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

wanted to take everything in, but I think & hope he was persuaded that the human eye can’t take everything in at one focus. I am enjoying the mud baths but Alas to-day they are not functioning because of the Strike.

Hedonism was obligatory. Luncheon in the huge dining room with its marble floor, frescoed walls, glass doors opening to the terrace, took three hours. George’s niece Lady Cecilia, daughter of the 9th Earl of Albemarle, and her husband, David McKenna, visited the Ombrellino when they married. There was a lavish dinner in their honour. David McKenna got sunstroke, felt ghastly and needed to be in bed. Mrs Keppel told him he was well enough to dine. It was his honeymoon, he would appear, the dinner was for him, the show must go on. Persuasion, as Violet said, was her mother’s hallmark.

George got himself an early Lanchester, red and very sporty. He liked to drive it fast with the roof down and a ‘little darling’ from the Ombrellino at his side. He kept an apartment in Florence for his personal use. And he became an author. He privately published a series of Aids to Memory by Colonel Keppel. These dealt, in columns, lists, indices and addenda, with ‘Contemporary Dates between the 13th and 18th centuries of the Medici in Florence and the Renaissance’ and ‘French Painters (1400–1900) And Their Times’. The Colonel’s readers could ascertain that in the year Charles X died at Goritz, the first electric telegraph was erected and that Manet ‘was an attractive personality, and had an exquisite sense of paint, as well as great decorative charm’.

Previously, Violet said, George had ‘scarcely glanced at a picture in his life’. Now he could tell his visitors that the ‘Tribuna’ was added to the Uffizi Picture Gallery during the reign of Ferdinand I, or that Ghiberti’s Baptistry Doors were finished in 1424.

In Paris on 3 December 1924 after a gap of three years, Violet and Vita met briefly. Vita was there for the sale of remaining pieces from Seery’s flat in the rue Lafitte. She stayed at 53 rue de Varenne home of the American lawyer Walter Berry. He arranged a dinner party for her and invited, among others, Violet and Gerald Berners. ‘Oh my God. What am I to do?’ Vita wrote to Harold in panic. She said she was frightened out of her wits. He wired urging her to be careful. ‘You are always so opty about things and so weak.’ Next morning she said curiosity had replaced her agitation. ‘If V does not know I am here she will get a nice jump – and anyway it will be great fun for Berners.’ Violet, Harold replied, had the evil eye, was a fiend of destruction and all she wanted was to destroy their happiness, ‘do do be careful and not get mesmerized by that devil. I know she will try to do us harm.’ But Violet and she were no more than guests at the same table. The fiend of destruction did no damage that day.

Denys freed himself from being accountable to or for his wife when he matchmade between her and the Princesse de Polignac. He accompanied her if a husband was required but she saw him less and less. Unencumbered, he travelled. He was drawn to Russia, had been working as a tutor there in 1914 and left only to fight in the war. In 1926 and again in the winter of 1927, he returned. Violet wanted to go too but he discouraged her. He was gone for months at a time. ‘I realised I was married to Lohengrin,’ she wrote.

In an unpublished book, The Stones of Emptiness, he alluded to business appointments and curiosity as to what he would find ‘after a disastrous European war’ and eight years of Bolshevik rule. He was emphatic he was not a spy. ‘Above all I have never taken any part whatever in espionage of any sort or kind.’ But he was undoubtedly an English aristocrat averse to egalitarianism, socialism, trade-union rule.

He found a changed country. He called it a wilderness now with the stones of emptiness stretched out on it. His prewar Russian friends shunned him. He was shadowed night and day, arrested, fined 500 roubles for contravening the Labour Code and half a rouble for getting off the wrong end of a tram. His book was a polemic against communism. He marshalled antipathetic arguments: it rewarded the unskilled and inefficient, sapped ambition and energy through lack of material incentive, encouraged widespread unemployment, exported goods in short supply at prices below production cost.

He wrote of street hawkers, ‘careworn faces’, queues for food, no well-dressed people, and emblems of hammers and sickles replacing crowns and eagles. ‘Wealth has flown but poverty lingers.’ He complained that British royalty was mocked, as were Ramsay MacDonald, Winston Churchill and Austen Chamberlain. In the street, people fingered his clothes in envy. At a Trade Fair there was nothing to buy. The state monopoly on vodka was a third of the national budget.

Theatres were full, he said, only because free seats were given to the Unions. The audience wore muddy boots, ate oranges, made no attempt at evening dress. State theatre conveyed the ‘ravings of an unbalanced mind tempered by hideous Bolshevik propaganda’. Ballet dancers were kept on long after they should have retired. Opera singers and sportsmen were second-rate.

He did though enjoy his favourite sport, shooting capercailzie – a sort of wood grouse – in the spring:

For 1½ roubles – 3 shillings – anyone can shoot throughout the USSR from the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Black Sea to the Arctic … I have never had the good fortune to kill a bear though I went after a fine specimen on one occasion.

He also shot foxes, hares, blackgame, snipe, ducks and wild partridges.

In March 1926 when Denys was getting away from his wife, deriding Bolshevism and shooting creatures, in Paris the play La Prisonnière by Edouard Bourdet at the Théâtre Femina caused