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

coats, liveries and white cotton gloves served them from a sideboard with tiers of silver-plated breakfast dishes and coffee pots of antique Dutch and English silver.

Among the guests, that last summer before the lamps went out over Europe, were Violet, Duchess of Rutland, who lived in Belvoir Castle and arrived off the boat wearing a silver turban and opera cloak (the Duke owned large parts of the Midlands); her daughter Lady Diana Manners, acclaimed for her beauty; Lady de Trafford in a tailored suit and tiny plumed toque; her daughter Vi; Sir Fritz and Lady Ponsonby with their children Loelia and Gaspard; the Ilchesters who lived at Melbury House near Dorchester and at Holland House, Kensington; Sir ‘Lulu’ and Lady Harcourt; Sonia’s godmother Maggie Greville; her brother-in-law Sydney; Henry Stonor; Harry Cust, poet, politician, editor of Pall Mall Gazette and the father of the Duchess of Rutland’s daughter Diana. Included among the guests were ‘a suitor or two’ for Violet, young men soon to be annihilated by the war.

Mrs Keppel’s former authority was restored. She carried on the tradition of hospitality, hedonism, entertainment on an extraordinary scale. Daisy de Brienen provided the palace but deferred to her queenly status. Alice was ensconced in the best rooms. At dinner the young liked to sit near to hear her humorous gossip and observe her social skills. What she disliked did not intrude. Sonia that summer, aged thirteen, wrote a novel about a loveless marriage, her mother called it extraordinary, ‘not very attractive for someone of your age’, and burned it.

George organized them all. His invitation book was divided and subdivided into columns headed Invited and Accepted, Old Men, Young Men, Ladies, Girls. He assigned rooms, recorded proposed lengths of stay and activities and amusements for each day. ‘Mama disliked such details,’ Sonia said. He arranged swimming sessions, barge expeditions, visits to cheese factories and picture galleries, cycling trips, games of golf, afternoons at the races, picnics on the lawn. He drew up lists of which guests were to travel in which car and provided them with maps, stopwatches and mileometers. Harry Cust called his efforts ‘George’s summer manoeuvres’.

Summer manoeuvres ended when news came that Germany had invaded Belgium. The journey home, usually a matter of state cabins and leisurely farewells, was chaotic. The privileged class became ‘mere units of a struggling crowd, pushing and shoving to board the last boat back to England’. Mrs Keppel, still La Favorita, was allocated two cabins by the purser. In London the banks were shut and 16 Grosvenor Street closed with no food ready. George went to his club, the Marlborough, and Mrs Keppel and her daughters walked across Berkeley Square for boiled eggs, coffee and toast at the Ritz.

War interrupted their lives. It put a stop to foreign travel, the casino in Monte Carlo, essential trips to Worth in Paris. It brought an unwelcome dimension of rationing, shortages, restrictions. It curtailed Violet’s flirtations with men. It was difficult to get engaged, however insincerely, between 1914 and 1918. For young men conscription was hard to avoid. Harold Nicolson was exempted on the grounds that his work as a civil servant was ‘indispensable’ but he was an exception. Conscripts died at a rate of 5600 a day. ‘It required’ Violet said, ‘superhuman courage to open a newspaper. George Vernon, Volley Heath, Patrick Shaw Stewart, Raymond Asquith, Bim Tennant, one after the other were struck down.’ First to go was Julian Grenfell, who only briefly wrote poems about the joys of battle. He had wooed Violet, Sonia said, with ‘poetry and pugilism’:

He would arrive at Grosvenor Street dressed in an old sweater and crumpled grey flannel trousers with frequently a black eye, and, more than once, a split lip (having been boxing the night before).

At a ball patronized by the royal family he locked himself in the ladies’ cloakroom with Violet. Once Sonia heard her calling for help from her sitting room at the top of the house. ‘His courtship was too spectacular,’ Violet wrote. ‘Father was infuriated by his dress, his recurrent black eye … Julian was banned … The war was imminent; he was one of the first to go. The war saw to it that we never met again.’

George Keppel rejoined the army and was made a captain, then a major and sent to France. His weekly letters to Violet and Sonia detailed route marches, outdoor sports, kit inspections and parades. He did not mention the horrors of battle. He spent his fiftieth birthday in the trenches. Alice sent out a hamper from Fortnum and Mason. When it arrived rats had eaten the cake and delicacies packed in cardboard. He asked that in future she send tinned food.

Mrs Keppel displayed support for the war effort but kept allegiance to her notions of civilized life. For about a month she did secretarial work at a hospital in Étaples run by Lady Sarah Wilson. Violet served in a canteen in Grosvenor Gardens – until fired for confusing cleaning powder and cocoa. Sonia served soup in Lady Limerick’s Canteen for Soldiers at London Bridge.

Back in England Mrs Keppel rented a house at Watlington Park, Oxford, for weekends. It was a nice house, Osbert Sitwell said, with beautiful grounds and views of the Chilterns. And at Grosvenor Street she gave mid-week lunch parties for women friends, politicians and service chiefs. Winston Churchill, Henry Asquith ‘or some leading soldier like Sir John Cowans’ were among those attending these. ‘It was tacitly understood that the conversation should remain on a light level with the darker shades of war excluded from it.’

But the dark shades of war were not entirely excluded. The bright colours of Bakst were eclipsed by the stark canvases of Paul Nash; the jingoism of Julian Grenfell was followed by the epitaphs of Wilfred Owen. When there were zeppelin attacks on London Violet and Sonia slept on camp beds in the drawing room among the Louis XV consoles and tapestry chairs, Persian carpets and Chippendale mirrors.

George Keppel came home at Christmas