Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  Dear Mrs Trefusis

  … Several members of the Edmonstone Family held High Offices which would have entitled these, and doubtless at such junctures, their children in the home, to wear the Royal Tartan, but I cannot see any principle for a doctrine that the Edmonstones, as a family, would have a right to wear the Royal Tartan, and I fancy it originated from certain of the Lairds of Duntreath having worn it ex officio for the above reason …

  Descent from Robert II and/or a Crown charter of Duntreath are things which, if one thinks of it, could not be a foundation for wearing Royal tartan, for the result when applied in other instances would be to supersede Douglas, Boyd, Hamilton, Macdonald and quite a number of other tartans.

  Her preoccupations were strange, her obsessions mocked, her claims neither believed nor entirely disbelieved. For herself Violet was as much Edward VII’s daughter as anyone’s. She had no other proof of paternity. When George VI died in 1952 Nancy Mitford wrote to a friend, ‘Violet has plunged into a deuil d’Andromaque1 but then she is one of the family’.

  In life as well as writing she dealt in metaphors, games, conundrums. After her mother’s death she employed a French servant called Alice. This Alice, she said, was Proust’s cousin and the mistress of a Russian grand duke. Violet behaved toward her like a needy, demanding, deprived child. Alice dressed her, looked after her money, instructed the other servants, was her surrogate mother, nursemaid, confidante and lady-in-waiting. Vita visited St Loup in March 1949 on her way to Spain to see the birthplace of her grandmother Pepita. She was alarmed at Violet’s behaviour:

  It reminds me of BM. It’s really more than a little mad. She curses her [Alice] all the time. If I spoke to Rollo [her Alsatian dog] like that he would run away and never come back. She (Alice the maid) poured it all out to me this morning, says her health is breaking down (V even wakes her up at all hours of the night) and that she will have to leave. Of course V doesn’t believe it but the day will come when Alice will really go, and I don’t know what V will do without her. It’s a sort of lust for power I think: she must have someone to bully.

  Alice did not leave, though her job went beyond any rational concept of service. She wore the mantle of the other Alice who was at a king’s beck and call. She was chic and charming in a way that Violet was not, humoured her mistress as if she was ersatz royalty, and in a paradox of who was servant and who was served, ruled at St Loup and the Ombrellino.

  For Violet had, as Vita knew, behind the neediness, bad behaviour, display and parade, an abundance of heart, a compensatory generosity. ‘I don’t want to go, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t,’ Vita said to Harold of her visit to Violet’s tower, a reciprocal visit which she felt obliged to make. But Violet met her at the Gare du Nord, made her chauffeur Henri drive slowly because Vita was afraid of speed, filled her bedroom at St Loup with flowers from Florence: anemones, ranunculi, gardenias, carnations. ‘She is,’ Vita wrote, ‘surprisingly kind’.

  St Loup gave her a feeling of recognition, a sense of home. She was surprised Violet was such a ‘good hausfrau’ though the atmosphere was chaotic: random instructions to servants, the sudden sacking of the chauffeur, various helpers from the village floating in and out. She drank champagne in Violet’s garden room painted with murals of Scotland. The chef cooked a delicious meal. There were wild violets and cowslips in the woods. She went with Violet to Provins. ‘It is her Cranbrook’ – Sissinghurst’s town – she told Harold. ‘You would be amused to see her calling first at the butcher and then at the charcutier and then at the patissier.’ In Paris at the flower market Violet bought her primrose roots to smuggle home. They walked to a little restaurant and the food was divine.

  Mindful of the past they shared, the home they never had and her quarrels with Sonia, Violet said she would like Vita to have St Loup when she died. Vita was pleased and flattered: ‘my love of St Loup is genuinely for its own sake – as well as yours’ but apprehensive that it ought to go to Sonia and her children. Violet said they would neither want it nor appreciate it. Beyond her desire to disinherit her sister, the legacy of her tower at St Loup was a way of manifesting her love of Vita and France, the true aspects of her life.

  Vita visited again with Harold the following year. Violet did everything to make their stay pleasurable: tuberoses and writing tables in their bedrooms, zabaglione and delicacies to eat, a wallet for Harold, a bag for Vita. From her own tower and in the safety of letters, Vita thanked her. She wrote of the bonds of childhood and passion ‘such as neither of us will ever share with anyone else’.

  Oh, you sent me a book about Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Thank you darling, generous Lushka and you gave me a coal-black briquet. It lights up into the flame of love which always burns in my heart whenever I think of you.

  Their talisman ring was she said on her table on its customary piece of lapis lazuli

  which reminds me to remind you of the promise you made as you held it in your hand. I should be really bitterly hurt if you didn’t tell me – you know what – in advance, and if I were to learn it accidentally from somebody else.

  The ‘you know what’ was presumably about not falling in love with anyone else.

  Violet was fifty-six and there was no danger of it. But though love was a past secret, a private pain, there was still a need for present displays. She trailed as fiancés sundry princes, marquises and counts. Betty Richards, her lover at East Coker during the war years, advised against Prince Rolphe de Faucigny Lucinge as a spouse:

  I do hope that you will not have a change of heart and marry Rolphe … I feel sure that marriage would be fatal; no darling, you deserve something better than R. and I don’t say this just because he hasn’t got any money; were I well off I should never mind the idea of someone marrying me with my money.

  Violet flirted awesomely, particularly with young gay men. James Pope-Hennessy (murdered in 1974), an erstwhile lover of Harold’s, said she had Paris manners and resembled Madame de Staël. At a dinner party in London in June 1950 she looked at him across the table ‘in a romantic manner’ and said ‘You look too young to be dining downstairs; you should be upstairs having your bread and milk.’

  She described the Lascaux caves, begged him to go there with her in August which he ‘wouldn’t think of’, and said Vita was so impressed by the comfort of St Loup she was thinking of making Sissinghurst habitable.

  He saw her again three days later at a party at Hertford House to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Wallace Collection. The King and Queen were there, Massigli the French Ambassador, and Vita ‘looking very blue and ill’ wearing a borrowed black dress and shawl. Afterwards Harold wrote to Vita that she looked splendid ‘with her dingle dangles’ and he wished she would go oftener to parties and ‘not have to scrounge round for dresses’. But it was Rollo, retreat and Sissinghurst that suited her, she did not want parties, dresses, social occasions.

  Parties, dressses, social occasions filled Violet’s days and nights. Society of a parodic kind became her way of life. She was an entertainer who played bitter games, their meaning only guessed at by a few. Tony Gandarillas, the Chilean Ambassador, small, witty and addicted to opium, told James Pope-Hennessy that Violet was now in love with him. Nancy Mitford said she claimed ‘she has a lover in the bullfighting trade. Carmen Trefusis.’

  Violet’s writing career came to an end. Vita accused her of scribbling for an hour or so in bed in the mornings between shouting at Alice and effecting the day. A postwar novel Pirates at Play was a farce about the English in Florence. A memoir, Don’t Look Round, published in 1952 she called a collage. Dedicated to her mother it was an exercise in concealment, a witty façade, an exemplar of Edwardian discretion, revealing nothing but loyalty, wit and charm. From it, no one would know who Violet was, whether she was happy or unhappy, cared a lot or not at all. Nancy Mitford suggested the title Here Lies Madame Trefusis. There were no echoes of passion or pain, no statements of commitment, no revelations of feeling. Her only confession was
of chronic insomnia.

  Managing her homes took her time. She would drive between St Loup and Florence her big Mercedes filled with servants, packages, provisions. At the Ombrellino she employed a lugubrious butler called Terzilio, Giovanni a cordon-bleu chef, a clutch of other servants, a series of chauffeurs whom she sacked or who left because she was always an hour late or muddled about when she wanted to be where. She considered herself a gourmet. If she thought a meal good Giovanni was summoned and congratulated, if not he was berated for all to hear.

  In the late 1950s she acquired the wing of a mansion in the rue du Cherche Midi which had once belonged to the Duc de Saint-Simon. She decorated it with marble busts on gilt consoles, Louis XV chairs, Aubusson rugs, eighteenth-century portraits, trompe-l’oeil paintings. She called herself aptly ‘a déclassée woman who lives only in classé houses’. She flaunted the trappings that when young she had professed to despise.

  Asked to do an entry for Figaro Littéraire she wrote of her vast salon in the rue du Cherche Midi, her marvellous cuisine, her beautiful jewels. Against her name in the telephone directory was inserted ‘femme de lettres’. She began to say she was thirtieth in succession to the throne.

  In 1952 the writer Susan Mary Alsop and her mother sometimes lunched at the Ombrellino. They thought it underfurnished, sprawling and Violet quirky and a bit of a fraud. There was a sense of ‘hanger-on beaux from Paris’ and servants using her for her money. Violet went on about being Edward VII’s daughter, she wore full skirts and was a messy eater:

  When she rose majestically at the end of a meal a cascade of crumbs and odd bits of food would fall to the floor. I was revolted. We were rather ashamed of going there and didn’t very often. Reading Portrait of a Marriage I feel an obtuse fool; there must have been poetry and fascination there.

  Guests at the Ombrellino and St Loup came and went. Violet was inordinately insistent to those who refused an invitation. She wheedled, cajoled and even cried. Rejections were more than forcefully made for she took little notice of them. Nancy Mitford said Violet tortured her by phoning her all the time when she was trying to work. ‘As she can write books without working she doesn’t understand the necessity for those less gifted of doing so.’ She had to leave the telephone on ‘because of various matters to do with the lease – nobody else telephones and I’ve begged her not to, she doesn’t pay the least attention.’

  Betty Richards had some abdominal operation in July 1951 and dreaded Violet coming to stay:

  much as I love you & long to see you darling you would only be doing me a very great disservice, retarding a convalescence it will take me all my physical strength and strength of will to cope with were you to come over here now. Please darling.

  Violet became unaware of the figure she cut. Vita, visiting the Ombrellino in September 1952, could not understand why servants stayed. Violet did not give them instructions then cursed them for not having done what they did not know she wanted. She never told them how many there were for lunch or dinner, failed to order the car then was angry when it was not there, or ordered it for eleven and then was not ready until twelve. Alice, her slave, took every opportunity to complain to Vita about Violet without her overhearing. She had a ‘second-in-command’ called Rita and whenever cries of ‘Rita, Rita’ echoed through the villa, Vita thought they were for her.

  ‘Today is the anniversary of her mother and she minds’ Vita wrote to Harold on 11 September. She did not like the climate created by Violet’s gay friends, Jean de Gaigneron – Harold’s lover in 1919 – ‘who is so waspish’, ‘Princey’ – Prince Rodolphe de Faucigny Lucinge – and Philippe Jullian. ‘I feel they all dislike each other.’ She was hauled off to an ‘incredibly boring’ cocktail party given for a youth congress at the French consulate. There were ten guests for lunch at the Ombrellino, more for dinner. The next day they were supposed to lunch at the villa of the Marchese Torrigiani near Lucca. At the last minute Violet said she was not coming, Vita and the three men were late setting off, they had difficulty finding the place and had been expected for tea, not lunch. It was all chaotic. The Marchese coped and was unsurprised but Vita wanted desperately to go home to Sissinghurst and never to visit again.

  Violet was brittle in body and mind. Osteoporosis led to painful breaking of bones. She broke a femur tripping on a step at the theatre, a shin when she fell from a chair. She had her hip pinned with a perspex plate. It left her with a limp and she walked with a stick. She began to resemble a dowager duchess, plumes waving, tapping her cane. She had her hair permed into girlish curls, took strong painkillers, the occasional barbiturate.

  She passed on everything she heard with rococo embellishments of her own, claimed her novels were coast-to-coast bestsellers, that she knew everyone of importance, had been courted by the world’s leading statesmen, poets, musicians. The Swedish ambassador told James Pope-Hennessy she was a war heroine who had been parachuted into France every week, which was how she broke her bones and why she was given the Légion d’Honneur.

  Her messiness and chaos, her constant painting of her face, seemed to signal inner distress. Nancy Mitford called her Auntie Vi, said she was ‘the ruin of a small evening. She made up her face ten times at dinner. I counted.’ The photographer Cecil Beaton found she had retouched his photos of her with the same impatient approximation she gave to painting her face. Parting from Vita at a station in July 1952 aged fifty-eight she said, ‘Oh now in five minutes time you will have disappeared and I shan’t feel safe any more. No sanctuary left.’

  Many of her traits went into the haughty egocentricity of Lady Montdore in Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. Harold Acton said:

  One can almost hear Violet remarking like Lady Montdore ‘I think I may say we put India on the map. Hardly any of one’s friends in England had even heard of India before we went there you know.’

  At the Ombrellino after her mother’s death Violet took centre stage. Always her mother’s understudy, she had learned the script, knew the moves and attitudes but her performance was caricature. She was too intelligent, too caustic and disappointed for it to be otherwise. The true spirit of Edwardian hypocrisy eluded her. At heart she grieved the price it made her pay. Hers was anachronistic impersonation, disconcerting parody. Like her mother she tended to take ambassadors to one side to say she was worried about China or Japan but she delivered the lines like a spoof.

  The Duc d’Harcourt in his memoirs included a Proustian pastiche of Violet at her mother’s villa, rejuvenating when royalty was among her guests, forgetting her cane and her limp, pushing her way to their side and executing curtsies to uncertain kings and princes. The laugh was on them and on her. Her childhood question, ‘Mama why do we call Grandpapa “Majesty”?’ had never been answered. It held resonance of sexual duplicity, concealment and the absurdity of pomp. She had wanted something quite other for herself. ‘I have crushed down the vision of life with you,’ she had written to Vita, ‘but always it remained at the back of my mind, so wide, so open, a life so free.’

  Unloved and unloving in her mother’s grand mansion she made her own risible majestic display of majesty. She contrived outlandish protocol whereby she would come into dinner on the arm of some Pretender only when all her guests were assembled, like Edward VII in his day. She sat at the head of table, on her right the French Ambassador, some duke on her left:

  The magnificent vermeil plate was massively displayed … Lady Enid Browne sat on the main table because she was descended from the Earls of Chesterfield and Stanhope. Her neighbour, the Marchese Valdamara Fioravanti, who sold his honey to everyone in Bellosguardo, had his place there too. He used to keep an enormous pet crocodile in the bath. His mother had it murdered, stuffed and encrusted with jewels then kept it in a state bed in a guest room. The Marchese was eccentric but a Knight of Malta …

  Once when she noticed there were thirteen at table she thought it unlucky and peremptorily sent the French Consul home. After dinner she summoned her guests in order of rank
to sit and amuse her, dismissing them if they palled. Egocentric, pretentious and artificial she seemed like an exiled Queen in Wonderland, a parody of her own parodies of materialism and loss. Her visitors were cast in roles she contrived, walk-ons in some glittering comedy of manners, perfected by her mother, travestied by herself.

  She drew God into her games. At the church of St Mark’s in the Via Maggio she inherited her mother’s roped-off pew and embroidered cushions – front row, right of centre aisle. In church, bronze plaques commemorated her mother and George Keppel. Like Mrs Keppel approving the day’s menus, in advance of Sunday worship Violet would summon the vicar, the Reverend Church, to the Ombrellino to consider hymns and prayers. He waited in her salon drinking her whisky until she made her entrance.

  * * *

  On 14 December 1961 Vita mentioned in her daily letter to Harold ‘a slight touch of that gastric flu’. She thought it would last twenty-four hours. It lingered. She wrote of ‘tiresome tirednesses’, her tower room was cold. She was operated on for cancer but without success. Harold kept to his schedule and went down to Sissinghurst on the weekend train. In too much pain to move, she went on with their ritual of daily letters but in a faint illegible scrawl. His replies – about daily events and who he had lunch with at the Beefsteak – compounded the virtues of fortitude and loyalty and the fatal omission of a vocabulary for suffering or desire.

  She died on 2 June 1962. Her body was taken to the vaults of the chapel at Knole. Harold returned the doge’s lava ring to Violet as Vita asked in her will.