Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter by Diana Souhami (people reading books .txt) 📗

aristocrat’s sense of having created the past and of owning the land. Mrs Keppel was the tinsel queen of a player king compared to Vita and Knole.

Based on the diurnal year, the house had 365 rooms, fifty-two staircases, seven courtyards. It covered six acres and had towers, battlements, twelfth-century buttresses, Tudor gables, long galleries, vast parks. Virginia Woolf called it ‘a conglomeration of buildings half as big as Cambridge’, capable of ‘housing half the poor of Judd Street’. Bought by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1456, it was added to, altered, given by Elizabeth I in 1556 to her cousin, Thomas Sackville, and stayed in the family from then on. ‘It is above all an English house,’ Vita wrote. ‘It has the tone of England; it melts into the green of the garden turf, into the tawnier green of the park beyond, into the blue of the pale English sky.’

She called herself its soul. She and Violet thought old houses if understood lived and formed relationships. ‘I really have antennae about places,’ Violet wrote. ‘I get their meaning, they tell me their secrets.’ Vita said Knole was not ‘haunted’:

But you require either an unimaginative nerve or else a complete certainty of the house’s benevolence before you can wander through the state-rooms after nightfall with a candle as I used to do when I was little … But I was never frightened at Knole. I loved it; and took it for granted that Knole loved me.

She knew every detail: the leadwork on the pipes, the smells of woodwork, leather, tapestry. If scolded she ‘took sanctuary’ in the Chapel of the Archbishops. She saw the evening sunlight reflecting into the Cartoon Gallery on to the Renaissance fireplace and walls of Genoese velvet. One winter in the banqueting hall she encountered a stag that had strayed in from the snow.

She showed Violet the ballroom hung with portraits of ten generations of Sackvilles, the chapel with Gothic tapestries, the Venetian Ambassador’s Bedroom, the King’s Bedroom where ‘the great four-poster of silver and flamingo satin towered to the ceiling’, coats of arms in the Leicester Gallery, the Poets’ Parlour ‘rich with memories of Pope and Dryden’, the vaults with the stacked coffins of Sackvilles dating back to the fourteenth century. She showed her the high-walled gardens, orchards, hothouses, ‘pineries’ and beyond the gardens the park with hills, glades, deer and rabbits.

‘Had you been a man,’ Violet when adult wrote to Vita, ‘I should most certainly have married you, as I think I am the only person who loves Knole as much as you do.’

Here was their palace. For Violet, Knole and Vita surpassed the outward glamour of her mother and the King. Vita was not a man but that did not stop her from falling in love with Violet. ‘Violet is mine,’ she was to write:

I can’t express it more emphatically or more accurately than that, nor do I want to dress up an elemental fact in any circumlocution of words.

There is a bond which unites me to Violet, Violet to me … what that bond is God alone knows; sometimes I feel it as something legendary. Violet is mine, she always has been, it is inescapable.

She could not openly acknowledge or allow this elemental fact and legendary bond. Nor, because she was a woman, though her concept of self was rooted in Knole, though she loved the place and took it for granted that it loved her, would it ever be hers. Her father’s brother Charles had a son, Edward, who would inherit the house and the Sackville title. From childhood on Vita was jealous. Her letters stressed his inappropriateness to the place, how he fussed about his stomach pains, wore make-up, bracelets and enormous rings, was ‘as floppy as an unstaked delphinium after a gale’. It was an irony that Eddy was gay, never married, had affairs with Duncan Grant and an American called Jimmy and painted swastikas and a large silver 69 on his bedroom walls:

There he stands shivering between two suitcases in front of a door far too large for him – dwarfed by the grey architecture towering above him … a little mingy niminy-piminy man in a grey overcoat like a dressing gown.

And then he knocks and the door is opened to him and I drive hastily away while he goes in.

She was dispossessed of Knole and Violet by inheritance law and matrimonial law. In their combined splendour they seemed like a paradise lost.

Visiting Knole Violet was ‘almost oppressively conscious’ of Vita’s mother, Lady Sackville. As forceful a presence as Mrs Keppel at Portman Square or Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace she was, Violet said, like the Cheshire Cat, ‘intermittent, yet omnipresent’:

Her daughter, who admired and distrusted her, was, up to a point, the Cheshire Cat’s plaything, but only up to a point. Knole, the Sackvilles, her charming if unobtrusive father watched over her.

When Violet came to code her life into fiction the portrait of a controlling matriarch recurred, a mother who invades the sexuality of her offspring. It was a creation with attributes of Queen Victoria and Mrs Keppel too, though she based it physically on Lady Sackville:

In her too fleshy face classical features sought to escape from the encroaching fat. An admirable mouth of pure and cruel design held good. It was obvious that she had been beautiful. Her voluminous, ambiguous body was upholstered rather than dressed in what appeared to be an assortment of patterns, lace, brocades, velvets, taffetas. Shopping lists were pinned to her bosom. She kept up a flow of flattering, sprightly conversation, not unlike the patter of a conjuror, intent on keeping your mind off the trick he is about to perform.

Fantastic and slightly barmy, Victoria Sackville had power, theatre and a conviction that what she wanted, she should have. Her volatility was an antidote to the usual Sackville lugubriousness. Her childhood did not prepare her for the mores of the English aristocracy. Her mother, ‘Star of Andalusia’, was Pepita the Spanish dancer, her father Lionel Sackville-West,