Meanwhile, Tommy was back at Langley End and once more disrupting the happy atmosphere of piano-playing and discussions about fantasy islands. He was more tired than ever and looked strained. Daphne wrote to his sister Grace that ‘when this war is over all the men will look 200’. (Except, of course, Christopher Puxley, whom excessive exercise at the piano had not aged.) He told her she was leading ‘the cushiest war life of anyone in the country’ and she was bound to agree. Now that Nanny was better, except for the occasional migraine, and the children under her care, Daphne lay in the sun, her new novel about to be published, and felt remarkably well. But she was tense when Tommy was there and was glad to go with him on a boat trip up the Ouse, so that she could be with him away from Langley End. It rained all week but they both enjoyed it, and by the time Tommy had to return she was more confused than Dona St Columb had ever been. She knew she loved Tommy and her sense of duty was powerful – her marriage, and the preserving of it, meant everything to her – but she also knew she was infatuated with Christopher and that she was happier with him.

  By late autumn this infatuation was causing at least two people at Langley End great concern. Margaret was well aware of what was happening, but was in no position to articulate her alarm. She adored Paddy Puxley – who alone seemed oblivious – was fiercely loyal to Major Browning,6 and loathed Christopher Puxley. There was a feeling of apprehension in the house, but Daphne either failed to pick it up or ignored it. What, after all, was she doing that was wrong? She was not technically unfaithful. So far, her obsession with Christopher had led only to being embraced and kissed and she felt their closeness was more emotional, even psychic, than physical. She was bewitched, entranced but not passionately consummating their relationship, though she was aware that she felt detached from her husband, which she thought might be nature’s way of helping wives survive this war. Even when Tommy was with her she felt remote from his concerns. The trouble was, she didn’t understand half the things he talked about, and some of the tasks allotted to him were so secret he couldn’t talk about them anyway. But she knew, all the same, how very important Tommy was becoming and what a Herculean task he had just been given in October 1941. The War Office had asked him to undertake the formation of airborne troops who could land by parachute, and at the same time to train infantry troops to land in gliders. Somehow, these two independent formations were to be moulded into what would be known as the ist Airborne Division, and it was to be ready for action within a year. As commander of these new paratroops Tommy was now raised to the rank of Major-General and a great deal rested on the success of the whole daring venture. It was a test not just of his powers of leadership but of his ability to undertake a prodigious amount of organization, involving training 10,000 men, equipping 800 gliders, and overcoming the formidable problems of getting all of them in the right place at the right time in all kinds of weather conditions. The necessary liaising with the Royal Air Force called for considerable tact, and the studying of maps and photographs involved in all the reconnaissance work for the greatest concentration. It was very little wonder that, carrying a burden like this, he arrived at Langley End for his brief leaves utterly exhausted. He was working a minimum of fourteen hours a day, every day. He explained to his wife that the role of the Airborne Division was potentially crucial, which she accepted. But the very importance of Tommy’s work left her feeling peripheral to his life. She knew this was foolish, knew she was vitally important to him, but it frightened her how rapidly a gulf seemed to be opening between them.

  From this appointment onwards, Tommy’s leaves grew shorter and fewer, and sometimes he did not even take them, though he desperately wanted to, because of all the work to be done. By the spring of 1942, Daphne was more involved than ever with Christopher and still Paddy noticed nothing. But others did and now one of them decided to act. Grace Browning, who visited Langley End from time to time to see her sister-in-law and the children, received a letter from Margaret asking if she could meet her in Hitchin; she had something she wanted to discuss. Margaret cycled to Hitchin to have tea in a café with Miss Browning and confided that she was worried and upset because she suspected something was going on between Mr Puxley and Mrs Browning. Miss Browning, greatly troubled, said that if it was true she hoped her brother never found out, because if he did he would never forgive his wife, whom he adored. But before Tommy had a chance to discover what his wife’s feelings were for Christopher Puxley, Paddy Puxley at last did so. One day she found her husband and Daphne in each other’s arms and was stunned. She merely told Daphne she had thought she was her friend and left the room where she had found them. Her evident distress and the bitterness of her only remark were worse than any violent anger or hatred. There were no scenes, but clearly Daphne could not go on living at Langley End. Everyone was intent on behaving in a civilized manner, and in keeping their various emotions concealed from children and servants, but plans already formed were hastily put forward. Instead of going to Fowey in June, for the summer, Daphne went in April, for good.

  In a letter to Garth Lean, Daphne said that after ‘many probings and thinkings’ she was moving to Fowey ‘to sort myself out’. The reasons she gave him, and everyone else, for leaving Langley End were that she felt she and the children were ‘becoming a burden’ and that she was particularly concerned about ‘poor Paddy . . . who is working day in, day out at war work’. If she were out of the way ‘things would be easier’. She wished more than ever that she could be ‘in a little hut on a little island’, but since she could not, Fowey was best. She could not go to Ferryside, which had been requisitioned as a naval headquarters, and did not in any case think it feasible to land on her mother and sisters, so she rented number 8 Readymoney Cove, which had originally been the old stable and coach-house for Point Neptune House, built for the Rashleighs of Menabilly. It is a large cottage with a pretty garden right on the little beach, but compared to the Lutyens house Daphne had just left it was small – there were a lot of people to fit into a fifth of the space they had previously occupied. But the advantages of being in Fowey once more far outweighed the disadvantages, though settling in proved a little difficult and was not helped by the continual rain. The girls, especially Flavia, pined for Paddy, but their grandmother and aunts were nearby and soon the attractions of living by the seaside, even in wartime, softened their sense of loss. Tessa, aged almost nine, started school at St David’s, along the esplanade, which she loved, and a Mrs Hancock, soon known as ‘Hanks’ (sister of the wife of George Hunkin, the boatman, who had been Tommy’s best man), came each day at 2.30 to cook: soon a routine was established and Daphne saw that she could, if she wished, begin another book.

  The book she had in mind was a novel about Christopher Puxley’s family. This was disappointing news for Garth Lean, who had never given up hoping either for some more stories or a play Daphne had hinted was taking shape about a group of people in a waiting-room all beset by moral dilemmas. But she wrote to him that everything had changed since Come Wind, Come Weather – ‘I have been through many varied processes of thought.’ She looked at some more true stories Garth sent her, but her verdict was ‘in all honesty . . . I do not feel that I am qualified to do them’. Most revealing was the reason she gave – ‘not being prepared to stick to standards myself, how can I write saying it is the answer?’ Instead, she wanted to write what she called ‘my saga novel’.

  ‘Start saving paper,’ she wrote to Victor Gollancz, adding that her new story was going ‘to be endless, full of birth and death, and love and disaster’. The basis for it was the Puxley family history, about which Christopher had told her. He had also supplied her with a dossier of family letters of which she made even more use than she had of the Jane Slade letters in her first novel and the du Maurier ones in the two books about her own family. John Puxley, Christopher’s grandfather, became Copper John in her new novel, which she called Hungry Hill, and she used some of his letters verbatim at various dramatic points. In a blue exercise book of George du Maurier’s, half-filled with his writing, she made lists of ‘translations’ – real place names from the Puxley history to be converted into invented ones. By August, she was ‘working away like one possessed’, and felt that this would turn out to be her longest book, ‘probably longer than Gone With the Wind’. Hungry Hill was the first of her novels to be truly historical, depending as the plot did on a real history before her imagination came into play.

  Daphne herself saw it as a reaction to Frenchman’s Creek, about which she was dismissive, endlessly referring to it as ‘frivolous’. Hungry Hill was to be solid, wide in scope and rooted in reality. It begins with Copper John, the mine owner, and his relationships with his children. The feud between Copper John and a dispossessed Irish family is dramatic, and the first quarter of the story has tremendous momentum. But in the next quarter, as Daphne was obliged to invent a little more, the momentum falters and by Book Three it becomes melodramatic. Soon it disintegrates into a series of births, deaths and improbable unions, wandering far from the original Puxley history. Book Five is sentimental until the epilogue, in which Daphne writes a moving and convincing account of the family home in flames and the return of a descendant of Copper John in modern times.

  The work Daphne put into this long novel was prodigious. She finished it in November and then started going through it, making cuts – ‘I adore cutting’ – before sending it to Victor in December. ‘Here you are,’ she wrote, ‘and the whole damn story is true, by the way, with a few embellishments.’ Alarmed, Victor promptly sent it to be read for libel, but when told this, Daphne changed her mind about the truth and said there was nothing to worry about, because ‘the story is a blend of fact and fiction, and all the people concerned are dead’.7 The paper shortage was still acute but, though he urged her to tell no one, Victor said he was going to print 100,000 copies using most of his paper ration and therefore severely restricting the number of other books he could print. This was a tremendous act of faith and acknowledged by her as such – Victor’s enthusiasm and wholehearted backing, especially in difficult times, meant a great deal to her. But though she was open with him about the source of her material, she was secretive about it to others, because she did not wish to draw attention to her connection with Christopher Puxley. There she was, writing furiously about his family history, while he was still in love with her and coming down to Fowey to see her. He did not, of course, stay at Readymoney Cove, but at the nearby Fowey Hotel, and she would slip out, taking a picnic with her, to meet him on the cliff top.

  They would go to the Watch House, though it meant entering a wartime restricted area. For £5 a year she had rented this tiny stone and slate building perched sixty feet above Watch House Cove between Polruan and Polperro. It had once been a coastguard’s hut, and there were steps dug into the cliff leading down from it to the cove. There she and Christopher could be absolutely safe from any possibly prying eyes – the nearest road was a mile away and the only other building visible was the tower of a distant church. Nothing could have been more romantic or made the war seem further away. She and Christopher would lie there, in the little twelve-by-twelve foot room, the door open to the sky, hearing the screeching of the seagulls as they skimmed the waves which crashed endlessly against the foot of the cliff.

  Daphne loved the thrill of these secret assignations and stifled feelings of guilt by assuring herself that Christopher was only a friend. How much of a friend and how much of a lover was something about which she liked to confuse her close friends, and she went on doing so all her life. On the one hand, she would say she was in love with Christopher, that his ‘spinning’ (code for preliminaries to love-making) was ‘divine’, and, on the other, drop heavy hints that the affair had never been consummated because Christopher was impotent. In her own mind, so long as there was no actual intercourse, there was no betrayal of Tommy. The love-affair she spoke of was not an ‘affair’ in the sense others used the word, and was therefore, in her opinion, innocent.

  Whatever the truth, it was certainly the case that Daphne, like Dona in Frenchman’s Creek, was allowing herself only to ‘wander for a bit’. She always intended to remain anchored to her husband and never encouraged Christopher Puxley to imagine otherwise. But Christopher himself did not receive this cruel message – he went on hoping, went on visiting her and ‘spinning’ with her, knowing he had broken his wife’s heart. The knowledge that she was responsible for this suffering made Daphne feel guilty and miserable and she wrote to Garth Lean that she was ‘trying to help someone very dear to me, who is going through the depths of despair. We have prayed together, and I am hoping that it may be a beginning of the first tiny step in a new life – for me too, perhaps.’ She told him that she had had a shock, but that ‘I always said that a shock is the only way of bringing Daphne to her knees, didn’t I?’ She went on to describe a book she had been reading which was relevant to ‘my despairing one’.

  The book was C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, published in 1940, as part of a ‘Christian Challenge’ series. It was what he had to say about human love in the course of his argument on the problem of pain which fascinated Daphne. ‘Love is more sensitive than hatred to every blemish in the beloved,’ he wrote, ‘[and] Human Love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty – of a want, or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed goodness in the beloved which the lover needs and desires.’ This made Daphne think that perhaps there was something Tommy could not give her of which she felt the lack, a lack Christopher could supply. If so, perhaps she need not feel guilty and ashamed? But C. S. Lewis also had this to say: ‘The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads.’ Shame led her to feel pain for Tommy and for Paddy and even for Christopher, and the final part of this book warned that ‘pain provides an opportunity for heroism’. The heroic role for her was to stop seeing Christopher.

  It was not one she assumed. She felt too exhausted to be heroic. Hungry Hill – ‘not a trifling affair after all’ – left her drained and she suffered from a kind of completion depression very similar to her post-natal depressions. The fact that Margaret was also depressed and once again incapacitated by migraines made things even worse. Margaret’s health was now a permanent worry and had been for a year. Before they left Langley End, Daphne had insisted she should go into hospital for a week to have ‘every test under the sun’. The doctors had reported that there was nothing organically wrong, but that Margaret was ‘run down and nervey’ and needed rest. Anxious to be sympathetic and caring, Daphne had despatched her to Fowey to enjoy a month’s recuperation before the rest of the party joined her. This proved beneficial at first, but by late 1942 ‘Nanny’s heads’ were appalling and when she succumbed there was chaos. Daphne wrote to Garth that Margaret, even when she didn’t have ‘a head’, was ‘weepy and feeling rotten and down in the dumps’. She had tried ‘reading from the Bible to her, after finishing Christian at night, and talking quietly and trying to get her to realise that by resigning herself the power will come from God. She is so inclined to rely just on me talking to her and getting rather sloppy and sentimental about it, which I feel is absolutely the wrong end of the stick.’ She felt exasperated but swore, ‘I do want to help her, but I do not want to have to sit and hold her hand.’

  Her mood crept into what she described to Tod as ‘a very cynical short story, called “Happy Christmas”’,8 about a refugee couple being treated as Mary and Joseph were. Her own Christmas was not happy in spite of the valiant efforts of her mother and Angela to make Ferryside (reclaimed from the Navy) festive. Tommy was not home for it. Instead, he had ‘flown to North Africa . . . I hate him going out into it all’. The New Year of 1943 found her depressed and weary of counting her blessings. She knew she was lucky to be so comfortably housed, lucky never to be short of food, lucky not to have been bombed, lucky to have her husband still alive, but she did not feel any happier for all this. The only thing that cheered her up was her son. He was her absolute delight, an enchanting cherub of a child whom, at two, she judged not only intelligent but talented and perfect in every way. She had his destiny all planned out: he was to be a man-about-town and a charmer – ‘heaven help any woman who crosses his path in twenty years’ time’.

  The news, in January, that Tod was in hospital confirmed Daphne’s feelings of imminent disaster. She was having an operation, and Daphne begged to be allowed to pay for her to convalesce at a comfortable hotel. She was worried about Tod’s fate once she had recovered: her millinery venture had failed and she was surely too old to be a governess. Tod felt the only alternative was to become a companion, and so Daphne, at her bidding, wrote her a glowing reference, describing her as a ‘long-standing friend’. She wondered, though, if after the war anyone would be able to employ companions or any other kind of servant – ‘we shall all have to live like Australians’. Tod recovered well but still Daphne’s sense of foreboding continued.

  Then, in the middle of February, she heard that Tommy had been in a glider crash: it had come at last, the phone call she had always dreaded, the knock on the door she had imagined, heralding the end of her run of luck.

  Chapter Eleven

  ARRIVING AT NETHERAVON, in Wiltshire, where Tommy had crashed, Daphne was immensely relieved to find that his injuries were restricted to a torn shoulder and a clot on the knee, but she was quickly aware that the psychological damage was more serious. Tommy was furious with himself for landing so badly, and underneath the fury was a nagging worry that, at forty-six, he was too old to lead an Airborne Division. It was nearing the time when this new division would go into action and, after all the exhausting months of preparation and gruelling training, he wanted to be with them, but he felt deathly tired. Daphne’s support at this point was vitally important and she did not fail him. Though she had little of the nurse in her, she was good at talking him out of his depression and restoring his confidence in himself. She stayed three weeks with him at Netheravon, then took him back to Fowey to make a full recovery.