* * *
How strange it is to think that this short driveway, this white gate, this square, unshaded house with its slate façade, is her home from now on. These few steps, this porch, these potted plants arranged by Tod, this entrance decorated with Tommy’s bow and arrows and Gerald’s baroque walking sticks, this really is where she lives now. The living room is to the right of the hallway, the dining room and library to the left. When all the doors are open, it gives the impression of being a long single orange-carpeted room, a bit like Menabilly, but more brightly lit. Daphne is proud of the neat, welcoming, modern kitchen, the domain of her dear Esther, given that her own culinary talents are still nonexistent. Last year, in October 1968, Esther lost her husband, Henry, to hepatitis, at only thirty-six, an event that upset Daphne, attached as she was to her able young housekeeper. Now Esther lives with her son in the neighboring stables that have been converted into a cottage.
At Kilmarth, Daphne has had a separate wing renovated for her grandchildren, where they will be able to make as much noise as they like, unheard by their grandmother. In the large vaulted cellar, Daphne has created a small private room, a sort of personal chapel. She likes to go there, alone, to meditate. There is a rudimentary altar, a crucifix, some ecclesiastical relics, and each week Daphne puts out fresh roses. There is much work to be done in the garden: flowers to plant, brambles to remove. The hull of the Yggy is on the lawn and will be repainted next spring.
This is a big change for a sixty-two-year-old, and it is not easy to adapt. She misses her “routes”* and must find new ones. Daphne feels disoriented, wandering between the worn, old furniture from “Mena” that looks as lost as she is in this sunlit, brightly colored décor, among these brand-new carpets and chintz curtains chosen by Tessa and Flavia. She likes to stroll around the lawn, the air full of butterflies, and watch the sun set from an old summer cabin built by her predecessors, including a lady from the previous century who apparently used to raise peacocks. But the place where she feels happiest is her bedroom, like the bow of a ship looking out on the sea through two large windows. Daphne has stood there every night, from her first evening, admiring “her” view, soothed by the immensity of blue spread out before her, by boats passing in the distance.
Daphne hears Esther making lunch downstairs, in the kitchen. What would she do without her? When Tommy died, Esther helped her reply to the hundreds of letters she received from all over the country. Maureen came to give a hand, too. The death of Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning was announced on the BBC, and there were numerous tributes. The queen and her husband sent a letter of condolence, as did General Eisenhower and Admiral Mountbatten. Messages of support came in a flood, from the Grenadier Guards, Tommy’s former regiment, from the airborne troops that he founded, and from a mass of people unknown to Daphne who had been fond of her husband. She sees herself again, at “Mena,” faced with these heaps of mail, simultaneously troubled and amazed by these expressions of sympathy. Some letters came as a surprise, like the one from Paddy Puxley, Christopher’s wife, whom she had not seen since 1942, and an unexpectedly warm letter from Philip Rashleigh, heir to Menabilly. The only good news in that terribly sad spring, marked by the scattering of Tommy’s ashes in the garden near her hut and some daffodils, a flower he loved, was the announcement that Hacker was pregnant. Now Frederick is nearly four, and his little brother, Robert, was born in 1967, another source of joy. Those little wheat-blond Brownings are Daphne’s delight, and she was traumatized by the car accident they had last November near London, caused by a reckless driver, when their nanny was at the wheel. Thankfully, they all recovered.
Four years without Tommy already. But the next one, 1969, her fifth without him, will also be her first at Kilmarth. Perhaps the most difficult. She doesn’t know yet. Her new guests will soon be here: Oriel is expected in a few days; she will sleep in the pink bedroom, in the four-poster bed that used to belong to Gerald. Tessa will come with her teenage children—Marie-Thérèse, known as Pooch, who is fourteen, and Paul, thirteen—but without her ex-husband: the divorce was finalized last year, in 1968. And then it will be Flavia’s turn, accompanied by her ten-year-old son, Rupert, not forgetting the youngest grandchildren, Kits and Hacker’s little blond boys. These guests will bring noise, life, animation, and goodness knows Daphne needs all of that.
At Kilmarth, when she goes for walks by the seaside, Daphne often thinks about the article she wrote on death and widowhood one year after Tommy passed away, which appeared in several newspapers and magazines, including the April 1966 issue of Marie-France. A few passages from it come to her mind as she walks. I would say to those who mourn, and I can only speak from my own experience, look upon each day that comes as a challenge, a test of courage. The pain will come in waves, some days worse than others, for no apparent reason. Accept the pain. Do not suppress it. Never attempt to hide grief from yourself.2
Tommy loved this house more than she did. He would have liked to grow old here, beside her, facing the sea. Daphne learned to tame her feelings of loneliness, helped by her daughters’ tenderness and Kits’s newfound maturity. Very quickly she decided she wanted to go forward alone, not to depend on her children. But she remembers some difficult moments, when she looked through Tommy’s belongings, his coat still hung on the chair, his hat in the entrance hall, his gloves, his walking stick, his sailing magazines. She found only one way to diminish her pain: taking possession of Tommy’s things, touching them, appropriating them. She put on his shirts, sat at his desk, used his pens to reply to those letters of condolence. For a year, she wore nothing but black and white. But it was the evenings without Tommy that were the worst: she remembered the ritual of the herbal tea, the few lumps of sugar handed out to the dogs, the brief prayer that Tommy used to recite every night. She often found herself in tears, she who had so rarely cried in her life, even as a child.
When Daphne thinks about Tommy, as at this precise moment, the sun above Kilmarth shining in her eyes, the blue sea filling her field of vision, she likes to believe that he is content now, that he has found his parents again, his war buddies, that he is no longer suffering, that he is at peace.
* * *
And writing? All those people who, when her husband died in 1965, whispered their commiserations to her—but you’re not alone, you have your books3—she felt like slapping them. As if she had a magic wand that would conjure up imaginary characters: the perfect antidote, or so they believed, to the desolation of grief. Before she could start writing again, she first had to get used to solitary life. Driving again, for example—she has a little red automatic DAF—gives her an extraordinary feeling of freedom. Thirty years since the last time she sat behind the wheel! Kits encouraged her to take driving lessons and she forced herself to go along with it, but once she got the hang of it again the adventure felt like a victory. She liked to visit Jeanne and Noël in Dartmoor, Angela at Ferryside, and to do the grocery shopping herself for the first time since her youth.
Menabilly seemed vast without her husband. Daphne accepted visitors, in order not to feel too alone. Ellen came in May, soon after Tommy’s death. It was a joy to see her again, but Daphne couldn’t help noticing that her once-beloved friend had become rather placid. And to think that this dignified seventy-something who now lived in Honolulu and politely sipped her Cointreau Blanc before dinner had, twenty years ago, been the dazzling center of her universe! Mrs. Doubleday had really taken to the effervescent Esther, offering her a golden brooch set with a fragment of lava from Hawaii. Ellen felt sure that Daphne would be happy at Kilmarth, that she could turn it into a dream home. Daphne listened to her and took comfort in her words, but in truth, it was still too early to leave Menabilly. And too early to start writing again.
What a shock she got, in September 1965! Kits had taken some pictures of her, and then a professional photographer came from St. Ives for another session. When she saw the photographs, Daphne wrote to Oriel: Poor Track looks just like an old peas
ant woman of ninety, far older and more wrinkled than Lady Vyvyan and I nearly cried when I saw them. I know I am lined, but I had not realized how badly! Kits told her unceremoniously: You must realize you do look a lot older than fifty-eight in real life. And he was right. Was it Tommy’s death that had aged her so suddenly? No, she had already noticed the wrinkles six years before, when she did the Marie-France photo shoot. The only way to treat it is to think I’m a throwback to old glass-blowing provincial aïeux,* peasants wrinkled by forty and bent, in shawls, carrying pails of water to the cows!4
Life after Tommy flowed along gently at Menabilly, in between visits from family and friends and the books she read. Daphne loved Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death, a sensitive book that reminded her of her own mother’s passing away. She took her first post-Tommy trip in September 1965, visiting Venice with Jeanne. And she tasted happiness at the Hotel Monaco, in the company of her discreet, kindly sister. She was fascinated by the secret recesses of the Serenissima, the ballet of gondolas, and the palaces on the Grand Canal. But it seemed inconceivable that she could start writing another book, particularly after the poor sales figures of The Flight of the Falcon, which Victor told her had shifted barely twenty thousand copies. And now there was this new novelist everyone was talking about, a certain Mary Stewart, who was encroaching on her territory with novels full of dark suspense. Enough to discourage her from returning to work.
During the rainy Christmas of 1965, Daphne had an idea. Not really a novel, but a way of getting back into writing via an album conceived around her love of Cornwall. She would write texts illustrated by Kits’s photographs (her son was now head of a small company they had founded together: Du Maurier Productions). The two of them had already worked on the script of a film commemorating the centenary of the Irish poet Yeats. After long negotiations, Daphne’s publishers gave her the green light. This project allowed her to give free rein to her passion for Cornwall, describing how inspiration born on this rocky coastline had given birth to almost all her books. She also gave her (sometimes virulent) opinions on the negative effects of tourism, despoiling the beauty of the region’s beaches, and her contempt for those who pollute the countryside with no respect for nature. In a letter to her Cornish writer friend Leo Walmsley, she wrote: I get spasms all over when I walk down to Pridmouth, hoping for a quiet swim and find hordes of people playing transistors.5
For three weeks, she and Kits roamed the region, going down to the Lizard peninsula in the south, following Mary Yellan’s footsteps northward through Bodmin Moor, not forgetting the excursions Daphne took with Tommy around the legend of Tristan and Iseult. In the evenings, they would sit by the fire in a roadside inn, Kits with a beer, Daphne with a whiskey, a map unfolded between them, to plan their next day’s trip, and Daphne would tell Kits the tales and legends connected to each place. For her, this was the best possible way to get back in the saddle, in the company of the one person able to infect her with his love of life and make her laugh. That journey with Kits brought back childhood memories, a long-ago vacation at Mullion Cove when she was a little girl, a place that she found changed for the worse: packed beach, litter everywhere. She finished writing the book, a genuinely pleasurable experience, in August 1966, but Daphne suspected that it would be a long time before she would be able to write another novel.
As for Angela, she was publishing a book at that moment: her second autobiography, Old Maids Remember, and the few reviews she received were lenient. The Western Mail wrote: “Miss du Maurier has a strong personality and decided opinions. She enables us to answer her out loud, manages to spark a conversation instead of a monologue.” Behind Angela’s sparkling wit, though, lurked real emotion. Daphne and I shared secrets and still do. Daphne enjoyed reading these alphabetically ordered memoirs, with their superficial-seeming, lighthearted chapter titles: “A for Age,” “B for Beauty,” “H for Hotels,” “J for Jealousy,” “P for Parents,” “S for Sisters,” “T for Theater,” et cetera. It is true I do not mind getting older. But I hate the word sixty.6
* * *
The summer storms at Kilmarth are even more spectacular than those at Menabilly. The wind howls around the house, the frothing waves smash against the cliffs, the thunder rocks the foundations, and lightning streaks over the raging sea. Daphne is not afraid: she has always loved seeing nature in the raw and stands at her window like a captain at the helm, her Westie at her feet.
On her bedside table lies the envelope she received this week, stamped with the royal seal. To her great surprise, Daphne was named Dame Commander by the queen for her services to literature, one of the highest British honors. On July 23, 1969, she is expected in London at a ceremony to receive her insignia from Elizabeth II. Family, friends, and readers applaud this consecration, but Daphne remains somewhat detached from it. First of all, that title, Dame, is laughable, and Dame Daphne even more so. Nico Llewelyn Davies, her cousin, admits to her that he almost choked on his boiled egg when he read the news in the paper, which makes her chuckle. Tommy and Gerald would have been so proud of her, as both Alec Guinness and Lord Mountbatten tell her in letters. Will she use this new title? Absolutely not. But, deep down, Daphne feels gratified. As she is by the critical welcome given to her latest novel, The House on the Strand, inspired by her new home, Kilmarth.
It all began in 1966, when Daphne visited the house with her architects to plan the renovation works. She was interested in the history of the old building that overlooked the sea and knew—through Mr. Thomas, of the Old Cornwall Society—that the foundations of Kilmarth dated back to the fourteenth century and that merchants used to live here in the Middle Ages, including a certain Roger Kylmerth, in 1327. She learned of the existence of an infamous old monastery located nearby, at Twyardreath, run by French monks of dubious morals. The memories held in those walls fascinated her, even if not quite so intensely as they had at Menabilly. The previous tenant was a fairly well-known professor, named Singer, and in the cellar where he carried out his scientific experiments, she found some macabre remains: animal embryos preserved in dusty jars, among them a calf with two heads and other oddities. The more she went to Kilmarth to oversee the renovations, the more strongly she scented a new novel intertwining past and present through this house, which, though it lacked Menabilly’s magnetic mysteriousness, did intrigue her all the same. She didn’t start work at once, though, preferring to let the book develop slowly in her head.
Tessa insisted on taking her mother on a trip in the spring of 1966, because Daphne had not left Menabilly since her vacation in Venice with Jeanne. They chose Greece, where Daphne had gone with her dear friend Clara Vyvyan in 1952. Tessa had to be patient and tender with her mother, because the thought of seeing so many people, so many strangers, on that boat panicked Daphne in advance, turning her back into the shy young girl she used to be. She feared she would quickly grow weary of people, but with Tessa’s support—and aided by the fact that everyone aboard knew the famous novelist was among them but that her privacy must be respected—Daphne ended up enjoying herself. She met a couple she liked very much, Sir John and Lady Wolfenden, and even did some dancing, something she had not done for years and years. The highlights of the trip were the visits to places she had always wanted to see, such as Delos, and Daphne came home tanned and relaxed.
Some sad news awaited her at Menabilly in August 1966: the death of Fernande Yvon, at seventy-three. Ferdie had been at the American Hospital in Neuilly, near Paris, for months, bedridden with bouts of pleurisy and bronchitis. Tessa, who saw her regularly and felt a great affection for her, went to visit her the previous year. She had lost weight and her hair had turned gray. Ferdie had waited in vain for Daphne to pay her a visit; they had not seen each other in over a decade. At the announcement of her death, Daphne felt sad, but no more than that. It was as if Tommy’s death had hardened her. She spent a few days thinking about Ferdie, her infatuation for her, the friendship that had lasted forty years. She remembered their complicity, thei
r tenderness; she remembered Camposenea, La Bourboule, Trébeurden, “Les Chimères,” but the page had been turned now. Fernande Yvon was gone from her life. When Daphne learned through the notaries in Mesnil-Saint-Denis that she had inherited Mlle Yvon’s furniture, Daphne gave it all to Tessa, in the name of the love that her eldest daughter had for France.
Another death marked Daphne’s life with the same fleeting sadness—that of Victor Gollancz, on February 8, 1967, following a sudden illness. There too, a chapter ended after thirty-three years of her life. Her editor, though in many ways the architect of her huge success, had annoyed her in recent years, always insisting on flashy ways of publicizing her books, which she considered vulgar and detrimental to her literary reputation. All the same, she knew she was losing an important mentor and a loyal ally. She would never forget that letter, dated October 21, 1935, in which Victor wrote to her that he was absolutely thrilled by Jamaica Inn. Who could take the baton from Victor? Who would be able to understand her, this shy, complex novelist? Victor’s daughter, Livia Gollancz, had taken over the reins of the publishing house after her father’s death. It was she, in the summer of 1967, who published Daphne and Kits’s book on Cornwall, a very personal work that, even though it had a print run of only seven thousand copies, was received favorably by press and readers alike, won over by this original hybrid of literature, travel, and history. Kits had decided, after this success, to make a film, financed by Du Maurier Productions, another chance to collaborate with his mother.
The House on the Strand was the last novel Daphne wrote at Menabilly, in her hut, between 1967 and 1968. It featured her future home, Kilmarth, probably in an attempt by her to come to terms with her new abode through the intermediary of writing. She threw herself into the book with the same appetite she had felt when writing The Scapegoat, ten years earlier. Again, it was her masculine alter ego, Eric Avon, who spoke in the first person, through Dick, a name she had already used in her second novel, I’ll Never Be Young Again. As she admitted to Oriel, I can think much better as an “I.”7 At the start of the book, Dick Young, a biochemistry professor, moves alone into the Cornish home of his colleague the respected Magnus Lane, in order to carry out a few secret experiments as a voluntary guinea pig for a revolutionary new drug invented by his friend. The drug in question is an illegal substance that will allow its user to be transported into the past, the side effects of which remain unknown. During his first trial of the drug, Dick finds himself in the Middle Ages. Is it a hallucination? Reality? Quickly addicted, Young cannot live without these spatio-temporal journeys that encroach on his everyday life. What he sees and understands of the fourteenth century takes on an outsized and disturbing importance in his mind.