The influence of J. M. Barrie in this first story was strong. Barrie was ‘Uncle Jim’ to the du Maurier girls just as he was to the Llewelyn Davies boys, their cousins, for whom he had written Peter Pan. He and Gerald were great friends15 and he was in the habit of coming home with him to play with the girls in the nursery. Daphne not only liked Uncle Jim but identified totally with his creation of fantasy lives. His imaginary islands and woods, which featured so heavily in the stories he told the children, were real places to her and she had no difficulty at all in matching his invention. But what gives this little tale merit as a literary effort is the feeling for landscape. Maurice loves to be alone, beside the sea, where there was ‘no sound of roaring traffic nor the sight of dingy chimney pots and wet grey roofs’. He runs barefoot on the sand and lies for hours listening ‘to the winds [which] whispered of romance and strange tumultous [sic] seas where bleak lands lie’. There is a real feeling of the sea evoked and his pleasure in it – ‘Oh! The never-ending glory of the day in such a place!’ Maurice, in this story, does not find what he is seeking nor does he identify what it is.

  In the same letter to Tod in which Daphne mentions this book she is trying to write, she repeats that she herself is searching for something, but does not know what exactly. Once, she had thought it was love, but now she had decided ‘it isn’t love or anything like that’. What she suffered from was that familiar adolescent yearning to give some meaning to life, that sense of a lack of purpose which can drive sensitive teenagers mad. Over and over she asked herself the question ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ It was not enough to reply: ‘Live – enjoy the easy, good time given to you.’ But that was the point: she hardly ever did enjoy these good times. Her own restlessness both disgusted and frightened her. She observed Angela becoming increasingly religious, heard her voice her growing attraction to Roman Catholicism, but she knew that was not the answer for her, any more than it was for her father. ‘Angela’, she told Tod, ‘is emotional and sentimental. I am matter-of-fact and hate sloppiness.’ ‘Churches’, she reasoned, ‘would never comfort me’ (though she did not reject religion itself, stating she was not an atheist).

  All this introspection exhausted her but she could not help it. She told Tod her absorption in herself nauseated her – ‘I only think of myself and pity anyone who likes me.’ So far as she could judge, few people did. She felt Angela and Jeanne were popular, but she was not, and they both appeared to her to relish their lives. Angela, in particular, always seemed to be having fun and was surrounded by other girls, also enjoying life as débutantes, who were in a permanent state of excitement about who was engaged to be married. This brought forth all the seventeen-year-old Daphne’s scorn – she might long to have friends but she certainly had no yearning to be engaged or married. ‘Tod, have you noticed’, she wrote indignantly, ‘(I think it is vile) that if one marries it’s considered awful if one doesn’t do it thoroughly (you know what I mean) and yet if one does certain things without being married it’s considered awful too. Surely that’s narrow-minded and disgusting. Either the act of – er – well, you know, is Right or Wrong. A wedding ring can’t change facts. An illegitimate child is looked upon as a sort of “freak” or “unnatural specimen”, whereas a child whose parents are married is wholesome and decent. Yet they both came into the world by the same means, they weren’t conjured up by a wedding ring.’ She wanted Tod to agree with her that it was ridiculous for people to say, on the one hand, ‘Isn’t it lovely, so-and-so is married’ and yet on the other ‘My dear, have you heard, so-and-so is living with some man.’ Both people, she fumed, were doing exactly the same thing, ‘yet one is praised, the other banned. It is extraordinary.’ The hypocrisy of it all revolted her, and into this revulsion came doubts about her own father. He was married, and loved his wife and children, and yet, as she now knew, ‘things went on’ with other women.

  Naturally, with her head full of such thoughts and her behaviour sullen, Daphne was often difficult to live with. Her parents never openly criticized her but, on the contrary, did everything possible to occupy and amuse her and in spite of some arguments remained long-suffering and concerned. What became obvious to them was that their middle daughter needed a life other than the one they indulgently offered her, and they broached the idea of a finishing school abroad. Angela had already been to a French finishing school and had not been happy, but since Daphne was very unlike her sister it was felt this might almost be a recommendation. In the spring of 1925, just before Daphne’s eighteenth birthday, arrangements were made for her to go to Camposena, a village near Meudon, outside Paris, to a school run by a Miss Wicksteed, with Doodie Millar, another girl the same age. This met with Daphne’s enthusiastic approval. It was not the thought of going to finishing school which attracted her so much as being near Paris, which she had visited on holiday with her family once and had adored. She was sure she would be able to find ways of getting to know Paris, perhaps even of finding that nameless ‘something’ she was conscious of looking for.

  Chapter Two

  ‘LIFE IS QUEER,’ Daphne wrote to Tod, soon after she arrived at Camposena.1 ‘I can’t make it out, I worry about things here that wouldn’t occur to me at home, and vice versa.’ Among the things she worried about was her own standing. At home, and in the circles in which the du Maurier family moved, she had never had any doubts about her own position. At Camposena, one of twenty-five girls, and together with Doodie the newest, she felt displaced. Most of the girls were English, with one or two Poles and Canadians, and so they knew what the du Maurier name stood for, but this gave Daphne little prestige. Nearly all the girls were the daughters of people of note, and the daughter of an actor-manager, even the most famous one of all, and one recently knighted, was nothing special. All her young life Daphne had thought she disliked her father’s fame, and the attention it brought her, but now she discovered with something of a shock that she loathed being virtually anonymous. What also worried her was that her French was not as good as she had believed, and she was deeply insulted by being put into the third of four classes.

  Another unpleasant surprise, and rather a rude awakening, was the discomfort of the school. Daphne liked to think she despised luxury – but then, to her, hot baths on demand and warm beds and a fire in her bedroom were necessities. In her first letter to her mother from Camposena she had reported how, on the journey over – with Miss Wicksteed herself acting as chaperone for Daphne and Doodie – she had been sure to ‘bag the best couch of course and poor old Wicksteed had to lie humped in a tiny space’. Once at Camposena, Miss Wicksteed had her revenge. Daphne was appalled by the cold. The place was ‘full of weird conservatories’ which were freezing and her bedroom was ‘bare and very cold just like a servant’s, and the drawers creak’. During the first week she did exercises to warm up before getting into bed wearing her fur coat. She had not slept because ‘cocks seemed to crow all night and the clock chimed every quarter of an hour’. Getting up in the mornings she was horrified that she was expected to wash in cold water and that the wash-basin was cracked. With dismay, she discovered girls had to make their own beds, something she had no idea how to do and had no intention of learning. Using all her du Maurier charm she soon had ‘a nice girl in the next room’ making hers. She didn’t like the food – ‘I scarcely eat anything without wanting to retch’ – but acknowledged this might be her own fault for being ‘too faddy’ and that really the food was perfectly palatable. But the biggest deprivation, worse than the lack of home comforts, was that she was only allowed to walk on her own in the not very extensive grounds of the school. It was quite a pretty garden, with statues in odd corners, but she felt confined in it. Wandering round it when she arrived she felt curiously depressed and it took a telegram from Gladys Cooper – ‘Fondest love darling, thinking of you, Glads’ – to cheer her up.

  It was her first experience of any kind of institutional living, of being part of any community other than her family. Most of the girls had come on to Camposena after boarding school and were used to all the things so disturbingly new to Daphne. They were also used to relating to one another. Daphne noted, derisively, how most girls went around in twos, ‘some soppy, with their arms entwined’. She wrote to her mother that ‘I’m a most objectionable girl to the others, I expect, because I make myself pleasant to the mistresses, especially Miss Wick. There’s nothing like currying favour if you want things done for you.’ She herself always saw through anyone who did that, and despised them accordingly, but she had no hesitation in doing it skilfully, and with great effect, herself. In no time she did indeed get things done: a fire in her bedroom, hot baths, and all on the grounds of precarious health. ‘I expect’, she wrote blithely to her mother, ‘the bill for extras will be huge.’ But what currying favour and exerting charm could not change were the rules and the timetable. These, she commented, were ‘absurd’, ‘OK for girls from boarding schools’ but not for her. It was ridiculous to have to get up at 7.15, report for prayers at 7.50, breakfast at 8, walk or practise music until 9.45 when lessons began, and lunch at the unbelievable hour of midday, and be summoned everywhere by the ‘great clashing of bells’. If it had not been for the regular trips to Paris – to the Comédie Française, the Opera, the Louvre, Versailles and so forth – she would not, she wrote, have thought it worth enduring these rules.

  Those outings meant everything to her. ‘Don’t you love Paris?’ she enthused to Tod, ‘with its cobbled streets, shrieking taxis and wonderful lights and chic little women and dago-like men2 with broad-brimmed trilby hats? I think that the Place de la Concorde at night, after it’s been raining, with all the lights, is too wonderful . . . it’s all quite divine.’ Paris was where she wanted to be, not stuck in school ‘with its petty intrigues and rather narrow outlook’ which made it ‘boring’. Not completely boring, however. From the moment she arrived Daphne had quickly detected that the teacher who seemed the most powerful was not Miss Wicksteed, so easy to curry favour with, but Mlle Fernande Yvon. At first, she described Mlle Yvon to her mother as ‘an alarming old hag’. She noticed how all the other girls seemed to have crushes on this teacher and therefore decided ‘I shall avoid her’. She wrote, darkly, ‘I know the type, she has favourites,’ and it certainly was not in her own character to compete to be a favourite. Within a month, she had reconsidered. It had become obvious to her that, hag or not, Mlle Yvon’s approval was vital if one was to have any prestige at all; and prestige, Daphne was mortified to acknowledge, mattered rather more to her than she had ever imagined.

  The plain truth was that although she judged most of her fellow pupils as ‘brainless types’ the few who were not sat at Mlle Yvon’s feet. She taught the top class and in the evenings they sat with her, an exclusive little group apart from the rest. It was an indication of how, in spite of being shy, Daphne could also be bold (and force herself to the kind of behaviour most shy people would not be able to contemplate) that one evening she simply took her place with this group though she was not entitled to. Mlle Yvon, amused, and sensing behind the superficial arrogance a great eagerness to be given her due, allowed Daphne to become part of the charmed circle. Soon she was the favourite, a position she greatly enjoyed. She wrote to Tod, ‘By the way, I’ve quite fallen for that woman I told you about, Mlle Yvon. She has a fatal attraction . . . she’s absolutely kind of lured me on and now I am coiled in the net.’ In case Tod should be in any doubt as to the meaning of this melodramatic announcement she was forthright in her estimate of Mlle Yvon’s sexual designs: ‘Venetian, I should think’ (‘Venetian’ being du Maurier code for ‘lesbian’). ‘She pops up to the bedroom at odd moments . . . and is generally divine. She’s most seductive when coming back from the opera. I get on the back seat with her and she puts her arm round me and makes me put my head on her shoulder, then sort of presses me! Ugh! it all sounds too sordid and low, but I don’t know, it gives one a sort of extraordinary thrill! I only hope I haven’t got Venetian tendencies.’ In fact, ‘Venetian tendencies’ were precisely what she realized she did have, though the reality was more complex than this. For six years, ever since, at the onset of puberty, she had had to acknowledge that there was no escape from being a girl, she had forced herself to lock up in a box the boy she had at heart thought herself to be.3 Attracted by Mlle Yvon, and feeling herself respond to her advances, she worried not only that she was ‘Venetian’ but that, after all, she was really a boy. Having ‘Venetian tendencies’ could only, in her opinion, mean just that: a woman who loved and was physically attracted to another woman must really be a man. This scared her and she fought her ‘tendencies’ hard. She might want to be male but she did not want to be ‘Venetian’. Her attitudes then were distinctly homophobic and she was repelled at the idea of being associated with homosexuals. The fact that her father despised homosexuals,4 who he felt were infiltrating the theatre, made her even more frightened of admitting she had any ‘Venetian’ feelings at all.

  The frankness of her letter to Tod illustrates very well Daphne’s remarkable ability to stand outside herself and realize exactly what was confusing her. She knew she was not ‘in love’ with Mlle Yvon, any more than she had been with Cousin Geoffrey, but she acknowledged the sexual implications of both encounters. Her body and her emotions seemed to her, as to many adolescents, quite separate. The strength of her physical reaction to being touched by Geoffrey or Mlle Yvon, even if they only ‘sort of press me’, surprised and excited her, but she knew that in her mind she felt quite cool and undisturbed. She wrote to Tod that she could see some of the girls were jealous and suspicious of her growing closeness to Mlle Yvon, and this made her uncomfortable, because she knew they were making the wrong assumptions. ‘When I next write,’ she promised Tod, ‘I expect the woman will have entirely dropped me, and I shall be languishing in despair!’ But there was no risk of that whether Mlle Yvon dropped her or not. It was all a game with nothing to lose. ‘It will be fun,’ she assured Tod, ‘when I get back for the holidays, imitating everyone here and laughing at it all. Even when I’m feeling most “épris” of Mlle Yvon, there is always something inside me laughing somewhere. I hope I never lose my sense of humour – it’s the saving of me here.’

  This sense of humour was of the du Maurier variety: mocking, sometimes jeering, often merciless, a touch cruel, and very easily misunderstood by those outside the family circle. Daphne’s contemporaries at Camposena were never quite sure whether some of her actions were funny or not. One day, a young curate came out from Paris to give religious instruction to those being prepared for confirmation. It was a hot afternoon and the class was held in the garden. Daphne stood on the fringe, listening avidly. Occasionally she would throw some clever question at the curate, who stammered in reply and found it difficult to cope. Suddenly, Daphne seized a wrought-iron chair and, advancing towards the curate, shouted she was going to bash him on the head and kill him. The young man cowered in front of her and Daphne started to laugh, saying that it was just as she had suspected – he had told them they were all going to Heaven when they died, but when he himself was threatened with death he was afraid. This proved, she laughed, that everything he said, all this promise of life eternal, was rubbish. The girls had hysterics, and Daphne’s daring was admired more than ever. But at the same time incidents like this did little to endear her to the others and she continued, though not unhappily, to be without close friends except for Doodie with whom she had arrived and who soon had new friends of her own. Certainly no one at Camposena thought of her as the shy girl she believed herself to be. On the contrary, the other girls, while admiring Daphne’s beauty – she was slim, blonde and strikingly attractive – never for one moment thought her solitary state was anything but her own choice. They saw no element of nervousness in her and had no idea how much it had cost her to force herself into Mlle Yvon’s circle.

  Originally, the plan had been that Daphne would spend only a term at Camposena but she stayed for three. This was entirely due to her growing dependence on Mlle Yvon who, by the end of that first term, had become ‘Ferdy’. When the school closed in July at the end of Daphne’s second term, for the long summer vacation, she was given permission to accept Ferdy’s invitation to accompany her to La Bourboule, in the Puy-de-Dôme, a quiet place in the Massif Central where Ferdy herself was going to take a ‘cure’. Daphne had always loved and thrived in the country and it would, both parents judged, be as good for her health as for her teacher’s. Muriel in particular had it firmly fixed in her head that Daphne was delicate and needed building up. She was far too thin and had regular bouts of bronchitis which were always worrying and suspected of being something more sinister. They were sorry Daphne would not be with them on their own family tour of northern Italy, but rather impressed that she had chosen instead what sounded like a studious vacation.

  The holiday with Ferdy was on the surface every bit as studious as it seemed. Daphne read almost the entire day, every day. What she read were the short stories of Katherine Mansfield and Maupassant (both in French and in translation). Katherine Mansfield influenced her enormously – she told Tod she probably would not have thought about trying to write at all if it had not been for reading her – but since coming to Camposena, Maupassant had become her greater love. The only diversion other than reading was taking the funicular up to Charlannes and having tea there. Otherwise, she wrote letters to her family and Tod, and talked to Ferdy.