Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  Before I had always buoyed myself with the thought that although she might hold no other moral precept, at least she was whole-hearted and true where she did love.

  In her love for Vita, Violet was whole-hearted and true, though unrewarded for it. And it was never a ‘moral precept’ Vita held. Her sexual jealousy persisted – towards Denys and Pat Dansey – and her demand that only by sexual fidelity to her could Violet be of worth. She implied Violet was jealous of Denys being with Nancy Cunard, but Violet could not have cared less who he was with.

  Vita wanted to see her but spoke no more of a shared life. When Violet became histrionic, Vita was dry and impatient. When Vita was dry and impatient, Violet became histrionic. She answered neither yes nor no to Violet’s obsession about meeting. Violet accused her of being ‘up to her old game’ of equivocation. ‘How delicious it would be’ Vita said in one taunting letter, ‘to spend a few days in Italy together.’ Her preferred option though would be for Violet to come to England, as Harold was in France, which was forbidden except in Denys’s company. ‘You have told me all along how you hated me being with DT and now you are deliberately suggesting I should return to him.’

  She said Vita had played her a ‘dirty trick’. She could not tolerate the thought of going back to Grosvenor Street, ‘that poisonous Grosvenor Street, that hated, watched and restricted existence’. Her other option was to be with Denys. He had to go to England in late March to finalize his discharge from the army. She would return with him simply to see Vita,

  but if ever you dare say one word of jealousy, or attempt one single row with me because owing to your own silly fault I am with Denys, I will clear out of that pestilential country and you shan’t set eyes on me again … I hate England, I hate that life with all my heart and soul. If I wasn’t such a fool as to love you as I do wild horses wouldn’t drag me there …

  Never say I don’t love you, if I have to travel across Europe sitting bolt upright, to England which I detest, braving the fury of my mother, merely to catch a glimpse of you! Je t’adore …

  * * *

  At the end of March, after a six-week separation, Vita joined Violet in Avignon. Within hours they were quarrelling about commitment and its meaning. They motored to the Villa Primavera, there were rows all the way. Violet had jaundice, ‘a most unromantic complaint’ Vita said. They travelled on to Italy with Pat Dansey and Joan Campbell and there were, said Pat, ‘scenes and storms’. At San Remo Vita promised Violet, wearily and without conviction, that they would stay together:

  L. [Lushka] horrible to me all day and makes me very miserable and exasperated. After dinner I lose my head and say I will stay with her. Paradise restored.

  It was a hollow promise and a fetid paradise. A week later Vita told her it was all impossible. She would be followed and brought back if she tried to stay with her. ‘It is horrible,’ Vita wrote in her diary. ‘She is in the depths. So am I. I feel the Grand Canal in spite of slime and floating onions would be preferable.’

  A complicity grew up between her and Pat Dansey. Ostensibly Pat was Violet’s ‘powerful ally’, a ‘saint to them both’ in their trials. But she was attracted to Vita and to the passion she inspired in Violet. She switched allegiance. ‘All through those scenes and storms at Bordighera and Venice I was working entirely on your side,’ she wrote to her some weeks later. She urged Violet to stay with Denys, asked Vita to trust and confide in her:

  My dear, I worry for you as much as for Violet, more perhaps for you than for her … I would be gratified to feel you knew you could speak about anything which troubles you in tangles with Violet … all I shall ever want is to see you both happy.

  After three weeks Vita returned to England. Violet, entirely distressed, wanted to stay abroad alone. Vita said she could not allow it, that she would not be safe from thieves and that they must travel back together. ‘I saw the sort of life she would lead, ranging from hotel to hotel, quite irresponsible and horribly lonely.’ By mid-April, Violet was back in Grosvenor Street. She wrote of feeling terrified. Her mother’s world closed around her: the world of Grosvenor Street, where a king might come for tea and politicians for supper, where it was as de rigueur for a daughter to have a husband as it was for husbands to shoot grouse and deer, play bridge, have titles, fields and servants. ‘In the Middle Ages,’ she wrote to Vita, ‘when people did things that the community didn’t understand they were instantly burned at the stake for being sorcerers and witches.’

  The injustice of their twin positions oppressed her:

  How can you expect me not to find it unjust? It’s as though two people had been caught stealing, but one is put in prison and the other is not. The one who is in prison can’t help feeling the injustice …

  Vita, she saw, would not change. Sex was exciting and essential, ‘a very great force’, but she was not going to live openly with a woman. After Violet she always had women lovers. They stayed in the wings, a private matter, and did not disturb her writing, marriage, gardening, house renovation or reputation.

  Violet for her part struggled alone with Vita’s equivocation and a society that required her to conceal her love. She was ostracized and panic-smitten. Her mother stayed abroad a further month with Sonia. When she returned she would not speak to Violet. George Keppel wanted Violet out of Grosvenor Street and to go there only by invitation. In letters to Vita, Violet returned to her key theme of social hypocrisy. ‘What a dreadful thing is marriage,’ she wrote:

  I think it is the wickedest thing in the universe. Think of the straight, clean lives it has ruined by forcing them to skulk and hide and intrigue and scheme, making of love a thing to be hidden and lied about … It is a wicked institution …

  It has ruined my life, it has ruined Denys’s – he would give his soul never to have married. It has ruined – not your life, but our happiness …

  Ever since I was a child I have loved you. Lesser loves have had greater rewards – you don’t know what you have been – what you are to me: just the force of life, just the raison d’être.

  She moved with Denys into the Dower House, Sonning-on-Thames, but described the house as small, claustrophobic and haunted. Vita hated it too. ‘Hate seeing her in her own house – hate the hypocrisy of it.’ Denys told Violet he intended to please himself in all things, she had done nothing to please him, he would do nothing to please her. She feared if he left her she would be entirely alone and that if she angered him he would ‘estrange me from my mother for the rest of my days’.

  Harold did not want Violet at Long Barn. Denys did not see why, if that was so, Vita should visit the Dower House. When Violet banished him so Vita could spend the night with her, he stayed at Grosvenor Street and threatened to give Mrs Keppel the reason. Vita lost the ring Violet had given her and felt miserable and superstitious about it.

  She went sailing in mid-May with her father and Harold on the Sackville yacht Sumurun. ‘I can’t bear to think of you in a boat on the sea with Harold,’ Violet wrote. ‘It makes me quite frantic – the enforced intimacy.’ Harold went back to Paris and Vita booked in with Violet for two nights at a hotel in Sonning, near the Dower House.

  Denys talked to Violet of killing himself. Mrs Keppel criticized him, so he kept away from her. He again wrote to her saying he wanted to end the marriage. Violet called him a ‘mercenary humbug’, accused him of saying awful things about her mother but when confronted by her ‘making up to her for all he was worth’. To Lady Sackville he said Violet was a liar, terrified of her mother, fond of money and social success. At a dance given by Lord Farquhar of Castle Rising, Kings Lynn, in June, he told Violet her mother had put a clause in her will disinheriting her unless she had a child. Mrs Keppel, he said, had willed most of her fortune to Sonia and the residue to him. In front of guests Violet called him ‘the most ill-mannered swine that ever walked the face of the earth’, asked for the key to the Dower House, which he refused her, and rushed out in her evening clothes.

  She felt continually unwel
l, suffered palpitations, fainted at the Ritz and had all the symptoms of acute anxiety. Her doctor said she had an ‘irritable’ heart, advised rest, giving up smoking, a cure at Evian. She craved sleep in the day and at night woke bathed in sweat. On her birthday, 6 June, she received no card from Vita, no present from Denys. ‘I am twenty-six, passée, futile, pointless and – letterless.’ She still pleaded with Vita to choose: ‘You can’t do “la navette” any longer. We must have a “situation nette”.’ But she knew Vita had chosen.

  Vita said their love had become ‘debased and corrupt’ and she could not trust her. Violet replied,

  O Mitya, you can trust me, you must have seen what is at the bottom of everything – an incorrigible, insatiable longing to be with you – no matter where, no matter when.

  In mid-July Violet had ‘a momentous interview’ at Grosvenor Street with Denys and her mother. Mrs Keppel insisted she stop seeing Vita until Sonia was married. Denys said that after that unless she lived with him as his wife ‘in the fullest sense of the term’ he would dissolve the marriage. There was a scene and Violet left the house. Vita was on holiday in the Beacon Hotel, Hindhead, longing to go home to Long Barn and peace, but Violet ‘was so distressed and seedy’ she felt she had to be with her.

  There was no way out for Violet. All her relationships were in chaos. Pat Dansey said gossip had reached its pitch, no decent person would have her in the house. George Keppel maintained his refusal to speak to her and always went out of the room if she entered. He burned letters to her from Vita. Her mother wrote to say that if she tried to separate from Denys

  I fear the scandal would be very great and you would be the laughing stock of the country, becoming Miss Keppel again … Even if you went for 6 months with Mrs Nicolson I could have nothing more to do with you.

  Provided Violet did not go off with Vita she would agree to an annulment after Sonia’s wedding. She would have to stay away for five or six years ‘to live it down’. Mrs Keppel would take her to Jamaica and leave her there with a small allowance and Moiselle as a maid.

  Violet lost all hope of continuing to live in England. ‘I know you realize how intensely and devastatingly I mind about my mother,’ she wrote to Vita:

  I could not live in the same country as she was, to say nothing of Sonia, knowing that by living either with you (which would end in disaster) or near you, I will be insulting her more and more irrevocably, and making her hate me more and more each day. There is nothing to be gained and everything to lose by remaining in England.

  Vita longed for peace. She wanted to go to Albania with Harold in August but Violet made such a fuss she cancelled. She finished her novel, set in Lincolnshire, The Dragon in Shallow Waters. Harold worked in Paris on the Treaty of St Germain and a biography of the poet, Paul Verlaine. He was having an affair with Jean de Gaigneron, a socialite who painted pictures, said witty things, had sex with lots of men and introduced him to Proust and Cocteau. ‘Jean is a nice friend for Hadji,’ Harold wrote to Vita, ‘as he knows all the clevers’. In late July he came with him to England. ‘Can you arrange with BM for Jean to sleep at Hill Street with me (!!) on Friday night?’ he wrote to Vita.

  While Harold was with Jean de Gaigneron, Vita began her autobiographical ‘confession’, published fifty years later by her son as Portrait of a Marriage. She began writing lying in the grounds of Long Barn ‘in the margin between a wood and a ripe cornfield’:

  Having written it down I shall be able to trust no one to read it; there is only one person in whom I have such utter confidence that I would give every line of this confession into his hands, knowing that after wading through this morass – for it is a morass, my life, a bog, a swamp, a deceitful country, with one bright patch in the middle, the patch that is unalterably his – I know that after wading through it all he would emerge holding his estimate of me steadfast. This would be the test of my confidence, from which I would not shrink. I would not give it to her – perilous touchstone!…

  Neither the bright patch nor the perilous touchstone ever got to read it. And though actions showed how swamp-like and deceitful a country her relationship with Violet now was, she still did not say, emphatically and categorically that no, they would never be together. They planned another ‘escape’ for after Sonia’s wedding and snatched five days when Harold was in Paris and Mrs Keppel away. Vita wrote to say how this time together disturbed her and how she despised herself for shillyshallying. ‘Darling, it’s true I’m afraid what you say,’ Violet replied. ‘You are neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring.’

  At times Violet and Denys made the social effort. Sonia and her fiancé called at the Dower House. Roland Cubitt found Violet alarming and teased her to conceal his apprehension. He and Denys talked of horses. Sonia thought Denys impossibly reserved and felt ‘submitted to some form of kit inspection’ by him.

  In private the Trefusis marriage grew worse by the day. Denys checked Violet’s alibis about going to the ballet or being alone, twisted her wrist to make her say, ‘Goodnight darling’, hit her on the side of the head for saying she was devoted to Pat Dansey, took more of Vita’s letters from the drawer of her writing table and burned them. Violet told him she could not stand living with him any more and was looking for a flat for herself. He went out with other women, but she said she did not mind his ‘Jeannes and Yvonnes’.

  He became ill and was put to bed in the blue room of the Dower House with a temperature of 103°F, an infected throat and visits three times a day from the doctor. His sister Betty, a theosophist with golden hair who was writing a novel, came to stay and look after him. His condition alarmed her. Her own husband had been killed at Gallipoli leaving her to care alone for their small children. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his courage.

  Mrs Keppel worked to give Sonia a dashing start to married life. The wedding was fixed for 15 November. They shopped for clothes:

  three dozen nightgowns, petticoats, bodices, chemises, knickers, stockings, handkerchiefs, gloves. A dozen pairs of evening and day shoes; six pairs of stays … a pink satin peignoir trimmed with ostrich feathers for summer, a quilted blue velvet dressing-gown with a real Valenciennes lace collar, for winter … two evening dresses … a black velvet square-necked ball dress and a pink velvet ball dress trimmed with silver lace … two tea gowns, one trimmed with Chinese embroidery and the other of billowing chiffon; three day dresses and three afternoon dresses; and three tweed suits and a travelling coat with matching hats and jerseys and shirts … a going-away dress of pale blue marocaine, with a skirt cut into petals, topped by a black velvet coat with a grey fox collar, and a grey velvet cap trimmed with ospreys.

  In late summer Violet joined her mother at Duntreath. They had a week’s remission from their woes. Away from Vita and Denys and in the perfect setting of her childhood Violet was restored. Her mother was happy too, freed from scandal and gossip:

  She has been gardening such a lot and cutting down so many trees, she is quite brown and sunburnt. She says she has been so happy here away from everybody. She was so attractive like she was yesterday no one could help loving her.

  Instead of being ‘hard and inquisitorial and menacing’, she was ‘kind and humorous and gay’. It was as if the social disaster of the past three years had not happened. She walked the dogs, charmed the neighbours, tended to a dove wounded by a rat:

  I couldn’t bear Mama a grudge for anything in the world. Whatever she did, she could always be forgiven. There are some people like that. She laughs and jokes … Oh! The charmers of this world, what an unfair advantage is given them!

  At Duntreath Violet felt calm and free. ‘the moment I get away, how gloriously emancipated I feel. I shed certain aspects of my life as easily as a garment…’ She, too, began to write ‘an undraped chronicle of things that actually happened’. It soothed her to write this chronicle, though she had no belief in its merit and it has not survived.

  She slipped into the fantasy of her childhood with Vita, the chil
dhood which she could not leave:

  You haunt this place … How young and happy we were – as free as the sparrow hawks that nest on the hill, as shy as the roe deer that feed on its slopes.

  … The place is inviolably yours, the lanky, awkward, adorable you that wrote historical novels and had no sense of humour. You have changed more than I have, for I haven’t changed at all.

  She would have benefited from a long stay there, away from the muddle she had made. But after a week she sailed with her mother and Sonia for the Baroness de Brienen’s house, Clingendaal, in The Hague. All the provocations returned. Denys was so ill he had been sent on ahead. He was to stay in a cottage on the estate. Violet was not to be out of her mother’s sight until Sonia was a bride.

  On the Channel crossing Mrs Keppel appropriated Violet’s cabin saying she must not be disturbed. Violet shared with Sonia who snored. Vita wrote caustically that she supposed Denys would be waiting impatiently for her. In fact he went for a walk when he knew she was about to arrive, did not return until lunchtime and evinced no interest at seeing her. He took all meals except lunch alone in his cottage. Violet visited only once, when he was out, to borrow a book. He befriended a guest called Ruby who asked Mrs Keppel if Violet was going to divorce. Out riding, he lamed one horse and killed another ‘by making them jump impossible obstacles’.

  He looked emaciated: ‘like a wraith, there is nothing of him’. Mrs Keppel tended to him. ‘She fusses far more about him than she has ever about anyone in her life.’ George continued to leave any room Violet entered and did not address a word to her. ‘In some extraordinary way he seems to think that I am responsible for D’s complaint.’ Sonia told Violet she could not help despising her both for missing Vita so much and for the way she had treated and continued to treat Denys.