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

her desire to live in Paris and to write, her derision of marriage and social conformity, her serious love of Vita. If she saw her unawares the colour drained from her face. Lord Sackville, as a joke, when Vita mentioned seeing Violet, would say: Did she turn pale? ‘O Vita,’ Violet wrote that year:

I get so sad when I think how like we are to two gamblers, both greedy to win, neither of whom will risk throwing a card unless the other throws his at the same time! You won’t tell me you love me, because you fear (wrongly most of the time) that I will not make the same declaration to you at the same moment!

Vita took conquest and possession – of people and place – lightly. She liked Harold but he seemed too diffident to make any physical move. She ‘tyrannized’ Rosamund and desired her. Violet she regarded as hers. ‘I knew it then, albeit only through my obscurely but quite obstinately proprietary attitude.’ Most of all she liked Knole, Kent, her dogs and writing stories, plays and poems.

After a week in San Remo the Keppel girls went on to Munich. Moiselle and Nannie, usually discordant, united in criticism of Mrs Keppel for dumping her daughters ‘like the Babes in the Wood’ in a country where they knew no one. They all booked in at a pension at 5 Maximilianstrasse owned by Frau Glocker, once an opera singer now a landlady who tippled brandy. Mrs Keppel had not vetted the place and would not have approved of it. The bedrooms had lino on the floors and inadequate stoves. Of the six other boarders one, Frau Leeb, had a wooden leg which she unscrewed at mealtimes and left propped by the fire. Violet and Sonia ate breakfast and lunch with the other guests and had tea in their own sitting room.

It was snowing when they arrived. The cold, the upholstered furniture, feather bedding and anxiety at being separated from her mother in unfamiliar surroundings exacerbated Sonia’s asthma. Nannie wrapped her in a cotton-wool pack which made her wheeze the more. She became chronically ill.

She and Violet went to an international school. Violet, more at home in Europe than England, learned German easily, proved witty and moved in a cosmopolitan set. Sonia was confused by the language, wore a brace on her protruding teeth, was homesick and sought out English girlfriends:

I liked the two Molesworth girls because their grandmother had written The Cuckoo Clock. And because most of our lives we appeared to have gone to bed at the same time and to have had milk and biscuits for supper.

Neither she nor Violet truly knew what mother was doing in China or why they were in Munich and she was there. For unexplained reasons the death of Kingy meant they lost her, too. The glittering goddess had disappeared to an unknown corner of the world as bewildering as Dambatenne.

George Keppel visited Munich once a month. While there, he saw much of the singer Nellie Melba who called him a ‘charmeur’. In the afternoons he took Sonia shopping, out to tea and to museums. In the evenings he often took Violet to the opera. She liked Wagner best. Mother, Duntreath and Grosvenor Street all seemed part of another life. Violet wrote to Vita and asked her to visit. ‘But I never did,’ Vita, absorbed in her own life, said.

In summer 1911 Mrs Keppel offered Violet a holiday in the country of her choice and told her she was welcome to bring a friend. Violet asked Vita to join them in the Austrian Tyrol. Vita declined and Violet’s disappointment was keen. ‘No I am not angry,’ she wrote on 31 July from the Grand Hotel Reichtenhall:

Why should I be? It is merely a pity. That is all I can say.

… No, I am afraid you will not see me again till goodness knows when! I don’t think I shall return to England before I’m married. To say the least of it I have forgotten everybody in England except you, which is not a compliment – only the truth which somehow or other never manages to be complimentary.

O Vita come! If not for your sake for mine. Don’t you understand. Can’t you see it can never be the same again. If I have ever wanted you I want you now. Come, I implore you. My pride forbids me to say more. I could kill myself for having said so much.

Their letters became infrequent. At Christmas Violet sent her a card of two cherubs floating in the sky.

Mrs Keppel visited Munich. At the station Sonia did not recognize her:

A lady caught my arm and said: ‘Here I am, darling!’ I gave her a brief look and tried to brush her aside. But the lady persisted. ‘Here I am!’ again she said.

I looked up at her and, rudely, I stared. The turquoise-coloured eyes were the same, smiling down at me … But what had happened to the hair?

The last time I had seen it, under the ship’s lights at Colombo, it had shone like gold. Now it was snow white.

Like a fairy Mrs Keppel transformed her daughters’ lives. Dismayed by the Pension Glocker she moved them to a spacious sunny apartment furnished with rented antiques. Disturbed by Violet’s weight gain and clothes she said ‘My poor child! You can never leave Germany!’ decked her out and told her to diet. Disapproving of her college friends, she contacted Sir Vincent Corbett, British Ambassador in Munich, and through him introduced Violet to young people she deemed more suitable. ‘They were a jolly, extrovert lot, given up to shooting and skiing,’ Violet said. For Sonia she found a new doctor, who threw out the feather bedding and cotton-wool padding and advocated opening the windows.

She then returned to Grosvenor Street, rose from the ashes of bereavement, tinted her white hair blue and re-established herself in society life. She took with her treasures from the East to adorn her Georgian mansion: