for the airplane’s arrival? The whole city, the whole country, is in mourning. Black is everywhere: in windows, on doors, on clothes, in people’s hearts. On the square outside Buckingham Palace, despite the icy rain, a crowd gathers until late at night in tribute to the late king. At Sandringham, where his body rests, people mass outside the castle gates. When the funeral train rolls toward London with the royal coffin aboard, people rush to the railway tracks to bid farewell to George VI, who is buried on February 14, 1952. The Brownings attend the funeral service at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor. Daphne feels sure that her husband’s career will evolve as a result of this royal death. And she is right: his new position will be Treasurer to Prince Philip, at Buckingham Palace, still assisted by Maureen. Lady Browning will have to take part in the commemorations, festivities, and galas for Elizabeth II, sumptuously crowned the following year, in June 1953, although the solitary mistress of Menabilly finds such social duties tedious.