On her return to Hampstead, Gerald and Muriel discover—to their intrigued amusement—a new Daphne, a real young woman, sure of herself, relaxed. She is cheerful, less timid, unhesitatingly accompanying her parents to cocktail parties, playing tennis at Cannon Hall with princes and viscounts, basking in a social whirl that, before, seemed not to interest her at all. But behind the sequined excitement of these soirées, Daphne still thinks about writing. Isn’t it time she got down to it properly? These few weeks with Fernande have not solved anything. Good God, she’ll never be a writer if she doesn’t give herself the opportunity! She complains about this in her letters to Tod. I try to write, but I find it boring … 3 The ultimate irony is that her aunt Billy has lent her a typewriter and she hasn’t even been able to change the ribbon.
September comes around, and she returns to Camposenea for her final term. To Camposenea, and to Fernande. Now Daphne is at last among the Firsts. This is a great satisfaction to her. The other young girls, envious, sense that something has happened between Mlle Yvon and Daphne during the summer vacation. Even Mrs. Wicksteed notices it; she doesn’t say anything, but she becomes more vigilant.
On October 19, 1925—a cold, rainy day—Fernande Yvon celebrates her thirty-second birthday. Mr. Sassisson, the chef, makes her a cake. There is a party atmosphere at Camposenea. Daphne, sadly, has caught a cold and must stay in bed. From her room, she hears the sound of voices, laughter, the cheerful singing before the candles are blown out, and she seethes at being separated like this from the one person who means so much to her. After a bad night, Daphne wakes with a high fever. She shivers, coughs, complains of aches and nausea. She looks exhausted. One week later, she is no better. Mrs. Wicksteed begins to worry. The doctor is called. He diagnoses a bad case of flu and expresses concern about the state of the young student’s lungs. Panic sets in. Gerald and Muriel demand her immediate return to Hampstead, but a Parisian specialist, after examining her, decides it is impossible for her to cross the Channel in her current state. She cannot stay at Camposenea either, as the temperature in the apartments is too low during this chilly November.
It is one of Muriel’s close friends—Mrs. Miller, a rich American lady, married to an impresario—who offers to put up the young convalescent at her suite in the Hotel de Crillon in Paris. That way, Daphne can be looked after by her personal physician, a marvelous Swiss doctor. Everyone agrees with this idea, except Daphne. Leaving Camposenea means leaving Fernande. When Mrs. Miller’s chauffeur arrives to pick Daphne up, she is struck down by sorrow, crying like a small child torn away from her mother. Bundled up in blankets, she sobs all the way from Fleury to the Place de la Concorde. In a vast, overheated room, pampered by luxury after the spartan conditions in the finishing school, she begs Fernande to come and visit her more often. Is Mlle Yvon being closely watched by Mrs. Wicksteed? Whatever the reason, Daphne doesn’t see her as much as she wants, and that hurts. Daphne submits to the doctor’s bizarre treatments: injections of volatile salt, electrified cushions placed on her abdomen, exposure to ultraviolet rays. The doctor’s assistant claims that this procedure works miracles but does point out that the doctor’s usual clientele consists of ladies of a certain age. After a few weeks of this, Daphne loses weight with frightening speed, falling below one hundred pounds. No one suspects that it is the absence of Fernande—whose every letter, every call, she awaits in a frenzy—that is making her waste away. After receiving yet another tearstained postcard from her daughter, bemoaning her fate at the Crillon, Lady Mo decides to leave right away for Paris, accompanied by Jeanne, who is now fourteen, to judge Daphne’s state of health for herself.
It is early December 1925, and snow is falling over Paris. Jeanne catches a cold. Daphne is fraught with anxiety: tonight, Ferdie will come to have dinner at the Crillon; she will meet her mother for the first time. The doctor will be there, too, and Mrs. Miller. What might Lady Mo detect? Will she suspect something? During the meal, Daphne watches her mother on the sly as her mother observes Mlle Yvon. Fernande, dressed in a severe navy-blue suit, her black hair pulled back, is serious, attentive, professional; she acts like a headmistress with a student. Lady Mo is completely fooled. She finds Mlle Yvon remarkably efficient and energetic.
The doctor advises Lady du Maurier to send her daughter to Davos to continue her treatment. Daphne explodes. This is too much! She refuses to go to Switzerland; she will not leave Paris. After a few lively words with her daughter, alone in her room, Muriel finally yields. The doctor suggests Lady du Maurier bring her daughter back to Paris in early January to continue her treatment at a clinic in the 8th arrondissement for six weeks. Muriel asks Mlle Yvon if she could supervise Daphne’s treatment in January, during the school holidays. She could stay in a little hotel near the clinic; Muriel would take care of all her costs. After that, when classes begin in Camposenea, Angela will arrive to watch over her sister in Paris, then accompany her to London in mid-February, at the end of the treatment. Mlle Yvon agrees: it is an honor for her to take care of Miss du Maurier’s health. Daphne’s face regains its radiance, and when the time comes for the headmistress to leave she says a polite, restrained good-bye to Mlle Yvon in front of her mother and her sister, knowing that Fernande will see the warmth and delight in her eyes, like a secret code.
The next day, Daphne, pale and very thin, accompanies her mother and sister to London. Daphne is happy to see her father and Angela again, but she is counting the days until her departure for Paris, when she will once again be with Fernande. As the Christmas festivities are in full swing, Daphne wonders what she is going to do with her life. What will happen to her? When she returns to London for good, next February, how will she settle down to her old routine, the walks on the Heath, the writing of poems and stories that she will never finish, the tall pile of novels that she will read, one after another?
In her journal, on New Year’s Eve 1925, Daphne writes these words: The finish of security. Doubt lies ahead. Adieu les jours heureux†.4
* * *
Every night, after the medical treatment at the clinic on Rue du Colisée is over, Daphne and Fernande have dinner together at Le Cheval Pie, a restaurant with a black-and-white, half-timbered façade on Avenue Victor Emmanuel, very close to the hotel where they are staying, on Rue de Ponthieu. A table is reserved for them, always the same one, near the chickens roasting on spits, the mouthwatering smell reviving Daphne’s appetite. But what most entertains them is the little half-hidden step in the middle of the floor. A good number of customers regularly trip over it and fall flat on their faces right next to Daphne and Fernande’s table. The two young women dissolve into infectious laughter and the waiters, accustomed to their bouts of hysterical giggling, wink at them while they help the customers to their feet.
Daphne comes back to life. Since her return, on January 4, 1926, since Fernande’s beaming face appeared before hers on the platform of the Gare du Nord, she has felt happier than ever before. She suspects the doctor is a quack who is pocketing her parents’ money with impunity for a harebrained treatment that is no longer needed because she is already cured, but she is in Paris, in this captivating city, Kicky’s city, and she is with the person who matters more to her than anyone else in the world. She feels Parisian to the tips of her fingers, proud of her French blood, and Paris is opening itself up to her. She no longer has to visit it like a rushed tourist, with a herd of clumsy, badly dressed English classmates for company; she is free to stroll along its boulevards, to roam its avenues, its parks, the banks of the Seine.
The first thing she must do is follow in her grandfather’s footsteps, walking or by tram, along the Right Bank. She stands dreamily outside 53 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, imagining Kicky emerging from these huge double doors with his companions from the Gleyre studio; then she sips a lemonade at the Rotonde or Le Dôme Café, on Boulevard du Montparnasse. She takes notes in her journal, eating up every detail that the city offers her. Nothing escapes her: the smell of the air, so different from London;
the passersby, more elegant and amusing than those in Piccadilly; the packed cafés, the noise, the traffic, the lit store windows, the exhilarating rhythm of life in this capital where Kicky’s literary and emotional legacy leaves an indelible imprint on her.
Sometimes Fernande goes with her, but most of the time she is alone. She likes to walk up the Champs-Élysées, past number 80 where Kicky was born, to stroll down Avenue Kléber toward Passy and Rue de la Tour, to immerse herself once again in the atmosphere of her grandfather’s first novel, going out as far as the Bois de Boulogne. The next day, indefatigable, she walks along the docks, beneath the rearing white walls of Notre-Dame; she leafs through the wares of the secondhand booksellers on the Seine. It is a personal version of Paris that she is forging, a Paris of the heart that she creates with her hiker’s strides, her head filled with Kicky’s nostalgic imagined world. Night falls quickly in January. Fernande is waiting for her at the Hotel du Rond-Point, and Daphne rushes back to see her. It is time to eat something after her exhausting explorations. Fernande has ordered brioches, eclairs, cups of hot chocolate.
Daphne’s treatment is reaching its end. Fernande must return to Camposenea. When Angela arrives in Paris to take over from Fernande and accompany her sister back to London, she is shocked by the fragile, hypersensitive state of her younger sibling. Angela doesn’t recognize this Daphne. Nothing seems to cheer her up or distract her. Leaving Paris is a tragedy for her: she feels like Kicky, torn from a city she loves so much, brutally uprooted. How can she bear this return to foggy London, so far from her darling Fernande, and submit to her parents’ authority after escaping it completely for almost a year? She has never dreaded crossing the Channel as much as she does now. Her parents make an effort to be accommodating with her bad moods and lethargy. The only thing that soothes her at all is Muriel’s suggestion that she learn to drive. Daphne throws herself into this, and after a few weeks of instruction from the chauffeur and her parents she is capable of driving her mother to the hairdresser, going shopping at Harrods. Another reason to smile: her own dog, which she names Jock, in memory of the Westie she had as a child on Cumberland Terrace. Jock and Daphne become inseparable: he sleeps in her room and sits by the window for her whenever she leaves Cannon Hall, eagerly awaiting her return. But beneath this apparent serenity, enough to reassure her parents, lurk the old ghosts of melancholy and boredom. In her journal, she gives free rein to her feelings of angst: Everyone at dinner says how well I am looking. If only they knew what I felt like inside they’d talk differently. I guess I hide my feelings pretty well, if I want to. They don’t know my mind is starving. Even if I read Claude Farrère, Zola and Maeterlinck. But it’s when I get back into the house, and the same things happen every day, that I go into a silent frenzy, and a mist of hate comes over me for it all.5
How can she motivate herself? She is not satisfied with the few short stories she’s written, including “The Terror,” which describes a child’s nightmare, and “The Old Woman,” which features a French peasant, nor with a long untitled poem that expresses her disenchantment. She loses heart. She will never be able to write like Katherine Mansfield. As for being published one day … it’s unthinkable. She dreams of leaving London, sleeps badly, loiters in the hallways of Cannon Hall. In March 1926, Jeanne suggests they get away for a few weeks, to Cumberland, that mountainous region in the northwest of England, famous for the beauty of its lakes, which inspired poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Jeanne has friends who stayed at a farm near Derwentwater: Why not go there for a while? Muriel seizes this opportunity, certain that a change of air will do the taciturn Daphne good. And why not invite Mlle Yvon to join the girls when Muriel has to go back to London in order not to leave Gerald on his own for too long? Daphne is stunned by this suggestion of her mother’s. Does she really not suspect anything? So this long-distance, secret passion of Daphne’s doesn’t show on the surface at all? She immediately writes to Ferdie. It will be like reliving La Bourboule: the walks, the pure air, the landscape. Ferdie agrees, to Daphne’s joy.
In early April, Muriel, Daphne, and Jeanne leave for Cumberland by train. Muriel has rented rooms from Mrs. Clarke, the owner of the large farm. In her journal, Daphne describes the pleasure she feels at being surrounded by wild nature again, the hills, streams and rivers, the silver-shining lakes, the green smells of the trees and plants. She doesn’t want to live in the city anymore, content with a walled garden. She enjoys the rhythms of days spent in nature, showing an interest in the farmers and their work, and even the charms of Parisian sidewalks seem to fade when faced with this need that grows inside her: to know the strength of the wind, the taste of the rain, the desire to touch the earth with her hands, to smell it, to feel it. Every morning, she leaves with her sister and her dog and goes off to climb peaks with magical names: Cat Bells, Causey Pike. With her mother, she visits Dove Cottage, the little white house that once belonged to William Wordsworth, left just as it was when he lived there; she walks through the rooms on tiptoes, thrilled by the sight of the desk where he wrote his most beautiful poems.
When Fernande Yvon arrives, ten days later, she brings the rain with her: huge thunderstorms and incessant downpour. This does not bother Daphne; in fact, she delights in the wildness of nature in the dark skies above, the heavy clouds, the wind that howls down the chimney. The bad weather is not to the taste of the sophisticated Frenchwoman, however: the dampness turns smooth hair curly, and, unlike the unperturbed du Maurier sisters, she is far from excited by the prospect of walking through a deluge. It rains every day. Fernande prefers to stay by the fire and chat to the farmers’ daughter, with her muddy clogs. And one morning, Daphne hears her friend boasting about the renown of the du Maurier family to a dumbfounded Miss Clarke: Fernande describes Daphne’s half-French grandfather, famous all over the world for his novels and drawings, and her father, who is undoubtedly the greatest living actor in England. Daphne can’t believe it. Her Ferdie, lowering herself to such pretentious verbosity. This is a facet of the headmistress she has never discovered before. (Later, “doing a Miss Clarke”* will signify “overdoing it” for Daphne and Fernande.)
Back in London in late April, when she arrives at the small hotel in Russell Square where she is staying, Mlle Yvon finds a letter from Mrs. Wicksteed, the manager of Camposenea. Mlle Yvon has been fired. Her services are no longer required at Fleury. There is no explanation. Fernande is in shock, Daphne too. Why this sudden dismissal? Could Mrs. Wicksteed have suspected the true nature of their relationship? Daphne doesn’t dare speak about this to Ferdie. And there is no way for her to verify the matter either way. All she can do is try to console Fernande and to encourage her in her idea of starting her own school in Paris. The next day, Daphne accompanies her to Victoria Station; she knows she won’t see her again until the summer. Impossible to kiss her tenderly in public, except on both cheeks, Parisian-style. The train moves away, and Ferdie’s gloved hand waves through an open window. Two months without seeing Ferdie. It is going to feel like a long time.
In early May 1926, while Daphne frets over the fate of her former headmistress, the country is paralyzed by a general strike that is carried out on an unprecedented scale and will last ten days. Workers protest against the lowering of wages and working conditions for miners. Gerald is panicked at the idea of having to cancel performances of his new play at Wyndham’s Theatre, The Ringer, adapted from a book by his novelist friend Edgar Wallace. Despite London being blocked by striking workers, the premiere is a success and the play will have a good, long run. Daphne is interested in the prolific Edgar Wallace and his working methods. He has published dozens of books at an impressive rate; what is the secret of his writing? She asks him, as he often drops by Cannon Hall with his daughter Pat, who is the same age as Daphne. He admits that he is capable of “bashing out” a novel in a few days. Daphne stares, amazed, at this balding man with his affable smile, a cigarette holder always to hand. The only method that works, according to him, is discipline.
An iron discipline. There is no other secret. No doubt he is right. She will have to force herself to write at least one page per day. Beyond her desire to be a writer, there is another desire, even more pressing: to be independent, to earn a living, no longer to rely, as her sisters do, on the pocket money given them by their parents.
At almost nineteen, Daphne already knows that she wants to live a long way from her family, a long way from Cannon Hall. She must provide herself with the means to do so. She shuts herself up in the little changing room above the tennis courts, with its musty smell of sweat, and sits there with a notebook and a pen. I sit down all afternoon and do more writing. It comes very slowly, though. It’s so much easier to think out vaguely in my head than to set it down in words. I wrote better at fifteen than now.6
The coming summer is full of temptations for a pretty girl who loves to dance and laugh. The invitations pile up; Daphne is never short of devoted admirers eager to take her to a ball, or the theater, or a garden party. Must writers hide away in a cave in order to write, she complains, when told that her car is waiting for her downstairs and she still hasn’t found the earring she was looking for. Or maybe she must simply become less attractive, so no one notices her, so people don’t whisper as she passes, That’s the du Maurier girl, the prettiest of the three. She will write tomorrow.
* * *
On the evening of July 15, 1926, Daphne arrives in Paris, at the Gare du Nord. Fernande has arranged to meet her at the café Le Dôme, at the Vavin crossroad. The next morning, early, they will catch a train from Montparnasse station to Lannion, in Brittany. Their ultimate destination is Trébeurden, the small fishing port on the Côte de Granit Rose. Her parents agreed without too much difficulty that she could accompany Mlle Yvon there. Paris is wilting under a heat wave. Sitting on the terrace of the Dôme, a place that always makes her think of Kicky, Daphne stays in the shade, her suitcase at her feet, and writes in her journal, discreetly observing the customers at the next table. To her amusement, they seem to be an illicit couple, the girl younger than the man, and their falsely casual attitude fails to conceal their nervousness. What point have they reached in their love affair? Where are they from? Daphne listens: they are British, which makes her smile. The man is cursing because he can’t find a hotel room: there are no vacancies in the whole of Paris, it’s outrageous. He pours wine clumsily, his face glowing and flushed; he’s drunk already. The girl, who is not much older than Daphne, says nothing, biting her lips and looking lost, her face wan, dark rings under her eyes.