Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  At that point Vita lost control. Here was both her excuse for liberation from Violet and the focus of her obsession. The idea unleashed her rage about sexual possession. ‘Violet is mine,’ she had said. She scarcely cared whether her mother’s testimony was true or false or what the question implied. She raged at Denys: ‘have you ever been really married to Violet?’ – meaning had he had sex with her? He gave an evasive reply.

  She went into the restaurant and challenged Violet. There was a scene and screaming. Colonel Keppel could not have liked it and the hotel staff must have wondered about English aristocrats. Denys held Violet while Vita rushed upstairs and packed not at Harold’s request but in response to the betrayal by Violet she chose to perceive. She had her justification for leaving with Harold.

  She kissed Violet publicly, though Harold and Denys tried to stop her, then she and Harold took the train to Paris. George Keppel was on the same train. His mission seemingly accomplished, he was going on to St Moritz to join Alice for a winter holiday. Harold and Vita booked in at the Paris Ritz and, while they ate their evening meal – Vita could only manage the soup – Violet and Denys arrived.

  Harold did not want another public scene and asked Violet and Vita to talk upstairs. There, Violet described such sex as had occurred between her and Denys. She said it had been against her will. Denys came in. Vita questioned him. He replied, ‘This must never go further than this room; I promise you that there has never been anything of that kind between Violet and me.’

  But Vita needed her excuse to leave with Harold and not be responsible for Violet. She told her she could not bear to see her for two months. ‘Two months and what then?’ Violet was to write. The answer was more of the same if she could take it. To Harold Vita said she would have killed her unless she left. ‘She calls it banishment – it is not. It is simply the impossibility of bringing myself to see her for the present.’

  To Denys Vita gave Violet’s money for the house in Sicily. He passed it back to his wife: ‘How could you give it back to him? It kills me to see it in my purse’ Violet was later to write.

  Thus the affair, though postponed, could continue. Vita would not have to live with Violet but nor had she let her go. She kept Harold, the children, Long Barn. Violet stayed married to Denys. She was his responsibility. This context, reinforced, was anguish for Violet and Denys. They were again in each other’s sole company, all the fraudulence of their marriage clear, ostracized from society, with nothing in common and nowhere to go. That night Violet wrote a despairing letter to Vita:

  I am simply dazed and sodden with pain …

  There has NEVER never never in my life been any attempt at what you thought from that person. Never – He said his pride wouldn’t allow him to say more, and he particularly doesn’t want anyone to know, but O Mitya, I do swear – may I die tonight – that there has never been anything of that nature and scarcely anything of the other. I loathe having to write this, but what I told you this evening is exactly true down to the minutest detail … O my beloved, I feel there has never been sorrow or pain or suffering for me till now.

  Next day she and Denys motored south on another journey to nowhere. ‘Every day L telephones to me from various provincial towns in France on her way south,’ Vita wrote, ‘and every day her voice is a little fainter.’ Violet wrote again and again on the issue of sex with Denys:

  Oh my darling, my darling, you mustn’t call me faithless, you mustn’t – it’s not that. O my God, if only I could tell you the circumstances very fully of that horrible evening … It was a sort of price to pay; I don’t know, but I think he looked upon it as such too; he was never like that before, and O Mitya, it wasn’t consummated – I know how awful it is for me to tell you all this, but the reality was so very far from you – what you shrink from – if only he could have brought himself to tell you more, namely that he desisted …

  She wrote to Lady Sackville saying she was heartbroken. Vita wrote too. ‘I try so hard to understand,’ Lady Sackville wrote in her diary. ‘If VT was a man I could understand. But for a woman, such a love beats me.’

  Such a love beat Vita’s readers too. In Paris she received proofs of Challenge. When she returned to London, her mother, Mrs Keppel and the writer Mrs Belloc Lowndes were adamant that publication should not proceed because it would provoke gossip. ‘I can’t give it up. BM asks too much,’ Vita wrote. ‘Vita is plucky about her bitter disappointment when Mrs Lowndes told her about the scandal it would create,’ Lady Sackville wrote in her diary. Violet was disbelieving when news reached her that the book was to be pulped. It had been printed but not bound. This was another betrayal, another capitulation:

  You can’t seriously mean it. It would be idiotic. The book is quite admirable. Ten times better than Heritage. Don’t relent, sigh or soften. It’s absurd, disloyal to me, and useless.

  Vita told Collins, her publisher, that she was unhappy with the book’s literary quality. Her mother paid them £150 to cover costs. ‘I hope Mama is pleased,’ Vita wrote in her diary. ‘She has beaten me.’

  These Mamas were hard to defy. Though their example was not always wise, nor their counsel always clear, they had power over their daughters’ lives. The book had variously been called Rebellion, Endeavour, Enchantment, Vanity, Challenge. But Conformity won the day. It, like the whole affair, was suppressed. The 999 out of every thousand need hear no whisper of noxious practices.

  Life went on, in Paris, London and Long Barn. In March, Harold gave Vita a cocker spaniel for her birthday. Sonia became formally engaged to Roland. She gave him cufflinks, he gave her a ruby and diamond ring and a little diamond star to pin in her hat. Lady Ashcombe allowed them now to dine alone together and to motor unaccompanied to stay with friends.

  THIRTEEN

  Violet and Denys were spinning in a circle of despair. Events now had a momentum of their own. A year on from their marriage they re-enacted their honeymoon: jilted elopement, the Paris Ritz, joyless travel and separate hotel rooms, all financed by Mrs Keppel.

  They alternated between rows and silence. For two days they did not speak to each other except about the luggage. ‘I would sooner be with Men Chinday or Papa than with him,’ Violet said. Denys wept, destroyed the novel he was writing and longed equally to be elsewhere.

  She thought she would drive to Toulon, leave Denys and meet up with Pat Dansey. ‘Pat is a powerful ally,’ she wrote to Vita. ‘Pat will take me away. But if everything fails and you won’t come to me I must kill myself.’

  At Fontainebleau Denys was ill with chest and joint pains and fever. He was breaking down. Violet told him she could not look after him, he must go to his sister Elizabeth. Mindful of the carnage of the war he said his life now was worse than anything that had gone before. At the Hôtel du Rivage, Gien, he cried at dinner then went to his room. The chauffeur went out for quinine and aspirin. Denys’s tuberculosis, undiagnosed, was exacerbated by being gassed in Flanders, endless cigarettes and the ghastliness of his emotional life. His vulnerability made Violet despise him more,

  he does nothing but cry and whimper: it fills me with repulsion, and I can’t conceal it. My obsession is to get away from him côute que côute.… He has ceased to be anything but my jailor, and I look at him and think: yes, if it wasn’t for you.

  If it was not for Denys, Violet liked to suppose, she would be with Vita. As they drove through France she sat in the back of the car, staring from the window, never speaking to him, urging the driver to go ever faster. ‘We crash over impossible roads, this morning we killed a dog – poor thing! After that we went faster than ever.’ They drove south via Allier, Vichy, Le Puy. On 19 February, at the Hôtel de Beaujolais in Vichy, Denys told her he hated being with her and when he had handed her over to Pat Dansey, or whoever would have her, he would extricate himself from this hell and go away for good.

  At Nîmes next evening Violet pleaded a headache and said she must sleep. In bed, she wrote – as ever – to Vita. Denys saw the light, put his head ro
und the door and accused her of lying. She said what she did was no business of his:

  He yelled: ‘I hate you. I hate you! I’m going to get even with you for all your deceit. I’m going to make you as unhappy as you’ve made me. I’m going to ruin your life as you’ve ruined mine!’

  He could not cope with this chaos. Without telling Violet he wired to Mrs Keppel. Five days later when they arrived at Toulon she was there. She had travelled with George from St Moritz and now she held hectic interviews with them both.

  Both told her they wanted an annulment. That was out of the question, she said. A façade of marriage must be kept intact. They must go away together, she would pay for it all. They could go round the world for a year, or to Jamaica, or Ragusa, or she would arrange for them to stay in Tangier with the painter Sir John Lavery (who had been at the Knebworth house party with Harold and Vita in 1918). Violet, she said, could stay only a fortnight with Pat Dansey, who was at the Villa Primavera at Bordighera with her partner Joan Campbell. Then she must travel with Denys.

  Denys persisted. He felt he had been tricked and he wanted divorce. His terms, he said, would be an unconsummated marriage and the ‘undue influence’ of Vita – terms likely to cause a social hum. Mrs Keppel passed responsibility to him. She warned that if he separated from Violet she would give her an allowance of £600 a year and have nothing else to do with her emotionally or financially. She was going to write to Vita but would not say what about. She would call her lawyer in England. Violet would need a medical examination to prove she was a virgin. (Given her history with Vita it is unclear what such scrutiny would have shown.)

  Next day, 25 February, Mrs Keppel was more determined, less concessional. She saw Denys alone. If he insisted on annulment she would not speak to Violet again, or let her inside the Grosvenor Street house, or give her any money at all. Denys had no money of his own and was to leave the army at the beginning of April. At first he insisted he wanted an annulment whatever the consequences. Under pressure he capitulated and said he would take Violet away rather than see her punished so entirely.

  He must, her mother said, take her to Tangier for two months while gossip cooled. It was arranged with Sir John Lavery. After that he could return to England with her only if they lived in a house out of town. She then saw Violet who told her that she loathed Denys. Mrs Keppel conceded the marriage had been a ‘hideous mistake’, but it was done, it was an agreement, it was binding and necessary.

  * * *

  Things were done much better in her day. Her main concern was to keep Violet married, out of England and away from scandal while Sonia’s marriage plans were sealed. Despite the engagement, Lord and Lady Ashcombe, were still dismayed about their son’s choice of wife. They hated the marriage ‘because of Little Mrs George and all that’. They were, said Vita, ‘very old-fashioned and apt to cut up rusty at any provocation’. This latest débâcle would, Mrs Keppel feared, spoil Sonia’s chances.

  Maggie Greville, Sonia’s godmother, had already intervened. Friend to royalty, statesmen, foreign ambassadors and all true aristocrats, she went uninvited to Denbies, the Cubitt estate, two miles from Polesden Lacey. Formally dressed and in her Rolls-Royce with footman and chauffeur, she asked to speak to Ashcombe but refused to go into the house. When he came out she said, ‘I only called to tell you that I do not consider that your son is good enough for my goddaughter.’

  Ashcombe asked for a meeting with George Keppel to discuss the marriage settlement. He arrived at Grosvenor Street to find Mrs Keppel alone. Unused to financial acumen in women – he gave his wife ‘pin money’ and paid all household expenses himself – he was off guard. Mrs Keppel said, ‘If we give Sonia a certain figure, will you give Roland the same?’ Stung by the amount she proposed, he said he hoped this expensive marriage would last. ‘My dear Lord Ashcombe, neither you nor I can legislate for eternity,’ Mrs Keppel replied.

  But she could legislate for the present. Her instructions given to Violet and Denys, she returned to St Moritz and the bridge tables. ‘She can’t ever have been in love herself or she wouldn’t treat me like that,’ Violet wrote to Vita.

  Alone with Denys, Violet made as if to jump out of a window but he restrained her. He saw that she was no more than her mother’s child, felt sorry for her and the mess she was in. He apologized for having summoned her mother and for not annulling the marriage. He said he had agreed to her mother’s demands for Sonia’s sake. He felt he had betrayed Violet and he wrote her a note:

  I know that just lately I have not deserved your trust. I will not undeserve it again.

  Don’t take that away too. Even if you must hate me, try just now to be a little generous and give me back the last vestige that remained to me of anything I cared for.

  I will not fail you again in that way. I will try and earn your trust again anyway – even if it comes with your hatred.

  I know there is nothing immediately that I can do for you. But if you feel that in future you can at least trust me – it may help a tiny bit.

  He would, like George Keppel, have been a complaisant husband had Violet done things in her mother’s style. But she scorned him and spun like a moth into the flame of her obsession with Vita. She asked if he thought Vita loved her or Harold more. He shrugged, said he did not know, but that in his view Vita had shunned the elopement pact not because of Violet’s ‘infidelity’, but out of a primary commitment to Harold.

  Pat Dansey did not want to be held responsible for Violet. She was going to Venice with Joan Campbell. Each year they went on long holidays financed by Joan, whose father was the fourth son of the eighth Duke of Argyll. Joan was scholarly, gentle, published volumes of verse, won the Country Life crossword several times and lived with her mother in Strachur Castle in Scotland and in Bryanston Square in London. Pat disliked the idea of Violet tagging along with her and Joan, pining for Vita. She sent telegrams and letters to Vita on Violet’s behalf, urging her to come and sort something out. ‘I am afraid this constant telegraphing is leading to bad muddles,’ she wrote. ‘What on earth you both will arrange in the future beats me.’

  Violet was on her own. ‘I could not be more maligned and shunned than I am at present,’ she wrote to Vita. ‘I am really just as cut off from my family now as I would have been if I had run away with you.’ Unable to look after herself, unused to doing so and ever more distracted, she had her money stolen and lost her jewellery – frequent occurrences throughout her life. Most people, including Sonia, cut her dead. Former friends would not be seen in public with her. One received a letter from Lady Sackville saying ‘that arch-fiend Violet has been trying to upset the Nicolsons’ marriage’.

  ‘There is no Phoenix,’ Violet wrote to Vita. She said her contempt for compromise, her ambition to dedicate her life to Vita, art and beauty was the best part of her and it had all turned to ashes:

  I am sick with longing for our old life. I don’t think we shall ever be allowed to be happy again, ever in our lives.

  She and Denys had rows at the Villa Primavera. He burned Vita’s letters, she burned the book he was trying to write. He found the pact between them impossible and moved out to a hotel in Monte Carlo where his friend Nancy Cunard was staying. She had short hair, wore short skirts, frequented nightclubs, drank, danced, wrote, had an affair with Henry Crowder, a black pianist. Mrs Keppel spent her days at the casino. It was as if she was gambling for a more abstract luck than money. Denys told her he returned to the villa in the evenings but she did not believe him. Violet felt guilt at her mother’s distress. Pat Dansey wrote on 15 March:

  Darling, I saw your mother in the Casino yesterday – she does look so ill – worried and sad. And she is quite miserable over the whole beastly business. Cannot anything be done to arrange things without this horrible disgrace? Won’t Denys change his mind?

  Darling, I was so sorry for your mother. She does mind quite dreadfully.

  Oh, Violet, what a hash you have made of things and all for one person. You fling all your
real friends to the wind – not to speak of your wretched family. How often, darling, have I told you no good would come if you persisted in your downward path. I know, child, you are miserable. So are your friends …

  Your mother is a brave woman and I admire the courage she displays amongst this fire of hateful gossip. She is a proud woman, and it is hateful for her.

  Make Vita promise that her mother shall never tell tales to your mother.

  Wanting some kind of reparation, Violet drove to St Moritz to see her mother. Mrs Keppel would not speak to her, told her she planned to go with Sonia to Spain, said she did not give a damn what Violet did provided Denys safeguarded the money she had invested in the marriage. Violet gambled flamboyantly, lost ten thousand francs in one session, five thousand in another. Her mother had managed the roles of mistress and wife with profit and style. Violet managed none of it. She saw the chaos she was in, and worst of all that Love, which she called ‘the greatest prize’ had become

  a debased crippled crafty thing of furtive pleasures and false generosities, of mean impulses and starved understanding. But to my mind the worst thing of all is its flagrant, its crushing hypocrisy. Under our skilful perversion – not only ours but other people round us – cowardice becomes prudence, selfishness is called love, misleading evasions are supposed to be ‘kindness’, meanness, blindness and jealousy are all different manifestations of ‘love’. Mind you, I blame myself every bit as much as I blame you – and I blame our circumstances more than anything. It is impossible for any love to expand healthily under such circumstances … How can one make the best of anything that revolves on lies and deception?

  Behind her obsession and panic she tried to keep a clarity of feeling and intention, a single-minded belief in the indivisibility of sex, love and commitment. ‘I am singularly pure, uncontaminated, and high principled,’ she wrote to Vita. ‘You will laugh but it is true.’ She was also, on her own admission, unable to see anyone else’s point of view. Pat Dansey urged her to seek reconciliation with Denys. But Violet could not extricate herself from Vita, who only sometimes answered the barrage of letters, phone calls and telegrams she received. She wrote that she was ‘not in a state to consider anything now’. For herself, she said, she ‘craved solitude’. She dwelt on Violet’s perceived infidelity: