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

with desire as she thought of her. ‘I am terribly and unashamedly passionate. All the force of that passion is centred on you. I want you, I desire you … as I have never desired anyone in my life.’

Time passed, no divine intervention put matters right. The muddle swirled. Pat Dansey, attracted to them both, tried to signify in the drama. Vita’s jealousy, she told her, was making Violet’s marriage impossible. She wrote to her, demanded the return of photographs of herself she had given Violet which Vita had taken and said she planned to tell the story to the whole of London:

Unless you make an early opportunity for seeing me I shall go and see Mrs Keppel who has many times both by word and letter assured me of the good friend I have been to Violet.

At the end of May Mrs Keppel gave a ball for the impending marriage. Her old Edwardian friends were there. Denys warned Violet he might tell her mother about the ‘unnatural compact’ between them. Harold asked Vita if he should give Violet a wedding present. ‘I should like to but it may hurt her feelings. Let me know.’ Vita gave her an alabaster head of Medusa, a Renaissance copy she found in an antique shop.

By June Denys seemed silent and indifferent to his fate. ‘I think he will break it off himself,’ Violet wrote to Vita. ‘He is beastly to me and made me cry yesterday … I think he is beginning to hate me.’ And still she believed, or had to believe, that Vita would intervene, prevent the marriage and claim her as Vita said she would do.

But Vita was making other plans. On 1 June she wrote to Harold in Paris. She said she felt like a person drowning. She turned the problem over to him to solve:

V’s wedding is tomorrow fortnight and I know that there will be some disaster if I stop here. I can’t be in England or it will never take place. If I am in Paris … if need be you can keep me under lock and key … I tell you about it in order to protect myself from myself. I’m not afraid of anybody but myself. I shall do something quite irretrievable and mad if I stay in England. I shall probably try and do it even from Paris, at the last moment, but there I shall be prevented by just sheer distance.

On 3 June Denys was formally awarded the Military Cross for bravery. He was not pleased with the honour for he thought he merited better. Postwar civilian life was to tax him more than his time in the trenches. Harold replied that day to Vita’s letter,

you must come over at once and let me know by telegraph. I shall get a room for you and meet you … come at once my poor shattered Viti – and I shall be with you, and help.

Vita did not let Violet know she had reneged on their plan to elope. She told Harold she would arrive in Paris the day before the wedding so as to rule out any chance that she might return. On 9 June she wrote to him:

Violet thinks I will save her from this bloody marriage. How much astonished would you be if I did? I shouldn’t be astonished in the least. It would be great fun anyway.

It was disingenuous if Vita supposed she was easing matters for Violet by going to Paris. Violet and Denys were to go there immediately after their wedding. It was, as her biographer Victoria Glendinning said, an act of provocation for her to be there at all. But she was out of control. She seldom made demands on Harold, but here, in an incoherence of emotion, she asked him to save her from herself.

On 12 June, three days before the wedding, she told Violet she would not go away with her. Violet, terrified, looked ill and changed and implored her to think again. She said she would wait for her up to the very last minute. ‘I was,’ said Vita, ‘obdurate’. On 14 June Harold met Vita at the Gare du Nord, took her to Versailles and stayed with her the following day, a Sunday.

On Monday 16 June Violet sent her a pencilled note, ‘You have broken my heart, goodbye.’ She was then driven to St George’s Church, Hanover Square. She wore a wedding gown of old Valenciennes over chiffon. The train was gold brocade with a raised pattern of velvet flowers. Her jewellery included a pearl necklace given to her by her mother. Four children and four adult bridesmaids, including Sonia, attended her. The children were her cousins Crispian and Cecilia, Denys’s niece Phyllida Walford and David McKenna. The bridesmaids wore yellow chiffon with sashes of blue and silver and blue wreaths in their hair.

Mrs Keppel chose the wedding clothes and flowers. She wore silk chiffon in lapis-lazuli blue with ‘oriental colourings’ and long russet silk tassels and a matching hat. George arranged the transport, allocated pews, chose the music in church, the champagne for the reception. Purcell’s ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ was played before Violet arrived, the Wedding March from Lohengrin as she walked down the aisle, Dame Nellie Melba sang Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’ during the signing of the register.

Edward VII’s intimates were there: Soveral and Sir Ernest Cassel. The King and Queen gave Violet a diamond brooch bearing the royal cipher. Mrs Keppel gave her a pearl and diamond bandeau, George a gold-fitted dressing case and a writing set, the Earl and Countess of Albemarle an emerald and diamond brooch, the servants at 16 Grosvenor Street a silver inkstand. Vita sat in her room at Versailles, her watch in her hand, as the hour of the wedding ticked past. ‘All that time I knew she was expecting a pre-arranged message from me which I never sent.’

TWELVE

Violet arrived at the Paris Ritz with her husband and maid on the evening of Tuesday 17 June. Her honeymoon was to last