Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  Denys, a month into marriage, also wanted a separation. He asked Violet to try to give up Vita and burned some of Vita’s letters. His hopes for a workable relationship faded. He said if Violet went abroad with her he would sub-let the house, that her parents would have nothing further to do with her and neither would he. Moreover he was ill. He had what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder endured by many who survived the First World War. He also had symptoms of tuberculosis and needed nursing. He was advised to go to Brighton for the sea air. Pat Dansey said Violet would be ‘abysmally selfish’ if she did not go too.

  ‘Men Chinday’, with all her genius for society, who excelled in making people happy, needed more than discretion and charm to sort this lot out. This was incoherent feeling, emotional disaster, passion wrecking everything in its path. It needed candid scrutiny, wise disinterested counsel, intervention to avoid more pain. And Mrs Keppel had another worry. Sonia wanted to marry. She was ‘unofficially engaged’ to Roland Cubitt, heir to the Ashcombe title and to the huge building firm founded by his grandfather.

  The Cubitts had built much of Belgravia, Pimlico and Eaton Square and had rebuilt Buckingham Palace. Lord and Lady Ashcombe lived at Denbies, Surrey, and were very rich. According to Denys they disapproved of Mrs Keppel’s past relationship with Edward VII and of what they knew of her elder daughter’s heart. They wanted a pretext to squash their son’s marriage. ‘Rolie’ was the fourth in a family of six boys. His three elder brothers died heroes’ deaths in the war. It mattered that he should marry well, fulfil the promise of his brothers, fly the family flag.

  The driveway to Denbies was long, the furniture late Victorian, the butler old. In the hall were life-size portraits of Rolie’s dead brothers, a stained glass heraldic window and, in a glass case, part of the skeleton of a brontosaurus. Ladies wore gloves indoors and no one smoked in the drawing room or played cards on Sunday. Lady Ashcombe referred to Sonia in the third person: ‘Will the young lady have a scone?’

  In the dining room, which was the size of a boardroom, hung a large Landseer painting of a horse, a mule, a donkey and a St Bernard. Lord Ashcombe held family prayers every day, was a chronic dyspeptic and carved the meat precisely. Menus, in English, stood on white china stands and followed a daily formula. Sunday lunch was roast beef, a cream pudding and cheddar cheese.

  In church at eleven Lord Ashcombe wore a surplice and read the lesson. On Sunday afternoons there was tennis and tea and in the evenings jigsaws, games of patience and bed at ten. Their world was one of propriety, order, family values and time-observed rules on how life should be lived. Violet’s recalcitrance unsettled it all.

  Mrs Keppel rose to action. She would hear no news of separation between Violet and Denys, forbade all mention of Vita and dismissed reference to Violet’s state of mind. When Violet was in London she did not let her out of her sight:

  I see no one, Mitya, not a soul except Chinday’s friends. Pat sometimes and Loge [her name for Denys, after the fire god in Wagner’s Das Rheingold] for perhaps an hour every evening. I never go anywhere. When I am not with Chinday, who makes life Hell for me I am alone … My thoughts are past describing. I am ashamed of them … I asked Loge the other day if he would be surprised if I committed suicide and he said, ‘No, not in the least. I think it’s a very natural thing to do if one is very unhappy. If one is very wretched and making everyone else wretched it is the most decent thing one can do.’

  There is something superhuman and terrifying in Loge’s indifference to all the things that most people cherish such as life etc. It is not theoretical either … O Mitya what are you making of four lives … Are you happy? Is H.N. happy? Am I happy? Is Loge happy? I expect the Moral Being is though and that apparently is all that matters.

  Instead of four utterly miserable people you could have two flawlessly happy ones. The other two would be wretched for the time being, but believe me they would eventually get over it & find two worthier objects of their affection.

  She might have been right. But Vita could neither commit herself to Violet nor reject her. She was never other than equivocal; ‘when you are not with me I feel and suffer uncontrollably on your account,’ she wrote to her, but ‘think what would happen if I were to lose you again – I do not think I could bear it … I could not remain with you en rocamblo [as gypsies] … and I could not let you go again.’

  Violet hoped she would choose her, feared she would not. ‘Every time I see the gates of Paradise opening in front of me you close them again,’ she wrote. Vita perhaps loved Violet equally, perhaps was in an equal emotional dilemma. But she cared for Harold, was drawn to convention, felt an affinity with England, an allegiance to her class. Violet disdained convention. When Vita and Harold went to the wedding of a friend she voiced her essential scorn:

  Tomorrow you will go to a charming wedding. You will blend facetiousness and sentimentality most suitably. You will be reminded of your own – damn you – and of mine – damn me. Somebody will say ‘Ah six years ago’ – damn him …

  Darling, I wonder if you noticed the parson scratching his head the whole time as though a fly kept tickling it? I wonder if you saw the bridegroom trip as he was walking down the aisle? I wonder if you saw the choir boys titter and I wonder if you heard the organ play a few bars of its own accord in the middle of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March? Did you? Did you?

  Because I tickled the parson’s head, I gave the bridegroom a push, I made the choir boys giggle, I played the few bars and I even tweaked the Lady Alberta’s nose and snatched away her hassock just as she was about to sit down on it.

  That was what she thought of marriage – the King’s, her mother’s, Vita’s and her own. It was an institution of deception, a meretricious parade, a declaration of status. What mattered was true love through whatever door it came.

  But she was isolated by her rebellion, in her rented manor house in Sussex; sustained only by Vita’s letters and visits and their scrambled plans again to run away. She spoke of herself as ‘dumped down in a jungle of entirely foreign and soul-shattering emotions and left to cope with them alone’.

  She and Vita planned to leave England on 19 October for their next escape. Denys began not to care where Violet was or with whom. He simply wanted to know when she was going so as to arrange his own affairs. They saw each other only at meals:

  I had another frightful row with D. I haven’t seen him since. He went to London this morning without saying goodbye. I am a pig to him. If I were him I would never come back. If only you could come here today.

  She told him she would never care for him, criticized his appearance, was glad when he was unable to get leave from the army.

  Harold, in Paris, had a new lover, the couturier Edward Molyneux – twenty-seven, good-looking, with a shop in the rue Royale and a smart flat at the Rond Point. Vita told her mother, who kept no secrets, of Harold’s inadequacies as her lover and of how there was now no sex between them.

  On 17 October, two days before they went away again, Violet asked Vita to weigh her own intentions:

  I can’t impress upon you sufficiently that this time it is more in the nature of a tragic undertaking than an adventure (like last year). And once again I must absolutely implore you not to go unless you are unmovably sure. Think over it very seriously and weigh everything in your mind … This time you would absolutely do me in and I swear I don’t deserve it at your hands.

  Vita was not unmovably sure. The day she left for Paris with Violet, she wrote to Harold that she loved him ‘immutably, sacredly and rootedly’, nothing in the world could ever alter her love for him: he, the house, the children were all she loved best.

  For two months she left all she loved best. She and Violet went again to Paris and Monte Carlo and lived the life of cafés, theatres, of Julian and Eve. They had the same rooms at the Windsor Hotel, the view of the harbour, the liberation from the expectations of home, the same sense of being happy.

  It was difficult to dismiss their rela
tionship as a torrid affair. They had loved each other for more than a decade. But in London Harold squirmed when he heard his sexual intimacies turned to gossip and more reports of Julian and Eve. ‘It drives me from the haunts of man and woman,’ he wrote, and was glad to get back to Paris. He spoke both of divorce and of forgiving Vita everything.

  Mrs Keppel was angry with Denys. Violet was his responsibility. She bought a house for them called Stonewall Cottage, at Langton Green, Tunbridge Wells, fifteen miles from Long Barn. She directed that when Denys got leave, on 15 December, he should go to the South of France, collect Violet, take her to this cottage and keep her there.

  Violet wanted to leave him stranded on the Riviera and flee with Vita to Greece, Africa, anywhere. Vita would not do this. She said she must sort matters out with Harold. When that was done in six weeks’ time, at the beginning of February 1920, she and Violet would elope together for real and start their new life, the choice made, the wavering over.

  But to Harold she wrote on 5 December that, though it was impossible for her to have sex with him, she loved him so deeply it could not be uprooted by this other love, ‘more tempestuous and altogether on a different plane’. The whole thing was, she said, the most awful tragedy. A ‘very great force’ had made her risk going away with Violet, she could not bear to think of her as married to Denys, but she was going to give her up ‘for ever’.

  ‘Vita is back with her hair short,’ Lady Sackville wrote in her diary on 18 December:

  … I said nothing as she looked lovely all the same, and I was glad to have her back. She has been so nice to Harold all day and stayed with him all the time. She told me of her gambling in Monte Carlo and we hardly talked of VT. She does not look a bit sad, which surprises me.

  Vita returned to Long Barn, to finding a new governess for her children and to seeing her publisher, Collins, about the publication of Challenge.

  Violet spent Christmas at Crichel and Polesden Lacey with her husband and mother. On 6 January, sustained by the secret plan to fly away with Vita at the beginning of February, she moved with Denys into Stonewall Cottage. She felt guilty at the thought of only being there three weeks. Mrs Keppel had paid for the furniture and servants. ‘I feel I ought to give her back the money. Mercifully she got it very cheap – Quelle triste farce!’

  A week later Violet told Denys of her elopement plan. He asked for a meeting with Vita, who felt like a young man wanting to marry, being interviewed by the father. He was ‘very quiet and business-like and looked like death’. He asked her how much money she had to keep Violet. He and Mrs Keppel would provide nothing. He asked Violet if she wanted to renounce ‘everything’ – marriage, relationship with her family, house, income, place in society – to go away with Vita.

  Violet saw that she was trapped between three perils: the life her mother had chosen for her which she did not want; the life with Vita which she had no conviction Vita would sustain, and social isolation if she chose to be alone. She did not give an answer but asked for a week to think it through.

  Four days later she asked Vita if they could leave at once. Vita told Harold. He had had an abscess on his knee and was on sick leave from Paris at his parents’ house in Cadogan Gardens. He wept. His mother, Lady Carnock, who looked troubled and wispy without her false hairpiece, begged Vita to think again. ‘I felt blackened,’ Vita wrote, ‘and felt my alienation from them and my affinity with Violet so keenly that I wanted to fly where I would not pollute their purity any longer.’ So it was Violet who was black and evil. But she sent white lilac to Vita of the sort they had picked in Polperro. Vita went alone to a hotel room. The next day she told Violet she would be spending a fortnight with Harold at Knole. At the end of that time she might or might not go away with her.

  In the familiar world of Knole with her children and father, no mention was made of feelings or the scarlet adventurer. When she and Harold parted they exchanged letters: ‘I know you can do anything with me,’ Vita wrote,

  you can touch my heart like no one, no one, no one … and I try to make you fight for yourself, but you never will; you just say, ‘Darling Mar!’ and leave me to invent my own conviction out of your silence …

  If I were you, and you were me, I would battle so hard to keep you.

  And Harold replied from Paris that he missed her all the time, wanted her all the time, would despair without her, could never love or be happy with anyone else, that he could not formulate in words how much he loved her, let alone express it.

  So Vita reaffirmed her family life and then, with Harold back in Paris, continued the adventure. She and Violet were to visit Lincoln because Vita was writing a book about the Fen country. From there they would cross the Channel, go to Sicily, buy a house and live together for ever. Or so Violet liked to think. Though the fantasy was wearing thin and Vita’s divided allegiance plain, she put all her desperate and disorganized hopes into this frail plan.

  The night before she parted from Denys, in what she intended as a permanent separation from him, they had some kind of desperate sexual exchange. ‘It was a sort of price to pay; I don’t know, but I think he looked upon it as such too.’ The following day in South Street, Lincoln, she tried to tell Vita about it. But Vita did not want to hear. For Violet this journey was to be her allegiance to and defence of love, the flouting of marriage, convention and society’s ties. She took great risks for it. ‘Test after test is applied to my love and test after test is vanquished triumphantly,’ she wrote.

  They prepared their luggage. Violet gave Vita the money she had saved for the Sicilian house. On 8 February, the evening before they left, Denys delivered a letter to Violet at their Liverpool Street hotel. In writing he advised her of the social destruction her plans would cause. Vita tried to persuade her to cancel the journey and stay with him. Violet refused.

  At Dover, at Vita’s instigation, Violet went on ahead across the Channel. ‘She seemed to think he would mind that less,’ Vita wrote. Violet was afraid of making the journey alone. She had never travelled without at least the company of her maid. She was to go to Amiens and Vita would join her the following day. On shore, Vita watched the boat sail out of sight. She then booked in at the Kings Head Hotel and called for help from all those who wanted her affair with Violet to end. She sent telegrams to Harold, her mother, her father, wires that led to a rescue network.

  Denys arrived soon after Violet had gone. He and Vita agreed to cross the Channel together the following day. Vita then wrote to Harold saying she had done everything she could to make Violet return to Denys:

  she refused so positively; she said she would never live with him even if I did not exist. I will try to make her, I will, I will, I will; I will only see her in front of Denys and he shall see that I will try.

  … O God, O God, how miserable and frightened I am - and if she refuses, he says he will never have anything to do with her again …

  If she consents and goes with him I shall come to you … I want so dreadfully to be with her and I cannot bear to think of her being with him, but I shall try to make her.

  How terrified she will be when she sees me arrive with him …

  How worried you will be by all this …

  O darling, it’s awfully lonely here.

  I must write to BM [her mother] now and Dada.

  By so doing Vita extricated herself from responsibility for Violet and forced Harold and all of them to fight for her. At Lady Sackville’s urgent call Harold left Paris for London. George Keppel ‘in a white rage’ went to Sir Neville Macready, head of Scotland Yard, and asked him to have all the ports watched and to detain his daughter.

  Vita and Denys crossed the Channel together. They got on curiously well. Denys said they could not complain that life was dull. The weather was stormy. At Calais they went to the buffet for lunch. Violet found them there. She was trembling, pale and had not eaten or slept for twenty-four hours. She had been to Amiens, left her luggage at the Hôtel du Rhin, then returned to Calais desperate to
meet Vita off the boat. They all ate chicken and champagne, booked in at a hotel and next day motored to Boulogne and took the train to Amiens.

  On the train Denys wrote on a scrap of paper that he knew Violet’s mind was made up and he would leave her at Amiens. Vita moved to an adjacent carriage. Denys cried. It was for him another exercise in humiliation. At Amiens he took the next train to Paris, then returned to London. Violet and Vita went to their hotel and Vita spent more time telephoning and telegraphing, so that everyone should know precisely where she was.

  Next day, while she waited for rescue, they looked at Amiens and the devastation of war: stained-glass windows in the cathedral broken and boarded up, windowless houses, shelled roads. First to arrive was George Keppel. ‘He was pompous, theatrical and unimpressive. He stormed at us and it was all we could do to keep from laughing.’ He stood guard and wired to Denys to come at once.

  At Grosvenor Street it was arranged that Denys, who was perhaps tired of trains and boats, should pilot a two-seater plane back to Amiens at 7 a.m. on the morning of 14 February. He was to keep Violet out of England. He must take her to Vichy, Nîmes, Toulon, Nice, anywhere away from scandal, Vita, Sonia’s marriage chances and society’s gaze.

  Harold arrived at his mother’s house from Paris. Lady Sackville called at Grosvenor Street, ‘interviewed’ Denys and asked him to take Harold to Amiens too. The drama caught her imagination. She wrote in her diary:

  Denys was very cool and collected, and fully determined to bring Violet back or have done with her. I have been thinking all day of those two husbands flying to Amiens to try and each get his wife back; quite like a sensational novel.

  The two husbands got to Amiens in a couple of hours. Harold, in an endeavour to be assertive, ordered Vita to pack which at his order she refused to do. Denys looked pale and ill. Violet told him she loathed him. He stared at her in silence. She then went to the restaurant and ordered coffee for herself. Harold, up in the bedroom, asked Vita, ‘Are you sure Violet is as faithful to you as she makes you believe? Because Denys has told your mother quite a different story.’