Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  Like Julian and Vita, Scovello did not telegraph. Pat was seldom long at one address and these cris de coeur were forwarded to her. ‘I am really losing my mind over these telegrams and missing letters…’ she wrote to Vita. ‘In what a fix she plants one.’ Pat was for a time Violet’s ally, gave circumspect replies knowing letters were opened, transferred money to Thomas Cook’s in Florence when Violet said she had not a penny in the world and had been ‘swindled by the cook’, sent cigarettes and press cuttings of Vita’s poems and stories.

  At the end of May Violet went with her mother to Rome and stayed in a villa on a hill with a ‘beautiful garden with fountains that play day and night beneath my window’.

  Men chinday now completely ignores me. It’s as though I didn’t exist. She says that her affection for me is dead and that after Sonia’s baby is born I may do as I like. I have only one preoccupation. Chepescar. [Escape.]

  She met Rebecca West who agreed to take a large, framed, coloured photograph of her to London and give it to Pat who would pass it to Vita. On her birthday she received via Pat an unsigned telegram from Vita, a mute reminder of past times.

  In July her mother took her to Clingendaal. Violet disliked the room she was given. She tried to write a novel which, she said, was now ‘everything to me inevitably: Lover, Husband, Child, Friend’. She felt, she wrote to Pat, ‘out of everything; I am never asked to take part in the numerous expeditions, dinners, dances, etc. that the others get up. I am always left out.’ Her mother said that if she ever gave a party again she could not ask Violet to it. ‘It is a small thing but it hurts my feelings.’ The guests treated her with condescension or were openly rude. ‘Julian and Denys between them,’ she wrote to Pat, ‘have completely ruined my chances of respectability for ever. Whatever I become it would be their fault.’

  She urged Pat to come out to Clingendaal. Mrs Keppel was going back to England while Sonia’s baby was born. Pat declined. ‘I honestly don’t want to go,’ she wrote to Vita:

  I have a lot of visits to pay in July and I hate old Daisy [de Brienen] as much as she hates me! Surely if she [Violet] is coming back in September, she can bear two more months?

  Violet went often to the doctor, scrutinized herself in the mirror, feared she had lost her looks, dreaded the approach of age. She was twenty-seven, her chin seemed to sag, her throat looked wrinkled. ‘I look ten years older than when you saw me last year,’ she wrote to Pat:

  My whole life seems ruined. I see only too clearly that it would be impossible for me to live in England. I cannot bear being snubbed and mortified. I am too proud.

  It was too problematic. She was déclassée. ‘I can count the pleasures that remain on the fingers of one hand,’ she wrote to Pat, ‘sleeping, smoking, a hot bath.’ She read D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and said there were beautiful things in it, ‘like jewels in a manure heap’. She asked Pat to send her more novels as writing and reading were her only resources and there were no books at all at Clingendaal.

  In her role as go-between Pat moved closer to Vita though her ostensible concern was Violet. ‘I would gladly do anything to help her,’ she wrote to Vita on 15 August:

  But what can I do? I have written her a most urgent appeal to give you up in all ways – for as long as there is any connection between you two the world will never allow the scandal to be forgotten. Curse the malicious tattlers who did all the harm, curse them. I have done my best to impress Violet that there can be no future for her as long as people are not made to understand that the mad friendship between you two is over and not to be revived.

  Poor child, I am afraid she has not much future ahead. O Vita, Vita, why didn’t you leave her for the first 6 months after she was married? Now the harm is irretrievably done. Doubtless you can be strong, but it is too late. I am sorry. I did not mean to upbraid! The tragedy was that in those days you looked upon me as an enemy. I wasn’t and never have been. You were the enemy, but the point is, how can Violet be helped?

  I think it is cruel the way she is being treated and that sort of treatment is not going to make people forget the scandal – is it? I simply don’t know what to do. Shall I go and see her mother and try to make her see that treating V as a pariah does more harm than good?…

  Vita, will you put all feelings aside from your personal point of view, and tell me quite candidly and truthfully what you consider would really be the best for V in the future?

  Neither had an answer. Both feared Violet’s return to London, scheduled for late August. ‘I do really really want to evolve some plan by which to regulate my life,’ she wrote. Lonely at Clingendaal, she invited Denys’s sister, Betty, to visit. From her she learned Denys had dropped legal proceedings because of her separation from Vita. He too was adrift, without occupation, and living unsatisfactorily with his mother. He felt ‘caged up’ in Devon. Travel, the war and the trials of marriage had ‘upset the old ideas’ he used to hold. Betty advised Violet to repair what there was, told her the mess was of her own making.

  Sonia’s daughter Rosalind was born in August. Mrs Keppel stayed with her and Roland at their house Hall Place in the village of West Meon, Hampshire. Rosalind was in her turn to be the mother of Camilla Parker-Bowles, Favorita of a future Prince of Wales.

  After the child was born, Violet was allowed to return to London and to her room in her mother’s Grosvenor Street house. Vita wrote L for Lushka in her diary, underlined it three times and, within a week, left for months of holiday in Italy with Dorothy and Gerald Wellesley. They were to be joined in October by Harold.

  Within a week, too, Violet was on her way to Paris with Denys. Their reunion was a convenience. It was, Pat told Vita, at Violet’s suggestion. ‘Her mother refuses to advise her one way or the other.’ They stayed in the Paris Ritz, then moved to a flat in the seventeenth arrondissement. London society was unperturbed; Violet had relinquished her place in it.

  She continued to send Pat letters asking if Vita cared. Pat told her Vita ‘would never lead the mad life of the past 3 years again’. But to Vita she wrote in November, ‘Beyond that I have said nothing. Personally, I would not bet 6d that in less than 3 months’ time you are not again on the same footing with V!!’ She would not have lost her sixpence. The old footing was gone.

  Less than three months after Violet’s exile Pat switched loyalties. ‘I do wish, Vita,’ she wrote in December, ‘that when you come to see me you could manage to look ugly. You always make me forget all the important disagreeable things I want to say.’ Pat now read Vita’s poems in bed at night and dreamed of her. By December she told her she could not ‘serve two masters’ and was beginning to dislike Violet. ‘Of course she is bound to say I am in love with you; however that won’t do you any active harm as she will only dare say it to me.’

  On 10 January 1922 some kind of lovemaking took place between her and Vita. ‘Dine Pat’ Vita noted in her engagement book. Next day Pat wrote to her: ‘You had struck something in me that has not been struck but once before – ten years ago.’ She pined to see her, called her DM which stood for Dark Man, planned a ring with the letters DMPAT inlaid in diamonds, pearls and topaz, but feared it would make an ugly mix. When Vita, stooping to kiss her, jabbed her eye with a hatpin, Pat said she did not mind how many hatpins ran into her eye under similar circumstances for she was, she declared, in love.

  As for the Nicolson marriage, Violet had discomfited it but no worse. Sex had found its marginal place. After Violet both Vita and Harold had affairs, she with women, he with men. These did not disrupt the form and fabric of all that made their marriage. If at times other hearts got hurt or even broken that was not a moral issue or a groundrule for change. Vita called her relationship with Harold ‘odd, strange, detached, intimate, mystical’. There was freedom in it and acceptance. She was unconcerned by his sexual relationships. He referred to the wreckage hers caused as the ‘muddles’ of his ‘little mar’. ‘I only feel that you have not got la main heureuse in dealing with married couples’ was as
near as he got to criticism.

  Later lovers learned their place with less display than Violet made. ‘After all,’ Harold wrote to Raymond Mortimer, ‘half a loaf is ever so much better than a whole one.’ He would, he said, like to go away with Raymond for weeks on end: ‘But I can’t and that’s the fly in the ointment.’ In December 1925 Raymond Mortimer wrote to Vita of his anxiety at not joining Harold in Teheran:

  I do not remember ever having been so much disappointed over anything … everything now seems unutterably dreary … I felt childish and wanted to break things … of course the sickening thing is not to see Harold for so long. There is no one else I in the least want to go abroad with.

  Vita wrote to Harold and tried to help them both.

  Like Edward VII and Alice Keppel, Harold and Vita believed that the best life was marriage ‘plus liaisons’. Vita conceded a ‘smug satisfaction’ over the way they resolved what she called the claustrophobic contract of marriage. ‘It is only very, very intelligent people like us who are able to rise superior.’

  Violet did not rise superior. She found it too difficult to be in love with a woman and to pretend to be married to a man. For her, marriage was a wicked sham. ‘It has ruined my life, it has ruined Denys’s … It has ruined not your life, but our happiness.’

  She was the only one of Vita’s liaisons whom Harold truly loathed. ‘I do so dread that woman … I think she is the only person of whom I am frightened.’ In November 1922 when he heard she was visiting London he worried Vita might be mesmerized by that ‘panther sneaking about, waiting to pounce … and you my darling are so gullible and weak’. Vita sent him a telegram, followed it with a letter, gave him all the reassurance she could:

  I curse myself for having told you she was coming to London, and so having given you even a moment’s anxiety.

  Darling, my own darling, not for a million pounds would I have anything to do with V. again; I hate her for all the misery she brought upon us; so there … don’t worry, oh don’t, my little boy; word of honour, padlock [their word for ‘promise’], don’t. I wish I could convince you.

  And above all, I would never have anything more to do with her; the boredom of it … and the lies … and the rows … oh no, no, NO. Even if you didn’t exist, you whom I love so fundamentally, deeply and incurably.

  Oh yes, I know you will say, ‘But you loved me then, and yet you did.’ It’s quite true, I did love you, and I always loved you all through those wretched years, but you know what infatuation is, and I was mad.

  So Harold as he travelled could safely write to Vita about the bonds of marriage and home:

  And with it all a sense of permanence so that as you sit in your room tonight I shall think of you there, I dashing through the Île de France in a train. And I shall think of the Rodin, and the blue crocodile and the figure of St Barbara – and the London Mercury upon the stool. And it will be for both of us as if I were there, and love still hangs, as well as smoke, about the room.

  … And please don’t run away with anybody without giving me time to get my aeroplane ready.

  And Vita could reassure him that he was the one and only person for her in the world and give him news of the polyanthas, the roses, the chicken run, tennis court, strawberry beds and Irish yews.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘How black is my future!’ Violet wrote to Pat Dansey. ‘I can hardly bear to think of it.’ She felt guilty and self-critical at the trouble she had caused:

  I feel I am such a trial to everyone, a sort of drag on the family who are so different. Heaven knows I am trial enough to myself.

  She took stock of what she described as a Greek tragedy, checked her feelings, made reparative moves toward her mother and, to salvage a vestigial social position for herself, kept the front of her marriage to Denys.

  This marriage was a screen riddled with recriminations and scenes, but without it she was on her own in a foreign city. She and Denys shared what she called a ‘tiny flat’ in the rue Fourcroy but led separate lives. They made no attempt at partnership. Anti-bolshevik, absorbed in Russian counter-revolutionary politics, Denys mixed with Russian emigrés, even spoke French with a Russian accent, went to night clubs, had love affairs. Most nights Violet dined alone:

  Denys would frequently ring up late in the day to say that he was not returning for dinner … I awoke to the fact that the wasp-waisted Caucasian dancers had more in common with him than I had.

  When she asked if he was having an affair with a Russian model at Coco Chanel’s he said yes, he loved Ludmila, she ‘was exquisite and had suffered’ and he was not made for marriage.

  On 17 March 1922 Mrs Keppel summoned Pat Dansey to lunch at 16 Grosvenor Street with an aunt of Denys’s, Daisy de Brienen and ‘two or three other old Grosvenor Street haunters’. She instructed her to arrive early, stay until all other guests had gone, then drive George to the City. The purpose of the lunch was to discuss a dinner party Mrs Keppel was to give for Denys in Paris. This was to be her ‘touching reunion’ with him, their first encounter since his defection the previous year, her public sanction of Violet’s relaunched marriage.

  The party took place in April and went off ‘fearfully well much to V’s disgust,’ Pat told Vita. Denys, after a technical hitch, was again Violet’s husband. The status quo was restored. Violet, who had always loved Paris, was there, living in a smart apartment, speaking flawless idiomatic French, married to Denys Trefusis. Occasionally they ‘gave makeshift dinner parties’. Sometimes they travelled together to Amsterdam, Brittany, Venice, Monte Carlo.

  Mrs Keppel’s money eased the day. She found him a remunerative office job and financed his and Violet’s move to an apartment at 7 rue Laurent Pichat in the sixteenth arrondissement. Pat’s brother Henry helped Violet find it. He said it was ‘extremely nice’. At Mrs Keppel’s request he supervised the financial arrangements. Pat retrieved Violet’s dispersed pictures, tapestries, rugs, furniture and sent them from Folkestone by van. Sonia thought such things of Violet’s as she had acquired were now hers and was annoyed at parting with them.

  ‘I have to go and see Mrs K.,’ Pat wrote to Vita:

  Ugh! All the things that V wants she thinks may be at G. Street. So ‘will you go and ask Mama’. Why hasn’t the silly said where they were before? It would have saved endless unnecessary bother. Mama won’t want the bother of finding them.

  Pat Dansey was still ostensibly Violet’s friend, ally, confidante, her link with the past. Through her Mrs Keppel kept check on her daughter’s affairs. When Violet wired Pat that she was in debt and low on funds, Pat conferred with Mrs Keppel who made the necessary transfers of cash. ‘I do hate these tangles,’ she wrote to Vita on 10 March from the flat in Bryanston Court that Joan Campbell had given her:

  The part I hate most is having that old terror George Keppel here for hours on end. I do dislike it so … Darling, please treat what I have told you about V’s difficulties as private. It is all a curse but only to be expected.

  Pat, courier, counsellor, go-between, reassured Mrs Keppel that she was a true friend to Violet, doing all she could to help. Violet could always rely on her, always stay with her in London. Thus Mrs Keppel was free to cruise to Greece, Italy and the East without more stigma from her daughter, more fear of scandal, bubbling back home.

  Neither Mrs Keppel nor Violet knew that Pat now wrote Vita daily declarations of love on stationery stamped with her seal – a witch on a broomstick captioned ‘All Have Their Hobbies’. Nor did they know that by her bed was a framed photograph of the painting of Vita by William Strang and a copy of her poems Orchard and Vineyard inscribed ‘with love from DM’.

  Violet, cuckolded again, confided to Pat her problems with Denys, his affairs, their debts, her loneliness. She longed, she said, for the old happy days when she had stayed as a young girl with Pat at Berkeley Castle. She asked if they might go there for a summer holiday:

  I will go as your maid, secretary, chauffeur, anything. Alas! Alas! In any case, even if we can�
�t go there couldn’t we go somewhere lovely? I long for the country and peace!

  ‘Well! I’m damned!’ wrote Pat to Vita:

  Darling, she might have second sight and have guessed you and I were planning to go to Berkeley. I suppose she would kill me with anger if she knew.

  Pat was ‘fearfully careful’ to keep Vita’s letters out of sight when Violet visited. ‘I even burn the envelopes so as she should not see your handwriting.’ When Violet accused her of taking Vita’s side she denied this but next day wrote:

  Darling if V was not so conceited, so wrapped up in herself, she might have guessed last night that I had more than affection for you!… O my darling DM … I simply must see you …

  Vita was, Pat told her, only ‘the second person ever who has really attracted me in a way which I cannot describe’. She ‘missed her dreadfully’ when separated, was jealous she might return to Violet.

  In a game of whispers and deceptions she derided Violet. To increase her own standing with Vita she implied Violet schemed and deceived in promiscuous relationships:

  Surely from old days Denys knows the trick of V saying she is with me when she is not. Her falseness simply appals me … I saw Henry [her brother] in London and his description of V in Paris is positively alarming.

  She stressed Violet’s impracticality. ‘All Violet’s and Denys’s things were stolen in Venice … I think we’ve heard the same story before … She’s a hopeless woman … Mrs K wrote me an awfully funny letter on the subject…’ She let Vita know when Violet travelled to Munich with Gerald Berners and someone referred to only as ‘M’. She told her when Violet asked to borrow £100. ‘I am sure it is blackmail money … If it was bills she would tell me I think. It is probably blackmail to do with M.’

  She had, she said, received from Rebecca West a letter about Violet ‘too dangerous to send through the post’.

  She bought Vita a Burberry mackintosh, sent her crates of Mumm Cordon Rouge, said she had seen ‘such a nice Daimler’ coupé she was ‘crazy to get’ for her, told her to order – on her account – anything she wanted for the Long Barn garden, flattered her writing talent, ‘you can leave future generations a legacy,’ she said.