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

of your own – damn you – and of mine – damn me. Somebody will say ‘Ah six years ago’ – damn him …

Darling, I wonder if you noticed the parson scratching his head the whole time as though a fly kept tickling it? I wonder if you saw the bridegroom trip as he was walking down the aisle? I wonder if you saw the choir boys titter and I wonder if you heard the organ play a few bars of its own accord in the middle of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March? Did you? Did you?

Because I tickled the parson’s head, I gave the bridegroom a push, I made the choir boys giggle, I played the few bars and I even tweaked the Lady Alberta’s nose and snatched away her hassock just as she was about to sit down on it.

That was what she thought of marriage – the King’s, her mother’s, Vita’s and her own. It was an institution of deception, a meretricious parade, a declaration of status. What mattered was true love through whatever door it came.

But she was isolated by her rebellion, in her rented manor house in Sussex; sustained only by Vita’s letters and visits and their scrambled plans again to run away. She spoke of herself as ‘dumped down in a jungle of entirely foreign and soul-shattering emotions and left to cope with them alone’.

She and Vita planned to leave England on 19 October for their next escape. Denys began not to care where Violet was or with whom. He simply wanted to know when she was going so as to arrange his own affairs. They saw each other only at meals:

I had another frightful row with D. I haven’t seen him since. He went to London this morning without saying goodbye. I am a pig to him. If I were him I would never come back. If only you could come here today.

She told him she would never care for him, criticized his appearance, was glad when he was unable to get leave from the army.

Harold, in Paris, had a new lover, the couturier Edward Molyneux – twenty-seven, good-looking, with a shop in the rue Royale and a smart flat at the Rond Point. Vita told her mother, who kept no secrets, of Harold’s inadequacies as her lover and of how there was now no sex between them.

On 17 October, two days before they went away again, Violet asked Vita to weigh her own intentions:

I can’t impress upon you sufficiently that this time it is more in the nature of a tragic undertaking than an adventure (like last year). And once again I must absolutely implore you not to go unless you are unmovably sure. Think over it very seriously and weigh everything in your mind … This time you would absolutely do me in and I swear I don’t deserve it at your hands.

Vita was not unmovably sure. The day she left for Paris with Violet, she wrote to Harold that she loved him ‘immutably, sacredly and rootedly’, nothing in the world could ever alter her love for him: he, the house, the children were all she loved best.

For two months she left all she loved best. She and Violet went again to Paris and Monte Carlo and lived the life of cafés, theatres, of Julian and Eve. They had the same rooms at the Windsor Hotel, the view of the harbour, the liberation from the expectations of home, the same sense of being happy.

It was difficult to dismiss their relationship as a torrid affair. They had loved each other for more than a decade. But in London Harold squirmed when he heard his sexual intimacies turned to gossip and more reports of Julian and Eve. ‘It drives me from the haunts of man and woman,’ he wrote, and was glad to get back to Paris. He spoke both of divorce and of forgiving Vita everything.

Mrs Keppel was angry with Denys. Violet was his responsibility. She bought a house for them called Stonewall Cottage, at Langton Green, Tunbridge Wells, fifteen miles from Long Barn. She directed that when Denys got leave, on 15 December, he should go to the South of France, collect Violet, take her to this cottage and keep her there.

Violet wanted to leave him stranded on the Riviera and flee with Vita to Greece, Africa, anywhere. Vita would not do this. She said she must sort matters out with Harold. When that was done in six weeks’ time, at the beginning of February 1920, she and Violet would elope together for real and start their new life, the choice made, the wavering over.

But to Harold she wrote on 5 December that, though it was impossible for her to have sex with him, she loved him so deeply it could not be uprooted by this other love, ‘more tempestuous and altogether on a different plane’. The whole thing was, she said, the most awful tragedy. A ‘very great force’ had made her risk going away with Violet, she could not bear to think of her as married to Denys, but she was going to give her up ‘for ever’.

‘Vita is back with her hair short,’ Lady Sackville wrote in her diary on 18 December:

… I said nothing as she looked lovely all the same, and I was glad to have her back. She has been so nice to Harold all day and stayed with him all the time. She told me of her gambling in Monte Carlo and we hardly talked of VT. She does not look a bit sad, which surprises me.

Vita returned to Long Barn, to finding a new governess for her children and to seeing her publisher, Collins, about the publication of Challenge.

Violet spent Christmas at Crichel and Polesden Lacey with her husband and mother. On 6 January, sustained by the secret plan to fly away with Vita at the beginning of February, she moved with Denys into Stonewall Cottage. She felt guilty at the thought of only being there three