Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  The story of their dancing together reached London. ‘I can’t forgive you if you have really done something as vulgar and dangerous as that,’ Harold wrote. He found it hard to believe because Vita could not dance. Nor did he like Vita ‘telegraphing to Gerry behind my back. Whenever you have been long with that clammy fiend you get crooked.’

  Violet was a bad smell, an illness, he said. ‘She flatters you – that is it – every silly ass woman is bowled over by flattery. How I hate women.’ He dined with Mrs Keppel on 10 December and described her as ‘magnificent as ever’. Socially she expressed no grievance toward Violet or Vita. She said they were having a holiday on the Riviera after the privations of the war. Lady Sackville for her part told friends Violet had ‘demoralized’ Vita and was a sexual pervert, pernicious, amoral and on a par with ‘that snake in the grass’ Olive Rubens who had taken her own husband from her.

  At Christmas Violet gave Vita corals. They went to church, then to the casino and lost 350 francs. Harold spent Christmas at Knole with his sons and invited the composer Lord Berners to stay. Gerald Berners had a spinet in his Rolls-Royce and dyed the doves at his home, Faringdon Hall, bright pink. Lady Sackville, no stranger to theatrical display, made friends with both him and Victor Cunard. Gay men were entertaining provided they were discreet and did not disrupt the social show. ‘It is nobody’s business to know our private lives … The less said about it the better … Silence is wiser,’ she wrote in her Book of Reminiscences. Lord Sackville liked neither of them. Nor did he want to speak to his wife or hear of the marital troubles of his daughter. Lady Sackville felt unwanted and ousted from Knole. She dined in the garden on 30 December.

  Harold went to Paris on the last day of 1918 as a Foreign Office official at the Peace Conference. Alone at the Majestic Hotel he felt himself to be ‘terribly overworked’ and ‘unnaturally upset’ by the sorrow and confusion of his private life. Edward Knoblock sent round bits and pieces left by Violet and Vita. Reminders of Violet, her cosmetics and shoes, made Harold feel sick. On 11 January he wrote he would spit in her face he hated her so. ‘All Paris,’ he said, was talking of his separation from Vita. He hired servants and waited for Vita to join him at the end of January. She did not come.

  Moreover she told him it was ‘indecent’ to write to him when she was with Violet, ‘oh, do, do try to see it!’. He told her she was irresponsible and ‘lured into corruption’ by Violet. Vita did not want him to blame Violet. She urged him to see that she was acting because of a ‘great force’ within herself. This he did not want to believe:

  You say Violet has no influence over you. Then what is it has made you so hard and selfish and unkind – not only to me but to Ben, Nigel and even Dada [Lord Sackville].

  The only explanation was that Violet – the witch, Eve, the snake, the seductress – had done her primeval worst. It could not be that Vita ‘like a person translated or reborn’ was following her own desires.

  Lady Sackville made it clear Vita would lose her if she did not give Violet up. She had had enough of organizing the lives of her grandchildren who were shunted from Knole to friends in Hampstead, to Harold’s mother, Lady Carnock. ‘Vita ought to come back and look after them,’ she wrote to Harold. Violet, she let it be known, was a viper with a putrid mind. Lord Sackville wrote to Vita of how he hated the ‘loathsome’ things people were saying. He thought the sun and ‘hand to mouth existence’ of Monte Carlo had turned her head. Olive Rubens wrote ‘you must, you simply must come home.’ And from Mrs Keppel came letters for Violet letting her know that when she returned to London, as she must, she would marry and that would be that.

  It was all too problematic, the pressures too great. Violet wrote to Harold. She told of the depth of her love for Vita, her despair at the anguish this love was causing, the tragedy she could see unfolding, her inability to sort things out. ‘I have destroyed her letter,’ Harold wrote to Vita:

  How sad it was! I like her to love you like that darling – it is the best thing Violet has done – and I really don’t feel that anything so deep and compelling can be called unnatural or debasing.

  He felt concern for Denys Trefusis with all the rumours of marriage and hoped if she was going to marry him she would announce the engagement soon and end the gossip. He thought Vita would advise Violet for the best.

  Violet returned in the middle of March, after the four happiest months of her life, she said. Vita joined Harold in Paris and wrote to her on British Delegation paper saying her anguish at separation was exquisite. ‘I’m glad,’ Violet replied. ‘I wish I could say as much for my own.’ She was back at Grosvenor Street facing the wrath of her mother.

  On 19 March Vita returned to England and was delighted to be reunited with her boys. Lady Sackville had moved to Brighton, the children and their nanny were there too. She refused to accept the presents Vita offered. ‘She talks in a voice trembling with passion,’ Vita wrote to Harold on 20 March. ‘I HATE her tonight … I want you so dreadfully badly. I know I have brought it all on myself.’ Harold, always forgiving, resolved to do everything he could to protect her and bring her back to ‘calm and security’ away from the scarlet adventurer.

  Mrs Keppel, determined and practical, moved into action. The errant desires of the King of England were one thing, those of her daughter another. Violet would marry, discretion and society dictated this must be. She was ashamed of Violet, scornful and unkind, concerned for the family reputation, unprepared to attempt to understand. It was not a negotiable situation. She had spent a long time gambling at the King’s side for high stakes. She was not going to lose her elevated position because of her wayward daughter. The accepted form was marriage into the aristocracy, the preservation of status, the semblance of propriety. Sex was a private matter, adultery an art, but this sort of scandal was beyond the pale.

  A week after Violet’s return she took her to a society ball where there were seven hundred guests. Mrs Keppel had announced that Violet was engaged to be married to Denys Trefusis. Violet was congratulated by everyone. She wrote to Vita when she got home at two in the morning ‘at the conclusion of the most cruelly ironical day I have spent in my life’. She could she said, have ‘screamed aloud’:

  Mitya I can’t face this existence … I am losing every atom of self respect I ever possessed … I want you every second and every hour of the day, yet I am being slowly and inexorably tied to somebody else …

  Nothing and no one in the world could kill the love I have for you … I have given you my body time after time to treat as you pleased … All the hoardings of my imagination I have laid bare to you. There isn’t a recess in my brain into which you haven’t penetrated. I have clung to you and caressed you and slept with you and I would like to tell the whole world I clamour for you … You are my lover and I am your mistress, and kingdoms and empires and governments have tottered and succumbed before now to that mighty combination – the most powerful in the world.

  But the only kingdom which was to totter was Violet’s own. The Crown, government, Grosvenor Street, Kent and the Foreign Office stayed intact.

  Her kind of love was beyond mention even in the gossip columns of the London papers. Lesbianism was not a subject for discussion, the word was not used. Such feelings were aberrant and manifestations of them an embarrassment. ‘You know how I loathe and abominate deceit and hypocrisy,’ she wrote to Vita:

  To my mind it is the worst thing on earth and here I am putting it all into practice – all the things I have most loathed and denounced to you … I belong to you body and soul. I ache for you all day and all night. You are my whole existence – O Mitya it is so horrible, so monstrous, so criminal to be with someone one doesn’t care for when your whole being cries out for the person you do love and do belong to. In all my life I have never done anything as wrong as this.

  How can I get out of it? What am I to say? What is this hideous farce I’m playing?

  Her ‘great love affair’ with Vita was shaping into a quagmire of confu
sion, lies, deception and sham. She did not know what to do. She wrote of the ‘hell of having to endure the caresses of someone you don’t love’. Hell or not, Mrs Keppel when determined was a formidable opponent. Violet did not have the courage to resist her. She depended on her and craved her love.

  She let Vita know that she alone could save the situation. ‘What’s going to happen?’ she wrote to her:

  Are you going to stand by and watch me marry this man? It’s unheard of, inconceivable …

  If we could go away, you and I, even for a few months I would get out of it – but if I got out of it, and remained here alone and without you my life would be unendurable.

  Chinday would make everything hell for me. If I had to go off and live alone at this juncture I should put an end to myself.

  O my love and this time last week we were still free and happy and – together, and all life seemed full of youth and spring and Romance …

  Mitya you must know how repugnant it is to me to tolerate this relationship. It is absolutely contrary to all my ideas of morals. I mayn’t have many, but this absolutely does them in. I hover between indescribable self-loathing and plans of suicide.

  Five days later, on 26 March 1919, Mrs Keppel gave the details of her daughter’s engagement to the press. The wedding was set for 2 June. Vita bought all the papers at Brighton station and felt faint when she read the facts in print. Harold was sympathetic. He rightly feared the strain and unreality of this engagement would be too much for Violet. ‘I feel really that it would be better if she broke it off – but you will know best,’ he wrote to Vita. The next day he wondered if marriage would ‘prove her salvation’ and if she would become fond of Denys. Vita said she was almost sure Violet would break the engagement. ‘Poor Denys but it is a little bit his own fault.’ Harold did not know what she meant by that.

  Poor Denys did not know what was going on. He had come from a war where it was useless to articulate feelings. He believed Violet wanted him. She had said ‘yes’ to his marriage proposal, had declared herself ‘thrilled’ when he came home on leave the previous October, had told people she was in love. ‘I certainly told people that’ she wrote to Vita, ‘and why? to camouflage our going away … You yourself told Pat I was on the verge of falling in love, you admitted, for the same reason.’

  But the prime player was Mrs Keppel, manoeuvring and arranging, promising him a world after the hell of the trenches and the battle-grounds of France. He was malleable in her hands. She offered him an income if he married her daughter, an undemanding office occupation, a house, the prospect of travel. Violet was witty, attractive, strong-willed, artistic, his prize, his mascot, the living emblem of the luck and fortune that had brought him if not his compatriots home from the war.

  Four days after the official announcement of their engagement he gave Violet ‘his word of honour as a gentleman’ never to do anything to displease her, ‘you know in what sense I mean’ she wrote to Vita. It meant, in code, no sex together. He put his assurance in writing to her. He wanted to behave honourably, to impress her with his trustworthiness. He viewed women as pure and less corruptible than men. He refrained from kissing her hair or taking her arm because that seemed to be her wish. He became despondent when she said she could not marry him, accepted she was fonder of Vita than of himself and tried to respect what he could not begin to understand. If he was jealous he did not or could not say. The closest he got to criticism was silence. One evening, when Violet returned from Vita, he said as she entered the room, ‘You look as though you have been very demonstrative,’ then took up a book and started to read: ‘I began to read too, but I was really wondering all the time what he was thinking about. He is a sphinx that man.’

  Denys was like those 999 out of every thousand women who, in Lord Birkenhead’s view, had ‘never heard a whisper of these practices’ of lesbianism. He was straight from the killing fields and not acquainted or tainted with ‘horrible and noxious suspicions’. He might have understood had Vita been a man. He was correct, musical, physically fearless, reserved, aloof. He had been through what he called a ‘disastrous war’ in which he killed men and saw men killed in swathes. He had symptoms of trauma: sleeplessness, bad dreams, an inability to talk of what he had seen. He wanted to build a civilian life, get married, work, write books, travel and be free.

  He spoke fluent Russian. At the outbreak of war he was working in St Petersburg as tutor to the sons of a Monsieur Balaschoff. In a letter to an uncle in 1910, he declared his intention to ‘specialise in Russian subjects – language, economics, trade, etc. Russia is the future field of investment,’ he said. ‘I am looking forward immensely to going into business.’

  War and revolution foiled such plans. He volunteered for active service in France and Flanders. In 1915 he was poisoned by gas and invalided to England for two months. He was left with respiratory problems and recurring chest infections.

  He felt ‘caged up’ at home and ‘longed to breathe the open air’. His parents, respectable, ‘very county and stuffy’, viewed Violet as an ‘absolute outsider’. She arrived to see them in Devon smelling of French perfume and in unsuitable clothes for the country. Colonel Trefusis was deaf, had little money and was dominated by Mitty, his wife, who was large and did charitable work for prisoners and unfortunates. Denys’s two sisters were professional musicians. His elder brother Kerr had converted to Catholicism and was about to marry a rich divorcee older than his mother.

  Violet recoiled from them all. She called them adamantine:

  I hate them, Mitya … I hate their overbred appearances, their academic mind, their musical aloofness and superiority, their inflexible point of view, their incredible pride, their extreme reserve and insurmountable indifference, their lack of humour, and – let it be faced! – total absence of any outward manifestation of humanity!…

  I hate them. I would like to tweak their aristocratic noses. I would like to tear their immaculate clothes from off their backs. I would like to give them penny dreadfuls to read, and make them listen to Helen of Troy for 4 hours a day on the gramophone!

  I’m trying to find the dominating adjective for them, because they’re not exactly bien, or prigs – no certainly not prigs – or old-fashioned – no! It’s aloofness, that’s what it is, sheer arctic aloofness … They were unutterably disgusted because I cried at Ivan1.

  Oh my sweet, how I miss you … I hate them Mitya, and sometimes I hate him. I should be miserable with him. I feel trapped and desperate.

  It was not a propitious start to married life. The Trefusis family had reason to ponder Violet joining their ranks.

  Vita wished Denys ‘was just a stray friend and not engaged to V’. Violet hoped the engagement would sting Vita into ‘claiming’ her. ‘Living permanently with me had become an obsession in her mind’ Vita wrote. She was extravagantly jealous at the thought of Denys touching Violet, but when it came to commitment her own reality was England, family, Kent, gardens, servants and a place to work. She played a double game of colluding with the plan to run away with Violet and of reassuring Harold that love with him was the real thing.

  Harold hoped for a diplomatic solution. He believed in the essential goodness of his wife. His tactics were patience and forgiveness. He preferred to negotiate terms, not talk of feelings. He told Vita he did not expect her to break with Violet but he would not allow them again to go away together for a long period. ‘You simply can’t go on sacrificing your reputation and your duty to a tragic passion.’

  Such terms suited Vita, provided Violet used Denys as a decoy and had no sexual exchange with him. But for Violet it was all unworkable. Her lover was insisting on fidelity without commitment, her mother on marriage without love, her fiancé had expectations of relationship however inchoate these were. On 17 April she spent three days with Vita at Knole. Vita said it was ‘an oasis’. For Violet it opened old habits, old wounds. On 23 April Vita joined Harold in Paris and left Violet in an entirely unstable state of mind, her wedding six w
eeks away. ‘You don’t know, you’ll never know the loneliness that I feel,’ Violet wrote to her. ‘You’ll never know how unhappy I am. You’ll never know how intolerably I miss you.’

  It would have been difficult for Vita not to know. She was in Paris a fortnight and deluged with the knowledge. It riled Violet to get letters written on Délégation Britannique paper. She was desperate at Vita being with Harold again: ‘he will say “My little Mar” [his nickname for her] and kiss the back of your neck. Tu me fais horreur Mitya, parfois tu me fais horreur. The depths of duplicity in you make my hair stand yon end.’ As Violet saw it she had given an assurance and a promise that no physical intimacy had or would take place between her and Denys and yet Vita was intimate with Harold. ‘Hadji this and Hadji that and you are strolling almost arm in arm … And I, who love you fifty times more than life, am temporarily forgotten – set aside.’

  Hadji could not feel victorious. Vita was ‘terribly unhappy’ in Paris with him. He felt overworked, stale, depressed about the peace negotiations and despairing about his private life: ‘O darling I have suffered so this long dark year: have I to go through another?’ He said he was resigned to not seeing much of her in his life. He accepted that for three months in the year she should go off alone somewhere and not leave him her address. But he had seen her for only fourteen days in six months and the children had seen her less. ‘You can’t say that marriage is a bore to you or motherhood a responsibility.’ What saddened him was that she wanted to be away for even longer. He thought Violet had ‘thrown the evil eye’ on them all.

  The concept of Violet the evil manipulator absolved Vita and explained everything. But in spring 1919 Vita worked in the gardens at Long Barn, was encouraged by the publication of her first novel, Heritage, which was well reviewed and knew that in the wings Harold waited: ‘All I can do,’ he wrote to her on 22 May, ‘is to love you absolutely, and understand you absolutely, and let you do whatever you like. That is easy…’