Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  The Princesse de Polignac stayed, Gerald Berners, Gaston Palewski, Paul Reynaud’s Private Secretary, General Catroux. ‘I had known him when he was Resident in Morocco which is the French equivalent to being Viceroy of India,’ Violet wrote. Mrs Keppel said he was ‘by far the nicest man’ Violet knew. ‘What a pity he is married.’ Helen Terré stayed in October. She worked for the Red Cross in Vichy and had been wrongfully imprisoned in Holloway Gaol. From her Violet heard the Gestapo now occupied the tower at St Loup and had imprisoned Antoinette d’Harcourt.

  Violet did book reviews for the Observer, articles for Horizon, worked at a novel in English, Pirates at Play, and Prelude to Misadventure, a memoir dedicated to the fighting French. Through Vita’s contacts – Hilda Matheson and Moura, Baroness Bulberg, mistress of Maxim Gorky – she broadcast for La France Libre which earned her the Légion d’Honneur after the war. But she lost confidence in her worth as a writer, turned from satire to anecdote, felt no one in England cared whether she wrote or not and opted for the social round.

  She and Vita wanted to meet and not to meet, felt the pain of the past like pressing a bruise. ‘It upsets me to see you or hear your voice,’ Vita wrote:

  I hate you for having this effect on me. I resent knowing that if I were suddenly to see a photograph of you it would disturb me for at least 24 hours. Damn you … you have bitten too deeply into my soul.

  They discussed writing their story. Vita objected to the ‘loathsome example’ of The Well of Loneliness, thought she could produce a better novel, doubted she and Violet could collaborate, ‘It would be a one person’s book.’

  I do feel that it is a great and new subject and I would like to do it. The vivid feelings that I have undergone throughout my life would make a worthwhile story of it. How much I would like to talk to you about this – quite dispassionately and with all the objective intelligence that you and I could bring to bear on it. I only wish that I could trust myself (and you) to come and stay with you.

  But I don’t, so I won’t.

  Yours, Mitya

  Neither was ever overt, dispassionate or objective about this ‘great and new subject’. Both were caught by it and flung to the winds. Vita fantasized about drawing her adult son Benedict into her drama of the past. In a continued compulsion to bend her own gender she saw herself reflected in him:

  Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee

  Renews the lovely April of her prime

  In 1941 he was in the army, stationed near Yeovil. She suggested he contact Violet:

  She will amuse you, but you must beware of her. She is a siren (not the air raid sort). Her appearance will startle you, as she has lost her eye for make-up. She has the loveliest voice in the world; interlards her conversations with French slang so up-to-date that one doesn’t understand half of it; is a mythomane as well as being profoundly untruthful; is witty; is an extravagant and fantastic personality; is a bore in the sense that she loves living in a world of intrigues and is determined to involve one in them, is in fact one of the most dangerous people I know. You have been warned.

  To Harold she wrote ‘I hope Ben won’t fall in love with Violet. He might you know. But I have warned him not to.’ The fantasy was projection. Ben was not going to fall in love with any woman, least of all Violet. He was twenty-seven, Violet, his godmother, was forty-six. When eighteen he confided to his mother that he was homosexual. She told him that it would not preclude his marrying. ‘Two of the happiest married people I know, whose names I must conceal for reasons of discretion are both homosexual.’ She said a home, belongings, marriage, roots were the essential way to happiness.

  In his thirties, in 1948, Ben told her he had fallen ‘desperately in love’ with the art historian David Carritt, it was ‘the most overwhelming experience’ he had ever had, they wanted to live together. Vita wrote to Harold calling this a muddle and a disaster: ‘He is bound to fall out with D … and meanwhile there may have been a scandal which might involve both his jobs.’ He would lose his career and reputation – he was Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and editor of The Burlington Magazine – ‘for the sake of a clever little boy who is not worth the sacrifice. I will talk to him at the weekend whether he likes it or not.’ Discretion, so lauded by Mrs Keppel and her circle, spread its net wide, capturing more than social caution, tact, manners. It caught and spoiled aspirations, feelings of a quintessential kind.

  Harold, asked by David Carritt for advice, replied:

  If I were Plato and consulted I should say ‘This can never lead to happiness therefore it must be abandoned.’ But as I cannot bear to see Ben wretched I cannot give that answer.

  Vita disliked David Carritt’s influence on Ben (as Harold had disliked Violet’s influence on Vita). She thought him cynical, hoped he would go abroad, deterred him from visiting Sissinghurst. She felt she had failed Ben, that he was too difficult for her. In his room she found a copy of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, his confession about his love for ‘Bosie’, Lord Alfred Douglas. She thought there was wisdom in it. Perhaps it put her in mind of her own confession, locked in a Gladstone bag. ‘How he paid for his follies,’ she wrote.

  Down the generations came the same cry from Wilde, Violet, Vita’s son Ben, echoing the plea to legitimize these affairs of the heart, to view them as a valid choice, accord them social respect. For themselves Vita and Harold squared the circle and thought others could do so too. Vita was delighted when in 1955 Ben married another art historian, Luisa Vertova. The marriage lasted three years.

  * * *

  ‘Poor Mor is out of everything,’ Mrs Keppel wrote of herself to Violet in June 1942,

  but it is such a just punishment for she had, in times past, too much. Beloved Titten please be careful & not spend anything you can avoid. After this year I shall be able to do so little. Personally I am not going to buy anything.

  All my love Sweetheart.

  There was no word from the Ombrellino, telephone lines from Florence were cut. Mrs Keppel slept badly, thought this was because she went out so little, resolved not to rest in the afternoons in the hope of sleeping better at nights. Her ankles swelled up, her back ached, she suffered bouts of bronchitis from cigarettes and London fog. She saw her doctor often, drank too much gin and called the Ritz gloomy (though a typical wartime lunch menu was oeufs en cocotte, tournedo steak, meringues). ‘Isn’t the news awful,’ she wrote to Violet on 17 June, ‘Rommel gets exactly where he likes, we seem useless & only squandering lives for nothing.’ She began to sign her letters to Violet ‘Your old sad Mor’. ‘I do hope Darling you will have fun & see interesting people,’ she wrote.

  She went to the country at weekends or when there were air raids. At Wherwell Priory, Andover, her abstracted hostess counted imaginary money in her pocket and spent much of her day in bed. Mrs Keppel played desultory bridge with Sir Randolph and Lady Baker from Blandford, Dorset, and Gracie Fields sang ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ on the wireless.

  She stayed at Sonia’s house in Hampshire, but had no authority there. Sonia ruled, ‘Dear Doey thinks she is the cats whiskers in everything even to growing roses on chalk,’ Mrs Keppel complained to Violet. She found the place ‘fearfully cold’, Sonia was not getting on with her husband, the children talked and giggled at every meal, there was nothing much to eat, the last meal of the day was high tea at six ‘so we sit from 6.30 to ten doing nothing, except reading’.

  Life was pared down. ‘Tell me what you are doing & if you miss me,’ she wrote to Violet. ‘I do you, every minute of the day & most of the night.’ There was no bitterness between them now. Violet was the preferred daughter, loved ‘more than anyone in the world’.

  Like her mother Violet went to ‘endless parties’, teas, lunches, dinners. But though she imitated her she lacked her social ease, her effortless charm. She was too caustic, chaotic, different to be admired in the same way. She had a reputation for purloining anecdotes and jokes. Her wit subverted social certainties. At a cocktail party
given by Lady Crewe she asked a group of elderly titled ladies if they were bisexual ‘answering severely on being answered in the negative, “Well you miss a lot”.’ At a tea party of Emerald Cunard’s James Lee-Milne described her as ‘a large, clumsy’ plain woman wearing a top-heavy hat and sitting in such a way that one could see a naked expanse of thigh’. She wished, he said, ‘to enchant, astonish, alarm; but I think she seldom tried to please’. A carapace of manner hardened round her.

  She again summoned courage to go to Sissinghurst and agreed the visit for 4 May 1943 but, that morning, cancelled pleading a fever. ‘What a bore Violet wanting to come to Sissinghurst’ Harold wrote perhaps not knowing that it was at Vita’s persuasion. ‘She is all very well in London but Sissinghurst is not a guest house.’ Vita told him not to mention the visit,

  because her mother would disapprove and she doesn’t want a row. I sympathise. Little Mrs George in a temper must be a formidable thing.

  Violet arrived on 11 May and stayed one night. It was then that she said ‘chacun sa tour’, with pain at the fate of hers. ‘She has quite grasped Sissinghurst,’ Vita wrote to Harold. ‘As I knew she would.’ Vita called the encounter ‘extraordinarily unreal’, ‘rather embarrassing’, ‘like speaking a foreign language that one has known bilingually and not used for years’. The vocabulary was atrophied, locked in the past, not to be used again. Violet took Vita’s bedroom, they did not share it. The next day she lost her belongings and missed her train from Maidstone station.

  In London she dined, cautiously, once or twice with Harold – on 24 February 1943 with the former Secretary of State for War, Hore-Belisha, the Princesse de Polignac and a French general who had escaped the Gestapo. ‘It was an amusing dinner,’ Harold wrote to Vita. A month later at lunch at the restaurant Boulestins he introduced her to René Massigli, French Ambassador in London. ‘She was at her most charming and gave me a bunch of violets for my buttonhole,’ Harold said. Violet phoned Vita to say she had enjoyed lunch and liked Harold very much. ‘Well the pattern of life is odd,’ Vita wrote.

  She was not a siren now, nor a fox, witch, seductress or squirrel. She had no power to disturb or destroy. I wish Violet would not seek always to be amusing,’ Harold wrote to Vita:

  She irritates me by repeating as her own jokes which have been made a thousand times … Violet – I tremble to say so – might become a bore. But she is a good old sort none the less.

  Vita bridled. It was a choice of words that washed away the past. ‘To describe her as “a good old sort” is really the queerest choice of epithet I have ever heard.’

  No one could now make Violet out. She was always on parade but eluded her audience. Marie Belloc Lowndes who in 1920 was persuasive at getting Challenge scrapped met her during the war at a weekend party at Trematon Castle, Saltash:

  Violet’s maid unpacked for me beautifully. She said dolefully ‘My lady calls me “Jones”. But my name is Matilda’ – so I said ‘You shall be Matilda to me!’ Violet is 52, looks and dresses like 28 …

  She is a fascinating talker and companion. To me it is extraordinary that of the many women who have spoken to me of Violet Trefusis, not one gave me even the smallest inkling of what she is like. Even as a talker she is extremely individual. I expect this irritates people for she likes ‘holding the floor’… Her love of France seems to me one of the honestly true things in her astonishing nature …

  She cried when describing her flight from Paris with the Princess de Chimay. Constant heavy machine guns … They broke their flight at Milly Sutherland’s house [widow of the Duke of Sutherland], apparently deserted. But then they found her in an upper room, dressed, and with all the jewels she could put on her person, waiting for death; as a huge ammunition dump close by was to have been blown up. It was – but not before they had forced her to leave. It was the strangest narrative to which I have ever listened, and it lasted about 2 hours.

  … In the middle of dinner a man rang up – she was gone a good 10 minutes – only consolation of host was that she did not make the call. She makes a great many. I do wonder who her father was. She really has la joie de vivre. I suppose that quality in her mother enchanted Edward VII.

  Her mother’s joie de vivre had waned. Her back troubled her and her cough. James Lees-Milne saw her at a party of Lady Crewe’s early in 1944, hobbling round the room smoking from a long cigarette holder:

  She is rather shapeless, with hunched shoulders, a long white powdered face. She was gazing with mournful eyes as though in search of something.

  She wanted the war to end and old customs somehow to be restored. ‘Archie says I must keep my slippers by my bed so I don’t tread on broken glass in case of an air raid,’ she announced – this Archie being Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air. She craved the sun on the terraces at the Ombrellino, the tables of Monte Carlo, to go to Aix for a cure, to be reassured by all her bank managers. England held little for her or Violet now. For them both grand romance was dead. They needed the consolation of their villas and towers under brighter skies.

  On Violet’s birthday in June 1944 her maid brought news of the liberation of Paris. In her mind’s eye Violet saw

  the blue letter boxes of Paris, the undulating Art Nouveau lettering of the Métro stations … the blue blouses of the porters, the little girls with gold rings in their prematurely pierced ears, the concierge’s crocheted shawl, her fat sated cat … I heard the clang of the porte cochère, the imprecations and hootings of the taxi drivers … It was too good to be true.

  In October she received the necessary visa from Gaston Palewski, then Chief of Staff to General de Gaulle. ‘My dear friend, naturally your presence is part of Paris. Respectfully yours,’ he wrote. That same month a soldier, Hamish Sinclair-Erskine, who escaped the German army and walked through Italy to the Allied lines, called on Mrs Keppel at the Ritz. He told her the Ombrellino was intact, ‘even the Chinese pagodas’.

  There were restraints on the immediate resumption of pleasure. It was not discreet for a King’s lady to hurry back to an enemy country. There were currency restrictions, income tax, rationing, frozen accounts. ‘Please darling try & live cheaply,’ she wrote to Violet.

  Times were not at all what they once had been, old friends were scarce, there was rationing, egalitarianism, a servant problem. Her maid, Williams, went for a month’s holiday ‘& I have a kind little fool who does not even wind my watches’. George’s valet, Pearman, was taken to hospital with a complete breakdown. ‘I don’t think he will ever come back so Papa has no one’. At Sheffield Park near Uckfield, Sussex, there was no heating in Mrs Keppel’s vast room and she coughed all night. At Mount Stewart, Newtownards, County Down she was horrified that Lady Londonderry dined in trousers, worked to keep the place going and had no maid. There were children staying in the house ‘& alas, in my passage!!’ She longed to get to Aix, had nothing to do, could not walk at all she coughed so much. ‘So I stay mostly in my own room which is lonely.’

  Towards the end of the war Chips Channon gave a dinner party at which Mrs Keppel was the anachronistic showpiece:

  She looked magnificent in black sequins and jewels and her fine white hair and gracious manners are impressive. She is so affectionate and grande dame that it is a pity she tipples and then becomes garrulous and inaccurate.

  It was a pity for her liver too which was not functioning properly. Neither her back pain nor the swelling in her legs would ease. Her ‘nice doctor’ said she would be ‘all right in a few days’, that her constant bronchial colds came from the dust of London. She had her hair curled in a ‘permanent’ which took four hours, went with beloved Archie to Bournemouth, stayed in the Palace Court Hotel, spent mornings in church and breathed a bit better in the sea air.

  In the summer of 1945 Violet wrote to Vita saying she would soon be going back to France and would like to stay a weekend at Sissinghurst before she left. Her previous departure from Vita and England had been humiliating. This time she wanted to leave by choi
ce and with self-respect. ‘Oh God Oh God Oh God I don’t want Violet here. But how on earth could I get out of it?’ Vita wrote in panic to Harold. ‘O tempora mutandi … how pleased I should have been once, and now just dismayed.’

  Violet did not stay with her. The embers were not raked. She needed France. ‘The landscape I had been starving for flowed into view.’ Paris was more beautiful than she remembered. She booked in at the Ritz: ‘the place looked normal enough save that there were no carpets or curtains’. Diana Cooper, whose husband Duff Cooper was now British Ambassador in Paris, held a party for her at the Embassy. Helen Terré drove her to St Loup. The butler, servants, gardener were there to greet her. Antoinette d’Harcourt and Gilone de Chimay had hidden away her valuables and these were safe. Some books had been taken, ‘cherished bibelots were missing, German inscriptions were scrawled all over the walls, they had kicked in my Chirico and my Dufy…’ She had, though, got off lightly, was still mistress of her mansion, châtelaine of her tower.

  But until she renewed residency and ‘stabilised’ her French account she could not afford to stay. Currency restrictions meant she could only take £75 out of England. While her mother sorted out such mundane matters Violet returned to the London Ritz. Mrs Keppel worried about fitting her and her maid in over the Christmas period. ‘Those Conferences on Education’ were ‘taking up every corner of London’. And in January 1946 there was to be the wedding of Sonia’s daughter Rosalind to an army man, Bruce Shand.

  Mother made many trips to Mr Williams at the Midland Bank, Pall Mall, to sort out various accounts and ‘nesty eggs’ for ‘darling Titten’. Violet finally returned triumphant to Paris three months after that. Her mother’s letters urging caution over money went unheeded. ‘Except I live on capital I don’t know what will happen,’ Mrs Keppel wrote. She was horrified to hear that Paris was smart: