Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter by Diana Souhami (recommended books to read TXT) 📕

her head, seemed mesmerized by the cars and stood in their path. In Sonia’s account:

The chauffeur sounded his horn. The next thing I remember was a bump, and then fruit from the basket flew all over the road … Then the crowd began to scream … Dimly, I sensed that we had killed the poor old woman … A native policeman appeared, and Watty towered over him, quietly answering his excited questions. Mama and Uncle Archie stood beside him while the villagers crowded round vociferously. Eventually the legal points appeared to be settled. And evidently Mama’s generosity placated the old woman’s relations. Like an old rag-doll I saw her carried limply away.

Though life with all its joys had come to a full stop, charm and money had its way.

*   *   *

Two days after Violet left for the East and five days after warning her to be faithful while she was away, Vita wrote a letter, on 5 November 1910, from Knole to Harold Nicolson:

My dear Harold

I have been asked to ‘ask a man’ to dine on Thursday with Mrs Harold Pearson and go to a dance, so would you like to come? I promise you shan’t be made to dance! I think it might be rather amusing.

She told him to let her know as soon as possible or ‘better still’ to come to tea with her and the Rubens lady.

In the winter she had a persistent chest infection and her mother sent her to the south of France to recuperate in the sun. She stayed in the Château Malet outside Monte Carlo. Rosamund and Harold stayed too. Violet wrote exotic letters evoking the Orient and the Thousand and One Nights. She wrote of pawpaws for breakfast, lagoons girded by nutmeg trees, swaying bamboo, purple orchids, camphor trees, white peacocks, the jungle, mountains, starry skies and weary oxen with bloodshot eyes, ‘a vermilion land, enamoured of light, drunk by sunshine…’

But behind the endeavoured seduction she was disquieted as she scanned Vita’s letters – less frequent than her own and half the length – for proof of fidelity or signs of betrayal: ‘Do try not to get married before I return,’ she asked her on 4 December 1910.

And though Vita spared the details, clues were there. They gave some inkling of Harold ‘so fresh, so intellectual, so unphysical’ whom Vita liked better than anyone as a companion and playfellow, and for his brain and ‘delicious disposition’. It was enough for Violet to write on 12 December without embellishment, some ten days after she arrived at Dambatenne that as she read, again and again, Vita’s latest letter, ‘a sort of heavy anguish’, an ‘apprehension’ made her heart beat fast and her hand tremble. In French, her language of the heart, she voiced fear:

For the first time your two extra years seem to me so real, arrogant, sinister. Don’t think I haven’t anticipated it. I’ve often thought of it. Oh God, tell me I’m wrong – carried away by my fiendish imagination.

After all, I’m hardly a woman. I ought to have known that at your age you’d have a liaison with a man. I’d be wise to accept this. I feel I’m about to say inappropriate things. Don’t laugh. Promise you won’t laugh. For so long I’ve asked nothing of you, so grant me that. It would hurt so.

Violet did not enjoy the trip to Ceylon. In her memoirs she described it as ‘a completely irrelevant interlude’. She was there not to learn a smattering of Tamil, but because it suited her mother. It was discreet for the previous King’s mistress to absent herself from London society while changes took place at the Palace. For Mrs Keppel travel was a compensatory way of putting Biarritz, Portman Square and her now uncertain social position behind her. She intended to be away for more than a year and so her daughters must be away too.

Violet suffered the heat and spicy food and felt herself ‘essentially an occidental’. She liked, she said, hints of the Orient – as in Bucharest, Sicily and southern Spain – but ‘the unmitigated East disturbs’. She spent the time in ‘a mood of settled melancholy’, bought a ruby for Vita but sensed she was losing her. ‘What a bitch you are!’ she wrote on 2 January 1911. ‘Do you know that you have ceased to be a reality for me?’

Mrs Keppel’s days at Dambatenne were spent lazing on divans. The heat was intense. Archie got migraines. Ida embroidered. Nannie, fractious, quarrelled with Moiselle and was shocked by the bare breasts of the women who picked tea. A house snake kept to catch mice terrified Sonia. One lunchtime a servant walked through the dining room with chamber pots stacked on his head. It was not Grosvenor Street, the Villa Eugénie or Portman Square.

They had picnics in the hills and admired the unfamiliar sight of monkeys, parrots and hummingbirds in the wild. They visited the buried city at Anuradhapura. The day after Violet wrote her premonitory letter to Vita they went into the jungle at Nuwara Eliya with rifles, huge nets, wading boots and cameras for big game hunting. It was the kind of trip Kingy passionately loved. ‘I hope terribly they won’t force me to participate,’ Violet wrote to Vita. ‘Those enormous beasts all bleeding – pouah! It makes one shudder!’

In February Mrs Keppel, her beloved Archie and his family sailed for China. Violet and Sonia, accompanied by Moiselle and the nanny, were despatched to Munich. Violet was nearly seventeen, Sonia ten. At Colombo they said goodbye to their mother whom they would not see for many months. ‘The parting with Mama was terrible,’ Sonia wrote.

At San Remo they were reunited with George Keppel for a few days. Violet met up with Vita who was still at the Monte Carlo villa. ‘I remember admiring to myself the thick plait of her really beautiful hair,’ Vita wrote. Violet gave her the ruby she had bought her. She did not waver from her love of Europe, its languages and culture,