Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  In her account of their affair, written in 1920, Vita portrayed Violet, that spring day in 1918, as the experienced seducer, the wily courtesan, as knowing as Mrs Keppel or Louise de Kéroualle – Charles II’s mistress – ‘infinitely clever’, ‘adept at concealment’, determined to conquer. ‘I might have been a boy of eighteen and she a woman of thirty-five’. In fact Violet was twenty-four, two years younger than Vita, watched over by her mother and with no particular experience of sex or life. ‘I am young, headstrong, exceptionally passionate. I am in love for the first time in my life,’ she wrote to Vita that year. It was Vita who had loved Rosamund Grosvenor, married Harold, published poems, given birth to three children.

  Violet’s love for Vita was the unequivocal focus of her life. Her perception of it had not changed from when she declared it in October 1910 before leaving for Ceylon. But she had no pragmatic plan for life, or idea of how to channel this love. When Vita married, she was hurt, made scathing comments, but did nothing to intrude. To please her mother she ‘came out’ into society but scorned its hypocrisies and double standards. The war frightened her but beyond a surface display of patriotism she took no interest in it. She flirted with its heroes to show her mother that she could, if she chose, have a man, but backed off if marriage loomed.

  Mrs Keppel was not a role model for candid relationship. She put a premium on seduction, elided duplicity and discretion and did not seem to value her own marriage in an intrinsic way. Her daughters when small were neglected guests at her Court. Violet fantasized that the King was her father. Kingy was a wonderful man not least because mother was his heartfelt queen. A mother so gilded could not be courtesan to a rich, fat, bronchial philanderer overly fond of food and horses.

  For Vita sex with Violet was a revelation. ‘How eventful a day!’ she wrote in her diary and marked it with a cross. In retrospect she wrote, ‘I felt like a person translated or reborn; it was like beginning one’s life again in a different capacity.’ Violet stayed all week at Long Barn. Then in high spirits they went on holiday to Cornwall. They had lunch at Claridges, took the train to Plymouth, lost their luggage and stayed overnight in a fisherman’s cottage, ‘very primitive, nice pudding, no drains’. Harold arranged for them to have Hugh Walpole’s cottage at Polperro. He said if it rained Vita would miss him, if the sun shone she would want him and that Violet would fall into the sea.

  Called The Cobbles, perched on the cliffs above the sea, reached only by a footpath, the cottage was a perfect lovers’ retreat. They read books, walked along the headland, went to Fowey in the local butcher’s pony cart, drank cider in a little restaurant. Violet picked white lilac for Vita from a deserted garden. They saw themselves as gypsies, free and made for love, talked in a secret Romany language, called themselves Mitya and Lushka. ‘How triumphant we were,’ Violet wrote,

  that little room … the sea almost dashing against its walls, the tireless cry of the seagulls, the friendly books … the complete liberty of it all … And sometimes we loved each other so much we became inarticulate, content only to probe each other’s eyes for the secret that was secret no longer.

  For Violet this was it. Commitment was now total. ‘She no longer flirted and got rid of the last person she had been engaged to, when we went to Cornwall,’ Vita wrote. But Vita had a husband who hated what was happening. Harold travelled a great deal, but this was the first time Vita had chosen to go away without him and he was angry at how gratuitous it seemed ‘just for a whim’. He was at the Foreign Office struggling with memoranda on the prospects of Germany invading Holland and of America fighting with Turkey. He sent her five letters a day. Couched in brittle humour, with drawings of Violet in towny clothes pretending a spartan life, their reality was alarm, anger, jealousy. ‘I wish I was more violent and less affectionate … I suppose that you will now want to go to California with Violet and grow peach-fed hams.’

  Vita wanted neither to lose nor hurt him. She returned to Long Barn on 11 May and wrote him a letter, though she was to see him that evening. She could talk with Violet until two in the morning but not with him. Her letter belittled Violet yet let him know they would go away together again. She was, she said, extraordinarily lucky to have Harold’s love, her boys, cottage, ‘money, flowers, a farm and three cows’. She loved him, he was an angel, but she had wanderlust badly – for new places, excitement ‘where no one will want me to order lunch or pay housebooks … yes it is silly little things like that which have got on my nerves. Being interrupted, being available.’ She wanted to travel with him but that was impossible because of his work. In the meantime Violet, whose life at heart she told him she loathed, saved her from ‘intellectual stagnation and bovine complacency’. He should not be jealous because ‘Darling one day we will go off with two little toothbrushes and the bloody war will be over.’

  But it was Violet and she who were to go off with two little toothbrushes when the bloody war was over. And it was not only intellectual stimulus which Violet provided or respite from the ennui of ordering lunch and paying the servants. It was passion, love, desire, of an overwhelming sort. Harold knew it and blamed and hated Violet for it. His other dangerous option would have been to blame and hate his wife.

  Violet ‘discovered’ the letter. It focused on facts she wanted not to see. ‘God Mitya do you wonder I mistrust you? If you were capable of that, what aren’t you capable of?’ It showed the whole scenario, beginning, middle and end: the choices to be made, the division of allegiance, the prospect of corrosive jealousy, obsession, manipulation, insecurity, pain. Someone was going to lose and get hurt, that much was clear. Had she been the skilled operator, the thirty-five-year-old seductress who knows life’s sexual laws, she would have run from the scene. What was not clear was the extent to which events would proceed to spoil her life.

  On 16 May Harold lunched at Grosvenor Street with Mrs Keppel, Violet and Sonia. Mrs Keppel ‘raved’ about Vita whom she had seen the day before. She said how she had changed, that her yellow dress was ‘too lovely’, that she had never seen her so ‘en beauté’ before. ‘She really is one of the most beautiful young women I have ever seen.’ Harold said Violet looked very pretty too, basked in the compliment and relayed it to Vita: ‘Hadji put on his little face like this’

  Violet too basked, and relayed:

  I am drunk with the beauty of my Mitya!… Even my mother who is not easily impressed shared my opinion. You have changed it appears … They said you were like a dazzling Gypsy. My sister’s words not mine … they noticed a new exuberance in you, something akin to sheer animal spirits that was never there before. You may love me Mitya, but anyone would be proud to be loved by you.

  She went down to Long Barn next day, Vita wore her Land Girl clothes and they walked to Knole. Lady Sackville raved too. She said Vita should have her portrait painted wearing them, ‘she looks so charming in her corduroy trousers. She ought to have been a boy.’ Next day in London for tea with Violet and Bear Warre Vita wore a red dress and hat. They decided she should be painted by William Strang ‘who does Spanish women so well’.

  Violet spent nights with Vita at Grosvenor Street, Ebury Street, Long Barn, and bombarded her with letters. In envelopes franked with ‘Buy National War Bonds Now’, or ‘Feed the Guns with War Bonds’, and with Bertie’s son’s head on the three-halfpenny stamp, she wrote of how she belonged to Vita, revered her superior beauty and wisdom, cared not a damn for anyone else, was nothing but an empty husk away from her, how ‘you alone have bent me to your will, shattered my self-possession, robbed me of my mystery, made me yours, yours.’

  She spoke of drawing ‘curtains’ to conceal her real self from everyone but Vita ‘for you there are no curtains not even gossamer ones’. She listened to Brahms and Debussy and daydreamed of her, read Swinburne and imagined making love with her, took lessons at the Slade and fantasized that in their shared gipsy life only Love, Art and Beauty would signify:

  God knows it is aesthetically incorrect that the artist shoul
d be hampered by domesticity. Pegasus harnessed to a governess-cart … an artist must necessarily belong to both sexes … the artist striding the mountain tops, silent, inspired and alone.

  For them both hamperings of domesticity were no worse than approving the lunch menu, telling the maid, or scolding the boot boy. But gipsies epitomized romance and artists dwelt in the realm of inspiration, exempt from moral behaviour of an ordinary sort:

  O Mitya come away let’s fly – if ever there were two entirely primitive people they are surely us: let’s go away and forget the world and all its squalor – let’s forget such things as trains and trams and servants and streets and shops and money.

  At the beginning of July they went again to Polperro. ‘How happy we were. And the second time still happier. Mitya do you remember Plymouth the second time?’ They sat on the rocks, looked at the sunset, talked of freedom and of love. Mrs Keppel, perhaps curious as to what was going on, invited Harold and Lady Sackville to dinner on 4 July, but cancelled when two of the housemaids got flu. Harold did not go to Long Barn while Vita was away. It depressed him to be there without her.

  Vita asked for patience from him. She did not want to lose him, or her two little boys, aged four and one, her cottage, farm, flowers and three cows. But she was cold and unavailable, turned aside when he tried to kiss her, disliked social occasions with him if Violet was not there. Her previous diary entries had been about her boys – their words, weight gain, temper, songs. Now it was Violet who filled her life. She told her she loved her, that they were made for one another, colluded with plans to go away with her, said she would not have sex with Harold and took off her wedding ring.

  But between Violet’s dream and the real world a wide gap loomed. When they got back from Cornwall Vita went to Esher Place in Surrey with Harold. The Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, the Duchess of Marlborough, Lord Stanmore, Lady Lancaster were guests. They all played tennis. ‘Beastly party,’ Vita wrote. ‘I hate it.’ Violet was ‘utterly lost, miserably incomplete, sleepless and depressed.’ Two nights running she had ‘appallingly jealous dreams’ about Vita. ‘I adore you as I shall never adore anyone in my life again,’ she wrote to her. ‘It breaks my heart to be without you.’

  Gossip wormed its way into smart drawing rooms. That month Violet discussed Vita ‘at great length’ with Oswald Dickinson, brother of Virginia Woolf’s friend, Violet Dickinson. ‘Ozzie’ as described by Harold’s friend and biographer James Lees-Milne was ‘a cosy, gossipy, “queer” bachelor’. Violet and he talked of the ‘dormant depths of passion and abandon’ in Vita, her temperament and dazzling beauty and of how domestic, condescending, cocksure and ‘not in the least thrilling’ Harold was.

  From Ozzie Lady Sackville heard of how Harold snapped at Vita in public. She hoped with all her heart, she wrote in her diary, that she would never see their love on the wane. She had her own problems with waning love. Her husband, unable to be civil to her, was ousting her from Knole. He removed portraits of her from his library and spent more and more time with Olive Rubens, who was charming and warm and sang songs after dinner. He turned the laundry into an apartment for her.

  ‘Married life under these circumstances even in a magnificent house is miserable work,’ Lady Sackville wrote. ‘I feel absoluely miserably unhappy and I want to go away miles and miles from Knole.’

  Miserable work or not, married life in a magnificent house was ordained by society and alternatives not countenanced. Mrs Keppel did not like gossip about her daughter’s sexual ways. She impressed on Violet that when the war ended, marry she must. Violet was twenty-four. The disruption of world war and the killing of most eligible men were the only acceptable excuses for her spinsterhood. She had no history of disobeying her mother. Mrs Keppel encouraged her correspondence with Denys Robert Trefusis, a major with the Royal Horse Guards, serving in Belgium. She required a husband for her daughter and thought that he would do. Violet, always flirtatious, met him when he came to London on leave and wrote to him when he returned to the Front. He was an aristocrat, twenty-eight, the fourth child of the Honourable John Schomberg Trefusis, who was the fourth son of the nineteenth Lord Clinton. His family had served as courtiers to successive sovereigns, could be traced back to the thirteenth century, had a family seat in Devon, a coat of arms, the family mottos ‘Neither rashly nor timidly’ and ‘All things come from God’. He had no money but Mrs Keppel was an astute businesswoman and would see to that.

  Violet encouraged him enough. On 23 July she received a letter from him but at a party that night felt so ‘possessed’ by Vita she could not dance twice with the same partner or talk of other things. She put it to Vita that the truthful path was for them to be open about their love and to go away together:

  What sort of life can we lead now? Yours an infamous and degrading lie to the world, officially bound to someone you don’t care for … I, not caring a damn for anyone but you … condemned to leading a futile purposeless existence which no longer holds the smallest attraction for me …

  Together they began writing a romantic novel about their love and the conflict between passion and marriage. They called it Rebellion though it was eventually published as Challenge. Its central evasion was that the lovers were of different sex. Vita was Julian, ‘a tall, loose-limbed boy, untidy, graceful’, at heart responsible and sensible, but ‘flushed with the spirit of adventure, the prerogative of youth’. Violet was Eve, older, wilier and burdened with the ‘female’ temperament: jealous, untrustworthy, vain, coquettish, wickedly irresistible, ‘all things seductive and insinuating’,

  the provocative aloofness of her self-possession, the warm roundness of her throat and arms, the little moue at the corner of her mouth, her little graceful hands and white skin … the pervading sensuousness that glowed from her … the marvellous organ of her voice … a dusky voice.

  Eve is a cross between Alice Keppel and Carmen. Julian cannot help himself …

  his fingers moulded themselves lingeringly round her throat; she slipped still lower within the circle of his arm and his hand almost involuntarily trembled over the softness of her breast.

  It was all Mills and Boon except of course that they were Vita’s fingers and arm and Violet’s throat and breast.

  Rebellion was principally Vita’s book though Violet contributed. They added to it each day throughout the summer of 1918 from letters and notes. In it, Vita showed admiration for Violet and sympathy for the bravado of her social manner. Only Julian knows the real Eve … knows her ‘like his sister’. Witch though she is, he prefers her company to any in the world:

  Her humour, her audacity, the width of her range, the picturesequeness of her phraseology, her endless inventiveness, her subtle undercurrent of the personal … He knew that his life had been enriched and coloured by her presence in it; that it would, at any moment, have become a poorer, a grayer, a less magical thing through the loss of her.

  … Her frivolity is a mask. Her instincts alone are deep; how deep it frightens me to think. She is an artist, although she may never produce art. She lives in a world of her own with its own code of morals and values. The Eve that we all know is a sham, the product of her own pride and humour. She is laughing at us all. The Eve we know is entertaining, cynical, selfish, unscrupulous. The real Eve is … a rebel and an idealist.

  Her idealism takes the shape of unswerving love and adulation of Julian/Vita:

  I have believed in you since I was a child; believed in you as something Olympian … I have crushed down the vision of life with you, but always it has remained at the back of my mind, so wide, so open, a life so free and so full of music and beauty.

  It was difficult for Eve’s prototype to live in the real world. On 14 August she lunched with Pat Dansey, ‘broke down and sobbed her heart out’. Pat reacted vicariously to her story, absorbed its details, offered to help. Next day Violet went with her mother to Clovelly Court, Devonshire. As ever she was not permitted to remain at Grosvenor Street alone. Mrs Keppel, star gue
st at Clovelly, was ‘so marvellously witful that I could forgive her anything,’ Violet wrote: ‘She is a clever woman. I do admire her.’

  Romance for Mrs Keppel, ‘Chinday’ as Violet and Vita called her in their Romany language, was strategic work. She meant to squeeze the lesbian version of it out of her daughter’s life. Gossip was rife and Violet unrepentant. Pained when she did not receive letters from Vita, obsessed with the when and where of their next meeting, she stayed aloof from other social exchange. There were rows when Chinday found her writing to Vita. Violet spoke of her mother’s ‘brutal and heartless treatment’. At Clovelly guests asked why she put up with it. ‘God knows I feel too despondent to take any steps.’

  ‘I hate lies,’ she wrote to Vita. ‘I am so fed up with lies’ She referred to promises Vita had made and hoped she was summoning courage to tell Harold his marriage was over and to go away with her for good:

  How right you were when you said we were made for one another … What a perfect life we could have together & have had together (for a fortnight).

  She was herself uncompromising:

  And the supreme truth is this: I can never be happy without you … You are the grande passion of my life. How gladly would I sacrifice everything to you – family, friends, fortune, EVERYTHING.

  Which was not what her mother would have her do. Violet wanted equivalent sacrifice in return. On 25 August she wrote to Vita of how she wanted her ‘hungrily, frenziedly, passionately’ – and exclusively:

  I want you for my own … I want to go away with you. I must and will and damn the world and damn the consequences and anyone had better look out for themselves who dares to become an obstacle in my path.