Daphne by Justine Picardie Read Free Book Online Page B

garden - it's an acre or so of terraced greenery, south-facing, with a view over the whole of London - and it was once even more rambling, before the vegetable patch and tennis court beneath the parapets were sold off to provide a building plot for a multimillionaire. Cannon Hall itself is as beautiful as its garden: a graceful Georgian house, amongst the biggest in Hampstead; elegantly symmetrical in design, tall sash windows filling it with sunshine, I imagine, and a grand sweeping staircase, though I have never been inside, only examined it from my vantage point, my attic eyrie.
    Now it's owned by someone very rich in the City, a man one never sees; not at all like Daphne's father, Gerald du Maurier, who was a well-known actor-manager when he bought it in 1916, and a familiar figure in Hampstead, presumably. He'd spent his childhood just around the corner from here, first in Church Row, then in New Grove House, where his father, George du Maurier, wrote Trilby. Imagine! Daphne's grandfather might have walked along this road with Henry James, on their weekly expeditions to Hampstead Heath, before going home to tea; and it was during one of those companionable Sunday afternoons that George told Henry the outline of his idea for the story of Trilby, and Henry encouraged him to go ahead and write it as a novel, never dreaming that his friend would become immensely rich and famous.
    I think Paul would prefer me to give up on the Brontës altogether, and write a PhD on George du Maurier and his relationship with Henry James: it would be sufficiently scholarly a topic for research, he says; even though George du Maurier is now dismissed as much more minor than James, he is not quite as minor in the literary canon as Daphne. 'He's almost certainly due for a comeback,' says Paul, 'and I could help you out on the Jamesian connection, of course . . .' Ridiculous, isn't it, these league tables? As if you can measure literary excellence with precise instruments; as if there were a science of writing, governed by equations that reveal immutable truths.
    Me, I can't help myself. I'm still stuck on Daphne, lost in the fog. Have been for years, ever since I first read Rebecca when I was twelve, and devoured the rest of her books, terrifying myself with her short stories, wide-eyed and sleepless after 'Don't Look Now' and 'The Birds', which were probably far too scary for me at the time (I've been wary of magpies and crows and yellow-eyed seagulls ever since). It was the same when I started reading the Brontës about six months later. I was totally enthralled by them, and frightened, too, by Cathy's ghost with her bleeding wrists at the windows of Wuthering Heights, and the living wraith that is Mrs Rochester, slipping through the doors of her attic prison, carrying her candle, dreaming of burning the house to ashes; though Charlotte annoys me sometimes when she gets too priggish about religion, as if she is trying to dampen down her overpowering rage, and put out the fire within herself. I mean, can you actually remember the exact details of the ending of Jane Eyre? Everyone goes on about the madwoman in the attic and the reworking of gothic plots - Mr Rochester and his crazed first wife; conflagrations and blindings and revelations, all of which I love - and then they ignore the preachy Christianity in the final pages, with St John Rivers leaving England to be a missionary in India, as if anyone cares about him by then; all they want to know is that Jane has married Rochester, and they've had a baby, and look set to live happily ever after, for ever and ever, amen.
    As for my own happy ever afters . . . Well, I'm beginning to wonder if I'm heading for a dead end, the point of no return, where stories unravel into unhappiness. That's what often happens in Daphne du Maurier narratives, the details of which are preoccupying me just as much as those of the Brontës. Because here I am, living across the road from Daphne's childhood home, not