Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters. Jane Dunn

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СКАЧАТЬ in the brilliant shaft of light between the death in 1901 of the old Queen Victoria and the beginning of the First World War. It was a time when new ways of being seemed possible: pent-up feelings erupted into exuberant hope in the dawn of the twentieth century. Under a new and jovial king, the longing for pleasure and freedom replaced Victorian propriety and constraint, and this energy infected the nation. Such optimism extended to a young theatrical couple who married in 1903. Gerald du Maurier, as an actor and then theatrical manager, was already on a trajectory that would bring him fame, riches and a knighthood. His wife was the young actress Muriel Beaumont, cast with him in a comic play, The Admirable Crichton, a great hit in the West End. She was very young when responsibility and care for him was passed ceremonially to her from his mother (for whom he would remain always her precious pet ‘ewe lamb’) together with a list of his likes and dislikes. Muriel was a pretty actress who eventually gave up her career to be the wife of a great man and the mother of his children. Her two elder children would recall her impatience and irritability when they were young, her lack of humour, and her beauty, always her beauty.

      On cue, just over a year after their marriage, on 1 March 1904 a plump baby girl was born in No. 5 Chester Place, a terraced Regency house close to London’s Regent’s Park. While Muriel laboured in childbirth with their first child, Gerald managed to upstage her. Suffering a serious bout of diphtheria, a potentially fatal respiratory disease, for which the cat was blamed, he lay in isolation on the floor above and, it seemed, at death’s door.

      When Gerald had recovered and could at last see his firstborn he was delighted to have a daughter. Girls were a rarity in this generation of du Mauriers. His sister Trixie had three boys, Sylvia five, and his brother Guy and wife Gwen were childless. Most importantly, his adored father George du Maurier had longed for at least one granddaughter. ‘That endless tale of boys was a great disappointment. If only he was here to see Angela.’³ For Angela is what this jolly baby was called.

      In the du Maurier family it was not enough to be a girl, however rare. Aside from ancestor worship, this was a family who adored beauty, demanded beauty, particularly in its women. This aesthetic sensibility was very marked in George whose drawings of gorgeous Victorian wasp-waisted females graced his witty cartoons. Despite his father’s good looks, Gerald’s attractiveness owed more to his charm and animation than the rather ungainly proportions of his face. He may have thought himself lacking in romantic good looks, but he was lightly built and elegantly made and expected grace and beauty in others, especially his womenfolk.

      Gerald’s wife Muriel was exceptionally attractive and stylish all her life, but their first daughter, by her own admission, was not: ‘I was a plain little girl, and I got plainer. Luckily, when I was small I was, apparently, amusing, but no one could deny I was plain.’⁴

      Muriel was still pursuing her acting career and baby Angela was handed over to ‘Nanny’ when she was eight months old, heralding Angela’s first great love affair in a life in which there would be many. This kind, inventive, affectionate young woman was the central loving presence in Angela’s universe and when she was dismissed, as surplus to requirements eight years later, the little girl’s bewilderment, grief and loneliness seemed to her ‘like a child’s first meeting with Death’.⁵

      Angela’s earliest memories, before her sisters joined her in the nursery, were fragments of life. Between the ages of two and three she could remember her canary dying and being replaced, seamlessly, by another. This sleight of hand was enacted a few times more during her childhood. She remembered dancing as her mother played on the piano the hymn, Do No Sinful Action, and being sharply reprimanded for this serious but inexplicable sin. But her very first memory was of wetting her pants in Regent’s Park when dressed in her Sunday best of bright pink overcoat with matching poke bonnet, trimmed with beaver fur. To complete the vision of prosperous Edwardian childhood, white suede boots clothed small feet that were not expected to stamp in puddles or run in wet grass. This memory of her immaculate outward appearance, contrasting with the shameful evidence under her coat, remained with her for life.

      When Angela was three the family moved to 24 Cumberland Terrace, a larger house in a grander terrace a few hundred yards away, just as close to Regent’s Park. Muriel was expecting another baby and this time it was hoped she would produce the son and heir. Gerald’s obsession with his father made him long for a boy who might embody some of the lost qualities of artistry, imagination and charm that so distinguished George du Maurier: he wanted continuance of the du Maurier name and his father’s genius somehow reincarnated in a son.

      The baby was born late in the afternoon of 13 May 1907. After a week of heat the weather had finally broken and rain pelted down from a thunderous sky, and into the world came not the expected son but another daughter, although this time she was pretty, which was some consolation. Angela did not remember her sister’s arrival but she recalled her mother insisting ‘she was the loveliest tiny baby she has ever seen’.⁶ Gerald was playing that night to packed houses in a light comedy called Brewster’s Millions. The eponymous hero, who had to run through a million-dollar legacy before he could inherit another seven million, mirrored something of Gerald’s own cavalier attitude to money: his characteristic off-hand style and sense of fun endeared him to the audience. He returned from the theatre to find Nanny in charge of this second daughter.

      Gerald decided to call her Daphne, after the mesmerising actress Ethel Barrymore, who had much preferred the name Daphne to her own, and had jilted him before he had met Muriel. One wonders if Muriel knew after whom her second daughter was named – perhaps thinking the impetus was the nymph Daphne who ran from Apollo and his erotic intentions (as a last resort transforming herself into a laurel tree), rather than the American beauty from a great acting dynasty who ran from Gerald and his ravenous need for uncritical adoration.

      Daphne fitted into a nursery routine long practised by Nanny and Angela. Angela was almost four and for nearly all that time had been the focus of Nanny’s love. She may not have remembered her sister’s birth but recalled she had to relinquish sole command of the nursery and share her beloved with a demanding interloper. Apart from a couple of terms, Angela did not go to school and was not able to establish a new kingdom for herself outside the confines of the nursery. Life continued in its soothing routines but now everything had fundamentally changed.

      The highlight of the day was the walk to the park with the enormous coach-built pram, enamelled white to match their front door. There Nanny met other nannies and their charges were allowed some sedate play while the women chatted. The sisters were always impeccably dressed, and dressed alike, something that frustrated them as they grew older and struggled for their own identities. Their days were spent away from their parents, everything done for them by Nanny who never, it seemed to Angela, had a day off. In her eight years’ employment with the family there were only two holidays, but looking back this was such an unjust state of affairs that Angela wondered if she had misremembered it.

      The children were brought to their parents at the end of the day, washed, brushed and on their best behaviour. Good manners and above all quietness were instilled into them from an early age; Gerald was extremely sensitive to sound: even the singing of a blackbird could be too plangent for his peace of mind. As he and Muriel slept late and had a rest in the afternoon when they were working, Angela and Daphne, whose nursery was on the floor above their room, learnt to creep around and talk in whispers. When he was available to them, however, he was unusually interested in their young selves, endlessly inventive, funny and full of jokes and games. He was iconoclastic and mocking of others behind their backs and drew his daughters into the joke, though insisting at all times they maintain high standards of politeness and deference to adults, to their faces.

      Muriel finally gave up the stage when she was pregnant with her third baby – surely this time a boy. Angela had been praying for years for a baby brother, perhaps giving voice to the whole family’s hopes. She was just seven years old when Gerald and the doctor came into the nursery at lunchtime to tell them that they had СКАЧАТЬ