The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Daphne du Maurier

Location:  Par, Cornwall.

Time:  July, 1959.

Eyewitness Description:  “Suddenly the lightning forked again, and standing there, alive yet immobile, was the woman by the turnstile. She stared up at the windows of the house and Deborah recognised her. The turnstile was there, inviting entry and already the phantom figures, passing through it, crowded towards the trees beyond the lawn. The secret world was waiting . . .”

Author:  Daphne du Maurier (1907–89) has been credited with shifting the Gothic mode towards romantic fiction with her novel, Rebecca (1938) which built on the work of the Brontes and inspired a genre that has flourished ever since. For many years, du Maurier was one of the most popular novelists in the English-speaking world with her tales full of atmosphere, suspense and melodramatic situations, a trait she may well have developed as the granddaughter of George du Maurier, author of Trilby (1894), and daughter of the great English actor-manager, Sir Gerald du Maurier. She grew up in the world of theatrical excess, yet found her own way in the rugged isolation and mystery of Cornwall where she wrote a series of hugely successful novels, especially the “Gothics” that followed Rebecca: Frenchman’s Creek (1941), Hungry Hill (1943) and Mary Anne (1954). Her short stories were equally impressive, notably “The Birds” (1952) and “Don’t Look Now” (1966), which were both brilliantly filmed, and “The Pool” in which a typical du Maurier heroine, the pretty, sensitive young Deborah, on the verge of puberty, finds herself in a secret world of feelings and enchantment.

I

The children ran out on to the lawn. There was space all around them, and light, and air, with the trees indeterminate beyond. The gardener had cut the grass. The lawn was crisp and firm now, because of the hot sun through the day; but near the summer-house where the tall grass stood there were dew-drops like frost clinging to the narrow stems.

The children said nothing. The first moment always took them by surprise. The fact that it waited, thought Deborah, all the time they were away; that day after day while they were at school, or in the Easter holidays with the aunts at Hunstanton being blown to bits, or in the Christmas holidays with their father in London riding on buses and going to theatres – the fact that the garden waited for them was a miracle known only to herself. A year was so long. How did the garden endure the snows clamping down upon it, or the chilly rain that fell in November? Surely sometimes it must mock the slow steps of Grandpapa pacing up and down the terrace in front of the windows, or Grandmama calling to Patch? The garden had to endure month after month of silence, while the children were gone. Even the spring and the days of May and June were wasted, all those mornings of butterflies and darting birds, with no one to watch but Patch gasping for breath on a cool stone slab. So wasted was the garden, so lost.

“You must never think we forget,” said Deborah in the silent voice she used to her own possessions. “I remember, even at school, in the middle of French” – but the ache then was unbearable, that it should be the hard grain of a desk under her hands, and not the grass she bent to touch now. The children had had an argument once about whether there was more grass in the world or more sand, and Roger said that of course there must be more sand, because of under the sea; in every ocean all over the world there would be sand, if you looked deep down. But there could be grass too, argued Deborah, a waving grass, a grass that nobody had ever seen, and the colour of that ocean grass would be darker than any grass on the surface of the world, in fields or prairies or people’s gardens in America. It would be taller than trees and it would move like corn in a wind.

They had run in to ask somebody adult, “What is there most of in the world, grass or sand?”, both children hot and passionate from the argument. But Grandpapa stood there in his old panama hat looking for clippers to trim the hedge – he was rummaging in the drawer full of screws – and he said, “What? What?” impatiently.