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

ripples of interest. It was about the triangle of love of a young wife, Irène, her lover – an older woman – and her husband. The characters were said to be Violet, the Princesse de Polignac and Denys. Through the Princesse, Violet had become friendly with Bourdet’s wife, Denise. At the play’s end the lovers part and the older woman sends Irène a bunch of violets. Irène presses these to her lips and weeps. Lesbians in the audience showed solidarity by pinning violets to their lapels.

Denys went back to Russia early in 1927. At a dinner at the British Embassy in Moscow he met Vita, travelling to Teheran with Dorothy Wellesley to see Harold. ‘Lord bless me!’ wrote Virginia Woolf. ‘Think of meeting your paramour’s husband. What did he say?’ Later that year he joined the Princesse de Polignac, Violet, Mrs Keppel, George and a ‘large party’ for a trip to the USA. ‘Denys vaguely toyed with the idea of finding a job there,’ Violet said. They had tea at the White House, went to Palm Beach, Florida, were guests of Winnaretta’s brother Paris Singer at the Everglades Club.

In 1928 Denys made his last visit to Russia. ‘He went there’ Violet said ‘at the risk of his life. He was fundamentally restless … Russia never left him in peace for long…’ He travelled back to England via Vienna, Florence, Cannes and Avignon. With his sister Betty and his niece, in rain and mud he revisited the battlefields of Belgium, now fields of white crosses. In England he stayed with his other sister, Beatrice, a musician, at Buxted in Sussex. His tuberculosis was chronic. He had a permanent cough, was extremely thin, suffered from insomnia, mood swings, disturbing dreams that made him shout in his sleep. She nursed him while he completed his book.

Back in Paris

he continued to go to bed as late as ever, sometimes even neglecting to take an overcoat on the wildest winter night; precautions were not for him … Then, what was bound to happen, happened.

Denys was thirty-nine. He had not tried to avert his death. His decade of civilian life had no particular direction. His scars of war were deep. He had not spoken to Violet of that war and all that he and relatively few others survived.

Violet did not look after him for his last illness. His sister Betty travelled to Paris and arranged his admission to the American Hospital in Neuilly. His mother travelled over too. The Princesse de Polignac gave help to them all and visited. ‘I can only suppose they talked about music,’ Violet wrote, ‘as I was not encouraged to be present.’

Violet, according to Denys’s niece, Phyllida Ellis, would

put her head round the hospital door, say ‘Hello Denys’ in her deep voice. ‘Goodbye, I’m off to the south of France.’ Part of it was a horror of illness. But she was so selfish. That was a key word. She could never see anybody else’s point of view.

He died on Monday 2 September 1929. ‘Heard from Pat that Denys was dead,’ Vita at Long Barn wrote in her diary. She had spent the day of his death with Virginia Woolf. They had a picnic under pine trees in Ashdown Forest. She visited Pat in London on 19 September and they talked about Denys’s death.

Violet in the world’s eyes was a young widow, more socially acceptable than a divorcee. Her mother invited her to live at the Ombrellino. Violet preferred the ‘less obvious charms’ of her own house in France. After the funeral she wrote to Cyril Connolly in a way that circumvented feeling and romanticized the short life of a man whom she should not have married and to whom she had nothing to give:

By now you doubtless know that Denys – my husband – is dead. He died nearly three weeks ago – and since I have been living in a sort of mist … My life is going through a series of revisions … More than anyone I know, he liked to live dangerously, his life was spent in impossible crusades. Russia was his Holy Land. His attitude towards life and towards death was magnificently condescending … I am writing hard at present with the fervour born of unhappiness.

SEVENTEEN

La Tour de St Loup de Naud near Provins was where Violet wrote after Denys’s death. Provins is a medieval town eighty kilometres from Paris, the hamlet of St Loup ‘one steep Utrillo-like street, green or blue shutters closed because of the heat, zinnias outside the cottages’. Marcel Proust urged her to visit Provins, its Romanesque church and St Loup in 1922.

The steep street led to a derelict tower which the Princesse de Polignac bought and renovated for Violet. ‘Romantic and mysterious’, it was a continuation from Duntreath, Berkeley and the romance of childhood. Like Duntreath it was ‘half medieval, half exotic’. Set in the ruins of an eleventh-century abbey, it had a monks’ refectory, ramparts, twenty acres of park and woodland.

Violet disdained practicalities, derided the ordinary, preferred theatrical effect. Her tower was inaccessible and hard to maintain. The unwary tripped down the narrow stairs. Beneath the dining room were dungeons, the chimneys had so far to draw that fires in the bedroom grates smoked like ‘the last act of the Valkyries’, waterpipes burst in winter, the place was so exposed.

Alone there Violet half-faced ambition. ‘I had been put into the world to write novels,’ she said in her self-deprecating way. If the truth was unacceptable she could admit experience in fictional guise. Broderie Anglaise, written in French, was her roman à clef, the third in a trilogy about herself and Vita. The others were Challenge by Vita and Orlando by Virginia Woolf. (She did not know of Vita’s ‘confession’, written in 1920 and hidden away.)

In 1924, four years after Challenge was pulped in Britain, it was published as a palliative in New York. American readers did not know why it had been previously withdrawn. Reviewers surmised it was because of risk of libel. Vita changed