Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters. Jane Dunn

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СКАЧАТЬ the atmosphere about him … But escape can be delusion, and what he is running from is not the enclosing world and its inhabitants, but his own inadequate self that fears to meet the demands which life makes upon it.²²

      The fact Daphne was becoming rather an accomplished writer of stories had come to the attention of a young dandy photographer out to make his name, Cecil Beaton. The elder du Maurier sisters had become friendly with him, possibly at the Peter Pan party where he had taken many photographs of famous people, including the du Mauriers, and sold them to the papers. He had begun to get his strikingly posed portraits accepted by Tatler and the daily newspapers. ‘We’d worked & plotted for our success & we’d got out in every paper except the Mirror and the Evening Standard!’²³ Beaton declared in triumph at the beginning of the new year of 1923. It was during this time, when Beaton was making a name for himself in society, that Angela began to meet him at parties and dances.

      When Angela returned to Cannon Hall she was officially ‘out’. A ball was given for her at Claridge’s and she became part of the generation of Bright Young Things who went to each other’s parties, not always in the company of parents. This important event in Angela’s young life caused great anxiety and grief to her, and a temporary rift in the family. Angela was so afraid of being upstaged by her prettier younger sisters that she declared she did not want either Jeanne or Daphne at her coming-out party. Muriel gave her an ultimatum: your sisters or your dance, and Angela gave in. She nevertheless could not but think that they inadvertently stole her show:

      They wore pale blue velvet frocks and both looked dreams, dancing every dance; I was at my fattest and wore a white satin frock that stuck out like a crinoline and must have made me look even fatter. I wore my hair in a low knot or bun at the back of my neck, and I would imagine a tear-stained face.²⁴

      During the celebration that should have been one of the more triumphant moments of her entry into adulthood, she was given an unkind letter from her latest crush telling her he did not want to have the all-important supper dance with her.

      Despite the advent of the Jazz Age and the general casting off of stays, the social life for young women of the du Mauriers’ social class was still very formal. Anyone going to the theatre and sitting in a box or the stalls or first rows of the dress circle was expected to wear full evening dress. No woman or girl would dream of lunching out without an immaculate frock, and a hat on her head. If you were a well-brought-up young woman you could not be seen in nightclubs, although it was considered safe for Angela and her friends to flock to the Embassy Club or Ciro’s, the glamorous dance club and restaurant that had been favourite family venues and where birthday parties were often held after an evening at the theatre.

      In January 1923, Seymour Hicks and Ellaline Terriss gave a party for their daughter Betty’s coming out. Like Angela’s, it was at Claridge’s. About one hundred people were invited to dinner with dancing afterwards. One of the guests was their new friend Cecil Beaton, whose remarkably detailed diaries recorded the merry social scene. This party he considered terrific good fun, with ‘such a riot of interesting people’, whom he then proceeded to criticise. ‘The du Mauriers were all there,’ he wrote, ‘they are charming except Sir Gerald whom I simply loathe. He is so conceited and so ridiculously affected. He gets completely on my nerves.’ This from an equally self-conscious dandy.

      Beaton seemed to be amused by Angela’s grave and innocent demeanour and enjoyed dancing with her and teasing her mercilessly: ‘I ragged [her] as looking [rather] Shaftesbury Avenue in a dress from Idare [the famous theatrical costumier]. It was dreadfully chorus girly & when she swished around the skirt swished up revealing knickers to match.’²⁵ But his attention must have helped restore some of Angela’s fragile confidence. Beaton himself did not so obviously lack self-confidence, but nevertheless was immensely gratified when Seymour Hicks sought him out to tell him he had a reputation as the wittiest young man in London. He was even happier to find himself seated at dinner in a more favourable place than the precocious novelist and journalist Beverley Nichols. They were natural rivals as talented, exquisite young men on the make.

      The family’s annual summer escape from London took the sisters to Frinton on the Essex coast and then to Dieppe in August, where Jeanne’s sporting prowess continued to grow. She was entered for tennis tournaments but Daphne’s diaries do not mention how well she did. Angela sought out another crush, this time a girl named Phil, and Daphne joked to Tod that her sister’s emotional nature would lead her into ‘more and more compromising [situations] and I fear she is on the road to ruin!’²⁶ The elder sisters went to stuffy afternoon dances and complained about the body odour hanging in the air. Daphne pretended to fancy a handsome French officer purely to irritate her father, who of course rose to the bait and raged that the man looked ‘an awful bounder’.²⁷ Their glamorous life continued with the whole family, including their Aunt Billy, spending Christmas in Monte Carlo, again visiting the Casino regularly, and Daphne and Jeanne playing tennis and golf with each other and their father.

      Female fashion had changed radically and young women at parties abandoned their restrictive undergarments and appeared in slim columns of beaded and sequinned silk. Angela, still dressed by her parents’ favourite theatrical costumier, remained in the waisted dirndls of her youth. While she was dancing in old-fashioned flouncy dresses, laughing at the inoffensive jokes of effete young men, Jeanne was focusing on her art and sport. Daphne, always more introspective and intellectual than her sisters, meanwhile wrote disconsolate letters to Tod about the impossibility of conventional happiness and her fear of growing up: ‘It seems a morbid and stupid thought but I can’t see myself living very long,’ wrote Daphne, ‘but the future is always such a complete blank. There is nothing ahead that lures me terribly, marriage doesn’t thrill me – nothing – nothing remains. If only I was a man! That is the one slogan to me … I like women much better than men.’ She then described how dance music made her long to dance with someone she had a crush on, but these barely understood emotions disturbed her: ‘It annoys me though to feel like that! I should love to be free from all that sort of thing.’²⁸ Full of anxiety and dread of the future, this was the girl who had once bitten her nails so savagely that her parents had sought medical help; theatrically she recalled what she considered a symbolic act – that of being offered bitter aloes as a cure rather than an attempt at understanding and the unconditional love she craved.

      Another great theatrical family who were very much part of the sisters’ youth was the Trees. Viola, the eldest daughter of the legendary Edwardian actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was larger than life and greatly loved. To call her an actress hardly did justice to her many talents; she was co-writer with Gerald on The Dancers, had an eccentric newspaper column in the Daily Dispatch and was a natural and unselfconscious comedienne. Viola was also blessed with a wonderful singing voice and would touch the heart, or the funny bone, with anything from German lieder to the rudest vaudeville ditty. Angela remembered her as ‘the most brilliant, most witty, most amusing – and at times most maddening – woman it has been my pleasure to have known’.²⁹

      Viola was married to the drama critic Alan Parsons, and their daughter Virginia was a contemporary of Jeanne’s. Jeanne was being tutored at home with her friend Nan Greenwood but at fourteen she went to school in Hampstead and made closer acquaintance with Virginia. Unsurprisingly, this younger Tree was much shyer than her mother but had her own generous helping of the family’s therapeutic charm. She was beautiful and lacking in cynicism or side. She loved most humans and all animals but, most importantly for Jeanne perhaps, she was highly artistic. Her enlightened parents allowed her to have private lessons with the Bloomsbury Post-Impressionist Duncan Grant, and then with the realist painter William Coldstream. When Virginia was only sixteen she became a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, the prestigious college that Coldstream would eventually direct as Professor of Fine Art.

      This was liberated, even libertine, company for a young woman of the privileged yet sheltered classes. There was no evidence СКАЧАТЬ