Daphne by Justine Picardie Read Free Book Online Page A

weeks passed, I realised that he was seeing his friends by himself, straight from the office, before coming home later in the evenings. I didn't mind that - I didn't particularly like his friends; they seemed so pleased with themselves, and competitive, like the contestants in a radio quiz, all eager to get the first word in, and score points over one another.
    But what I do mind is that there's this niggling tension between us now, even when we're alone together, that wasn't there before; or at least, I don't think it was there until I finally admitted to him that I was just as interested in Daphne du Maurier as the Brontës. 'Oh God, not her again,' he said, when I told him this a few weeks ago, after he'd discovered me in my study re-reading Rebecca, instead of getting on with my thesis. 'Why is it that adult women have this obsession with Daphne du Maurier? I can just about understand why an immature teenage girl might be fixated on her, but surely it's time to grow out of her? I can't believe that you would be as predictable as that.'
    He sounded dismissive, but furious, as well, and I couldn't understand what I'd done to make him so angry; his outburst was illogical, and completely disproportionate. 'This is absurd,' I said. 'I happen to think du Maurier is an intriguing writer, and to dismiss her seems to me to be a kind of knee-jerk intellectual snobbery.'
    'Better to be an intellectual snob than a dimwit,' he said, and then went downstairs and turned the television on, while I slipped out for a walk in the dark wintry evening, which wasn't very satisfactory as a protest, because he fell asleep on the sofa and didn't even realise that I'd gone.
    Still, I want to make everything right between us again, but it keeps going wrong. I can't seem to find the right thing to say to him, or the right way to touch him, so I wait for him to reach out to me, which happens less frequently than before, so that sometimes when I'm with him I feel like I'm shrinking and disappearing, blurring at the edges into a nobody; though when I'm alone, and away from this house, I feel more myself again.
    And now I have this odd sense that there's an unspoken secret that stands between us; a secret, which shouldn't be a secret, that has something to do with what he sees as my obsession with Daphne du Maurier. But at the same time, it's hard to stop thinking about Daphne, because Paul's house is just across the road from where she lived in Hampstead, when she was growing up as a child in Cannon Hall, one of the grandest mansions in London. I don't understand why Paul isn't as fascinated as I am; in fact, his antipathy seems down-right perverse to me, given his interest in Henry James and J. M. Barrie and so on. After all, this is the very same house that Barrie used to visit every week; Daphne writes about it in one of her memoirs; she'd call him 'Uncle Jim', and play games pretending to be Peter Pan, while one or the other of her sisters was Wendy, and her aunt Sylvia's boys might be there, too, the Lost Boys, playing hide and seek with their younger cousins.
    I can see into what used to be her back garden from my study on the top floor; I can see into it now, when the leaves are all fallen from the trees, and the bare branches look like a dark lattice against the sky, and the earth is black and sodden, with just a few snowdrops in the ground. But if I close my eyes, it's easy to imagine the du Maurier family are still there, Daphne and her two sisters, Angela and Jeanne; three girls, invisible yet very close, calling out to one another at the end of a summer's day, when the light is slanting, soft and golden, and the roses are in full flower. It's the most wonderful place, a secret garden that is hidden from the street by a circle of very high brick walls, and built into the side of the wall, at the point furthest away from the house, is the old Hampstead lock-up, a tiny prison cell with barred slit windows. But there's nothing confined about the