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

she scorned him and spun like a moth into the flame of her obsession with Vita. She asked if he thought Vita loved her or Harold more. He shrugged, said he did not know, but that in his view Vita had shunned the elopement pact not because of Violet’s ‘infidelity’, but out of a primary commitment to Harold.

Pat Dansey did not want to be held responsible for Violet. She was going to Venice with Joan Campbell. Each year they went on long holidays financed by Joan, whose father was the fourth son of the eighth Duke of Argyll. Joan was scholarly, gentle, published volumes of verse, won the Country Life crossword several times and lived with her mother in Strachur Castle in Scotland and in Bryanston Square in London. Pat disliked the idea of Violet tagging along with her and Joan, pining for Vita. She sent telegrams and letters to Vita on Violet’s behalf, urging her to come and sort something out. ‘I am afraid this constant telegraphing is leading to bad muddles,’ she wrote. ‘What on earth you both will arrange in the future beats me.’

Violet was on her own. ‘I could not be more maligned and shunned than I am at present,’ she wrote to Vita. ‘I am really just as cut off from my family now as I would have been if I had run away with you.’ Unable to look after herself, unused to doing so and ever more distracted, she had her money stolen and lost her jewellery – frequent occurrences throughout her life. Most people, including Sonia, cut her dead. Former friends would not be seen in public with her. One received a letter from Lady Sackville saying ‘that arch-fiend Violet has been trying to upset the Nicolsons’ marriage’.

‘There is no Phoenix,’ Violet wrote to Vita. She said her contempt for compromise, her ambition to dedicate her life to Vita, art and beauty was the best part of her and it had all turned to ashes:

I am sick with longing for our old life. I don’t think we shall ever be allowed to be happy again, ever in our lives.

She and Denys had rows at the Villa Primavera. He burned Vita’s letters, she burned the book he was trying to write. He found the pact between them impossible and moved out to a hotel in Monte Carlo where his friend Nancy Cunard was staying. She had short hair, wore short skirts, frequented nightclubs, drank, danced, wrote, had an affair with Henry Crowder, a black pianist. Mrs Keppel spent her days at the casino. It was as if she was gambling for a more abstract luck than money. Denys told her he returned to the villa in the evenings but she did not believe him. Violet felt guilt at her mother’s distress. Pat Dansey wrote on 15 March:

Darling, I saw your mother in the Casino yesterday – she does look so ill – worried and sad. And she is quite miserable over the whole beastly business. Cannot anything be done to arrange things without this horrible disgrace? Won’t Denys change his mind?

Darling, I was so sorry for your mother. She does mind quite dreadfully.

Oh, Violet, what a hash you have made of things and all for one person. You fling all your real friends to the wind – not to speak of your wretched family. How often, darling, have I told you no good would come if you persisted in your downward path. I know, child, you are miserable. So are your friends …

Your mother is a brave woman and I admire the courage she displays amongst this fire of hateful gossip. She is a proud woman, and it is hateful for her.

Make Vita promise that her mother shall never tell tales to your mother.

Wanting some kind of reparation, Violet drove to St Moritz to see her mother. Mrs Keppel would not speak to her, told her she planned to go with Sonia to Spain, said she did not give a damn what Violet did provided Denys safeguarded the money she had invested in the marriage. Violet gambled flamboyantly, lost ten thousand francs in one session, five thousand in another. Her mother had managed the roles of mistress and wife with profit and style. Violet managed none of it. She saw the chaos she was in, and worst of all that Love, which she called ‘the greatest prize’ had become

a debased crippled crafty thing of furtive pleasures and false generosities, of mean impulses and starved understanding. But to my mind the worst thing of all is its flagrant, its crushing hypocrisy. Under our skilful perversion – not only ours but other people round us – cowardice becomes prudence, selfishness is called love, misleading evasions are supposed to be ‘kindness’, meanness, blindness and jealousy are all different manifestations of ‘love’. Mind you, I blame myself every bit as much as I blame you – and I blame our circumstances more than anything. It is impossible for any love to expand healthily under such circumstances … How can one make the best of anything that revolves on lies and deception?

Behind her obsession and panic she tried to keep a clarity of feeling and intention, a single-minded belief in the indivisibility of sex, love and commitment. ‘I am singularly pure, uncontaminated, and high principled,’ she wrote to Vita. ‘You will laugh but it is true.’ She was also, on her own admission, unable to see anyone else’s point of view. Pat Dansey urged her to seek reconciliation with Denys. But Violet could not extricate herself from Vita, who only sometimes answered the barrage of letters, phone calls and telegrams she received. She wrote that she was ‘not in a state to consider anything now’. For herself, she said, she ‘craved solitude’. She dwelt on Violet’s perceived infidelity:

Before I had always buoyed myself with the thought that although she might hold no other moral precept, at least she was whole-hearted and true where she did love.

In her love for Vita, Violet