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

She gave her a diamond ring, an emerald ring, a gold keyring, an exquisite copy of the Arabian Nights, sent her oranges when she bought an orange farm in South Africa, flowers from the Riviera – ‘you shall have all the flowers in Monte Carlo sent to you’ – and tempted her with money:

I was fearful that you wouldn’t realise how desperately shy and nervous I should be of daring to ask you to give me the joy of lending you any money you wanted … you know that I would do any mortal thing in the world for you.

Pat bought a kite and carpentry set for Ben, found letters for Harold for the book he was writing on Tennyson, shopped for, lunched with and listened to Lady Sackville, who viewed her as Vita’s true friend, preferable to Dorothy Wellesley. She wished Vita would travel abroad with Pat instead of Dorothy.

Pat kept Joan Campbell as her constant companion, her equivalent of the dependable marriage partner. In London Joan lived with her mother in Bryanston Square a minute away from Pat. They always phoned each other first thing in the morning while still in bed and socially did most things together. Pat wrote to Vita from the Ritz in Paris and Madrid, the Hotel Inglaterra in Seville, from Lisbon, Madeira, Singapore, Panama, California, Hawaii, from ‘somewhere up the Amazon’, from various ocean cruisers. ‘The sea is blue blue blue,’ she told her, ‘and there are flying fish.’ Joan, like Harold, felt insecure when Pat cut short their holidays, cancelled meetings and dithered over dates. ‘I have palpitated at every footstep thinking it will be a telegram from you to say you can’t come,’ she wired from Strachur Castle in summer 1922 on a day when Pat sent a dozen bottles of Veuve Cliquot 1906 to Long Barn.

The Dansey affair was a pale parody of Vita and Violet’s relationship. It held faint echoes of their drama: jealousy, manipulation, insecurity, secrecy. But Vita was not interested in Pat except as a link with Violet, a symptom of her pain at parting, a way of punishing Violet more. As for Violet, she knew scant details and this, from her ‘powerful ally,’ her one true English friend, her mother’s appointed messenger, was simply a postscript to the death of trust.

In December 1922 Pat told Vita she would, in her will, leave everything to her. From the Berkeley Castle wine cellar she gave her all the remaining champagne and ‘some delicious Sauterne’. ‘So Hadji better hurry up and come home,’ Vita wrote to Harold who was in Lausanne.

Violet visited London for the Christmas holiday and stayed with her mother at Grosvenor Street. ‘Apparently her mother is keeping an eagle eye on her,’ Pat wrote to Vita,

and demands an account of where she spends every second. This is quite intolerable for V. But though I have not said it to V it may be done because her mother thinks she is trying to see you. V told me that when she had said she was coming round here last evening her mother had said ‘Why now so late?’ The Keppel lot may know you come here and are afraid of a meeting. You remember Sonia did come one morning and went away again! I also told old G myself I frequently saw you and that often you came to the flat. V is coming here this morning … I must warn CD [the novelist Clemence Dane] somehow not to mention Long Barn in front of V … Have you any idea of how terribly I miss you?

‘I shall turn her down properly if she does telephone to me – beast’, Vita wrote to Harold on 2 December. Six days later Violet phoned. Vita asked Dorothy Wellesley to stay in the room while she told Violet nothing would tempt her to see her. Pat spent Christmas in Brighton with Vita, her children and Lady Sackville and was a ‘howling success’. Lady Sackville referred to her as ‘beloved Pat’.

Like Violet Pat knew that Vita valued devotion and fidelity in her lovers, but if they asked the same of her she quit, pleading her marriage to Harold, her need for a quiet life. Knowing, too, that Vita’s faltering attention could be fanned alight by hints of sexual competition from any man, she fed the flame even while sensing it came not from Vita’s desire for her, Pat, but from ‘your obsession’ as she put it ‘that you are a romantic young man who treats women badly’.

In July 1923 Vita seemed jealous of a man called Anselm whom Pat was seeing. Pat reassured. ‘I loathe being touched or kissed by anyone unless I love them or they physically attract me … I don’t want it except from you…’

Men were a social convenience, a cover for appearances’ sake, of no emotional relevance. ‘Would it,’ she asked, ‘be easier for you if I produced a husband?’

Would that lighten the position? I know that it is not for yourself but fear of talk. If a husband would make it as easy as it is with anyone else, I will produce one instantly. I don’t say I want to produce one, but at the same time I will make the sacrifice for you.

She shared none of Violet’s scorn of hypocrisy and volunteered the usual adulterous formula: give society – the drawing rooms of Grosvenor Street and Mayfair – the ‘values’ it said it respected. That done, have secretive sex with whoever you please. ‘Three perfect days’, she wrote in summer 1923 when her driver, Burley, took her to Long Barn on Wednesday and collected her on Friday before Harold arrived from London. ‘I cannot think about them – hot waves rush all over me. Little electric needles of sensation prick all through me.’

Less manageable sensations followed in autumn. Vita and Harold stayed in Florence with the writer Geoffrey Scott and his wife Sybil. Scott, author of The Architecture of Humanism, was writing The