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

weeks. Mrs Keppel had paid for the furniture and servants. ‘I feel I ought to give her back the money. Mercifully she got it very cheap – Quelle triste farce!’

A week later Violet told Denys of her elopement plan. He asked for a meeting with Vita, who felt like a young man wanting to marry, being interviewed by the father. He was ‘very quiet and business-like and looked like death’. He asked her how much money she had to keep Violet. He and Mrs Keppel would provide nothing. He asked Violet if she wanted to renounce ‘everything’ – marriage, relationship with her family, house, income, place in society – to go away with Vita.

Violet saw that she was trapped between three perils: the life her mother had chosen for her which she did not want; the life with Vita which she had no conviction Vita would sustain, and social isolation if she chose to be alone. She did not give an answer but asked for a week to think it through.

Four days later she asked Vita if they could leave at once. Vita told Harold. He had had an abscess on his knee and was on sick leave from Paris at his parents’ house in Cadogan Gardens. He wept. His mother, Lady Carnock, who looked troubled and wispy without her false hairpiece, begged Vita to think again. ‘I felt blackened,’ Vita wrote, ‘and felt my alienation from them and my affinity with Violet so keenly that I wanted to fly where I would not pollute their purity any longer.’ So it was Violet who was black and evil. But she sent white lilac to Vita of the sort they had picked in Polperro. Vita went alone to a hotel room. The next day she told Violet she would be spending a fortnight with Harold at Knole. At the end of that time she might or might not go away with her.

In the familiar world of Knole with her children and father, no mention was made of feelings or the scarlet adventurer. When she and Harold parted they exchanged letters: ‘I know you can do anything with me,’ Vita wrote,

you can touch my heart like no one, no one, no one … and I try to make you fight for yourself, but you never will; you just say, ‘Darling Mar!’ and leave me to invent my own conviction out of your silence …

If I were you, and you were me, I would battle so hard to keep you.

And Harold replied from Paris that he missed her all the time, wanted her all the time, would despair without her, could never love or be happy with anyone else, that he could not formulate in words how much he loved her, let alone express it.

So Vita reaffirmed her family life and then, with Harold back in Paris, continued the adventure. She and Violet were to visit Lincoln because Vita was writing a book about the Fen country. From there they would cross the Channel, go to Sicily, buy a house and live together for ever. Or so Violet liked to think. Though the fantasy was wearing thin and Vita’s divided allegiance plain, she put all her desperate and disorganized hopes into this frail plan.

The night before she parted from Denys, in what she intended as a permanent separation from him, they had some kind of desperate sexual exchange. ‘It was a sort of price to pay; I don’t know, but I think he looked upon it as such too.’ The following day in South Street, Lincoln, she tried to tell Vita about it. But Vita did not want to hear. For Violet this journey was to be her allegiance to and defence of love, the flouting of marriage, convention and society’s ties. She took great risks for it. ‘Test after test is applied to my love and test after test is vanquished triumphantly,’ she wrote.

They prepared their luggage. Violet gave Vita the money she had saved for the Sicilian house. On 8 February, the evening before they left, Denys delivered a letter to Violet at their Liverpool Street hotel. In writing he advised her of the social destruction her plans would cause. Vita tried to persuade her to cancel the journey and stay with him. Violet refused.

At Dover, at Vita’s instigation, Violet went on ahead across the Channel. ‘She seemed to think he would mind that less,’ Vita wrote. Violet was afraid of making the journey alone. She had never travelled without at least the company of her maid. She was to go to Amiens and Vita would join her the following day. On shore, Vita watched the boat sail out of sight. She then booked in at the Kings Head Hotel and called for help from all those who wanted her affair with Violet to end. She sent telegrams to Harold, her mother, her father, wires that led to a rescue network.

Denys arrived soon after Violet had gone. He and Vita agreed to cross the Channel together the following day. Vita then wrote to Harold saying she had done everything she could to make Violet return to Denys:

she refused so positively; she said she would never live with him even if I did not exist. I will try to make her, I will, I will, I will; I will only see her in front of Denys and he shall see that I will try.

… O God, O God, how miserable and frightened I am - and if she refuses, he says he will never have anything to do with her again …

If she consents and goes with him I shall come to you … I want so dreadfully to be with her and I cannot bear to think of her being with him, but I shall try to make her.

How terrified she will be when she sees me arrive with him …

How worried you will be by all this …

O darling, it’s awfully lonely here.

I must write to BM [her mother] now and Dada.

By so doing Vita extricated