Another blessing was television. Daphne had begun to be a devotee of this medium in 1956, when she first had a television installed, and now that Tommy was obliged to sit still for long periods it became more important than ever – it was another ‘routes’, usually indulged in from seven till eleven in the evening. Tommy liked Grandstand, anything to do with sport and programmes like The Brains Trust, whereas Daphne loved anything with fast car chases and thrillers. There was no more settling down either side of the fire and reading – now it was on with the television and anyone staying in the house was simply assumed to want to watch too. If they didn’t want to, they could ‘lump it’, Daphne said cheerfully, and always warned friends before they came that this would be the case. All memories of being irritated that her grandchildren ‘do nothing but watch that wretched TV’ were forgotten and she was quite amused and proud of her own addiction to ‘honky’ programmes. Anyone telephoning during them was ignored and she often instructed friends ‘don’t telephone after seven as I shall be watching TV’. It made her interested in trying to adapt her own work for television, or have it adapted, and also in Kits’ plans for TV films. She spent the winter doing ‘nothing but scribble a draft script for a film about Yeats’ which she hoped Kits would make.

  Somehow the two of them staggered through until Christmas and then the family, when they came to stay, saw at once that something would have to be done. There was their father, in obvious agony half the time, and their mother being stoical. As soon as the holiday was over, Tommy was finally persuaded by them to go to London to see a specialist. In the first week in January 1965 he was admitted to the Lindo wing of St Mary’s, Paddington, where his left foot was amputated. Daphne stayed at the Great Western Hotel next door and never left his side, except to go and visit Kits, who was living comparatively near, for an hour each day. She hated the hospital atmosphere, however kind the doctors and nurses, and when Tommy said he thought he would never get better until he was home, she quite agreed. But he was sixty-eight years old and had just had major surgery, so the alien environment had to be endured for a little longer. Sitting with him most of the day and evening she was struck by how wretchedly thin he had become and how drawn and weary his face. ‘Life has been hell,’ she wrote to a friend,’. . . I don’t know if I am coming or going.’ Her own weariness and distress were as nothing compared to the ‘hideous pain’ her ‘poor Moper’ had endured. He was worrying about never being able to sail again, in spite of now having a motor-boat, and not being able to drive. She assured him they would be able to adapt a car to his needs and had a friend search out a three-litre coupé, a green Rover, which could be duly altered.

  Three weeks after the operation they went home together by train, travelling in a closed carriage with a nurse in attendance. It was a journey as different as possible from any other they had ever made across the Tamar Bridge – there was no whoop of joy this time or tossing of caps as they entered Cornwall. Instead, Tommy was sedated to help him stand the journey, and Daphne sat silent in the darkened carriage, listening to the sudden rackety noise as the train trundled on to Brunel’s bridge. The rain lashed against the windows and when they arrived at Par the afternoon was as dark as night. It was a sad home-coming, but there was relief, too, in being once more in Menabilly. Tommy continued to be brave but it was too much to expect. The ordeal of being fitted with an artificial limb hung over him and he was ‘very depressed’, wrote Daphne, ‘. . . and now feeling the psychological effect of the second operation’. At the end of February, he was taken to Plymouth to have the first fitting for his artificial foot, but she could not go with him because she was feeling ‘very much under the weather’. She thought it was ‘my usual spring bug’, but it turned out to be jaundice, and Tommy worried about catching it – ‘I’ve had quite enough illness and bed to last me a long time’. She stayed in her room, in bed, and he stayed in his.

  They were both in a desperate plight. Daphne vomited repeatedly and had hardly the strength to lift her head from the pillow, while Tommy struggled to drag himself around, feeling wretched in every way. They were well looked after by Esther and two nurses, but neither seemed to be recovering. Neither ate nor slept much. Daphne wondered if she would ever walk again through the Menabilly woods to Pridmouth beach and in her mind’s eye saw the stormy sea and wished she could feel the spray on her cheeks – then, she might feel better. Thinking of Tommy, in an even worse state than she was, was an additional torment. On 10 March, he managed to scrawl a letter to his sister Grace telling her he had contracted bronchitis on top of everything else and commented sadly that ‘it would really be more dignified to fade quietly out’. He felt completely finished and even scribbling a few lines was too much – ‘it’s quite amazing how tired one gets just writing’. During the day, his mind seemed to wander and at night he alarmed the nurses by trying to sleepwalk. Daphne, when told this, remembered how his mother had become confused like this just before she died, and she had ‘an awful apprehension’ something was going to happen.

  On Saturday night, 13 March, feeling a little better than she had done for three weeks, she got up and went through to Tommy’s room to say goodnight. He told her he dreaded the night because he could not sleep, and seemed particularly restless, but she was weak and tired herself and could only soothe his brow and promise him the nurse would give him a sleeping pill. In the early hours of the next morning she was wakened by the nurse, who said she was alarmed at General Browning’s condition and had rung for the doctor. Daphne went to him and saw at once that his face had changed. She bent over him and could not hear any breathing. The nurse tried to resuscitate him, but he was dead.

  All three children came at once and afterwards she marvelled at how each of them had surprised her by demonstrating the very qualities she had not realized they possessed. Tessa seemed so tender and emotional, and it was with her that she wept; Flavia was calm and efficient, and she felt she could leave her to organize everything; and Kits, always appearing to live for the moment, just as she wanted him to, and to be flippant and full of life, was suddenly serious and talked immediately of preserving his father’s belongings. And in her staff, too, she knew she was fortunate – ‘My good Esther,’ she wrote,’ . . . and her husband and the Burts, it is rare these days to have people so devoted, like in the old days on an estate, sparing themselves nothing.’ To everyone’s surprise, she ordered a post-mortem, which showed ‘the clot entered his heart, also the arteries everywhere were poor, he could not have had many months ahead’. His sister Grace was given the fullest description of what she felt had happened and of her own state of mind. It was her firm belief, Daphne wrote, that ‘these things get handed down . . . I swear it is handed down . . . we are born with the particles in the blood that will finally predispose us to disease. I think this will be medically proved this century. More and more I go “off” the twentieth century “put everything down to psychology” thesis, and back to probably what the Greeks may have believed, chemistry is all important.’ Already, she had decided Tommy’s ‘bad bouts of gloom’ and ‘his tum throughout his life’, also his ‘urge to drink’, were all due to ‘physical and chemical’ reasons – ‘a deficiency of some sort’.

  There was no grand funeral because Tommy ‘loathed memorial services, funerals, and the lowering into tombs’. He never discussed death ‘though he was a Christian and did not fear it’. Once, when she had urged him to say how he would like his mortal remains dealt with, he had said he would like a Viking’s funeral. This appealed to her and she was tempted to have his body put into ‘Yggy III’ and sent, all aflame, out to sea, but ‘I just can’t cope’. Instead, there was a very private cremation, which she did not attend, just as she had not attended her father’s funeral – ‘I can’t face it’ – and later she took the casket of ashes and scattered them round ‘Yggy I’, ‘at the end of the lawn, by my Hut, where the daffodils grow, and where latterly he used to sit in the sun, and it was a lovely day . . . and peaceful, and the dogs came too and cocked, which he would have approved of and laughed at, and it was all perfectly happy and somehow “routes”’.

  But ‘routes’ had been changed forever, and she knew it. ‘We have been so much together latterly,’ she wrote, ‘since the retirement, that everything had become geared to him.’ She saw with frightening clarity ‘the thing of empty rooms, etc., etc., months ahead that in one moment have become without point’. What shocked her most was how shocked she found she was. Over and over in her novels and stories she had written death scenes, often with great zest, and yet nothing in her imagination had prepared her for the reality. No other death had affected her like this, not even her father’s or Gertrude Lawrence’s. The death of a parent, however young, seemed to her ‘in the natural order of things’ in the way that the death of a husband did not, and she had not witnessed Gertie’s death, so that it went on seeming unbelievable. She felt now that she knew ‘what suffering means’, and what she was suffering from was not only distress at the death itself but from guilt. Throughout the vicissitudes of her married life, and in spite of the breakdown of one side of it, she had always known she loved Tommy even when she appeared to despise him, or to be unbearably irritated by him. Now he was dead, a sense of waste as well as grief overwhelmed her – she could not bear to remember what a mess both of them had made of so many of their years together. ‘I have got to try and forget the last days,’ she wrote, ‘because the sense of loss is terrible.’ So was the sense of guilt, and the only way to deal with that was to concentrate on the good and happy times they had had. ‘I want my memories to go back to the time when he was well and strong,’ she wrote to Foy, ‘and I think they will.’

  They did, with great and rather startling rapidity. Daphne exerted all the tremendous willpower of which she was capable in wiping out the pain and difficulties she had experienced in her marriage and bringing to the fore the happiness which Tommy had once brought her. She was soon seeing him in her mind only as the handsome guardsman who had swept her off her feet, and banishing forever the bad-tempered, complaining husband who shuffled around the house looking pathetic. She saw him even now in some heavenly yachting harbour waiting for her in Yggy and saying ‘Come on, duck, jump in, whatever kept you?’, and the thought made her smile and feel cheered. She didn’t want to be like Queen Victoria, and refused to wear all black – if she did, Tommy would ‘peer down from Heaven’, ask what on earth she had got on and say, ‘she must be mad’.3 This belief that he was somewhere waiting for her was the greatest possible comfort, but she found she couldn’t make any plans. ‘One’s job is over, and one has to begin anew,’ she wrote, ‘but how?’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  THE TRIBUTES PAID to her husband on his death were very important to Daphne. She wanted his qualities both recognized and appreciated, and was not a widow who pushed aside condolences. Maureen Baker-Munton, who came down to help her with the shoals of letters which poured in, and who replied to many of them on Daphne’s behalf, was impressed by how carefully Daphne attended to the expressions of sympathy and by how many she replied to personally. But at the same time she was capable of seeing how absurdly inappropriate some of the letters were and, as after her father’s death, was not so grief-stricken that the farcical side of it all could not amuse her. One letter began: ‘I once met your husband forty years ago in the Post Office,’ she told Grace Browning, and another: ‘I must warn you that it won’t get better as the months pass, but worse.’ She could hear ‘Tommy saying sourly, “Why doesn’t the bloody woman go and cut her throat?”’

  But most of the letters touched her and were a real comfort – ‘Such tributes! I feel like Lady Churchill.’ It mattered very much that a telegram had arrived from the Queen and another from Prince Philip, as well as several more from other members of the Royal Family. It mattered almost as much that those who had served with Tommy in the war and knew his worth as a soldier should write and say so – General Eisenhower and General Montgomery in particular. Some of the letters from ordinary soldiers impressed her greatly – she liked to think Tommy had been popular – and occasionally someone would catch the spirit of him with phrases like ‘He had the heart of a child’ and ‘A true knight, in the oldest sense’. The formal obituaries were all read and noted for length, prominence and tone, with comments scribbled across them. One newspaper headed its obituary with ‘Boy was a Giant’, and across it she wrote, ‘All these eulogies won’t bring him back. RIP.’ No, but they did console her, and her pride in Tommy’s achievements helped to sustain her.

  Some of the letters surprised her with their warmth or perception. Paddy Puxley wrote, a kind letter from a kind woman whose life she sometimes thought she had ruined. And Philip Rashleigh, whom she had been determined to think of as cold and unfeeling, wrote movingly of how he had met her husband in 1945 and had been amazed by his ‘broad smile and most enlivening handshake and his very friendly welcome to a junior officer’. This sort of recognition of Tommy’s worth was important to her, but so was the realization of what his death would mean to her. Ellen Doubleday wrote that although Daphne had always been ‘a lonely soul’ she had had Tommy coming and going. Now, truly alone, adjusting would be hard. Ellen, of course, knew because she had had to adjust herself after her own husband’s death. She remembered how swiftly Daphne had responded to her need at the time, and was anxious to offer the same support to her friend now. But Daphne wanted to be by herself for the moment. The distinction between being lonely and alone was subtle and was causing her some difficulty. It was true, she had indeed always been a lonely soul, but she had liked it and had always resented the interruption of her solitary life. Scheming to get more time on her own had been one of the main preoccupations of her adult life and she knew she had resented bitterly those who thwarted this desire. But now she very quickly saw that what Ellen had said was true: there was a difference between being a lonely soul and being alone. She felt curiously adrift and wrote of being ‘suspended in time’, of feeling ‘weightless’ and also ‘not really here’. Some of this was due to shock, and some to the after-effects of jaundice, but there was also a slight feeling of fear. She had been married for nearly thirty-three years, and whatever the circumstances of that marriage, it had been a partnership. Now, it was over and she had to adjust to the change.

  All her thoughts about widowhood were clear and sensible.1 One acquaintance wrote to her that she knew how she felt, because when her own husband died she had realized that ‘I was always his puppet, and now he is not pulling the strings any more I am still’. This seemed to Daphne a horrifying admission and one she would never think of making. She had never been a puppet and she was certainly not now ‘still’. She knew her life was not over and that grief had not made her feeble or apathetic. But she was shaken and knew that a period of stability was vitally necessary. People who urged her to go away at once for a long holiday annoyed her intensely, and she regretted having urged a holiday on Ellen after Nelson died. ‘At the moment,’ she wrote to Ellen, a month after Tommy’s death, ‘I am neither physically nor emotionally ready for a trip anywhere . . . I tire easily and would not enjoy travelling anymore than you wanted to go anywhere after Nelson died. My God, how you stuck me in Paris and Florence passes my belief. All I could think of was wanting to kiss your hands, and not only your hands. If anyone tried that on me I’d murder them! (But then that was always the case with me).’

  Those who advised moving right away from her home annoyed her even more. Both bits of advice she felt instinctively were quite wrong. Her surroundings soothed her, she liked to walk where Tommy had walked and to sit where they had sat together. She felt his presence and had no desire to flee from it. It was precious. As for holidays, those would come, but not until she had more energy to organize them. She did not want to be among strangers, who could not understand, and therefore be obliged to make an effort for their sake. She was, she wrote to Foy, two months later, ‘settling to the emptiness . . . it does not seem so overpowering now the summer weather has come. I come and go about the house quite cheerfully and everything is “routes” after all. What folly it is when people up sticks at once when bereaved and take themselves to a different milieu. I wonder what they hope to find.’

  What she hoped to find herself, eventually, was a greater freedom for her ‘No. 2’. In a questionnaire2 she had answered two years before, she had written beside ‘What are your unfulfilled ambitions?’ – ‘I would like to have climbed mountains and travelled a lot in remote places.’ Now there was no reason why she could not do both. Another freedom she wanted for herself was to be more of a grandmother. The grandchildren could come and make as much noise as they liked without her having to worry that this would annoy Tommy. This was something of a delusion – the noise had annoyed her as much as him – but she sincerely felt that her role as matriarch would now be more fulfilling. The fact that Kits and Olive were expecting their first child three months after Tommy’s death went a long way towards making the immediate future brighter. When Kits rang to announce the birth of Frederick Kevin du Maurier Browning in June, she was overjoyed. She didn’t feel up to travelling to see the baby, but Kits drove down with him and she paid him the highest compliment possible: he was just like Tommy. The beginning of a new generation of Brownings just as Tommy died seemed to her wonderfully significant, a passing of one life into another, a reminder that Jung’s biological continuity was what she believed in and must hold on to. She felt that Olive (now nicknamed ‘Hacker’) was a good mother and a good wife and her son was secure. All she worried about was his future prosperity – ‘Olive will soon be serving teas,’ she joked.

  Then suddenly, just as she was announcing ‘I have adapted myself better than I had expected,’ an old anxiety resurfaced. There were four and a half years of her lease on Menabilly still to run and she had paid a deposit on the lease of Kilmarth, the dower house of Menabilly, but now Philip Rashleigh suggested to her that since the Kilmarth tenants had left, and it was empty, perhaps she would like to give up Menabilly and take up residence there herself, leaving him free to move into Menabilly. What Daphne herself wanted was a renewal of the Menabilly lease for fifteen years and permission to build a dower house in its grounds at the end of that. At first, Philip Rashleigh appeared to agree to the renewal of the lease if she gave up Kilmarth, but then it turned out this was not his intention at all: he wanted her to move into Kilmarth. Daphne asked him to come and discuss the whole matter, and gave a dramatic account of what transpired. ‘I said . . . “You do want to come to live here, don’t you?” Stiffly, he replied, “In the course of time, yes” (why not say “I can’t wait. It’s my life” as I would have done).’ She said she had then tried to discuss Kilmarth but he had said he was not prepared to discuss it. This enraged her – ‘This abrupt stiff-necked pomposity of his attitude so confounded me that there was nothing to be done.’ It was then suggested to her that the Menabilly lease could be renewed for seven years if she paid for the demolition of the wing which had been falling down for ages. She felt ‘further conversation was obviously as hopeless as when the Russians sat round the table at UNO vetoing every proposal. I even said to Philip, “This is being just like Vietnam or something,” – not a flicker of a smile in response.’ She took him to the door, ‘longing to plant a kick in his posterior’.3