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

Mitya you must know how repugnant it is to me to tolerate this relationship. It is absolutely contrary to all my ideas of morals. I mayn’t have many, but this absolutely does them in. I hover between indescribable self-loathing and plans of suicide.

Five days later, on 26 March 1919, Mrs Keppel gave the details of her daughter’s engagement to the press. The wedding was set for 2 June. Vita bought all the papers at Brighton station and felt faint when she read the facts in print. Harold was sympathetic. He rightly feared the strain and unreality of this engagement would be too much for Violet. ‘I feel really that it would be better if she broke it off – but you will know best,’ he wrote to Vita. The next day he wondered if marriage would ‘prove her salvation’ and if she would become fond of Denys. Vita said she was almost sure Violet would break the engagement. ‘Poor Denys but it is a little bit his own fault.’ Harold did not know what she meant by that.

Poor Denys did not know what was going on. He had come from a war where it was useless to articulate feelings. He believed Violet wanted him. She had said ‘yes’ to his marriage proposal, had declared herself ‘thrilled’ when he came home on leave the previous October, had told people she was in love. ‘I certainly told people that’ she wrote to Vita, ‘and why? to camouflage our going away … You yourself told Pat I was on the verge of falling in love, you admitted, for the same reason.’

But the prime player was Mrs Keppel, manoeuvring and arranging, promising him a world after the hell of the trenches and the battle-grounds of France. He was malleable in her hands. She offered him an income if he married her daughter, an undemanding office occupation, a house, the prospect of travel. Violet was witty, attractive, strong-willed, artistic, his prize, his mascot, the living emblem of the luck and fortune that had brought him if not his compatriots home from the war.

Four days after the official announcement of their engagement he gave Violet ‘his word of honour as a gentleman’ never to do anything to displease her, ‘you know in what sense I mean’ she wrote to Vita. It meant, in code, no sex together. He put his assurance in writing to her. He wanted to behave honourably, to impress her with his trustworthiness. He viewed women as pure and less corruptible than men. He refrained from kissing her hair or taking her arm because that seemed to be her wish. He became despondent when she said she could not marry him, accepted she was fonder of Vita than of himself and tried to respect what he could not begin to understand. If he was jealous he did not or could not say. The closest he got to criticism was silence. One evening, when Violet returned from Vita, he said as she entered the room, ‘You look as though you have been very demonstrative,’ then took up a book and started to read: ‘I began to read too, but I was really wondering all the time what he was thinking about. He is a sphinx that man.’

Denys was like those 999 out of every thousand women who, in Lord Birkenhead’s view, had ‘never heard a whisper of these practices’ of lesbianism. He was straight from the killing fields and not acquainted or tainted with ‘horrible and noxious suspicions’. He might have understood had Vita been a man. He was correct, musical, physically fearless, reserved, aloof. He had been through what he called a ‘disastrous war’ in which he killed men and saw men killed in swathes. He had symptoms of trauma: sleeplessness, bad dreams, an inability to talk of what he had seen. He wanted to build a civilian life, get married, work, write books, travel and be free.

He spoke fluent Russian. At the outbreak of war he was working in St Petersburg as tutor to the sons of a Monsieur Balaschoff. In a letter to an uncle in 1910, he declared his intention to ‘specialise in Russian subjects – language, economics, trade, etc. Russia is the future field of investment,’ he said. ‘I am looking forward immensely to going into business.’

War and revolution foiled such plans. He volunteered for active service in France and Flanders. In 1915 he was poisoned by gas and invalided to England for two months. He was left with respiratory problems and recurring chest infections.

He felt ‘caged up’ at home and ‘longed to breathe the open air’. His parents, respectable, ‘very county and stuffy’, viewed Violet as an ‘absolute outsider’. She arrived to see them in Devon smelling of French perfume and in unsuitable clothes for the country. Colonel Trefusis was deaf, had little money and was dominated by Mitty, his wife, who was large and did charitable work for prisoners and unfortunates. Denys’s two sisters were professional musicians. His elder brother Kerr had converted to Catholicism and was about to marry a rich divorcee older than his mother.

Violet recoiled from them all. She called them adamantine:

I hate them, Mitya … I hate their overbred appearances, their academic mind, their musical aloofness and superiority, their inflexible point of view, their incredible pride, their extreme reserve and insurmountable indifference, their lack of humour, and – let it be faced! – total absence of any outward manifestation of humanity!…

I hate them. I would like to tweak their aristocratic noses. I would like to tear their immaculate clothes from off their backs. I would like to give them penny dreadfuls to read, and make them listen to Helen of Troy for 4 hours a day on the gramophone!

I’m trying to find the dominating adjective for them, because they’re not exactly bien, or prigs – no certainly not prigs – or old-fashioned – no! It’s aloofness, that’s what it is, sheer arctic aloofness … They were unutterably disgusted because I cried