Daphne by Justine Picardie Page A

didn't talk about that to anyone -but our conversations about books have melted away, along with those consoling Cambridge afternoons of tea and biscuits in front of a flickering gas fire, and walks along the river, feeding the ducks, and talking about the impossibility of understanding the footnotes to The Waste Land, or whether Emily Brontë's childhood fantasy of Gondal could be traced in Wuthering Heights. When we were students, it seemed like the time we spent together would go on for ever; but of course, there was an ending, there had to be, when our finals were over, and we left to make way for a new batch of girls, who would move into the college rooms we had once occupied.
    And maybe I've forgotten how to sustain friendship; maybe I live too much in my head. That was what my mother said to me just a few days before she died. 'Don't forget to talk to other people, darling,' she said. Which was odd, coming from such a quiet woman, a librarian, as it happens, who was accustomed to silence, who found it peaceful, rather than oppressive.
    Perhaps that's why I became even more attached to Rebecca after my mother died; it was familiar, at the same time as remaining insoluble. I loved the book as a teenager, loved its promise of escape, its wild Cornish landscape that seemed a million miles away from London, and yet somehow within my reach. But now I reread it for clues, trying to see if there was anything I missed, just as the second Mrs de Winter tries to read her husband's face, trying to make sense of everything. Which is hopeless, of course; the novel is supposed to be mysterious, to leave one wanting to know more. One thing I'm certain of, though: 'the lovely and unusual name' which belongs to the nameless narrator before she becomes Mrs de Winter must be Daphne du Maurier.
    Anyway, I've decided to make far more of an effort with Paul, and I'll start by persuading him to come home for dinner tonight, instead of working late. I'm not going to consult Rachel's cookery books - I'm not going to look at them ever again, they make me feel like an interloper - but I'll make roast chicken, like my mother used to do for the two of us on Sunday evenings. She always added lots of lemon juice, and bay-leaves and thyme from the garden, and in the winter she baked apple crumble as well, and we'd talk about the books that I was reading, about The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Wuthering Heights; and I shivered at the thought of Cathy's ghost, tapping at the window, crying 'Let me in, let me in'; but I was safe, I knew I was safe inside with my mother.
    I'm not quite sure what Paul and I will talk about - he clearly doesn't like it when I ask him what's keeping him so much at work these days, and I can't mention Daphne, either; I can't say anything about her to him ever again, because last time I did was disastrous, he said I was turning into a weird kind of du Maurier stalker, that I was losing touch with reality, as well as with him. I don't think that's true - he's the one that is spending more time away from this house, not me. But I don't want to argue with him again, I can't bear it when people shout at each other, and anyway, no one hears what's being said, it's just an angry sound.
    But I also know that silence doesn't seem to help. 'Silence is your default setting,' Paul said to me last week, 'occasionally punctuated with a sharp burst of static electricity, and maybe you don't know how enraging that can be.' So I've vowed to try to find the right words for him, to make it clear that I'm not living only in my head; for if the outlines of our life together have become blurred and indistinct (if, indeed, they ever clearly existed), then I must find a way to fill them in, to make them real again.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Menabilly, August 1957
    Daphne stood at her bedroom window as the sun was sinking in the sky, looking down to the drive that circled in front of the house, and she felt rigid, like a sentry, like Mrs Danvers . . . No, not