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

Oh my sweet, how I miss you … I hate them Mitya, and sometimes I hate him. I should be miserable with him. I feel trapped and desperate.

It was not a propitious start to married life. The Trefusis family had reason to ponder Violet joining their ranks.

Vita wished Denys ‘was just a stray friend and not engaged to V’. Violet hoped the engagement would sting Vita into ‘claiming’ her. ‘Living permanently with me had become an obsession in her mind’ Vita wrote. She was extravagantly jealous at the thought of Denys touching Violet, but when it came to commitment her own reality was England, family, Kent, gardens, servants and a place to work. She played a double game of colluding with the plan to run away with Violet and of reassuring Harold that love with him was the real thing.

Harold hoped for a diplomatic solution. He believed in the essential goodness of his wife. His tactics were patience and forgiveness. He preferred to negotiate terms, not talk of feelings. He told Vita he did not expect her to break with Violet but he would not allow them again to go away together for a long period. ‘You simply can’t go on sacrificing your reputation and your duty to a tragic passion.’

Such terms suited Vita, provided Violet used Denys as a decoy and had no sexual exchange with him. But for Violet it was all unworkable. Her lover was insisting on fidelity without commitment, her mother on marriage without love, her fiancé had expectations of relationship however inchoate these were. On 17 April she spent three days with Vita at Knole. Vita said it was ‘an oasis’. For Violet it opened old habits, old wounds. On 23 April Vita joined Harold in Paris and left Violet in an entirely unstable state of mind, her wedding six weeks away. ‘You don’t know, you’ll never know the loneliness that I feel,’ Violet wrote to her. ‘You’ll never know how unhappy I am. You’ll never know how intolerably I miss you.’

It would have been difficult for Vita not to know. She was in Paris a fortnight and deluged with the knowledge. It riled Violet to get letters written on Délégation Britannique paper. She was desperate at Vita being with Harold again: ‘he will say “My little Mar” [his nickname for her] and kiss the back of your neck. Tu me fais horreur Mitya, parfois tu me fais horreur. The depths of duplicity in you make my hair stand yon end.’ As Violet saw it she had given an assurance and a promise that no physical intimacy had or would take place between her and Denys and yet Vita was intimate with Harold. ‘Hadji this and Hadji that and you are strolling almost arm in arm … And I, who love you fifty times more than life, am temporarily forgotten – set aside.’

Hadji could not feel victorious. Vita was ‘terribly unhappy’ in Paris with him. He felt overworked, stale, depressed about the peace negotiations and despairing about his private life: ‘O darling I have suffered so this long dark year: have I to go through another?’ He said he was resigned to not seeing much of her in his life. He accepted that for three months in the year she should go off alone somewhere and not leave him her address. But he had seen her for only fourteen days in six months and the children had seen her less. ‘You can’t say that marriage is a bore to you or motherhood a responsibility.’ What saddened him was that she wanted to be away for even longer. He thought Violet had ‘thrown the evil eye’ on them all.

The concept of Violet the evil manipulator absolved Vita and explained everything. But in spring 1919 Vita worked in the gardens at Long Barn, was encouraged by the publication of her first novel, Heritage, which was well reviewed and knew that in the wings Harold waited: ‘All I can do,’ he wrote to her on 22 May, ‘is to love you absolutely, and understand you absolutely, and let you do whatever you like. That is easy…’

But Violet was heading for the rocks. She was filled with panic at the prospect of marriage and with self-loathing for the mess she was in and the distress she caused. She appealed to Pat Dansey to go away with her. Pat refused and said it would not make Violet love her, if she did. ‘She says I would only go on loving you,’ Violet wrote to Vita, ‘and that I would throw her over at the first opportunity, all of which is undeniably true.’

Vita told Violet she would elope with her before the wedding and that they would live together. ‘I don’t absolutely remember the process in detail,’ she wrote two years later,

but I know that I ended by consenting. After that we were both less unhappy; I could afford to see her ostensibly engaged to Denys when I knew that instead of marrying him she was coming away with me. I really intended to take her; we had every plan made. We were to go the day before the wedding – not sooner, because we thought we should be overtaken and brought back. It was of course only this looking forward which enabled me to endure the period of her engagement.

She gave consent but not commitment. At the beginning of May she wrote to Denys, insisted he not mention to Violet that she had done so, asked if he was happy and if all was well with his marriage plans and sent him a copy of her novel, Heritage. He replied from the Marlborough Club, Pall Mall:

My dear Vita

Yes, I am very happy and everything goes well – though I must admit LMG [Little Mrs George] is somewhat worrying at times to both of us – quite charming at others!

This you will readily understand! The wedding has been put off till June 16th now.

I am more than delighted to hear that one