He always seemed such a normal, charming, courteous man that this lack of response has long puzzled me. It could, I suppose, have had something to do with the tragic loss of his son.
During that summer in France we bathed and sunbathed and boated and socialized and drove up and down the coast in our big open Alvis, and went to the Festival of Flowers in Nice, and an August fiesta there with fireworks of extravagant variety, and to the Monte Carlo Grand Prix, and to other events wherever and whenever the fancy took us.
A girl called Penny, who was at school with Rosamund in England, and of an age, arrived to stay for a couple of weeks. Compared to Rosamund’s piquant good looks, she was quite awful. Her black hair was lank, she walked with a limp, her eyes were lacklustre, her skin pasty, she didn’t have much to say for herself. Jean looked her over for a couple of days and then took her in hand. She found the shuffling limp was due to ill-fitting shoes; she bought her new ones – with high heels. Penny was taken to a hairdresser, and came out with her straight dull black hair shining like a sword and draping attractively over one side of her face. A new dress, a bit of tactful make-up and she was transformed. The lacklustre in her eyes disappeared overnight. She was killing. For the first few days of Penny’s stay, Rosamund found her friend a drag on her cheerful activities. After that she was slightly chagrined to find gazes straying from her to this sultry dark-eyed girl with the brilliant eyes and the fresh complexion and the elegant walk. No filmic transformation was greater. It was Roman Holiday over again.
A big American aircraft carrier came in to Villefranche Bay. Rosamund decided to take a pedalo, along with Penny, from Passable Beach to reconnoitre. Only when they came back did we discover that Penny could not swim. Thereafter they had two American sailors who came over to see them whenever they were free. We nicknamed them Mutt and Jeff. But in imagination I began to compose a letter to Penny’s parents: ‘It is with the deepest regret that I have to inform you that in a drowning accident in Villefranche Bay …’
At the end of the summer holidays our two children went back to England to school, and, a bit later, when our lease of Villa Caprice expired, we followed. We could have renewed the lease but did not.
We had had a wonderful time. A few years later Philip Larkin, writing of expatriate authors, speaks of:
… the shit in the shuttered chateâu
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds.
I didn’t have a shuttered chateau but a pleasant small villa and the possibility of buying some property nearby. I was never a boozer, but wine was plentiful and cheap. I was happily married but that was not exactly a liability. But I was ready to go home.
For one thing I had perversely chosen to write my one historical novel of those twenty years, The Grove of Eagles, at this juncture, and although I had weighted down the cars with reference books I still needed more. For a second I don’t think I was averaging anything near five hundred words a day, little though that seems. If one puts on bathing trunks for breakfast and goes down to a beach with a picnic lunch and a beach ball and returns at five, satisfactorily drunk with sea and sun – and then settles down to work – it just doesn’t come off. Elleston Trevor, who lived high in Monte Carlo and used to drive down to the beach before breakfast in his ancient Rolls, bathe and then return to spend the morning writing, had established a routine that I would have to have adopted if I had made the decision to stay.
A third objection was that the Villa Caprice, being right down by the harbour, was an enervating place to live. Used to the Cornish sun, which is always welcome in such light air – or to shorter dosages of the Mediterranean heat – I had always been a sun worshipper. (Many of our friends used to look with envy on Jean because she had a husband who loved to spend all day on a beach.) But perhaps it’s not altogether surprising that the Druids lived in Britain where the sun is errant and therefore always welcome. The Mediterranean sun, after some months, and enclosed as we were by rising ground about us, became oppressive. Sometimes we would drive up and picnic on the Moyen Corniche where the lighter air made the sun more enjoyable.
Much of this could, of course, have been corrected by a change of residence. You needed a place three or four hundred feet up. Elleston Trevor had the right idea, though I wouldn’t have wanted to live in a flat in Monte Carlo. We priced the cost of one or two small villas for sale and – by English standards then – they were exorbitant. So far as I can remember, the cost of living in France was not muchdifferent from England, but I did not fancy buying a small, ill-built villa, after living all my married life in a big house. (No doubt Cap Ferrat and its neighbourhood was one of the worst places to try: we were surrounded by millionaires.)
Although we had plenty of friends in Cap Ferrat, notably those I have mentioned, I lacked the stimulus of my London friends. I missed the theatre and the cinema. I missed the Savile, I missed the availability of endless books to read. There were cinemas in the neighbourhood, but they never started until nine and were distinctly smelly, and there was always a sudden break in the middle of the feature film when everyone loped out for ice-cream or a fruit drink, and usually the programme did not finish until nearly 1 a.m., so that one arrived home feeling bleary. And there were, of course, the bits of officialdom common to all countries, such as re-registering as an alien at regular intervals; the cars were still insured in England; our furniture was in store there; did we go back and sell it or have some of it shipped over?
Another influence was my own physical well-being. In July I had a bad attack of stomach pain, vomiting and diarrhoea. The local doctor gave me morphia for the pain and antibiotics to effect the cure, saying it was probably caused by the local wine. I was soon about again but thereafter subject to fortnightly or so attacks of a sort of colitis, which was weakening and horribly uncomfortable. These symptoms were faithfully driven away by antibiotics, and as faithfully returned when the antibiotics stopped. The sequence continued despite all dietary and other changes until several months after our return to England. Also my wife’s asthma, which had been enormously improved as a result of two courses of injections from Harley Street, but which always threatened and which needed pills and inhalers handy to ward it off, had shown no sign of improvement in the warm Mediterranean air. It was if anything slightly more troublesome than it had been in Cornwall. (I was still not entirely attuned to the idea of climate and environment having a drastic effect on her asthma, but I had hoped for some improvement. It used to frustrate me sometimes when we would leave Cornwall on a beautiful light and airy and sunny November day and her breathing would be so tight she could hardly go a dozen steps without using an inhaler, and we would arrive in London in dirty fog, and she would immediately begin to breathe freely. Such, I would say, is the cussedness of human nature.)
A few other straws in the wind drew us home, among them a feeling that, however delicious and funny and stimulating a time they had had when they were on the Côte d’Azur, my children felt the need of a root in England. I remember particularly my son’s delight when he heard we had bought a house, even if it was not in his beloved Cornwall.
Chapter Nine
But where was home? If it had to be England in spite of the tax, then should it again be Cornwall? I had grown increasingly fond of London (or, at least, a small area in the centre) and although we had taken houses and flats in London four times for shortish periods in the last few years, we had never actually lived near enough to feel it within easy reach. It was a stimulating idea and I felt that while we were footloose we should experiment. To return to Cornwall so soon – though that was in our eventual sights – would be defeatist.
Several times in earlier days we had driven to London and thence to Glyndebourne and by stages home. Often also we had passed through Sussex on the way to and from the Channel ports. We both thought it a lovely county, one of the only ones I thought I could bear to live in after Cornwall. It was c
onvenient, it had a long sea coast with easy access to France – which we still wanted to visit – it was wooded and undulating. It was a great cricketing county (though abysmal at rugby). It was near London and a lot of my friends.
I answered a number of advertisements in The Times; furnished houses to let. We had replies from five, so, regretful at the end, we packed up our two cars and our Kleppermaster – which was to go by rail – and made our affectionate farewells and started for home.
Having a choice of houses as far separated as Midhurst, Partridge Green and Uckfield, we chose Uckfield, because the house was eighteenth century and handsome and roomy and because it was immediately available. Hotel life with two cars overflowing with personal possessions did not attract. We moved in as quickly as we could, drove down at the earliest opportunity and recovered our Siamese cat, and settled to another world, another experience.
I shall not forget that first winter in Sussex. The weather was gentle, mild and sunny – I remember driving to Brighton one January day and seeing people sitting on the promenade in the sun. I thought: Good Lord, so this is winter in the south-east, how infinitely preferable to a Cornish winter with its cold rain and its ranting, bitter winds! The next summer, looking for a house to buy (we saw about forty), I was struck by the dishonesty of estate agents and the semi-squalor in which so many apparently respectable people lived. When we visited the house we eventually bought I observed an attractively distorted Japanese cherry in the garden and thought to myself, If this were in Cornwall I would think that tree had been so shaped by the wind – of course not in this balmy climate! We moved in in the following February, and the night after our arrival we were struck by a massive gale that shook the house to its foundations and nearly uprooted the cherry. It then proceeded to blow from every direction for the next twelve months.
But one strange thing was emerging: my wife’s asthma was going away. For years, almost from the time my son was born – and he was then eighteen – I had never seen her lie in bed without at least three non-feather pillows to prop her up. Now she was beginning to lie flat, relaxed, sprawled, on her back, on her side, on her stomach, the way most people sleep. One doctor in Cornwall, who loved to think himself a psychiatrist, had tried to find some linkage between her comparative freedom when she was away from home and her immediate tightness when she came back. He perceived that there was some deeply buried and unhappy connotation between his patient when she was away from home ties and when she returned to the domestic round. He even began to query whether most of it was my fault. Was I in some way too demanding, too critical, too expectant of perfection, and, knowing this, did her subconscious react, putting up a barrier of illness and disability?
It seemed in fact that all that happened when she went back home was that she returned to the sea. (Buxted is rather more than fifteen miles from the sea.)
When I first looked over the house in the village of Buxted, near Uckfield, which became our new home I said as we came out: ‘If anyone expects me to purchase that broken-down Victorian ruin, they’re very much mistaken.’ But having seen thirty-nine others, much more hideous and equally expensive, I consulted an architect to see what he thought of ‘the Gossage house’. Being an architect, he was enthusiastic (shouldn’t I have guessed?). He then produced plans for a possible renovation, which we disliked on sight; but more importantly he introduced me to a rich builder called Clarence Preston, who, although spoken ill of by many of his contemporaries, apparently took a liking to us and proceeded to offer his practical help. Liking him, I accepted it, and that was the greatest piece of luck.
The previous owner, Lady Gossage (widow of Sir Frederick Gossage, who during the war had been in charge of the barrage balloons of London’s air defences and who inevitably had become known as Sir Frederick Sausage), had lived alone in the big house and had allowed it to fall into disrepair. The twelve acres that went with it included two cottages which were in pretty good trim, but the main house was in a state of ghastly neglect. The alterations to be undertaken were enormous (the builder first suggested putting a charge of gelignite under the house and starting afresh) and would need major structural changes involving the knocking down of inner walls to make small rooms into large, virtually turning part of the house round to face the other way, more than half reroofing, and complete rewiring, replumbing, redecoration and new central heating. When the local doctor came to see it when it was nearing completion there seemed to be no room on the ground floor that he recognized.
‘No, don’t recognize that. No, completely different. No, don’t recognize that.’ Only when I took him into the room which I had chosen to be my study did he say: ‘Ah, I know this! This is where General O’Brien lived and died.’
Very wisely we did not take up the architect’s suggestion that we should go and spend six months in the West Indies while the major work was done. Instead, precipitately, we moved in while everything was in chaos. With half the roof off, rainwater frequently ran down the stairs; our big dining room gaped at the end like a memory of the Blitz, and was full of cement bags and piles of long planks; and in order to move from the kitchen to the morning room – the only two habitable rooms downstairs – I would regularly put on a hat and coat. Our son came home from Oxford on one occasion and found us both in bed upstairs, his mother in her fur coat and me in my overcoat and fur hat, while the bitter east wind blowing through exposed rafters below lifted the carpet on the bedroom floor as if we were on an Atlantic swell.
In the summer before this, while we were still in our furnished house, we went down to Cornwall for a holiday: all my friends urged us to come back; and one said to me, ‘There’s a charming house just come free above Polkerris in St Austell Bay. It belonged to a Dr Charles Singer, but he has just died and it is now up to rent – or maybe to buy. Why don’t you look it over?’
I said: ‘ I can hardly do that as I’ve just paid the deposit on a house in Sussex.’
I did not realize then that in the present ridiculous law of purchase one can simply withdraw from such an agreement and demand one’s deposit back and walk away without even an apology. Had I done so I might – just – have gone to see the house. And if I had seen it I might – just – have decided to buy it and come back to live in Cornwall after all. It was the house, Kilmarth, which later Daphne du Maurier, dispossessed of Menabilly by the return of the Rashleighs, was to take from them and where she spent the remainder of her life.
In the meantime my work had not, it seemed, materially suffered by the disturbances. Perhaps the long historical novel about sixteenthcentury Cornwall, The Grove of Eagles, would have taken a bit less than the three years it actually did take to finish; but, looking back on the amount of research that had to be done, one can’t be sure. The book was begun in the South of France looking out over a blue bay somewhat different from the wind-flecked blue of Falmouth Bay that the narrator of the book, Maugan Killigrew, looked out on from the great house of Arwenack where he was born. The book was continued for eighteen months in the furnished house we took, where the room I used as my study looked out on a beech hedge, some birch trees and a road; and it was finished in the room in my present house which has been my study ever since, where the view is of green fields and copses of woodland, with the Sussex Downs in the distance.
Just after we moved into our new house my agent rang to say an anonymous Hollywood buyer had made an offer for the film rights of another novel, called Marnie, which had been published before we left England. My three previous films had been British, though the third, Fortune is a Woman, had been financed by Columbia. This was the first direct Hollywood bite. The offer was for X thousand dollars, which seemed a big one to me. I talked it over with my agent, who said the anonymity was suspicious and he thought one of the leading women stars of the day fancied playing the lead and was buying it anonymously to keep the price down. He said we should ask double. We asked double. The reply came, accepting, but stipulating that we must agree within a fortnight or the deal f
ell through. We agreed.
It was a month after that that the news came: the buyer was Alfred Hitchcock. I was wholly delighted. I had admired his wonderful films since I was a boy. After the film was made he told me with satisfaction over lunch one day that he had bought the book anonymously for exactly the reason my agent suspected, to keep the price down. I did not tell him that such was my admiration for his work, if I had known he was the buyer I would gladly have sold it him for his original offer. The information would have spoiled his lunch.
Some months after the sale of the rights the news burst upon the world that Hitchcock had persuaded the former Grace Kelly, now Princess Grace of Monaco, to play the lead. All hell broke over my head. Newshounds from the five continents sought me out. The telephone never stopped ringing, nor the doorbell. One morning I had a telephone call from Sydney, another from Montreal, a third from New York, while a girl interviewing me for the Daily Mail was in the house and two more reporters were waiting. Very, very few people, it seemed, had ever heard of the novel and now everyone wanted to read it. There were no copies to be found. The book had just gone out of print, and my then publishers refused to reprint it, announcing a huge paperback issue for the autumn. An assistant at Harrods was heard to remark: ‘ If anyone else asks me for a copy of Marnie I shall go out of my mind.’ I was dragged into a bitter legal battle between Amalgamated Press, who had bought the serial rights, and Express Newspapers, who, having been outbid, decided to pinch the story anyway. Writs and ad-interim injunctions flew about. My American publisher said the whole thing was a million dollars’ worth of free publicity.