But that was not the whole story. What also depressed her was that she was beginning to prefer the company of Christopher1 Puxley to Tommy’s. Whenever her husband joined her at Langley End he arrived exhausted and bad-tempered, endlessly cursing the stupidity of everyone at the War Office and saying he had to do every bloody thing himself. He was unable to talk about anything but the war, which he saw, with reason, as going from bad to worse. Invasion was still a strong possibility, and he foresaw ‘a big boil-up in the East’ as inevitable. Christopher, by contrast, talked about ‘music and birds, and islands and things’. He was quiet, gentle, rather languid, whereas Tommy was noisy, energetic and so worried he had forgotten how to smile except when the ‘Brigade Butterflies’ were around. Christopher made her feel secure, Tommy made her feel threatened. She was ashamed that when Tommy went back to his brigade she was relieved. The house fell quiet once more and the strains of Christopher playing Chopin, ‘divinely’, wafted through the air. She lay on a sofa, evening after evening, listening to him play and studying him. He was a man who seemed somehow familiar to her, as though she had known him in another life, in different circumstances and company. His real name was Henry and he was two years younger than Tommy. In the First World War he had been in the Royal Navy and fought at the Battle of Jutland where he was wounded. Now he farmed and helped with Civil Defence, but had plenty of time to follow his passion for music and luxurious cars (he had a Bentley and an Alvis, both kept in immaculate condition). Clearly, he was wealthy and had the ease of manner to go with it. His was an ancient Irish family and he had a photograph of himself taken just before he married in 1920, standing before the ruins of Dunboy Castle at Berehaven, the ancestral home in Ireland, which had been burnt down in a fire. The more she got to know him, the more of ‘a menace’ he became.

  Always used to analysing her own emotions, Daphne was a little afraid to look too deeply into her feelings for Christopher Puxley. It was a relief to leave Langley End and move to Cloud’s Hill for three months, even though she immediately missed the comfort and company it had afforded her. She did not mind that Tommy’s brigade had now moved out of the area, and that he was somewhere near Ramsgate – ‘better for him to be out of sight and hearing’. She preferred to be on her own for the birth with a woman doctor in attendance, which greatly pleased her – she did not like male doctors to assist at childbirth.

  In the event, the doctor did little assisting. The birth of her third child on 3 November was easy – ‘only half an hour and the doctor hadn’t time to get her rubber gloves on’, she wrote to Tod – and the happiest. ‘I have done it at last . . . a son!’ Her air of triumph was blatant – ‘For seven years I’ve waited to see “Mrs Browning, a son” in The Times.’ He was to be called Christian, the name written on the cupboard doors of the nursery so long ago, after Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress (like Flavia his name came from one of his father’s favourite books). His given names were Christian Frederick du Maurier, after his father and to keep faith with Gerald. And Gerald was very much part of the euphoria which filled Daphne, not only because this was the grandson he, cheated of a son, had wanted, but because of that long-remembered wish, so disturbing at the time, that one day he would like to come back as her son. Right from the moment of birth she was saying that Christian looked like Gerald, seemed like Gerald, and would undoubtedly grow up to act like Gerald. Tommy, to whom she saw no resemblance in her son whatsoever, amused her by ignoring this prediction and promptly entering his day-old son for his regiment for the year 1960.

  Margaret, the children’s nanny, who had seen Mrs Browning with Tessa at six weeks old and Flavia at birth, was astonished by her behaviour this time. This baby was treated quite differently. Mrs Browning could hardly bear to have him taken from her arms to be put into his cradle. Far from not wanting to do much for him, she wanted to do everything. The girls noticed too – at seven and three they were aware that their new brother received all the cuddles and kisses which had been rare in their own young lives. But they were drawn into all the adoration and, instead of exhibiting signs of resentment and jealousy, were surprisingly happy to accept that their mother felt towards Christian what she had not seemed able to feel towards them. There was no doubt in the minds of anyone who saw Daphne then that she had at last been given her heart’s desire.

  But within a month, in spite of her passionate love for her son, Daphne found herself in the grip of a depression worse than those that had followed the births of her daughters. She could not understand it. She had had an easy birth, had been given the son she craved, and yet by the end of November she felt very low. She tried to tell herself it was because of the dark days, and her worry about Tommy who was on the south-east coast, but she knew it was more than that. She felt distressed about herself, about her own worthlessness, and wrote to Garth that, when she turned ‘the old searchlight’ on herself, she did not like what she saw. There was, about all her letters to Garth, a pious tone, most unlike the tone of any of her other letters, and it was obvious she was telling him what she thought he wanted to hear. Just as, in the company of different people, she automatically adapted her outward behaviour to suit them, so in her letters she adapted her style and sentiments. But, nevertheless, she was genuinely a little ashamed of herself. She had not in any way betrayed Tommy and yet she felt she had been somehow disloyal in thought. When he dashed home to see her he looked so worn and harassed and she felt guilty that this had ever annoyed her. She came to the conclusion that her depression arose from self-pity and that since she had no reason to feel sorry for herself, in fact quite the reverse, she must take herself in hand and conquer it. The only way she knew how was through work – she needed ‘the mental exercise to keep me going and it is fun, you know, creating a story and incidents and characters . . . and [I] thump away in the world of imagination’.

  She found as she lay resting, thinking about how hateful the war was, that her mind flew to the past, to another, quieter age when there were no bombs, and also to Cornwall, where she yearned to be, out on the sea in Restless, the sailing ketch which they now had, as well as Ygdrasil, with Tommy at the helm. Into her head came a vision of ‘storms, and battles, and the sea, and the hulk of a pirate ship lying at anchor in Frenchman’s Creek’. There was a pirate, who would try to tempt away a wife who no longer loved her husband. She wrote to Foy that this war was ‘beyond me’, and she wanted to escape into another world. But in that other world, she knew before she began that she would be struggling with emotions she felt in this troubled one. In her vision, the pirate bore an uncanny resemblance to Christopher Puxley.

  In December, just before Christmas, Victor Gollancz came to lunch and was excited to be given an outline of what Daphne’s new novel would be about when she had time and strength to write it. She had her suspicions about how he came ‘to motor fifty miles out of his way’ to drop in on her, and joked to Garth that she would not be surprised ‘if he were a really bad spy and ought to be watched’. He was, she observed, ‘a long way from being changed or saved’ according to MRA principles, to which she herself still adhered. ‘I keep finding I am never grateful enough to God,’ she told Garth and, though she had taken his advice and now had a notebook in which to write down her thoughts, she found they were all of a practical nature – ‘nothing revealing or stupendous’. She concluded ‘that, as probably one of my worst faults is vagueness about practical things, and a sort of general inefficiency about anything that does not interest me (forgiven hitherto by my family and excused by myself as “artistic temperament”), this is where I must first check myself’. Her attempts to do so were valiant and also comic – exactly the sort of thing the du Mauriers would traditionally mock. Since Margaret’s migraines had returned and Prim, the nursemaid, could not do everything, Daphne had to look after her children in a way she had never done before. She was quite unable to resist the invitation to return to the Puxleys’ home at Langley End when her tenancy at Cloud’s Hill ended in January 1941.

  The moment the Browning entourage settled in again at Langley End, where there were also two other evacuee children, both girls developed measles and Margaret succumbed to a particularly virulent form of influenza; in spite of Prim’s help and the support of Paddy Puxley, Daphne wrote to Grace Browning that ‘My life is slightly mad . . . after washing out bedpans and coping with the measled ones I rush . . . and minister to Christian . . . and when I have turned him upside down, pinned his nappy on wrong . . . I hurl him into his cot and find Flavia wanting to put on a party frock . . . I chuck her a doll to play with and then rush to the privacy of a room alone and hammer upon my typewriter at Frenchman’s Creek, my new book, and I am lucky if I get a page written.’ (The life of many a woman writer, but not, until then, one within Daphne’s experience.) She wrote with what sounds like a most uncharacteristic smugness to Garth: ‘I am very grateful for being given the power to deal with all these little domestic worries and I am sure it has been a discipline. I’ve always shirked responsibility before. Now I find I can bear it. I seem to know the children more through looking after them . . . God is testing one out on those little points.’ As well as knowing the children better she was also involving them in her writing for the first time. Tessa and Flavia were thrilled to be told about the story she was engaged on and loved being told each evening where their mother had got to and what was going to happen next.

  Halfway through Frenchman’s Creek progress was halted because Margaret, when she recovered from flu, was, according to Daphne, ‘only functioning four days out of seven’. Margaret herself wrote to Garth that she didn’t know what she would do ‘without Mrs Browning . . . she is a saint living, creating a spirit of peace everywhere she goes and I just live for ten o’clock at night when everything is finished and she sits by my bed and we have our quiet time together, and all the day’s worries are smoothed away and there is a most wonderful atmosphere’. Garth responded by sending Daily Readings to help in these quiet times and Daphne, writing to thank him, remarked, ‘it is awfully hard to go on slowly and be cheerful . . . but I have been so stubborn and selfish’. Now she could no longer enjoy the luxury of being selfish. While Margaret suffered her migraines, Daphne was up twice in the night with Christian and then for good at six in the morning. She was so tired she felt like a zombie and wrote to Tod, ‘Having tied napkins on my son day after day for two months there is nothing I would like to do so much as lie on my back in the sun and eat cherries’ – the sentiments of every woman in wartime England, as Daphne perfectly well appreciated. It made her feel a certain solidarity with mothers everywhere to share something of the average load and quietened her discontent that she could not get on with her novel. She was reading Angela’s third novel, The Little Less, at the time, a story with a lesbian theme, which she thought not suitable for Nanny. She had ‘a bit of fun’ out of the book but came to the conclusion that Angela should write short stories, not novels, because The Little Less ‘is so much more a series of episodes than a continuous novel’.2

  There was some satisfaction in leading such a typically hard life, even within the privileged setting of a Lutyens house with servants, and satisfaction, too, in responding to a request that she should further the MRA cause by making a broadcast to America with Peter Howard.3 The effort this cost her was considerable. She came to London on 10 March, running the risk of air-raids, and broadcast from an underground shelter.

  She then went back to Hertfordshire and collapsed – she had the same influenza, it was thought, which had debilitated her children’s nanny. But after a week of high temperatures, the doctor diagnosed a severe chill on the lungs which developed into pneumonia. She was saved – ‘it was nearly all over with your old Daph’, she wrote to Tod – by the M & B drug.4 But she was very ill for another month and at the end of it described herself to Garth as ‘so fagged . . . rather like someone who has been up all night at a bottle party’.

  She also read into her illness an almost spiritual significance. ‘I don’t know if I told you, but just before getting ill, when Flave and Nanny, and even little Christian, were smitten again with colds, I said to God, “Now, please, let me take it all – all the pain, all the suffering, all the unhappiness, and let the children have no more” – and the day after I woke with a temperature (and the children have been OK since!).’ She was feeling ‘stunned’ and ‘unable to feel things, which I think may be part of God’s plan, as though, having perhaps been rather pleased with myself for having coped all through the winter with the children and Nanny and all that, God now lets me see what it is like to be unable to cope, to be plunged, as it were, not exactly into depression again, but into a great void’. She lay in bed, weak and lethargic, ‘looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope, the world itself and the people on it being very small and ant-like, and all their activities a little futile’. She vowed that if she were told that Hitler had reached the next county, she would merely yawn. Her mind centred on an island, the island of her dreams ever since J. M. Barrie had inspired her with the notion, an island just surfacing from the sea. She drew a picture of it for Garth, with the sun behind the island and a boat sailing towards it and signed it ‘My dream island which will never come at all’.

  By the time she was recovered sufficiently to come downstairs it was April and spring had arrived. She was still very weak and frighteningly thin and pale. At the end of each day she was so exhausted that Christopher Puxley had to carry her up to her bedroom, cradling her easily in his arms. But sometimes she stayed in the drawing-room, covered with a rug, and after Margaret had taken the children to bed and Paddy was seeing to the two evacuee children, Christopher would play the piano for her, especially her favourite piece, Chopin’s 24th Prelude. It was suddenly warm and the scent of lilac drifted through the open window . . . Margaret, driven to exasperation by the very music Daphne loved, could not always resist coming down from the room used as a nursery, which was directly over the piano, and complaining that the children could not sleep. She sensed, as every adult in the house did, an atmosphere between Mr Puxley and Mrs Browning, whether Mrs Puxley was there or not. On the surface, everything was innocent, a host and friend amusing a guest who had been ill, but under it there was a highly charged intensity.

  This atmosphere went into Frenchman’s Creek, which Daphne resumed writing in May. She wrote quickly, keeping to her vow to make this a purely escapist novel – ‘a romance with a big R!’ she wrote to Victor. By Whitsun she told him she had done 60,000 words and that it was ‘lightish, you know’. But under cover of this ‘lightish’ tale, with its lyrical descriptions of the Helford river, was something tougher. The heroine was Dona St Columb, a woman of thirty who felt ‘a sudden boiling up of resentment against the futility of her life’. Like so many du Maurier heroines, she wishes she had been a man and has even once dressed up as one to take part in an escapade. The pirate, when eventually she meets him, is no ruffian. Jean-Benoit Aubéry is sophisticated, handsome, educated and even artistic.5 She realizes she is in love, that ‘a glow hitherto unknown to her’ has spread through her body. There is a great deal of rollicking schoolgirl fantasy in Dona’s expedition with the pirates, but the aftermath is deadly serious. She wakens on board the pirate ship naked and asks Aubéry what she can do until her clothes are dry. ‘In France,’ he replies,’ . . . there is only one thing we could do’: he unscrews her ruby earring, and we are given to understand that they make love. Dona is happy at last – she has never felt such joy. Yet at the same time, she knows her marriage is not really threatened – ‘women are more primitive . . . for a time they wander . . . and play at love . . . but instinct is too strong . . . they must make their nest’. There is never any doubt that Dona will let her pirate go and return to her husband – ‘the Lady St Columb will become a gracious matron’.

  Daphne finished the novel in early July and wrote to Grace that Victor Gollancz was delighted with it. All that was worrying him was where he would get the paper to print it on. The paper shortage was acute, but he wanted to bring it out the following month ‘in case of a blitz in late summer’. With the phenomenal success of Rebecca as an indication, he was going to have a first print-run of 50,000 copies this time, but to do so would take some ingenuity, and while he wrestled with the wartime paper problems Daphne struggled with the task of defending her escapist novel to her MRA friends.

  Garth was trying to persuade her to do some more stories but, though she promised to think about it, she was beginning to believe he had mistaken ideas about her. It was, she wrote, ‘all right for Lord Elton and Herbert Agar to feed the hungry sheep’ but for her own part she felt ‘you have still . . . got to keep the novelists whose job it is to tell a story and entertain (I don’t mean entertain in a vulgar fashion, but to tell a story – you know what I mean). Novelists who try to do moral uplift always go astray, it’s not their forte . . . I am all for being ruthless with trashy authors . . . but I still think people like myself may be capable of creating good and interesting stories about the human character without becoming sort of Winston Churchills.’ This was very near to admitting she had had enough of writing to suit MRA purposes. She had, after all, made sure Dona did not go off with her pirate, but instead went back to her husband, which she felt should satisfy Garth. But she did not close the door entirely to the idea of contributing in the future to the MRA effort, and she was still in favour of the movement, though ‘the brave new world seems distant, Armageddon rather heaven’.