Yet at the same time as enjoying this social life more. Daphne was also always on the look-out for conversation of a more serious kind than holiday banter. She was a listener and an observer rather than a talker, and what she liked to listen to was not idle chat but people she admired discussing issues they cared about or literature they knew and in which she was interested. She read voraciously herself – an average of four books a week, with heavy emphasis on R. L. Stevenson, Walter Scott, and W. M. Thackeray at that time – and liked to discuss what she read. Any conversations of a philosophical as well as a literary bent engaged her instantly, even if she did not always contribute towards them; and though these were in short supply at Caux, or indeed at Cannon Hall generally, she had that autumn become acquainted with a man she greatly revered both as a writer and a person. This was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, known as ‘Q’, who lived half the year at The Haven, in Fowey, and half in Cambridge where he held the chair in English. J. M. Barrie, a great friend of his, introduced the du Mauriers, who were now going to be his neighbours in Fowey, to him.

  Meeting ‘Q’ was rather different from meeting Edgar Wallace. Daphne had met few intellectuals in her life and was from the first greatly in awe of this eminent scholar, who had also written a vast amount of fiction, verse and literary journalism, not to mention having edited in 1900 the first Oxford Book of English Verse. She had read ‘Q’s Troy Town, a novel about a barely disguised Fowey, and also On the Art of Writing, one of ‘Q’s influential volumes of lectures. ‘Q’ was a Victorian, strictly conventional, holding the highest possible standards and wanting to see any aspiring writer hold them too. To ‘Q’, language was more important than content, and language ‘should be kept noble’.

  Sitting at ‘Q’s feet on a visit to Cambridge in the autumn of 1926, Daphne was fascinated by him. His appearance was idiosyncratic – he looked like a weather-beaten sailor and dressed in a strange collection of brightly coloured garments4 – and his speech, with its West Country pronunciation (he was born in Cornwall), was most attractive to listen to. ‘Q’ put ideas of excellence into her head which she was almost afraid to think about and made her re-examine what she had already written with some natural anxiety. Was her language noble? She did not think so. And had she striven to emulate the literary greats? She did not think that either, and it was all rather depressing.

  Unfortunately, when she brought herself to show the poems and blank-verse play she had now completed to her cousin Gerald Millar (Geoffrey’s brother), who was a reader for the Heinemann Publishing Company, he had to share her own doubts. As yet, he told her, she had not turned out anything good enough for publication. She wrote to Tod that she was glad her cousin had told her the truth, because she knew herself that her stuff was not yet up to much. What was odd was that she had chosen to submit to Gerald Millar her poems and play and not her short stories. This was because she felt that her short stories were too trivial and lightweight, whereas her poetry, however poor, was at least an attempt at something ‘noble’. Writing poetry, whatever the quality, came easily, whereas writing stories was work. It needed sustained effort and she was still shamefully aware at the start of 1927 that she simply was not making enough effort for enough time – pleasure constantly beckoned and she succumbed too readily.

  The outstanding pleasure of that year was the completion of the Ferryside conversion. In May, the builders and decorators moved out and Muriel and the girls moved in (Gerald was in London directing Gladys Cooper in an adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s The Letter). Muriel, who had a flair for interior decoration, had seen to it that the essential character of the house was kept – it remained simple and plain – but that it was made comfortable and colourful. There was nothing fussy or .grand about the result. Whereas Cannon Hall, with its imposing period furniture and valuable old pictures, struck some people as a little over-formal, Ferryside had a country feel about it. Daphne loved it at once. The room she shared with Jeanne was the kind of room she had always wanted, with windows facing west over the estuary and south-west towards the open sea. There was a door leading onto some small wooden steps which went down to the garden, so that one did not even have to go through the house to get outside – it was perfect. She lay in bed, hearing the hooting of ships’ horns and the constant cry of the seagulls, and she found that instead of clinging to sleep, as she had done all her life, she was eager to be up and out at once.

  The walks directly from the house satisfied her in a way that Hampstead Heath had never done. Immediately above Ferryside, starting halfway up the Bodinnick hill, is the famous Hall Walk along the cliff top, winding inland round the Pont river and then back once more to the cliffs and eventually to Polruan. Striding along this path with her dog Daphne could look to the right, over the rooftops of Fowey, and there spread out were all the yachts and steamers and rowing-boats filling the estuary. If she wished, she could walk even further, on to Lanteglos church, hidden in a little valley with the high hedges along the lanes shutting out all sight and sound of the sea. Then there was the Fowey side – she only had to take the ferry over and she could walk through Fowey all the way to Readymoney Cove at the end and up into the woods to the cliff path which ran right round the Gribbin headland to Polkerris and beyond to Par. There were hours and hours of walks to be had, and even in bad weather she loved them. The mist might hide the magnificent views but it made everything sinister and mysterious, just as she liked it.

  But walking was not her only passion. Daphne now began to learn how to sail. Not to do so was foolish, when she was living practically on the water, and she was eager to identify herself with a universal way of life in Fowey. She bought a fisherman’s jersey and boots – the kind of clothes she loved best – and started learning immediately, taught by a local boatman, Adams, who told her stories about his family and his wife’s family as he showed her how to handle a boat. ‘My time’, she wrote ecstatically, ‘is spent in a sort of fatuous state of bliss and ridiculous concentration.’ On the day after her twentieth birthday, 13 May, Muriel, Jeanne and Angela returned to London and she was left alone for the first time in Ferryside (but with a woman coming in to cook and clean for this one solitary girl). The obliging Adams taught her how to helm, how to tack, and how to handle rough seas, all the while encouraged by her to carry on talking about the past. Always inquisitive, Daphne questioned him about the old schooner, Jane Slade, its figurehead still intact, which she had seen lying up the Pont river, and listened attentively as he told her that Jane Slade was his wife’s grandmother. By the time Daphne had learnt to sail adequately enough to go out on her own, she knew the Jane Slade story off by heart and knew, too, that some family letters still survived which one day she might persuade Adams to show her. In her mind, though very vaguely, was the idea that she might somehow make something of them.

  The summer seemed long and wonderful, every day filled with sailing, swimming and walking, and even when the rest of the family returned, and Ferryside was filled with people, it was always possible to slip off with her new dog, Bingo, half spaniel and half sheepdog, and see nobody at all. But one person she did want to see, and who she arranged should visit her, at his request, when she was on her own, was Cousin Geoffrey, who was back in England after touring in a play abroad. At twenty, Daphne considered she was now capable of dealing with Geoffrey’s advances rather better than she had done at fourteen, and she did not see why she should not have the pleasure of his company even if he was a married man. Geoffrey spent only a day with her, but that was long enough for him to discover that his outrageous flirting now only made his cousin laugh. He had the grace to laugh himself, giving up all hope of conquering the little schoolgirl of six years before. But they liked each other, and Daphne was foolish enough to tell her parents about Geoffrey’s visit – foolish because she well understood how unbalanced her father could be on this subject. There was no need for Gerald ever to have known about this fleeting visit, but Daphne told him and was subjected to the usual inquisition, this time by telephone. She was so irritated by her father’s absurd and quite unfounded suspicions, and also by the way he continued to treat her as a child and wanted to control every corner of her life, that she promptly invited Geoffrey again and was sorry when he could not come.

  She was even sorrier when October arrived and Ferryside was shut up for the winter. The return to London was terrible, not only because she lost everything she loved in Cornwall, but because she had once more to face living with her father. Her love for Gerald, no longer a simple emotion, did not blind her to the change in him. The intimacy they had shared when she was a child, that complete empathy which had bound them together, had changed into something else. He still claimed the same closeness, but she felt stifled by his growing dependency on her – their roles seemed reversed and she did not like it. Nor did she like observing how much more depressed Gerald was than he had ever been before. He seemed suddenly to be verging on the pathetic and Daphne loathed pathos, hated anyone who made an open show of their distress. And now here was the once fun-loving Gerald drooping about the house waiting humbly for her to go for walks with him and, even worse, succumbing to tearful appeals for her company on any terms. Even his appearance, off stage, had changed. Once, he was vitality itself, never still, but now he lacked energy. He was no longer able to relax by playing the energetic games of tennis and golf which had kept him occupied when he was not working, and he had nothing with which to fill the gap. This lack of physical activity depressed him and he was visibly slipping into a state of apathy. There were mutterings, too, about financial worries, which no one took seriously (though these were serious), and she knew Gerald’s career was in the doldrums. He had a run of plays which failed and his only successes seemed to be in revivals. He wandered about Cannon Hall with books on psychology under his arm, and though there was nothing new in his obsession with family history there was something new about his frantic determination to trace every one of his own characteristics back to his ancestors.

  It was all difficult for a young woman to handle just at the stage when she was attempting to assert her own independence. The more Daphne tried to slip out of her father’s orbit, the harder he worked at keeping her at the centre of his universe. He wished aloud that he was her brother and not her father – since he could see his paternal role rapidly waning – and most upsetting of all told her that when he died he hoped he could come back as her son.5 Mixed up with this panic that he was losing his favourite daughter was a deeper terror that he was going to find himself old and would have to confront the fact that he had wasted his life. It was no good anyone pointing to his enormous success in the theatre – this was dismissed as worthless. He felt himself sliding into decay and ruin, and just when he needed his daughters most, they were leaving him spiritually if not in reality. The quality of his visible emotion was so overpowering that it inhibited Daphne – she found herself incapable of reacting spontaneously with true warmth, and felt towards him the same paralysing shyness she had always felt towards strangers. When he, who had always been a tactile person, clung to her she found this almost unbearable and was afraid he would sense this. ‘Oh! I am so unhappy!’ he would wail, and no longer was it possible to laugh and consider it a joke.

  In November, Daphne could stand no more of this without some respite. She took her quarterly allowance out of the bank and went to visit Ferdy, whose new school at Boulogne-sur-Seine was flourishing. A month later, she returned to find Gerald no better. To her alarm, she found Muriel and Angela had already gone to Fowey, to open Ferryside up for Christmas, and that she was effectively in charge of her father with sixteen-year-old Jeanne for company. It seemed to her that he must be going through some kind of breakdown, and he was certainly drinking too much, but it was difficult to make any sense of what he said. He had always had a rambling way of talking – someone once remarked that he spoke in telegrams, abruptly, in short, choppy sentences – but now the rambling was wilder. The effect on Daphne was to make her want to be alone more than ever. Once, Gerald had been so tolerant of that urge, had understood exactly, but now he demanded her presence virtually all the time they were both in the house. She found herself pitying her mother, having to endure this newly sad, demanding husband, and felt even more disillusioned about marriage as an institution. It was well known that Gerald, before this particular collapse, had taken up with an old flame again, and this seemed to Daphne particularly contemptible: that her mother should suffer this kind of whining at home and then, when Gerald recovered, he should go off to his mistress. Meanwhile, once at Ferryside, after the rest of the family had returned to London, she put all her cynicism into completing more short stories.

  All the stories she wrote at that time, as earlier, were fuelled by disgust. She was repelled by the way men used women, and women allowed themselves to be used. She wrote not about the society, and its manners, which she knew, but about what she suspected went on, what she heard talked about. In all of her stories, girls suffered because of men’s lust and always the men got away with it. One of the strongest stories was ‘And Now to God the Father’, in which a fashionable vicar is sought out by a young aristocrat who has made a lower-middle-class girl pregnant. The vicar is sympathetic – young men will be young men – and says he will take care of everything. He sends for the girl, telling her not to bother her seducer and that he will arrange for her to be taken care of. The girl drowns herself. There is no remorse on the vicar’s part when he learns of her death: the reader is meant to despise him, and does, but is left in no doubt that this is how the world works and that nothing can be done about it. Men triumph over women; wealth and breeding over poverty.

  The rest of the stories continued in the same vein. In all the stories, eleven of which were finished by the spring of 1928, there is no trace of the charmed life Daphne led. Her view of the world is dark and dismal, and the overriding influence is clearly that of her father’s amorous relationships. None of the men in these stories is even remotely like Gerald du Maurier – none has any charm, none is witty, none talented or attractive – but in all of them is the unmistakable flavour of what Daphne found it so hard to accept: all men were like her beloved father, unfaithful and not what they seemed. No other topic interested her so much as the relationship between men and women. What she was doing was emphasizing over and over again her own pessimism as she surveyed what she believed to be the truth about these relationships. She concentrated on the interchanges between couples, often not bothering to give either man or woman a name, and made no attempt to build up their characters or to set them securely in any context. One story, ‘Tame Cat’, about a girl who has suddenly grown up and arrives home for the holidays to find her mother’s lover desires her instead, seemed to express succinctly what the author was saying repeatedly: ‘Being grown-up was this, a sordid tissue of intimate relationships, complicated and vile.’

  But the way in which these stories were written went some way towards making them less dismal than the subject matter dictated. Most were written in a taut, almost cinematic way, in short scenes with distinct breaks punctuating the text. Although she frequently acknowledged the influence of Katherine Mansfield and Guy de Maupassant there was no sign of this influence in Daphne’s own stories. Her style was slightly more akin to Somerset Maugham, and she shared some of Maugham’s preoccupations, but even then nothing was recognizably derivative. Aunt Billie typed them out for her and this time she decided not to send them to her cousin Gerald, but instead to try a literary agent.

  Feeling that this would be a real test, Daphne could not bear to hang about waiting for the verdict and so she arranged to go to Paris, saying goodbye before she left to Geoffrey, who was going to Australia. She found this a strangely unemotional experience and tried to analyse why. She liked Geoffrey so much and when it came to kissing him goodbye – the first and last time he really kissed her – she found this very agreeable. It was, she wrote, like kissing her father used to be – pleasant, familiar, comfortable – making her think how strong family similarities were, seeming to show Gerald and Geoffrey, uncle and nephew, inextricably linked both with each other and with her, daughter and cousin. What worried her, though, was how quickly she forgot Geoffrey once he had gone. Did this mean she did not after all care very much for him? Or did it mean she was selfish and cold, caring only for people who were actually with her? Either way, she was relieved to find she did not miss her cousin, and instead found herself embarrassed by the evidence in his letters that he missed her. She had a horror of sloppiness, and Geoffrey’s letters were full of the kind of phrases she used to copy out of bad novels and send to Tod with her own caustic comments alongside.

  She liked, all the same, to make a story out of Geoffrey’s devotion to her. While in Paris she visited Ferdy, as usual, and related to her, with much mocking, her cousin’s adoration. Understandably, Ferdy was not amused. She thought it disgraceful that a married man of forty-two should carry on like this with a girl of twenty. Daphne said she could not see that Geoffrey’s being married mattered, especially as nothing had happened between them. She liked to tease Ferdy, to push her into defending her moralistic point of view, and there was more than a whiff of titillation about it all. She knew perfectly well that this admission of an interest in men hurt Ferdy, whom she still professed to love, but she could not resist displaying her own power. She wanted Ferdy, and Tod for that matter, to see that she had this ‘power’ and that even if she did not choose to use it she was aware of it and it excited her. In a sense both these older women were substitute mothers, people who would forgive her anything and to whom she could tell anything, and with whom she enjoyed a closeness she did not have with her own mother. If her relationship with Gerald was now causing her considerable anguish, hers with Muriel had, of course, always done so. She had adored Gerald, which made her new, confused feelings about him painful; though she had never adored Muriel, she was finding it almost equally painful to observe that instead of growing closer to her mother now she was an adult, she was growing even further away. This disturbed and hurt her. She needed Muriel now as an ally, needed her to act as a kind of buffer between herself and her father, but her mother remained distant.