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

in her diary and marked it with a cross. In retrospect she wrote, ‘I felt like a person translated or reborn; it was like beginning one’s life again in a different capacity.’ Violet stayed all week at Long Barn. Then in high spirits they went on holiday to Cornwall. They had lunch at Claridges, took the train to Plymouth, lost their luggage and stayed overnight in a fisherman’s cottage, ‘very primitive, nice pudding, no drains’. Harold arranged for them to have Hugh Walpole’s cottage at Polperro. He said if it rained Vita would miss him, if the sun shone she would want him and that Violet would fall into the sea.

Called The Cobbles, perched on the cliffs above the sea, reached only by a footpath, the cottage was a perfect lovers’ retreat. They read books, walked along the headland, went to Fowey in the local butcher’s pony cart, drank cider in a little restaurant. Violet picked white lilac for Vita from a deserted garden. They saw themselves as gypsies, free and made for love, talked in a secret Romany language, called themselves Mitya and Lushka. ‘How triumphant we were,’ Violet wrote,

that little room … the sea almost dashing against its walls, the tireless cry of the seagulls, the friendly books … the complete liberty of it all … And sometimes we loved each other so much we became inarticulate, content only to probe each other’s eyes for the secret that was secret no longer.

For Violet this was it. Commitment was now total. ‘She no longer flirted and got rid of the last person she had been engaged to, when we went to Cornwall,’ Vita wrote. But Vita had a husband who hated what was happening. Harold travelled a great deal, but this was the first time Vita had chosen to go away without him and he was angry at how gratuitous it seemed ‘just for a whim’. He was at the Foreign Office struggling with memoranda on the prospects of Germany invading Holland and of America fighting with Turkey. He sent her five letters a day. Couched in brittle humour, with drawings of Violet in towny clothes pretending a spartan life, their reality was alarm, anger, jealousy. ‘I wish I was more violent and less affectionate … I suppose that you will now want to go to California with Violet and grow peach-fed hams.’

Vita wanted neither to lose nor hurt him. She returned to Long Barn on 11 May and wrote him a letter, though she was to see him that evening. She could talk with Violet until two in the morning but not with him. Her letter belittled Violet yet let him know they would go away together again. She was, she said, extraordinarily lucky to have Harold’s love, her boys, cottage, ‘money, flowers, a farm and three cows’. She loved him, he was an angel, but she had wanderlust badly – for new places, excitement ‘where no one will want me to order lunch or pay housebooks … yes it is silly little things like that which have got on my nerves. Being interrupted, being available.’ She wanted to travel with him but that was impossible because of his work. In the meantime Violet, whose life at heart she told him she loathed, saved her from ‘intellectual stagnation and bovine complacency’. He should not be jealous because ‘Darling one day we will go off with two little toothbrushes and the bloody war will be over.’

But it was Violet and she who were to go off with two little toothbrushes when the bloody war was over. And it was not only intellectual stimulus which Violet provided or respite from the ennui of ordering lunch and paying the servants. It was passion, love, desire, of an overwhelming sort. Harold knew it and blamed and hated Violet for it. His other dangerous option would have been to blame and hate his wife.

Violet ‘discovered’ the letter. It focused on facts she wanted not to see. ‘God Mitya do you wonder I mistrust you? If you were capable of that, what aren’t you capable of?’ It showed the whole scenario, beginning, middle and end: the choices to be made, the division of allegiance, the prospect of corrosive jealousy, obsession, manipulation, insecurity, pain. Someone was going to lose and get hurt, that much was clear. Had she been the skilled operator, the thirty-five-year-old seductress who knows life’s sexual laws, she would have run from the scene. What was not clear was the extent to which events would proceed to spoil her life.

On 16 May Harold lunched at Grosvenor Street with Mrs Keppel, Violet and Sonia. Mrs Keppel ‘raved’ about Vita whom she had seen the day before. She said how she had changed, that her yellow dress was ‘too lovely’, that she had never seen her so ‘en beauté’ before. ‘She really is one of the most beautiful young women I have ever seen.’ Harold said Violet looked very pretty too, basked in the compliment and relayed it to Vita: ‘Hadji put on his little face like this’

Violet too basked, and relayed:

I am drunk with the beauty of my Mitya!… Even my mother who is not easily impressed shared my opinion. You have changed it appears … They said you were like a dazzling Gypsy. My sister’s words not mine … they noticed a new exuberance in you, something akin to sheer animal spirits that was never there before. You may love me Mitya, but anyone would be proud to be loved by you.

She went down to Long Barn next day, Vita wore her Land Girl clothes and they walked to Knole. Lady Sackville raved too. She said Vita should have her portrait painted wearing them, ‘she looks so charming in her corduroy trousers. She ought to have been a boy.’ Next day in London for tea with Violet and Bear Warre Vita wore a red dress and hat. They decided she should be painted by William Strang ‘who does Spanish women so well’.

Violet spent nights with Vita at