One December evening, Daphne waits for Tommy at Menabilly, glancing constantly at her watch. She has been worrying for hours now; her husband was supposed to return from a meeting with his army buddies, an event he had been dreading. The telephone rings, and as she picks up she has a bad feeling. It’s the police. There has been an accident: Tommy lost control of his Alfa Romeo and two people were injured. Later, when he gets home, distraught and ashamed, escorted by a police officer, Tommy admits that he drank a few whiskeys for Dutch courage before the meeting, unaware of just what a bad mix alcohol makes with antidepressants. The victims are not seriously hurt, but Tommy feels humiliated by his arrest and the trial that follows. Two days before Christmas, accompanied by Tessa, he appears in front of the judge at Truro and is found guilty of drunk driving. He must pay a fine of fifty pounds, as well as the victims’ medical bills, and his driver’s license is confiscated for six months. Mortified, Tommy hides out at home, refusing all invitations and giving up all his club memberships. He admits to his wife that the thought of going to their son’s wedding frightens him more than the idea of returning to the Battle of the Somme in 1914 did. Daphne manages to reason with him, and they are both thrilled by the warm, spontaneous wedding celebration. Daphne tells Oriel all about it in a letter: It was much more fun than the girls’ weddings. I thought I might feel triste,* because of being so silly about Kits, but I didn’t a scrap and felt thoroughly gay the whole time! The wedding itself was simple and nice, outside the crowds were incredible, like waiting for the Beatles, Olive being an ex Miss Ireland and on Irish TV, is of course well known.64 Even newspapers in America report on the wedding of the famous British novelist’s son and an Irish beauty queen. At the reception, in Dublin’s Gresham Hotel, Daphne and Tommy are swept away by the contagious good cheer of the other guests and the lusty renditions of traditional Irish songs.
After the excitement of the wedding, it is time to start writing again. Enough note-taking: she must dive into the book, her fifteenth novel. That figure amazes her. Fifteen, already? Urbino becomes her home away from home. She goes there every day in her imagination, while sitting in her hut. For hours, Daphne studies maps and postcards of the city. She knows this will almost certainly be the last novel she writes at Menabilly. At Easter, the young newlyweds come to spend a weekend with them and Daphne is blown away by the sight of her Kits as a husband, looking so happy. She is convinced he will make a wonderful father. Kits has never liked his wife’s first name very much and thinks her middle name, Ursula, is even worse. During their honeymoon, he made fun of Olive with her curlers in her hair and her scarf tied over her forehead, giving her the appearance of having horns. According to Kits, she looks like Hacker, a delightful goat in a children’s TV series. So, no calling her Olive anymore. From now on, everyone names her Hacker, even Daphne and Tommy. Daphne makes good progress on the book: forty thousand words done already, a very good start. Daphne worries about inaccuracies regarding Urbino: If ever it gets translated into Italian, I will be stoned,65 she writes to Oriel. Tommy seems better, but there remains a deep-lying sadness within him, which Oriel notices during a stay at “Mena.” He has not touched a drop of alcohol since December and is devoting himself to finishing his new boat, Yggy III.
In June 1964, having practically finished her novel, Daphne, goes to Italy with Kits and Hacker and returns to Urbino. This is a happy trip, sunny and easygoing. She is relieved to discover that her descriptions of the city, which she nicknames Ruffano, were not inaccurate after all. The only source of vexation is her editor, Victor: that ignorant old man66 has a tendency to consider her new novel a “thriller,” whereas for her The Flight of the Falcon is much more than that. It is an Italian and political tragedy of two brothers turned enemies, separated for decades by the war, both persuaded that the other is dead, who see each other in Ruffano, their childhood home, amid conflict and blood. The story is told in the masculine voice of Eric Avon: it is one of the brothers who narrates the novel—Armino, the younger brother in the shadow of the older, more powerful and tortured brother who bears some resemblance to Svengali, Kicky’s antihero. Their mother is a scandalous seductress defeated by cancer, reminiscent of the venomous Rebecca. Armino was hoping that, by returning to the city where he grew up, he would be able to rediscover his roots and find inner peace and was not expecting the climate of violence and terror that his brother, Aldo, has brought to this small university city haunted by an old, macabre legend. In this harsh allegorical novel that explores the destructive effects of excessive ambition, Daphne drew inspiration from the connections and invented rules of childhood. The book’s publication is set for January 1965.
In the meantime, Daphne passes the summer peacefully at Menabilly, giving Oriel some advice on writing and spending time with her grandchildren. She adopts a new Westie, Morray, as a companion to the dog she already has, Bib. Tommy insists on visiting Kilmarth, the house offered them by the Rashleighs; it is near Polkerris, with a view of the bay. Daphne is forced to admit that it is a beautiful place, but—unlike her husband—she cannot see herself living here at all. Tod, still lively if somewhat deaf at eighty years old, has moved to London, an elegant apartment near Battersea Park. When the Daily Express suggests an article about her life as governess to the du Maurier children, Miss Waddell takes offense and replies that she has no intention of seeing her name displayed in the papers.
In September, Tommy’s state of health suddenly deteriorates. During the summer, he’d suffered pain in his left foot, preventing him from enjoying his new boat, and he had been bedridden, in agony. In mid-September, Tommy is hospitalized in Plymouth; a blood clot is diagnosed, and he undergoes an operation. Ever since his glider accident in 1943, the flow of blood to his left leg has remained weak. After the operation, Daphne is alarmed by his waxy complexion and the fever that does not seem to diminish. He is still in pain, and the doctors explain to Daphne that the only solution is amputation. She firmly refuses. Her husband would never get over it. They must increase his morphine dose and pray that he gets used to the pain. When Tommy returns to “Mena,” there is a wheelchair waiting for him. He reacts with great dignity and never complains. He’s very plucky. I help him dress and undress, he’s not wandery or dopey, although awfully fatigued after bouts of pain, she writes to Oriel. I do get tired, but it’s not the angry fatigue of the days when he drank, I have so much more sympathy now, and somehow it’s less tiring. It’s draining, yes, and I suffer every time I watch him suffer.67
Tommy finds the strength to write a short note to Oriel in November 1964: Thank you so much for the card and news, and was glad to hear you are having lovely weather. Here, thank goodness, it has been the mildest November ever, I should think, so I have been able to get out quite a lot in my electric chair. Apart from the old foot, Bing and I are flourishing, though the former had had a pretty trying time with a semi-invalid on her hands for three months. She has certainly been wonderful and very patient. We have got the whole outfit coming down for Christmas, which with my disabilities, will be a rather major operation, but still all very good fun.68
Daphne’s new novel is published in January 1965 by Gollancz and Doubleday. The Flight of the Falcon does not fare well with the critics. The New Yorker goes so far as to call it “this extraordinarily dull book.” Daphne remains impervious to these articles. The novel vanishes without a trace, but she doesn’t care because, in this gloomy January, all that matters to her is Tommy’s health. Tessa, Flavia, and Kits, shocked by their father’s condition at Christmas, had begged their mother to have him hospitalized again. This time, the doctors’ verdict is irrevocable: Tommy’s left foot must be amputated or he will lose his entire leg to gangrene. The operation takes place on January 14, 1965, in London. Tommy is sixty-eight.
While still recovering, Tommy is taken back to Menabilly by Daphne in early March. Two nurses have been hired to watch over him, Esther is at his beck and call, and his children are never far away. Daphne, exhausted, falls sick in tur
n, immobilized for two weeks by jaundice. Tommy catches bronchitis and grows weaker every day. Why is it that a sudden doom descends on people in a flash? she writes to Oriel. I don’t know when I shall be strong enough to cope. How I long for the spring.69
Drained and emaciated, Daphne tries to gather what little energy she has in order to support Tommy, who is becoming ever sicklier now his bronchitis has turned into pneumonia. She manages to get out of bed and walk to his room, at the end of the corridor, to see him. Her handsome Boy is no more than a shadow of his former self, and tears spring to her eyes when she hears him speak. He is afraid of the coming night; he knows he won’t sleep and he can’t stand it anymore. She comforts him as best she can—tells him he’ll fall asleep eventually—but she feels so fragile herself when she whispers these words to him. She knows, with infinite sadness, that Tommy will never be able to drive again, never go out in a boat again. Everything he liked doing best, everything he was so good at doing … it is all just a distant memory. She kisses him good night and leaves his room.
They wake her at dawn. Lady Browning must come immediately. It is still dark on this March morning when she grabs her bathrobe and follows the nurse down the long, red-carpeted corridor. She walks slowly, with dread in her heart. As soon as she sees her husband’s face on the pillow, she knows.
Tommy is leaving them.
PART FIVE
CORNWALL, 1969
KILMARTH
I have exhausted Menabilly, I have squeezed it dry.
—DAPHNE DU MAURIER1
Kilmarth, Par
November 2013
Daphne du Maurier’s last house is easier to reach than “Mena.” It is not hidden in the heart of a forest, but to the west of Menabilly, atop the cliff that overlooks the little port of Polkerris and the bay of Par, by the side of the road leading to the village of Twyardreath (pronounced tower-dreth). Its name is Kilmarth, Cornish for “horses’ ridge” or “Mark’s retreat.” It is a manor house in gray slate, handsome and austere, protected by a high gate.
Ned, one of Daphne’s grandchildren, explained to me how much the house had been altered and extended. It bears little resemblance to the place he knew when he was a little boy, when his grandmother, Track, lived there. Twenty years ago, the current owners, who are passionate gardeners, had a swimming pool and a tennis court built there, as well as some water pavilions that are now internationally renowned.
The new mistress of Kilmarth told me that living here is source of daily happiness. Her friends even call the house the Kilmarth sanctuary. She has not sensed Daphne’s presence within these walls, but since she moved there, twenty years before, one of her dachshunds never wanted to enter Lady Browning’s old bedroom. It was only when the floorboards were covered with a carpet that the dog felt able to go into the room. Asked about this, Kits, Daphne’s son, replied with his usual wit that it must be a dispute between the dachshund and the ghosts of his mother’s Westies.
Kilmarth is the house on the water, turned toward the light and the open sea. The waves, omnipresent, seem to lap at the door, a constant reminder of the sea that Daphne loved so much and where she would swim every day, weather permitting. It was here, outside this manor house, that she took her daily walks, along cliffs thick with grass, gorse, and heather, followed by a trotting Westie. At Kilmarth, the house on the strand, Daphne communed with nature and the sea. The view over St. Austell Bay cannot have changed very much in the last twenty-five years. The brisk, salty wind blows the clouds through the sky, revealing the pale November sun. It is as if Daphne stood beside me, one of Tommy’s old caps covering her white-haired head. I know she never missed a chance of bird-watching, that she could identify curlews, goldfinches, and yellowhammers, that she used to watch out for cormorants and kingfishers. Climbing the steep slope that she nicknamed Thrombosis Hill, she would admire the trees, the Moorlands twisted by the power of the wind into the shapes of strange, disheveled witches, and the curious conifers with thorny branches, monkey puzzle trees, standing out proudly against the stormy sky.
My pilgrimage ends here.
* * *
July 1969. Leaving Menabilly. It has been four years since Tommy died, on March 14, 1965, four years during which she held on, four years of the Rashleighs’ prevaricating. The agreement had been vague, imprecisely worded, and she took advantage of it: they couldn’t demand she leave, she had just lost her husband, it would have been inhuman. But now, in June 1969, Daphne knows that she no longer has a choice. The renovation works at Kilmarth were finished long ago: everything is ready; the new house awaits her. The problem is that she cannot, does not want to, leave.
Over the past few weeks, most of the furniture has been moved, bit by bit, to Kilmarth, in the van belonging to her faithful handyman Mr. Pascoe. Daphne’s children have helped her with this testing move, as have Esther, Oriel, and Tod, who is remarkably energetic for a woman in her eighties. But Daphne finds it impossible to choose a specific day for her departure; she cannot bear to say that this night will be her last at “Mena.” While preparing to leave the nest, Daphne has spent hours in the large, empty living room, listening to the silence of the manor house, like a huge hollow shell, its walls containing the shadowy ghosts of her past. She saw herself again, forty years ago, a young girl fascinated by the abandoned mansion, face glued to the dusty windowpanes, then as a mother, triumphantly taking possession of the house in 1943, so proud and happy to be the mistress of Menabilly, the only one in her family to feel so bewitched by it; she thought of her marriage, weakened by the repercussions of the war and Tommy’s painful return.
Daphne will never forget that gloomy March morning in 1965 when the nurse came to her room to fetch her. She had written so much about death, had constructed so many scenes in her books around it, but in that moment she found herself face-to-face with the dreadful reality of it, and it overwhelmed her. When she entered the room, Tommy had just enough strength to turn his face toward her. He was pale and barely recognizable, and at that very second death seized him. The last thing Tommy must have seen was his wife looking at him with her blue eyes. And then, panic. One of the nurses called the doctor, while the other one gave Tommy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Daphne tried, too, again and again, but she was aware, even while she was blowing between his cold lips, that it was no use, that Tommy’s wide-open eyes, those beautiful green irises, had become glazed and lifeless. She held her dead husband in her arms and knew that her Boy was gone forever: the father of her three children, the man she had said “I do” to thirty-three years before, in the little chapel at Lanteglos. At last the doctor arrived, but it was too late. Daphne stood at the bedside, in silent horror, remembering her idiotic words of the night before, promising him he would fall asleep, and she wondered what would have happened if she’d stayed there all night to watch over him. Would it have changed anything? Might she have saved him? She should never have left him alone. She should never have gone to her own bed.
They’d had to call the children, right away, in spite of the early hour. Tessa had gone with her ten-year-old daughter to her new school in Berkshire: she was on the road, and Daphne had to leave a message for her with the headmistress. Daphne felt as if part of her brain was on automatic pilot, while the other part was numb, stunned. The automatic part asked the doctor to perform an autopsy to confirm the diagnosis of coronary thrombosis. The numb part, submerged by emotion, was already thinking about the obituary she would have to publish in the Times. She knew that Tommy wanted a simple, family-only ceremony, no mass, a cremation (which she would not attend), and no gifts or flowers—just donations to the Royal Air Force, his beloved “paras,” his heroes, the glider pilots. On January 11, 1966, Daphne wrote to Mlle Verrier, the owner of the hotel Les Glycines, in Saint-Christophe-sur-le-Nais. She typed her letter in French. Alas, I have had a terrible year. My dear husband died last March, after suffering with bronchitis and two operations. He suffered so much, and he was so brave. Now I am adjusting to my new circumstanc
es, and my health is good. I am still here at Menabilly with the two dogs, who love me so faithfully. How is your little dog?
Before leaving Menabilly for good, Daphne walked slowly through the empty rooms, stroked the bannister of the staircase with her hand. Everything had been packed up, but her life was still here: she could feel it, fluttering around, like a moth in search of the light. She remembered her final Christmas here, spent alone with Angela, her final birthday celebrated at “Mena” in May with Tod, Kits, and Hacker. She walked up the steps, caressed the walls, looked at her bedroom, where she once wrote with such frenzy and desire, where she dreamed, imagined, constructed imaginary worlds in her mind. In a distant future, perhaps one of Menabilly’s inhabitants would pick up what she had left behind her there, those tiny particles of inspiration that clung to the walls like a secret magic spell.
Leaving “Mena.” Walking out of the front door for the last time. Pretending that she was just going for a walk with her dogs on the beach, persuading herself that later she would return, whistling, and drink a cup of tea in the library while she read her mail or the newspaper. Closing the door, hearing its inimitable creak, feeling that thick, so-familiar handle in her palm. Not turning back, never turning back. Not looking at the façade, striding quickly away from those walls, within which she had spent twenty-six years of her life, those walls that had given birth to so many books, that had witnessed Tommy’s last breath. It was here, she knew, that she had been happiest. To leave “Mena” … was to die, a little bit.