Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  But Violet was heading for the rocks. She was filled with panic at the prospect of marriage and with self-loathing for the mess she was in and the distress she caused. She appealed to Pat Dansey to go away with her. Pat refused and said it would not make Violet love her, if she did. ‘She says I would only go on loving you,’ Violet wrote to Vita, ‘and that I would throw her over at the first opportunity, all of which is undeniably true.’

  Vita told Violet she would elope with her before the wedding and that they would live together. ‘I don’t absolutely remember the process in detail,’ she wrote two years later,

  but I know that I ended by consenting. After that we were both less unhappy; I could afford to see her ostensibly engaged to Denys when I knew that instead of marrying him she was coming away with me. I really intended to take her; we had every plan made. We were to go the day before the wedding – not sooner, because we thought we should be overtaken and brought back. It was of course only this looking forward which enabled me to endure the period of her engagement.

  She gave consent but not commitment. At the beginning of May she wrote to Denys, insisted he not mention to Violet that she had done so, asked if he was happy and if all was well with his marriage plans and sent him a copy of her novel, Heritage. He replied from the Marlborough Club, Pall Mall:

  My dear Vita

  Yes, I am very happy and everything goes well – though I must admit LMG [Little Mrs George] is somewhat worrying at times to both of us – quite charming at others!

  This you will readily understand! The wedding has been put off till June 16th now.

  I am more than delighted to hear that one of V’s poems is to appear in print. Also she is doing what I think to be an extremely good portrait of me. Not that these two comparatively small achievements probably mean much in themselves, but what I greatly hope is that she will eventually find what she wants to do & then pursue it to the uttermost. I should like to see one really absorbing interest develop itself for her – I should be equally sorry to see whatever talent she has dissipated over a wide variety of subjects without any real devotion to one. If you agree about this please try & influence her in that direction, though perhaps there is no need to hurry her to any conclusion yet.

  Meanwhile I am just reading your book. I would not presume to criticise even after finishing it, much less now – I will only say that it will be quickly read – and carefully.

  Yours

  Denys

  I will not mention your letter to V, so you must not mention this!

  Whatever he felt, he was not going to show it. Even before the war, in a letter to his sister in 1909, he described himself as ‘rigidly suppressed’. He said this was because of the ‘sausage machine’ public school system. A true Englishman, he said, after school was strong, healthy, honourable ‘but he has had all his personality squashed out of him’.

  Denys avoided analysis of motive or mood, took his fiancée to the Ballets Russes, to the opera, escorted her at dinner parties, planned trips to Venice and Spain, behaved as a gentleman, however capricious her affections. But he floundered when she flailed at the institution of marriage and said it ‘ought to be confined to temperamental old maids, weary prostitutes and royalties!’ He told her to make up her mind whether she wanted to be an artist or to marry and bring up a family, ‘But whatever you do, don’t attempt to run both!’

  Mrs Keppel was more emphatic. There were frequent rows and Violet felt trapped and stifled in her mother’s house. When she told her of the poem to which Denys referred, published in Country Life, Mrs Keppel said:

  ‘Really, how nice. How much are they paying you for it?’ And later in the day she remarked: ‘Of course it’s no use writing poetry unless you get paid for it.’… The point of view!… I nearly said: ‘It’s not possible that you should be my mother. I won’t, I can’t believe that we are any relations!

  Violet said she wanted to burn to the ground St George’s Church in Hanover Square where her wedding was to be held. It was delayed for a fortnight – from 2 to 16 June – ostensibly because so many people would be at the races. ‘I don’t think any objection was made by Mrs K at the change of date,’ Pat Dansey wrote to Vita. ‘It was changed for purely convenience sake.’ (She would, she added, be ‘truly thankful’ when Vita came and sorted matters out.) Violet worked at the escape plan with Vita, whose equivocation took her to her wits’ end.

  At the end of May she told Denys Vita meant more to her than anyone and that she would die if she ceased to love her. He said he felt sorry for her. When she threatened to back out of the wedding he feared the wrath of Mrs Keppel and the ‘appalling scandal’ that would follow. He promised when they were married she could come and go as she pleased, he would be content if she spent three months of the year with him and would try to be her ‘safe and loyal friend’. Pat Dansey, at Violet’s request, talked to him. He told her, too, that he would keep to the pact of protective friend, with no sex.

  Like Harold he sought to shield his temperamental wayward woman. Perhaps he thought time and patience would change her. But Harold and Vita had built a life and had much to preserve. Denys had nothing with Violet but bright hopes and fragile promises. As these began to tarnish and break, he brought into play qualities that made him a good soldier and a good Englishman: courage, trustworthiness, self-sacrifice. ‘O Mitya,’ Violet wrote to Vita:

  We are making a sort of brawling tavern out of what was once a Greek temple. Soon it will be ruined … There are no words strong enough for what has happened. I have ruined everything in my life … The only really effective thing would be for us to transplant our temple stone by stone and set it down in some new site … We can’t, Oh we can’t go on as at present. It makes me sick with disgust and self-loathing.

  She needed a kind of help that was not on offer: disinterested advice and the chance to get away. She was learning hard lessons about her sort of love: society would not condone it, there was no context for it, it led to social ostracism, which led to self-dislike. Had her temperament allowed, she might have copied her mother, Vita, the King and Harold, and had sex with her lover while her spouse was out. But she had spoken the truth when she said that it was impossible for her to care for more than one person at a time. ‘When I say care, I mean it is impossible for me to be even fond of anyone but you or merely superficially interested.’ She was in too deep a mess to dissemble well.

  On 6 May she had the worst of rows with her mother:

  I nearly struck her she was so terribly unkind. But all the time I thought in three days I shall have Mitya and it didn’t seem to matter so much.

  On 9 May she went with Pat Dansey to look at a house in the country for herself and Denys to live in when married. ‘I can’t, can’t have one with anyone but you,’ she wrote to Vita. In the train she felt faint with desire as she thought of her. ‘I am terribly and unashamedly passionate. All the force of that passion is centred on you. I want you, I desire you … as I have never desired anyone in my life.’

  Time passed, no divine intervention put matters right. The muddle swirled. Pat Dansey, attracted to them both, tried to signify in the drama. Vita’s jealousy, she told her, was making Violet’s marriage impossible. She wrote to her, demanded the return of photographs of herself she had given Violet which Vita had taken and said she planned to tell the story to the whole of London:

  Unless you make an early opportunity for seeing me I shall go and see Mrs Keppel who has many times both by word and letter assured me of the good friend I have been to Violet.

  At the end of May Mrs Keppel gave a ball for the impending marriage. Her old Edwardian friends were there. Denys warned Violet he might tell her mother about the ‘unnatural compact’ between them. Harold asked Vita if he should give Violet a wedding present. ‘I should like to but it may hurt her feelings. Let me know.’ Vita gave her an alabaster head of Medusa, a Renaissance copy she found in an antique shop.

  By June Denys seemed silent and indifferent to his fate
. ‘I think he will break it off himself,’ Violet wrote to Vita. ‘He is beastly to me and made me cry yesterday … I think he is beginning to hate me.’ And still she believed, or had to believe, that Vita would intervene, prevent the marriage and claim her as Vita said she would do.

  But Vita was making other plans. On 1 June she wrote to Harold in Paris. She said she felt like a person drowning. She turned the problem over to him to solve:

  V’s wedding is tomorrow fortnight and I know that there will be some disaster if I stop here. I can’t be in England or it will never take place. If I am in Paris … if need be you can keep me under lock and key … I tell you about it in order to protect myself from myself. I’m not afraid of anybody but myself. I shall do something quite irretrievable and mad if I stay in England. I shall probably try and do it even from Paris, at the last moment, but there I shall be prevented by just sheer distance.

  On 3 June Denys was formally awarded the Military Cross for bravery. He was not pleased with the honour for he thought he merited better. Postwar civilian life was to tax him more than his time in the trenches. Harold replied that day to Vita’s letter,

  you must come over at once and let me know by telegraph. I shall get a room for you and meet you … come at once my poor shattered Viti – and I shall be with you, and help.

  Vita did not let Violet know she had reneged on their plan to elope. She told Harold she would arrive in Paris the day before the wedding so as to rule out any chance that she might return. On 9 June she wrote to him:

  Violet thinks I will save her from this bloody marriage. How much astonished would you be if I did? I shouldn’t be astonished in the least. It would be great fun anyway.

  It was disingenuous if Vita supposed she was easing matters for Violet by going to Paris. Violet and Denys were to go there immediately after their wedding. It was, as her biographer Victoria Glendinning said, an act of provocation for her to be there at all. But she was out of control. She seldom made demands on Harold, but here, in an incoherence of emotion, she asked him to save her from herself.

  On 12 June, three days before the wedding, she told Violet she would not go away with her. Violet, terrified, looked ill and changed and implored her to think again. She said she would wait for her up to the very last minute. ‘I was,’ said Vita, ‘obdurate’. On 14 June Harold met Vita at the Gare du Nord, took her to Versailles and stayed with her the following day, a Sunday.

  On Monday 16 June Violet sent her a pencilled note, ‘You have broken my heart, goodbye.’ She was then driven to St George’s Church, Hanover Square. She wore a wedding gown of old Valenciennes over chiffon. The train was gold brocade with a raised pattern of velvet flowers. Her jewellery included a pearl necklace given to her by her mother. Four children and four adult bridesmaids, including Sonia, attended her. The children were her cousins Crispian and Cecilia, Denys’s niece Phyllida Walford and David McKenna. The bridesmaids wore yellow chiffon with sashes of blue and silver and blue wreaths in their hair.

  Mrs Keppel chose the wedding clothes and flowers. She wore silk chiffon in lapis-lazuli blue with ‘oriental colourings’ and long russet silk tassels and a matching hat. George arranged the transport, allocated pews, chose the music in church, the champagne for the reception. Purcell’s ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ was played before Violet arrived, the Wedding March from Lohengrin as she walked down the aisle, Dame Nellie Melba sang Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’ during the signing of the register.

  Edward VII’s intimates were there: Soveral and Sir Ernest Cassel. The King and Queen gave Violet a diamond brooch bearing the royal cipher. Mrs Keppel gave her a pearl and diamond bandeau, George a gold-fitted dressing case and a writing set, the Earl and Countess of Albemarle an emerald and diamond brooch, the servants at 16 Grosvenor Street a silver inkstand. Vita sat in her room at Versailles, her watch in her hand, as the hour of the wedding ticked past. ‘All that time I knew she was expecting a pre-arranged message from me which I never sent.’

  TWELVE

  Violet arrived at the Paris Ritz with her husband and maid on the evening of Tuesday 17 June. Her honeymoon was to last a month. She wore new clothes but no wedding ring. Mrs Keppel had supervised her trousseau: a satin peignoir trimmed with ostrich feathers, travelling coats with matching hats.

  Harold did not keep Vita under lock and key. Tuesday was a working day and he was busy with the Peace Conference. She left Versailles and booked in alone at the Hotel Roosevelt in Paris. On 18 June, she met Violet at the Ritz, went back with her to her own hotel and had sex with her. ‘I treated her savagely. I had her, I didn’t care, I only wanted to hurt Denys,’ she wrote. She then assured Violet that, come autumn, they would go away together.

  Next day they confronted Denys with facts that were terrible to hear. Violet told him she did not care for him. She had planned to run away with Vita instead of marrying him. Marriage to him was only a cover for this elopement. The plan had gone wrong. Neither she nor Vita made any effort to spare his pain. ‘Don’t you know, you stupid fool, that she is mine in every sense of the word,’ Vita said she wanted to say. Denys went white in the face and looked as if he was going to faint. It was a moment of ghastly awakening. For Violet was not Vita’s in every sense of the word. She was hers in the sense of sexual possession. In the eyes of the world and the law she was Denys’s by the contract of their marriage two days before.

  Of all the players in the drama it was Denys who now knew the plot. The true relationship between his wife and Vita was clear. It was not loving friendship as he had, perhaps, liked to suppose. He had been used, tricked. His marriage was not a marriage at all. He was not going to have the consolation of peace after war. To compound his humiliation, that evening Vita dined alone at the Ritz. Violet, with Denys in tears behind her, watched her from an open window in their suite.

  In subsequent letters to Violet he referred again and again to that day. If he had hopes that was when they drained away. He cried but could not find words for the mess. He was a man for whom the expression of emotion was a luxury denied. He was volatile, unsettled and in trauma from the war. This was his chance to define civilian life; he needed help not domestic tragedy.

  Vita, her point made, booked out of the Roosevelt. She went for two days to Geneva with Harold and, when back in Paris, booked in with him at the Majestic Hotel. The reparation of their love and marriage is well documented.

  * * *

  Violet and Denys began their honeymoon and married life. Their schedule was to spend a week in Paris and then to go south to St Jean de Luz. Violet spent the Paris week crying in the Ritz. She told Denys he got on her nerves and mattered no more than a fly on the wall. Everything she said to him made him wince. She counted the number of cigarettes he smoked and they argued about money. He was devastated and at a loss to know what to do. He agreed that if Vita came on to St Jean de Luz, he would leave them together. But Vita went back to Long Barn to write her poems and to garden. She wrote to Harold, ‘everything else is ephemeral but not you’.

  In St Jean de Luz the newlyweds took separate rooms in the Golf Hotel and had frequent variations on the following conversation:

  Denys: What are you thinking about?

  Violet: Vita.

  Denys: Do you wish Vita were here?

  Violet: Yes.

  Denys: You don’t care much about being with men, do you?

  Violet: No, I infinitely prefer women.

  Denys: You are strange, aren’t you?

  Violet: Stranger than you have any idea of.

  He teamed up with a Basque poacher and went off on muleback into the mountains to shoot vultures. Alone in the hotel Violet got drunk and talked to the patron about Monte Carlo and being in love. She bought Vita a stone for a ring. She wanted an emerald to signify jealousy but settled for blue agate, ‘exactly the same colour as the most wonderful sapphire’. She asked Vita to wear only her ring and no other and to burn all letters she sent her.

  Some days four letters came from Vita. If there
was none or only a short one, she felt ‘frenzied’ and suspicious:

  If only I knew the truth about you and H! If only I knew for certain that you weren’t playing a double game!… Oh God it is degrading to trust you so little.

  At the beginning of July she and Denys moved to the Grand Hotel Eskualduna at Hendaye in the Basses-Pyrénées. ‘Here our rooms aren’t even next door to one another.’ They went for long uncompanionable walks together in the hills. Some days they argued without stopping, on others he was ‘silent, taciturn, unresponsive’. At night Violet wrote to Vita:

  O God another whole week of this. It seems I have never wanted you as I do now -

  When I think of your mouth …

  When I think of other things all the blood rushes to my head and I can almost imagine … If ever anyone was adored and longed for it was you.

  In one letter Vita suggested meeting Violet in Italy. Fear of her mother, not concern for Denys, held Violet back. Mrs Keppel had rented a house for her daughter and son-in-law, Possingworth Manor in Uckfield, Sussex, the tenure of which began on 15 July. ‘Men chinday would be frantic if I didn’t go to the house’ Violet wrote to Vita.

  Possingworth Manor was about twenty miles from Long Barn. Denys, still in the army, spent most of the week in London. Violet and Vita spent most of the week with each other. Gossip spread. On 20 July Vita sacked her children’s nanny who spoofed her by walking in the village dressed in a suit of Harold’s.

  Violet fought with her mother and pleaded to be released from her marriage. On 21 July she went to bed in tears after an extravagant row:

  All this will probably end in my being quite penniless, she already seems to think that I should ‘support myself’ but I won’t, no I won’t let things like being jewel-less and impecunious distress me!… I shall have to become a governess or something!! When I think that men Chinday has at least £20,000 a year.