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

He was commander of the West Kent Yeomanry and on various civic committees in Kent. Virginia Woolf called him ‘the figure of an English nobleman, decayed, dignified, smoothed, effete’. Conversation between him and his wife stalled when Baby tired: ‘L says that I talk a lot and I do,’ Victoria wrote in her diary on 9 April 1891, ‘as I am always trying to keep the conversation going at meals, which I dread. I think there is so little small talk in England.’

On 9 March 1892 Vita was born. Giving birth was an experience Victoria resolved not to repeat. She begged for chloroform and longed to die, said it was a hundred times worse than she had expected and that she would drown herself sooner than have another child.

By 1904, the year Vita and Violet met, sex with Lionel had lost its appeal. She told him her nervous system was out of order and she must be left in peace. Lionel said little but found himself other women. Victoria found consolation with Seery – Sir John Murray Scott. He was six feet four, weighed twenty-five stone, had a red face and white mutton-chop whiskers. In summer he sweated and flies buzzed near. Vita once measured the region of his waist and said it was five feet round.

He was as rich as he was large. From the collector Sir Richard Wallace, to whom he was secretary, he inherited Hertford House, its paintings and treasures (now known as the Wallace Collection), money, land, a huge Paris apartment ‘packed with the most wonderful furniture and bibelots’, Bagatelle (a pavilion in sixty acres in the Bois de Boulogne), a shooting lodge at Sluie in the Scottish Highlands where Vita as a child, like Violet at Duntreath, felt at her most free,

those lovely, lovely hills, those blazing sunsets, those runnels of icy water where I used to make water wheels, those lovely summer evenings fishing on the loch, those long days when I often walked fifteen miles or more with the guns and the gillies.

Seery worshipped Victoria, called her a little Spanish beggar and let her have whatever she wanted. ‘At times she wanted a good deal,’ Vita wrote. ‘Mother became absolutely the light and air of his life.’ She bullied, charmed, teased and fought with him. The first evening he met her he added a codicil to his will leaving her £50,000. He gave her large sums of money for the upkeep of Knole. She told Vita he was in love with her and that he pleaded outside her bedroom door at night. She said if he were to have a fit she would come and wake Vita and together they must bump him downstairs back to his room to avoid scandal.

Seery came into Lady Sackville’s life when Vita was six, as Kingy came into Mrs Keppel’s life when Violet was four. Both girls were used to the presence of immensely rich, genial, fat men who adored their mothers and turned their fathers into shadowy figures. ‘Went to tea with Violet and stayed to dinner. The King was there’ was an offhand diary entry of Vita’s in 1905. Years later she wrote of her childhood visits to Portman Square:

Often when I went to their house I used to see a discreet little one-horse brougham waiting outside and the butler would slip me into a dark corner of the hall with a murmured ‘One minute, miss, a gentleman is coming downstairs’ so that I might take my choice whether it was the King or the doctor.

Often, too, Violet would be sent for to go to the drawing room to be exhibited to Kingy, and the girls would say, O bother, much as they did when Vita was sent for to see Seery. They were left to make whatever sense they could of these men who visited mother’s boudoir in the afternoon, or pleaded outside mother’s door at night. And though infidelity and acquisitiveness lurked beneath the glittering surface of charm and manners both girls, too, were aware of the sexual power of their mothers, a power that had no moral dimension, made men seem slavish and weak and was rewarded with riches and flattery. ‘How my mother puzzled me and how I loved her!’ Vita wrote. ‘She wounded and dazzled and fascinated and charmed me by turns.’

At times the wounds surpassed the charm. ‘She loved me as a baby, but I don’t think she cared much for me as a child,’ Vita wrote. Herself emotionally neglected as a child, Lady Sackville was an erratic parent. In adult life she could not talk without tears of her own mother’s death. Sometimes she said Vita was beautiful; at others that she could not look at her because she was so ugly. Once she unjustly accused her of lying and made her kneel at her feet and ask God for forgiveness. Capricious with discipline, she bewildered with changes of heart and mood,

one moment she would be in tears saying that my father wanted to kill her with worry because the electric lighting at Knole had broken down and next moment she would be mopping her eyes with laughter because a gardener had stumbled over a flower pot.

Her moral guidance confused too: ‘One must always tell the truth darling if one can’ she told her, ‘but not all the truth; toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire.’ ‘Never refuse a good offer my child’ was another piece of advice. ‘I have refused a good many offers in my life and always regretted it.’

Lady Sackville pried into Vita’s inner world then lamented when she refused to speak of what she felt,

it has been rather hard to live all my life with Papa and Lionel who are both so cold on the surface and now I find the same disposition in my child. I like my old Seery because he is so sympathetique and I want that so much with my Spanish nature.

But it did not lead her to treat him