Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  Vita writing of her in the early 1950s called her ‘une âme damnée. Dance little lady, dance dance dance.’ She used the same phrase of her own mother who died in January 1936. ‘I do wish she had been a happier person,’ she wrote to Harold.

  Violet was entirely silent about her relationships with women like the Duchesse d’Harcourt and the Princesse Gilone de Chimay – drawn from the Princesse de Polignac’s set – the châteaux, the gratin, the closed discreet world of the French aristocracy. George Keppel photographed them on the terraces of the Ombrellino. But as in those group photographs of Edwardian weekend parties, with Edward VII at the centre in a Homburg hat, nothing was revealed in their closed faces of intimacy, affection or desire.

  For her forty-third birthday in June 1937 Violet hired the Eiffel Tower for a costume ball. She told her guests to come dressed in the period of the inauguration of the tower in 1889:

  People arrived in dog-carts, on bicycles, in bloomers. They had muffs, feather boas, buttoned boots, fans, carnets de bal, hats with sea-gulls … Jewels were mostly astronomical – crescent moons, comets constellations … A contemporary Colette, with a tiny waist and a boater, flirted with a 1900 Boni de Castellane. I made an unrehearsed entry with Serge Lifar; we polkaed round the palms of the first floor where my guests were assembled …

  The June night was perfect … Multi-coloured balloons floated up from between the iron shafts of the great Tower, which was mine for the night. All summer in a night. My childish wish had come true: I was one with Paris.

  ‘Chacun sa tour’. For a night the Eiffel Tower was hers, symbol of the city she loved:

  I was at the apex of my life. I had poise, experience, friends, possessions. Romance was at long last disciplined, coups de tête rationed. Then, as ever, I believed in three things, God, France, my mother.

  She had published four novels, three of them in French, created a home, carved a place in the cultural and ‘mondaine’ life of the city. She did not dwell on what she had lost – love, looks, youth. She had aged, was overweight, had brittle bones, broke a knee, then an arm. Her mother said she expected a letter saying, ‘By the way I forgot to tell you I broke my neck.’

  On 26 June 1939 Chips Channon gave a lunch party at the London Ritz for the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Mrs Keppel was there – her once auburn hair now blue. Regal, charming, she seemed anachronistic. She sat between Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead, who asked her if she was any relation to ‘King Edward’s friend’ whom he thought was dead.

  Two months later and a week before the eruption of war, Sonia arranged a ball at Holland House, Lord Stavordale’s home, for her daughter Rosalind, who was eighteen and coming out. ‘We were dancing on the edge of a precipice,’ Lady Cecilia McKenna, George Keppel’s niece, said with hindsight.

  Mrs Keppel was staying with Sonia and her family at their house, Hall Place, in West Meon, Hampshire. She was anxious to get back to the Ombrellino. ‘I am here till Friday if there is no war,’ she wrote to Violet on 29 August. Hitler, she maintained, had lost his ‘war of nerves’. ‘nothing is calmer than England or France and personally I don’t believe in war now … I don’t think Chamberlain has done badly.’

  She was restless in the English countryside and her grandchildren irritated her. Rosalind was eighteen, Harry fourteen, Jeremy twelve:

  Those children! Harry I consider an idiot. Yesterday he said Mummy loves us much more than you love your children, you don’t love anyone!! All I could do was to clasp my hands believe me I love Luna [Violet] and Doey [Sonia] with every old particle of me but not Harry.

  The exchange riled, for perhaps Harry received his opinion from his mother.

  Mrs Keppel prayed for peace and worried about her bank accounts in Italy and France. On 1 September Germany invaded Poland. On 3 September at 5 p.m. Britain declared war on Germany. She changed her mind about Chamberlain. ‘Who could help Poland? Impossible and idiotic ever to say we could. It has come out as I always said.’

  Violet did not want to leave France. She moved between St Loup and Antoinette d’Harcourt’s Paris house in the rue de Verneuil. Antoinette was separating from the Duc d’Harcourt who owned the Château d’Harcourt at Thury-Harcourt in Normandy. She wrote poetry, had two sons, worked for the French Resistance and when the Gestapo arrived in Paris was imprisoned and tortured. At her instigation Violet joined the Ambulance Brigade – though she could not drive – and talked of turning St Loup into a convalescent home for soldiers.

  Mrs Keppel worried for Violet’s safety and was ‘terrified’ to think of her still in Paris. ‘I must know where you are’ she wrote to her on 19 September:

  Are you going to remain with Antoinette? I can do nothing about fetching you to England. No one of course is allowed on the troop ships. Had you only come any time in August when I implored you everything would have been quite simple. Now you can only stay in France or get François [d’Harcourt] to make friends with the harbour master and he could tell you the best way. Its terrible being cut off like this and I can’t see how St Loup would be a convalescent home … Darling, darling, do be careful. You know you are the person I love best in the world … I love you with all my old faithful heart.

  She sent Violet £3000 for herself and £10 for the Ambulance Brigade, ‘we had such a struggle and it can only be done till January’. She had the Ritz searched from top to bottom for Violet’s lost carte d’identité. ‘I have paid unknown sums!! Not a trace, so darling you must have lost it somewhere else.’ Beloved Archie and her friend Ria Ponsonby joined her in Hampshire, but the weather was dismal, the daily round ‘duller than ever’, the food poor. ‘There is very little to eat here. (I am sure Berlin has far more) and it is so nasty.’ She had bronchitis and persistent back pain but an X-ray revealed nothing. She missed the Ritz a great deal, the Ombrellino more.

  At the end of October 1939 she went to London ‘for a consultation’ with her bank manager. ‘I am afraid there will be endless complications … I may have to leave England.’ She needed to get to her accounts in Monte Carlo and Florence. War was a hectic worry, a financial drain, a chaos of displacement, a cruel contrast to the delights of past times.

  At Sissinghurst Vita flew the Sackville flag, ‘a dream of gaiety and garishness’. Harold in his daily letters wrote to her of the politics of invasion. ‘What fiends are loose over this earth.’ She wrote to him of the moon, swans and subsidies on ploughing and feared she must appear ‘dull and rustic’ in his eyes. She wondered how she would feel if all her male relations were wiped out and she were to succeed to Knole:

  Would I be happy giving up Sissinghurst for Knole? I broke my heart once and for all over Knole and finished with that …

  How I wish Dr Freud had never existed to explain our deepest feelings to us.

  ‘My word!! The budget!!’ Harold wrote to her at the end of September. Income tax was raised to ten shillings in the pound. The House, he said, ‘gave one long gasp’ when it heard. ‘My darling we must discuss our finances. I fear that life is not going to be easy.’

  At the end of April 1940 Mrs Keppel and George were at the Hôtel de Paris, Monte Carlo. She had been to the Ombrellino, put treasures into store, seen her bank managers. She hoped to go back there – her luggage had been packed for a fortnight – but the news was ‘worse and worse’. She heard a swastika had been hoisted over the villa and she was ‘taking advice’ from the British Consul: ‘the Consul here is charming & so kind’. George was not coping:

  Papa’s temper is beyond words’ I think his spots make him much worse, & I am sure mine is not too good. If only he could make some friends but he wont or cant …

  all this worry has made him very very ill … his heart is very very tired and his nerves are completely out of hand. He is having Bromide to try to calm him now, but it’s very sad to see him like this, covered wih rash and furious with everyone … his kidneys have gone wrong too.

  She was, she said on 11 April, longing to see Violet. ‘I can’t bear to thi
nk of you in Paris and I here.’

  Violet was having trouble with her teeth, which had loosened in her gums. As the prospect of German invasion drew near she closed St Loup, left her silver with the Duc d’Harcourt, and in a car marked with the Red Cross travelled with her friend the Princesse Gilone de Chimay to the safety of the Princess’s chateau in the Dordogne. ‘Never shall I forget the exodus from Paris,’ she wrote with embellishment, ‘the terrified scrutiny of the skies … the wild-eyed refugees … the swaying, stinking camions…’

  Her plan was to meet with Mother so that together they could escape to freedom. On 20 April Mrs Keppel got three telegrams from her. She replied to her at Gilone de Chimay’s house, told her it would be a joy to see her, not to bring much luggage and to watch what she spent:

  This hotel is so fearfully expensive – £600 in six weeks, so sweetie you will have to try & be very careful here. You left a bill (unpaid) in the bar & owed that beastly Nigger some francs!!

  Over the next six weeks the Germans took Boulogne, Ypres, Lille, Paris. Italy declared war on Britain and France, Hitler threatened total annihilation of his enemies. Mrs Keppel again found protection from the British Consul and officials in Biarritz, Violet dashed around acquiring visas for Spain and Portugal with the thought of getting a boat for England there.

  They made their exodus in July 1940 in a Royal Navy troop ship from St Jean de Luz. Places that echoed with memories of regal adultery and disastrous matrimony for La Favorita and the ill-favoured Lushka were ports of passage for mother and daughter, both adventurers, whose romantic days were done. Politics had rushed like a tide into their lives, taken their houses, riches, freedom, friends and forced them literally into the same boat.

  They were three days docked in the harbour while soldiers and British nationals crammed on board. Violet gave her bag of jewels to someone she supposed to be a porter. Mrs Keppel was the only passenger to be given a cabin. Privilege and status are relative concepts and wherever she went she was something of a queen. Each morning from the engine room she collected a jug of hot water for her wash and George’s shave. Violet was afraid of submarines, torpedoes, bombs and the Gestapo and vexed by a shortage of good food, privacy and cigarettes. After an arduous journey they arrived unharmed on England’s shores with a story to embroider. At Polesden Lacey Mrs Greville remarked, ‘To hear Alice talk about her escape from France, one would think she had swum the Channel with her maid between her teeth.’

  NINETEEN

  They repaired to Mrs Keppel’s spiritual home. During the war years she became known as ‘Empress of the Ritz’. She presided in the Edwardian lounge with an ‘aura of grandeur … far more regal than the poor Queen of Albania’. Sometimes her audience wondered quite which war she was in. She divulged the latest gossip, professed intimacy with the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Air, held ‘completely pre-war cocktail parties’ and worried about her money.

  Violet, dispossessed, was back in the land where she had always been unhappy. She described herself as ‘fundamentally sad and homesick’, bereaved at being separated from her tower, language, country. ‘People were very kind; they forebore from questioning me; it was as though I was in mourning for an unmentionable relation.’

  She stayed first at Pat Dansey’s London flat then moved to Coker Court in Yeovil, Somerset, home of Dorothy Heneage. Dorothy, in her sixties, lived with an older companion, Miss Darnell, in a regulated atmosphere of fastidious habits, antique furniture, Persian rugs, views of mature gardens. Violet was given the room she first stayed in when she was seventeen. She was grateful but claustrophobic, called life at Coker Court a ‘rehearsal of old age’ and herself ‘a cosmopolissonne if ever there was one’.

  She and Vita made contact again. ‘Curious how war has drawn the strands of our lives together again,’ Vita wrote:

  I was so worried about you when France collapsed; I couldn’t bear to think of you in danger and distress. One travels far, only to come round to the old starting point. I realised then that we might still be sitting on the leather fire-seat at 30 Portman Square, when I went home to Hill Street saying to myself ‘I have a friend. I have a friend.’ And thousands of other things as well.

  She wrote seductively of Sissinghurst, white owls flying across the orange moon, her garden of green vistas, her pink tower and less seductively of constant air raids and bombs. She wanted Violet to visit but was afraid she would find it painful ‘since, as you say, I believe my tower must have some affinity with yours’.

  Violet equivocated, turned down the offered dates, agreed to Wednesday 28 August 1940 then phoned without notice to say she had to be in London with her mother and to rearrange for the 31st. ‘I am quite absurdly pleased at the thought of your coming here’ Vita wrote – while telling Harold she devoutly hoped Violet would not come. She prepared the scene, put out gramophone records they once played together. Violet again cancelled at the last minute and said she was going back to Coker Court. Vita was both disappointed, ‘a real disappointment’, and relieved:

  The very sound of your voice on the telephone upsets me. I loved you and I think you loved me. Quite apart from our three years of passionate love affair we had years and years of childhood love and friendship behind us … It makes you dear to me. It makes me dear to you …

  We have loved each other too deeply for too many years and we must not play with fire again. We both upset the other’s life, we mustn’t do that again.

  She hoped Violet would come another time, ‘yet in a way I don’t want you to come’. Both were afraid. Violet, more self-protecting now, hoped to meet on neutral ground, a village in Somerset perhaps. She did not want to arrive at Sissinghurst, dispossessed of her tower, language, friends and way of life. It had always seemed that Vita kept her world intact while she was stripped of hers.

  Vita was rooted in her Kent home, ‘How horrible towns are … they all seem to me a mad system of life,’ more hating of confrontation, cautious with her lesbian affairs, careful never to distress Harold who had proved such a permanent support. She asked nothing from him that she knew he could not give, did not complain if troubled or in pain.

  She and Violet delayed meeting, circumvented, cancelled. They wrote letters of affection – for those at least were safe. They used their old romantic sobriquets Mitya and Lushka, remembered the gardens at Carcassone, the owls at Duntreath. In October Violet heard St Loup was occupied by German soldiers. Pity me a little, she asked Vita in French. ‘I mind for you more than you will believe,’ Vita replied. ‘I translate it into terms of my own tower and can’t imagine anything more grievous.’

  After twenty years of silence and four months of circumvention they met for lunch at the Red Lion in Pulborough, Sussex, on Thursday 15 December. As ever despite their towers and castles, they had no place to go.

  Violet was forty-six, Vita forty-eight. It was a quest for the past. They said that interim loves had been ephemeral. Violet tried to pick up their love despite its corrosion by time. It had, she said, two dimensions, ‘the Greek tragedy sort and the childhood friendship sort’. That evening Vita stayed with an aunt nearby and wrote to Violet of their meeting. She had felt as though ‘the wings of the past’ were beating around her:

  Yes it was good to see you – and the absurd happiness of having you beside me in the car – even the sudden pain of saying goodbye to you was vivifying … I told you I was frightened of you. That’s true. I don’t want to fall in love with you all over again, or to become involved with you in a way that would complicate my life as I have now arranged it. I definitely don’t want to become involved in the intrigues which ‘an affair’ with you would entail. Besides, it wouldn’t be just ‘an affair’. It would be a resumption of what you rightly call a Greek tragedy and I don’t want that …

  We simply couldn’t have this nice, simple, naif, childish connexion without it turning into a passionate love affair again … You and I can’t be together. I go down country lanes and I meet a notice saying �
�Beware unexploded bomb’ so I have to go round another way. The unexploded bomb is you, Lushka.

  It was a love letter that belonged to the past, an echoed renunciation, fair because Vita knew that life as she had ‘arranged it’ excluded Violet, sad because of passion denied, unfair because Violet was not an unexploded bomb or a fox or witch, but the woman who had loved her with single-hearted obstinacy. The last part of Vita’s letter scrawled across the page as her biographer Victoria Glendinning put it, ‘in the jerky, spidery way she wrote only when blurred by drink or tears’.

  Violet knew that it was over, but in a spoiling war she sought to repair her past. She wanted friendship at least. ‘She sounds sobered somehow,’ Vita wrote to Harold. ‘I think she dreadfully minded the collapse of France.’

  Violet turned to her mother and to her mother’s material preoccupations. There were problems when Mrs Keppel came to Coker Court. ‘They have no modern arrangements in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘No Aga stove, no gas.’ Servants if found she was sure would not get on with Dorothy. ‘They might come but they would leave the next day.’ She financed Violet’s move, in February 1941, to the nearby Manor House in the village of East Coker. Its owners were spending their war in Canada. A cook was found whom Violet coaxed to serve French food, a housekeeper, a ‘lady’s maid’. Dorothy Heneage helped decorate with Chippendale chairs, Chinese lacquer cabinets, pictures by Titian and Van Dyck. Violet invited Vita who did not visit – she said there was ‘nothing she would like better’ but they must not again depend on each other’s company. ‘We should miss it too much when again deprived of it.’

  Violet made her extrovert mark on East Coker with weekend parties and visitors from France. She and her guests attended the village church and confused the vicar by arriving noisily and late. He then muddled the service and she said it was because he was in love with her. She started an affair with Betty Richards who told her in French that she loved her with all her heart, called her ‘my own darling foxy’, lived nearby at Hamlet House, Sherborne, and had been a model in Paris.