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

or talk of other things. She put it to Vita that the truthful path was for them to be open about their love and to go away together:

What sort of life can we lead now? Yours an infamous and degrading lie to the world, officially bound to someone you don’t care for … I, not caring a damn for anyone but you … condemned to leading a futile purposeless existence which no longer holds the smallest attraction for me …

Together they began writing a romantic novel about their love and the conflict between passion and marriage. They called it Rebellion though it was eventually published as Challenge. Its central evasion was that the lovers were of different sex. Vita was Julian, ‘a tall, loose-limbed boy, untidy, graceful’, at heart responsible and sensible, but ‘flushed with the spirit of adventure, the prerogative of youth’. Violet was Eve, older, wilier and burdened with the ‘female’ temperament: jealous, untrustworthy, vain, coquettish, wickedly irresistible, ‘all things seductive and insinuating’,

the provocative aloofness of her self-possession, the warm roundness of her throat and arms, the little moue at the corner of her mouth, her little graceful hands and white skin … the pervading sensuousness that glowed from her … the marvellous organ of her voice … a dusky voice.

Eve is a cross between Alice Keppel and Carmen. Julian cannot help himself …

his fingers moulded themselves lingeringly round her throat; she slipped still lower within the circle of his arm and his hand almost involuntarily trembled over the softness of her breast.

It was all Mills and Boon except of course that they were Vita’s fingers and arm and Violet’s throat and breast.

Rebellion was principally Vita’s book though Violet contributed. They added to it each day throughout the summer of 1918 from letters and notes. In it, Vita showed admiration for Violet and sympathy for the bravado of her social manner. Only Julian knows the real Eve … knows her ‘like his sister’. Witch though she is, he prefers her company to any in the world:

Her humour, her audacity, the width of her range, the picturesequeness of her phraseology, her endless inventiveness, her subtle undercurrent of the personal … He knew that his life had been enriched and coloured by her presence in it; that it would, at any moment, have become a poorer, a grayer, a less magical thing through the loss of her.

… Her frivolity is a mask. Her instincts alone are deep; how deep it frightens me to think. She is an artist, although she may never produce art. She lives in a world of her own with its own code of morals and values. The Eve that we all know is a sham, the product of her own pride and humour. She is laughing at us all. The Eve we know is entertaining, cynical, selfish, unscrupulous. The real Eve is … a rebel and an idealist.

Her idealism takes the shape of unswerving love and adulation of Julian/Vita:

I have believed in you since I was a child; believed in you as something Olympian … I have crushed down the vision of life with you, but always it has remained at the back of my mind, so wide, so open, a life so free and so full of music and beauty.

It was difficult for Eve’s prototype to live in the real world. On 14 August she lunched with Pat Dansey, ‘broke down and sobbed her heart out’. Pat reacted vicariously to her story, absorbed its details, offered to help. Next day Violet went with her mother to Clovelly Court, Devonshire. As ever she was not permitted to remain at Grosvenor Street alone. Mrs Keppel, star guest at Clovelly, was ‘so marvellously witful that I could forgive her anything,’ Violet wrote: ‘She is a clever woman. I do admire her.’

Romance for Mrs Keppel, ‘Chinday’ as Violet and Vita called her in their Romany language, was strategic work. She meant to squeeze the lesbian version of it out of her daughter’s life. Gossip was rife and Violet unrepentant. Pained when she did not receive letters from Vita, obsessed with the when and where of their next meeting, she stayed aloof from other social exchange. There were rows when Chinday found her writing to Vita. Violet spoke of her mother’s ‘brutal and heartless treatment’. At Clovelly guests asked why she put up with it. ‘God knows I feel too despondent to take any steps.’

‘I hate lies,’ she wrote to Vita. ‘I am so fed up with lies’ She referred to promises Vita had made and hoped she was summoning courage to tell Harold his marriage was over and to go away with her for good:

How right you were when you said we were made for one another … What a perfect life we could have together & have had together (for a fortnight).

She was herself uncompromising:

And the supreme truth is this: I can never be happy without you … You are the grande passion of my life. How gladly would I sacrifice everything to you – family, friends, fortune, EVERYTHING.

Which was not what her mother would have her do. Violet wanted equivalent sacrifice in return. On 25 August she wrote to Vita of how she wanted her ‘hungrily, frenziedly, passionately’ – and exclusively:

I want you for my own … I want to go away with you. I must and will and damn the world and damn the consequences and anyone had better look out for themselves who dares to become an obstacle in my path.

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