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

Violet fought with her mother and pleaded to be released from her marriage. On 21 July she went to bed in tears after an extravagant row:

All this will probably end in my being quite penniless, she already seems to think that I should ‘support myself’ but I won’t, no I won’t let things like being jewel-less and impecunious distress me!… I shall have to become a governess or something!! When I think that men Chinday has at least £20,000 a year.

Denys, a month into marriage, also wanted a separation. He asked Violet to try to give up Vita and burned some of Vita’s letters. His hopes for a workable relationship faded. He said if Violet went abroad with her he would sub-let the house, that her parents would have nothing further to do with her and neither would he. Moreover he was ill. He had what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder endured by many who survived the First World War. He also had symptoms of tuberculosis and needed nursing. He was advised to go to Brighton for the sea air. Pat Dansey said Violet would be ‘abysmally selfish’ if she did not go too.

‘Men Chinday’, with all her genius for society, who excelled in making people happy, needed more than discretion and charm to sort this lot out. This was incoherent feeling, emotional disaster, passion wrecking everything in its path. It needed candid scrutiny, wise disinterested counsel, intervention to avoid more pain. And Mrs Keppel had another worry. Sonia wanted to marry. She was ‘unofficially engaged’ to Roland Cubitt, heir to the Ashcombe title and to the huge building firm founded by his grandfather.

The Cubitts had built much of Belgravia, Pimlico and Eaton Square and had rebuilt Buckingham Palace. Lord and Lady Ashcombe lived at Denbies, Surrey, and were very rich. According to Denys they disapproved of Mrs Keppel’s past relationship with Edward VII and of what they knew of her elder daughter’s heart. They wanted a pretext to squash their son’s marriage. ‘Rolie’ was the fourth in a family of six boys. His three elder brothers died heroes’ deaths in the war. It mattered that he should marry well, fulfil the promise of his brothers, fly the family flag.

The driveway to Denbies was long, the furniture late Victorian, the butler old. In the hall were life-size portraits of Rolie’s dead brothers, a stained glass heraldic window and, in a glass case, part of the skeleton of a brontosaurus. Ladies wore gloves indoors and no one smoked in the drawing room or played cards on Sunday. Lady Ashcombe referred to Sonia in the third person: ‘Will the young lady have a scone?’

In the dining room, which was the size of a boardroom, hung a large Landseer painting of a horse, a mule, a donkey and a St Bernard. Lord Ashcombe held family prayers every day, was a chronic dyspeptic and carved the meat precisely. Menus, in English, stood on white china stands and followed a daily formula. Sunday lunch was roast beef, a cream pudding and cheddar cheese.

In church at eleven Lord Ashcombe wore a surplice and read the lesson. On Sunday afternoons there was tennis and tea and in the evenings jigsaws, games of patience and bed at ten. Their world was one of propriety, order, family values and time-observed rules on how life should be lived. Violet’s recalcitrance unsettled it all.

Mrs Keppel rose to action. She would hear no news of separation between Violet and Denys, forbade all mention of Vita and dismissed reference to Violet’s state of mind. When Violet was in London she did not let her out of her sight:

I see no one, Mitya, not a soul except Chinday’s friends. Pat sometimes and Loge [her name for Denys, after the fire god in Wagner’s Das Rheingold] for perhaps an hour every evening. I never go anywhere. When I am not with Chinday, who makes life Hell for me I am alone … My thoughts are past describing. I am ashamed of them … I asked Loge the other day if he would be surprised if I committed suicide and he said, ‘No, not in the least. I think it’s a very natural thing to do if one is very unhappy. If one is very wretched and making everyone else wretched it is the most decent thing one can do.’

There is something superhuman and terrifying in Loge’s indifference to all the things that most people cherish such as life etc. It is not theoretical either … O Mitya what are you making of four lives … Are you happy? Is H.N. happy? Am I happy? Is Loge happy? I expect the Moral Being is though and that apparently is all that matters.

Instead of four utterly miserable people you could have two flawlessly happy ones. The other two would be wretched for the time being, but believe me they would eventually get over it & find two worthier objects of their affection.

She might have been right. But Vita could neither commit herself to Violet nor reject her. She was never other than equivocal; ‘when you are not with me I feel and suffer uncontrollably on your account,’ she wrote to her, but ‘think what would happen if I were to lose you again – I do not think I could bear it … I could not remain with you en rocamblo [as gypsies] … and I could not let you go again.’

Violet hoped she would choose her, feared she would not. ‘Every time I see the gates of Paradise opening in front of me you close them again,’ she wrote. Vita perhaps loved Violet equally, perhaps was in an equal emotional dilemma. But she cared for Harold, was drawn to convention, felt an affinity with England, an allegiance to her class. Violet disdained convention. When Vita and Harold went to the wedding of a friend she voiced her essential scorn:

Tomorrow you will go to a charming wedding. You will blend facetiousness and sentimentality most suitably. You will be reminded