Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  She gave her a diamond ring, an emerald ring, a gold keyring, an exquisite copy of the Arabian Nights, sent her oranges when she bought an orange farm in South Africa, flowers from the Riviera – ‘you shall have all the flowers in Monte Carlo sent to you’ – and tempted her with money:

  I was fearful that you wouldn’t realise how desperately shy and nervous I should be of daring to ask you to give me the joy of lending you any money you wanted … you know that I would do any mortal thing in the world for you.

  Pat bought a kite and carpentry set for Ben, found letters for Harold for the book he was writing on Tennyson, shopped for, lunched with and listened to Lady Sackville, who viewed her as Vita’s true friend, preferable to Dorothy Wellesley. She wished Vita would travel abroad with Pat instead of Dorothy.

  Pat kept Joan Campbell as her constant companion, her equivalent of the dependable marriage partner. In London Joan lived with her mother in Bryanston Square a minute away from Pat. They always phoned each other first thing in the morning while still in bed and socially did most things together. Pat wrote to Vita from the Ritz in Paris and Madrid, the Hotel Inglaterra in Seville, from Lisbon, Madeira, Singapore, Panama, California, Hawaii, from ‘somewhere up the Amazon’, from various ocean cruisers. ‘The sea is blue blue blue,’ she told her, ‘and there are flying fish.’ Joan, like Harold, felt insecure when Pat cut short their holidays, cancelled meetings and dithered over dates. ‘I have palpitated at every footstep thinking it will be a telegram from you to say you can’t come,’ she wired from Strachur Castle in summer 1922 on a day when Pat sent a dozen bottles of Veuve Cliquot 1906 to Long Barn.

  The Dansey affair was a pale parody of Vita and Violet’s relationship. It held faint echoes of their drama: jealousy, manipulation, insecurity, secrecy. But Vita was not interested in Pat except as a link with Violet, a symptom of her pain at parting, a way of punishing Violet more. As for Violet, she knew scant details and this, from her ‘powerful ally,’ her one true English friend, her mother’s appointed messenger, was simply a postscript to the death of trust.

  In December 1922 Pat told Vita she would, in her will, leave everything to her. From the Berkeley Castle wine cellar she gave her all the remaining champagne and ‘some delicious Sauterne’. ‘So Hadji better hurry up and come home,’ Vita wrote to Harold who was in Lausanne.

  Violet visited London for the Christmas holiday and stayed with her mother at Grosvenor Street. ‘Apparently her mother is keeping an eagle eye on her,’ Pat wrote to Vita,

  and demands an account of where she spends every second. This is quite intolerable for V. But though I have not said it to V it may be done because her mother thinks she is trying to see you. V told me that when she had said she was coming round here last evening her mother had said ‘Why now so late?’ The Keppel lot may know you come here and are afraid of a meeting. You remember Sonia did come one morning and went away again! I also told old G myself I frequently saw you and that often you came to the flat. V is coming here this morning … I must warn CD [the novelist Clemence Dane] somehow not to mention Long Barn in front of V … Have you any idea of how terribly I miss you?

  ‘I shall turn her down properly if she does telephone to me – beast’, Vita wrote to Harold on 2 December. Six days later Violet phoned. Vita asked Dorothy Wellesley to stay in the room while she told Violet nothing would tempt her to see her. Pat spent Christmas in Brighton with Vita, her children and Lady Sackville and was a ‘howling success’. Lady Sackville referred to her as ‘beloved Pat’.

  Like Violet Pat knew that Vita valued devotion and fidelity in her lovers, but if they asked the same of her she quit, pleading her marriage to Harold, her need for a quiet life. Knowing, too, that Vita’s faltering attention could be fanned alight by hints of sexual competition from any man, she fed the flame even while sensing it came not from Vita’s desire for her, Pat, but from ‘your obsession’ as she put it ‘that you are a romantic young man who treats women badly’.

  In July 1923 Vita seemed jealous of a man called Anselm whom Pat was seeing. Pat reassured. ‘I loathe being touched or kissed by anyone unless I love them or they physically attract me … I don’t want it except from you…’

  Men were a social convenience, a cover for appearances’ sake, of no emotional relevance. ‘Would it,’ she asked, ‘be easier for you if I produced a husband?’

  Would that lighten the position? I know that it is not for yourself but fear of talk. If a husband would make it as easy as it is with anyone else, I will produce one instantly. I don’t say I want to produce one, but at the same time I will make the sacrifice for you.

  She shared none of Violet’s scorn of hypocrisy and volunteered the usual adulterous formula: give society – the drawing rooms of Grosvenor Street and Mayfair – the ‘values’ it said it respected. That done, have secretive sex with whoever you please. ‘Three perfect days’, she wrote in summer 1923 when her driver, Burley, took her to Long Barn on Wednesday and collected her on Friday before Harold arrived from London. ‘I cannot think about them – hot waves rush all over me. Little electric needles of sensation prick all through me.’

  Less manageable sensations followed in autumn. Vita and Harold stayed in Florence with the writer Geoffrey Scott and his wife Sybil. Scott, author of The Architecture of Humanism, was writing The Portrait of Zélide. On Saturday 24 November Pat received a letter from Vita saying she had fallen in love with him. This love, Vita said, was intense and spiritual and left no room for Pat.

  Pat fainted when she read the letter, then sat until 5 a.m. in her sitting room with what she called a broken heart. Then she turned nasty. ‘I centralized on you for 3 solid years as my life,’ she wrote, ‘and you just shut me off bang! stranded.’ Vita was, she told her, vile, contemptuous, a coward, a bully, base and awful. God would, if he existed, one day punish her. She herself felt picked up, used and dropped. She called their three years an ‘episode’, accused her of motives of lust and money and returned such presents as Vita had given her – ‘I would sooner die than be beholden to anyone for a ½d stamp who has treated me as you have.’ She wanted the immediate return of all gifts bestowed – books, jewels, fountain pen, vases and more.

  She had, she declared, always shown the greatest interest in Vita’s life, ‘your dogs, cats, garden, books, children, husband and mother!’ She had given her money and deep affection and was now on the edge of a nervous breakdown. She intended to shoot herself or jump out of a window and she asked Vita to look after her myrtle tree when she was gone. Worse, she threatened to appear at Long Barn in the small hours of the night and make a scene. Harold, she felt sure, was a just man who would discern the truth in all she had to say.

  Scenes took place when Vita tried to placate her. ‘My darling,’ Pat wrote:

  I do apologise for the hitting scene in the flat! I simply saw red when you talked to me of honour! I wasn’t going to have murdered you. Also sweet, let me warn you that you must never try to take a pistol away from anyone in that rough way! If it had been loaded it was bound to have gone off … I will show you the correct Daily Mail survival way of taking a pistol away from someone.

  She sent reply-paid telegrams to Vita which went unanswered and she parodied Violet’s plight. ‘You have,’ wrote Pat, ‘always only considered your feelings, your wishes, your wants.’ Now, she said, she intended taking Vita to the Law Courts to ‘thrash the thing out there’. It would, she hoped, mean ‘ruination to your self and family’. She consulted a lawyer called Dixon and contrived a plan to make a public apology to Vita for having made her feel under ‘a great obligation’ toward Pat. This apology would, Pat said, rouse curiosity, require explanation from Vita and involve ‘washing much dirty linen’ in public:

  I am going to tell my story. I shall tell the despicable way in which you treated me throughout, the way in which you played me off against DW [Dorothy Wellesley]. How you dropped me when it suited you. How miserable you made me and after my unhappiness you cruelly took me up again
and then dropped me last summer with no fair explanation.

  She threatened scandal on a scale to dwarf anything caused by Violet. She had, she said, heard from Lilly, a servant of Vita’s, that Vita and Dorothy Wellesley had been seen ‘in a very amorous position, D. with no clothes on’ and that when Dorothy acquired a black eye, Vita said she got it from walking in her sleep.

  She made specious threats, tried peculiar bribes. She said the newspaper Morning Post had changed hands and she was now a principal shareholder. She offered to send her chauffeur round to Vita with £10,000 in cash, realized from these shares. Vita’s acceptance of the money would console Pat and dissipate her feelings of bitterness and hatred. Vita, disconcerted, wrote to Lord Northumberland, owner of the Morning Post, to see what was behind this convoluted story. It was, he replied, a fabrication:

  She never bought any shares in the Morning Post nor sold any. I can’t imagine why she has told you this story … she has endeavoured to impose upon you in the most shameless way. I believe (but am not quite sure) that some years ago a lady of that name wrote to me in regard to anti-Bolshevik propaganda and I am informed by a friend that she was not quite right in the head.

  Many women went through passion, anger, suffering in vain pursuit of Vita’s love. The strength of her pact with Harold meant lovers were marginalized and kept in place. Pat’s letters showed tense and unresolved conflict between propriety and desire. Sex – hot waves and electric needles – she maintained, as do many when jilted, should carry with it obligations of commitment.

  With this idea Vita did not concur. Her sexual partners came then went – usually in anger, often with broken hearts and homes. Dorothy Wellesley’s marriage broke up in 1923. ‘I do not want to be dragged into this,’ Vita wrote to Harold, ‘either for your sake or my own. We have had quite enough of that sort of thing, haven’t we?’ Geoffrey Scott’s wife, Sybil, was ‘completely broken’ by his desertion. He gave up his job at the embassy in Rome in June 1924 telling Vita, ‘It was just one more barrier separating me from you.’ Dumped by Vita after a week or so, he was then adrift. Lady Sackville saw him at Long Barn and recorded he was ‘trembling all over’.

  Harold was not threatened by this wreckage. It was Vita’s business how she behaved, he said, but he did not want to be drawn again into a ‘vortex of unhappiness’. Only Violet, ‘absolutely unscrupulous … waiting to pounce’ had the power, he believed, to do that.

  All doors were closed against Violet. For a while she nudged at these then turned away. Paris was her second love. Paris had compensations. ‘I surrendered all my links with the past and began again in Paris’ she wrote in her autobiography:

  Paris would make up for everything: failed friendships, the measures necessary for making new ones … In a half-hearted way I tried to pick up the threads of the life I had lived as a jeune fille.

  These threads were thin. Paris in the 1920s offered a context for artistic talent, same-sex relationships and experimental thought. But though she loved the city, emotionally she was on her own in it and without the romantic optimism of her youth. ‘I was unhappy … I had no intimate friend.’

  In Paris she turned her disappointment into fiction. She wrote equally cleverly in French and English, her style witty, polished, concealed, sharp. The themes she chose for her novels were betrayal, marriage for gain, malicious matriarchs, love versus possessions.

  She did not seek publication for her first novel. It was in English, a roman à clef, not witty or fast but sad. It was about her plight. She called it The Hook in the Heart. On the first page of her manuscript she wrote, ‘Less voluntary than grief or death is the choice of desire.’

  She appeared in it as Cécile, innocent and young. Vita, she as ever masculinized. She was both the Spanish duke whom Cécile is forced to marry and Kalo the gypsy with whom she falls in love. Mrs Keppel and Lady Sackville she merged into the controlling persona of the duke’s grandmother, a dowager duchess who lives in a tower in her Spanish castle, ‘a smile of malice on her lips’. She manipulates her grandson’s fate.

  Marriage between Cécile and the duke is a loveless tryst arranged by his aunt:

  Every night they made love, in married fashion, without prelude or subtlety. Cécile did her best to respond but could not repress, every night, the same reflection: So this is what makes people torture themselves, fight each other, kill each other. Incredible!

  The newlyweds travel to Spain to visit his grandmother. On a terrible honeymoon journey Cécile writes to her mother the letter of disappointment Violet might have sent:

  How could she make her understand that her marriage … that aim and object of so many girlhood dreams, seemed to her to have no emotions, no ecstasies to divulge? When once the first shock was over … Cécile might have summed up her reactions in one short phrase: ‘So that’s all there is to it?’

  The duchess in her grotesque Spanish castle appears at supper dripping with jewels. She hates Cécile, thinks her not good enough for her grandson, claims her with a diamond necklace ‘the ice-cold necklace slipped round her throat like a snake’.

  To escape the castle, its lovelessness, manipulation, materialism, Cécile goes alone to the Spanish countryside. She meets, falls in love and has sex with a gypsy, Kalo, who lives in a cave. But Kalo betrays her. His trade is to catch songbirds, put out their eyes to make them sing better, then sell them. He does not tell her he has a wife. Cécile finds them in bed planning to steal her necklace. Disaffection makes her ill:

  Her love of love had bred disgust of love … with all her soul she cursed passionate love, the hook in the heart that you cannot tear out without tearing out the heart also.

  The duke rejects her for her infidelity. She sells the offending necklace and runs away:

  Disowned by her own class, disowned by the gypsies, forsaken by all, she found herself face to face with an unknown quantity. Solitude.

  It was a romantic yarn of no great worth but it was how more or less she felt. All her trouble with Vita was because her heart was caught. Though her links with the past were severed, her personal tragedy was acute. She could not live with the woman she loved, her marriage was a disaster, she had offended her family, she was on her own.

  Violet, without a heart, could not be hooked though she would do her share of netting. In 1923 Denys, aware of her needs and wanting his own freedom, introduced her to Winnaretta, Princesse de Polignac, the eighteenth child of Isaac Singer, inventor of the sewing machine. In her autobiography Violet described Vita as tall, graceful and beautiful. Winnaretta de Polignac she described as remarkable, imperturbable, inscrutable, infinitely intimidating, immensely rich and given to making dry, caustic utterances:

  People quailed before her … her face was more like a landscape than a face, cloudy of hair, blue of eye, rugged of contour … her rocky profile seemed to call for spray and seagulls; small blue eyes, the eyes of an old salt – came and went.

  It was not a face to inspire love and passion. But the Princesse de Polignac provided Violet with patronage for her novels, emotional protection, dazzling society and a lesbian relationship rich and discreet enough to impress Denys Trefusis, the elite of Paris society and Mrs Keppel.

  PART THREE

  Chacun Sa Tour

  SIXTEEN

  The Princess talked through her teeth, wore high-necked gowns, spoke French without concession to accent, taught herself ancient Greek when she was fifty and willed that her personal papers be burned when she died. Jean Cocteau said she had Dante’s profile. James Lees-Milne, Harold Nicolson’s biographer, called her ‘very Faubourg Saint-Germain’. Virginia Woolf described her as like a ‘perfectly stuffed cold fowl’. Thirty years older than Violet, reserved, controlled, she gave her a place in Parisian life.

  Her biographer, Micheal de Cossart, recorded a sartorial penchant for riding boots and hunting clothes, a preference for sexually submissive women and relationships with a sado-masochistic undertow. She married two princes without sexual interest in eithe
r. The first marriage, in 1887 when she was twenty-two, was arranged by her mother. Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard, was aristocratic, short of money and masterful. Winnaretta refused sex with him, accused him of cruelty and petitioned the Vatican for annulment. Being very rich helped. She was granted a civil divorce in 1891. The following year the papal court, the Curia, declared the marriage null in the eyes of the Catholic Church.

  Pope Leo XIII on 15 December 1893 gave his blessing to her union with Prince Edmond de Polignac. Homosexual, sensitive to draughts, a composer of an avant-garde sort, Polignac was thirty years older than she. Edmond de Goncourt described him in his journal as having the air of a drowned dog. Winnaretta he said had ‘a cold beauty, distinct, cutting’. The marriage was agreed

  on condition that the husband does not enter his wife’s bedroom and on the payment of a sum of money which might permit him to mount his music which the opera houses do not want.

  The Princess bought a fifteenth-century Lombardesque palace in Venice, renamed it the Palazzo Polignac and spent consecutive summers there until, as she put it, ‘the hideous Hotel Excelsior was built on the Lido … and before the invasion of fashionable visitors from every Continent during the bathing season.’

  Before such spoiling times hers was la dolce vita. Her neighbours were ‘the lovely Lady Helen Vincent whose Palazzo Giustimani was perhaps the most beautiful in all Venice’; the Countess de la Baume whose Casa Dario was, ‘a marvel of comfort and good taste, filled with the finest pictures and the most precious books and musical instruments’; the Marchesa Casati at the Venier de Leoni, who at one of her own fancy-dress balls appeared wearing a costume designed by Bakst, a drugged tiger at her feet.