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

by nicotine. Her voice is her best feature, ‘soft, full of hidden depths, crepuscular’. That and her thick springy hair ‘curly as vine tendrils’. She has herself written two well-received novels. ‘Where was the siren Shorne had described?’

They talk, as prescribed, about gearboxes, shock absorbers and servo-brakes. It transpires that the fictional Violet has a husband and a little boy in Paris. She lives in a very old house by a stream and an old local woman cooks for her. ‘I’m so happy in France,’ said the languid voice. ‘If I hate England it may be because I’ve always been unhappy here.’ She tells Alexa she had not enjoyed Conquest, that the character of herself in it is ‘psychologically false’, ‘why make her into an intriguer, someone false and treacherous, when really she’s only an impulsive little animal?’

Violet retaliated against the portrait of herself in Orlando, the account of her relationship with Vita that the book broadcast, her chagrin that Challenge should have been censored by their mothers. Through Virginia as briefed by Vita she is described, she says in Broderie Anglaise, as

a brilliant, volatile, artificial creature, predictably unpredictable, a historical character, a du Barry who behaved like Lola Montez. In short a king’s mistress.

She had been turned by their combined efforts into ‘a family portrait worthy to hang in the Long Gallery beside Lely’s Nell Gwynne and Kneller’s Louise de Kéroualle’. It was, she implied, a portrait of a courtesan more fitting to her mother’s life. The very opposite of this portrait fitted herself. This was the role she had sought to avoid. She had wanted with Vita a life together, a marriage of the heart.

The public, with its taste for the romantic, loved Conquest/Orlando. It won enthusiastic praise from the critics and literary prizes. But it distorted Violet’s life.

Anne/Violet gives Alexa/Virginia her version of the broken ‘marriage’. The wedding was fixed for 11 April. Their cases were packed. Anne was waiting for Shorne to arrive. Shorne sent the chauffeur with a message: ‘The dreadful lying letter he wrote me! He didn’t even have the courage to tell me face to face.’ Lady Shorne has intercepted all their letters and forbidden him to marry. John Shorne is a coward with no assertion of his own. Anne was his victim, not the other way round. She asks Alexa if Shorne is still afraid of his mother. She ends the meeting by saying that, though betrayed, she still loves Shorne and always will. It is the abiding theme of her life.

Too late for Conquest Alexa sees Shorne through Anne’s eyes. She sees his character as torn between his mother and father, ‘fatally divided … between two kinds of atavism’. Because of his mother he has ‘paltry affairs’, plays the role of libertine, wants to feel strong, masculine and brutal. But the other side of him is repressed, kind, solitary, lives for his dogs and fields.

Alexa sympathizes with Anne, and is contrite at having written ineptly about her using false information from Shorne. As Anne leaves she gives her all the flowers in the room and says she will read her books. She then confronts Shorne with Anne’s accusations. He defends himself, blames Anne, says she is ‘cunning personified’. Alexa then asks him one question:

‘Were you or weren’t you afraid of angering your mother by marrying Anne?’

‘Yes, but…’

‘That’ll do.’

*   *   *

It was on an autumn afternoon in November 1932 that the real Violet, over from Paris, called for tea in the London drawing room of the house where the real Virginia lived with her pipe-smoking literary husband, Leonard Woolf. Curiosity made her visit her rival – and she wanted impressions for her roman à clef. ‘Who d’you think came and talked to me t’other night?’ Virginia wrote to Vita

Three guesses. All wrong. It was Violet Trefusis – your Violet. Lord what fun! I quite see now why you were so enamoured – then: she’s a little too full, now, overblown rather; but what seduction! What a voice – lisping, faltering, what warmth, suppleness, and in her way – it’s not mine – I’m a good deal more refined – but that’s not altogether an advantage – how lovely, like a squirrel among buck hares – a red squirrel among brown nuts. We glanced and winked through the leaves; and called each other punctiliously Mrs Trefusis and Mrs Woolf – and she asked me to give her the Common R. which I did, and said, smiling, ‘By the way are you an Honourable, too? No, no,’ she smiled, taking my point, you, to wit. And she’s written to ask me to go and stay with her in France, and says how much she enjoyed meeting me; and Leonard: and we positively must come for a whole week soon. Also Mrs Keppel loves me, and is giving a dinner party solely for me in January. How I enjoyed myself! To be loved by Mrs Keppel, who loved, it is said – quite a different pair of shoes.

In the new year of 1933 Violet sent her ‘a vast nodding bunch of lilac’. ‘No, I’m not spending the New Year between her and Mme. de Polignac,’ Virginia wrote to Vita. ‘I wave the banner of chastity and cry upward.’

Violet hoped that Virginia Woolf, through the Hogarth Press, would publish her novel Tandem, written in English, about the relationship of two Greek sisters from 1900 until an imagined 1962 (the year Vita was to die). This did not happen. The doors of Bloomsbury and Kent were closed to her. She was not to be acknowledged seriously. She was Eve, Sasha, fox, squirrel, siren, panther.

Broderie Anglaise was published in France in 1935. In March that year Virginia perceived her love affair with Vita as over:

Not with a quarrel, not with a bang, but as ripe fruit falls. No I shant be coming to London before I go to Greece, she said. And then I got into the car.

Neither Virginia nor Vita read Violet’s book. It was not mentioned in their correspondence.