Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  She showed Violet the ballroom hung with portraits of ten generations of Sackvilles, the chapel with Gothic tapestries, the Venetian Ambassador’s Bedroom, the King’s Bedroom where ‘the great four-poster of silver and flamingo satin towered to the ceiling’, coats of arms in the Leicester Gallery, the Poets’ Parlour ‘rich with memories of Pope and Dryden’, the vaults with the stacked coffins of Sackvilles dating back to the fourteenth century. She showed her the high-walled gardens, orchards, hothouses, ‘pineries’ and beyond the gardens the park with hills, glades, deer and rabbits.

  ‘Had you been a man,’ Violet when adult wrote to Vita, ‘I should most certainly have married you, as I think I am the only person who loves Knole as much as you do.’

  Here was their palace. For Violet, Knole and Vita surpassed the outward glamour of her mother and the King. Vita was not a man but that did not stop her from falling in love with Violet. ‘Violet is mine,’ she was to write:

  I can’t express it more emphatically or more accurately than that, nor do I want to dress up an elemental fact in any circumlocution of words.

  There is a bond which unites me to Violet, Violet to me … what that bond is God alone knows; sometimes I feel it as something legendary. Violet is mine, she always has been, it is inescapable.

  She could not openly acknowledge or allow this elemental fact and legendary bond. Nor, because she was a woman, though her concept of self was rooted in Knole, though she loved the place and took it for granted that it loved her, would it ever be hers. Her father’s brother Charles had a son, Edward, who would inherit the house and the Sackville title. From childhood on Vita was jealous. Her letters stressed his inappropriateness to the place, how he fussed about his stomach pains, wore make-up, bracelets and enormous rings, was ‘as floppy as an unstaked delphinium after a gale’. It was an irony that Eddy was gay, never married, had affairs with Duncan Grant and an American called Jimmy and painted swastikas and a large silver 69 on his bedroom walls:

  There he stands shivering between two suitcases in front of a door far too large for him – dwarfed by the grey architecture towering above him … a little mingy niminy-piminy man in a grey overcoat like a dressing gown.

  And then he knocks and the door is opened to him and I drive hastily away while he goes in.

  She was dispossessed of Knole and Violet by inheritance law and matrimonial law. In their combined splendour they seemed like a paradise lost.

  Visiting Knole Violet was ‘almost oppressively conscious’ of Vita’s mother, Lady Sackville. As forceful a presence as Mrs Keppel at Portman Square or Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace she was, Violet said, like the Cheshire Cat, ‘intermittent, yet omnipresent’:

  Her daughter, who admired and distrusted her, was, up to a point, the Cheshire Cat’s plaything, but only up to a point. Knole, the Sackvilles, her charming if unobtrusive father watched over her.

  When Violet came to code her life into fiction the portrait of a controlling matriarch recurred, a mother who invades the sexuality of her offspring. It was a creation with attributes of Queen Victoria and Mrs Keppel too, though she based it physically on Lady Sackville:

  In her too fleshy face classical features sought to escape from the encroaching fat. An admirable mouth of pure and cruel design held good. It was obvious that she had been beautiful. Her voluminous, ambiguous body was upholstered rather than dressed in what appeared to be an assortment of patterns, lace, brocades, velvets, taffetas. Shopping lists were pinned to her bosom. She kept up a flow of flattering, sprightly conversation, not unlike the patter of a conjuror, intent on keeping your mind off the trick he is about to perform.

  Fantastic and slightly barmy, Victoria Sackville had power, theatre and a conviction that what she wanted, she should have. Her volatility was an antidote to the usual Sackville lugubriousness. Her childhood did not prepare her for the mores of the English aristocracy. Her mother, ‘Star of Andalusia’, was Pepita the Spanish dancer, her father Lionel Sackville-West, an English diplomat. They made their home at Arcachon in south-west France, though Lionel travelled widely. They produced five children but did not marry. Pepita was Catholic and constrained from divorcing her husband and dancing teacher Juan Antonio de Oliva.

  When Victoria was nine Pepita died. She and her two sisters were sent to a convent in Paris. The place was cold, the regime strict, at night in her prayers she asked the Virgin Mary to warm her bed. Chatter was punished. If she complained of feeling unwell she was sent to an extra church service, if she fainted she was given extra lessons. Holidays were trips with the nuns to Bercq near Boulogne. She was told not to mention that her mother had been a dancer called Pepita.

  She was at the convent seven years and assumed her future would be as a governess. But in 1880 a Mrs Mulhall, sent by Lionel, arrived at the convent to take his daughters to England. On the boat she told Victoria and her sisters they were illegitimate.

  In England, Lord Sackville of Knole and Lord de la Warr of Buckhurst were revealed as uncles and the Duchess of Bedford and Countess of Derby as aunts. The Duchess of Bedford refused to associate with this illegitimate brood. Lady Derby – Aunt Mary – was kind, but drew the line at inviting them to tea with visitors.

  In 1881 Lionel was appointed British Minister in Washington. Victoria went with him as lady of the house. Unusual, exotic, French-speaking, unpredictable, she was a fascination and a success. In her diary she listed her offers of marriage from politicians and diplomats – the President of the United States, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice who himself became British Ambassador in America, Sir Charles Hardinge who became head of the Foreign Office and wrote Bertie’s speeches, and half a dozen more.

  She was in Washington seven years. In 1888 there was a presidential election. Lionel gave his views on who he would prefer as president, the indiscretion was publicized and he was asked to leave. Three weeks later his brother Mortimer, the 1st Baron Sackville, died and Lionel inherited Knole. Victoria, aged twenty-six, was to return with him to manage the estate.

  On the way home they stopped at the French Riviera. Bertie was there. The company was dashing, smart and fast. ‘All the fast women respect me because I never go anywhere without Papa,’ Victoria wrote in her diary. Bertie wooed and teased her but she was not as yielding as Little Mrs George ten years later. ‘I was horribly shy, terriblement intimidée, the first time I met him.’ After dinner he sent for her to go to the smoking room. ‘I refused to smoke but I was obliged to go there … He asked for my photograph which I shall delay sending him as long as possible.’

  She did not understand his jokes but assumed they were funny because everyone laughed. He told her she brought him luck at baccarat:

  He made me sit at his right hand, and indeed he won. He gave me a big gold piece of 100 francs as a mascot with his name and the date engraved on it.

  When she went to talk to someone else he looked for her ‘all over the place’. ‘He put me at his right hand at supper.’ They went to his club and he danced the ‘quadrille d’honneur’ with her. ‘He is amiability itself toward me.’

  With convent primness she thought herself too popular and resolved to stop wearing her pink tulle frock trimmed with silver leaves. A French marquis whom Bertie said was a very good fellow wanted to marry her, but she worried he was not a Catholic. Life was dazzling. She reflected on the vanity of money, ‘mais pourtant j’aimerais bien avoir un petit million à moi’.

  Then came Knole and her little million. She gave the servants orders, wore the family jewels, marvelled at the paintings, tapestries and treasures with which the place was stuffed and to herself repeated the refrain, ‘Quel roman de ma vie’. Her father, diffident and eccentric, took no notice of her or Knole. He whittled paper knives from the lids of cigar boxes, read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, walked in the garden followed by two pet cranes and refused to speak to visitors. Given the chance he went to London for the day to avoid them.

  Her cousin – also called Lionel – visited. Heir to the Sackville t
itle and to Knole, he was twenty-two, five years her junior, gentle and quiet. They played draughts in the library and he thought her exotic. ‘I wonder whether I shall ever marry Lionel?’ she wrote in her diary. ‘How much people admire Knole! I should be very lacking in ambition were I to renounce it, but one’s personal happiness should come before ambition.’

  She prayed for guidance, worried about the French marquis and on 17 June 1890 married ambition, happiness and her cousin in the chapel at Knole. Bertie sent her a diamond and pearl brooch as a wedding present. The marriage caused jealousy and consternation among her brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts – the blood tie, the illegitimacy, her Catholicism, the huge inheritance.

  At first she loved her husband, though she thought him unfathomable and took no notice of his work. In her diary she recorded how, when and where they had sex: in the library, on the sofa, in the bath, in the park. She called him Tio and his penis Baby. ‘Baby very naughty this morning while I was pretending to sleep … Tio is getting more passionate every day … Tio was perfectly mad tonight … He really is a stallion – 4 times … Delirium. Afterwards Tio said, “Was it nice Vicky?”’

  For a while sex and organizing Knole concealed their incompatibility. She enjoyed installing electric lights, bathrooms and modern conveniences. ‘Everybody says that I made Knole the most comfortable large house in England, uniting the beauties of Windsor Castle and the Ritz.’

  Lionel, like his uncle, took no interest in running the estate. He was commander of the West Kent Yeomanry and on various civic committees in Kent. Virginia Woolf called him ‘the figure of an English nobleman, decayed, dignified, smoothed, effete’. Conversation between him and his wife stalled when Baby tired: ‘L says that I talk a lot and I do,’ Victoria wrote in her diary on 9 April 1891, ‘as I am always trying to keep the conversation going at meals, which I dread. I think there is so little small talk in England.’

  On 9 March 1892 Vita was born. Giving birth was an experience Victoria resolved not to repeat. She begged for chloroform and longed to die, said it was a hundred times worse than she had expected and that she would drown herself sooner than have another child.

  By 1904, the year Vita and Violet met, sex with Lionel had lost its appeal. She told him her nervous system was out of order and she must be left in peace. Lionel said little but found himself other women. Victoria found consolation with Seery – Sir John Murray Scott. He was six feet four, weighed twenty-five stone, had a red face and white mutton-chop whiskers. In summer he sweated and flies buzzed near. Vita once measured the region of his waist and said it was five feet round.

  He was as rich as he was large. From the collector Sir Richard Wallace, to whom he was secretary, he inherited Hertford House, its paintings and treasures (now known as the Wallace Collection), money, land, a huge Paris apartment ‘packed with the most wonderful furniture and bibelots’, Bagatelle (a pavilion in sixty acres in the Bois de Boulogne), a shooting lodge at Sluie in the Scottish Highlands where Vita as a child, like Violet at Duntreath, felt at her most free,

  those lovely, lovely hills, those blazing sunsets, those runnels of icy water where I used to make water wheels, those lovely summer evenings fishing on the loch, those long days when I often walked fifteen miles or more with the guns and the gillies.

  Seery worshipped Victoria, called her a little Spanish beggar and let her have whatever she wanted. ‘At times she wanted a good deal,’ Vita wrote. ‘Mother became absolutely the light and air of his life.’ She bullied, charmed, teased and fought with him. The first evening he met her he added a codicil to his will leaving her £50,000. He gave her large sums of money for the upkeep of Knole. She told Vita he was in love with her and that he pleaded outside her bedroom door at night. She said if he were to have a fit she would come and wake Vita and together they must bump him downstairs back to his room to avoid scandal.

  Seery came into Lady Sackville’s life when Vita was six, as Kingy came into Mrs Keppel’s life when Violet was four. Both girls were used to the presence of immensely rich, genial, fat men who adored their mothers and turned their fathers into shadowy figures. ‘Went to tea with Violet and stayed to dinner. The King was there’ was an offhand diary entry of Vita’s in 1905. Years later she wrote of her childhood visits to Portman Square:

  Often when I went to their house I used to see a discreet little one-horse brougham waiting outside and the butler would slip me into a dark corner of the hall with a murmured ‘One minute, miss, a gentleman is coming downstairs’ so that I might take my choice whether it was the King or the doctor.

  Often, too, Violet would be sent for to go to the drawing room to be exhibited to Kingy, and the girls would say, O bother, much as they did when Vita was sent for to see Seery. They were left to make whatever sense they could of these men who visited mother’s boudoir in the afternoon, or pleaded outside mother’s door at night. And though infidelity and acquisitiveness lurked beneath the glittering surface of charm and manners both girls, too, were aware of the sexual power of their mothers, a power that had no moral dimension, made men seem slavish and weak and was rewarded with riches and flattery. ‘How my mother puzzled me and how I loved her!’ Vita wrote. ‘She wounded and dazzled and fascinated and charmed me by turns.’

  At times the wounds surpassed the charm. ‘She loved me as a baby, but I don’t think she cared much for me as a child,’ Vita wrote. Herself emotionally neglected as a child, Lady Sackville was an erratic parent. In adult life she could not talk without tears of her own mother’s death. Sometimes she said Vita was beautiful; at others that she could not look at her because she was so ugly. Once she unjustly accused her of lying and made her kneel at her feet and ask God for forgiveness. Capricious with discipline, she bewildered with changes of heart and mood,

  one moment she would be in tears saying that my father wanted to kill her with worry because the electric lighting at Knole had broken down and next moment she would be mopping her eyes with laughter because a gardener had stumbled over a flower pot.

  Her moral guidance confused too: ‘One must always tell the truth darling if one can’ she told her, ‘but not all the truth; toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire.’ ‘Never refuse a good offer my child’ was another piece of advice. ‘I have refused a good many offers in my life and always regretted it.’

  Lady Sackville pried into Vita’s inner world then lamented when she refused to speak of what she felt,

  it has been rather hard to live all my life with Papa and Lionel who are both so cold on the surface and now I find the same disposition in my child. I like my old Seery because he is so sympathetique and I want that so much with my Spanish nature.

  But it did not lead her to treat him very well.

  Mrs Keppel in contrast was sharp, straightforward and unambiguous. She took no interest in the complexity of her daughters’ states of mind. ‘Too clever to be malicious’, she appeared charming to both Kingy and her husband. Vita, though, witnessed her mother shouting at her father and goading Seery:

  I thought they would quarrel for good … It was all very unpleasant and they called each other names and I hated it … I am awfully sorry for Seery … he cried this afternoon.

  Such scenes made Vita create her own world of stories, choose the company of her pony, dogs and rabbits and observe her mother’s eccentricities from a haven of her own control.

  Capricious with money, her mother veered from indulgence to parsimony. She casually purchased antiques and pearls but picked the stamps off unfranked letters. She bought the most expensive writing paper then wrote her letters on stationery she had taken from railway hotels, or on the backs of letters received or catalogues. ‘I think she touched the peak’ Vita said ‘when she wrote to me on the toilet paper she had found in the ladies cloakroom at Harrods.’

  At Knole she had one room entirely papered with postage stamps. In her gardens she liked a display of flowers, so into gaps in the herbaceous border she stuck delphiniums made from painted tin on metal st
alks, ‘annual, biennial, perennial meant nothing to her; it merely irritated her that plants shouldn’t flower the whole time and in exactly the right colours’.

  Her oddness matured with the years. She obsessed about the benefits of fresh air, refused to have fires in the biting cold, and kept every door at Knole open – not with mundane door stoppers, but statues of Nelson, Cupid and the Duke of Wellington. Vita was given a wooden Shakespeare: ‘You like poetry darling so you will like to have Shakespeare holding the door for you. N’est-ce pas que c’est bien trouvé?’

  She took to eating meals in the garden even when it snowed. Her husband found it worse than idiosyncratic, went round shutting all doors and withdrew into his own thoughts. Vita disliked having to eat dinner in a fur coat and with hot-water bottle, foot muffs and mittens, but ‘never lost the sense that no ordinary mother could introduce such fairy tales into life’.

  Her mother’s extravagant relationship to material things contrasted with Mrs Keppel’s orderly acquisitiveness. With bizarre facility Lady Sackville acquired and abandoned stately homes, fortunes, admirers, jewels. In the back drawing room of her London house at Hill Street, Berkeley Square, she created a Persian Room with murals of exotic flowers, latticed windows and ‘improbably spiky cities’. It delighted her,

  she possessed, more than anybody I have ever known, the faculty of delusion. When once she went into her Persian Room she ceased to see the fog or to hear the taxis. She entered the only world she knew, the world of unreality which she made real to herself, and into which she persuaded other people by the sheer strength of her own personality and conviction to enter.

  Violet, too, was a fantasist with the faculty of delusion. In her letters she wooed Vita with images as seductive as her mother’s Persian Room. Like Lady Sackville she created her own world. ‘Do you know’, she was to write to Vita in 1920,