The Rebecca Notebook Read online

  I am three, I am four, I am five, and why is it that Cousin Jack, Aunt Sylvia’s second son, already a midshipman surely in naval uniform, takes to calling at Cumberland Terrace, where we live, to bring me sweets, and once a balloon?

  ‘Someone to see you,’ says the parlourmaid. ‘Just go into the dining room.’

  I wander in and he is there, sitting in the chair at the far end of the room.

  ‘Hullo, Daphne,’ and he stands up and smiles at me. At four, at five years old, I am smitten on the spot. Cousin Jack is the only one in the world for me. But now, in retrospect, why did he come? Was it because he knew that his mother Sylvia loved little children, and when I sat on her bed as a baby he remembered this? I do not know.

  The image of Cousin Jack persists. He has come to see all of us in the country, where we are spending the summer. He climbs an enormous tree in the garden with supreme confidence. Yet to enter the dining room and say, ‘Hullo, Cousin Jack,’ overwhelms me with shyness. My heart beats. I nearly faint with embarrassment.

  Another image. We are at Ramsgate. Our grandmother takes a house there every summer. We go to stay, and the cousins too. I overhear my mother say, ‘I don’t know why the Davies boys have to have the best front rooms, and our children are put at the back.’

  At five, six, I know the answer. The Davies boys are boys. Hurrah for them! They are all playing in a front room, and we join them. Some sort of hide-and-seek, and Cousin Michael knocks into me inadvertently. I begin to cry. Cousin Michael rushes from the room. Cousin Nico, nearer to my age, though some four years older, comforts me.

  ‘Look. Look at this picture in Punch of a plum pudding. It’s Michael.’

  This is funny. I stop crying and laugh.

  ‘Come and see Michael, he’s ashamed,’ says Nico. We go into the adjoining room. Michael is sitting in a chair with a rug over his face. ‘Kiss him,’ says Nico, ‘go on.’ Instinctively I know that, although I would like to kiss Cousin Michael, he would not want me to do so.

  Overheard conversation. It is between their nanny, Mary, and ours.

  ‘Michael had bad nightmares. He dreams of ghosts coming through the window.’ Yes… Yes… I stare at the window of our night nursery in London, and I understand. But what about Peter Pan? Peter Pan came through the window to the night nursery of the Darling children, and he was not a ghost. Peter Pan. The play that we act in our own nursery endlessly. The play that we go to see every Christmas. Uncle Jim, who wrote the play for the cousins, and looks after them now that Uncle Arthur and Aunt Sylvia are dead, comes to see us act it in our nursery. But I don’t remember when he came.

  The memory box switches to Cousin George, the eldest of our cousins; he is tall and dark, smiling down at us from another seaside house at Bournemouth that our grandmother rented. Almost a man. Not a boy.

  ‘Let’s all play hide-and-seek in the garden,’ somebody says—Nico? It will be doubly exciting if Cousin George will play too.

  ‘Doris will play as well,’ says Nico, always game for anything.

  Cousin George looks embarrassed. ‘I don’t think I’ll play,’ he says. ‘You children go instead.’

  Am I seven years old? I can’t remember. But the thought came to me then, ‘Perhaps Cousin George would feel shy if he caught Doris.’ Doris is our nursemaid.

  And almost instantly it’s the war. Uncle Guy, Daddy’s brother, is killed. And a few weeks later we are told, back in Cumberland Terrace, that Cousin George has been killed like Uncle Guy. We wear black bands on our arms for both of them. And the following Sunday we are at the zoo. Uncle Jim is there, with Nico, and we stare at the lion’s cage. But surely if Cousin George has been killed we should not go to the zoo? I don’t understand. I am confused. Why aren’t Uncle Jim and Nico crying? Nico is laughing at the lions. Daddy cried when Uncle Guy was killed. Angela, Jeanne and I have no brother. Why? I shall pretend to be a boy, then. Like the lady who acts Peter Pan at the Duke of York’s.

  Three years pass. They are rehearsing Dear Brutus at Wyndham’s Theatre. Uncle Jim and J. M. Barrie merge into one person, and I am no longer a child. I understand what is happening. Daddy—Gerald—has to be the father of a girl called Margaret, and they are alone together in a magic wood. I begin to identify. The daughter might be me. Then Uncle Jim calls me up on to the stage.

  ‘Daphne? Shall we show Faith Celli how to walk?’

  Up and down, up and down, he takes my hand and we walk together. Everyone rehearsing watches. But I can’t identify any more. I feel silly, awkward. Daddy tells me to go back again and watch the rehearsal from the stalls. I know then I would hate to be an actress. I couldn’t even be Peter Pan.

  Meanwhile the cousins have grown up. Jack, the onetime idol, is married, out of my thoughts. Peter, a more distant figure, also a grown man. Michael, whom I wanted to kiss and never did, is at Oxford. Nico is at Eton, and sometimes we go to the great day there, the Fourth of June, and although he is still the same laughing, joking Nico there is a grandeur about him, he is in Pop, he belongs to the élite.

  I am fourteen, no longer a child, at any rate in my own eyes, and one day, saying the customary ‘Good morning’ to our parents in the bedroom, I hear the dreadful news. The night before Uncle Jim had gone round to Wyndham’s Theatre and said to our father Gerald, ‘Michael’s dead… Drowned.’ And he broke down, there, in the dressing room. I can’t put it out of my mind. Uncle Jim loved Michael best of all the boys. There is a funeral. Michael is buried in Aunt Sylvia’s grave, next to Grandpapa and Granny, in the Hampstead churchyard. Michael, I never knew you as we all know Nico, where have you gone? Why did it happen?

  One morning, some days after the funeral, when we go for our daily walk into the town to buy biscuits or whatever is needed in our schoolroom, I slip away from the governess and buy some violets with my pocket money. Then I go to the churchyard and put them on the grave. ‘These are for you, Michael.’ Perhaps he heard. But would he be there? I don’t know. Then I go quickly away to find the others. ‘Where have you been?’ No answer. I shan’t tell anyone. Let them scold. Aunt Sylvia, George, Michael, perhaps they are all laughing at me together.

  The years pass. Ten, twenty, thirty years, the remaining boys are married, myself as well, and I am now a writer, Peter and Nico publishers. Uncle Jim is dead. Peter wants to bring out a book about our grandfather, George du Maurier, and asks me to write the Introduction. Peter, the shadowy boyhood figure, becomes a close friend. We meet at the Café Royal, and talk and talk. Always about family; ours. Grandfather George is Kicky to us, as he was to himself and to his friends. We never discuss the world of today. Always the past. Do all of us carry a seed of melancholy within, except perhaps Nico? Peter thought yes, I could not be sure. Then, within a few years, Peter himself was dead. Jack was dead. Nico, dear Nico, remains.

  My Name in Lights

  [1958]

  I believe that success and the enjoyment of it are a very personal and a very private thing, like saying one’s prayers or making love. The outward trappings are embarrassing, and spoil achievement. There come moments in the life of every artist, whether he be a writer, actor, painter, composer, when he stands back, detached, and looks at what he has done a split second, perhaps, after he has done it. That is the supreme moment. It cannot be repeated. The last sentence of a chapter, the final brush stroke, a bar in music, a look in the eye and the inflection of an actor’s voice, these are the things that well up from within and turn the craftsman into an artist, so that, alone in his study, in his studio, on the stage (and the stage behind the footlights can be the loneliest place on earth), he has this blessed spark of intuition. ‘This is good. This is what I meant.’

  The feeling has gone in the next breath, and the craftsman takes over again. Back to routine, and the job for which he is trained. The pages that must link the story together, dull but necessary; the background behind the sitter’s head; the scenes in the actor’s part which come of necessity as anticlimax: all these are measures of discipline
the artist puts upon himself and understands, and he works at them day after day, week after week. The moment of triumph is a thing apart. It is the secret nourishment. The raison d’être.

  The moment, rare and precious, must never be confused with those occasions which come, alas, only too often, when the writer—full of complaisance and conceit—becomes blunted to his own style, and believes he has only to dash off a few thousand words and the result is literature. The moment of the inner glow, and the purr of pleasure, are two very opposite things. The inner glow can bring despair in its train, or a high temperature, or such fever of intensity that nothing but a ten-mile walk or an icy swim will break the spell and release the writer to the world of day-by-day. The purr of pleasure is an indication that the writer has never left the world at all. He has been watching himself at work, hearing his own voice; and the fret with which he waits for public opinion—the criticism of friend, publisher, reader—points to the doubt within. He must be praised, he must be flattered, he must be boosted by some means other than his own life spark: otherwise there is no momentum, all is sound and fury, signifying nothing.

  The supreme moment can come to anyone, from Shakespeare penning a sonnet to a clown turning a double somersault. The flash is no respecter of persons, but each and all share one thing in common at the moment of impact, and that is integrity. A kind of purity within. Like a prayer, like the giving of love to a beloved, the feeling says, ‘This is what I have to offer.’ Anatole France put it best when he wrote his story of the Juggler of Notre Dame, who, demanding no audience, his being filled with the inner glow, did his circus turn before the statue of the Blessed Virgin, a tribute and a triumph all in one.

  After the private homage the public homage is anticlimax, and worse than anticlimax, second rate. Values go awry. We have learnt in our generation to misdoubt, even to dread, mass hysteria. The mob which sobs and screams at a boy with a guitar is the same mob which hanged Mussolini and his mistress upside down. Tip the scales, and the hands that acclaim the artist become the hands that tear him to pieces. The wreath of laurel is the crown of thorns. The actor and the writer are especially vulnerable today, when worldwide publicity through press and television makes them into that treacherous thing, a ‘personality’.

  In other days rogues, vagabonds and scribblers clung together, if they clung at all, and, gently mocked at as a race apart, were left mercifully alone. In the 1950s they are expected to pronounce on the H-bomb, enter Parliament, open hospitals, shut bazaars, and—surely the most surprising activity of the lot—crown carnival queens! In moments of cynicism I like to ponder on what would have happened over a hundred years ago if two sisters from Haworth had been inveigled into Leeds for an afternoon at an art gallery, and found themselves thrust upon a stage before a gaping audience while ringing tones announced, ‘Charlotte and Emily Brontë, This Is Your Life…’

  Certainly no moment of triumph for them. Only disgust and horror. Living as we do in an age of noise and bluster, success is now measured accordingly. We must all be seen, and heard, and on the air. What toothpaste do we use? Do our husbands snore? What about AID and foot and mouth? To answer these questions counts as sucking up. To refuse to answer is high-hat. No remedy for the artist today.

  My own dislike of the trappings of success date from watching my father, the theatre idol of his time, push his way through a crowd after a first night. Adoring, and fiercely proud, I felt instinctively as a small child that the clamour was false, the praise unreal. What the mob really wants is for the artist to fail, so that the whispering campaign can begin. ‘Poor chap, he’s had his day. The thing’s misfired… a flop. Tear down the bills.’ Destroy the idol.

  When my father went to Harrow at fourteen the first thing that happened to him was to be made to stand up, in class, while the rest of the boys stared at him for having a famous Punch artist for a parent. This was in 1887. When I went to finishing school in Paris in 1925 the girls goggled round me because I was Gerald du Maurier’s daughter. There is a lad at school in 1958 who gets chaffed and ragged because he is Daphne du Maurier’s son. A circus family has no illusions about success. They tumble from the cradle, and are used to taking knocks. It is the amateur and the dilettante who hide their heads in shame when the jeers begin; or, swift to offence, hit back in anger.

  If fan letters do not surprise me, or begging letters either, it is because I read my father’s and my grandfather’s as well. The people who write these letters are sincere, but they are lonely. They are writing to an idol, to a myth—never to an individual. Sometimes, answering them, I have wondered what would happen if I followed up my acknowledgement with a ring on the bell, a knock on the door, and a request, ‘You said you wished you knew me. Here I am. May I share your home?’ What bewildered stares! What stammering denials!

  If those of us who have been successful with what wares we peddle are truly honest, we will admit a certain snob value to praise. The college girl who empties her heart from Texas is tossed aside more quickly than the poet from Corfu. The old lady who knew an aunt in Cambridge is answered, reluctantly, on Friday, but that fellow author we so much admire, and find to our delight and gratification admires us too, he is answered the very afternoon that his letter came.

  Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, said the preacher, except during that moment when the writer felt the flash and wrote… what did he write? The flash has gone. It’s as swift as that, as ephemeral, as fierce, but, like the song that ended, the memory lingers on.

  Quite otherwise the trappings. I remember coming out of the underground in Piccadilly. I was alone, it was raining, and I had no date for the evening and very little money on me, not enough for a taxi. I looked up and saw my name in lights, and the title of the current film, Rebecca. There were lines of people standing in a queue, waiting to go in. I did not join them. Moment of success? Perhaps.

  Romantic Love

  There is no such thing as romantic love. This is a statement of fact, and I defy all those who hold a contrary opinion. Romantic love is an illusion, a name given to cover up an illicit relationship between two people, one of whom is married, or betrothed, to somebody else. The great love stories of the world that have been handed down to us through the centuries, whether in verse or prose or sung upon a lute, have had for theme forbidden passion, for nothing else would stimulate the reader, or in earlier days hold the attention of the listener, as he or she sat before the hearth and waited upon the teller of old tales. Battles, yes, the gorier the better, slaughter, blood, Hector dragged round the walls of Troy; but Helen was the prime cause, who left her husband Menelaus of her own free will and fled with her lover Paris, son of the Trojan King Priam. If ever illicit love brought disaster in its train this did, some twelve hundred years B.C., causing the deaths of thousands, Greeks and Trojans. Her lover Paris slain in battle, the beautiful Helen returned to her husband Menelaus, and at his death retired to the island of Rhodes, where she was almost immediately strangled by order of her one-time friend Polyxo.

  Romantic love? If so, a bloody business, with unhappiness for all.

  Theseus, King of Athens, was one of the most celebrated heroes of antiquity, but he was no romantic lover, unless making love to two sisters at the same time can be called romantic. He eloped with Ariadne, elder daughter of the King of Crete, to Naxos, and then deserted her and married her younger sister Phaedra. She, in due course, succumbed to a hopeless passion for Hippolytus, the son of Theseus by a former marriage; and because he did not return the love of his stepmother she accused him of rape, when he fled to the seashore and was drowned in his own chariot by a great wave which Neptune, in answer to Theseus’ prayer, caused to rise up from the sea. On hearing of his death Phaedra hanged herself. A charming relationship.

  Theseus, her husband, not content with one abduction in his life, invaded the underworld and tried to carry off the Queen of Hades but, foiled in the attempt by the god Pluto, King of Hades, he returned to Athens to find a usurper in charge, and then, lacki
ng a family and a kingdom, he retired to Scyros, where he fell to his death from a precipice.

  These were the tales that stimulated our ancestors in bygone centuries, and if the loves of mortals palled they could always fall back upon the amours of their gods. Zeus, or Jupiter as the Romans called him, reigned in heaven—Olympus—with his consort Hera, Juno, but his appetite was prodigious, and nothing pleased him more than to adopt a disguise when making love to earthly beings. He impregnated Leda, wife of the King of Sparta, in the guise of a swan, and she brought forth two eggs, from which, as they cracked, emerged four children, Castor and Clytemnestra, Pollux and Helen.

  Castor and Pollux are twin stars in the sky, you can see them any night when the sky is clear, and as for Helen, we already know what happened to her. Clytemnestra, if she lacked her sister Helen’s beauty, had inherited her swan father’s appetite, for while her husband Agamemnon was away at the Trojan wars she lived in sin with her cousin Aegysthus, and then when her husband returned murdered him, only to be slaughtered in her turn by their son Orestes.

  These stories, savage, brutal, utterly amoral, are the foundation of our literary culture. They spread from Greece to Rome and so throughout Europe, and although the gods died their deeds lived after them. New stories arose, based upon the old, but the main themes were the same: illicit passion, betrayal, and a grim death for the lovers. The coming of Christianity may have changed the course of history, although the birth of a heavenly son to a virgin has a curious similarity to the Greek myth preceding it, but despite the Jewish tradition of devout and strict family life, which had a supreme influence on Christian morals, when it came to singing songs and telling tales the main theme was still illicit love.