Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  Surely they ought not to spend money on fashions. I am not going to buy a single dress. I can’t as I have no coupons, so when I do arrive in France I shall be like a char, but I would rather look like that!!!

  Violet would rather not look like a char. Nancy Mitford wrote to Diana Mosley of a gala she went to in May 1946 with Duff Cooper and Jacques Février,

  suddenly Jacques seized my arm & I thought would break it & I saw the following apparition: Violet practically naked to the waist and smothered in birds of paradise. Oh could you all have seen. She also hired a regalia of jewels from Cartiers.

  Violet was back, as startling as any of the bejewelled grandes dames she satirized in her novels. A Mr Fitzgerald couriered money from England for the refurbishment of the tower, Mrs Keppel bought her a car and was ‘filled with despair’ at not being able to do more. ‘I could have given you a large sum to keep you for some years.’ She grieved at not being able to send a cheque for her birthday,

  now you are domiciled in France it is not allowed. It breaks my heart not to send you anything & I had a nice little one ready for you, but now you must either come over for it & spend it here or wait till I meet you in France which I hope to do on the 8th of August.

  For Mrs Keppel her fifty-three-year-old daughter was now her pride and joy, a chip off the old block, always socializing, always on parade. There was usually some man in tow, an amourette, for advertisement and show: ‘What did you mean’ her mother asked, ‘when you said to Doey in your letter to her “Alas poor Pomeroy”! so I suppose that is all off!!!’ She was disconcerted to get a letter which had no ending ‘except about manure for St Loup & there was no loving messages & it was not even signed. Darling what has happened to your letters?’

  Mrs Keppel’s plan for the summer was to stay with Violet in Paris, go on to Aix-en-Provence for a ‘cure’, meet her again there and they would travel to Florence together. She worried about how to circumvent the £75 currency restriction to pay for her trip. ‘England is perfectly right of course to stop all money going out of her country. Some people manage of course.’

  Somehow the Bank of England arranged a £500 transfer for her journey and she gave Betty Richards a cheque for £1000 to give to Violet. Violet travelled to Dover to meet her in the first week of August 1946. She described the visit as ‘a Keppel festival’ with herself ‘a breathless lady-in-waiting’. She arranged a lunch party with Duff and Diana Cooper, visits to Carlos de Beistegui’s chateau at Groussay and to exhibitions at the Orangerie and Musée du Trocadèro of artworks looted by the Germans.

  But it was not her mother’s idea of a good time. Mrs Keppel was relieved when the visit was over. From the Hôtel Splendide Royal & Excelsior at Aix she wrote to George:

  Paris was lovely to look at but I cannot like the French. Dear Bye [Violet] was so kind, but endless conversations in wonderful French which I cannot understand get thoroughly on my nerves.

  She took mud baths and water dips and instructed George, Sonia and Harry all to bring soap, tea, sugar, coffee and two hundred cigarettes to the Ombrellino. George was to get these from the Ramadan Tobacco Co. Ltd, 84 Piccadilly, and to go and see Mr Williams at the Bank. ‘I am writing to him today to try & get me some money for Italy.’

  Money did not buy sound medical advice. The doctor at Aix said there was nothing wrong with her, ascribed her weight loss and chronic backache to not eating enough, said her cough did not matter in the least, ‘Isnt that odd!! for I cough all night especially in the train.’

  She found the expense at Aix enormous and had to curtail her ‘cure’ when the hotel closed in early September. Violet with an ‘ami’ was due to join her at the end of August but wired the day before to say ‘Ami is ill so cant come’. ‘I suppose it is all over like the rest,’ Mrs Keppel wrote to George:

  I have always thought that the French think she is much richer than she really is, as she entertains them so lavishly at my expense, but I do hope she isn’t too unhappy. She may have cared for him.

  The ami was Prince Rodolphe de Faucigny Lucinge who was after a rich wife. Nancy Mitford wrote to Gerald Berners saying Violet dropped him ‘because she says all his friends are dentists’:

  She has now taken up with a chap called M. de Grand Guignol [Guido Sommi Picenardi, Marchese di Calvatore, who owned a ‘magnificent castle’ near Cremona and was recovering from a nervous breakdown] with whom she gave a cocktail party of great brilliance. Goodness I do love her.

  The Keppel family reunited at the Ombrellino in early September. There was a drought and the water pump Mrs Keppel paid 10,000 lire for did not work properly. She supervised the restoring of the villa, employing new servants, getting a car, planting the gardens, then returned to London for Christmas while work was done.

  Back at the Ritz she was angry when presented with a large bill of Violet’s. She wrote to her on 3 January 1947:

  It is nearly all made up with the following list of things you have sent out for, cars, theatre tickets etc this is very surprising. Do you pay for your men friends to go out with you. Far better to stay in with me. Also dearest having your maid getting cash from George & putting it down to my bill. You changed your day of leaving so that had to be paid for. You know Darling I would give you all I have if I could but if the villa has to be built up, I simply can’t pay all these huge extras so I had to write all this. If I give up Italy I can quite afford your bills here. Everything has been paid don’t write to anyone here about it, they will only ask you not to come back.

  Violet offered to send a cheque, but Mrs K said that she would only tear it up. She could not understand why Violet was not managing her money better when she had given her £1000 as a Christmas present and an extra £1000 a year on her allowance. ‘This year I must be most careful & am not buying a single thing.’ She stayed at Hall Place but found it fearfully cold. Her legs were so swollen she could hardly walk. Of Sonia who was having problems with her marriage she wrote, ‘I know nothing about what is happening between herself & her husband.’

  She went back to Ombrellino for the spring of 1947 but not to enjoy the frescoed walls, the marble halls, imposing views of the Duomo and Palazzo Pitti, the grand dinner parties for which she was renowned. Her return was short-lived. Her Italian doctor diagnosed sclerosis of the liver and said he did not expect her to live. To Violet her mother seemed as beautiful, in control and charming as ever: ‘she will even make a success of her death, was my involuntary thought’. It was a complicated involuntary thought implying that her mother had made a success of love, money, friendships, life, while she herself had not. It implied, too, that her mother was indomitable, formidable and had set the stakes too high: ‘We were the inferior daughters of a dazzling mother … We had to live up to her, she had to live down to us.’

  Mrs Keppel died on 11 September 1947. She was buried in the Protestant cemetery near Florence. In London her death was announced on the BBC. At a memorial service in St Mark’s Church, North Audley Street, those that were left of her friends – Dukes, Viscounts, Marchionesses and Earls – who defined themselves and society by their closeness to the Crown, heard tributes and prayers. Queen Mary ‘was represented’ though none of the royal family was there. Obituaries made discreet reference to Mrs Keppel’s intimate friendship with King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. For The Times ‘a friend’ wrote that her death more than that of any of her contemporaries put a full stop to an era. ‘Discretion was perhaps her long suit,’ the friend said, using a gambling term.

  ‘In losing my mother I lost everything’ Violet wrote in her memoir, Don’t Look Round. ‘Any little success I may have had is dedicated to her.’ She wrote of the

  unwanted licence of loneliness. Oh to be hemmed in by frowning family obstacles … I can do what I like, go where I wish, there is no one to say me nay.

  She was free but it had come too late. She did not now know how to choose a direction. Her one fierce attempt at flight failed. Like the bird in the glass picture her mother gave her she wa
s lost without the cage of her mother’s eyes, or without her mother’s arm on which she had for so long been made to perch.

  TWENTY

  Mrs Keppel died without seeing her great-granddaughter Camilla, born to Sonia’s daughter Rosalind in July 1947. She was too unwell to travel and Sonia said England was ‘glacially cold’, with no heating allowed in hotels ‘or anywhere’. She had no prescience that Camilla would follow the Keppel trail and choose as her lover Bertie’s great-grandson Charles, another Prince of Wales.

  Mrs Keppel would have been delighted had Camilla married Charles not Captain Andrew Parker-Bowles, an army man like George. But given her respect for social appearances and discretion, her powerful intervention when her own daughter revealed a revisionist sort of love, she would have viewed with disdain the way Prince Charles, his princess and mistress made public their muddle over sex.

  ‘Things were done much better in my day,’ she said in 1936 when Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry Mrs Simpson. She would have said so again in the 1990s when Prince Charles and his wife separated and told the nation of their loveless marriage, infidelities, breakdowns, inadequacies and family pressures.

  Briefed by Mrs Keppel the Prince of Wales would have had sex with Camilla on the side, said, if asked, that of course he loved his wife and would never have used a cellular phone. She would have packed her great-granddaughter off for a tour with Captain Parker-Bowles and advised Lady Diana’s entourage to send her to take the waters at Aix for her bulimia nervosa and unacceptable emotional state.

  For concomitant with her notions of the divine precedence of kings, queens and royal mistresses went expectations of codes of perceived behaviour for families of the ruling class. Mrs Keppel understood that unless the semblance of royal marriage was kept alive, other undemocratic myths might in time die: the myth that love was the prerogative of husband and wife, that a ruling class deserved by rights to be served and deferred to by an underclass, that jewels, tiaras, castles and vast tracts of land should by birthright go to the titled few.

  Discretion was her synonym for concealment, semblance mattered not substance, the worst of fates was to be déclassé. It was socially acceptable to be mistress or widow, but not lesbian or divorcee. Mrs Keppel kept the social apple cart intact. Her daughter and great-granddaughter helped topple it in their way.

  Violet and George Keppel went to London after Alice’s death. Violet, wanting comfort, contacted Vita and hoped to go to Sissinghurst. On 20 November 1947 Harold in London heard that ‘Pawpaw’ was in bed at the Ritz with pneumonia. ‘Blessed pneumonia great are thy mercies,’ he wrote to Vita. He did not want to sleep under the same roof as Violet. ‘I refuse absolutely to be left alone in our cottage with Violet. I would rather walk the fields all night.’

  Pawpaw died two months after his wife, thus sparing Harold either fate. The Times obituarist wrote of George Keppel’s splendid looks, exquisite manners and ‘benign geniality’:

  Admiring as we do in him so many of the characteristics of the generation which he personified, we may well question whether we have not something more to learn from its gentle courtesy and code of behaviour than in these perplexing times it is the fashion to admit.

  Sonia got divorced the year her parents died. She and Violet were the main beneficiaries of their mother’s will. Violet was to have use of the Ombrellino for life, then it was to pass to Sonia and her children. Its contents were to form a family fund divided on a percentage share. Violet wanted to defer the sale of the contents, to keep the villa as it was, a memorial to her mother, and to emulate her as châtelaine. Her mother had stamped the place with inimitable style and this she wished to preserve.

  Sonia wanted her share of the capital raised. She was unsparing. She insisted on the valuation and sale of every picture, garden statue, wall-panel, doorknob, carpet or rug. Anything Violet kept she had to buy at current value from the family trust. Violet was to be left with the shell of a mansion, the spirit of her mother gone. She sent worried and unhappy letters to friends. ‘I wish Violet had some responsible relation,’ Vita wrote to Harold. ‘But there is only uncle Archie and he is eighty.’.

  Violet asked Sonia to agree to leave some of the villa furnished, pointing out she would have all of it in time. ‘Darling I am terribly sorry,’ Sonia replied. ‘But I have never agreed to a “furnished bit”. It just isn’t on and would lead to endless complications.’ She applied for export licences and pushed the sale along.

  Violet listed furniture, tapestries, statues she felt were intrinsic to the Ombrellino. ‘You do realise don’t you,’ Sonia told her, ‘that the total value of these (as I think highly injudicious) eliminations wld amount to £13,760.’ Violet wanted to keep her mother’s bed and a picture of an Edmonstone ancestor by the Scottish portrait painter Sir Henry Raeburn. Its saleroom value, Sonia told her, was £3200.

  Christie’s advised against shipping to England large items like wall panels:

  6 Dutch panels (value £800)

  3 Chinese panels from the Dining Room (value £400)

  4 Tempora panels from the Music Room (value £320)

  6 Chinese silk panels from Mama’s bedroom (value £240)

  These were to be sold in the villa along with all carpets and rugs. Sonia recommended two auctioneers in Florence – Galleria Ciardello and Cesare Falardelli.

  Whichever we decide on should start his catalogue soon. Rosalind had another sweet little daughter, Annabel, on Feb 2nd & both are v. well.

  Camilla is lovely.

  Violet tried to raise capital to buy some of the furniture back. But all her inherited money was tied up in dividends and trust funds. ‘I’m afraid no one can make you understand the legal aspects involved here in your wish to break Mama’s Italian will so that you get capital,’ Sonia wrote to her:

  As British subjects we must disclose to the Bank of England any monetary transactions made in foreign currencies and the amount involved. If we don’t we run the risk of going to jail!

  It was all ghastly: a scene from one of Violet’s novels but without her brittle humour, a parable of the vanity of riches, the conflict between possessions and love, the inheritance of a vast stone mansion stripped of its treasures, warring sisters competing for their dead mother’s affection, squabbling over the spoils accrued from her illicit relationship with an indulgent king. Family, the root relationship of society, had degenerated into a wrangling over things and money between two women who had much more than enough.

  As Violet saw it her sister was now destroying what bombs had spared and the German army left unplundered. It was never her mother’s intention that she should inherit an empty house. Violet perceived possessions as metaphors and did not care about their saleroom worth. Friends spoke of her bizarre generosity. How she would give away an emerald, an amber paperweight, a brooch, a tie, a souvenir ashtray. Her generosity perturbed or annoyed depending on what she gave. ‘One doesn’t need things,’ she had written to Vita. ‘What one needs is the sun, the person one loves, to be free.’

  Denied freedom in love she aspired to be like her mother, who was defined by what she had, for whom a palace was home. She wanted to be her mother’s daughter for no other relationship endured, to live in her mother’s mansion, emulate her social parade. Without her presence and control she felt chaotic and adrift. Her childhood chant ‘de Madame Keppel je suis la fille’ became her way of life.

  Sonia wanted to have what was hers, a compensatory justice for not having been loved enough. For her, too, possessions had been rivals. She stayed as rooted in the family drama as Violet, identified with her father who was rendered inconsequential by Mrs Keppel and the King, detested Violet for her childhood cruelty, her flamboyant life, for eclipsing her as a writer. Her own biography of her Keppel antecedents Three Brothers in Havana was not more readable than her father’s manuals on Renaissance art. Her memoir Edwardian Daughter gave an equivocal picture of her mother. Her one novel she called without irony, Sister of the Sun. Its heroine stu
dies art in Paris, is ‘the symbol of emancipation for her sex and generation’. She marries a man she does not love because she is hopelessly in love with her brother-in-law, an artist. (In later years Sonia spoke admiringly of Denys Trefusis.) She has jewels, furs, cars, is ‘about as happy as a caged skylark’ and after the wedding ceremony she tells her husband, ‘I felt as if I were deputising for someone else.’

  Violet thought Sonia’s response to their mother’s will was because she was jealous that she, Violet, was Edward VII’s daughter. In a letter to John Phillips six years before she died she wrote of Sonia:

  We had a curious conversation: she simply cannot accept my being who I am, clearly a childhood inferiority complex, which has, in a way poisoned her life. I told her to believe what she liked, and whatever gave her most comfort. I can both understand and sympathize because if anyone was ever given a ‘traitment de faveur’ it was I.

  At first Violet was forced to close many of the villa’s empty rooms. She could not afford to furnish both it and St Loup. She then slowly recreated the Ombrellino as a monument to her mother. She resorted to her own parodic style, filled the vast frescoed rooms with indifferent furniture and quantities of bad pictures, bought plagiarisms and fakes and accorded them romantic provenance. She chose baroque statues, ornate mirrors, said a painting of a doge was a Tintoretto, a painting of a Medici was a relative, a huge silver sturgeon was a gift to Peter the Great from the people of Holland, a Chinese lacquer writing desk was given by Queen Anne to the 2nd Earl of Albemarle. Objects had an attribution linking her in royal line. On a lavatory wall she hung group photographs of Edward VII at country house picnics.

  She took to saying, ‘I am the daughter of Edward VII but don’t tell anybody.’ Guests were cautious and thought the fantasy ‘dangerously dotty’. To hedge her bets she drew up convoluted genealogical trees purporting to show how the Keppels descended from Giovanni de Medici via Henri VI of France and Charles I of England. She spent a good deal of time investigating whether, as a member of the Edmonstone family, she was entitled to wear the Royal Tartan: