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

There has NEVER never never in my life been any attempt at what you thought from that person. Never – He said his pride wouldn’t allow him to say more, and he particularly doesn’t want anyone to know, but O Mitya, I do swear – may I die tonight – that there has never been anything of that nature and scarcely anything of the other. I loathe having to write this, but what I told you this evening is exactly true down to the minutest detail … O my beloved, I feel there has never been sorrow or pain or suffering for me till now.

Next day she and Denys motored south on another journey to nowhere. ‘Every day L telephones to me from various provincial towns in France on her way south,’ Vita wrote, ‘and every day her voice is a little fainter.’ Violet wrote again and again on the issue of sex with Denys:

Oh my darling, my darling, you mustn’t call me faithless, you mustn’t – it’s not that. O my God, if only I could tell you the circumstances very fully of that horrible evening … It was a sort of price to pay; I don’t know, but I think he looked upon it as such too; he was never like that before, and O Mitya, it wasn’t consummated – I know how awful it is for me to tell you all this, but the reality was so very far from you – what you shrink from – if only he could have brought himself to tell you more, namely that he desisted …

She wrote to Lady Sackville saying she was heartbroken. Vita wrote too. ‘I try so hard to understand,’ Lady Sackville wrote in her diary. ‘If VT was a man I could understand. But for a woman, such a love beats me.’

Such a love beat Vita’s readers too. In Paris she received proofs of Challenge. When she returned to London, her mother, Mrs Keppel and the writer Mrs Belloc Lowndes were adamant that publication should not proceed because it would provoke gossip. ‘I can’t give it up. BM asks too much,’ Vita wrote. ‘Vita is plucky about her bitter disappointment when Mrs Lowndes told her about the scandal it would create,’ Lady Sackville wrote in her diary. Violet was disbelieving when news reached her that the book was to be pulped. It had been printed but not bound. This was another betrayal, another capitulation:

You can’t seriously mean it. It would be idiotic. The book is quite admirable. Ten times better than Heritage. Don’t relent, sigh or soften. It’s absurd, disloyal to me, and useless.

Vita told Collins, her publisher, that she was unhappy with the book’s literary quality. Her mother paid them £150 to cover costs. ‘I hope Mama is pleased,’ Vita wrote in her diary. ‘She has beaten me.’

These Mamas were hard to defy. Though their example was not always wise, nor their counsel always clear, they had power over their daughters’ lives. The book had variously been called Rebellion, Endeavour, Enchantment, Vanity, Challenge. But Conformity won the day. It, like the whole affair, was suppressed. The 999 out of every thousand need hear no whisper of noxious practices.

Life went on, in Paris, London and Long Barn. In March, Harold gave Vita a cocker spaniel for her birthday. Sonia became formally engaged to Roland. She gave him cufflinks, he gave her a ruby and diamond ring and a little diamond star to pin in her hat. Lady Ashcombe allowed them now to dine alone together and to motor unaccompanied to stay with friends.

THIRTEEN

Violet and Denys were spinning in a circle of despair. Events now had a momentum of their own. A year on from their marriage they re-enacted their honeymoon: jilted elopement, the Paris Ritz, joyless travel and separate hotel rooms, all financed by Mrs Keppel.

They alternated between rows and silence. For two days they did not speak to each other except about the luggage. ‘I would sooner be with Men Chinday or Papa than with him,’ Violet said. Denys wept, destroyed the novel he was writing and longed equally to be elsewhere.

She thought she would drive to Toulon, leave Denys and meet up with Pat Dansey. ‘Pat is a powerful ally,’ she wrote to Vita. ‘Pat will take me away. But if everything fails and you won’t come to me I must kill myself.’

At Fontainebleau Denys was ill with chest and joint pains and fever. He was breaking down. Violet told him she could not look after him, he must go to his sister Elizabeth. Mindful of the carnage of the war he said his life now was worse than anything that had gone before. At the Hôtel du Rivage, Gien, he cried at dinner then went to his room. The chauffeur went out for quinine and aspirin. Denys’s tuberculosis, undiagnosed, was exacerbated by being gassed in Flanders, endless cigarettes and the ghastliness of his emotional life. His vulnerability made Violet despise him more,

he does nothing but cry and whimper: it fills me with repulsion, and I can’t conceal it. My obsession is to get away from him côute que côute.… He has ceased to be anything but my jailor, and I look at him and think: yes, if it wasn’t for you.

If it was not for Denys, Violet liked to suppose, she would be with Vita. As they drove through France she sat in the back of the car, staring from the window, never speaking to him, urging the driver to go ever faster. ‘We crash over impossible roads, this morning we killed a dog – poor thing! After that we went faster than ever.’ They drove south via Allier, Vichy, Le Puy. On 19 February, at the Hôtel de Beaujolais in Vichy, Denys told her he hated being with her and when he had handed her over to Pat Dansey, or whoever would have her, he would extricate himself from this hell and go away for good.

At Nîmes next