This was the secret subtext to the story of those six weeks, but even the surface narrative was full of problems. Most of them involved the children. Tommy came home to children aged thirteen, nine and five and a half, whom he hardly knew. He had confessed in some of his letters to Daphne how worried he was, and the reality of resuming his role as father proved every bit as difficult as he had envisaged. Like so many men coming back from six years of wartime army life Tommy had forgotten how to behave in a domestic situation. He shouted and swore, and the children had never experienced this – their mother never shouted. Nor had they been subjected to any real discipline. Their mother, although strict about manners, was not in the habit of giving orders. Tommy gave them and expected them to be obeyed, sharpish. If Daphne was angry, the worst that could happen was a tight-lipped silence or her swift, disapproving disappearance, but they now discovered that if their father was angry – and his temper was short – it could be terrifying. Daphne told Ferdy she thought his hectoring manner and unjustified rages were ‘the effect of having millions of men under him, it is like Hitler. This sounds absurd, but . . . no one must argue with him.’ Nobody dared.

  Tommy certainly was not proud of his temper and had no idea how frightening he could be. He desperately wanted to show his love for his children and to have them show their love for him. But he was not only up against the disadvantage of his own unconsciously bullying behaviour, but against a wife who had in no way kept him alive in her children’s minds as a loving father. There was no careful preparation for his return, beyond warnings that they must try to keep quiet because he would be tired. On his leaves, there had been no chance for them to establish any kind of rapport. So now, he came home as a virtual stranger, and one of whom all three of them were a little afraid. He tried hard to act as he thought a father should act, making determined efforts to be jolly and play games – bombing the two younger ones in their bath with soapy sponges, having cushion fights, and inventing a kind of indoor Olympics (known as the Monkey Skin Game) which had four events in it: boxing, hurdles, long jump and show jump, all performed before an audience of teddy bears.2 He could even be funny, pretending he was walking downhill as he passed the nursery window, so that his head sank lower and lower. But just as suddenly he would yell at them for some minor misdemeanour and all his jollity was forgotten. It was all extremely confusing for them, and Daphne realized this only too well.

  The child who suffered most was the one who had actually had the best chance of pleasing her father. Tessa, at thirteen, was pretty and lively, and Tommy was quite charmed by how she had grown up. But this was the trouble, as Daphne explained to Grace. Tommy ‘treated her as if she was 20, then realised she is only 13 and has rather dropped her, if you know what I mean’. She could, she wrote, ‘see it all so well’ from both their points of view. Both father and daughter were disappointed in each other, and the mother looking on found it ‘infinitely pathetic’. In no time at all Tommy was complaining that Tessa was ‘ill-mannered and needed school which made poor old Tessa get aggressive and awkward’. Tessa, for her part, was ‘hoping for understanding and not getting it’. She was ‘too old to be romped with’ and so felt excluded. Allowed to eat in the evening with her parents, a privilege still denied to Flavia and Kits, she did not find this the happy time it should have been. Daphne found it agony to witness how Tommy, with no knowledge of teenage girls, misjudged Tessa’s maturity at every stage and made her pay the penalty. But however sensitive her reading of the situation, she did not seem able to act as mediator between the two of them. More successful was her protection of Kits. Kits was hers and he was going to remain so. Though in her letters to Ferdy she commented that ‘it’s awful, his Greek feeling for me, he can’t bear it if I go away, and even if I go out to lunch from here he’s in an awful state’, at the same time she was not really prepared to share him with Tommy. The artistic side of Kits, strong in any case, was encouraged, and even had his father tried to forge the kind of bond Daphne had with their son, it is unlikely it would have developed. As for Flavia, both parents referred to her as ‘old Gumbo’ or ‘old dopey’: her role in life at that time was to play with Kits and keep the peace.

  Peace was hard to maintain, not just because of all the strain involved in settling down as a family again, but because that family now included Tod. Daphne had been absolutely honest with Tommy about Tod’s coming, knowing she irritated him profoundly, and he had written agreeing to her becoming the children’s governess, while expressing the fervent hope that their energy would tire ‘old Tod out and keep her quiet’. But when he arrived at Menabilly, Tommy quickly realized there was no hope of that – Tod was a force to be reckoned with and she drove him wild. She incensed him by pontificating on matters about which he knew a great deal and she knew nothing, and he could hardly restrain himself. Sometimes his dislike came out openly. Once, when Tod, who had a sore throat, asked if anyone could suggest how she could treat it, Tommy could not prevent himself from suggesting, ‘Cut it.’ Tod stalked from the room, and Daphne said Tommy must apologize, which he duly did. But he muttered constantly about her being ‘a silly old arse, always belly-aching’. The trouble was that he wanted his wife to himself and he only seemed to manage that when they were on board his wonderful new boat, Fanny Rosa, shipped back from Singapore and his pride and joy.

  ‘It quite hurts me’, Daphne wrote to Grace, ‘to think of the money going on that old hulk. All my precious hoardings from films!’ But Tommy was oblivious to the cost or to where the money had come from. Fanny Rosa was his reward for surviving the war – ‘I do want a nice big ship after all these many years,’ he had written, and the cost of £8,000 (without some of the more extravagant fittings) he reckoned as well within his wife’s means. She was, after all, to be paid £65,000 for the film rights of The King’s General, and even after enormous tax there would be ‘enough for my boatie’. He despised as faint-hearted Daphne’s preference to ‘be canny and try and spread it out over ten years to give a feeling of security’. Veteran of the war that he was, Tommy had little respect for such far-sightedness. The knowledge that his wife, as part of her Sunday ‘routes’, sat entering everything she had spent each week in a little red notebook, he found extraordinary.

  So far as her marriage went Daphne was not prepared to look too far into the future at all. ‘I feel somehow lost now,’ she wrote to Ferdy, but stressed that she must not tell anyone else this. ‘I will see how life goes this winter,’ she added, and said that she would try to visit Tommy every month in London in the hope things would get better. But they didn’t. When she did go up to London after Tommy had started his new job, she reported that he was ‘completely absorbed in his work which I know so little about, so that it is difficult for me to take an intelligent interest even in that’. Returning to Menabilly she was more depressed about their relationship than ever and ‘felt quite rotten’. The cause was partly physical – she told Ferdy ‘that bad anaemia started again and then I had to have a tooth out, and I felt I was looking unattractive and old’.

  She had ‘a down-feeling’ about herself and the next time she went to stay with Tommy ‘saw my “someone” [Puxley] and felt that after all I was not such a dreary old fool . . .’ She also saw Carol Reed (married himself since 1943, but already on the edge of divorce) and her old friend Pat Frere (Edgar Wallace’s daughter). ‘Tommy’, she commented, ‘was nice and pleased to have me to stay (although there was nothing else), but I have a feeling that he likes his own little flat up there on his own better than he likes this house down here. I think he has a vaguely jealous feeling against this house . . . so he retaliates by having his flat and feeling that up there it is his show. But I feel that all these separate things make for a kind of barrier, and I wonder how and when we are ever going to share things and be together again.’

  Not, certainly, ever, if she were to stay in Cornwall and he were obliged to live most of the time in London, but never at any time did Daphne contemplate giving up Menabilly, nor did Tommy ask her to. Contrary to the impression she gave Ferdy, Tommy did not like ‘his own little flat’ better than he liked Menabilly. He did not like it at all and was always desperate to get down to Menabilly, which he loved, if not with quite the same passion as his wife. His life in the Whitelands House flat was dreary and comfortless, and the travelling backwards and forwards at weekends to his real home exhausting. Except that they saw much more of each other, the new regime was little better than in the war, and the emotional distance between them was bound to grow. Daphne understood this perfectly well, telling Ferdy, ‘The sad thing is that looking back now over the years, I realise that the thing that kept our marriage happy was the actual fact that we were together all the time and I somehow adapted myself to his ways. Our minds and thoughts were really poles apart, but I used to squash my thoughts so as to be “in” with him . . . now the less we see of each other the more apart we become.’ None the less, she let the unhappy situation continue. Put brutally, there was nothing Tommy could have done – he had to be in London, where his job was – but if Daphne had been prepared to sacrifice Menabilly she could have made a home in or near London for both of them, so that their marriage would have had a better chance of flourishing once more.

  But it was not even as cruelly simple a decision as that of giving up the house she adored and a way of life in which she was happy. The deciding factor was her recognition that the damage done was irreparable – just as in The Years Between the past could not be reclaimed. Her description of herself as previously keeping ‘in’ with Tommy falsely suggested he had dominated her. What he had done was fail to be in tune with her mercurial character, and now she realized he never would be. With a feeling of great regret and helplessness she saw that nothing could be done about it. It wasn’t that Tommy was not worth sacrificing Menabilly for, but that the sacrifice would be pointless. She would be left with nothing. The effect on her as a writer was as disastrous as the effect on her as a woman. She found it impossible to contemplate writing anything at all – ‘I somehow can’t get down to thinking about anything or working out a story.’ All she could think of was her own secret drama. Her anguish was pent up but to the world at large she presented a smiling face, amazed that she could carry off the pretence of happiness. Tommy did the same. Seen together in Fowey, they were admired as a totally contented couple, and even friends staying with them saw not a hint of strain. Nobody realized how deeply Daphne’s self-analysis probed, or was aware that she saw herself with a cast of mind quite different from her husband’s. There was no room, she decided, in Tommy’s scheme of things, for her own waywardness – he was too correct and controlled, too straightforward altogether. The very quality Daphne had admired most in him – his absolute integrity – now seemed an irritant. Tommy was, in the best sense of the word, a simple man who saw everything in black and white, whereas she was devious, highly complex and employed all kinds of subterfuges and pretences (not all harmless) in her personal relationships. Tommy was always what he seemed, Daphne never.

  But nobody guessed. Like the second Mrs de Winter, who had cared so deeply about ‘the disgrace of a failed marriage’, she preserved intact the façade of contentment. Maureen Luschwitz, Tommy’s PA, had come down to Menabilly during that first six weeks and had been enchanted by the Brownings’ home life. She liked Daphne as much as she liked Tommy – they seemed to her the ideal couple, both so good-looking and charming and blessed with three lovely children. The curious mixture of formality and casualness which characterized their family life fascinated her as it did most visitors and seemed wholly enviable. On the one hand, meals were at set times, precisely when the gong went, routine was strictly adhered to and exquisite manners were everywhere in evidence. But within this framework there was plenty of scope for a different kind of spirit of a more Bohemian character. Daphne’s love of ‘jam-a-long’ ways prevailed, with clothes and conversation equally relaxed and a good deal of mockery going on. The telling of amusing anecdotes, the spirited mimicking, the sly teasing and uproarious laughter at every kind of pretension, made mealtimes not the staid things one normally found in country houses. Daphne never did a thing in the house except pick flowers and arrange them, but she did not seem the sort of woman who did nothing, nor even the sort who depended entirely on servants. It was a very attractive set-up and Maureen, only twenty-three and impressionable, fell under its spell. When Daphne, who appeared to have realized her assumptions about Maureen had been wrong, suggested she might like to act as her part-time secretary as well as working for Tommy, Maureen was delighted to agree and from then onwards was a frequent guest, quickly becoming very involved with the whole family. Never, at that time, did she think of the Brownings as anything but supremely happily married and fortunate.

  That first winter of Tommy’s return, 1946–47, the winter in which Daphne had told Ferdy that she was going to wait and see what happened, set a pattern which was all too easy to follow without any kind of confrontation between herself and her husband. Nothing ‘happened’, but there was no resolution of their difficulties. In January, Tommy went on a rapid tour of Europe, so that for some weeks he did not come down to Menabilly. Daphne found this a relief, and not only because she felt freer. It was a viciously hard winter and she dreaded Tommy’s complaints about the cold at Menabilly (about the only thing on which he and Tod agreed). The electricity was off for days at a time, the water froze in the pipes and, in spite of wearing all their clothes in bed and heaping covers on top, no one was ever really warm. Tommy was better out of this, though he was experiencing rigours of another kind. Everywhere he went he saw destruction which horrified and depressed him. Berlin was smashed up beyond anything he had expected and he saw with his own eyes the devastation caused by the Allied bombing throughout Germany. Seeing ‘the misery of Europe’, he wrote to Daphne, made him think of his own future. He was ‘keen to get out of the army’ but felt compelled to stay in, because ‘I feel there is a bit of work for a man to do in this world yet’. When he returned to London he went to church and prayed for guidance as to what he should do. He also went to the House of Commons, seeking another kind of guidance, and came away unable to fathom ‘what this government is on about’. Like so many men he had come back from the war to a country in which he was no longer sure he had a place. The new Labour Government bewildered him and he did not think it was because he was not a Labour supporter (he was a Liberal) – but simply that he found those in power unimpressive, especially Attlee, who ‘makes me weep . . . he is so pathetic’. To his wife he confessed, ‘There is a lot of staleness about everything and probably about myself, which gets me down.’ More than ever he longed ‘to be at Menabilly for good’.

  The mere thought made Daphne tremble. The first time Tommy came home after his tour he complained bitterly about the state of the house and compared it most unfavourably with the house of a friend he had just visited where everything was immaculate. Tod, who was on holiday at the time, was treated to a letter in which Daphne said how depressed this made her feel. When Tommy was not at home nobody gave a damn how chaotic the housekeeping was, but when he was there she was made to feel a failure ‘because I can’t organise tea for 800’ as his friend had been able to do. But she still wanted to try to get closer to Tommy and it was she who suggested they should go abroad for a holiday, just the two of them. She hadn’t been abroad, of course, because of the war, for nearly a decade and yearned for some southern sun, if a place not ruined by bombing could be found. Who knew what magic it might work? Tommy, who had had quite enough of abroad, was more interested in some kind of sailing holiday in England, but in the end agreed to go to Switzerland for two weeks in May. Daphne was full of new hope, imagining Tommy relaxed and the two of them rediscovering that easiness between them of the Greyfriars days, to which she now found herself harking back nostalgically in a Gerald fashion.

  Although the holiday was enjoyable, it worked no miracle. She and Tommy walked a lot, read and swopped comments as they used to do, but there was none of that coming together, either sexually or spiritually, which she had looked for. This lack of true closeness was still not something ever discussed – both of them had a natural reticence about voicing their intimate feelings and fears, and each waited for some sign from the other which never came. They were friends, they loved each other, but it was no longer possible to imagine they were truly united. She was relieved to be back in Cornwall, on her own with the children.

  And still she could not write, though the summer was as wonderful as the winter had been terrible and she felt happier, resigned to what she could see was going to be the way of things with Tommy. These were good times. She and the children would set off every day through the woods down to Pridmouth beach to spend hours swimming and sunbathing. All she wore was ‘my sharkskin pants and a red hankie round the bosom’ and she took these off to swim naked as she always had done if possible. She loved to get brown and so did Flavia, whereas Tessa and Kits remained stubbornly pale and were teased. Lying on a rock in the little cove they had made their own, Daphne observed her children and was pleased with what she saw. She felt that the ‘real companionship’ she had looked forward to when the girls were small had perhaps arrived – now that they were fourteen and ten she could talk to them and share confidences with them, and she was altogether more comfortable. She saw how pretty Tessa had grown and was amused by her ‘beadiness’ about people’s love-affairs. When she was on her own with her she found Tessa gratifyingly intelligent and well-read yet still she felt distant from her, as though this could not be her daughter in spite of the striking physical resemblance. It was in Flavia that she was beginning to see something of herself – ‘old Gumbo’ was not after all so ‘dopey’ and had a dreaminess and diffidence about her which her mother recognized. Kits, of course, was altogether perfect, as he had always been, and she gloried in him. The thought of him having to go away to prep school was so unbearable she shut it out of her mind firmly.