Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  * * *

  Life at Court changed with Bertie’s death. ‘Are we as welcome as ever?’ was the caption to a cartoon by Max Beerbohm showing Ernest Cassel, Arthur Sassoon and Leopold Rothschild creeping along a Palace corridor. Scawen Blunt predicted a ‘regular sweep’ of

  the Jews and the second-rate women that the King preferred to his aristocracy because they amused him … [George V] hates all these and would have nothing to do with them.

  Cassel subscribed to a bust of Bertie by Sir Thomas Brock and continued for a while to oversee the royal portfolio and to donate large sums to charity. But for him and Mrs Keppel royal intimacy was over, the special relationship gone. He retired in December 1910. The Times gave him a respectful appraisal and, in private, he continued his flair for making money.

  For Mrs Keppel life changed overnight. The King’s death left her wealthy but uncrowned. Without a role she could not publicly parade her grief or continue as part of Palace life. She was cold-shouldered by Bertie’s son and rebuffed when she went to sign her name in the visitors’ book at Marlborough House.

  Soon after Bertie’s death she moved into a huge house at 16 Grosvenor Street. Originally an eighteenth-century mansion, converted in the late nineteenth century into piano showrooms with flats above, she set about having it restored to its former glory. Violet described it as ‘a great improvement’ on Portman Square. Osbert Sitwell called it ‘surely one of the most remarkable houses in London’:

  Its high façade, dignified and unpretentious as only that of a Georgian mansion can be, very effectively hid its immense size. Within existed an unusual air of spaciousness and light, an atmosphere of luxury, for Mrs Keppel possessed an instinct for splendour.

  Hostessing came later. She sought to scotch rumours from critics like Lord Knollys that her appetite for partying was as keen as ever. To his wife she wrote from Grosvenor Street, after Bertie’s death, on paper framed in black:

  My dear Lady Knollys

  I feel sure you cannot think I should give a dinner party, feeling as I do. Tomorrow, Soveral, Louise Sassoon and Captain Fortescue come. Soveral because he does not dine out, & I told Ld Knollys of Louise, who is coming up simply to see me. How people can do anything I do not know, as life with all its joys, have come to a full stop, at least for me.

  Sincerely

  Alice Keppel

  Three guests, she let it be known, did not constitute a dinner party. She withdrew temporarily from the social scene and while builders worked on improvements to 16 Grosvenor Street, arranged a year’s trip to Ceylon, China and round the world.

  She went to Duntreath for the summer months and in August announced to her daughters that they would sail with her to Ceylon on 3 November. ‘No young lady’s education is complete without a smattering of Tamil,’ she told Violet. The journey out would take three weeks. For three months they were to be guests of Bertie’s friend and George’s employer Sir Thomas Lipton. Their destination was his bungalow and tea plantations at Dambatenne.

  Mrs Keppel’s brother, ‘beloved Archie’, was in the party along with his wife Ida, their son Ronnie and his wife Eva, Nannie, Moiselle and a male escort for the girls, Watty Montgomery, who already had a smattering of Tamil and whom Sonia liked because he reminded her of Papa – who stayed at home.

  In October Violet wrote to Vita telling her how she did nothing but try on dresses all day. ‘I want you to come to Ceylon if only to see them. O Vanity Thy Name is Violet.’ She did not want to part from Vita. She again told her that she loved her and Vita asked her why. Violet who was sixteen replied,

  you ask me pointblank why I love you … I love you because you never capitulate. I love you for your wonderful intelligence, for your literary aspirations, for your unconscious (?) coquetry. I love you because you have the air of doubting nothing! I love in you what is also in me: imagination, the gift for languages, taste, intuition and a host of other things … I love you Vita because I’ve seen your soul.

  But Vita, two years older, was busy. She had ‘come out’ into society. A Florentine Marquis, Orazio Pucci, wanted to marry her and pursued her to Rome and Paris. She called him poor Pucci and did not in the least want to marry him. Her friend Rosamund Grosvenor, whom she called ‘the Rubens lady’ because she was pink and white and curvy was besotted with her. Vita desired, kissed and shared a bed with her, but thought her stupid. (‘O my dears do consider your illustrious names,’ her governess said as she saw their amorous displays.) And at a dinner party she had met Harold Nicolson, liked his curls and boyish ways and thought him witty, amenable and not in the least boring. Violet warned she would become the ‘wife of a gentleman … I pray that my prediction will not be realized.’ But Vita was easy about men. ‘I didn’t think of them in what is called “that way”.’

  On 31 October Violet met her to say goodbye. They went to a play and drove round Hyde Park. ‘The end of that motor-drive was one of the very rare but extremely disturbing occasions when she kissed me,’ Vita recalled ten years later. She warned Violet to stay true while she was away and threatened to kill her if she did not. From Grosvenor Street Violet wrote:

  Your speech impressed me profoundly … if only your imagination could take it in, you were holding, so to speak, my soul in your hands. You could mould it any way you liked …

  My curiosity on the other hand is so great that I would let myself go to the extreme just to see how you would arrange to kill me. Would it be a stiletto thrust between the shoulder blades by a traitor at midnight or a poisoned cup by daylight? Do tell me so that I know where I stand …

  Dambatenne, 6000 feet above sea level, had panoramic views of mountains, lagoons, camphor trees and mile after mile of plantations of tea. Ceylonese women in bright clothes picked the leaves for a pittance. The Keppel party travelled out via Naples and Tangier, across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. For the journey by road from Colombo to Dambatenne three cars carried them all, their luggage and guns, spears and nets for hunting in the jungle. As they drove through mountain villages local people gathered to look. Alice said they thought the cars were gods.

  In one village a woman, a basket of fruit on her head, seemed mesmerized by the cars and stood in their path. In Sonia’s account:

  The chauffeur sounded his horn. The next thing I remember was a bump, and then fruit from the basket flew all over the road … Then the crowd began to scream … Dimly, I sensed that we had killed the poor old woman … A native policeman appeared, and Watty towered over him, quietly answering his excited questions. Mama and Uncle Archie stood beside him while the villagers crowded round vociferously. Eventually the legal points appeared to be settled. And evidently Mama’s generosity placated the old woman’s relations. Like an old rag-doll I saw her carried limply away.

  Though life with all its joys had come to a full stop, charm and money had its way.

  * * *

  Two days after Violet left for the East and five days after warning her to be faithful while she was away, Vita wrote a letter, on 5 November 1910, from Knole to Harold Nicolson:

  My dear Harold

  I have been asked to ‘ask a man’ to dine on Thursday with Mrs Harold Pearson and go to a dance, so would you like to come? I promise you shan’t be made to dance! I think it might be rather amusing.

  She told him to let her know as soon as possible or ‘better still’ to come to tea with her and the Rubens lady.

  In the winter she had a persistent chest infection and her mother sent her to the south of France to recuperate in the sun. She stayed in the Château Malet outside Monte Carlo. Rosamund and Harold stayed too. Violet wrote exotic letters evoking the Orient and the Thousand and One Nights. She wrote of pawpaws for breakfast, lagoons girded by nutmeg trees, swaying bamboo, purple orchids, camphor trees, white peacocks, the jungle, mountains, starry skies and weary oxen with bloodshot eyes, ‘a vermilion land, enamoured of light, drunk by sunshine…’

  But behind the endeavoured seduction she was disquieted as she scanned Vita’s
letters – less frequent than her own and half the length – for proof of fidelity or signs of betrayal: ‘Do try not to get married before I return,’ she asked her on 4 December 1910.

  And though Vita spared the details, clues were there. They gave some inkling of Harold ‘so fresh, so intellectual, so unphysical’ whom Vita liked better than anyone as a companion and playfellow, and for his brain and ‘delicious disposition’. It was enough for Violet to write on 12 December without embellishment, some ten days after she arrived at Dambatenne that as she read, again and again, Vita’s latest letter, ‘a sort of heavy anguish’, an ‘apprehension’ made her heart beat fast and her hand tremble. In French, her language of the heart, she voiced fear:

  For the first time your two extra years seem to me so real, arrogant, sinister. Don’t think I haven’t anticipated it. I’ve often thought of it. Oh God, tell me I’m wrong – carried away by my fiendish imagination.

  After all, I’m hardly a woman. I ought to have known that at your age you’d have a liaison with a man. I’d be wise to accept this. I feel I’m about to say inappropriate things. Don’t laugh. Promise you won’t laugh. For so long I’ve asked nothing of you, so grant me that. It would hurt so.

  Violet did not enjoy the trip to Ceylon. In her memoirs she described it as ‘a completely irrelevant interlude’. She was there not to learn a smattering of Tamil, but because it suited her mother. It was discreet for the previous King’s mistress to absent herself from London society while changes took place at the Palace. For Mrs Keppel travel was a compensatory way of putting Biarritz, Portman Square and her now uncertain social position behind her. She intended to be away for more than a year and so her daughters must be away too.

  Violet suffered the heat and spicy food and felt herself ‘essentially an occidental’. She liked, she said, hints of the Orient – as in Bucharest, Sicily and southern Spain – but ‘the unmitigated East disturbs’. She spent the time in ‘a mood of settled melancholy’, bought a ruby for Vita but sensed she was losing her. ‘What a bitch you are!’ she wrote on 2 January 1911. ‘Do you know that you have ceased to be a reality for me?’

  Mrs Keppel’s days at Dambatenne were spent lazing on divans. The heat was intense. Archie got migraines. Ida embroidered. Nannie, fractious, quarrelled with Moiselle and was shocked by the bare breasts of the women who picked tea. A house snake kept to catch mice terrified Sonia. One lunchtime a servant walked through the dining room with chamber pots stacked on his head. It was not Grosvenor Street, the Villa Eugénie or Portman Square.

  They had picnics in the hills and admired the unfamiliar sight of monkeys, parrots and hummingbirds in the wild. They visited the buried city at Anuradhapura. The day after Violet wrote her premonitory letter to Vita they went into the jungle at Nuwara Eliya with rifles, huge nets, wading boots and cameras for big game hunting. It was the kind of trip Kingy passionately loved. ‘I hope terribly they won’t force me to participate,’ Violet wrote to Vita. ‘Those enormous beasts all bleeding – pouah! It makes one shudder!’

  In February Mrs Keppel, her beloved Archie and his family sailed for China. Violet and Sonia, accompanied by Moiselle and the nanny, were despatched to Munich. Violet was nearly seventeen, Sonia ten. At Colombo they said goodbye to their mother whom they would not see for many months. ‘The parting with Mama was terrible,’ Sonia wrote.

  At San Remo they were reunited with George Keppel for a few days. Violet met up with Vita who was still at the Monte Carlo villa. ‘I remember admiring to myself the thick plait of her really beautiful hair,’ Vita wrote. Violet gave her the ruby she had bought her. She did not waver from her love of Europe, its languages and culture, her desire to live in Paris and to write, her derision of marriage and social conformity, her serious love of Vita. If she saw her unawares the colour drained from her face. Lord Sackville, as a joke, when Vita mentioned seeing Violet, would say: Did she turn pale? ‘O Vita,’ Violet wrote that year:

  I get so sad when I think how like we are to two gamblers, both greedy to win, neither of whom will risk throwing a card unless the other throws his at the same time! You won’t tell me you love me, because you fear (wrongly most of the time) that I will not make the same declaration to you at the same moment!

  Vita took conquest and possession – of people and place – lightly. She liked Harold but he seemed too diffident to make any physical move. She ‘tyrannized’ Rosamund and desired her. Violet she regarded as hers. ‘I knew it then, albeit only through my obscurely but quite obstinately proprietary attitude.’ Most of all she liked Knole, Kent, her dogs and writing stories, plays and poems.

  After a week in San Remo the Keppel girls went on to Munich. Moiselle and Nannie, usually discordant, united in criticism of Mrs Keppel for dumping her daughters ‘like the Babes in the Wood’ in a country where they knew no one. They all booked in at a pension at 5 Maximilianstrasse owned by Frau Glocker, once an opera singer now a landlady who tippled brandy. Mrs Keppel had not vetted the place and would not have approved of it. The bedrooms had lino on the floors and inadequate stoves. Of the six other boarders one, Frau Leeb, had a wooden leg which she unscrewed at mealtimes and left propped by the fire. Violet and Sonia ate breakfast and lunch with the other guests and had tea in their own sitting room.

  It was snowing when they arrived. The cold, the upholstered furniture, feather bedding and anxiety at being separated from her mother in unfamiliar surroundings exacerbated Sonia’s asthma. Nannie wrapped her in a cotton-wool pack which made her wheeze the more. She became chronically ill.

  She and Violet went to an international school. Violet, more at home in Europe than England, learned German easily, proved witty and moved in a cosmopolitan set. Sonia was confused by the language, wore a brace on her protruding teeth, was homesick and sought out English girlfriends:

  I liked the two Molesworth girls because their grandmother had written The Cuckoo Clock. And because most of our lives we appeared to have gone to bed at the same time and to have had milk and biscuits for supper.

  Neither she nor Violet truly knew what mother was doing in China or why they were in Munich and she was there. For unexplained reasons the death of Kingy meant they lost her, too. The glittering goddess had disappeared to an unknown corner of the world as bewildering as Dambatenne.

  George Keppel visited Munich once a month. While there, he saw much of the singer Nellie Melba who called him a ‘charmeur’. In the afternoons he took Sonia shopping, out to tea and to museums. In the evenings he often took Violet to the opera. She liked Wagner best. Mother, Duntreath and Grosvenor Street all seemed part of another life. Violet wrote to Vita and asked her to visit. ‘But I never did,’ Vita, absorbed in her own life, said.

  In summer 1911 Mrs Keppel offered Violet a holiday in the country of her choice and told her she was welcome to bring a friend. Violet asked Vita to join them in the Austrian Tyrol. Vita declined and Violet’s disappointment was keen. ‘No I am not angry,’ she wrote on 31 July from the Grand Hotel Reichtenhall:

  Why should I be? It is merely a pity. That is all I can say.

  … No, I am afraid you will not see me again till goodness knows when! I don’t think I shall return to England before I’m married. To say the least of it I have forgotten everybody in England except you, which is not a compliment – only the truth which somehow or other never manages to be complimentary.

  O Vita come! If not for your sake for mine. Don’t you understand. Can’t you see it can never be the same again. If I have ever wanted you I want you now. Come, I implore you. My pride forbids me to say more. I could kill myself for having said so much.

  Their letters became infrequent. At Christmas Violet sent her a card of two cherubs floating in the sky.

  Mrs Keppel visited Munich. At the station Sonia did not recognize her:

  A lady caught my arm and said: ‘Here I am, darling!’ I gave her a brief look and tried to brush her aside. But the lady persisted. ‘Here I am!’ again she said.

  I looked up at
her and, rudely, I stared. The turquoise-coloured eyes were the same, smiling down at me … But what had happened to the hair?

  The last time I had seen it, under the ship’s lights at Colombo, it had shone like gold. Now it was snow white.

  Like a fairy Mrs Keppel transformed her daughters’ lives. Dismayed by the Pension Glocker she moved them to a spacious sunny apartment furnished with rented antiques. Disturbed by Violet’s weight gain and clothes she said ‘My poor child! You can never leave Germany!’ decked her out and told her to diet. Disapproving of her college friends, she contacted Sir Vincent Corbett, British Ambassador in Munich, and through him introduced Violet to young people she deemed more suitable. ‘They were a jolly, extrovert lot, given up to shooting and skiing,’ Violet said. For Sonia she found a new doctor, who threw out the feather bedding and cotton-wool padding and advocated opening the windows.

  She then returned to Grosvenor Street, rose from the ashes of bereavement, tinted her white hair blue and re-established herself in society life. She took with her treasures from the East to adorn her Georgian mansion: porcelain and Coromandel screens, Chippendale chinoiserie furniture, eighteenth-century painted silk panels to line the walls of her boudoir. She turned 16 Grosvenor Steet into a spectacular townhouse. ‘In these spacious rooms Mama had all the scope she needed to demonstrate her matured taste and knowledge,’ Sonia said. ‘Not only were the rooms beautiful,’ Osbert Sitwell wrote,

  with their grey walls, red lacquer cabinets, English eighteenth-century people in their red coats, huge porcelain pagodas [a gift from Bertie] and thick, magnificent carpets, but the hostess conducted the running of her house as a work of art in itself …

  From Bond Street she bought Old Masters, china, cut-glass candelabra, chandeliers. The dining room seated seventy. Her Angora cats matched the carpets. Twice as many servants as in Portman Square lived in the basement area.