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

Brienen] as much as she hates me! Surely if she [Violet] is coming back in September, she can bear two more months?

Violet went often to the doctor, scrutinized herself in the mirror, feared she had lost her looks, dreaded the approach of age. She was twenty-seven, her chin seemed to sag, her throat looked wrinkled. ‘I look ten years older than when you saw me last year,’ she wrote to Pat:

My whole life seems ruined. I see only too clearly that it would be impossible for me to live in England. I cannot bear being snubbed and mortified. I am too proud.

It was too problematic. She was déclassée. ‘I can count the pleasures that remain on the fingers of one hand,’ she wrote to Pat, ‘sleeping, smoking, a hot bath.’ She read D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and said there were beautiful things in it, ‘like jewels in a manure heap’. She asked Pat to send her more novels as writing and reading were her only resources and there were no books at all at Clingendaal.

In her role as go-between Pat moved closer to Vita though her ostensible concern was Violet. ‘I would gladly do anything to help her,’ she wrote to Vita on 15 August:

But what can I do? I have written her a most urgent appeal to give you up in all ways – for as long as there is any connection between you two the world will never allow the scandal to be forgotten. Curse the malicious tattlers who did all the harm, curse them. I have done my best to impress Violet that there can be no future for her as long as people are not made to understand that the mad friendship between you two is over and not to be revived.

Poor child, I am afraid she has not much future ahead. O Vita, Vita, why didn’t you leave her for the first 6 months after she was married? Now the harm is irretrievably done. Doubtless you can be strong, but it is too late. I am sorry. I did not mean to upbraid! The tragedy was that in those days you looked upon me as an enemy. I wasn’t and never have been. You were the enemy, but the point is, how can Violet be helped?

I think it is cruel the way she is being treated and that sort of treatment is not going to make people forget the scandal – is it? I simply don’t know what to do. Shall I go and see her mother and try to make her see that treating V as a pariah does more harm than good?…

Vita, will you put all feelings aside from your personal point of view, and tell me quite candidly and truthfully what you consider would really be the best for V in the future?

Neither had an answer. Both feared Violet’s return to London, scheduled for late August. ‘I do really really want to evolve some plan by which to regulate my life,’ she wrote. Lonely at Clingendaal, she invited Denys’s sister, Betty, to visit. From her she learned Denys had dropped legal proceedings because of her separation from Vita. He too was adrift, without occupation, and living unsatisfactorily with his mother. He felt ‘caged up’ in Devon. Travel, the war and the trials of marriage had ‘upset the old ideas’ he used to hold. Betty advised Violet to repair what there was, told her the mess was of her own making.

Sonia’s daughter Rosalind was born in August. Mrs Keppel stayed with her and Roland at their house Hall Place in the village of West Meon, Hampshire. Rosalind was in her turn to be the mother of Camilla Parker-Bowles, Favorita of a future Prince of Wales.

After the child was born, Violet was allowed to return to London and to her room in her mother’s Grosvenor Street house. Vita wrote L for Lushka in her diary, underlined it three times and, within a week, left for months of holiday in Italy with Dorothy and Gerald Wellesley. They were to be joined in October by Harold.

Within a week, too, Violet was on her way to Paris with Denys. Their reunion was a convenience. It was, Pat told Vita, at Violet’s suggestion. ‘Her mother refuses to advise her one way or the other.’ They stayed in the Paris Ritz, then moved to a flat in the seventeenth arrondissement. London society was unperturbed; Violet had relinquished her place in it.

She continued to send Pat letters asking if Vita cared. Pat told her Vita ‘would never lead the mad life of the past 3 years again’. But to Vita she wrote in November, ‘Beyond that I have said nothing. Personally, I would not bet 6d that in less than 3 months’ time you are not again on the same footing with V!!’ She would not have lost her sixpence. The old footing was gone.

Less than three months after Violet’s exile Pat switched loyalties. ‘I do wish, Vita,’ she wrote in December, ‘that when you come to see me you could manage to look ugly. You always make me forget all the important disagreeable things I want to say.’ Pat now read Vita’s poems in bed at night and dreamed of her. By December she told her she could not ‘serve two masters’ and was beginning to dislike Violet. ‘Of course she is bound to say I am in love with you; however that won’t do you any active harm as she will only dare say it to me.’

On 10 January 1922 some kind of lovemaking took place between her and Vita. ‘Dine Pat’ Vita noted in her engagement book. Next day Pat wrote to her: ‘You had struck something in me that has not been struck but once before – ten years ago.’ She pined to see her, called her DM which stood for Dark Man, planned a ring with the letters DMPAT inlaid in diamonds, pearls and topaz, but feared it would make an ugly mix. When