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

Mrs Keppel visited her daughter: ‘my mother paid me the supreme compliment of coming to stay in “my” flat.’ She feared Violet was becoming too bookish, clever, avant-garde. She taught her to order the dinner menu, rebuked her for choosing mayonnaise with three courses and took her, as ever, to the dressmaker.

In spring 1908, when she was thirteen, Violet told Vita that she loved her. In reply Vita ‘stumbled out an unfamiliar “darling”. Oh God, to remember that first avowal, that first endearment!’ she wrote twelve years later. That summer both went to Florence to improve their Italian. Violet and Moiselle stayed at a pension in the Via Venezia, Vita and her French governess in the Villa Pestellini. They went to the Uffizi and saw Botticelli’s Primavera, to Fiesole – ‘It was very hot, but the view one gets to the top’ – to the church of the convent of San Sacramento ‘where the nuns sing too beautifully’. The nights, in recollection, ‘were lit by fireflies and serenaded by frogs’.

They had a farewell tea together when Vita left. Violet cried and gave her the doge’s lava ring she had cajoled from Joseph Duveen when she was six. Vita kept it on a piece of lapis lazuli. ‘I don’t think I was ever more sorry to leave any place,’ she told her mother. ‘Violet Keppel seemed very sorry to say goodbye to me; at least she cried very much.’

Violet cried again that autumn when she feared Vita might break her plan to stay with her at Duntreath. Vita’s grandfather, Lord Sackville, died in September and she was, ostensibly, in mourning. But she arrived and Violet ‘in a carefully thought out Scottish get-up’ met her at the station. ‘I am afraid I forgot to sorrow much while I was there,’ Vita wrote. Mrs Keppel was at the castle with Colonel Forbes, Mrs Alec Farquharson, Sir Archibald and Lady Edmonstone and their sons. Violet filled Vita’s room with tuberoses, they walked together in the rain, dressed up and acted in Vita’s play The Viper of Milan.

On Vita’s first night there, when she had gone to bed, Violet went to her room. They talked all night while owls hooted outside. It was the first time in either of their lives that they had shared the night with anyone. ‘I can’t hear owls now without recalling her soft, troubling presence in my room in the dark,’ Vita was later to write.

Their childish passion for each other was, she said, too fierce even then to be sentimental. For Violet it was from the start obsessive and unswerving. Duntreath became haunted by Vita. ‘How I loved you then! I was always afraid of your guessing how much I loved you … The place is inviolably yours, the lanky, awkward, adorable you that wrote historical novels and had no sense of humour…’

Violet’s love was not for a king but for a girl with whom she shared a sense of legendary allegiance, the capricious splendour of mothers, the expectation of a palatial home. This girl held sexual power for her while men and their desires were ‘no more than amourettes’. To this girl she took a romantic sensibility, an uncertainty of the worth of kings and princes and a fierce determination that what she wanted she might one day have:

Darling, how dreadfully happy we were before we grew up, you and I! I am terribly against being grown up. It does nobody any good.

EIGHT

King Edward VII died in 1910. He set off for Biarritz on 6 March. The night before leaving Buckingham Palace he did ‘full justice’ to a menu of turtle soup, salmon steak, grilled chicken, saddle of mutton, several snipe stuffed with foie gras, asparagus, a fruit dish, ‘an enormous iced concoction’ and a savoury. He also had words with his Queen about ‘Mrs Keppel and the affront of his going openly with her’.

Alexandra took a Mediterranean cruise in the new yacht named after her. Bertie stopped over in Paris and went to the Théâtre de la Porte St Martin to see Chantecler, a play by Edmond Rostand. He thought it stupid, childish and like a pantomime; the theatre was damp and cold, he caught a chill and arrived at the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz with a chest infection. Mrs Keppel, flustered, wrote to Soveral:

The King’s cold is so bad that he can’t dine out but he wants us all to dine with him at 8.15 at the Palais. SO BE THERE. I am quite worried entre nous and have sent for the nurse.

Alexandra when told blamed ‘that horrid Biarritz’. She suggested Bertie join her in April when her yacht docked at Genoa and that together they sail to Corfu to visit her brother, the King of Greece. Bertie said that was ‘quite out of the question’.

Cassel was not at the Villa Eugénie that spring. His daughter Maud was chronically ill with tuberculosis. In a vain attempt to cure her he took her, his sister and niece, on a cruise up the Nile to Aswan. To ensure her peace he booked three floors of all hotels. He and the King wrote regularly to each other about money and Maudie’s health. Bertie’s annual accounts were due. On 28 March he told Cassel ‘the matter you generally report to me at this time of the year is as satisfactory as the preceding ones.’

He said his bronchitis was no more than a cold. With Little Mrs George he followed his routine of sightseeing, picnics and promenades. They saw Blériot fly at the local aviation ground, watched pelota in the Basque mountain village of Sare, spent afternoons at the Biarritz golf club and the racecourse at Anglet. On 20 April they took a trip to Pau, stayed in the Hôtel de France there, lunched in the mountains at Cauterets and went on to Lourdes to seek a cure for what was left of his lungs.

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