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

for Violet to meet him there. She viewed with relief the prospect of her daughter out of the country and away from gossip. It was not what Violet felt or did but how her behaviour was perceived that vexed her most. ‘She says we may go abroad whenever we like, the sooner the better and for as long as we like,’ Violet wrote.

Lady Sackville, suspicious, loathed the idea of her ‘lily of a Vita to go with such a dreadful immoral girl’. But she was busy renovating and furnishing a big house in Brighton. She wrote in her diary that Violet would shoot herself if Vita did not go. ‘It is a real case of blackmail.’ Violet, she said, could copy handwriting and would leave forged incriminating letters for the inquest.

On 5 November Sonia had a severe asthma attack and Mrs Keppel nursed her. ‘Mama is marvellous when anyone is really ill,’ Violet told Vita. ‘So cool and calm and competent. She has not been to bed all night.’ On 7 November in London Denys was cheered as a hero by his regiment. Three days later he again asked Violet to marry him. ‘I said “no” with more emphasis than I usually do. Je t’aime, je t’aime’, she wrote to Vita.

On 11 November Winston Churchill phoned Mrs Keppel at 9.15 in the morning with news that the Armistice was about to be signed. In Brighton Lady Sackville rang an enormous dinner bell out of an upstairs window which impressed her grandson Ben. Violet ‘went mad’ with the rest of London. She dashed to Selfridges, bought flags and with George Keppel festooned the balconies of Grosvenor Street. Then she cheered her way with the crowds down Bond Street to Trafalgar Square.

On 13 November she accused Vita of ruining her whole life and said if they did not go away together she would marry Denys ‘in order to forget you’. On 18 November a new nanny arrived in Brighton for Vita’s sons. On 24 November Harold wrote in his diary ‘a tiresome day explaining to BM why Viti is going to France’. Two days later Violet and Vita spent the night in a hotel in Folkestone, then sailed the Channel the following day. Vita had packed her ‘Julian clothes’.

ELEVEN

‘I shall never forget my joy on arriving in Paris’ Violet wrote in her autobiography. It was she said the culmination of her dreams, the happiest day of her life. France was her country, Paris her city. She liked hearing Vita talk ‘beautiful rhythmical French’. This, away from the hypocrisy of Grosvenor Street and Kent was a new life of freedom, dedicated to love, art and truth.

She had saved from her allowance ‘in order not to arrive impecunious in Paris’. All her money came from her mother. In January 1918 Mrs Keppel had invested an additional £50,000 in war stocks for her and these yielded extra dividends. Violet and Vita stayed at 30 rue Montpensier in the Palais-Royal. The apartment belonged to Edward Knoblock, author of Kismet and himself gay, like Hugh Walpole who owned the Polperro cottage. Denys visited on Wednesday 27 November. ‘He lunched and dined with us, our guest, a casual friend, an outsider.’ His presence, Violet said, ‘was intended as a camouflage, to give Chinday, to her mind, excellent reason for my going there’.

‘I had never felt so free in my life’ Vita said, as she lived the role of Julian. Violet dressed as herself. They went to the opera, to a musical, The Season of Love, ate in the cafés. ‘I was madly insatiably in love with you,’ Violet wrote. At a play by Pierre Louys, The Woman and the Puppet, she ‘lay back in an abandonment of happiness and gave myself up to your scandalously indiscreet caresses in full view of the theatre’.

‘I shall never forget the evenings,’ Vita wrote in her 1920 Confession, ‘when we walked back slowly to our flat through the streets of Paris. When we got back to the flat the windows all used to be open on to the courtyard of the Palais-Royal and the fountains splashed below. It was all incredible – like a fairy-tale.’

Denys returned to Belgium after a week. They moved south without telling anyone where they were. Their uncertain plan was to live the life of their novel Rebellion, to go to Monte Carlo, Ajaccio, Greece. They booked in at the Hôtel Beau Rivage, St Raphael, ‘riviera weather, palms, moonlight and the sea’, then moved on to the Hotel Bristol, Monte Carlo. ‘The weather was perfect, Monte Carlo was perfect, Violet was perfect,’ Vita wrote. It was a place of pleasure – sunshine, flowers, ornate villas, domed hotels, cliffs studded with brightly painted houses, quays filled with yachts. Over the town loomed the casino with marble steps and perfect gardens, the Temple of Chance, where they gambled their money away. They were Eve and Julian, lovers and artists, in the backstreet bars and cafés. Sometimes they stayed in bed all day.

On Monday 16 December they caused a stir by dancing together at a thé dansant at the hotel. They left in a flurry with Vita pawning jewels to settle the bill. She wired for cash to Gerald Wellesley, Violet’s erstwhile fiancé. They moved to the Windsor Hotel, to rooms on the third floor and with a lift that was worked by ropes. One evening Violet stood at the open window with Vita. They looked down over Monaco in the setting sun, there was the sound of waves and of singing from the other side of the harbour. She thought,

Mitya will never leave me. O Beloved and that night we slept in each other’s arms … I feel it is so dreadfully wrong of us to attempt to conceal … There would never be a particle of happiness in my life away from you.…

Violet extolled romantic feelings. She wanted to emulate her mother and have an equivalent love. She only obliquely realized her mother used her head far more than her