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

Mrs Keppel feared they would scheme. On 26 March Violet wrote her last direct letter to Vita. Her battle for love was lost: ‘You have chosen my darling; you had to choose between me and your family and you have chosen them.’

Vita tried to conceal her unhappiness from Harold. Two days later she wrote a postscript to her account of her affair with Violet:

It is possible that I may never see Violet again, or that I may see her once again before we are parted, or that we may meet in future years as strangers; it is also possible that she may not choose to live; in any case it has come about indirectly owing to me, while I remain safe, secure and undamaged save in my heart. The injustice and misfortune of the whole thing oppresses me hourly.

She went to see Pat Dansey who counselled her to make a complete break – ‘no writing no communication’. It had to end, she said, for both their families’ sake. Vita should make no promises and exact none from Violet. If she kept in touch Violet would hope that they would go away together. ‘It would be far wiser and better for you both not to prolong the misery.’

*   *   *

Vita went sailing with Harold on her father’s yacht, saw the publication of The Dragon in Shallow Waters which she dedicated to ‘L’ and which sold well, cultivated her garden and sowed the seeds of a new affair – with Dorothy Wellesley whose marriage to Gerald, Violet’s former admirer, was going wrong. Dorothy Wellesley was, said Vita, a born romantic and a natural rebel, with fragile build, ‘blazing blue eyes, fair hair, transparently white skin’. Her poetry was admired by Yeats. She lived in Sherfield Court, a moated Georgian mansion near Basingstoke, with furniture inlaid with lapis lazuli and paintings by Caravaggio.

Harold welcomed the signs of transference. The Nicolson children and the Wellesleys’ son Valerian could play together. Vita and Dorothy went to Tintagel in Cornwall, played tennis and stayed with Lord Berners at Faringdon Hall in Berkshire. Harold did not object: ‘Tell Dottie she is an angel and very good for us both.’ Lady Sackville had her doubts: ‘I don’t like at all that friendship either,’ she wrote in her diary.

Mrs Keppel kept Violet on an emotional leash. In April she took her to Pisa to ‘a sort of mediaeval fortress flanked by four towers’. It was quiet and Violet would like to have recuperated there, but her mother preferred Florence. Violet was wry at being taken to Florence to have her character reformed. She spoke Italian, French and German, her mother did not. The rich cosmopolitan set of Florentine villa life, the expatriates and aristocrats, were, she said, ‘the most corrupt I have ever run across’.

She lost weight, was lonely, unhappy and adrift. Her mother ignored her socially, said her affection for her was dead and cut her allowance. Violet sent letters to Pat Dansey intended for Vita. She asked that Julian write to her Poste Restante, but he did not do so. She took stock of her life:

It seems so odd to have lost V and D, my freedom, my home, my money, all at one fell swoop. I begin to think the sort of reckless, exorbitant love I gave is the one unjustifiable crime in this world. One should love prudently, reasonably, comfortably; not dash one’s glove in the face of the world …

Mama made me cry and cry last night. She said if she had been me she would have killed herself long ago! Will you tell — he can telegraph anything he likes in Italian if he signs himself Scovello?

Like Julian and Vita, Scovello did not telegraph. Pat was seldom long at one address and these cris de coeur were forwarded to her. ‘I am really losing my mind over these telegrams and missing letters…’ she wrote to Vita. ‘In what a fix she plants one.’ Pat was for a time Violet’s ally, gave circumspect replies knowing letters were opened, transferred money to Thomas Cook’s in Florence when Violet said she had not a penny in the world and had been ‘swindled by the cook’, sent cigarettes and press cuttings of Vita’s poems and stories.

At the end of May Violet went with her mother to Rome and stayed in a villa on a hill with a ‘beautiful garden with fountains that play day and night beneath my window’.

Men chinday now completely ignores me. It’s as though I didn’t exist. She says that her affection for me is dead and that after Sonia’s baby is born I may do as I like. I have only one preoccupation. Chepescar. [Escape.]

She met Rebecca West who agreed to take a large, framed, coloured photograph of her to London and give it to Pat who would pass it to Vita. On her birthday she received via Pat an unsigned telegram from Vita, a mute reminder of past times.

In July her mother took her to Clingendaal. Violet disliked the room she was given. She tried to write a novel which, she said, was now ‘everything to me inevitably: Lover, Husband, Child, Friend’. She felt, she wrote to Pat, ‘out of everything; I am never asked to take part in the numerous expeditions, dinners, dances, etc. that the others get up. I am always left out.’ Her mother said that if she ever gave a party again she could not ask Violet to it. ‘It is a small thing but it hurts my feelings.’ The guests treated her with condescension or were openly rude. ‘Julian and Denys between them,’ she wrote to Pat, ‘have completely ruined my chances of respectability for ever. Whatever I become it would be their fault.’

She urged Pat to come out to Clingendaal. Mrs Keppel was going back to England while Sonia’s baby was born. Pat declined. ‘I honestly don’t want to go,’ she wrote to Vita:

I have a lot of visits to pay in July and I hate old Daisy [de