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

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