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

Mrs Keppel in contrast was sharp, straightforward and unambiguous. She took no interest in the complexity of her daughters’ states of mind. ‘Too clever to be malicious’, she appeared charming to both Kingy and her husband. Vita, though, witnessed her mother shouting at her father and goading Seery:

I thought they would quarrel for good … It was all very unpleasant and they called each other names and I hated it … I am awfully sorry for Seery … he cried this afternoon.

Such scenes made Vita create her own world of stories, choose the company of her pony, dogs and rabbits and observe her mother’s eccentricities from a haven of her own control.

Capricious with money, her mother veered from indulgence to parsimony. She casually purchased antiques and pearls but picked the stamps off unfranked letters. She bought the most expensive writing paper then wrote her letters on stationery she had taken from railway hotels, or on the backs of letters received or catalogues. ‘I think she touched the peak’ Vita said ‘when she wrote to me on the toilet paper she had found in the ladies cloakroom at Harrods.’

At Knole she had one room entirely papered with postage stamps. In her gardens she liked a display of flowers, so into gaps in the herbaceous border she stuck delphiniums made from painted tin on metal stalks, ‘annual, biennial, perennial meant nothing to her; it merely irritated her that plants shouldn’t flower the whole time and in exactly the right colours’.

Her oddness matured with the years. She obsessed about the benefits of fresh air, refused to have fires in the biting cold, and kept every door at Knole open – not with mundane door stoppers, but statues of Nelson, Cupid and the Duke of Wellington. Vita was given a wooden Shakespeare: ‘You like poetry darling so you will like to have Shakespeare holding the door for you. N’est-ce pas que c’est bien trouvé?’

She took to eating meals in the garden even when it snowed. Her husband found it worse than idiosyncratic, went round shutting all doors and withdrew into his own thoughts. Vita disliked having to eat dinner in a fur coat and with hot-water bottle, foot muffs and mittens, but ‘never lost the sense that no ordinary mother could introduce such fairy tales into life’.

Her mother’s extravagant relationship to material things contrasted with Mrs Keppel’s orderly acquisitiveness. With bizarre facility Lady Sackville acquired and abandoned stately homes, fortunes, admirers, jewels. In the back drawing room of her London house at Hill Street, Berkeley Square, she created a Persian Room with murals of exotic flowers, latticed windows and ‘improbably spiky cities’. It delighted her,

she possessed, more than anybody I have ever known, the faculty of delusion. When once she went into her Persian Room she ceased to see the fog or to hear the taxis. She entered the only world she knew, the world of unreality which she made real to herself, and into which she persuaded other people by the sheer strength of her own personality and conviction to enter.

Violet, too, was a fantasist with the faculty of delusion. In her letters she wooed Vita with images as seductive as her mother’s Persian Room. Like Lady Sackville she created her own world. ‘Do you know’, she was to write to Vita in 1920,

that my only really solid and unseverable lien with the world is you, my love for you? I believe if there weren’t you I should live more and more in my own world until finally I withdrew myself inwardly altogether. I’m sure it would happen.

As a child her romantic heart went out to a friend whose English heritage spanned the centuries, whose home was the size of Hampton Court and whose mother trailed the romance of Pepita the Spanish dancer, the austerity of a French convent and the needs of a deprived child.

Together Violet and Vita attended Helen Wolff’s School for Girls in South Audley Street. They were both clever, though Vita was better at exams. ‘Brilliant performance’ she wrote of her results in April 1908. Their education was formal and academic, free thinking was discouraged, sex was not discussed, views on social superiority went undisturbed. Vita knew which girls were Jewish or ‘bedint’ – the dismissive Sackville term for the middle class. ‘Genealogies and family connexions, tables of precedence and a familiarity with country seats formed almost part of a moral code,’ she wrote.

She and Violet took piano lessons, learned Italian with Signorina Castelli and dancing with Mrs Wordsworth, lunched sometimes at George Keppel’s office, went to matinées with him and out to tea. ‘Mr Keppel is really a dear and so kind, he gave me a huge box of chocolates,’ Vita wrote in her diary.

In spring 1906 Violet again stayed in Paris with Moiselle in an apartment in the Quai Debilly belonging to a friend of her mother’s. She visited Vita in Seery’s apartment in the rue Lafitte. Vistas of rooms opened into each other and there were ‘old and magnificent’ servants and footmen. There were paintings by Boucher, Fragonard panels, chandeliers in every room. They staged, in costume, Le Masque de Fer, a play in French by Vita. It rhymed and was in five acts. Their audience comprised their governesses, the concierge and his wife, the chef and the butler. ‘It speaks highly for their good manners that they sat it out,’ Violet wrote.

Spurred by Vita’s fluent grammatical French, Violet went to classes in the Faubourg St Honoré, was ‘forever poring over a French grammar and a French dictionary’ and planned one day to write novels in French. They talked in French and tutoyered to show what friends they were. ‘Without the stimulus of Vita it is doubtful whether I should have taken so much trouble with my lessons,’ Violet wrote:

If I’d read all the Elizabethans by the time I was twelve and quoted Marvell, Herrick and Pope … it was because she liked them. If I learned Rostand’s plays by heart and agreed to get myself up in Cyrano’s