Acton’s book has no reference to earlier days when Nancy Mitford enjoyed going to Violet’s parties. Nancy had likened her to Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda ‘who told such dreadful lies, it made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes’. And yet, she added, ‘one can’t help being fond of her’. This fondness is wholly absent from Harold Acton’s memoir. The Violet Trefusis we are shown is ‘quite off her old head’ and irritates Nancy Mitford so much with her tiresome telephone calls when she is trying to work that ‘I’m really beginning to quite hate her’. Acton believed that this hateful figure regarded Nancy Mitford as a literary trespasser on her private property. Yet in Don’t Look Round Violet gave an admiring pen portrait of her, praising her for having ‘the courage to break with the familiar paraphernalia [of the novel], the decor, family jokes, even the vocabulary’. She describes her as ‘France’s wittiest conquest’. But there were to be few reciprocal civilities. Nancy suggested that Don’t Look Round should have been called Here Lies Mrs Trefusis.
Nancy Mitford used Violet Trefusis as the basis for Lady Montdore in her novel Love in a Cold Climate (Violet is ‘Lady Montdore exactly’ she told the bookseller Heywood Hill). She had been born Sonia Perrotte, the handsome daughter of a country squire ‘of no particular note’. But her marriage to the cardboard figure of Lord Montdore had raised her unexpectedly high in a society she pretended to despise but which ‘gave meaning to her existence’. By the time we meet her in the novel she is aged sixty and has become known for her rampant vulgarity and proverbial rudeness. She is much disliked by people who have never met her and long to do so. Royalty she adores and she also has a weakness for bankers who may not be much to look at but ‘one can’t get away from them’. Whoever invented love, she believes, ‘should be shot’. Everything is coated with a superficial charm and conveys what Nancy Mitford came to regard as the cold climate of the Keppels.
Lady Montdore has one daughter, the beautiful and unfeeling Polly Hampton. Scattered between the two of them are a number of Keppel characteristics enveloped by clouds of gossip (there is even a popular rumour that ‘Polly isn’t Lord Montdore’s child at all. King Edward’s, I’ve heard’). Both mother and daughter are indifferent to children and when Polly’s child is born dead, Lady Montdore remarks: ‘I expect it was just as well, children are such an awful expense, nowadays.’ Polly’s long-held secret love for her lecherous uncle by marriage to whom she proposes as soon as his wife ‘is cold in the grave’, is considered as ‘unnatural’ as Violet’s love had been for Vita – she is described by one of the characters as an ‘incestuous little trollop’. Polly had fallen in love with this ‘uncle’ when she was aged fourteen, not knowing that he had previously been her mother’s lover. This secret love for a much older man made her indifferent to other men. She was an unresponsive debutante, unable to provoke eligible suitors to duels or play the game of stirring unsatisfied desire in married men and breaking up her friends’ romances – everything her mother had done before settling down to make a socially desirable marriage.
The dramatic surprise of the plot comes with the arrival of ‘the awful offensive pansy Cedric’ hitherto dependent on the whims of barons and the temperament of a drunken German boy. He transforms Lady Montdore ‘from a terrifying old idol of about sixty into a delicious young darling of about a hundred’. And with this fate, the satire is complete.
Violet’s lesbian relationship with Vita has been well vindicated by Diana Souhami in Mrs Keppel and her Daughter. But she did not make it her business to examine Violet’s novels. These novels have been described as period pieces in which the characters step directly out of her address book. Her style is sardonically lightweight, high, comic and faintly camp, veering in places between the influence of Ronald Firbank and Angela Thirkell – and with a French ingredient taken perhaps from Paul Morand. She has been criticised for holding up her narrative with school essays on national characteristics, cluttering it with unnecessary cultural references, with travelogues, commentaries and vivid descriptions of furniture, food and buildings that advance from the background of her novels and take over the foreground. But these ‘faults’ are part of an original tapestry.
A reassessment of her writing was begun by Lorna Sage whose study of twelve twentieth-century women novelists, in the posthumously published Moments of Truth (2001), contains a fine essay on Hunt the Slipper and places Violet Trefusis in the company of Edith Wharton, Christina Stead, Jane Bowles and others. In her introductory note to this book, she wrote that Violet Trefusis ‘is mainly now remembered as a character in others’ books’. Her aim was to extract some of her novels from this punishing incarceration; and she hoped to publish a new translation of Violet’s dissenting roman-à-clef, Broderie Anglaise. I have tried to pick up the baton Lorna Sage left and run a further lap of that course, showing the value of Violet’s best novels – Echo, Broderie Anglaise, Hunt the Slipper, Pirates at Play – before handing over this baton to a new generation of readers.
Postscript
He disappeared: but some ten months after my book was published, the secret of Eve Fairfax’s son, John Francis Mordaunt, was revealed. A reader telephoned my publisher claiming to be his daughter. I was incredulous at first, but she came to see me and within a few minutes I realised she was certainly his daughter – and Eve Fairfax’s granddaughter (though she had not known this until she read my book). Her father was not adopted. He had no foster parents and was brought up, a solitary child, at the Welbeck Nursing Home, looked after by the matron, Clara Nelson Smith, who had been present at his birth. Eve’s friends must have paid for his upkeep and later sent him to the Merchant Taylors’ School, a Public School for day boys – after which he studied at Guy’s Hospital and University College Hospital where he taught dentistry before joining a private practice in New Cavendish Street. In the Second World War he joined the Royal Air Force and went out to Kenya. He got his wings, flew and returned to England. In 1942 he married a girl whose family was returning from India. They had two daughters; Joanna was the younger.
John Francis Mordaunt seemed destined for tragedy. In 1964, when in his late forties, he, his wife and their elder daughter all died in a plane crash at Innsbruck. They were going skiing, but Joanna, then aged fourteen, did not go with them as she was in training at the Royal Ballet School at White Lodge in Richmond Park. She was subsequently brought up by her godfather and went on to be a dancer with the Royal Ballet and the English National Ballet Company. In her early forties she qualified to teach piano students (though she does not claim any extraordinary musical talent).
Those who had paid for her father’s upbringing and education did so on the condition that no one should reveal who John Francis Mordaunt’s parents were. A solicitor who dealt with the finances was part of this secret pact. No one now knows whether Eve Fairfax was told of her son’s death.
In 1972, Joanna Mordaunt married Roger Vickers, a distinguished orthopaedic surgeon. They had two daughters and two sons. Despite her successful career and happy family life, the mystery of her father’s birth and the absence of any other relatives disturbed her. Who were the Mordaunts? Who were her grandparents? Why had her father grown up in such strange circumstances? Sometimes she felt sad about this, sometimes angry. She remembers him as being quiet and rather shy, with a mild stammer, but extremely athletic and good at all sport. He had known he was illegitimate but had seemed to have no answers to questions about his family or even about his mother. Joanna went to the Merchant Taylors’ School, to her father’s university, to Guy’s Hospital and the Welbeck Clinic, but could find no answers herself to these questions. Encouraged by her children, she asked a friend of hers, Margaret Bohn, who was an amateur genealogist, to help – but she also drew a blank. In the late summer of 2011, Margaret Bohn had a final shot at discovering something. She typed the name John Francis Mordaunt into her computer again – and this time my book appeared on the screen. At the age of sixty-one, Joanna Vickers began to trace and identify her family.
Two weeks later she and I met each other. She was full of excitement and wonder at her discovery – it had been a long time coming and her expectations had begun to fade. I was able to put her in contact with one or two people who had helped me with my book and could now help her. There was, for example, Eve Fairfax’s great-niece Serena Sparks and her husband Alexander who lived in Wiltshire and who owned the enormous volume Lady Diana Manners had given Eve in 1909 and which she carried with her for the rest of her long life, insisting that the people she met write something in it. In this way it became a history of her social life. I also introduced Joanna to Catherine Till who had driven me round Yorkshire when I was doing research. She was close to the Grimthorpe family, had met Eve herself and knew her solicitor, Charles Dodsworth, now approaching his young nineties (a generous and genial man, he had forgiven me, merely laughing, for having promoted him in my original acknowledgements page to being “the late Charles Dodsworth”).
A wonderful atmosphere of friendship, co-operation and exuberance has followed Joanna Vickers as she puts together her discoveries. It is impossible not to feel the exhilaration and happiness of her quest. In some respects she already knows more than I did during my years of research. And she has come up with an ingenious idea as to who her grandfather might have been if, by any chance, he was not after all Désiré Defauw, the Belgian violinist and concertmaster who became director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. I had been given his name by the Grimthorpe family as having been Eve’s lover and the father of her child. Could this possibly have been a false clue?
In Eve’s extraordinary leather-bound book (like the saddle of a Trojan horse that is full of people) there is a surprising entry by Ernest Beckett who, in his late fifties, was visiting Britain to see his daughter, then seriously ill. He wrote in Eve’s book the devastating verse from Swinburne’s poem ‘Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)’ ending with the lines: ‘And marriage & death & division/Make barren our lives.’ He dated his entry as 25 May 1915, signing his name ‘Grimthorpe.’ This meeting, Joanna points out to me, was ten days or a fortnight more than nine months before Eve’s son John Francis Mordaunt was born. Is it possible, she asks, that some ten years or more after Eve’s engagement to him was broken off, Ernest actually became her hidden lover, Joanna’s missing grandfather? He was staying at 27 Welbeck Street in 1916 when John Francis Mordaunt was born in the clinic at 15 Welbeck Street, which suggests he may well have known about Eve’s son. A year later, having caught tuberculosis from his daughter, Ernest died, leaving the secret behind him.
But there is no mention of Eve or of her son in Ernest’s will. So, Joanna calculated, ‘the odds are still with Defauw.’ With formidable determination she begins tracking down his family. The first surprise is that Désiré Defauw had a son who was born in England the year after Eve’s son was born. Did Eve know about his son? Did Defauw know about hers – or theirs? Every time a question is answered, two other questions spring up. John Defauw, who became an architect and a jazz musician (a renowned rhythm guitar player), had died in 2005. But Joanna contacted his son, Désiré Defauw’s grandson, explained her predicament and asked whether he knew anything about this past history, any evidence that would penetrate almost a hundred years of extraordinary secrecy and complete her story. ‘You might be my cousin!!’ she wrote.
And there was evidence. ‘When I was a young man my Father John Defauw gave me an 18k gold chain bracelet that he said his Father Désiré (Deski) had given to him when he was young,’ John Defauw junior replied. There was, he added, a miniature gold plate attached to this bracelet with the words ‘love forever Eve.’ After Désiré’s death in 1960 no one in the Defauw family knew who Eve was. But ‘I would say you are my cousin,’ John Defauw concluded. And Joanna agreed. Further facts may of course emerge, but ‘I think I need search no further,’ she wrote. ‘No DNA needed.’ But she takes a DNA test and it is not positive. So the search goes on to find the father of Eve’s child.
BECKETT FAMILY
FAIRFAX FAMILY OF SEETON AND NEWTON KYME
ERNEST WILLIAM BECKETT’S ADDITIONAL FAMILY
THE LYCETT GREEN FAMILY
Select Bibliography
Acton, Harold, More Memoirs of an Aesthete (London, Methuen, 1970)
Acton, Harold, Nancy Mitford (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1975)
Alsop, Susan Mary, To Marietta from Paris, 1945 – 1960 (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976)
Alsop, Susan Mary, Lady Sackville: A Biography (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978)
Asquith, Lady Cynthia, Diaries 1915 – 1918 (London, Hutchinson, 1968)
Beauman, Nicola, Morgan: A Biography of E. M. Forster (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1993)
Beckett, Lori (ed.), City of Leeds Training College: Continuity and Change 1907 – 2007 (Leeds, Leeds Metropolitan University, 2007)
Blanche, Jacques-Emile, Portraits of a Lifetime (London, Dent, 1937)
Bloch, Michael, James Lees-Milne: The Life (London, John Murray, 2009)
Brewster, E., and A. Brewster, D. H. Lawrence: Reminiscences and Correspondence (London, Secker, 1934)
Briggs, Julia, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (London, Allen Lane, 2005)
Brittain, Vera, Testament of Youth (London, Gollancz, 1933)
Butler, Ruth, Rodin: The Shape of Genius (London, Yale University Press, 1993)
Churchill, Lady Randolph, Reminiscences (London, Edward Arnold, 1908)
Connolly, Cyril, The Rock Pool (rev. ed., London, Hamish Hamilton, 1947)
Connolly, Cyril, The Unquiet Grave (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1945)
Cornwallis-West, G., Edwardian Hey-Days (London, Putnam’s, 1930)
Cossart, Michael de, The Food of Love: Princess Edmond de Polignac (1865 – 1943) and Her Salon (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1978)
DeSalvo, Louise, and A. Mitchell Leaska (eds.), The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (New York, William Morrow, 1985)
Eden, Timothy, The Tribulations of a Baronet (London, Macmillan, 1933)
Ferriday, Peter, Lord Grimthorpe 1816 – 1905 (London, John Murray, 1957)
Forster, E. M., Selected Short Stories (London, Penguin Books, 1954)
Forster, E. M., Selected Letters: Volume One 1879 – 1920, eds Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank (London, Collins, 1983)
Furbank, P. N., E. M. Forster: A Life (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978)
Glendinning, Victoria, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville- West (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983)
Grunfeld, Frederic V., Rodin: A Biography (London, Hutchinson, 1988)
Gutsche, Thelma, No Ordinary Woman: The Life and Times of Florence Phillips (Cape Town, Howard Timmins, 1996)
Hare, Marion J., The Sculptor and His Sitter: Rodin’s Bust of Eve Fairfax (Johannesburg, Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1994)
Harrison, Marjorie J., Four Ainsty Townships (Appleton Roebuck, Ainsty Books, 2000)
Jullian, Philippe, and John Phillips (eds.), Violet Trefusis: Life and Letters (originally published as The Other Woman: The Life of Violet Trefusis) (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1976)
Kahan, Sylvia, Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2003)
Keppel, Sonia, Edwardian Daughter (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1958)
Lamont-Brown, Raymond, Edward VII’s Last Loves: Alice Keppel and Agnes Keyser (Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 1998)
Lawrence, D. H., The Letters: Volumes VI and VII, eds Keith Sagar, James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991 and 1993)
Leaska, Mitchell A., and John Phillips (eds.), Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville- West, 1910 – 21 (London, Methuen, 1989)
Lees-Milne, James, Ancestral Voices (London, Chatto & Windus, 1975)
Lees-Milne, James, Prophesying Peace (London, Chatto & Windus, 1978)
Lees-Milne, James, Harold Nicolson: A Biography (London, Chatto & Windus
, 1980, 1981)
Lees-Milne, James, Caves of Ice (London, Chatto & Windus, 1983)
Leslie, Anita, The Fabulous Leonard Jerome (London, Hutchinson, 1954)
Masucci, Tiziana, Violet, Vita, Virginia: Passagi a Ravello (Rome, Mephite, 2007)
A Book of Secrets Page 24
