Daphne’s own response was to ask who Nancy Spain was and then to dismiss all the reviewers as ‘nearly always indifferent writers who can’t make a living from their own books and are forced to make a living through shoddy journalism . . . kicking at writers more successful than themselves is probably the only thrill they ever get’. Victor was, in fact, doing her no favours by encouraging her to take this attitude, so that soon she was no longer able to detect genuine and potentially helpful criticism. But it was a pity this collection did not merit more attention, and that it was ‘The Birds’ which monopolized any attention it did get, because it was a huge improvement on Daphne’s previous short stories of her early years.

  Not only were these new stories better written, they also showed a shift in the balance of power between the sexes which she had been working out for some twenty years now in her novels. The women were no longer pathetic and exploited, the men no longer always powerful and dominant. Now, women were often in control and making men suffer. Women had become quite vicious creatures, perfectly capable of tricking, and even killing, men as they had been tricked and killed in the early stories. Daphne’s friends and family were rather taken aback at this strain of brutality she displayed, but she was unrepentant and talked cheerfully of ‘my macabre tastes’ without seeming to fear any significance being read into them. But this collection was highly important: it represented a change not only in Daphne’s style but in her subject-matter – her ‘macabre tastes’ at last were acknowledged and given an outlet, reflecting the confusion of her inner self.

  Chapter Sixteen

  MY COUSIN RACHEL had been even more rapturously received by Daphne’s American publisher than it had been by Victor Gollancz, and she agreed to go over for the publication of the book. This meant, of course, that she could see both Ellen and Gertrude, so as soon as her short stories were finished she began planning her visit. Ellen thought My Cousin Rachel ‘one of your masterpieces’ and announced that she saw Daphne very clearly in Philip, but that in spite of some ‘physical and other characteristics I couldn’t miss’ Rachel herself, to Ellen’s relief, was ‘like no one’1 . . . Daphne replied that she was right – ‘in the writing of the novel I turned myself so completely into Philip I was beguiled, and she could have poisoned the entire world and I would not have minded.’2

  But this time Daphne was particularly anxious to see Gertie, who had been sick, and, though all the tests to which she had been subjected had revealed nothing sinister, Daphne was worried, sensing some deep malaise. Richard Aldrich, Gertie’s husband, was going to be away in March, so she could stay in their New York apartment. Gertie warned her that Richard was liable to change his plans, in which case they might have no privacy, which would be a strain. Instead of being put off, Daphne began to fantasize about climbing ‘fire escapes . . . on the East Side if I want to have any fun’. She had her fun but saw how tired Gertie was – she was starring in The King and I and was the toast of New York – and suddenly realized she was also ageing. Gertie had a cold and seemed very low, and all they did was watch ‘awful films on TV’. Daphne had to go to a publishers’ dinner and, when it came to the time, Gertie ‘put on that face’ and said it was ‘just like Cinderella’:3 Daphne going out and her staying in. She went with Gertie to an acting class she was conducting for students, and was perturbed to observe that the students thought Gertie a bit of a joke. It made her feel tender and protective towards her, though sometimes there would be such a flash of the old, brilliantly cheeky and vital Gertie that she wondered if there was any need. Once, driving through the awful New York traffic after the show, a taxi driver cut in front of their car and screamed at them for obstructing him. Gertie rolled down her window and yelled at him, ‘Fuck you, we’re in a hit.’4 This was so much the showbiz put-down that Daphne dissolved into hysterical giggles and adored Gertie all over again. She went to Cartier’s and bought her a heart-shaped brooch.

  There followed the usual visit to Barberrys, accompanied by Oriel Malet, a young writer (also over to promote her book, which had just won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), whom Daphne had met in London, and liked. She enjoyed Ellen’s company as much as ever, but there was a new distance between them, another change in their relationship because of what was happening between Gertie and Daphne.

  Once, Daphne had wanted to be alone with Ellen all the time and had resented the other people in her life, but now, enjoying a different kind of relationship with Gertie, she was able to be close to Ellen without needing to have her to herself. This made no difference to the depth of their friendship – it had been tried and tested and found solid for too long now to be truly endangered – but only to the way it was conducted. They still confided in each other absolutely, but Daphne was not in such desperate need, nor did Ellen worry now about what she could not give. Both of them realized their friendship was settling down into a less intense phase, one that would endure but never regain the fire of the last few years.

  For Ellen there was a new element. She wrote to Daphne, after this visit, that a ‘slight touch of romance’5 had entered her life. It was nothing serious but it was pleasant and had shown her that she was not quite as dead as she had thought herself – though Daphne was not to ‘get in a stew’. Daphne could not resist remarking a little sarcastically, ‘So the lady is for burning after all, but, of course, in a perfectly respectable way.’6 She wrote that she had never believed for one moment that Ellen, any more than Stella in September Tide, was dead ‘that way’ – she had always known she was ‘only deliberately asleep’. What was annoying, and even at one time distressing, was that she herself had never succeeded in waking Ellen up. Now she did not want to. Gertie had satisfied her instead, though she enjoyed speculating as to what might have happened if she had ‘dressed up like a man’ – maybe her fantasy romance with Ellen could have become a reality. She paid tribute to what her infatuation had done for her literary life: loving Ellen had resulted first in September Tide and then in My Cousin Rachel, and the disturbing short stories. She felt ‘drained of all emotion’ except for ‘the drag of Gertie pulling in the opposite direction’.7 In August 1952, after Ellen had paid her a brief visit as part of a European trip, Daphne was moved to reflect on what made people want to make love – ‘What makes people get the craving? . . . There never seems an answer. You might say loneliness. But to my mind, drinking and making love are the two most lonely pastimes on earth.’8 Gertie, too, was lonely and wanted her to go to the Florida Cape again with her, but Daphne, not realizing Gertie would be free, had already arranged to go first to Switzerland, then walking in the Rhône Valley with Clara Vyvyan, her friend for over twenty years.9

  Clara loved roughing it and was off on a walk down the Rhône with a rucksack on her back. Daphne said she would go with her – it was just the kind of jaunt she loved. Clara had her doubts. She knew perfectly well that Daphne liked comfort whatever she said, but rather against her better judgement agreed she could join her to walk some of the route. In the event, the idea was a success. Daphne joined her for two weeks and adored every minute of it – Clara found her ‘indefatigable’ and was amused by her habit of finding some ‘high niche in the mountains or . . . some mid-stream boulder where she would squat and meditate for hours’. Daphne went off on her own sometimes, exploring, and would return ‘in a mood of mountain ecstasy’. The two of them made fires and boiled water in a billy-can, and Clara maintained she ‘could feel that Daphne . . . was separated from her everyday-self by a new sense of freedom’. What puzzled her were the two sides to her friend: on the one hand the genuine love, after all, of the simple life, but on the other the contradiction, to Clara, of a rucksack full of ‘cosmetics, vanishing creams . . . lotions . . . and also scents’. Daphne’s clothes fascinated her too:. ‘a white jockey cap, socks, mountaineer’s boots with yellow laces, linen blouse and a zip linen skirt on top of white cotton shorts’. Swinging along the paths she unzipped the skirt and walked in shorts, then in villages she zipped it back up – ‘she was feminine . . . [then] on the yonder side up rolled the skirt and she strode forward like a boy’. It was, wrote Daphne, ‘one of the best holidays ever . . . we lived like two tramps . . . never felt so free of ties in my life’. In some ways it was even better than behaving like a schoolgirl with Gertie, because she didn’t feel Clara needed anything from her, and she came to the conclusion that the best holidays were always those spent with people with whom one had no emotional ties.

  Back at Menabilly, Daphne began yearning to see Gertie, before winter arrived, but then heard she was ill again. This was not at first alarming. She assumed, as most people did, that Gertie was simply exhausted after a gruelling summer in The King and I. But Fanny Holtzman, Gertrude’s lawyer, wrote to say that Gertrude wanted her to know that she was suffering from something more serious than exhaustion and, though tests had initially shown nothing sinister, there was now the suspicion that she had hepatitis. From Gertrude’s collapse, at the end of August, in her dressing-room after a matinée, until she went into a coma on 6 September, Daphne was kept closely informed of her progress. But the end, when it came, was devastatingly sudden. Even though Daphne had not ‘liked the sound of something wrong with the liver’, and had written to Evie Williams, ‘It sounds to me like a tumour,’ she had not imagined Gertie to be in such imminent danger. The news that Gertrude, aged only fifty-four, was dead was a shock so severe that it rendered Daphne virtually catatonic. Those who were with her at Menabilly – her husband, her children, Tod, and Maureen – were horribly aware that she was utterly grief-stricken and quite unable to speak or cry. She went to bed and stayed there for several days, not eating or sleeping, simply lying there, staring sightlessly, so bereft and pitiful no one was in any doubt that Gertie had meant everything to her. It was frightening for her family to witness, particularly as none of them knew the exact nature of her love for Gertie. It seemed an unaccountably extreme reaction, not sufficiently explained by the knowledge that Gertie had been Daphne’s ‘dearest friend’. Only Ellen knew the truth, and it was only to Ellen that she could open her heart.

  On 18 September she wrote to Ellen, in extremely simple, direct words, all the more moving for being on the surface unemotional, a kind of testimony to her love for Gertrude. ‘You, who know me better than anyone,’ she wrote, ‘may understand the inner meaning of the story “Kiss Me Again, Stranger”; the lines in it “Go from me, and don’t look back, like a person walking in their sleep”, were actually said, from the pillow, to me as I left her for the last time about 2 am . . .’ She told Ellen she could not talk about ‘these things’ to anyone but her, ‘because in a strange way it’s all mixed up with you (not your fault, darling). But if there had never been a September Tide, I would not have seen her, in fantasy, as doing what I wanted you to do, or started the gay, happy friendship. But for the knowledge that you really couldn’t be what I wanted you to be, I would never have gone on that Florida weekend; and so become beguiled and bewitched (nothing, except gay flirtation, had ever happened before that). No regrets. It was such fun, and so happy, and so entrancing. Never sordid. I suppose, cold-bloodedly, you could say “Two lonely people getting rid of inhibitions.” I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. The odd thing is, once you have loved a person physically, it makes the strangest bond (I suppose not always, no, sometimes, I think it could mean nothing, like playing tennis). In this case, it meant a lot. I couldn’t talk to her, you know, like I can to you, or have the peace, that you give (or the fever either!), but there was so much warmth there and generosity of giving, if you know what I mean, that I cannot imagine it ever being equalled by anyone in the world. I think, if one was Gauguin in the South Seas or loved a native girl, and never even spoke their language, in a way it would be like that. Yet there was a mutual language. Something all mixed up with theatre and writing. Knowing that only that, and “work”, were what mattered most.’

  To everyone else, Daphne struggled to put her grief into some kind of acceptable form, but it was miserable work. Her only comfort was that, like Gerald, Gertie was not suited to either illness or old age – ‘she could not have borne the later years to come, the real enjoyment of her life was over, she was in a sense marking time. I felt this with Daddy and I felt it with her.’ To Victor Gollancz, whose wisdom she respected, she wrote: ‘I would like . . . a treatise on how to look at loss through death, having been knocked quite off my balance by the sudden death of Gertrude Lawrence, who happened to be my dearest friend . . . what philosophy? How to cope with loss and the emptiness of waking up in the morning and thinking what now? (I have no business to think this with a dear husband and children, but I think you, with your intuition, understand the somewhat erratic schizo personality that is mine . . .).’10 To those around her, who did not know the truth, it seemed an exaggerated response to the death of a woman to whom she had been a close friend for only four years, but her family saw the misery in her face and were frightened by it. The ‘state of numb emptiness’ continued for the next few weeks and she had to stop thinking of the good times she and Gertie had planned to have again in Florida, because ‘it just leads to suicidal thoughts’.

  During this time, when she was openly mourning Gertie, Daphne constantly equated the loss with the loss of her father. It was not that Gertie had meant to her what Gerald had meant, but that both of them symbolized all she loved most about life – both had that Peter Pan spirit she envied and marvelled at, and the death of both of them was a reminder that it must finally die. ‘She never grew up,’ she wrote of Gertie, as she had written of Gerald, and that was it precisely. She put all her feelings about Gertie’s immense vitality into an obituary for The Times, ‘which they hadn’t the nerve or decency to print. I’d love to know why. I shan’t ask.’ The only person she could talk with about Gertie was Noël Coward (he himself had added a note to the official obituary), who was ‘very hard hit’, but she felt he would get over Gertie’s death more quickly than she would herself, ‘living down here, gloomy autumn weather, etc., and no work on hand . . . I’ll have to pull myself together somehow.’

  It was unfortunate that there was a certain pressing urgency to pull herself together at the end of that awful month following Gertie’s death: she was invited to Balmoral and had agreed she must go. When Princess Elizabeth became Queen, in February 1952, Tommy had become Treasurer to the Duke of Edinburgh, and she knew it was her duty to accompany him, though she dreaded the prospect. Fortunately, Tommy hurt his arm sailing and since this meant he would be unable to shoot they did not go. Instead, Daphne went on her own to Venice, where she was the guest of Ronald Armstrong, who had been British Consul at Geneva for twenty years and was now retired.

  This was an unusual friendship which had begun some years previously after Ronald Armstrong had written her a fan letter. A correspondence developed and she and Tommy were invited to visit him, which they had briefly done on one of their rare holidays together. He became known as ‘Penfriend’ and Daphne would imitate him endlessly and hold entire imaginary conversations with him out loud. He was sixty-two when she joined him in Venice (to her forty-five) and ‘a perfect dear’. He gave her what she needed – good company – without expecting anything in return. It rained, but she wrote that she had never had ‘such a delightful cultivated companion and with a sense of humour that can only be compared to Daddy’s’. She was well aware that Penfriend flattered her, but saw no harm in this, commenting in a letter to Flavia, ‘it is too late in life’. Penfriend was ‘a bit old . . . I mean, it is no good for menace, but now and again his eyes twinkle which is vaguely stimulating’. Considering Penfriend was homosexual, and she knew he was, it was an odd stimulation, but it amused her, made her feel happier, to flirt with men especially if there was no future to it. If they were elderly, if they were homosexual, then so much the better.

  Once back at Menabilly, with all the children away at boarding school and Tommy back in London, she knew that the pulling herself together she had to do was now truly upon her. ‘I have felt this strange restlessness for about a year now,’ she wrote to Victor Gollancz, ‘I wonder if it is the change of life? But isn’t forty-five a bit young?’ Like so many women, she was taken by surprise at how middle age and the onset of the menopause affected her looks. With her phobia about fat, and her dislike of all ugliness, she was dismayed by the increasing lines on her face and the thickening of her waist, which she found, to her horror, measured 29 inches, after a lifetime of being as slim as a reed.11 Some photographs taken for publicity purposes in the early fifties clearly showed the change in her physique – ‘I look aged with a kind of humped back, which is irritating’ – and she was moved to comment: ‘I look and feel my age . . . what I mean is, I find myself really not bothering very much any more . . . some sort of loss of energy.’ She realized only too well that, although the basic change in her appearance was one she could not help, there was also a deliberate side to what was happening and she was defiant about it, caught between not wanting to care and yet caring very much.

  Her hair annoyed her, never ‘seeming to be right’, and she was irritated that this bothered her. After the short bob of her adolescent years and then the shingle of her twenties she had worn it loose, quite long, gently waved and framing her face very attractively. Before her first trip to America in 1947 she had it cut and permed. The result was not flattering, both the shorter length and the rigidity of the perm making her face look square and less delicate, and her jaw harder. She still made herself up carefully, even for windswept walks on the Gribbin, but the make-up was more of a half-hearted disguise than an enhancement of her features. The way she dressed changed too. Ever since she had come to live in Cornwall she had worn trousers, but as the forties gave way to the fifties, the style of trousers changed – from looking graceful in the loosely cut slacks of the earlier decade she began to look rather military in the straight-legged new shapes which tended to emphasize the increased weight on her hips. Large, ornate belts became a feature of her wardrobe and, though often very beautiful in themselves, looked rather awkward. She settled down into what was almost a uniform of no-nonsense casual dressing, though even now all the colours of shirts and jumpers and trousers were carefully chosen and co-ordinated – casual was never to mean scruffy or untidy. Far from ‘not bothering any more’, she simply made the decision to accept the changes in herself and adapt to them.