The year, and the decade, ended with feelings of ‘nothing to look forward to’. Esther, who lived next door in a separate cottage, sprained her foot and then Ralph, her son, had to have a dental operation, so Daphne was managing on her own. As she sat in bed reading The Mayor of Casterbridge, a drip started coming through the ceiling. Soon the drip became a persistent thin stream and she was reminded of being in Yggy with Tommy, when leaks always seemed to happen above her head and not his. The builder would have to come and fix the roof: more expense. Pulling her bed into the middle of the room, she vowed she would get herself to the sunshine as soon as possible and find something to write.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  IN JANUARY 1970 Tessa was remarried – to David Montgomery, son of Field Marshal Montgomery, whom she had known for about a year – and Daphne was prepared to forget her disapproval of her divorce. ‘I was sorry when her first marriage came to grief,’ she wrote to Montgomery, ‘. . . but we cannot arrange our children’s lives for them.’ But her marriage put Tessa out of the running as a holiday companion, and Daphne turned to Kits and Olive, who agreed readily to join her in Crete in April. The choice of hotel was left to Kits, ‘whose tastes are somewhat fanciful like my father’s’, and he picked out the Minos Beach Hotel. She hoped it would not be ‘jet set . . . clothes always being a problem where I am concerned’. It was not jet set and Crete was her idea of perfection – ‘I would be happy to live and die there’. She loved the sun, the scenery and swimming, as well as enjoying it all in the company of her son and daughter-in-law. The three of them played the kind of games she had played with Carol Reed and then with her own children, scrutinizing people sitting in bars and restaurants and making up histories for them as well as mimicking them. Kits, the brilliant mimic, had her in hysterics, and she loved his undiminished sense of fun. The three of them made an interesting trio and Daphne was well aware of this. She liked the attention her beautiful daughter-in-law and handsome son attracted, and being the mother-figure appealed to her. It ‘made a bit of a life for Bing [herself], just watching everyone’.

  Back at Kilmarth, she began a short-story collection, but was aware that she was having to force herself to do so. She knew that if she stopped writing she had nothing to put in its place and that she could no longer afford to wait until the spirit genuinely moved her – she had to keep in practice. Whatever anyone thought of her books, whether they were scorned or sold in their millions, was irrelevant: what mattered was the act of writing. Beside this, nothing else compared. Her interest in her children and grandchildren was intense but it was not enough to sustain her without writing. So she set to and began working out ideas inspired by recent holidays. She had a story already written six years before in response to a request from Kingsley Amis, who was hoping to edit a collection of stories on a vaguely science fiction theme. She had been touchingly thrilled that a younger writer who was so successful should ask her to contribute, and even more delighted when he liked the story so much he sent her a telegram saying so. Her confidence in her own abilities was always so low that praise from such a source pleased her out of all proportion (and this exchange was the reason she had previously suggested sending books to Kingsley Amis for quotes). The story was ‘The Breakthrough’, and it had never appeared. ‘It covers me with confusion’, an embarrassed Kingsley Amis had written when she enquired, after a year, what had happened to his proposed collection to have to admit that ‘the SF series has totally broken down because of lack of support from writers . . .’ He returned the story, ‘which I admire very much’, with ‘great regret and chagrin’.

  ‘The Breakthrough’ was written before The House on the Strand and was in some ways a rehearsal for the novel. The story deals with experimental work in a laboratory in Suffolk and the idea that when people die there must be an untapped source of energy. A scientist prepares to release such energy from a young man, who will die of leukaemia, into the mind of a retarded child. ‘The Breakthrough’ is skilfully worked and has an atmosphere of chilling menace about it which Daphne greatly liked. Menace of one sort or another, more sinister than macabre this time, was to be the theme of the volume. ‘Don’t Look Now’1 (the phrase she often used herself, before launching into an entertaining fantasy about someone she was observing) was set in Venice. The plot turns on psychic twins (Daphne had seen elderly twins at Torcello) and a small girl who turns out to be a dwarf (again, she really had been surprised by such a mistake herself). The whole story evokes Venice at its most mysterious and depends for its success on the power of hallucination, mistaken identities and, of course, the revelation that the girl is a male dwarf and a murderer. These two stories, one written so much earlier and one very quickly after her holiday, caused her no trouble, but the others were more difficult.

  ‘Not After Midnight’ demonstrated how her liking for an intricate plot could lead her into complications which made her writing tortuous. It centred on an American she had seen in a bar who was ‘the spit of Silenos’ and this gave her the idea for a story revolving round the search by a drunken American and his wife for ancient remains. Drawn into it all is an unsuspecting homosexual teacher who has come to paint and who, in the end, becomes a victim. Long before she had finished this not very successful story, Daphne was taking the unusual step of ringing up her children and asking how on earth she could end it. ‘The Way of the Cross’, on the other hand, though not easy to write, worked out so well that it turned into a story long enough to be a novella. The idea behind it – a party of seven on a trip to Jerusalem from a cruise ship – was inspired by the Swan Hellenic tours. Each character is a type, but as the story develops each becomes a distinct individual and all of them, as they follow the Via Dolorosa, experience their own personal humiliation. In the end, they have all met the fate they most dread and only a small boy, grandson of one of the pilgrims, is left inviolate. Daphne was tempted, at one stage, to try turning it into a novel, but was worried that she could not maintain the tension.

  Tension featured heavily in another story, ‘A Borderline Case’, by far the most biographically revealing (this collection, unlike The Breaking Point and The Apple Tree, was not rooted in personal emotional experience with the exception of this story, but in general observation). ‘A Borderline Case’ had something of a history to it. Maj.-Gen. Eric Dorman-Smith,2 ‘Chink’, Tommy’s great friend, whom Daphne had first met in 1932 and been ‘menaced’ [attracted] by (as he was by her), had become involved with the IRA. While on holiday once in Ireland with Kits and Olive, Daphne had tried but failed to find him. In 1968, however, she had sent Vanishing Cornwall to his old address and it reached him. He replied, thanking her and sent her a poem as a tribute – ‘For Daphne, In Gratitude: Beauty Remembered’ – saying that the memory of her beauty still had ‘the power to disturb my pen’. In 1969, Chink died, and she felt free to write a story about a character, ex-British Army, who works for the IRA: a girl is searching for the man who has been her father’s friend. The feelings expressed by the girl echo those expressed by Daphne herself when Gerald died, and so the advice ‘only by hating can you purge away love’ takes on some obvious significance. The girl finds the man, makes love with him, and only after she has returned home realizes he was actually her real father. All this, wrote Daphne, was ‘purely imaginary’.

  Nowhere else in her work does Daphne have a daughter make love with her father, even though incestuous relationships are touched on, and nowhere else is the anguish of the father-daughter attraction so strongly described. But then incest interested her and she had begun to admit this openly, though in a way that was confusing and caused misunderstanding. In the 1969 radio interview with Wilfred De’Ath she had told him she thought people looked for partners who ‘resemble their family . . . the boy looks for someone like his mother or sister . . . the girl for someone like her father or brother . . . the whole thing is incestuous’. She thought ‘cleaving to family’ of vital importance but ‘not when young’: parents cleaving to children was ‘disastrous’, and possessive parents ‘dreadful’. Yet ‘A Borderline Case’ was not intended to be any kind of affirmation that incest was natural. What was natural, in her opinion, was the desire for closeness between family members because they were part of the same whole. She did not condone incest, but she did think that not being able to give free rein to incestuous feelings was some kind of tragedy. Everything she wrote, in both her letters and her fiction, indicated a very strong desire on her part, at one point, to enjoy with her father such a relationship which she considered quite normal and which she grew out of as most girls do. But she could not dismiss either the memory of her own feelings or, more importantly, the strength of Gerald’s own feelings towards her. This was what she meant by ‘the tragedy of incest’: that at a certain stage in growing up incestuous desires were normal but they could never be fulfilled, and therein lay the tragedy. Incest itself she found repugnant.

  The publication of these stories, entitled Not After Midnight, in July 1971, coincided with the first television interview Daphne ever gave. She had written to Liz Calder, in charge of publicity at Gollancz, that she wanted ‘no interviews please . . . I’ll do a tape for the Australian broadcast but anything else is out!’ Though not, it seemed, if it would give ‘my lad a leg up’. For Kits, to help his career, she was prepared to do what she had never done before, to expose herself to the kind of publicity she both dreaded and disapproved of. Kits’ film of Vanishing Cornwall had been a great success, running for six weeks at the Curzon Cinema in Mayfair as the second feature, and she now agreed to do a programme if the BBC would show Kits’ film later in the summer. ‘The bargain was struck,’ she wrote to her old friend Bunny Austin, adding that she sincerely hoped giving the lad a leg up would not result in ‘a leg down for the distinguished Dame’. In fact, to her own great surprise, she found she enjoyed being part of a television team – ‘in a moment it was as though we were a little group working with and for each other . . . it really did open my eyes’. She realized that what she had suspected for some time now was true: solitary by nature she might be, but the company of others could stimulate and amuse her and please her important ‘No. 2’ self. ‘It made me think of the relationship that can exist with an army platoon,’ she wrote. Nor did nervousness trouble her as much as she had thought it might, or ‘worries about seeming a fool’. It helped that Kits’ friend Wilfred De’Ath was the interviewer and, though she was putting on a great act, this was not obvious to viewers. To them she appeared charming and relaxed and most of all amazingly fit and athletic, as she strode across the cliff top, leaving De’Ath, some thirty years her junior, visibly panting. The only real drawback was that she ended up quite exhausted and in need of another holiday.

  The programme was shown on BBC 2 on 31 August and Kits’ film the following Friday. The bargain had been kept, but she was annoyed that ‘they have cut down Kits’ film . . . to make it fit into half an hour which will ruin it. You can’t have the last word with the BBC – they think they know best.’ It was a great success, though critics thought De’Ath had let her off very lightly indeed, and brought her many admiring letters from fans and friends. Beverley Nichols wrote to her that she had been enchanting and would get many offers of marriage. What she did get were letters from admirers asking for her photograph and exclaiming over ‘my beauty at the advanced age of sixty-four . . . all due to having my teeth fixed . . . hurrah for aids to beauty’. One letter, from ‘a bachelor of forty’, who sent a snap of himself leaning against a white Rolls-Royce, said she had seemed ‘bewitchingly naughty . . . and delightfully refreshing’. This man also said he never took cream in his coffee – a reference to the story she had told in the television interview about how she and her sisters had always thought men who did so were effeminate. She was very amused by this letter and rather unwisely wrote back ‘suggesting we form a black coffee brigade together’. Her correspondent thought it ‘a magnificent idea’ and admired her ‘sexy handwriting’. He was, he said, ‘willing if you are’. His next letter, written on Cats Protection League paper, was from ‘a nearby tavern on Par beach’ and requested an assignation on the cliff. She had the sense to realize she had let the joke go too far and did not reply, but the incident demonstrated to her how potentially vulnerable she was, living where she did. Esther was next door, but she was alone in the house most of the day and all night, and on her walks she was very easy to spot and track for anyone who wished to do either.3

  This had never troubled her, even at Menabilly, which was much more hidden away, but now it began to, just a little. One day two men ‘came round the door asking if I would vote for them to go off on some Youth Travel Association . . . order a case of wine or take out a subscription’. She refused, but promptly phoned a neighbour to warn her to ‘be on your guard’. When Esther was on holiday – and she was noticeably reluctant for Esther to go on holiday – Daphne found herself thinking ‘if I fainted I wouldn’t be found for days later’. Once, when a storm brought a tree down on to the telephone wires and her car was out of action at the same time, she realized how cut off she was. But this did not encourage her to think about moving ‘somewhere more suitable to my years’. On the contrary, she was adamant that she would never move, never go to live with her children and never have anyone living with her. Fending for herself was something she was quite determined to do, though she admitted that when Esther was away she found ‘swabbing floors, emptying dustbins and cooking’ exhausting. ‘Don’t you wish,’ she joked to Foy, ‘we still had slaves?!’

  The television interview marked the beginning of a new attitude towards her own privacy. She still wished to retain it, and would certainly never play the publicity game to the extent of attending literary lunches or book-signing sessions or going on tour, but she was more receptive to requests for interviews. Journalists began to be tolerated, and those who came were agreeably surprised to find how affable and lively she could be, not at all the cold, remote, aloof, reclusive person of her public image. Afterwards she would comment how worn out she was, ‘completely drained’, when the interviewer could have sworn she had been at ease and enjoying herself: it was always an effort, always a performance, and when she came ‘off stage’, the more convincingly casual she had been, the greater the fatigue. But the seventies were the decade when she finally began to understand how much publishing had changed and how much certain types of publicity could help to sell books, which she very much wanted to do. Playing the game a little made her more open about her expectations too. The Gollancz traveller4 for Cornwall, who had always found her the most modest and undemanding of authors, began to notice signs of discontent about the sales and marketing of her books. Penguin annoyed her even more than Gollancz and she finally decided, against all advice, to move to Pan, even though Giles Gordon, who handled the negotiations on behalf of Gollancz, warned her rather cunningly that Pan would treat her ‘as a bestselling romantic novelist of the Georgette Heyer, Mary Stewart variety’ when her books were ‘more serious than that . . . [you] are now a prescribed author for English literature exams’. But the switch to Pan was about money, not ego. The Penguin licence on seven of her novels would run out in October 1972 and they were offering £15,000 for the renewal as against Pan’s £75,000. Under pressure, Penguin went up to £30,000, but the lure of the larger amount was too great to resist.

  The publicity she did in 1971 prepared her for doing even more – ‘perhaps’ – for the new novel she was writing. She might have in her, she thought, ‘one last hit’, and she wanted to make the most of it. For the first time since she had written The Parasites in 1949 she had an idea for ‘a funny novel . . . mocking everything’. Wit and humour were not associated with her writing and it struck her as odd that she, who was always ready to laugh and loved making and hearing jokes, and adored amusing anecdotes, had never let this side of herself find expression in the books. She now wanted to have a stab at ‘a mock-up of what this country may be like in the mid-seventies’. She started Rule Britannia in January 1972 and ‘worked like blazes’, commenting that she had ‘never cracked so hard on a book in my life, not even in my young days’.5 By mid-February she was writing to her granddaughter that this new novel was ‘very funny, at least I think so . . . it takes the mickey out of everything, including us as a family’. The heroine is a grandmother-figure, based on Gladys Cooper, who takes in various maladjusted boys and looks after them, helped by a housekeeper and by her granddaughter. The plot revolves round the unification of Britain and America and the arrival of the American fleet. The locals (it is set in Cornwall) resist Americanization. The grandmother is an energetic, unconventional character and great play is made of her eccentricity.

  Daphne was quite convinced she had pulled off a fast and funny piece of satire and showed none of the usual diffidence about her work. She was also quite proud at the thought that it might cause some offence in America – ‘perhaps one could call it controversial?’ – and that it was ‘disturbing . . . good, I like to disturb people’.6 She thought it would be ‘popular autumn reading’ and was pleased Gollancz showed faith with a first print-run of 50,000 – 10,000 more than for her last novel, though still nowhere near the great days of automatic runs of 100,000 and more. It was therefore a shock to her when the reception of the novel was a chastening affair. Not only were the reviews unenthusiastic – or ‘mixed’, as Daphne described them – but there was an air of embarrassment about them on both sides of the Atlantic. Nobody wanted to savage Dame Daphne du Maurier, but there was a general consensus that, at best, this new novel was pedestrian and, at worst, it was plain silly. At Gollancz, there were those who had known this was true, but nobody dared say so – Daphne was still the star in their firmament and they were afraid she might go elsewhere.

  It took her old friend Frank Price to speak out. He wrote her a storming letter saying he did not like Rule Britannia one little bit. The basic premise was ridiculous, the jokes feeble, the characterization hopeless and the dialogue limp. He wondered why Gollancz had not saved her from herself – ‘or do your editors just take your manuscripts and say: “It’s Daphne du Maurier”’. If he didn’t esteem and love her so much ‘I would just have lied to you and said it was marvellous’. Others did just that. Nowhere did she express any doubt as to the merits of Rule Britannia, the last and the poorest novel she ever wrote. It was making money – Pan had included it in their deal and boosted their offer accordingly by £25,000 – and anyway it had only been ‘a bit of fun’, not to be ranked with The Scapegoat or any of the others where she had been attempting to write something deeper.