This interlude was a great success from the minute she and Tommy and Tessa and Margaret boarded the ship to take them to Cyprus. They stayed in a good hotel up in the mountains and she was invigorated by the sharp air, so different from the dusty heat of Alexandria. She even climbed Mount Olympus in spite of feeling sick, and in the evenings she read Mrs Gaskell. Slowly, she managed to adjust herself to being pregnant again and, if it had not been for the necessity of returning to Alexandria before going to England, she felt she could now cope. But Alexandria was even worse than it had been before, when they returned at the end of the month – ‘a nightmare’, she vowed to Tod, ‘I didn’t know it was possible to hate a country with such intensity’. All that kept her going were plans for her return home to ‘an English winter, fogs and all’. Told that all the ships might be full of people going back for the coronation of Edward viii, she was in a panic until Tommy had secured berths for her, Tessa and Margaret. She utterly confused her mother with complicated arrangements about where she would have her second child. She did not want to go into a home – ‘I have a grim antipathy for Homes’ – but instead instructed Muriel to rent an apartment in Queen Anne’s Mansions4 and to wire in code when she had found out the price. ‘SAGDA’ was to mean ‘terms too high’ or ‘ADIPB’ to read ‘anticipate much difficulty’.

  By November, with all her plans made, and with the weather cooler, she was much happier. She stopped being sick and was greatly cheered by Victor Gollancz writing to say that he was delighted with The Du Mauriers and was going to print 10,000 copies, the same as for Gerald, with every anticipation of doing as well with it. At last, well enough to visit Cairo, a long-awaited treat, she found it no more enticing than Alexandria – ‘like Hammersmith Broadway . . . and the Bazaar an inferior Burlington Arcade’. She had also seen the Pyramids, which, she wrote to Tod, were ‘just like a couple of slag heaps, my dear, on the Great Western Road’. Not only could anyone who wanted it have Egypt, they could have ‘the whole Eastern hemisphere’, and she swore she had persuaded Tommy to retire if he was ever sent to India.

  With a prejudice against a whole country and its people as violent as Daphne’s, there was obviously no hope of her ever learning to adapt, and nor did she try to. It was no joke of hers to say she had no intention of enduring another foreign posting – she meant it. After this second baby was born, she planned to return with Tommy to Alexandria, when he in turn had finished the three months’ leave he was due to have in May, and see his term there out, but as far as she was concerned there must be no more foreign postings. The thought that this might stand in the way of Tommy’s career did not seem to occur to her – she swore that, although Tommy loved his work out there, he hated Egypt too, and that his own health suffered. He had had bouts of stomach trouble and complained of lumbago, and she was convinced that he would not be fit until he was home. Bracing him to bear her departure, which he dreaded, she tried to look ahead to the next happy summer in Fowey. This comforting vision was marred only by the thought of the second baby. Her heart sank when she contemplated managing two (though in fact she had done very little managing of the existing one).

  Margaret went to Cairo for a weekend off just before Christmas, leaving Tessa to be looked after by her mother, who found it all ‘rather exhausting’, though she admitted Tessa was ‘very well behaved while nanny was away’. Her little daughter was a mystery to her. Right from the moment of Tessa’s birth she seemed to concentrate on stressing how different she was from herself – she was ‘all Browning’ and ‘more like Angela than me’. Even when she was reporting Tessa’s cleverness it was only to disapprove and say how she ‘disliked precocity in a child’. Any show of independence and her daughter was ‘vilely headstrong and disobedient’, an opinion not shared by her nanny. When Tessa started dancing classes and insisted on a pretty frock to dance in, her mother professed to be horrified by her love of clothes. Looking after her, on the rare occasions when she did so, she was moved to comment to her mother, ‘I shall never be a real child lover . . . looking after one is just a grind, I think.’ Looking after two did not bear thinking about.

  Yet she was not exactly the cold, remote figure these remarks might suggest. Always gentle, always kind, she was, from a young child’s point of view, a very attractive mother to have. She had a sense of fun, which small children relished, and an imagination which appealed to them. The distance she felt between herself and Tessa was not shared by Tessa, at that stage. But, unconsciously or not, she was extending the kind of treatment to Tessa which she herself felt her own mother had dispensed, and it had hurt her greatly. Then, she had thought it somehow her mother’s fault; now, she acted as though it were Tessa’s. There was no Gerald this time to complicate matters – though Tommy loved his daughter, he did not have even remotely the kind of closeness to her which Gerald had once had with Daphne. But over and over in her letters Daphne talked about the three-year-old Tessa as though she were observing a fascinating but strange being who had little to do with her. She was repeating the history of a relationship, copying her own relationship with her mother as it once had been. It was as though she wished to make Tessa suffer as she had suffered, which for a woman of such imagination, sensitivity and self-awareness was extraordinary. But, in fact, because Tessa was temperamentally very different, the damage was not as great. Tessa was emotionally much better able to stand her mother’s remoteness than Daphne had been able to accept Muriel’s.5

  Quite deliberately Daphne made plans to separate herself from the new baby even before it was born. She was going to leave both children in England when she returned with Tommy to Egypt the following July. It would, she wrote, ‘not be worth carting them out’, and they would be much happier with their nanny at home. This was a perfectly sensible decision, one made by many army wives whose husbands served in hot countries, but it was an indication that this time Daphne would not even allow herself to think of being unable to leave a three-month-old baby. She had had enough of intrusive emotional bonds. Her father had attempted to bind her with them and now her husband did the same, or tried to, and she was set against children adding to the constraints she felt. But the reality of parting from Tessa proved harder than she had anticipated, and surprised her.

  On 16 January 1937 she sailed for England with Tessa and her nanny. Margaret was going to take Tessa to her own home while Daphne went on alone to Fowey, so she left the ship at Tilbury, leaving Daphne to disembark at Plymouth. Saying goodbye to her daughter, and watching her being taken off by Margaret, distressed Daphne more than she had ever thought possible. It was, she reported to her mother, ‘agony’, and told her more about herself than she dared admit. Would Tessa be happy? Would Margaret be fit enough to look after her (she had been feeling ‘out of sorts’ lately)? Instead of feeling relieved by her little daughter’s departure she only felt guilty and worried.

  Once at Ferryside, the anxiety lifted. Margaret wrote, saying all was well, and being back in Cornwall lifted Daphne’s own spirits immediately. She went for her beloved cliff top walks, blessing the rain and fog and luxuriating in the strong, cold winds which made others shiver. She was just so intensely happy to be home and pushed out of her mind the awful reminder that she was not home for good. It did occur to her that she could use the new baby as a reason for not returning to Alexandria in July, but she rejected this dangerous temptation. Tommy was wretched without her and his letters, full of his depression, touched her. She could not desert him and must go back to ‘that vile place I hate’. She stayed until March in Fowey, loving every day of it, and observing the publication of The Du Mauriers from a distance. In Cornwall she felt remote from the book’s reception and, because she thought it pretentious to subscribe to a press-cuttings agency, and even worse to buy extra newspapers or magazines, she was not sure whether the book had been a success. The answer was that critically the book had nothing like the reception of Gerald – no reviewer was really enthusiastic – and from the sales’ point of view it was a slow starter. But ‘Q’ liked it, and so did all the family, and Tod and Ferdy, so Daphne felt her efforts had not been wasted. Once the baby was born she would start thinking about another book, but she wrote to Victor Gollancz that ‘I don’t intend doing any work until August . . . suppose you want a novel . . . I would like to do a funny one about Empire society . . . but on the other hand might go to the opposite extreme and write rather a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower . . . Psychological and rather macabre.’ But first the ordeal of giving birth had to be endured again.

  To her relief, it was not so terrible. ‘The child literally whizzed out,’ she wrote to Tod, after the birth on 2 April. It was another girl, but to her own surprise she found ‘I didn’t mind nearly so much about it not being a boy. Third time lucky?!’ To another friend she confided that since ‘the child’ had arrived so easily, she could be forgiven both for being a week early and for being a girl. Tommy, who arrived back in England in May, was ‘in the seventh heaven’ at it being safely over and the baby not the undernourished scrap they had anticipated, but a healthy, pretty baby. It was he who chose the name – Flavia, ‘heroine of one of his favourite books, The Prisoner of Zenda’. Within days of Flavia’s birth her mother had decided she was quieter than Tessa and not as robust. This helped Daphne keep to her original decision to leave both children in England when she returned with Tommy, and she went ahead with arrangements for Margaret to look after them both at Rousham, her mother-in-law’s home, where her sister-in-law Grace could act as guardian. The three months of Tommy’s leave flew by, but ‘like everything one looks forward to enormously’, she wrote to Tod, ‘hasn’t come up to dreams’. It had proved impossible to shut out of her mind the thought of returning to Egypt and she was once more experiencing a mild post-natal depression, not helped by the imminent sale of the Cannon Hall cottages. Her mother and Angela and Jeanne were to live full-time at Ferryside and ‘some shilling [disappointing] people from Kensington’ were looking round the cottages, while she and Tommy were once more living there.

  On 30 July, the Brownings returned to Egypt and Daphne tried to settle at once, in spite of the heat, to writing her new novel, the ‘psychological and rather macabre’ one. By the end of September she was obliged to report to Victor Gollancz that she was ‘ashamed to tell you that progress is slow on the new novel and there is little likelihood of my bringing back a finished MS in December’. Progress had actually been worse than slow – ‘the first 15,000 words I tore up in disgust and this literary miscarriage has cast me down rather as I have never done such a thing before and hate going over the ground again’. She tried to blame the weather but knew this was not a good excuse, because of having written The Du Mauriers the year before, ‘though how they found their way onto my typewriter . . . heaven knows’. Sitting staring at this same typewriter, with the heat making even her fingers perspire and stick to the keys, she experienced a feeling of panic. What if she had lost the ability to write at all? All she had was a provisional title, Rebecca, 15,000 words in the waste-paper basket, and her notes. These read: ‘very roughly the book will be about the influence of a first wife on a second . . . she is dead before the book opens. Little by little I want to build up the character of the first in the mind of the second . . . until wife 2 is haunted day and night . . . a tragedy is looming very close and crash! bang! something happens . . . it’s not a ghost story.’ But she could not at first think what the crash and bang would be, or even the ‘something’ that happened. Instead, she found herself fantasizing about Cornwall and in particular about Menabilly. It sustained her in the terrible heat to wander in her daydreams through the woods around Menabilly and to hear the sea pounding in her ears. The story took on a hallucinatory quality from the first, long before she had worked out the details of the plot – the unnamed heroine’s interior life was what became important.

  Meanwhile, struggling to get over her ‘literary miscarriage’, she was finding this second Egyptian experience had something to recommend it. In November she went with Tommy on a trip down to the Libya border and was mesmerized by the beauty of the desert. Here, at last, she could feel the ‘magic of the East’ whose existence she had denied. They camped – ‘sleeping under an umbrella’ – and got up at dawn, with stars still in the vast sky, ‘to make a hearty bacon and egg breakfast at sunrise’. She adored it – this was exactly how she wanted to live, far from other people, like nomads. She wrote to Grace that she was now, like Tommy, ‘desert mad . . . I didn’t know I had it in me’. It gave her an ambition: she wanted to ‘cross the Andes with a pack on my shoulder’.

  Instead, she returned to Alexandria for another month to try to make some headway with Rebecca. Victor Gollancz was chasing her and wanted to announce the book in his next catalogue. She had signed a three-book contract with him and he was eager to see the first fruit. But, though she applied herself diligently, she still found she had not accomplished much. Partly this was because she was not sleeping well and had not the psychic energy she needed to write. After Flavia’s birth she had resorted to sleeping pills and wrote to her mother that she always kept ‘half a medinol’6 beside her. Then there was the socializing in which she was obliged to take part. Tommy’s battalion was ending its tour of duty in Egypt and there were endless farewell parties, which she hated but could not always avoid. No one who was at these functions knew how much the young, pretty, demure and shy-looking commanding officer’s wife inwardly raged at ‘the effort of talking . . . I don’t know how people stand it’. Nor did they realize the effort any kind of entertaining in her own home caused her. She had servants and needed to do nothing except give orders but this, as ever, was precisely the trouble: she couldn’t. Tommy, who liked a well-run house, was exasperated and, she wrote dismally to her mother, ‘says even the best servant would go to pieces with me’. Her feelings of inferiority in this respect, and of being intimidated, went straight into the character of the second Mrs de Winter. She herself felt an outcast, an outsider, someone who did not fit in and was aware of it. She began to imagine what it must be like to feel as she did, but to have a social background, and a marital one, which would make those feelings even more acute. More and more her theme came to be not simply one of how jealousy motivates people but how feelings of isolation distort reality.

  By the time she and Tommy sailed for home in mid-December, she had completed only a quarter of the novel and wrote to her mother just before leaving that ‘I haven’t been able to get going properly over here’. She was worried that the reunion with her children and settling down in a new home would further prevent her from working, and Victor was snapping at her heels. This was one of the reasons why she intended to go down to Ferryside for Christmas without the children. Her mother was shocked to be told this – surely, when she had not seen her children for almost five months and would be with them only ten days between landing and coming to Cornwall, surely she could not leave them behind, especially Tessa, who would realize what was happening? But Daphne could and would. She was defensive but determined. Tessa, she wrote, was ‘just too young to join a communal life of grown-ups’ and Muriel clearly did not appreciate ‘what a handful she would be’. There would be no peace – ‘it means meals together and being in the big room all the time, no sort of nursery existence, and you will think me ridiculous perhaps, but I do not think it is right until she is 6 or 7 to be taken away to stay like that. You will say she is no trouble, she is advanced for her age, but that is more or less my point . . . I do so dread her becoming too precocious and for the next few years want her to lead as quiet and nurseryfied an existence as possible.’ She was anxious her mother should not think her ‘a brute . . . or unkind’ which would make her ‘very unhappy’. Muriel, who had had three children, was told that she probably did not realize ‘what a strain’ Tessa would be. And besides, if she came with them, ‘I should get no work done’.

  So Tessa and Flavia stayed with their nanny, and Daphne and Tommy had a relaxing time at Ferryside. Angela was about to have her first novel published – The Perplexed Heart – and there was that to celebrate as well as Christmas. Progress on Rebecca went better, but once more had to be put aside while the Brownings moved into a new house. It was called Greyfriars and was at Church Crookham, near Fleet, in Hampshire, near where Tommy was now stationed. Daphne loved the beautiful old house immediately, but reunited with her children found settling down difficult. Like many writers, she found domestic disruption the hardest thing to handle – she could not concentrate while everything was not orderly and organized, even if she did have servants. She needed to have a set routine, to feel that everything ran smoothly, everything was comfortingly familiar, before she could enjoy the peace of mind she needed to write. Eventually, it came. By the beginning of March she was writing at a tremendous pace and enjoying herself, though she was a little unsure of what she was producing. ‘It’s a bit on the gloomy side . . .’, she wrote to Victor, ‘and the psychological side7 may not be understood.’