Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  Mrs Keppel’s suite was on the first floor, George’s on the floor above. All the old Portman Street furniture went into his rooms: screens, chaises-longues, leather chairs, his photos of ‘masses of beautiful ladies with well-developed bosoms and tiny waists’. Sonia’s and Nannie’s rooms and the schoolroom were on the second floor, too. Violet and Moiselle had the floor above. Violet’s sitting room was converted out of an attic.

  Mrs Keppel, her social confidence unimpaired, resumed her life of bridge, visiting and choosing the menus. In March 1912 she retrieved her daughters from Germany. Sonia was to be despatched to London, Violet to Paris. From the Grand Hotel Heidelberg Violet wrote to Vita that she ‘would suffocate with rage’ if she did not see her in Paris. She was eighteen and it was time for her to ‘come out’ into society. Mrs Keppel bought her brassieres, corsets, chic clothes, got her hair curled, her nails manicured. On this metamorphosis much money was spent. Vita wrote to Harold Nicolson, who was in Constantinople and to whom she was unofficially engaged: ‘My erratic friend Violet Keppel is coming home in April so you will know her; I am so glad. She will amuse you more than anybody.’

  ‘After a month in Paris, who would have recognized the Bavarian Backfisch?’ Violet said:

  Patiently, tirelessly, my mother dealt with my appearance, item after item; complexion, hair, figure, clothes, adding here, subtracting there. A whole quartier concentrated on my uninviting person.

  Mrs Keppel’s coming back and her daughter’s coming out were to dazzle Grosvenor Street and Berkeley Square.

  NINE

  Mrs Keppel ‘determined to give Violet a wonderful season’ whether she wanted one or not. Life at 16 Grosvenor Street focused on entertaining, parties and who was getting married to whom. Ostensibly it was all for her daughter’s sake. Each day she would say ‘So and So’s engagement was in The Times this morning’. Her table, Sonia wrote, was graced by

  exquisite beauties like Zia Torby and Diana Manners and Bridget Colebrooke and Vi de Trafford. And romantic young men like John Granby and Charles Lister, and Julian and Billy Grenfell.

  Violet did not enjoy herself. She seemed ‘much less gay than she had done in Munich’. On her own admission she cared for no one in England but Vita. Men thought her too acerbic, too clever. She sprinkled her conversation with phrases in French and German, alluded to her painting classes and love of Wagner and scared the ‘pink and white’ young men introduced as putative husbands.

  All agreed she could be very amusing, a good mimic, and that she sparkled when she chose. She liked dancing – particularly the foxtrot and tango. But at heart she found her mother’s social world intolerable. It brought with it constraints, hypocrisies and obligations of a sort she hated but was not strategic enough to defy. These were the people who by virtue of their wealth and class were society – royalty, politicians, beauties – but she was not attracted to their lives. Vita, too, rejected them as role models and satirized them in her novel The Edwardians:

  their conversation seemed to consist in asking one another what they had thought of such and such an entertainment and whether they were going to such and such another … investments bulked heavy in their talk, and other people’s incomes, and the merits of stocks and shares;… These are the people who ordain the London season, glorify Ascot, make or unmake the fortunes of small Continental watering places, inspire envy, emulation and snobbishness … they spend money, and that is the best that can be said of them.

  Mrs Keppel invited three hundred people to Violet’s coming-out ball in April 1912. George and Mr Rolfe the butler planned it all like a military manoeuvre. ‘The house was full of men moving furniture and of florists arranging flowers.’ Guests dined at little tables, the Italianate garden was ‘spanned by a tent’, Casano’s band played soft music throughout dinner. Sonia panicked and elected to stay with Lady Elizabeth Williamson who was eighty and lived in Curzon Street.

  The old Edwardians regrouped at Mrs Keppel’s command in their brilliant jewels and grand dresses, with their now grown-up children, still confident of power and privilege despite King Edward’s death. Violet scorned them. She extolled art and freedom. She shared the pre-war craze for Diaghilev’s productions of the Russian ballet, saw Nijinsky and Karsavina dancing in Scheherezade and, influenced by the set designs of Bakst, decorated her rooms at the top of the house with gold lamé curtains, subdued lighting, the painted head of a sphinx over the fireplace. She festooned the divans with cushions, burned incense, filled the place with ikons, missals, Persian jackets and feathered turbans. It was a setting for less orthodox seduction than Mrs Keppel’s bedroom two floors down.

  Vita was abroad and did not attend this ‘coming out’. But a month later Violet and her mother went to Knole for a Saturday to Monday party. (‘Weekend’ was considered vulgar, resonant of trade and the necessity for paid occupation.) Violet was discomfited to see Vita’s popularity and social success: ‘she had all the prestige that two years’ precedence dans le monde can confer. I felt resentful, at a disadvantage.’ She thought Vita beautiful, not a Bavarian Backfisch like herself:

  She was tall and graceful. The profound hereditary Sackville eyes were as pools from which the morning mist had lifted. A peach might have envied her complexion. Round her revolved several enamoured young men.

  Violet, marginalized, flirted with one of the guests, went with him to the park and did not return until everyone was in bed. She made her way to Vita’s bedroom ‘down miles of passages’, past the state rooms, through the long gallery. She went in without knocking and did not turn on the light. ‘Moonlight poured through the uncurtained windows on to the carved historical-looking bed.’

  Vita was not asleep. She was caustic about Violet’s flirtatiousness with men. They kissed. Violet felt betrayed, thought her condescending, feared rumours about her impending engagement to Harold Nicolson were true and that their own intimacy was at an end. She asked if Vita was in love and Vita said she was not.

  To her mother Violet confided her disappointment that Vita gave more time to Rosamund Grosvenor than to herself. Mrs Keppel mentioned this to Lady Sackville, which irritated Vita. ‘This jealousy between R and V will end badly,’ she wrote in her diary. But such feelings were of no social significance, no more than girlish moods. And now Violet was ‘out’ they all met at country house parties, at Knole, Coker, Crichel, Crewe, Sutton Courtney.

  On 8 June Violet wrote to Vita from Buckhurst, Withyam, Sussex:

  This is a rather nice place with a divine garden. Of course it is not Knole … Knole is quite unique & I love it far better than you have any idea of … I would not at all object to being housemaid at Knole.

  From Crichel at Christmas she thanked Vita for a jade claw, sent love to Rosamund, hoped to meet ‘sometime next year etc., etc.’ They met at Knole at New Year in 1913 and at Vita’s birthday party in March. On 10 March they walked together in Hyde Park. ‘She is mad,’ Vita wrote in her diary, ‘she kissed me as she usually does not, and told me she loves me. Rose does not know that I went out with V. this evening.’

  None of them considered the implications of these kisses and declarations of love. In May, Violet and her mother stayed in Ravello at the villa of Lord Grimthorpe – the banker reputed to be Violet’s father. Vita stayed, too, to vex Rosamund who was having a romance with a sailor.

  On 29 May Mrs Keppel gave a dinner party for seventy at Grosvenor Street. Vita was there. Violet, responding to social expectations and knowing jealousy unleashed possessiveness in Vita, got engaged to Gerald Wellesley, heir to the title of Duke of Wellington, a diplomat and colleague of Harold Nicolson. He bought her a ring but the engagement was one of her ‘parlour tricks’ and she broke it. Vita, disturbed, wrote to Harold:

  He lays down the law so he is positively rude, and I never knew anyone so critical … He is excited about Violet Keppel but she doesn’t like him. How you will hate her, or perhaps you will be completely bowled over, so on the whole I think you had better not meet.


  The following year Gerald Wellesley found a new, very rich fiancée, Dorothy Ashton, stepdaughter of the Earl of Scarborough. The marriage lasted until she started an affair with Vita in 1922.

  Marriage and its prospects prompted the parties, dinners and dances given by mothers. If the sexuality of the daughters in ballgowns and the family pearls appeared equivocal or complicated, marriage would sort that out. Marriage was the main tide, other liaisons squalls and eddies of the heart. But Violet would not or could not go with the tide. She had her mother’s bold love for a king to match. She put a regal premium on her own feelings. She found Vita’s engagement to Harold Nicolson intolerable, a betrayal, and would not observe the social niceties surrounding it. Her jealousy was acute. On 28 July he wrote to Vita from his parents’ home at 53 Cadogan Gardens:

  Isn’t it funny – Violet is so jealous of Gwen [his sister] getting nearer to you (legally) than she is – and has not answered any of her letters. G is terrified that she will be catty to you about her. She (Violet) is a vulgar little girl.

  A week later on 5 August 1913 Vita’s engagement was formally announced in the papers. Violet wrote a scornful letter:

  Accepté mes félicitations les plus sincère à la nouvelle de tes fiançailles! I never could write letters on this subject in any language but somehow it sounds less sickening in French. I wish you every possible happiness (et cetera) from the bottom of my heart (et cetera). Will you and Mr Nicholson come and have tea with me? Also Mama me charge de te demander if you would both care to spend the week at Clingendaal beginning Sunday 10th of August.

  … I see in the evening papers that the rumour is contradicted, in which case the effusion would be (officially at least) in vain. Ma non importa. You can keep it till the day when it ought publicly to be forthcoming. It will suit the same purpose at any age, with no matter whom.

  Behind Violet’s love for Vita was contempt for the hypocrisy of marriage as she had seen it practised by her mother and the King. For herself she knew marriage would be a meretricious show. She wanted proof that Vita was dissembling too.

  The night before her wedding Vita cried for an hour at the thought of leaving Knole. She was married in the chapel there on 1 October 1913. She wore a gold gown, a veil of Irish lace; Rosamund Grosvenor and Harold’s sister Gwen were bridesmaids. Six hundred wedding presents were displayed in the Great Hall: emeralds and diamonds from Lady Sackville, an amethyst and diamond ring from Mrs Keppel on Violet’s behalf. Violet stayed away – a measure of how betrayed she felt. Lady Sackville stayed in bed. She disliked not being the centre of attention and parting with her daughter made her ill.

  She had had a difficult year. Seery died in January 1912. She was waiting for him at Spealls, the interior design shop in South Audley Street which she managed, erratically, for a few years. He was going to take her to lunch. She had told him to bring a bottle of port wine for one of the staff who was ill. Instead he had a massive heart attack. He left her £150,000 in cash, the contents of 2 rue Lafitte estimated at £350,000, and valuable antiques, jewels and artworks. His relatives went to court alleging she had mesmerized him and exerted ‘undue influence’. She was defended by Sir Edward Carson, famous for his prosecution of Oscar Wilde. Mr F.E. Smith – later Lord Birkenhead defended the Scott family. Lady Sackville knew him socially and with her inimitable capacity for intervention wrote to him before the case:

  19 June 1913

  Dear Mr Smith

  I hear that Mr Malcolm Scott has approached you on the subject of attacking me and my husband and my daughter in his iniquitous suit, coming next week.

  I can’t believe that you would let yourself be mixed up in this painful affair when you and I meet among our friends in society and I meet your wife often too.

  The whole Defence put forward by Mr Scott is a tissue of falsehoods against a woman who has behaved well all her life and tried to help saving one of the finest places in England.

  I do hope you will think over the undeserved pain you will give so unnecessarily …

  Yours sincerely

  V. Sackville

  I swear on my honour that I have never influenced Sir J. over his will, except to leave us much less than he intended and that I have never seen or destroyed any signed Codicil.

  She won and made a friend of the judge, Sir Samuel Evans. Summing up he called her a lady of high mettle, ‘very high mettle indeed’. She sold the contents of 2 rue Lafitte (though Seery had hoped these works of art would enrich Knole) and in the year of Vita’s marriage spent money wildly. ‘How she flung money about that year … It was almost terrifying to go out shopping with her,’ Vita wrote. She invested £60,000 in the goldmine of a Canadian whom she met on a train. Walking down Bond Street she saw in a jeweller’s window a chain of emeralds and diamonds and bought it for Vita. Her victory made Lady Sackville very rich, but it was a public humiliation for her husband, who turned to his lover, Olive Rubens.

  For Vita marriage to Harold was supportive, companionable, calm. His background was not exotic like hers and he had no money other than what he earned. Born in Teheran in 1886, the third son of a Scottish diplomat, Sir Arthur Nicolson, and Catherine Rowan Hamilton, he spent his childhood in embassies and legations in Constantinople, Tangier, Madrid, St Petersburg. He went to Wellington College and Balliol, Oxford, and in 1909 joined the Foreign Office.

  He was, Vita said, ‘a merry angel’, enthusiastic, intelligent, jokey, avoiding of confrontation. Mild disdain for Americans, Jews and the middle class and a dislike of women, left him easy and charming in the company of aristocratic men. He admired and adored Vita but preferred to write of emotion not show it.

  They honeymooned in Italy and Egypt, then sailed to Constantinople where he was third secretary at the British Embassy. She was homesick for Knole and Rosamund, but life was new and happy. By December she was pregnant. The following June war loomed and Harold was recalled to England:

  I remember a divine voyage by sea from Constantinople to Marseilles, through the Aegean, a second honeymoon. We met Mother in Paris and both thought that she was going off her head, as she was obviously in an extraordinarily unbalanced state of mind. Then we went to Knole. War was declared on the 4th of August and Ben was born on the 6th. Scenes immediately began with mother over his name.

  Lady Sackville was having a difficult menopause. Excluded by Vita’s harmonious family life, she marginalized Harold, was disparaging about his parents and tried to claim the new child by insisting he be called Lionel. She filled Harold with dread. Four years later, he felt equal loathing for Violet whom he thought resembled her. Emotionally manipulative women who claimed Vita made him venomous:

  Everything in me cries out in loathing of BM [Bonne Maman], of her vain empty insincere nature – and I get hot with shame to think that I have allowed myself to pander to her vanity, to adulate her emptiness and to abet her insincerity.

  Vita and he moved out of Knole. BM’s money bought them 182 Ebury Place in Pimlico, rebuilt by Edwin Lutyens. Her money too bought them, a year later, Long Barn, a Tudor house two miles from Knole, a Rolls-Royce to get them between the two places, and then the adjacent property, Brook Farm and the surrounding fields.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1914 Mrs Keppel and Violet went again to Clingendaal near The Hague. It belonged to Daisy, Baroness de Brienen, who inherited it from her father. He had no sons and willed it to whichever of his daughters did not marry. Daisy de Brienen wore nautical suits, shirts, collars, ties and round her neck a pearl chain with a whistle to call her dogs.

  Clingendaal spanned a canal, had rose-garlanded bridges, stables, carnation houses, a Japanese garden and an observatory. Mrs Keppel and Daisy de Brienen shared the expense of elaborate summer holidays there. Guests travelled out by night ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. Cars were sent to meet them and bring them back in time for breakfast. They ate at a long table laid with embroidered linen and oriental china. There was bacon, eggs, grilled kidneys, devilled chicken, cold
ham and galantine, freshly made rolls, pyramids of fruit. Footmen in tail coats, liveries and white cotton gloves served them from a sideboard with tiers of silver-plated breakfast dishes and coffee pots of antique Dutch and English silver.

  Among the guests, that last summer before the lamps went out over Europe, were Violet, Duchess of Rutland, who lived in Belvoir Castle and arrived off the boat wearing a silver turban and opera cloak (the Duke owned large parts of the Midlands); her daughter Lady Diana Manners, acclaimed for her beauty; Lady de Trafford in a tailored suit and tiny plumed toque; her daughter Vi; Sir Fritz and Lady Ponsonby with their children Loelia and Gaspard; the Ilchesters who lived at Melbury House near Dorchester and at Holland House, Kensington; Sir ‘Lulu’ and Lady Harcourt; Sonia’s godmother Maggie Greville; her brother-in-law Sydney; Henry Stonor; Harry Cust, poet, politician, editor of Pall Mall Gazette and the father of the Duchess of Rutland’s daughter Diana. Included among the guests were ‘a suitor or two’ for Violet, young men soon to be annihilated by the war.

  Mrs Keppel’s former authority was restored. She carried on the tradition of hospitality, hedonism, entertainment on an extraordinary scale. Daisy de Brienen provided the palace but deferred to her queenly status. Alice was ensconced in the best rooms. At dinner the young liked to sit near to hear her humorous gossip and observe her social skills. What she disliked did not intrude. Sonia that summer, aged thirteen, wrote a novel about a loveless marriage, her mother called it extraordinary, ‘not very attractive for someone of your age’, and burned it.

  George organized them all. His invitation book was divided and subdivided into columns headed Invited and Accepted, Old Men, Young Men, Ladies, Girls. He assigned rooms, recorded proposed lengths of stay and activities and amusements for each day. ‘Mama disliked such details,’ Sonia said. He arranged swimming sessions, barge expeditions, visits to cheese factories and picture galleries, cycling trips, games of golf, afternoons at the races, picnics on the lawn. He drew up lists of which guests were to travel in which car and provided them with maps, stopwatches and mileometers. Harry Cust called his efforts ‘George’s summer manoeuvres’.