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

December 1910. The Times gave him a respectful appraisal and, in private, he continued his flair for making money.

For Mrs Keppel life changed overnight. The King’s death left her wealthy but uncrowned. Without a role she could not publicly parade her grief or continue as part of Palace life. She was cold-shouldered by Bertie’s son and rebuffed when she went to sign her name in the visitors’ book at Marlborough House.

Soon after Bertie’s death she moved into a huge house at 16 Grosvenor Street. Originally an eighteenth-century mansion, converted in the late nineteenth century into piano showrooms with flats above, she set about having it restored to its former glory. Violet described it as ‘a great improvement’ on Portman Square. Osbert Sitwell called it ‘surely one of the most remarkable houses in London’:

Its high façade, dignified and unpretentious as only that of a Georgian mansion can be, very effectively hid its immense size. Within existed an unusual air of spaciousness and light, an atmosphere of luxury, for Mrs Keppel possessed an instinct for splendour.

Hostessing came later. She sought to scotch rumours from critics like Lord Knollys that her appetite for partying was as keen as ever. To his wife she wrote from Grosvenor Street, after Bertie’s death, on paper framed in black:

My dear Lady Knollys

I feel sure you cannot think I should give a dinner party, feeling as I do. Tomorrow, Soveral, Louise Sassoon and Captain Fortescue come. Soveral because he does not dine out, & I told Ld Knollys of Louise, who is coming up simply to see me. How people can do anything I do not know, as life with all its joys, have come to a full stop, at least for me.

    Sincerely

            Alice Keppel

Three guests, she let it be known, did not constitute a dinner party. She withdrew temporarily from the social scene and while builders worked on improvements to 16 Grosvenor Street, arranged a year’s trip to Ceylon, China and round the world.

She went to Duntreath for the summer months and in August announced to her daughters that they would sail with her to Ceylon on 3 November. ‘No young lady’s education is complete without a smattering of Tamil,’ she told Violet. The journey out would take three weeks. For three months they were to be guests of Bertie’s friend and George’s employer Sir Thomas Lipton. Their destination was his bungalow and tea plantations at Dambatenne.

Mrs Keppel’s brother, ‘beloved Archie’, was in the party along with his wife Ida, their son Ronnie and his wife Eva, Nannie, Moiselle and a male escort for the girls, Watty Montgomery, who already had a smattering of Tamil and whom Sonia liked because he reminded her of Papa – who stayed at home.

In October Violet wrote to Vita telling her how she did nothing but try on dresses all day. ‘I want you to come to Ceylon if only to see them. O Vanity Thy Name is Violet.’ She did not want to part from Vita. She again told her that she loved her and Vita asked her why. Violet who was sixteen replied,

you ask me pointblank why I love you … I love you because you never capitulate. I love you for your wonderful intelligence, for your literary aspirations, for your unconscious (?) coquetry. I love you because you have the air of doubting nothing! I love in you what is also in me: imagination, the gift for languages, taste, intuition and a host of other things … I love you Vita because I’ve seen your soul.

But Vita, two years older, was busy. She had ‘come out’ into society. A Florentine Marquis, Orazio Pucci, wanted to marry her and pursued her to Rome and Paris. She called him poor Pucci and did not in the least want to marry him. Her friend Rosamund Grosvenor, whom she called ‘the Rubens lady’ because she was pink and white and curvy was besotted with her. Vita desired, kissed and shared a bed with her, but thought her stupid. (‘O my dears do consider your illustrious names,’ her governess said as she saw their amorous displays.) And at a dinner party she had met Harold Nicolson, liked his curls and boyish ways and thought him witty, amenable and not in the least boring. Violet warned she would become the ‘wife of a gentleman … I pray that my prediction will not be realized.’ But Vita was easy about men. ‘I didn’t think of them in what is called “that way”.’

On 31 October Violet met her to say goodbye. They went to a play and drove round Hyde Park. ‘The end of that motor-drive was one of the very rare but extremely disturbing occasions when she kissed me,’ Vita recalled ten years later. She warned Violet to stay true while she was away and threatened to kill her if she did not. From Grosvenor Street Violet wrote:

Your speech impressed me profoundly … if only your imagination could take it in, you were holding, so to speak, my soul in your hands. You could mould it any way you liked …

My curiosity on the other hand is so great that I would let myself go to the extreme just to see how you would arrange to kill me. Would it be a stiletto thrust between the shoulder blades by a traitor at midnight or a poisoned cup by daylight? Do tell me so that I know where I stand …

Dambatenne, 6000 feet above sea level, had panoramic views of mountains, lagoons, camphor trees and mile after mile of plantations of tea. Ceylonese women in bright clothes picked the leaves for a pittance. The Keppel party travelled out via Naples and Tangier, across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. For the journey by road from Colombo to Dambatenne three cars carried them all, their luggage and guns, spears and nets for hunting in the jungle. As they drove through mountain villages local people gathered to look. Alice said they thought the cars were gods.

In one village a woman, a basket of fruit on