Lost Daphne du Maurier story found after 70 years

[Nemonymous]

THE POOL by Daphne du Maurier


The turnstile woman, the author herself, I guess.
The gradual turning of style from children’s story to horror?

Has anyone else read this story.
My full review below —


THE POOL

“Deborah, still on her knees and crossing her hands once more, edged her way to the brink of the pool and then, crouching there beside it, looked down into the water. Her reflection wavered up at her, and it was not the face she knew, not even the looking-glass face which anyway was false, but a disturbed image, dark-skinned and ghostly. The crossed hands were like the petals of the water-lilies themselves, and the colour was not waxen white but phantom green. The hair too was not the live clump she brushed every day and tied back with ribbon, but a canopy, a shroud. When the image smiled it became more distorted still. Uncrossing her hands, Deborah leant forward, took a twig, and drew a circle three times on the smooth surface. The water shook in ever widening ripples, and her reflection, broken into fragments, heaved and danced, a sort of monster, and the eyes were there no longer, nor the mouth.”

That ‘looking-glass’ face again of the woman in the du Maurier’s Blue Lens, and her Alibi woman, too, reflected in this pool that we meet in a children’s story if not FOR children.
Deborah being a symbol of these women, now in waiting, and given her chance for an explicitly Christian religious healing, a cleansing epiphany — or a potential grievous subsumption? Otherwise, she is part of a story like Narnia or E. Nesbit or Sarban’s Calmahain or this story’s own “monster tree” to match a more recent book (‘A Monster Calls’ by Patrick Ness) that I happened, as if by destiny, to review a few days ago.
This is a du Maurier story, however, that seems to be the darkest side of Elizabeth Bowen as blended with some D.H. Lawrence short stories, whereby we now see the garden and its pool explicitly lurking in wait for the children to stay with their grandparents there. Although that sense of the garden’s thus waiting, its sumner house et al, starts off indeed as an idyllic story for children, about Deborah and her brother Roger playing cricket and having a bath together and listening to Grandma read aloud Black Beauty … until the words start to possess Deborah on one of her night visits to the pool and she later petulantly throws a knife at Roger, then there is the heat wave and eventually the storm. And the woman at the turnstile…with a key to a secret world.
Meanwhile, I wonder who persuaded du Maurier to add the very short ending coda of chapter 4, to soften the blow?
Some amazingly powerful stylistic writing here. Blew me away. Although some passages as well as the general denouement are arguably inchoate.

“…this isn’t a dream. And it isn’t death, either. It’s the secret world.”