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

poet, Paul Verlaine. He was having an affair with Jean de Gaigneron, a socialite who painted pictures, said witty things, had sex with lots of men and introduced him to Proust and Cocteau. ‘Jean is a nice friend for Hadji,’ Harold wrote to Vita, ‘as he knows all the clevers’. In late July he came with him to England. ‘Can you arrange with BM for Jean to sleep at Hill Street with me (!!) on Friday night?’ he wrote to Vita.

While Harold was with Jean de Gaigneron, Vita began her autobiographical ‘confession’, published fifty years later by her son as Portrait of a Marriage. She began writing lying in the grounds of Long Barn ‘in the margin between a wood and a ripe cornfield’:

Having written it down I shall be able to trust no one to read it; there is only one person in whom I have such utter confidence that I would give every line of this confession into his hands, knowing that after wading through this morass – for it is a morass, my life, a bog, a swamp, a deceitful country, with one bright patch in the middle, the patch that is unalterably his – I know that after wading through it all he would emerge holding his estimate of me steadfast. This would be the test of my confidence, from which I would not shrink. I would not give it to her – perilous touchstone!…

Neither the bright patch nor the perilous touchstone ever got to read it. And though actions showed how swamp-like and deceitful a country her relationship with Violet now was, she still did not say, emphatically and categorically that no, they would never be together. They planned another ‘escape’ for after Sonia’s wedding and snatched five days when Harold was in Paris and Mrs Keppel away. Vita wrote to say how this time together disturbed her and how she despised herself for shillyshallying. ‘Darling, it’s true I’m afraid what you say,’ Violet replied. ‘You are neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring.’

At times Violet and Denys made the social effort. Sonia and her fiancé called at the Dower House. Roland Cubitt found Violet alarming and teased her to conceal his apprehension. He and Denys talked of horses. Sonia thought Denys impossibly reserved and felt ‘submitted to some form of kit inspection’ by him.

In private the Trefusis marriage grew worse by the day. Denys checked Violet’s alibis about going to the ballet or being alone, twisted her wrist to make her say, ‘Goodnight darling’, hit her on the side of the head for saying she was devoted to Pat Dansey, took more of Vita’s letters from the drawer of her writing table and burned them. Violet told him she could not stand living with him any more and was looking for a flat for herself. He went out with other women, but she said she did not mind his ‘Jeannes and Yvonnes’.

He became ill and was put to bed in the blue room of the Dower House with a temperature of 103°F, an infected throat and visits three times a day from the doctor. His sister Betty, a theosophist with golden hair who was writing a novel, came to stay and look after him. His condition alarmed her. Her own husband had been killed at Gallipoli leaving her to care alone for their small children. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his courage.

Mrs Keppel worked to give Sonia a dashing start to married life. The wedding was fixed for 15 November. They shopped for clothes:

three dozen nightgowns, petticoats, bodices, chemises, knickers, stockings, handkerchiefs, gloves. A dozen pairs of evening and day shoes; six pairs of stays … a pink satin peignoir trimmed with ostrich feathers for summer, a quilted blue velvet dressing-gown with a real Valenciennes lace collar, for winter … two evening dresses … a black velvet square-necked ball dress and a pink velvet ball dress trimmed with silver lace … two tea gowns, one trimmed with Chinese embroidery and the other of billowing chiffon; three day dresses and three afternoon dresses; and three tweed suits and a travelling coat with matching hats and jerseys and shirts … a going-away dress of pale blue marocaine, with a skirt cut into petals, topped by a black velvet coat with a grey fox collar, and a grey velvet cap trimmed with ospreys.

In late summer Violet joined her mother at Duntreath. They had a week’s remission from their woes. Away from Vita and Denys and in the perfect setting of her childhood Violet was restored. Her mother was happy too, freed from scandal and gossip:

She has been gardening such a lot and cutting down so many trees, she is quite brown and sunburnt. She says she has been so happy here away from everybody. She was so attractive like she was yesterday no one could help loving her.

Instead of being ‘hard and inquisitorial and menacing’, she was ‘kind and humorous and gay’. It was as if the social disaster of the past three years had not happened. She walked the dogs, charmed the neighbours, tended to a dove wounded by a rat:

I couldn’t bear Mama a grudge for anything in the world. Whatever she did, she could always be forgiven. There are some people like that. She laughs and jokes … Oh! The charmers of this world, what an unfair advantage is given them!

At Duntreath Violet felt calm and free. ‘the moment I get away, how gloriously emancipated I feel. I shed certain aspects of my life as easily as a garment…’ She, too, began to write ‘an undraped chronicle of things that actually happened’. It soothed her to write this chronicle, though she had no belief in its merit and it has not survived.

She slipped into the fantasy of her childhood with Vita, the childhood which she could not leave:

You haunt this place … How young and happy we were – as free as the sparrow hawks that nest on the hill, as shy as the roe deer that feed