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

heart. Letters from home pursued them and at 16 Grosvenor Street trouble brewed. On 29 November Mrs Keppel went to a dinner given by General Sir Archibald Hunter and his wife Mary. Among the guests were Lady Lowther, wife of Sir Gerard Lowther, Harold’s ambassador when he was in Constantinople, Lady Muriel Paget, Maud Cunard the society hostess, Sir Ian Hamilton, Lord Farquhar who had been lord-in-waiting to Bertie, and Harold. They had oysters, snipe, champagne, dessert, coffee and cigars. Mrs Keppel talked of her vexation with the faulty self-starter on her new car. She did not speak of her vexation at the ‘inquisitiveness’ Harold said all the guests showed as to the whereabouts of Vita and Violet.

Two days later she phoned Harold in a fuss because she had not heard from Violet. He said he was expecting a telegram from Vita and would let her know. No telegram arrived so he did not phone. Next day George, ‘Pawpaw’ as Harold called him, phoned before breakfast to say Mrs Keppel had not slept all night worrying.

On 5 December Harold sent an aggrieved letter for Vita to Edward Knoblock’s flat. He did not know where to get hold of her. He put the whole mess down to ‘that swine Violet who seems to addle your brain’ and accused his wife of mooning on from day to day ‘with the future in a sort of sloppy fog’. Two days later he sent another letter instructing Vita to tell Violet she was ‘not the only second string to our bow’. He had in anger started an affair with Victor Cunard, nephew of the baronet of ocean liner fame. Victor Cunard was twenty, sharp and explicitly gay. Harold stayed with him in his family’s house in Leicester then invited him to Knole. but Vita was not jealous of Harold’s affairs, only Violet’s.

The story of their dancing together reached London. ‘I can’t forgive you if you have really done something as vulgar and dangerous as that,’ Harold wrote. He found it hard to believe because Vita could not dance. Nor did he like Vita ‘telegraphing to Gerry behind my back. Whenever you have been long with that clammy fiend you get crooked.’

Violet was a bad smell, an illness, he said. ‘She flatters you – that is it – every silly ass woman is bowled over by flattery. How I hate women.’ He dined with Mrs Keppel on 10 December and described her as ‘magnificent as ever’. Socially she expressed no grievance toward Violet or Vita. She said they were having a holiday on the Riviera after the privations of the war. Lady Sackville for her part told friends Violet had ‘demoralized’ Vita and was a sexual pervert, pernicious, amoral and on a par with ‘that snake in the grass’ Olive Rubens who had taken her own husband from her.

At Christmas Violet gave Vita corals. They went to church, then to the casino and lost 350 francs. Harold spent Christmas at Knole with his sons and invited the composer Lord Berners to stay. Gerald Berners had a spinet in his Rolls-Royce and dyed the doves at his home, Faringdon Hall, bright pink. Lady Sackville, no stranger to theatrical display, made friends with both him and Victor Cunard. Gay men were entertaining provided they were discreet and did not disrupt the social show. ‘It is nobody’s business to know our private lives … The less said about it the better … Silence is wiser,’ she wrote in her Book of Reminiscences. Lord Sackville liked neither of them. Nor did he want to speak to his wife or hear of the marital troubles of his daughter. Lady Sackville felt unwanted and ousted from Knole. She dined in the garden on 30 December.

Harold went to Paris on the last day of 1918 as a Foreign Office official at the Peace Conference. Alone at the Majestic Hotel he felt himself to be ‘terribly overworked’ and ‘unnaturally upset’ by the sorrow and confusion of his private life. Edward Knoblock sent round bits and pieces left by Violet and Vita. Reminders of Violet, her cosmetics and shoes, made Harold feel sick. On 11 January he wrote he would spit in her face he hated her so. ‘All Paris,’ he said, was talking of his separation from Vita. He hired servants and waited for Vita to join him at the end of January. She did not come.

Moreover she told him it was ‘indecent’ to write to him when she was with Violet, ‘oh, do, do try to see it!’. He told her she was irresponsible and ‘lured into corruption’ by Violet. Vita did not want him to blame Violet. She urged him to see that she was acting because of a ‘great force’ within herself. This he did not want to believe:

You say Violet has no influence over you. Then what is it has made you so hard and selfish and unkind – not only to me but to Ben, Nigel and even Dada [Lord Sackville].

The only explanation was that Violet – the witch, Eve, the snake, the seductress – had done her primeval worst. It could not be that Vita ‘like a person translated or reborn’ was following her own desires.

Lady Sackville made it clear Vita would lose her if she did not give Violet up. She had had enough of organizing the lives of her grandchildren who were shunted from Knole to friends in Hampstead, to Harold’s mother, Lady Carnock. ‘Vita ought to come back and look after them,’ she wrote to Harold. Violet, she let it be known, was a viper with a putrid mind. Lord Sackville wrote to Vita of how he hated the ‘loathsome’ things people were saying. He thought the sun and ‘hand to mouth existence’ of Monte Carlo had turned her head. Olive Rubens wrote ‘you must, you simply must come home.’ And from Mrs Keppel came letters for Violet letting her know that when she returned to London, as she must, she would marry and that would