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

1915, his appearance altered, his shoulders rounded from crouching in the trenches. ‘Mamma did her best to entertain him,’ Sonia said. She invited pretty women to dinner, arranged theatre outings and games of bridge. But George seemed abstracted and found Grosvenor Street and armchair politics hard to bear. Men like him did not tell women how terrible this war was. ‘Even Mama stung him sometimes,’ Sonia wrote. He was irritated when she contradicted him then said, ‘Well after all Georgie darling, Winston told me so.’ He was most at ease with Sonia with whom he liked to sit in his living room in silence by the fire. ‘Is it awful at the Front, Papa?’ she asked him. ‘Not too good, Doey,’ he replied.

They spent Christmas at Crichel but without the ritual exchange of Fabergé. Gerard Sturt, Lord and Lady Alington’s son, paralysed from the waist down from wounds inflicted in France, was a reminder that the halcyon days had passed. Never happy at Crichel he had wanted to leave but was now dependent on his family. On Christmas Day tension between him and his father was high. There were difficulties as to where his nurse should have her meals and because he had asked for his own sitting room. Lord Alington complained his wheelchair pulled tacks from the carpet and took up room at the dinner table.

He stumbled over Gerard’s dog and in temper said,

‘You and your dog are nothing but a nuisance in this house.’

‘Then obviously the solution is for me and my dog to move elsewhere,’ Gerard replied.

‘Which I hope will be to us in Grosvenor Street,’ Alice said. ‘You can have your own sitting room and we can put up your nurse. As for you Humphrey you ought to go down on your knees and beg Gerard’s pardon. And then pick the rest of the tintacks out of your beastly carpet with your teeth.’

Gerard moved to London to the house of a friend, Mrs Julie Thompson, not to Grosvenor Street. He died at Crichel from his wounds on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918.

*   *   *

In spring 1916 Mrs Keppel managed to get to Paris to buy clothes. For Sonia’s sixteenth birthday party she bought her a dress by Jean Lanvin of royal blue tulle edged in mink. She sent out invitations: ‘Mrs Keppel At Home 31 May 1916 Dancing 9.30’. The naval Battle of Jutland began that night. In a display of patriotism, she told the band to play the national anthem and the guests to go home.

In August George was posted to Ireland to train soldiers. He found a house for the summer at Connemara for Alice, her brother Archie, Ida, Violet, Sonia. The morning bugle calls disturbed Alice’s sleep and she asked George to cut Reveille or have it an hour later. ‘There’s a war on, Freddie darling,’ he said (her middle name was Frederica), ‘and I’m not here to train the men to lie in bed.’

A month later a telegram brought news of the death of the nineteen-year-old son of Ida and Archie. Archie went to bed. Mrs Keppel sent for George. Sonia sat with Ida who was embroidering something in greens, yellows and blues. In the hall they heard Alice say to George, ‘Poor Archie, poor darling Archie, luckily dear Ida doesn’t feel things like Archie.’ When Alice came into the sitting room Ida did not look up from her embroidery.

To Quidenham, where the Keppel family motto was ‘Do not yield to misfortunes’, came news that Violet’s cousin Edward was killed at Ypres. Another cousin, Rupert, was for three years a prisoner of war.

Violet saw little of Vita during the war, though sometimes they had tea together or went to a matinée. ‘At her own sarcastic request,’ she was godmother to Vita’s son Benedict. In late August 1916 Vita and Harold stayed at Watlington Park. In the party were Osbert Sitwell, Lady Lily Wemyss, Daisy de Brienen, the Hwfa Williamses, Lord Ilchester. They all played poker and games when it rained.

Violet took drawing lessons at the Slade but seemed without direction. She was expected to marry but could not take the idea seriously. She found another unlikely fiancé – Osbert Sitwell. He had, she said, ‘a schoolboy adulation’ for her mother, who teased him because he adored her so:

The idea of matrimony crept insidiously into our conversation. Everything to do with Osbert filled me with awe: his magnificent ancestral home, Renishaw, his dim and mysterious mother, his unknown ogre of a father … his fascinating but intimidating sister Edith who made me feel uncouth and ungraceful, his more accessible brother ‘Sachie’.

Edith Sitwell, according to Violet, was sure the marriage would work.

At Christmas Osbert Sitwell was among the house guests at Polesden Lacey. Maggie Greville had turned the north and west side into a convalescent home for King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers. She kept the rest for herself. From there Violet wrote to Vita of tangles with another man, too. She said she hated being at Polesden but her mother would not let her remain at Grosvenor Street when she herself was away. Osbert complained to Vita’s mother that he was ‘very unhappy’ about the way Violet treated him.

Lady Sackville for her part was perturbed when all the male staff from Knole were called up. She asked Lord Kitchener to help:

I think perhaps you do not realise, my dear Lord K, that we employ five carpenters and four painters and two blacksmiths and two footmen and you are taking them all from us! I do not complain about the footmen, although I must say that I had never thought I would see parlourmaids at Knole! I am putting up with them, because I know I must, but it really does offend me to see these women hovering round me in their starched aprons, which are not at all what Knole is used to, instead of liveries and even powdered hair! Dear Lord K., I am sure you will sympathise with me when I say that parlourmaids