When Tommy left Fowey or Hampstead to go back to camp, Daphne described him with dismay as ‘like a miserable boy being sent to school’ and commented again, ‘how awful if he gets like Daddy about being left’. It was rapidly dawning on her that whereas she thought she had married a man who was the opposite of her father (except for the charm, and it was a very different kind of charm) she was discovering disquieting similarities all the time. Tommy’s need of her was blatant. He yearned to be with her all the time, whereas she could tolerate small separations very well. It was like the situation in her early short story ‘A Difference in Temperament’, though not so extreme, and of course, unlike the couple she had imagined, she and Tommy still loved each other and were happy. But she felt already, in the first months of marriage, that in some curious as yet unproven way she was stronger than Tommy; and she did not like that feeling. She never, ever, wanted to find herself in the position she had found herself in with her father, with him desperate for support and demanding a complete devotion of body and soul, which she did not want to give. She had seen her mother devote her life to upholding Gerald during his bad times and appearing to bear no resentment. Daphne knew she was not like Muriel – no matter how deep her love for her husband, and it was deep, she had no intention of becoming indispensable to him. She was not going to be a motherly wife: men who were like children did not appeal to her.

  Children themselves she expected to have, six of them, all sons. By November, four months after her marriage, she was reporting to Tod that there was ‘no sign of the pattering of tiny feet’ with what reads like regret and certainly an acknowledgement that the tiny feet were anticipated. Two months later she knew she was pregnant. The thought of her son being born was exciting and during her pregnancy she dreamed of him as Janet did of Joseph in The Loving Spirit. She felt serene and placid and also, which came as a surprise, found she had the urge ‘to wax’ (du Maurier code for making love) very strongly. So these were happy months. Waiting for her son to be born was an occupation in itself and she had no desire to write. The Progress of Julius came out that spring (1933) and, though the two newspapers whose reviews she most valued at the time – the Observer and The Times – found some praise for it, the general reception was much more critical than she had expected. It did not sell as well as The Loving Spirit, but then neither had I’ll Never Be Young Again. She was puzzled that nobody seemed to appreciate that her second and third novels were, in her own opinion, actually better books than the first and that no one gave her credit for attempting more ambitious and relevant themes.

  In idle moments, she made lists of what she should prepare for her son’s arrival, aware that this was what one did. She was amused at her own vagueness as to what would be needed. ‘One yard of flannel,’ she jotted down, wondering what on earth one did with it, ‘four vests (luxury weight chillprove [sic], four flannels, four neighties [sic], four dresses, two small shawls . . . baby’s chamber pot’. But she knew all this was playing and what she would really need was a nanny to put her right. The thought of having to have one bothered her – she disliked the idea of any personal relationship being forced on her and yet did not know how to keep such relations impersonal. It was one of the most attractive sides of her character that she was never haughty, never treated servants as inferiors or exerted any authority over them, even if her expectations of them were high and invariably disappointed. She advertised in The Lady and the Daily Telegraph for a nanny who ‘need not be highly trained’, hoping that this would protect her from the kind of fearsome, dominant character she dreaded. The young woman she liked the sound of, and whom she selected for interview, was two years younger than herself – she thought if she had a young nanny she might feel less intimidated. Margaret Eglesfield had had one previous job and had been trained at Putney Nursery Training School. Confronted with her, Daphne was at a loss for words. She had no idea how to conduct an interview and in desperation asked Margaret what they should talk about. Startled, Margaret replied that they should discuss Mrs Browning’s requirements. But Daphne could not think how to be specific about these, so Margaret interviewed herself and agreed to £42 a year, all found, the standard rate. She noticed, when she asked to see the nursery which had been prepared, that everything was in blue and the boy’s name ‘Christian’ was painted on the cupboard doors. She commented that this might be a little awkward if the baby turned out to be a girl. ‘Heaven forbid,’ said Daphne.

  The baby was due at the beginning of July. ‘I still go for long walks on the heath every morning, even when it is 90º in the shade,’ Daphne wrote to Foy. She wished she was down at Ferryside, walking by the sea, but Hampstead was so much more convenient for the birth. She had no fear of childbirth, but when the time came the reality shocked her. On 15 July, four days before her first wedding anniversary, Daphne gave birth not to the son she longed for and confidently expected, but to a daughter. She found the pain excruciating – ‘a hundred times worse than an appendix – real hell’ – and wrote to Tod, ‘all the old wives’ tales about childbirth are true! Of all the hellish performances – so beastly degrading too, lying on a bed with legs spreadeagled and feeling exactly as though one’s entire inside plus intestines and bowels were being torn from one! Pheugh! It makes me sweat to think back on it.’ It also made her sweat to think of going through it again. ‘Let’s hope I shan’t be like the rhyme about the poor Queen of Spain, how does it go? “What a life for the Queen of Spain / Two minutes’ pleasure and nine months’ pain / Three weeks’ rest and she’s at it again.”’ She was determined to ‘take steps’ to safeguard herself from this fate – ‘a good two and a half years, I hope, before I make an effort to get a son’.

  Her disappointment was intense, nor did it disappear quickly, and she made no attempt to hide it. But in spite of the pain she had suffered and her dismay at being the mother of a daughter some pride did come through. ‘The child is flourishing,’ she wrote to Tod. ‘Exactly like Tommy, but fair hair and blue eyes. Very well-formed body, though I say it myself. Strong limbs and nice skin, never red or pasty. Name of Tessa.2 She was also proud that she was ‘by way of coping with feeding her myself’, though this did not last long. By the time Margaret Eglesfield took over from the monthly nurse, Tessa was being bottle-fed. Daphne wrote to Tod that she was not only disillusioned with childbirth but also with breast-feeding – ‘have always heard it left one in a state of ecstasy, but can assure you that the pastime leaves me unmoved. The child hiccups most of the time and kicks me in the stomach. But then I never was sentimental.’ She was nevertheless more devoted than she was sometimes prepared to admit. Although in every letter Tessa was referred to in a detached, ironic way as ‘The Child’, Daphne was reluctant to leave her. Tommy had a month’s leave after Tessa’s birth and was keen that Daphne should go with him down to Fowey, but although she longed to go she resisted the temptation, because ‘I wouldn’t like to leave The Child at so tender an age’.

  Once the nanny was installed, Daphne’s life went on much as before. Her involvement with her baby was minimal. The nanny had complete charge and Daphne had nothing to do with the care of the baby – she was prepared to put her total trust in the nanny. When Margaret arrived it was August and still very hot, but she was disconcerted to find that, although there was a yard of flannel, there was no pram and evidently no thought of one being needed. She could not bear to be inside on such beautiful days, with Hampstead Heath so near, and decided to take short walks carrying the five-week-old Tessa in her arms. On one such walk, she wandered along to the nearby Vale of Health pond on the heath, where she sat on a seat. It was cool there, beside the water, shaded by a tree and she was perfectly happy until a man came and sat beside her. He asked her how old the baby was. She replied, but then turned pointedly away to make it quite clear she did not speak to strange men. The man would not be put off and persisted in questioning her – was it not tiring carrying a baby, did her arms not ache, would it not be better to purchase a pram, and so on. Margaret decided this had gone far enough. She got up and began walking home. To her alarm, the man followed her. She walked more quickly. So did he. By the time she reached the Cannon Hall cottage she was running. She banged on the door and when Richards opened it told him a strange man was following her, who seemed suspiciously interested in the baby. Richards looked past her, saw the man who was now coming up to the door and, smiling, said, ‘This is Sir Gerald du Maurier, the baby’s grandfather.’

  Feeling extremely foolish, Margaret apologized. Gerald sighed and said it was typical of Daphne not to have thought of a pram and that one must be bought at once. Next morning, a Harrods van arrived at the door and six prams were wheeled out for Margaret’s inspection. An hour later, a Selfridges van arrived with a similar cargo, followed by a third from Milson’s. Quite overcome, Margaret chose a big grey Osnath, for which Gerald paid, instructing her to come to him should she need anything else for his granddaughter. But there was nothing else she lacked. Her days settled into a pleasant routine with no interference from, and not much contact with, her employer. Daphne got up late, went for walks, visited her parents and sisters. Angela and Jeanne were still living at home, just round the corner, and Angela in particular loved Tessa and adored playing with her. Since neither sister worked, though Angela, too, was trying to write, and Jeanne had begun to take her painting seriously, they had plenty of time, still leading the privileged life which had made Daphne so discontented, to see a great deal of their sister. Daphne and Tommy went to theatres with them and dined out with various friends of their own, including Bunny and Phyllis Austin, known as ‘Mr and Mrs A’ to their ‘Mr and Mrs B’. Margaret had no idea she was working for a writer and saw no writing being done. Every now and again there would be visits to Fowey, which sometimes included her and Tessa, and sometimes not. After nearly six months of this, Margaret realized that, though her days were perfectly easy, and life in the Browning household extremely pleasant, she had not had a single day off and Mrs Browning appeared not even to have noticed or thought anything of it. But Major Browning did. One evening he came bounding upstairs to the nursery, asking if it was very hard to give a baby its bottle. Margaret assured him it was simple. Encouraged, the Major then suggested Margaret should have a night off, going with Richards and his wife Lily to the theatre, for which he would get tickets, and he and Mrs Browning would take care of Tessa.

  Tickets were duly provided and off the three of them went. They had a wonderful time, but as they arrived home, Richards pointed out that all the lights were blazing in the nursery and as they entered they could hear piercing screams. Margaret rushed upstairs to find the Major pacing the floor and shouting ‘Oh my God!’ and Daphne sitting with a look of agony as she tried to force a bottle into the mouth of her blue-faced baby, while Bunny Austin sat watching, helpless. Within seconds, Margaret had calmed Tessa, brought up the wind that was troubling her, cleared the hole in the bottle’s teat, which had become clogged, and all was well. But it was from then onwards that she began to insist the young mother should become more involved in the care of her own baby. Dutifully, Mrs Browning agreed. She was perfectly aware how incompetent she was, and anxious to do her best whatever her feelings towards her baby.

  It was rather too clear by then what these feelings were. Daphne had still not got over Tessa being a girl, and Margaret went so far as to consider that she was rejecting her own baby. She did not cuddle or kiss her, she did not talk or sing to her, she did not in any way appear to dote on her or want to be with her. She seemed, in fact, to have difficulty with the whole idea of being a mother. But Margaret could see that even if Mrs Browning was no earth-mother, she was also no socialite, however idle her days appeared to be. There were ‘words’ over various engagements Major Browning wished to accept and Mrs Browning did not. It turned out there was a side to Tommy that Daphne had not known about.

  It was true that, as she had told Tod before they were married, he liked nothing better than to mess about in boats, wearing old clothes, just as she did; but it was also true, which she had never suspected, that he could occasionally also enjoy a kind of socializing she loathed. Her idea of socializing, if she had to be sociable, was to be among like-minded people in a relaxed and casual setting, all being what she called ‘jam-a-long’ – easy-going, informal, with no need for any pretence. But Tommy had been in the habit before he met her of accepting invitations to rather grand country house weekends, and now that he had a lovely young wife he was eager for her to share this pleasure with him. Daphne did not find such experiences a pleasure – in fact, she hated them. Reluctantly, she was sometimes obliged to accompany him, but put up great resistance. She wrote to Grace, Tommy’s sister, in the autumn of 1933, after such a visit to Leeds Castle, that she had ‘never known anything like it’. There were twenty-one people to dinner every night and to her amazement the dinner was held in a different dining-room each of the three nights. The footmen were ‘like cabinet ministers’ and her bedroom ‘like a stateroom at Versailles’. She vowed she needed opera glasses in bed to see the dressing-table across the room and that the marble lavatory, disguised as an armchair, was distinctly insanitary. ‘I am afraid they are a dreadful set,’ she commented to Foy, ‘. . . the sort of people one would gladly see guillotined.’ She found such opulence distasteful and wished herself at home with a hot-water bottle. Nor did the sight of Tommy enjoying himself, and proving an obvious hit with every woman present, make her feel any happier. She came back from such weekends feeling furious.

  There were signs that she was suffering from a mild post-natal depression. She confessed to Grace that a ‘shameful weakening of the eye-duct’ kept coming over her. She found herself weeping for no reason and was horrified – she was not that sort of woman and did not want to be. She despised tears as weakness and was proud that only rarely, under extreme stress, did she give way to them. Though she had nothing else to do in Hampstead but rest, if she so chose, she wondered in her letter if she might come to her sister-in-law’s home, where Grace lived with her widowed mother, and rest. All she would need was ‘a glass of water and a lettuce leaf every now and again’, and she would only need the sheets changed every two weeks. Maybe, she suggested, Grace would like to swap places – a switch for them both ‘might be amusing and act as a tonic’. Apparently the energetic Grace, tireless worker for the Girl Guides and countless other organizations, had no need of a tonic.3

  Daphne went home to her hot-water bottle. Tommy, concerned over her weepiness and general low spirits, reacted much as her parents had done: he thought she needed amusement and bought her ‘a little Morris . . . in a frenzied fit of divine generosity, for me to go about in’.4 But ‘going about’ did her little good, and she was disturbed to find herself feeling as restless as she had done before she got down to her first novel at Ferryside in the winter of 1929–30. Being a wife and a mother ought, she felt, to fulfil her, but the truth was that it did not; it was writing which made her content. But there was more to her restlessness than that. Not only did she miss writing, she missed being alone, far away from everyone, walking on the Gribbin or sailing. And now she could not indulge herself exactly as she wished – she had a husband and a baby to think of, even if her duties were minimal. Instead of making her unselfish, as she had hoped, marriage had made her desire to return to being more selfish again in spite of her love for Tommy.

  Things got worse in the New Year of 1934. Tommy was now second-in-command of the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards (he became commanding officer in January 1936) and had to take up residence at Frimley, in Surrey. The Cannon Hall cottage was given up and the Brownings moved, though not to any army quarters – they rented a beautiful Queen Anne house, the Old Rectory, and though Daphne had groaned at the thought of suburban Surrey, she was charmed with it. The country round about was pleasant and afforded some tolerable walks which were better than Hampstead Heath. Tommy was very busy which left her with more time on her own, and she quite frankly relished this. Margaret looked after Tessa, except for an hour a day, which she insisted Mrs Browning should devote to her daughter, and she began to see that if she wanted to she could begin to write again.

  But then Gerald became ill. He was to go into hospital for an exploratory operation, and though she was told there was no cause for alarm, the entire family shared her fear. Gerald hated hospitals – which, in du Maurier code, were always called ‘slaughterhouses’ – and was always frightened of illness. Daphne did not want him to have any kind of operation. She was, she wrote to Tod, ‘against all operations on principle, believing, as I do, three-quarters of them to be unnecessary’. But the week after his sixty-first birthday Gerald went into a clinic in Devonshire Place and was operated on. Cancer of the colon was diagnosed. The malignant tumour was removed and everyone informed that the operation had been a complete success. But on 11 April, his thirty-first wedding anniversary, Gerald died.