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

Grosvenor Street, Ebury Street, Long Barn, and bombarded her with letters. In envelopes franked with ‘Buy National War Bonds Now’, or ‘Feed the Guns with War Bonds’, and with Bertie’s son’s head on the three-halfpenny stamp, she wrote of how she belonged to Vita, revered her superior beauty and wisdom, cared not a damn for anyone else, was nothing but an empty husk away from her, how ‘you alone have bent me to your will, shattered my self-possession, robbed me of my mystery, made me yours, yours.’

She spoke of drawing ‘curtains’ to conceal her real self from everyone but Vita ‘for you there are no curtains not even gossamer ones’. She listened to Brahms and Debussy and daydreamed of her, read Swinburne and imagined making love with her, took lessons at the Slade and fantasized that in their shared gipsy life only Love, Art and Beauty would signify:

God knows it is aesthetically incorrect that the artist should be hampered by domesticity. Pegasus harnessed to a governess-cart … an artist must necessarily belong to both sexes … the artist striding the mountain tops, silent, inspired and alone.

For them both hamperings of domesticity were no worse than approving the lunch menu, telling the maid, or scolding the boot boy. But gipsies epitomized romance and artists dwelt in the realm of inspiration, exempt from moral behaviour of an ordinary sort:

O Mitya come away let’s fly – if ever there were two entirely primitive people they are surely us: let’s go away and forget the world and all its squalor – let’s forget such things as trains and trams and servants and streets and shops and money.

At the beginning of July they went again to Polperro. ‘How happy we were. And the second time still happier. Mitya do you remember Plymouth the second time?’ They sat on the rocks, looked at the sunset, talked of freedom and of love. Mrs Keppel, perhaps curious as to what was going on, invited Harold and Lady Sackville to dinner on 4 July, but cancelled when two of the housemaids got flu. Harold did not go to Long Barn while Vita was away. It depressed him to be there without her.

Vita asked for patience from him. She did not want to lose him, or her two little boys, aged four and one, her cottage, farm, flowers and three cows. But she was cold and unavailable, turned aside when he tried to kiss her, disliked social occasions with him if Violet was not there. Her previous diary entries had been about her boys – their words, weight gain, temper, songs. Now it was Violet who filled her life. She told her she loved her, that they were made for one another, colluded with plans to go away with her, said she would not have sex with Harold and took off her wedding ring.

But between Violet’s dream and the real world a wide gap loomed. When they got back from Cornwall Vita went to Esher Place in Surrey with Harold. The Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, the Duchess of Marlborough, Lord Stanmore, Lady Lancaster were guests. They all played tennis. ‘Beastly party,’ Vita wrote. ‘I hate it.’ Violet was ‘utterly lost, miserably incomplete, sleepless and depressed.’ Two nights running she had ‘appallingly jealous dreams’ about Vita. ‘I adore you as I shall never adore anyone in my life again,’ she wrote to her. ‘It breaks my heart to be without you.’

Gossip wormed its way into smart drawing rooms. That month Violet discussed Vita ‘at great length’ with Oswald Dickinson, brother of Virginia Woolf’s friend, Violet Dickinson. ‘Ozzie’ as described by Harold’s friend and biographer James Lees-Milne was ‘a cosy, gossipy, “queer” bachelor’. Violet and he talked of the ‘dormant depths of passion and abandon’ in Vita, her temperament and dazzling beauty and of how domestic, condescending, cocksure and ‘not in the least thrilling’ Harold was.

From Ozzie Lady Sackville heard of how Harold snapped at Vita in public. She hoped with all her heart, she wrote in her diary, that she would never see their love on the wane. She had her own problems with waning love. Her husband, unable to be civil to her, was ousting her from Knole. He removed portraits of her from his library and spent more and more time with Olive Rubens, who was charming and warm and sang songs after dinner. He turned the laundry into an apartment for her.

‘Married life under these circumstances even in a magnificent house is miserable work,’ Lady Sackville wrote. ‘I feel absoluely miserably unhappy and I want to go away miles and miles from Knole.’

Miserable work or not, married life in a magnificent house was ordained by society and alternatives not countenanced. Mrs Keppel did not like gossip about her daughter’s sexual ways. She impressed on Violet that when the war ended, marry she must. Violet was twenty-four. The disruption of world war and the killing of most eligible men were the only acceptable excuses for her spinsterhood. She had no history of disobeying her mother. Mrs Keppel encouraged her correspondence with Denys Robert Trefusis, a major with the Royal Horse Guards, serving in Belgium. She required a husband for her daughter and thought that he would do. Violet, always flirtatious, met him when he came to London on leave and wrote to him when he returned to the Front. He was an aristocrat, twenty-eight, the fourth child of the Honourable John Schomberg Trefusis, who was the fourth son of the nineteenth Lord Clinton. His family had served as courtiers to successive sovereigns, could be traced back to the thirteenth century, had a family seat in Devon, a coat of arms, the family mottos ‘Neither rashly nor timidly’ and ‘All things come from God’. He had no money but Mrs Keppel was an astute businesswoman and would see to that.

Violet encouraged him enough. On 23 July she received a letter from him but at a party that night felt so ‘possessed’ by Vita she could not dance twice with the same partner