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

are so middle class, not at all what you and me are used to. But as I said that is not what I complain about. What I do mind is your taking all our carpenters from us. I quite see that you must send my dear Lionel to Gallipoli; and he would be very cross with me if he knew I had written to you. Of course all the gentlemen must go. There is noblesse oblige isn’t there? And you and I know that – we must give an example. You are at the War Office and have got to neglect your dear Boome which you love so much. I think you love it as much as I love Knole? And of course you must love it even more because the world says you have never loved any woman – is that true? I shall ask you next time I come to luncheon with you. But talking about luncheon reminds me of parlourmaids and I said I would not complain about them (because I am patriotic after all), but I do complain about the way you take our workmen from us. Do you not realise, my dear Lord K, that you are ruining houses like ours? After all there is Hatfield where Queen Elizabeth spent her time as a young princess, and that is historic too, just like Knole, and I am sure Lord Salisbury would tell you he was having frightful difficulties in keeping Hatfield going, just as we are having in keeping Knole. What can you do about it? It seems to me a national duty, just as important for us as keeping up the army and our splendid troop. I do admire them so much. Do help me all you can.

She briefly offered Knole as a hospital ward but when five Belgians were assigned to her decided they were spies in German pay and that Knole would be bombed. She contacted the local police and had them taken away.

Violet visited Long Barn and mocked the cosiness of the Tudor architecture – low ceilings, small leaded window panes, oak beams, sloping floors. Excluded and betrayed by Vita’s family life she denigrated it if she could. Here, married and committed to a man, was the girl to whom she had sworn to stay true, declared her love and given the doge’s ring. In June 1917, when Harold phoned her to say Vita could not go to a party, Violet ‘was so disappointed’. But she jumped at his suggestion that he should not go either. ‘Damn that little too too,’ he wrote to Vita, ‘it hates me and misses no opportunity of letting me down.’

That summer Violet formed a new friendship. Pat Dansey lived with her elderly uncle Lord Fitzhardinge ‘a crochety ogre’ in Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire, a medieval castle dating back to 1153. She weighed seven stone, had dark hair, a brittle manner and a stutter. Violet intrigued her by confiding her love of Vita. She invited Violet to the castle, allocated her the Blue Room, showed her the dungeon where Edward II was murdered, told her of how when young she would sit like a mouse in the Great Hall listening to her uncle and his cronies in their evening hunt clothes talking about vintage wines and playing whist. Violet liked the grandeur of Berkeley and its haunting sense of the past. Pat had formed a relationship with the Duke of Argyll’s granddaughter, Joan Campbell. This relationship was to last a lifetime and took on the closeness of marriage. But it did not preclude Pat’s interest in other women. She told Violet that she loved her and gave her photographs of herself. ‘I used to invent the most erotic pastimes to appeal to her taste,’ she said to Vita in later years.

PART TWO

Portrait of a Lesbian Affair

TEN

Mrs Keppel and her daughters moved as guests from stately home to country house as the war went its way. In April 1916 they were at Cassel’s seaside home at Branksome Dene, Bournemouth – ‘all chintz and white paint’, sea breezes and games of piquet. He was there with his sister and granddaughter Edwina – who in 1922 married Queen Victoria’s grandson, Louis Mountbatten. His only daughter Maudie had died in 1911.

Despite the ‘old undercurrent’ Violet’s meetings with Vita were of the social sort appropriate to good friends. In March 1917 they went to a matinée at the Garrick theatre, in May they saw the Russian exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, in September Violet stayed at Long Barn and they went for walks together.

In October Violet and her mother were at Coker Court near Yeovil, Somerset, a Tudor house owned by Dorothy Heneage who was rich, hypochondriacal and sympathetic to Violet. From her Violet heard that Vita intended renting out her Ebury Street house for the winter. She feared if that was so they would meet infrequently:

I simply can’t get on without a periodical glimpse of radiant domesticity and you will become smug to an intolerable degree if the vagabond – what Dorothy calls ‘rackety’ – element as supplied by me, is indefinitely withheld from you. We mustn’t let it happen. We are absolutely essential to one another, at least in my eyes!

She had she said ‘a sudden craving’ for Vita’s company. Her letter was at Lady Sackville’s Hill Street house when Vita returned with Harold from a weekend at Knebworth, Hertfordshire, the country estate of Lord Lytton, Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty. Guests included the portrait painter Sir John Lavery, Sir Edward Marsh MP, Sir Horace Rumbold, Ambassador to Switzerland, Sir Louis Mallet, Ambassador to Turkey, and Osbert Sitwell.

The following week Harold sought treatment for a venereal infection caught from a male guest. From the Foreign Office he wrote to Vita in anxiety and distress. He warned if he had passed it to her she would need treatment. He feared they might have ‘a bloody time ahead’. The implication was that they had had sex together after he