Daphne by Justine Picardie

far from my own, in a part of London that has just as many ghosts as the Cornish coast or the Yorkshire moors; city ghosts that might rise up from between the cracks in the pavement, if the mist has blown in from the heath, where Wilkie Collins first saw his woman in white. The heath is London's moor, a place that can slip just beyond the reach of the rational mind, or at least it does if you are feeling alone, in the midst of this crowded city. And I do feel alone here, sometimes, when I walk along the streets at dusk, glancing into the lighted rooms, where families gather, and they have a whole life spilling out of them, shining bright against the winter gloom; though not all the houses are filled with life, there are several on this road with shuttered windows and drawn blinds, turned inward, away from the world. That's when I start thinking about Daphne du Maurier again, and it hasn't escaped me, the parallels between my life and the heroine of Rebecca, the orphan who marries an older man, moves into his house, and feels herself to be haunted by his first wife (and then there's the unsettling matter of My Cousin Rachel, which happens to be another of my favourite du Maurier novels, but I suppose I'm getting ahead of myself here).
    Paul, of course, would be horrified if he caught me thinking like this. He believes in coincidence. I mean it - he really believes in coincidence, in the coincidental being evidence of the essential randomness of the world; he can't bear it if I see patterns in life, or echoes or mirroring, he sees that as magical thinking, as irrational foolishness, as the most insidious kind of intellectual laziness.
    Even so, I think I've just stumbled across something interesting. Not here, not in this house: that would be too neat. But I'm hoping that I might be able to track down something that might, just might, constitute original material for my PhD: some of Daphne's old letters, written by her to a now-forgotten Brontë scholar called John Alexander Symington, when she was working on The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, which is actually dedicated to Mr Symington. And I'm hoping I'll discover Symington's replies to her, as well. I have no idea if any of these letters have survived, but the correspondence must once have existed, because Daphne referred to it in several other of her letters to a close friend; letters that form part of the du Maurier Family Archive at Exeter University. Yes, there is such an archive, and I've been emailing a very nice librarian there, and she put me in touch with another librarian at Leeds University, and then he told me about Daphne's visits to Leeds in the 1950s, when she came to the university library to examine a special collection of Brontë manuscripts whilst researching her biography of Branwell.
    Paul doesn't think this is particularly interesting. 'It's a cul-de-sac,' he said, when I tried to tell him about it last night, 'as moribund as du Maurier's book about Branwell. This can't possibly lead you anywhere.'
    'But it could be relevant to my PhD,' I said.
    'How do you know any of this is relevant,' he said, 'when you don't know what's in these letters, if indeed the letters are there to be found?'
    'I don't know, but until I do, how can you be so sure it's irrelevant?' I said, suddenly furious with him. He didn't answer me, just walked out of the room, banging the door hard behind him. But whatever Paul says (or doesn't say), I'm still intrigued by Daphne's letters to Symington, and by his replies to her. What did they write to one another in their letters? What did they feel about each other? Were they united by a strange, shared passion for a dead writer, whom just about everyone else had forgotten, or consigned to the dust-heap of failure? Did they fall in love with each other, as well as with Branwell? No one knows, and maybe no one cares, except for the librarian at Leeds University, who told me that Mr Symington was himself a librarian at the university,