The backcloth to this tragic love-story is the Civil War in which Menabilly is invaded by the Roundheads, giving Daphne not only the opportunity for some effective atmospheric descriptions of the sacked house but the chance to bring into play the secret room which so fascinated her. It is Richard’s weak and pathetic son who is incarcerated there and dies. But more interesting than all this drama is the way in which Honor’s love for Richard develops. All around her she sees women losing men because of the war, and not always because they have been killed or become exiles – ‘the aftermath of war . . . another marriage in the melting pot’.

  The novel was dedicated to Tommy (knighted in the 1946 New Year’s Honours List) – ‘To my husband, also a general, but, I trust, a more discreet one’ – which he knew, of course, would make people think Richard Grenvile, ‘first a soldier, second a lover’, this man ‘violent from his youth . . . cruel . . . hard’, was based on him. Tommy, far from objecting, was amused but hoped ‘it will have a nice ending for a change, because you know what I think of your sad endings’. He enjoyed making suggestions by letter, especially about the heroine, who he thought ‘ought to be fair, young, innocent and locally adored, but in the end proves a drunkard, sleeps every night with a different gentleman and has committed innumerable murders!’ He also had another idea – ‘Why not dedicate it to Mountbatten, because he’s a big man . . . it would be a good ploy.’ More people might buy it, bringing in more money for boats. When the novel was finished, and Daphne expressed the same high hopes she had had for Hungry Hill, it was Tommy who gently warned her, ‘You want to be careful about being too pleased, because it might be a colossal flop,’ though after reading it he, too, was sure of its success, because it was ‘most beautifully written and very exciting’. He laughed at the idea of people identifying him as the general in her story, especially ‘locals . . . who will probably ostracise us, and a good thing that would be’.

  The reviews, when the book was published in April 1946, were, or so Daphne thought, patronizing. She did not relish having The King’s General praised for its ‘glorious teenage exuberance’, nor for being not ‘matter-of-fact historical but romantic historical’. As far as she was concerned, there was plenty of accurate historical fact in it, and none of her painstaking research, all those weeks reading up local history and absorbing the details of the Rashleigh family history, had been acknowledged. Nor did she like being told that her prose style was ‘within a few hundred years or so’ of the period. But it sold well, and with Tommy fitting out his splendid new boat (in Singapore, where he was now stationed after Ceylon) money was needed.2 He had told her he expected to be back in the summer and tried to console her for this delay by reminding her that some of the Dutch officers didn’t even know if their wives were still alive.

  Daphne responded by suggesting they have separate bedrooms when he came home. This threw him and he took a while to reply, especially as he was afflicted with a bad attack of ‘me tum’ just then. Finally, he wrote: ‘I’ve never answered you about having a little separate room from you. It is very hard to say, as I’ve now been living on my own practically since 1941 – which is five long years, except for brief periods of being with you. I just don’t know . . .’ But a month later he returned to the topic again and this time he did know – ‘I never answered about whether I’d want a separate room from you’ (obviously forgetting he had), he began, and then said, ‘NO! – I want my routes, but in case it makes you start not sleeping as you fear, I can always creep into the spare room.’

  This harping on separate rooms, even if it was out of consideration for his comfort, was not exactly calculated to make a man feel his arrival home was eagerly awaited. By June, a month before his estimated return, Tommy was in a great state of nerves anyway. He knew he had aged and worried about it. He had, he wrote, put on weight – ‘You’ll find me round as a tub’ (though this was a ridiculous exaggeration) – and he now wore reading spectacles. There was much agonizing over what kind of frames to have but he assured her that whatever he chose ‘a man will have them carefully designed to suit him’. But about his thinning hair he could do nothing, lamenting that she would find him ‘bald as a coot’. It was very touching, his anxiety about his looks and whether she would still find him attractive, but more serious was his confession of how he felt. He was ‘worn out’ and could hardly get up in the mornings. One day he blacked out, which naturally terrified him. His left leg now hurt when he walked any distance and he feared she would find him ‘much changed’. He would be crawling back ‘in my fiftieth year which is quite a business when you think of it in cold blood’ wanting only ‘a quiet life and a complete rest’. This, he was sadly aware, was not the husband and father everyone looked for. ‘I worry’, he wrote, ‘that I’ll prove a disappointment to my children . . . I’m not cut out for too much fun and games.’ The other big worry was whether he would have to ask his wife to leave Menabilly. He didn’t know what his future would be – nobody would tell him, though Mountbatten, who had returned already, had promised to find out. There was a rumour he might become Military Secretary at the War Office, which he liked the idea of, except that it would mean living in London. But whatever happened on his return, he reminded her, ‘God is very good to me. Except for this last four years not being properly together we have a great deal .to be thankful for.’

  His last letters home became more and more excited – ‘I’m pretty perky as the thought of routes and you and Yggy and the bumps and all doings is buoying a man up.’ He could hardly wait to see her – ‘Only ten days left and the last eighteen months will seem like a dream.’ But to Daphne, those last eighteen months were not something which she wanted to wipe out. Quite frankly, she had enjoyed them. Tommy’s persistent emphasis on their instant return to ‘routes’ of every kind unnerved her. Life was now quite easy and comfortable with Tod in charge of the children and without Margaret. She had thought long and hard, as she confided in her sister-in-law Grace, about ‘the kindest yet wisest thing to do regarding Nanny’. Margaret had had a complete collapse in the spring and Daphne managed to steel herself to have ‘quite a talk’ with her in which she suggested Margaret should go on an extended holiday (for which Daphne would pay), then think about her future. She also floated the idea that Margaret, who was clever with her needle, should set up as a dressmaker and said she would give her £500 to start. What Daphne wanted to avoid was ‘any break in a harsh or abrupt manner’, because she was well aware of, and grateful for, Margaret’s ‘many years of devoted service’. To her relief, Margaret accepted that the time had come to leave – she had been wearing herself out and was not particularly happy at Menabilly, nor was she doing the job for which she was trained. Tessa and Flavia, aged twelve and nine, no longer needed a nanny, and Kits had never been looked after by her in the same way.

  So in April 1946 Margaret had left and Daphne felt released from ‘the awkwardness of it all’. She had plenty of time to herself and liked her solitary evenings. Tod had been firmly warned that she must not expect to share Daphne’s company – ‘I must have evenings alone . . . a curious little routine of a tray by the fire . . . awful, probably very selfish thing.’ Since January, when she had gone to London for the removal of a cyst, she had been trying to look after herself better and part of this attention to her health was indulging her already strong desire for resting in perfect peace. She saw nobody socially except her mother, Angela, and Angela’s friend Angela Halliday, sometimes Jeanne (though she was now in St Ives, painting) as well as Foy and Clara Vyvyan, and even they never intruded on her evenings. Now, Tommy would be back and she would have to learn all over again to share her time. When her children had burst in to tell her the war was over she had replied crossly, ‘I know it is, now go back to bed,’ and a large part of her allegation that Tommy did not want to come home was due to a desire to pretend this was true: if he did not want to hurry back to her, she need not feel guilty about not wanting her peace to be threatened.

  There was no pleasure in being honest with herself – it simply made her miserable. If she loved Tommy – and she knew she did – why did she not want him back in her day-to-day life? She was afraid and yet at the same time resentful – she couldn’t help her feelings. But when she heard that her husband would land at RAF Northolt on 19 July, she suddenly found herself capable after all of genuine excitement. She made great efforts to look as beautiful as possible for him. Instead of the usual slacks and jumper she wore an elegant suit and blouse, and her blonde hair was sleek and shining after a visit to the hairdresser. She had always, even while living as she did at Menabilly, paid great attention to her face, despite her love for casual clothes, and now she made herself up with great care. When she had completed the transformation she went ‘up to London with my heart beating with excitement’, putting behind her all doubts and uncertainties about her marriage and ‘determined to make a real effort . . . and not seem to be different at all, and give him a great welcome’.3 All this was because ‘I do love him very deeply’, and she was not going to let the war spoil that genuine love whatever had happened during it to them both. The fact that 19 July was their fourteenth wedding anniversary seemed to her the best of omens.

  At nine o’clock on the evening of 19 July, Daphne stood on the tarmac of the airport. If Tommy had put on a little weight during the last year of the war, she had lost a great deal and was even slimmer at thirty-nine than she had been when she married him. If he had aged, she looked more youthful. All the fresh air and rest in Cornwall during the last year had made her fit and healthy-looking, her skin tanned, her eyes bright. Her face looked softer than it had done, framed by hair she now wore touching her shoulders, slightly waved and parted at one side. She could not have looked more alluring. As she stood there, waiting for the door of the plane to open, she imagined Tommy feeling as she did and a great wave of emotion gripped her – it was all going to be all right after all.

  But it was not. From the very moment Tommy came down the steps and strode across to her the great home-coming ‘fell flat’. He did not wrap her in his arms, or even hold them out for her. Instead it was ‘a peck on the cheek’ and that was all. She rationalized this as his dislike of public displays of affection, which she herself hated. He was surrounded by his staff and did not feel free to greet her as he would have done in private. But there was another cause for surprise: behind Tommy was a very beautiful young woman, Maureen Luschwitz, aged twenty-three, who had been his Staff Officer (PA) for the last year, and whom he was now bringing back to England to continue to work for him. Daphne knew about this but she had not been prepared for Maureen’s beauty. The moment she set eyes on her, she jumped to the unjustified conclusion that this girl was, or had been, Tommy’s mistress. The fact that he showed no interest in Maureen at all, merely ordering her to see his luggage through customs and report for work at an address which meant nothing to her (she had never been to England before) the next morning, was beside the point. By the time the two of them had reached the flat in Whitelands House,4 where they were to stay, Daphne was wondering bitterly ‘why I had bothered to come up to meet him even, he would not have noticed my absence’.

  Their first night together was as different as possible from anything she had imagined. He did not make love to her and though ‘this sounds silly and bitter . . . it was all a queer anti-climax’.5 This, at any rate, was her given version of what had happened: she had been spurned, ignored, made to feel unattractive. The weeks ahead, with Tommy at Menabilly, were ones she dreaded.

  PART FOUR

  The Breaking Point

  1946–1960

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE NEXT SIX weeks were among the most tense in Daphne’s whole life – now, more than ever, she needed that ability to appear calm and cool and charming, when emotionally she was in turmoil. She felt that she was acting even more than she usually did, forcing herself to smile and say the right things and appear completely happy, because her husband was home at last. They went down to Menabilly and out in Ygdrasil, and Tommy seemed ‘very pleased, and we rushed about Fowey’, but she knew that all this ‘on the go’ as she described it was in fact moving them ‘miles apart in our minds’. At the end of this agonizing six weeks, when he went to London to take up his new posting, which was, as predicted, to be Military Secretary to the Minister for War, he still had not made love to her – ‘there was no “Cairo” [sexual intercourse] all the leave’. It seemed there had been no ‘Cairo’ for several other leaves either, but that ‘in the war I thought it was just because his mind was too full of war’. Now, she felt unwanted, ‘a dull, grey-haired, nearly-forty wife’. This was ‘bad for my morale’ and more significant ‘it just made me say to myself, “Well, if he doesn’t want me, I damn well know someone who does.”’ She hated to find herself thinking like this – ‘I don’t want to think like that. I don’t want my marriage to break up like so many other people’s do’ – but could not help herself. She was more hurt than she had ever thought possible, but equally determined that nobody should guess.

  It was only to Ferdy that she confessed her misery and bitterness in two long, impassioned letters. Tod, the other person in whom she had been used to confide, was, of course, now living with her so it was to Ferdy, in France, that she chose to unburden herself.1 But Ferdy was not told about how she herself had appeared reluctant to resume this particular side of her married life – there was no mention of the suggestion she had made that her husband might like a separate room, or that she had been steadily bombarding him with cuttings about the difficulties married couples would experience after the war. The whole tone of her letters was one of outraged distress: Tommy had rejected her, he was unfeeling, he did not find her attractive. She was wretched, the injured wife who had waited so patiently for him to come home, only to find that when he did he was not interested in her.

  Clearly, something had gone very wrong, but it is very difficult to decide exactly what this was. Daphne’s letters to Ferdy breathe sincerity in every line – this was no performance, no attempt to present herself as the injured party and conceal the truth. Yet it was not the whole truth. Quite apart from the fact that she had given signals to Tommy that she might not want to resume ‘Cairo’ immediately, she fails to admit that she made no attempt to make love to him. His letters right up to the moment he returned are full of love for her, full of impatience to be with her, full of an almost tangible yearning for her. Her letters to him she later burned but, in those that survive to other people, all the references to Tommy contain not one expression of real excitement about the approaching reunion. What they reflect instead is an edge of panic. Yet as she wrote to Ferdy, when the day came she was excited and hopeful, and then just as suddenly devastated by being ‘rejected’. But, of course, because of her history with Ferdy she knew perfectly well that her account of there being no ‘Cairo’ would hardly be thought a disaster by her old teacher. It might actually be thought significant in another way: perhaps she was no longer interested in any kind of ‘Cairo’ herself and was once more struggling with the boy-in-the-box.

  This is the point at which hypothesis has to take over, however unsatisfactory: what seems likely to have happened when the two of them were reunited is that Daphne, even if her heart was ‘pounding with excitement’, seemed distant and tense, because she felt guilty about Puxley and had not been looking forward to Tommy’s return; and Tommy, although desperately eager to show his love for Daphne, seemed abrupt and preoccupied with work. They were both nervous and they were both waiting for the other to make the first move, a move which never came. Once at Menabilly, where he was put in a separate, though connecting, bedroom, he waited in vain for a sign from her. It is a sad scenario, and one hard to understand when it is remembered not only how attractive both of them were, but how genuinely they had loved each other. But it was nevertheless a situation many couples found themselves in after the war. What was hardest to do was talk about it to each other – there was a shyness, a loss of that ease of communication which comes from always being together, and a feeling between couples that suddenly they were strangers.

  The sadness of it permeated Daphne’s letters of this period to Ferdy. It occurred to her that Tommy’s ‘rejection’ of her might be thought a kind of poetic justice – ‘You might say “serve me right”, because of that “someone” I have hinted at in my letters to you, but that someone loves me too well not to know that my marriage must come first with me.’ What distressed her was not only the sexual rejection but how much she cared about it. From this point onwards she began to make remarks about sex not really being important, and even indicated she had never really cared for full ‘Cairo’, but this looks like a deliberate attempt to convince herself as well as others. She certainly did not acknowledge that the reason for the sexual difficulties in her marriage might be that she now found all heterosexual sex abhorrent. What she had enjoyed with Puxley was the ‘spinning’, not full intercourse. But to Ferdy she gave every indication that far from finding ‘Cairo’ repulsive she regretted the lack of it greatly. She wrote, ‘if Tommy just looks on me as a dull old thing he is fond of . . . the outlook is dreary’. It frightened her to think ‘Well, is that side of marriage finished for ever?’ Because if it were, if there were to be ‘not even “Cairo” to make a bond, there is little but past loyalty and ordinary affection to keep us together at all’. This not only demonstrated how much importance she placed on the sexual side of her marriage, but also that it occurred to her that this was the only way they had been truly together. She had realized ‘how very different we are in mind and thought . . . it is worrying because I don’t want things to be like that’. She couldn’t sleep, and Tommy, in his separate room, could not sleep either. She took sleeping pills regularly now, instead of occasionally, and when she fell into a restless sleep it was to dream of her father. ‘I dream so often of my Daddy,’ she wrote to Ferdy, with infinite pathos, ‘I think he watches over me, from wherever he is.’ Dreams of her father at this time, when she was so disturbed about the sexual state of her marriage, cannot help but seem significant.