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

Horthy’s escapade with an Englishwoman was not approved of. It was lovely while it lasted.

Vita writing of her in the early 1950s called her ‘une âme damnée. Dance little lady, dance dance dance.’ She used the same phrase of her own mother who died in January 1936. ‘I do wish she had been a happier person,’ she wrote to Harold.

Violet was entirely silent about her relationships with women like the Duchesse d’Harcourt and the Princesse Gilone de Chimay – drawn from the Princesse de Polignac’s set – the châteaux, the gratin, the closed discreet world of the French aristocracy. George Keppel photographed them on the terraces of the Ombrellino. But as in those group photographs of Edwardian weekend parties, with Edward VII at the centre in a Homburg hat, nothing was revealed in their closed faces of intimacy, affection or desire.

For her forty-third birthday in June 1937 Violet hired the Eiffel Tower for a costume ball. She told her guests to come dressed in the period of the inauguration of the tower in 1889:

People arrived in dog-carts, on bicycles, in bloomers. They had muffs, feather boas, buttoned boots, fans, carnets de bal, hats with sea-gulls … Jewels were mostly astronomical – crescent moons, comets constellations … A contemporary Colette, with a tiny waist and a boater, flirted with a 1900 Boni de Castellane. I made an unrehearsed entry with Serge Lifar; we polkaed round the palms of the first floor where my guests were assembled …

The June night was perfect … Multi-coloured balloons floated up from between the iron shafts of the great Tower, which was mine for the night. All summer in a night. My childish wish had come true: I was one with Paris.

‘Chacun sa tour’. For a night the Eiffel Tower was hers, symbol of the city she loved:

I was at the apex of my life. I had poise, experience, friends, possessions. Romance was at long last disciplined, coups de tête rationed. Then, as ever, I believed in three things, God, France, my mother.

She had published four novels, three of them in French, created a home, carved a place in the cultural and ‘mondaine’ life of the city. She did not dwell on what she had lost – love, looks, youth. She had aged, was overweight, had brittle bones, broke a knee, then an arm. Her mother said she expected a letter saying, ‘By the way I forgot to tell you I broke my neck.’

On 26 June 1939 Chips Channon gave a lunch party at the London Ritz for the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Mrs Keppel was there – her once auburn hair now blue. Regal, charming, she seemed anachronistic. She sat between Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead, who asked her if she was any relation to ‘King Edward’s friend’ whom he thought was dead.

Two months later and a week before the eruption of war, Sonia arranged a ball at Holland House, Lord Stavordale’s home, for her daughter Rosalind, who was eighteen and coming out. ‘We were dancing on the edge of a precipice,’ Lady Cecilia McKenna, George Keppel’s niece, said with hindsight.

Mrs Keppel was staying with Sonia and her family at their house, Hall Place, in West Meon, Hampshire. She was anxious to get back to the Ombrellino. ‘I am here till Friday if there is no war,’ she wrote to Violet on 29 August. Hitler, she maintained, had lost his ‘war of nerves’. ‘nothing is calmer than England or France and personally I don’t believe in war now … I don’t think Chamberlain has done badly.’

She was restless in the English countryside and her grandchildren irritated her. Rosalind was eighteen, Harry fourteen, Jeremy twelve:

Those children! Harry I consider an idiot. Yesterday he said Mummy loves us much more than you love your children, you don’t love anyone!! All I could do was to clasp my hands believe me I love Luna [Violet] and Doey [Sonia] with every old particle of me but not Harry.

The exchange riled, for perhaps Harry received his opinion from his mother.

Mrs Keppel prayed for peace and worried about her bank accounts in Italy and France. On 1 September Germany invaded Poland. On 3 September at 5 p.m. Britain declared war on Germany. She changed her mind about Chamberlain. ‘Who could help Poland? Impossible and idiotic ever to say we could. It has come out as I always said.’

Violet did not want to leave France. She moved between St Loup and Antoinette d’Harcourt’s Paris house in the rue de Verneuil. Antoinette was separating from the Duc d’Harcourt who owned the Château d’Harcourt at Thury-Harcourt in Normandy. She wrote poetry, had two sons, worked for the French Resistance and when the Gestapo arrived in Paris was imprisoned and tortured. At her instigation Violet joined the Ambulance Brigade – though she could not drive – and talked of turning St Loup into a convalescent home for soldiers.

Mrs Keppel worried for Violet’s safety and was ‘terrified’ to think of her still in Paris. ‘I must know where you are’ she wrote to her on 19 September:

Are you going to remain with Antoinette? I can do nothing about fetching you to England. No one of course is allowed on the troop ships. Had you only come any time in August when I implored you everything would have been quite simple. Now you can only stay in France or get François [d’Harcourt] to make friends with the harbour master and he could tell you the best way. Its terrible being cut off like this and I can’t see how St Loup would be a convalescent home … Darling, darling, do be careful. You know you are the person I love best in the world … I love you with all my old faithful heart.

She sent Violet £3000 for herself and £10 for the Ambulance Brigade, ‘we had such a struggle and it can only be done till January’. She had the Ritz searched from top to bottom for Violet’s lost carte d’identité. ‘I have paid unknown sums!! Not a trace, so darling you must have