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

She was tall and graceful. The profound hereditary Sackville eyes were as pools from which the morning mist had lifted. A peach might have envied her complexion. Round her revolved several enamoured young men.

Violet, marginalized, flirted with one of the guests, went with him to the park and did not return until everyone was in bed. She made her way to Vita’s bedroom ‘down miles of passages’, past the state rooms, through the long gallery. She went in without knocking and did not turn on the light. ‘Moonlight poured through the uncurtained windows on to the carved historical-looking bed.’

Vita was not asleep. She was caustic about Violet’s flirtatiousness with men. They kissed. Violet felt betrayed, thought her condescending, feared rumours about her impending engagement to Harold Nicolson were true and that their own intimacy was at an end. She asked if Vita was in love and Vita said she was not.

To her mother Violet confided her disappointment that Vita gave more time to Rosamund Grosvenor than to herself. Mrs Keppel mentioned this to Lady Sackville, which irritated Vita. ‘This jealousy between R and V will end badly,’ she wrote in her diary. But such feelings were of no social significance, no more than girlish moods. And now Violet was ‘out’ they all met at country house parties, at Knole, Coker, Crichel, Crewe, Sutton Courtney.

On 8 June Violet wrote to Vita from Buckhurst, Withyam, Sussex:

This is a rather nice place with a divine garden. Of course it is not Knole … Knole is quite unique & I love it far better than you have any idea of … I would not at all object to being housemaid at Knole.

From Crichel at Christmas she thanked Vita for a jade claw, sent love to Rosamund, hoped to meet ‘sometime next year etc., etc.’ They met at Knole at New Year in 1913 and at Vita’s birthday party in March. On 10 March they walked together in Hyde Park. ‘She is mad,’ Vita wrote in her diary, ‘she kissed me as she usually does not, and told me she loves me. Rose does not know that I went out with V. this evening.’

None of them considered the implications of these kisses and declarations of love. In May, Violet and her mother stayed in Ravello at the villa of Lord Grimthorpe – the banker reputed to be Violet’s father. Vita stayed, too, to vex Rosamund who was having a romance with a sailor.

On 29 May Mrs Keppel gave a dinner party for seventy at Grosvenor Street. Vita was there. Violet, responding to social expectations and knowing jealousy unleashed possessiveness in Vita, got engaged to Gerald Wellesley, heir to the title of Duke of Wellington, a diplomat and colleague of Harold Nicolson. He bought her a ring but the engagement was one of her ‘parlour tricks’ and she broke it. Vita, disturbed, wrote to Harold:

He lays down the law so he is positively rude, and I never knew anyone so critical … He is excited about Violet Keppel but she doesn’t like him. How you will hate her, or perhaps you will be completely bowled over, so on the whole I think you had better not meet.

The following year Gerald Wellesley found a new, very rich fiancée, Dorothy Ashton, stepdaughter of the Earl of Scarborough. The marriage lasted until she started an affair with Vita in 1922.

Marriage and its prospects prompted the parties, dinners and dances given by mothers. If the sexuality of the daughters in ballgowns and the family pearls appeared equivocal or complicated, marriage would sort that out. Marriage was the main tide, other liaisons squalls and eddies of the heart. But Violet would not or could not go with the tide. She had her mother’s bold love for a king to match. She put a regal premium on her own feelings. She found Vita’s engagement to Harold Nicolson intolerable, a betrayal, and would not observe the social niceties surrounding it. Her jealousy was acute. On 28 July he wrote to Vita from his parents’ home at 53 Cadogan Gardens:

Isn’t it funny – Violet is so jealous of Gwen [his sister] getting nearer to you (legally) than she is – and has not answered any of her letters. G is terrified that she will be catty to you about her. She (Violet) is a vulgar little girl.

A week later on 5 August 1913 Vita’s engagement was formally announced in the papers. Violet wrote a scornful letter:

Accepté mes félicitations les plus sincère à la nouvelle de tes fiançailles! I never could write letters on this subject in any language but somehow it sounds less sickening in French. I wish you every possible happiness (et cetera) from the bottom of my heart (et cetera). Will you and Mr Nicholson come and have tea with me? Also Mama me charge de te demander if you would both care to spend the week at Clingendaal beginning Sunday 10th of August.

… I see in the evening papers that the rumour is contradicted, in which case the effusion would be (officially at least) in vain. Ma non importa. You can keep it till the day when it ought publicly to be forthcoming. It will suit the same purpose at any age, with no matter whom.

Behind Violet’s love for Vita was contempt for the hypocrisy of marriage as she had seen it practised by her mother and the King. For herself she knew marriage would be a meretricious show. She wanted proof that Vita was dissembling too.

The night before her wedding Vita cried for an hour at the thought of leaving Knole. She was married in the chapel there on 1 October 1913. She wore a gold gown, a veil of Irish lace; Rosamund Grosvenor and Harold’s sister Gwen were bridesmaids. Six hundred wedding presents were displayed in the Great Hall: emeralds and diamonds from Lady Sackville, an amethyst and diamond ring from Mrs Keppel on Violet’s behalf. Violet stayed away – a measure of how betrayed she felt. Lady Sackville stayed