Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  There were to be plenty of obstacles in her path. Next day Violet received a letter from Denys. He said his company had won a boxing competition and he a silver cup for horse jumping. He addressed her as his ‘fairest Fialka’ – Russian for Violet – said she brought him luck and was his mascot. Violet showed Vita the letter to make her jealous:

  I have greatly dared and now I am terrified. If you knew how poignantly true is all I wrote you last night you would realize the futility of making plans for ‘after the war’… I don’t care a fig for the remote future and what happens after the war. Whatever happens is going to happen now.

  She was, she said, ‘sick to death of all this camouflage’. None the less camouflage plans were made for after the war, an unworkable prospect of lies and the desire for truth.

  Somewhere in Violet’s perception of social behaviour was the idea that marriage was a socially acceptable cover for socially unacceptable sex. It was the fulcrum of those Edwardian house parties, the cover used by her mother, the King, Harold, Vita. Denys Trefusis was oblivious to the emotional intricacy of his postwar fate. He did not know how he was to be used. He had had an awful war, fought in the battle of the Somme, endured years of slaughter, threat and fear. He was emotionally precarious, not strong or well. Mrs Keppel wanted him to make her daughter respectable. Violet wanted him not for himself but to appease her mother and provoke Vita into breaking with Harold so her love would be for her alone. Vita hoped Violet, like herself, ‘would gain more liberty by marrying’. But the marriage must not preclude fidelity to her. ‘Violet is mine,’ she wrote in 1920 in her Confession. But so, if not in the same way, was Harold hers, and Long Barn, the boys, the farm, the garden, the cows. And so should Knole have been, she felt, by rights.

  Denys admired Violet’s intelligence, humour, originality and status. He wrote again to her on 1 September. He said he loved her as much as one person could love another, that he was ‘waiting for her reply’ and that he hoped for lucrative employment at the war’s end. Thus Violet sailed into the wind, her feelings in turmoil. Five months into her affair with Vita she was acting out a charade of courtship to oblige her mother, distract society and provoke the woman she loved into claiming her.

  * * *

  From Clovelly Court Mrs Keppel took her daughter to Appley Hall at Ryde on the Isle of Wight. She forbade her to return to London until the end of September, when Denys Trefusis would be home on leave. In her mother’s social milieu Violet had the status of a rebellious child. ‘O Vita get away we must,’ she wrote from Appley Hall:

  It has become an obsession with me. To see the much vaunted cliffs of Dover retreating in the mist, the intoxicating swish swish of the waves becoming more emancipated every moment … Let’s go to Paris, the Riviera, anywhere.

  Harold, diplomatic and conciliatory, looked for a solution that would concede to Vita and save their marriage. He suggested on 2 September that she buy a little seduction cottage ‘in Cornwall or elsewhere’ where she could go whenever and with whomsoever she liked. It would be a rule that he never visited it or asked who she was with. The arrangement would, he thought, ‘make a real escape from the YOKE’. And when he was rich he would have one too, ‘just the same and on the same condition’.

  This was the kind of set up Violet at heart resented and abhorred. It was the pattern of adultery acceptable to her mother and the King. As she saw it Vita belonged to her and should never have married. She wanted monogamy founded on passion. Now she was compromised by Vita’s marriage and was compromising Denys and herself:

  What is the good Mitya? I get far more unhappiness out of love than happiness. Jealousy, immediately omnipotent, is at the root of all my misery … You see it is never without something to feed on. The only time when I forget it temporarily is when I’m with you – when I’m away it rules supreme. You see there is always the insurmountable Nicolson to deal with; if only he would disappear some day, but he won’t. I have almost ceased in a sense to be jealous of what he is to you, I am jealous of what he is to you in the eyes of the world …

  It would be absurd for you to be jealous of me because you know at the bottom of your heart that it is impossible for me to care for more than one person at a time – when I say care, I mean it is impossible for me to be even fond of anyone but you or merely superficially interested, whereas you admittedly have affections, very deep ones … for people who, God knows, are no concern of mine. The bargain is a one-sided one: you are all in all to me – and I am the dominating interest of several interests for you. I know you love me but not at all in the same way as I love you. How can you help it? You have inevitably other affections, other resources – if I fail you, you have plenty of other people to fall back upon. If you fail me what have I got?

  It was all true but not useful for being so.

  Introduced at Mrs Keppel’s dinner parties, Denys Trefusis was praised, Violet said, for his appearance, ‘manliness’ and sense of humour. He was tall, slim, with reddish hair, blue eyes, looked smart in uniform. Vita met him, compared him to ‘an ascetic in search of the Holy Grail’ and liked him. ‘I could afford to like him because I was accustomed to Violet’s amusements.’ But she was sexually possessive. She could not countenance him – or anyone – touching Violet with desire. She was jealous when Violet visited Pat Dansey. She took Violet’s photographs of Pat and went to see her when Violet was away:

  Mitya, even you in your blindness were fully aware that your visit to Pat would not exactly fill me with rapture. You do these inevitably mischievous things, and then profess surprise at the result.

  Harold called Violet evil, tortuous, erotic, irresponsible, a ‘fierce orchid glimmering and stinking in the recesses of life’. He wished she was dead, said she had ‘poisoned one of the most sunny things that ever happened’. As for Vita he supposed it was ‘a sort of George Sand stunt’, or a ‘scarlet adventure’, or perhaps she was a bit deranged like the rest of her family.

  On 1 October Vita wrote him a love letter before he left for Italy. She told him she loved him ‘unalterably’, with a love that would survive passing passion. Their love, she said, after five years had ‘long strong roots’. With him and no one else she had a sense of belonging, ‘a sense of “He is MINE” – I don’t think that often happens.’

  Violet received similar avowals and the claim “She is MINE”. The following week they went to Scheherazade – twice. ‘Marvellous.’ At Ebury Street Vita changed into men’s clothes, browned her face, put a khaki bandage round her head, walked down Piccadilly smoking a cigarette, bought a newspaper from a boy who called her sir, went with Violet to Charing Cross station, then by train to Orpington.

  She was Julian, Violet was Eve. ‘This is the best adventure,’ Vita wrote, ‘The extraordinary thing was how natural it all was for me … I had wondered about my voice, but found I could sink it sufficiently.’ They booked in at a lodging house as husband and wife. The following day they ‘went to Knole which I think was brave. Here I slipped into the stables and emerged as myself.’ ‘Leave Julian at Knole,’ she wrote in her diary and that night dreamed a wish-fulfilment dream of the escapade.

  Gossip swelled. Ozzie Dickinson told Lady Sackville that Violet wanted to separate Vita and Harold. Violet told her she intended to marry Denys who had not got a penny, that Harold was stifling Vita’s writing career, that Vita was not in love with him. Vita told her Harold was too sleepy and quick to be a good lover. Harold told her Violet was trying to destroy his home life by constantly ridiculing it. Lady Sackville told Harold that Violet was pernicious and amoral. Vita made Violet promise not to have any sexual exchange with Denys. And Violet told Vita how she loved her overwhelmingly, devastatingly, possessively, exorbitantly, submissively, incoherently and insatiably.

  The war moved to an end. Mrs Keppel was concerned as to how George would fill his time. Vita suggested talking to her uncle Charles (who became the 4th Lord Sackville) to see if there was room at Knole on the staff. Mrs Keppel said George was too seni
or. She went into battle with Violet, whose behaviour made fissures in the structure of her world more damaging than war. There were ‘hideous rows’ when Violet tried to meet alone with Vita. She would not let her go to Long Barn unless Denys went with her. In London Violet felt incarcerated at Grosvenor Street:

  It does seem unfair that you aren’t limited and supervised like me – that you can be in the country in a lovely place and day in day out I am made to stay in the place I hate most of any place on earth.

  When separated from Vita, Violet was so miserable Denys suggested they both go and talk to Vita about it. Violet said she wanted to marry Denys in a registry office to get away from home. She asked Vita to be a witness.

  In October Mrs Keppel took her daughter to Bideford to a house party of statesmen and their wives. On the train down she berated her for the embarrassment she caused. Violet felt the tough side of ‘Chinday’ her beloved mother, whose life was unparalleled romance:

  Chinday was at her worst, at her snobbiest, at her unholiest coming down here – the things she said hurt so much, that after a time I ceased to feel them … Then an awful thought struck me: perhaps she didn’t love me after all, how was it possible to love someone and yet say such things to them? How was it possible to be so nearly related yet so utterly apart?… God, how I longed for you, Mitya … I was so completely unhappy … It’s impossible, it’s intolerable, and always the note of slight condescension that obtrudes itself on everything she says to me, as though I were her social, moral and intellectual inferior. I may be the first two but I swear I’m not the last.

  In London on Saturday 26 October, Denys returned to his regiment. He proposed to Violet at Grosvenor Street before he left but she was equivocal in her reply. Mrs Keppel was away for the weekend. Vita stayed the night then bolted round in a taxi to Harold’s parents at Cadogan Gardens before she got back. On 31 October Mrs Keppel took Violet to be photographed professionally so Denys might have a permanent image of his mascot. The appointment foiled Violet’s plan to see Vita who had the flu. She sent gardenias and an apology. She told Vita that going abroad with her was ‘the only thing that can save me from an otherwise CERTAIN FATE’.

  She applied that same day to a Mr Sidney Russell Cooke for permits and visas for her and Vita to go to Paris. He told her she must first obtain passports from the Foreign Office and Harold was the logical person to arrange this:

  As Mrs Nicolson could no doubt get a medical certificate advising her to go to the South of France after her flu & as she would no doubt require a ‘companion’ I think it would be possible to arrange the matter of the permits, but I doubt it could be done under a fortnight from the time you get the passport as there is rather a congestion of traffic.

  Violet asked Harold and he helped. It was not his nature to obstruct their plans. To Vita he said he was so busy with the prospective Paris Peace Conference he would not ‘mind much’ if she went. Mrs Keppel was agreeable as Denys would be in Paris and the ostensible point of the trip was for Violet to meet him there. She viewed with relief the prospect of her daughter out of the country and away from gossip. It was not what Violet felt or did but how her behaviour was perceived that vexed her most. ‘She says we may go abroad whenever we like, the sooner the better and for as long as we like,’ Violet wrote.

  Lady Sackville, suspicious, loathed the idea of her ‘lily of a Vita to go with such a dreadful immoral girl’. But she was busy renovating and furnishing a big house in Brighton. She wrote in her diary that Violet would shoot herself if Vita did not go. ‘It is a real case of blackmail.’ Violet, she said, could copy handwriting and would leave forged incriminating letters for the inquest.

  On 5 November Sonia had a severe asthma attack and Mrs Keppel nursed her. ‘Mama is marvellous when anyone is really ill,’ Violet told Vita. ‘So cool and calm and competent. She has not been to bed all night.’ On 7 November in London Denys was cheered as a hero by his regiment. Three days later he again asked Violet to marry him. ‘I said “no” with more emphasis than I usually do. Je t’aime, je t’aime’, she wrote to Vita.

  On 11 November Winston Churchill phoned Mrs Keppel at 9.15 in the morning with news that the Armistice was about to be signed. In Brighton Lady Sackville rang an enormous dinner bell out of an upstairs window which impressed her grandson Ben. Violet ‘went mad’ with the rest of London. She dashed to Selfridges, bought flags and with George Keppel festooned the balconies of Grosvenor Street. Then she cheered her way with the crowds down Bond Street to Trafalgar Square.

  On 13 November she accused Vita of ruining her whole life and said if they did not go away together she would marry Denys ‘in order to forget you’. On 18 November a new nanny arrived in Brighton for Vita’s sons. On 24 November Harold wrote in his diary ‘a tiresome day explaining to BM why Viti is going to France’. Two days later Violet and Vita spent the night in a hotel in Folkestone, then sailed the Channel the following day. Vita had packed her ‘Julian clothes’.

  ELEVEN

  ‘I shall never forget my joy on arriving in Paris’ Violet wrote in her autobiography. It was she said the culmination of her dreams, the happiest day of her life. France was her country, Paris her city. She liked hearing Vita talk ‘beautiful rhythmical French’. This, away from the hypocrisy of Grosvenor Street and Kent was a new life of freedom, dedicated to love, art and truth.

  She had saved from her allowance ‘in order not to arrive impecunious in Paris’. All her money came from her mother. In January 1918 Mrs Keppel had invested an additional £50,000 in war stocks for her and these yielded extra dividends. Violet and Vita stayed at 30 rue Montpensier in the Palais-Royal. The apartment belonged to Edward Knoblock, author of Kismet and himself gay, like Hugh Walpole who owned the Polperro cottage. Denys visited on Wednesday 27 November. ‘He lunched and dined with us, our guest, a casual friend, an outsider.’ His presence, Violet said, ‘was intended as a camouflage, to give Chinday, to her mind, excellent reason for my going there’.

  ‘I had never felt so free in my life’ Vita said, as she lived the role of Julian. Violet dressed as herself. They went to the opera, to a musical, The Season of Love, ate in the cafés. ‘I was madly insatiably in love with you,’ Violet wrote. At a play by Pierre Louys, The Woman and the Puppet, she ‘lay back in an abandonment of happiness and gave myself up to your scandalously indiscreet caresses in full view of the theatre’.

  ‘I shall never forget the evenings,’ Vita wrote in her 1920 Confession, ‘when we walked back slowly to our flat through the streets of Paris. When we got back to the flat the windows all used to be open on to the courtyard of the Palais-Royal and the fountains splashed below. It was all incredible – like a fairy-tale.’

  Denys returned to Belgium after a week. They moved south without telling anyone where they were. Their uncertain plan was to live the life of their novel Rebellion, to go to Monte Carlo, Ajaccio, Greece. They booked in at the Hôtel Beau Rivage, St Raphael, ‘riviera weather, palms, moonlight and the sea’, then moved on to the Hotel Bristol, Monte Carlo. ‘The weather was perfect, Monte Carlo was perfect, Violet was perfect,’ Vita wrote. It was a place of pleasure – sunshine, flowers, ornate villas, domed hotels, cliffs studded with brightly painted houses, quays filled with yachts. Over the town loomed the casino with marble steps and perfect gardens, the Temple of Chance, where they gambled their money away. They were Eve and Julian, lovers and artists, in the backstreet bars and cafés. Sometimes they stayed in bed all day.

  On Monday 16 December they caused a stir by dancing together at a thé dansant at the hotel. They left in a flurry with Vita pawning jewels to settle the bill. She wired for cash to Gerald Wellesley, Violet’s erstwhile fiancé. They moved to the Windsor Hotel, to rooms on the third floor and with a lift that was worked by ropes. One evening Violet stood at the open window with Vita. They looked down over Monaco in the setting sun, there was the sound of waves and of singing from the other side of the harbour. She thought,

  Mitya will never leave me. O Be
loved and that night we slept in each other’s arms … I feel it is so dreadfully wrong of us to attempt to conceal … There would never be a particle of happiness in my life away from you.…

  Violet extolled romantic feelings. She wanted to emulate her mother and have an equivalent love. She only obliquely realized her mother used her head far more than her heart. Letters from home pursued them and at 16 Grosvenor Street trouble brewed. On 29 November Mrs Keppel went to a dinner given by General Sir Archibald Hunter and his wife Mary. Among the guests were Lady Lowther, wife of Sir Gerard Lowther, Harold’s ambassador when he was in Constantinople, Lady Muriel Paget, Maud Cunard the society hostess, Sir Ian Hamilton, Lord Farquhar who had been lord-in-waiting to Bertie, and Harold. They had oysters, snipe, champagne, dessert, coffee and cigars. Mrs Keppel talked of her vexation with the faulty self-starter on her new car. She did not speak of her vexation at the ‘inquisitiveness’ Harold said all the guests showed as to the whereabouts of Vita and Violet.

  Two days later she phoned Harold in a fuss because she had not heard from Violet. He said he was expecting a telegram from Vita and would let her know. No telegram arrived so he did not phone. Next day George, ‘Pawpaw’ as Harold called him, phoned before breakfast to say Mrs Keppel had not slept all night worrying.

  On 5 December Harold sent an aggrieved letter for Vita to Edward Knoblock’s flat. He did not know where to get hold of her. He put the whole mess down to ‘that swine Violet who seems to addle your brain’ and accused his wife of mooning on from day to day ‘with the future in a sort of sloppy fog’. Two days later he sent another letter instructing Vita to tell Violet she was ‘not the only second string to our bow’. He had in anger started an affair with Victor Cunard, nephew of the baronet of ocean liner fame. Victor Cunard was twenty, sharp and explicitly gay. Harold stayed with him in his family’s house in Leicester then invited him to Knole. but Vita was not jealous of Harold’s affairs, only Violet’s.