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

It was all too problematic, the pressures too great. Violet wrote to Harold. She told of the depth of her love for Vita, her despair at the anguish this love was causing, the tragedy she could see unfolding, her inability to sort things out. ‘I have destroyed her letter,’ Harold wrote to Vita:

How sad it was! I like her to love you like that darling – it is the best thing Violet has done – and I really don’t feel that anything so deep and compelling can be called unnatural or debasing.

He felt concern for Denys Trefusis with all the rumours of marriage and hoped if she was going to marry him she would announce the engagement soon and end the gossip. He thought Vita would advise Violet for the best.

Violet returned in the middle of March, after the four happiest months of her life, she said. Vita joined Harold in Paris and wrote to her on British Delegation paper saying her anguish at separation was exquisite. ‘I’m glad,’ Violet replied. ‘I wish I could say as much for my own.’ She was back at Grosvenor Street facing the wrath of her mother.

On 19 March Vita returned to England and was delighted to be reunited with her boys. Lady Sackville had moved to Brighton, the children and their nanny were there too. She refused to accept the presents Vita offered. ‘She talks in a voice trembling with passion,’ Vita wrote to Harold on 20 March. ‘I HATE her tonight … I want you so dreadfully badly. I know I have brought it all on myself.’ Harold, always forgiving, resolved to do everything he could to protect her and bring her back to ‘calm and security’ away from the scarlet adventurer.

Mrs Keppel, determined and practical, moved into action. The errant desires of the King of England were one thing, those of her daughter another. Violet would marry, discretion and society dictated this must be. She was ashamed of Violet, scornful and unkind, concerned for the family reputation, unprepared to attempt to understand. It was not a negotiable situation. She had spent a long time gambling at the King’s side for high stakes. She was not going to lose her elevated position because of her wayward daughter. The accepted form was marriage into the aristocracy, the preservation of status, the semblance of propriety. Sex was a private matter, adultery an art, but this sort of scandal was beyond the pale.

A week after Violet’s return she took her to a society ball where there were seven hundred guests. Mrs Keppel had announced that Violet was engaged to be married to Denys Trefusis. Violet was congratulated by everyone. She wrote to Vita when she got home at two in the morning ‘at the conclusion of the most cruelly ironical day I have spent in my life’. She could she said, have ‘screamed aloud’:

Mitya I can’t face this existence … I am losing every atom of self respect I ever possessed … I want you every second and every hour of the day, yet I am being slowly and inexorably tied to somebody else …

Nothing and no one in the world could kill the love I have for you … I have given you my body time after time to treat as you pleased … All the hoardings of my imagination I have laid bare to you. There isn’t a recess in my brain into which you haven’t penetrated. I have clung to you and caressed you and slept with you and I would like to tell the whole world I clamour for you … You are my lover and I am your mistress, and kingdoms and empires and governments have tottered and succumbed before now to that mighty combination – the most powerful in the world.

But the only kingdom which was to totter was Violet’s own. The Crown, government, Grosvenor Street, Kent and the Foreign Office stayed intact.

Her kind of love was beyond mention even in the gossip columns of the London papers. Lesbianism was not a subject for discussion, the word was not used. Such feelings were aberrant and manifestations of them an embarrassment. ‘You know how I loathe and abominate deceit and hypocrisy,’ she wrote to Vita:

To my mind it is the worst thing on earth and here I am putting it all into practice – all the things I have most loathed and denounced to you … I belong to you body and soul. I ache for you all day and all night. You are my whole existence – O Mitya it is so horrible, so monstrous, so criminal to be with someone one doesn’t care for when your whole being cries out for the person you do love and do belong to. In all my life I have never done anything as wrong as this.

How can I get out of it? What am I to say? What is this hideous farce I’m playing?

Her ‘great love affair’ with Vita was shaping into a quagmire of confusion, lies, deception and sham. She did not know what to do. She wrote of the ‘hell of having to endure the caresses of someone you don’t love’. Hell or not, Mrs Keppel when determined was a formidable opponent. Violet did not have the courage to resist her. She depended on her and craved her love.

She let Vita know that she alone could save the situation. ‘What’s going to happen?’ she wrote to her:

Are you going to stand by and watch me marry this man? It’s unheard of, inconceivable …

If we could go away, you and I, even for a few months I would get out of it – but if I got out of it, and remained here alone and without you my life would be unendurable.

Chinday would make everything hell for me. If I had to go off and live alone at this juncture I should put an end to myself.

O my love and this time last week we were still free and happy and – together, and all life seemed full