Writing about her life. What an idea! It is torture to dwell on her past, and Daphne doesn’t know where to start. Wouldn’t it be a terrible “tell-him”* to recount her life? What if she told it through the houses she had loved? She could begin with Cumberland Terrace, Cannon Hall, describe the inspiration she had drawn from Milton in her portrayal of Manderley, then Ferryside and Menabilly. She would talk about her first stories, how she wrote them, how she came to be published. Sheila, her editor, encourages her down this path, but Daphne is not convinced. Somehow, though, she sticks to her task during the icy winter that settles on Kilmarth, wrapped up in several sweaters, fur boots on her feet. She must look through her journal again, for the first time in six years. She does so with a certain amount of consternation, drawing on it for the construction of her account but toning down large parts of it. Now she knows what she must do with this journal: she will create an embargo on those pages; she’ll talk to the husband of Tommy’s former assistant, Bim Baker-Munton, about it, as he is in charge of her estate. There will be a fifty-year wait after her own death before anyone is allowed to read this private journal.
* * *
In the spring of 1976, while she is still struggling over her memoirs, Daphne receives a first draft of the screenplay for A Bridge Too Far by Richard Attenborough. She is alarmed: just as she feared, Tommy is shown in an unflattering light, as a phlegmatic dandy bereft of charisma, who washes his hands of the consequences of the armed intervention. He will be played by Dirk Bogarde, an actor she considers unmanly and not at all like her late husband. The script takes liberties with the book, cutting out many of the key characters and leaving Tommy to take the blame for the carnage that resulted. Outraged, Daphne immediately calls Attenborough to voice her concerns. The director attempts to reassure her, but Daphne is not fooled. She waits anxiously for the film’s release, scheduled for June 1977.
One morning in May 1976, she returns from the hairdresser’s, turns on the radio and is shaken by the news she hears. Sir Carol Reed has died suddenly at his home in London. The day before, Daphne had written about him in her memoirs, describing their close relationship, their shared laughter and tenderness. She is stunned by this strange coincidence. Later, Kits tells her about the emotional ceremony at the church in Chelsea. Another death saddens her, too—that of her adored Westie, Moray. She even asks the doctor if it is normal for her to feel so devastated, even gaga, after the loss of her dog. In August, she spends several days with her sister Jeanne, in Dartmoor, and enjoys her intellectual discussions with Noël, Jeanne’s poet partner. They cannot take their usual walks, however, because Britain has been hit by an unprecedented heat wave in that summer of 1976.
Daphne has made reasonable progress with her memoirs. Enough for her to think about taking a trip with Kits and Hacker to Scotland in October. Well you never know, I might get inspired by old Scotch ancestors!34 she writes to Oriel. But, despite spending nine days in a wild, mountainous setting, between the Highlands and the lochs, the ruins of an old castle, inspiration does not come, as if the mechanism was somehow blocked. Back at Kilmarth, she is overcome by melancholy. It’s those damned memoirs, Daphne feels sure. She’s only written about a hundred pages, but it is such a struggle. To her mind, Angela’s autobiography was so much better, full of humor and lucidity, whereas her own account seems dry, stiff, and grinds to a halt at the moment she marries Tommy. Impossible to go any further. She wrote about Geoffrey, of course, and about Fernande, too, but she didn’t reveal everything. Her secrets remain secret. But the act of looking behind her, stirring up old memories, as her father did constantly, has tipped her over into depression. She cannot stop thinking about those distant reminiscences, about her childhood, her parents, her youth, all her friends who have passed away. She misses Tommy. Loneliness oppresses her. And winter only intensifies her torments, especially as she no longer has Moray to go for walks with her. Already she dreads the next year, when she will turn seventy. Her publishers want to organize a large party in May, to celebrate her birthday. She refuses: it’s out of the question. However, she is going to have to agree to several interviews to publicize her autobiography in the spring of 1977. For the first time in her life, as her birthday draws closer, Daphne has a few health problems; her doctor diagnoses gallstones. She must follow a special diet, which makes her lose fifteen pounds, leaving her weak and sensitive to the cold. Even the arrival of two puppies, Mac and Kenzie, is not enough to put her back on an even keel.
It is in this fragile state that she submits once again to the arrival of a TV team at Kilmarth, though this time she is reassured by the fact that Kits is the director. The journalist, Cliff Michelmore, is someone she likes, a warm, well-known, and respected man. Kits is in charge of the choice of music, and he includes some of Daphne’s favorite tunes, including Charles Trenet’s “La Mer” and “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte” by Ravel. The show’s title is Once Upon a Time: The Make-Believe World of Daphne du Maurier. Supported by her son, Daphne forces herself to appear cheerful. She wears a pink sweater and cardigan, a gold brooch, and beige pants. She looks frail, in comparison with the 1971 interview, when she was full of energy, her figure rounder and her gait triumphant. But her voice remains lively. Kits begins the program with her spirited voice, speaking over Charles Trenet’s mellow singing as the screen shows the approach to Fowey from the sea. I suppose I was born into a world of make-believe and imagination, I take after my father, Gerald, and my grandfather George. I was always pretending to be someone else and my father would say, “Don’t take any notice; she’s acting, she’s always acting!” Daphne sits in her living room for an hour and discusses her books, their movie adaptations, and her youth. A few images show her at the helm of a little fishing boat in Fowey Bay. The tone of the conversation is light and pleasant. The only time her voice becomes firm, almost stern, is when she exclaims, I am NOT a romantic novelist, and the only romantic novel I ever wrote, and I do admit it, was Frenchman’s Creek. She keeps smiling, albeit in a rather strained way, when her most famous novel is, inevitably, mentioned. Apparently, Rebecca is the favorite of every reader of my books, I never knew quite why. She stares wearily into space. Rebecca, Rebecca, always Rebecca …
Soon after this, Daphne agrees to an interview with a highly respected journalist from The Guardian, Alex Hamilton, a man in his forties who travels from London to Kilmarth in order to meet her. Over lunch, Hamilton notices that the novelist barely touches the delicious meal (lamb, roast potatoes) prepared by pretty, dark-haired35 Esther, but that she has a second helping of lemon meringue. Her favorite object, placed on the dining room table, is the bronze statuette that the parachutists gave her in 1968, in memory of Tommy. Hamilton remarks that her voice seems younger than her appearance, and when she stands up to look after the dogs, he notes her lively, alert movements. She admits to him that she probably ought to stop calling her father Daddy, now that she is in her seventies. Why not simply Gerald?
The journalist brings up Daphne’s two youthful crushes, as depicted in her memoirs: her cousin Geoffrey and the headmistress of her French boarding school, Fernande Yvon. Daphne visibly hesitates. What was her connection with Fernande? A little like a girl in search of a mother. She does not disapprove of physical relations between women, she is tolerant and always has been, but for her, it is merely a pale ersatz, a youthful pose. She admits she has never been a “sexy” person. Everything she repressed was used for writing her novels. Her most personal book? The Parasites, not one of her better-known novels. She was all three characters at once. Hamilton returns to the subject of her marriage: Was it difficult to reconcile her career as a writer with her husband’s increasingly eminent positions? She smiles and says that when they first got married, Tommy would mock her excessive love for her family, that famous French blood of which she was always boasting. But he was proud of her novels, telling her each time, I say, Duck, I’m on chapter fifteen, and it’s really jolly good, and yearning to give a good hiding to any journa
lists who gave her a bad review. There is only one thing she dreams about, she admits to Hamilton: being able to ask Tommy, up in heaven, if he found it unbearable, their marriage, with her writing in Fowey and him only there for the weekends, and whether she’d bitched up his career.…36
Daphne agrees to one last interview for BBC Radio 4’s famous show Desert Island Discs, presented by Roy Plomley, where guests talk about their life through their favorite pieces of music. Plomley goes down to Kilmarth to record the show. Although Daphne’s voice does not betray the fact, ringing out clear and self-confident and full of good humor, she finds it trying to reminisce about the music of her past. Each melody brings memories surging back, accompanied by a dreadful, gut-wrenching rush of nostalgia, as with the overture to the play of Peter Pan, which she cannot hear without tears welling in her eyes, without seeing her father on stage again. When Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is played, it is Menabilly she sees, its mystery, its enchantment. Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” brings to mind Christopher Puxley’s long, slender fingers, while “Shall We Dance?” (from the musical comedy The King and I) conjures Gertie’s pink crinoline. “Plaisir d’Amour” evokes Fernande’s green eyes, and “You Were Meant for Me” (from Broadway Melody) the kisses of Carol Reed. You’re not writing anything at the moment? asks Roy Plomley. No, not at the moment, I’m too busy training my puppies. Dame Daphne’s laughter at this moment sounds a little forced.
Finally, the interviews are over. Daphne will never again talk about those memoirs, which she regrets writing. All they brought her was bitterness, and to make things worse, the book—titled Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer—is not well received by the press. “She is a far better novelist than journal-keeper,” says the critic from Kirkus Reviews. Even her French publisher, Albin Michel, though generally keen on her recent works, refuses the book, after a negative reader’s report written by Daphne’s translator, Maurice-Bernard Endrèbe. What a cruel disappointment,37 he writes to Mme Pasquier, assistant to Francis Esménard, who succeeded his father as the head of the publishing house. Daphne wonders if it has not been a fatal mistake, dipping her lips in the chalice of the past.
The phone call she receives, one morning in June 1977, from a journalist friend sends her into a fury. He attended a preview of Attenborough’s film, and the Browning character played by Dirk Bogarde is disastrous for Tommy’s reputation. In Cornelius Ryan’s book, Tommy pronounced his famous phrase—that Arnhem would be a bridge too far—when giving his opinion to Montgomery during the first meeting to decide on the plan to seize the five bridges over the Rhine. But in the movie, Dirk Bogarde speaks this line after the tragedy of Arnhem, with an insensitivity that Tommy’s friends and colleagues consider despicable. When she read the script, Daphne had demanded, in her phone call to Attenborough, that he put this line back where it belonged chronologically, at the beginning. But her wishes had not been followed.
Indignant, Daphne writes to her friends in high places, asking them to boycott the film, which she refuses to see. She is not the only one to regret the cruel and unfair representation of her late husband. Other voices are raised, letters sent to the Times, and the controversy rages. Daphne herself writes in the Times on October 1977, and Brian Urquart, Tommy’s former intelligence officer, writes to her personally to say how shocked he is at the appalling portrayal of Lieutenant General Browning in the movie.
This movie, which she would never watch, and the harm it does to her husband’s reputation, becomes her obsession in late 1977. She can’t stop brooding over it, and her friends and family are unable to reason with her or comfort her. After all those painful months turning back time to write her memoirs, this is the coup de grâce.
* * *
Good morning, Lady Browning!38 Esther opens the door, then the curtains. It is an August morning in 1981 and the weather is beautiful. Daphne opens her eyes and sees the sunlight pouring into her bedroom. The smell of coffee fills the air. Esther goes downstairs, leaving her alone. For four years now, Daphne has been balanced precariously like a fragile tightrope walker, clinging to her “routes”* even though there is no book in the works. The typewriter remains silent: no more novels, and no letters either. It is Esther, now, who replies to Daphne’s fan mail, with Daphne sometimes scrawling her signature or a few words at the foot of the page. She doesn’t read much—a Jane Austen novel occasionally and the newspapers and magazines scattered all over the living room. It is the telephone that has become vital to her. The calls come at the same exact times, in accordance with Daphne’s wishes. At nine in the morning, every day, Angela phones, from Ferryside. Oriel calls at 7:15 on Sunday evening. Each family member has his or her own time slot. These strict routines fill the void that her life has become since 1977. Her appetite has diminished, she has lost even more weight. She still takes the dogs for walks, but no longer with the same enthusiasm. Once a week, she tours the grounds of Menabilly. Her long winter evenings are filled by watching television. Nothing else.
She turned seventy-four in May. Nine years have passed since the publication of her last novel, Rule Britannia. Her mind is arid; not a single idea grows there. It is unbearable. Every writer’s worst nightmare, the situation they all secretly fear, is now Daphne’s reality. Daphne, who never lacked imagination; Daphne, who would lock herself in her hut with a novel all day long, as if the book were a lover, the very substance of her life. What remains of that secret passion, that fever? Hell. Her friends and family look at her compassionately, while other people watch with curiosity and pity. And all those imbeciles who try to give her ideas, as if that would help drag her from this pit! Even her friend Alfred Leslie Rowse has been at it, suggesting that she write a book about her dogs. Something seems to have died inside her. That flame that made her live, that urge which drove her on, it is gone. Forever.
Daphne stands in her room, looking out the window. Her breakfast, brought up by Esther, is still on her bed. Untouched. She should be outside with her dogs, enjoying the sunshine, the sea. But she no longer feels like it. She no longer feels like doing anything. On her bedside table are all those medications prescribed by her doctor, which she swallows obediently every day, those pills with their complicated names. The only one she can remember is Mogadon, the one that makes her sleep; the others are for her “nerves” or for her “melancholy.” Since she started taking them, she has had dizzy spells, and she often has to lie down in the middle of the day. At night, even with Mogadon, it sometimes takes her a long time to fall asleep, and the waiting is unbearable.
A woman came to see her recently, a psychiatrist, a kind woman and a capable doctor, good at listening. But what could she do to help her regain her desire to write? And to think that, twenty years ago, Daphne had trotted out poems for her grandchildren, like those she wrote in a few minutes for Paul, a copy of which she recently found in a drawer.
Paul Zulu, an unlucky lad,
Was sometimes happy, sometimes sad,
He never knew–which made him vex’t-
What frightful thing would happen next.
Chicken pox, jaundice, tonsils, ‘flu,
He had the Lot, and measles too.
He swallowed pennies, burnt his bom,
And fell into a goldfish pond.
So many troubles, I declare,
Would even make an angel swear.39
Her grandchildren … She is only interested in the young ones now. The teenagers no longer amuse her.
What did she tell that psychiatrist? The two deaths that had deeply affected her: Frank Price in December 1977, just after the Bridge Too Far ordeal, and then her dear Ellen, in April 1978. And that trip to France in the fall of 1979. It still makes her shudder now. Oriel had convinced Daphne to pay her a visit. As she packed her suitcase, Daphne had thought that her friend was right: it would do her good to go back to the country she loved so much, it would clear her mind. The journey she had to make terrified her, but she was too embarrassed to mention this to her friends and
family, so she simply asked Oriel to pick her up at the airport. But when she landed at Roissy, her friend was not there. Panic took hold of her, and Daphne had to sit down, frightened, out of breath, heart pounding. A couple noticed her state of distress and offered to help her. Daphne was so upset, she couldn’t speak. Her mouth was dry, she was close to fainting. At last Oriel appeared: the arrival boards had signaled the wrong gate, that was why she was late. It took Daphne a long time to calm down. The rest of her trip went well, however: Oriel took her to Chartres, Alençon, and Lisieux, in the footsteps of Saint Thérèse. She had regained her dark sense of humor and took obvious delight in speaking French. But behind the smiles, Oriel could tell, that tension never seemed to leave her.
And the death of her little red DAF, after fifteen years of good and loyal service … that had put her into such a state! No, Daphne did not want to hear anything about getting another vehicle. No matter how hard Kits tried to find one, the truth was that that model was no longer being made. In the end, she had to settle for a Ford, which she considered unbearable. Just after this problem with the car, she had idiotically fallen down the stairs, last month, probably because her pills give her dizzy spells. She didn’t break anything, but she spent three weeks in bed in the hospital at Fowey. When she came out, she felt numb, her limbs stiff, her morale low.
The sun shines in a cloudless sky, but Daphne doesn’t see it. How can she survive, if she can no longer write? Her publisher brought out a new collection of short stories last year, but they were all old, things she wrote in her youth. They must have realized that she will never produce any more novels. She didn’t tell them that, but they know. Livia Gollancz suggests publishing her notebook for Rebecca, the one she used during the trial, in 1947, as well as some articles Daphne wrote for the press, about ten years ago. She has to agree, for fear of running out of money, her biggest worry. She has given so much to the people around her: she helped her sister Jeanne buy her cottage, contributed toward her grandchildren’s school fees, and all three of her children have investments that she made on their behalf. What will she have left if she stops publishing books? So she says yes to Livia Gollancz. Are her readers fooled? Are they waiting for the new novel from the great Daphne du Maurier? The one that will never come?