Bobby had a mellifluous voice and it amused him to spout the most rousing bits of Shakespeare under Angela’s bedroom window at night. Inevitably, Angela, by now sixteen, began to dream of marrying him. The age gap seemed no barrier: perhaps the fact that he was her father’s generation was a reassurance to her. Then with the thoughtlessness of adulthood, Bobby hijacked her fantasy by casually saying to Gerald at one of their family Sunday lunches at Cannon Hall, ‘the day will come I expect when I shall ask you for Angela’s hand’. Given her youth, innocence and supercharged romantic nature, it was not unreasonable of her to imagine the deed was done and she would be the next Mrs Robert Loraine, with accompanying beautiful house, enchanting children, dogs, the whole caboodle. (She admitted she daydreamed about weddings and babies’ names, without sex coming into any of this at all.) But Angela had misunderstood Bobby’s manly banter with her father, and he had misunderstood how serious she was and how tender her heart. ‘The day never came, and he suddenly appeared with an exquisite wife very little older than me (which made one’s frustrated misery more acute).’31 It may have been on this occasion that Angela, in the depths of despair and with pure melodrama running in her veins, had jumped up onto a wall running along the Embankment, declaring she would cast herself into the Thames. Luckily she was with the imperturbable Tod who replied, ‘Not now, dear, it’s teatime.’32
The sisters, unable to confide in their parents, turned to each other. Daphne, struggling with deeper existential questions, turned to Tod. Their exasperated mother would complain that she could never get one sister to side with her against another as they always stood up for each other. Angela was incapable of keeping her tumultuous emotions to herself and so Daphne, already a confidante, was party to all her upset and disappointment. Daphne at thirteen had just sought refuge from the adult world in the creation of her boy-self Eric; no wonder that she retreated further when she observed the incomprehensible behaviour towards women of even the nicest men. Her body may have betrayed her by beginning to turn her into a woman, but her diary for that year was still childlike, full of cricket matches and the birthday party she gave for her teddy bear. Jeanne at nine, the favoured companion of their mother, was very much the baby and sheltered from even this incursion of the adult world.
The following summer Angela would see her longing for love thwarted at every turn while her younger sister, without seeking it, once again became effortlessly the centre of admiration and, this time, of male desire. In the middle of the family seaside holiday, fourteen-year-old Daphne glanced up from paddling and shrimping to find her much older cousin, Geoffrey, looking at her with a strange smile. Something about the smile caught the girl’s attention and made her heart beat faster. She had never felt this way before. She smiled back. She knew nothing of the facts of life and was completely uninterested in the mechanics of sex and would remain so, she recalled, until she was eighteen. But in that one moment, Daphne’s innocent world of cricket and reading and making up stories was intruded on by a grown-up male old enough to be her father.
It was 1921 and the du Mauriers had rented a house in Thurlestone in south Devon, and as usual other guests had been asked to join them. Cousin Geoffrey, the elder brother of Gerald Millar, who had so appealed to Angela when she was younger, was divorced from his first wife. This had caused a scandal amongst the aunts and uncles who considered divorce something that should never happen in a family like theirs; ‘one might have thought a national calamity was about to occur’.33 This raffishly good-looking thirty-six-year-old actor had subsequently remarried and had brought his second wife with him on this visit to his cousins. But his roving eye had been caught by the attractive sight of his young cousin paddling in the sea, still so obviously just a pretty child but on the threshold of sexual awakening, and he smiled.
Daphne never forgot the peculiar excitement caused by that secret smile. She could not understand it but liked the physical sensation and the sense that she was special and there was a precious understanding between them. When all the children were sunbathing on the lawn, with rugs over their knees, Geoffrey came and lay beside her and under the blanket reached for her hand. The effect on her was electrifying and unsettling; something dormant was awoken in her. ‘No kisses. No hint of the sexual impulse he undoubtedly felt and indeed admitted … but instead, on my part at least, a reaching out for a relationship that was curiously akin to what I felt for D[addy].’ Daphne found this frisson with Geoffrey even more exciting because it was wrong and especially because it was secret, hidden from her pathologically possessive and suspicious father and right under the nose of Geoffrey’s unsuspecting wife. ‘Nothing, in a life of seventy years, has ever surpassed that first awakening of an instinct within myself. The touch of that hand on mine. And the instinctive knowledge that nobody must know.’34
Geoffrey’s behaviour could be seen as a subtle seduction by a much older, worldly-wise man of a vulnerable cousin, still a child who should have been safe in his company. In a classic ploy of the seducer, he told her he had already grown disenchanted with his new wife and now, because of his feelings for Daphne, no longer wished to go on tour to America at the end of the year. There was little doubt that the whole flirtation that summer was a deliberate manipulation of a young girl’s emotions to gratify his egotistical needs. The loading of responsibility for his dubious behaviour on her child’s shoulders was cowardly, and distorted her sense of power and integrity. The intrusion of a confusing adult world into her child’s one, lived largely in the imagination, certainly unsettled Daphne and absorbed much of her thoughts for the rest of the year, uniting her to him in an indissoluble bond of rebellious conspiracy that was to last a lifetime. Daphne loved to think of herself as daring and she also enjoyed a growing sense of the power she had over others. Neither was she averse to causing her father anxiety and jealousy – it all reinforced her central importance in his life.
Her recognition of the similarity of the feelings she felt for Geoffrey and those for her own father informs one of the enduring themes of her fiction: that of incest and taboo. But for Daphne, always living more vividly in the mind than the body, the idea of incest would come to exert an intellectual fascination that grew, she explained, from her realisation that we are attracted to people who are familiar to us, that family provide the real romance of life.
Years after the encounter in south Devon, when she was twenty-one and her obsession with Geoffrey had cooled to an amused flirtatious affection – although he remained as smitten with her as ever – she had fun teasing him by meeting him in the drawing room at Cannon Hall to say goodnight, dressed only in her pyjamas. With her parents in bed on the floor above, she allowed him passionately to kiss her for the first – and last – time. Having not been kissed by a man before, apart from her father, she found it ‘nice and pleasant’, but, with a startling lack of understanding of human sexuality and empathy for the feelings of another, wished Geoffrey could be more light-hearted. He had finally managed some intimacy after years of secretive smiling, furtive knee-stroking and hand-holding, with the object of his forbidden desire prancing about in her pyjamas, at night, and she complained he was rather overexcited.
‘Men are so odd,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘it would be awful if he got properly keyed-up.’35 Daphne added another peculiarly detached statement: ‘He is very sweet and lovable. The strange thing is [kissing Geoffrey] is so like kissing D[addy],’ and went on to surmise that perhaps their family was like the incestuous Borgias, with her as the fatally attractive Lucretia. But then this was a girl who liked to shock and given how underwhelmed she was by Geoffrey’s kisses, likening them to Daddy’s did not suggest unbridled fatherly or daughterly passion. Any incestuous impulse between father and daughter was more likely to reside in his overbearing emotional demands on her and her answering fascination with him, united with resentment and