He convinced her it was all a matter of iron discipline and she vowed she was going to impose a rigid working routine on herself. But, apart from jolly lunches at the Embassy, the summer brought a more tempting and dangerous distraction. No real work was done, because she had a suitor in whom she was interested. The suitor was male. Daphne, in spite of her love for Ferdy, which had by no means ended, could not suppress an interest in men too. She found that she was so attractive herself that men flirted with her and that, when they did so, she often felt the beginnings of a sexual response similar to that she had felt with her cousin Geoffrey. The boy could sometimes be shut up in the box inside her, it seemed, without causing any strain. In the summer of 1926 her mysterious suitor certainly believed her to be attracted to him and had no suspicions that there was any boy in her at all. What he saw was a young woman of nineteen who had about her a strangely appealing air of vulnerability. She was pretty in a classic English way – perfect complexion, enormous blue eyes, thick fair hair, delicate features, slender figure – and yet there was something elusive and secretive about her which decidedly did not belong to the average girl. She was tremendous fun to be with – quick, intelligent, responding instantly to jokes and easily able to share in witty repartee. She was too original and unusual to be labelled sophisticated – though her clothes at the time, heavily influenced by her mother’s excellent taste, were very chic – and yet she was too well versed in the theatrical life to be naïve. In du Maurier code, she was undoubtedly ‘a menace’ (attractive), and her unidentified suitor was very ‘menaced’ indeed.

  At the end of June, this man sent Daphne a letter dated ‘3.20 am, Tuesday’ to say that he had ‘just got home from leaving you to your bluebells – very late – very quiet – I never want to wake up from the trance into which I shot suddenly. Don’t ever wake me and don’t put it in your diary – oh, that diary! Dangerous, indiscreet and stupid.’ This mysterious gentleman expected, it seems, to meet Daphne on Wednesday, by which time he vowed his longing for her would have made him ‘forty years older, stumbling along’. Rather curiously, he begged her to ‘be happy – rather young, than old and wise’. He knew she was off to France soon, to Trébeurden, in Brittany (where she was to join Ferdy for a holiday), and he could hardly bear the thought of this separation.

  Once in Brittany, safe with Ferdy, she wrote a poem on the notepaper of the Grand Hotel de la Plage in which her feelings about the man she had left behind were neatly analysed. It began:

  If to be happy one must needs be chaste

  Dull and neglected, middle-class and kind,

  Surrounded by a garden and four walls

  Croquet, and a tennis court behind,

  Surely one would choose then to be sad . . .

  and ended:

  I fear you are too faithful to be false

  And that I shall see you in a while

  Fashioning for children nursery rhymes

  Or listening to a sentimental waltz.

  However, you have a certain twisting smile

  That forces one to think of you at times.

  What she was thinking about in particular was the day she had spent in June with him-of-the-twisted-smile, the day at the end of which he had written her that unsigned letter. On the back of this letter, Daphne wrote another poem, entitled ‘Richmond Park’:

  ‘Oh, we played halma,7 talked, and read,

  After all, one has to live.’

  This is what I vaguely said

  To those who were inquisitive.

  But more beautiful, less drear,

  Was the vision in my mind

  A greater risk, a happy fear,

  Halma of another kind,

  Crushed ferns amidst a haze of blue –

  The sun, egg sandwiches – and you.

  What precisely had happened among the bluebells and ferns of Richmond Park that June day was never elaborated upon, but Daphne’s desire for excitement, for ‘a greater risk’, for life to be something other than ‘middle-class and kind’ was obvious. But no sooner had she involved herself with this man, however lightly, than she was off to be with Ferdy. She spent her time swimming, often naked as she preferred (always having a complete lack of self-consciousness in this particular respect), walking and reading: the mixture as before but with one vital difference. Removed from London, with Edgar’s advice ringing in her ears, she was determined to finish a short story which satisfied her before she went home. And she did so. By the time she returned to London she had three stories completed, and felt quite triumphant that she was on her way to achieving something at last.

  Chapter Three

  THE SHORT STORIES Daphne wrote in Brittany, and for the next three years, all have one striking thing in common: the male characters are thoroughly unpleasant. They are bullies, seducers and cheats. The women, in contrast, are pitifully weak creatures, who are endlessly dominated and betrayed, never capable of saving themselves and having only the energy just to survive. The settings of these first stories, most of which were published in magazines, are often Paris, but a Paris the author did not know well. The tone of all the stories is cynical and there is an obsession with the life of the working-class girl, often a prostitute. The thread that binds all the early stories together is one of total disillusionment with the relationship between men and women – they are bleak, bitter and sad, not at all the sort of stories which might have been expected to come from someone with Daphne’s early history. Yet, in a way, these cynical stories could be said to reflect very accurately her secret feelings about her parents’ marriage which had troubled her for so long. Gerald was no bully but she certainly saw him as a cheat. Mo was not a pitiful weak creature, but it seemed to Daphne that she was indeed betrayed. Her anger with her father went into these stories, however obliquely, and so did her despair at her mother’s position, even if it was a position Mo herself did not acknowledge. There was nothing, by the late 1920s, that Daphne did not know about Gerald’s philandering and, though tales of his exploits, which were common currency among the theatrical set, did not make her despise him, or turn against him, they did make her believe that sex was the cause of all the difficulty she saw in the relationships between men and women.

  But if these stories were cynical in tone they were also atmospheric, with a strong sense of place. This, from the beginning of her writing life, fascinated Daphne. If she was describing a scene, she wanted readers to be there. ‘La Sainte-Vierge’, the first story she completed in Brittany (though it was not the first published), has atmosphere, if little else, to recommend it. The setting is the countryside, near the sea, and in the very first paragraph its atmosphere is strongly established:

  It was hot and sultry, that oppressive kind of heat where there is no air, no life. The trees were motionless and dull, their drooping leaves colourless with summer dust. The ditches smelt of dead ferns and long-dried mud, the grasses of the field were blistered and brown. The village seemed asleep. No one stirred among the far scattered cottages on the hillside, strange uneven cottages, huddled together for fear of loneliness, with white walls and no windows, and small gardens massed with orange flowers.

  The story itself is about a young woman married to a fisherman who is ignorant, unintelligent and betraying her without her knowledge. The reader’s sympathy is hardly engaged at all because the woman herself seems as despicable as her husband in her avowal that there are no ‘depths of degradation’ to which she would not sink for his sake. In the end she is tricked by her husband and her intense religious faith, but rather than pitying her the author appears to invite scorn.

  As soon as she arrived home, Daphne showed this story, and the other two, to Gerald. There was no doubt that she wanted his approbation, but showing him her work was another little test along the lines of showing him ‘Rain’. Would he think ‘La Sainte-Vierge’ ‘sordid’ too? Would he pronounce it not the sort of thing a jeune fille should write? Gerald, although dismayed by the cynicism of the story, had the sense to realize that what was important was that Daphne had completed something to her satisfaction and might well be launched on the writing career he had wished for her and to which she herself aspired. He launched into a familiar paean of praise of his father, emphasizing once more how like George du Maurier Daphne was, and predicting that she, too, would one day write novels as great as Trilby. But novels were not something his daughter felt she could yet attempt. She resolved to go on with the short stories until she had enough to form a collection, and at the same time tried to write a play in blank verse.

  It annoyed her that, just as she was settling down to writing for at least an hour a day in the little room above the Cannon Hall garage, she was required to go with her mother and sisters on a tour of Cornwall in an attempt to buy a house which could be used for holidays. Normally, she would have jumped at this opportunity to get out of London, but for once she was reluctant to go. It seemed to her that whenever she tried to discipline herself her family worked equally hard to distract her, and it could only mean that nobody took her writing seriously. What was more to the point, if a holiday home was to be bought she would rather it were in France. Much as she had loved Cornwall on the family’s two holidays there, when she was five and ten,1 she wondered what it could have to offer compared with France.

  What it had to offer was Fowey. Daphne’s first view of this little town was dramatic. The du Mauriers drove down the startlingly steep hill into Bodinnick and saw Fowey across the estuary, spread out along the waterfront with woods behind. The houses, painted grey and white, with the occasional touch of blue and pink and yellow, were all different shapes and ages and, hugging the sea so closely, gave a first impression of some Mediterranean village. The sky was blue, the clouds moving swiftly across it, and there was an exuberance about the scene which immediately lifted Daphne’s spirits. Fowey is a working port and she could see ships, some of them enormous, chugging their ponderous way up the estuary from the open sea with all the white-sailed boats scattering before them. The whole scene, from the top of the Bodinnick hill, was vibrant and exhilarating. By the time the du Mauriers had reached the bottom and found that opposite the inn in Bodinnick there was a house for sale, Daphne’s fascination was complete.

  Fortunately, Muriel was equally charmed. The house, which had once been part of a boatyard, was bought that autumn out of the proceeds of The Ringer, and renamed Ferryside, since it was literally beside the ferry across to Fowey. Compared to the houses Daphne had already lived in, Ferryside was modest and small. It was, in fact, rather ramshackle and needed a great deal of work, but far from being daunted, Muriel saw this as a challenge she would enjoy. It was the position of the house which was its chief attraction: it stood almost over the water which rushed dangerously past the front wall. There was virtually no garden beyond a strip of grass, which bore traces of being regularly submerged, and a few lilac bushes. The house is cut into the hillside behind, and anyone could have told at a glance that damp would be a major problem. But the romantic appeal of this unusual house far outweighed practical drawbacks for the du Mauriers, and they were thrilled with the views of the sea from all the windows. The timbers of the floors and ceilings were ancient, and the shape of the rooms, spread out on two floors connected by small staircases, and with additional bedrooms under the eaves, was irregular. Muriel saw at once the possibility of converting it into something original. Daphne saw the possibility of escape: she was filled with an absolute conviction that, if only she could live at Ferryside on her own, she could be both successful and happy.

  It was three years before that escape came about, and during those years Daphne changed considerably. On the surface, back in London, life went on as usual that winter of 1926. Daphne went on trying to write for an hour a day – still the short stories and blank-verse play – but there was the same constant pressure to enjoy herself and become caught up in the parties, first nights, and holidays abroad. Some of these holidays were too tempting to refuse. Who could stay in a dismal little room above a garage trying to write if invited, begged and even half-bribed into going to join the Edgar Wallace family on a skiing holiday in Switzerland? There was a side of Daphne, as there is of even the most studious and earnest nineteen-year-old, which longed for fun – and fun was what the winter sports party staying at the Palace Hotel in Caux promised. To her own surprise and pleasure, Daphne discovered she had no problems fitting in – this was not, after all, school, and she got on well with the young people the Wallaces had so generously gathered together. She and Pat Wallace were already good friends, both with quick minds and a relish for mockery. Pat saw very well how, in this new environment, Daphne blossomed – she was more relaxed, not so defensive, more light-hearted, less reflective and aloof. She and Pat spent hours practising conversations to have with young men, very ‘ATP’ – anxious to please. It was all a delicious game, and without Gerald waiting for her to come home, ready to cross-examine her, it was a game Daphne was prepared to play with a new zest.

  She had realized, of course, that Pat’s relationship with her father Edgar was very different from her own with Gerald. Both fathers doted on their daughters, but there the similarity ended. Edgar adored Pat, cared about her deeply, loved to be with her, but he was not possessive nor did he brood over her in the suspicious way Gerald did over Daphne. Life at Cannon Hall for both Daphne and Angela had become increasingly difficult over the last few years, ever since they had reached the age when they were of interest to, and interested in, the opposite sex. Gerald, in the tradition of his great friend J. M. Barrie, did not want his girls to grow up. This reluctance to face the fact that they would was not the normal, rather touching feeling of any father, but a much more violently experienced emotion, especially towards Daphne’s transition from child to woman. In Dear Brutus,2 the play in which Gerald took the part of the father, Will Dearth, who has a fantasy daughter, Barrie caught exactly the nature of Gerald’s infatuation with his daughter. Daphne was only ten when the play was first performed in 1917, but even then she had found it unbearable to watch her real father’s pain as he enacted Will Dearth’s part. ‘Oh! How you do love me, daddy!’ cries Margaret, the fantasy daughter, and when she considers her own future life, grown up, she says knowingly, ‘It would be hard for me if you lost me, but it would be worse for my daddy! I don’t know how I know that, but I do know it. What would you do without me?’ Her father immediately tells her not to be ‘wicked and stupid and naughty’ – the mere thought of losing her is unbearable, and when the moment in the play arrived at which this daughter is revealed as the fantasy she always was, the entire theatre sobbed.

  But by 1926, after experiencing once too often Gerald’s fury and misery every time she was invited out by a young man, Daphne no longer wept in sympathy. She bitterly resented both her father’s desire to know absolutely everything about her private life and also his unpleasant insinuations as to her supposed behaviour. There was nothing amusing or sweet about Gerald’s jealousy, which was ugly and ridiculous. Waiting for his daughters to come home he could work himself up into such a lather of rage that he would hurl at them quite shocking accusations which they hardly understood. This was a different father from the one they had always known, the father who had always been such fun and so kind, who had endlessly entertained and educated them with infinite patience. They hardly recognized him in this man who now was so unreasonable and shouted. Angela, the most innocent of girls, was once accused of being a whore, and when she had pains in her stomach, from what turned out to be appendicitis, was suspected of being pregnant.3 But what had begun to tinge Daphne’s great love for her father with disgust was the hypocrisy involved in his attitude. Who was he to be such a puritan, such a prude? The double standard he was operating brought her near to hating him at times, and it coloured her own already ambivalent attitude to sex. Gerald’s ‘stable’ was no longer such a joke. The latest favourite, Audrey Carten, was only a few years older than Daphne herself and she was clearly not playing with Gerald as he was playing with her, but was profoundly in love with him. It was disturbing to witness and so was the first overt sign of her mother’s resentment. Gerald had broken their implicit understanding by parking his car outside Audrey’s house for all to see, and Mo was outraged at this humiliation. Her reaction – so very rare – made a deep impression on Daphne. She looked at her father more critically and came to the conclusion that his chief problem was his refusal to grow old gracefully. He was a true Peter Pan, who never wanted to grow up, and now, at fifty-three, was refusing to do so. Part of this refusal was his determined resistance to the fact that his daughters were growing up too – he wanted them all to stay young and innocent, and never reach the stage where they could have been members of his own ‘stable’.

  In Caux, however, there was no Gerald. Daphne felt free, and at the same time began to believe that she was attractive. In spite of her obvious prettiness and the compliments she had been paid, she had never rated herself highly and had had little confidence in her looks, but now she began to recognize her own power. Then there was the dancing – she had always loved to dance and now, at Caux, there was dancing every night, all night, with young men queuing up to partner her and no Gerald waiting at home to glare and storm and subject her to loathsome questions. She was greatly admired as she whirled round the floor, and, though on the one hand never susceptible to flattery, and completely lacking in vanity, this admiration made her feel better about herself than she had done since early adolescence. The result was that she looked less fierce and allowed herself to have a good time without endlessly analysing her own behaviour.