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

in bed. She disliked not being the centre of attention and parting with her daughter made her ill.

She had had a difficult year. Seery died in January 1912. She was waiting for him at Spealls, the interior design shop in South Audley Street which she managed, erratically, for a few years. He was going to take her to lunch. She had told him to bring a bottle of port wine for one of the staff who was ill. Instead he had a massive heart attack. He left her £150,000 in cash, the contents of 2 rue Lafitte estimated at £350,000, and valuable antiques, jewels and artworks. His relatives went to court alleging she had mesmerized him and exerted ‘undue influence’. She was defended by Sir Edward Carson, famous for his prosecution of Oscar Wilde. Mr F.E. Smith – later Lord Birkenhead defended the Scott family. Lady Sackville knew him socially and with her inimitable capacity for intervention wrote to him before the case:

19 June 1913

Dear Mr Smith

I hear that Mr Malcolm Scott has approached you on the subject of attacking me and my husband and my daughter in his iniquitous suit, coming next week.

I can’t believe that you would let yourself be mixed up in this painful affair when you and I meet among our friends in society and I meet your wife often too.

The whole Defence put forward by Mr Scott is a tissue of falsehoods against a woman who has behaved well all her life and tried to help saving one of the finest places in England.

I do hope you will think over the undeserved pain you will give so unnecessarily …

    Yours sincerely

            V. Sackville

I swear on my honour that I have never influenced Sir J. over his will, except to leave us much less than he intended and that I have never seen or destroyed any signed Codicil.

She won and made a friend of the judge, Sir Samuel Evans. Summing up he called her a lady of high mettle, ‘very high mettle indeed’. She sold the contents of 2 rue Lafitte (though Seery had hoped these works of art would enrich Knole) and in the year of Vita’s marriage spent money wildly. ‘How she flung money about that year … It was almost terrifying to go out shopping with her,’ Vita wrote. She invested £60,000 in the goldmine of a Canadian whom she met on a train. Walking down Bond Street she saw in a jeweller’s window a chain of emeralds and diamonds and bought it for Vita. Her victory made Lady Sackville very rich, but it was a public humiliation for her husband, who turned to his lover, Olive Rubens.

For Vita marriage to Harold was supportive, companionable, calm. His background was not exotic like hers and he had no money other than what he earned. Born in Teheran in 1886, the third son of a Scottish diplomat, Sir Arthur Nicolson, and Catherine Rowan Hamilton, he spent his childhood in embassies and legations in Constantinople, Tangier, Madrid, St Petersburg. He went to Wellington College and Balliol, Oxford, and in 1909 joined the Foreign Office.

He was, Vita said, ‘a merry angel’, enthusiastic, intelligent, jokey, avoiding of confrontation. Mild disdain for Americans, Jews and the middle class and a dislike of women, left him easy and charming in the company of aristocratic men. He admired and adored Vita but preferred to write of emotion not show it.

They honeymooned in Italy and Egypt, then sailed to Constantinople where he was third secretary at the British Embassy. She was homesick for Knole and Rosamund, but life was new and happy. By December she was pregnant. The following June war loomed and Harold was recalled to England:

I remember a divine voyage by sea from Constantinople to Marseilles, through the Aegean, a second honeymoon. We met Mother in Paris and both thought that she was going off her head, as she was obviously in an extraordinarily unbalanced state of mind. Then we went to Knole. War was declared on the 4th of August and Ben was born on the 6th. Scenes immediately began with mother over his name.

Lady Sackville was having a difficult menopause. Excluded by Vita’s harmonious family life, she marginalized Harold, was disparaging about his parents and tried to claim the new child by insisting he be called Lionel. She filled Harold with dread. Four years later, he felt equal loathing for Violet whom he thought resembled her. Emotionally manipulative women who claimed Vita made him venomous:

Everything in me cries out in loathing of BM [Bonne Maman], of her vain empty insincere nature – and I get hot with shame to think that I have allowed myself to pander to her vanity, to adulate her emptiness and to abet her insincerity.

Vita and he moved out of Knole. BM’s money bought them 182 Ebury Place in Pimlico, rebuilt by Edwin Lutyens. Her money too bought them, a year later, Long Barn, a Tudor house two miles from Knole, a Rolls-Royce to get them between the two places, and then the adjacent property, Brook Farm and the surrounding fields.

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In the summer of 1914 Mrs Keppel and Violet went again to Clingendaal near The Hague. It belonged to Daisy, Baroness de Brienen, who inherited it from her father. He had no sons and willed it to whichever of his daughters did not marry. Daisy de Brienen wore nautical suits, shirts, collars, ties and round her neck a pearl chain with a whistle to call her dogs.

Clingendaal spanned a canal, had rose-garlanded bridges, stables, carnation houses, a Japanese garden and an observatory. Mrs Keppel and Daisy de Brienen shared the expense of elaborate summer holidays there. Guests travelled out by night ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. Cars were sent to meet them and bring them back in time for breakfast. They ate at a long table laid with embroidered linen and oriental china. There was bacon, eggs, grilled kidneys, devilled chicken, cold ham and galantine, freshly made rolls, pyramids of fruit. Footmen in tail