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

was whole-hearted and true, though unrewarded for it. And it was never a ‘moral precept’ Vita held. Her sexual jealousy persisted – towards Denys and Pat Dansey – and her demand that only by sexual fidelity to her could Violet be of worth. She implied Violet was jealous of Denys being with Nancy Cunard, but Violet could not have cared less who he was with.

Vita wanted to see her but spoke no more of a shared life. When Violet became histrionic, Vita was dry and impatient. When Vita was dry and impatient, Violet became histrionic. She answered neither yes nor no to Violet’s obsession about meeting. Violet accused her of being ‘up to her old game’ of equivocation. ‘How delicious it would be’ Vita said in one taunting letter, ‘to spend a few days in Italy together.’ Her preferred option though would be for Violet to come to England, as Harold was in France, which was forbidden except in Denys’s company. ‘You have told me all along how you hated me being with DT and now you are deliberately suggesting I should return to him.’

She said Vita had played her a ‘dirty trick’. She could not tolerate the thought of going back to Grosvenor Street, ‘that poisonous Grosvenor Street, that hated, watched and restricted existence’. Her other option was to be with Denys. He had to go to England in late March to finalize his discharge from the army. She would return with him simply to see Vita,

but if ever you dare say one word of jealousy, or attempt one single row with me because owing to your own silly fault I am with Denys, I will clear out of that pestilential country and you shan’t set eyes on me again … I hate England, I hate that life with all my heart and soul. If I wasn’t such a fool as to love you as I do wild horses wouldn’t drag me there …

Never say I don’t love you, if I have to travel across Europe sitting bolt upright, to England which I detest, braving the fury of my mother, merely to catch a glimpse of you! Je t’adore …

*   *   *

At the end of March, after a six-week separation, Vita joined Violet in Avignon. Within hours they were quarrelling about commitment and its meaning. They motored to the Villa Primavera, there were rows all the way. Violet had jaundice, ‘a most unromantic complaint’ Vita said. They travelled on to Italy with Pat Dansey and Joan Campbell and there were, said Pat, ‘scenes and storms’. At San Remo Vita promised Violet, wearily and without conviction, that they would stay together:

L. [Lushka] horrible to me all day and makes me very miserable and exasperated. After dinner I lose my head and say I will stay with her. Paradise restored.

It was a hollow promise and a fetid paradise. A week later Vita told her it was all impossible. She would be followed and brought back if she tried to stay with her. ‘It is horrible,’ Vita wrote in her diary. ‘She is in the depths. So am I. I feel the Grand Canal in spite of slime and floating onions would be preferable.’

A complicity grew up between her and Pat Dansey. Ostensibly Pat was Violet’s ‘powerful ally’, a ‘saint to them both’ in their trials. But she was attracted to Vita and to the passion she inspired in Violet. She switched allegiance. ‘All through those scenes and storms at Bordighera and Venice I was working entirely on your side,’ she wrote to her some weeks later. She urged Violet to stay with Denys, asked Vita to trust and confide in her:

My dear, I worry for you as much as for Violet, more perhaps for you than for her … I would be gratified to feel you knew you could speak about anything which troubles you in tangles with Violet … all I shall ever want is to see you both happy.

After three weeks Vita returned to England. Violet, entirely distressed, wanted to stay abroad alone. Vita said she could not allow it, that she would not be safe from thieves and that they must travel back together. ‘I saw the sort of life she would lead, ranging from hotel to hotel, quite irresponsible and horribly lonely.’ By mid-April, Violet was back in Grosvenor Street. She wrote of feeling terrified. Her mother’s world closed around her: the world of Grosvenor Street, where a king might come for tea and politicians for supper, where it was as de rigueur for a daughter to have a husband as it was for husbands to shoot grouse and deer, play bridge, have titles, fields and servants. ‘In the Middle Ages,’ she wrote to Vita, ‘when people did things that the community didn’t understand they were instantly burned at the stake for being sorcerers and witches.’

The injustice of their twin positions oppressed her:

How can you expect me not to find it unjust? It’s as though two people had been caught stealing, but one is put in prison and the other is not. The one who is in prison can’t help feeling the injustice …

Vita, she saw, would not change. Sex was exciting and essential, ‘a very great force’, but she was not going to live openly with a woman. After Violet she always had women lovers. They stayed in the wings, a private matter, and did not disturb her writing, marriage, gardening, house renovation or reputation.

Violet for her part struggled alone with Vita’s equivocation and a society that required her to conceal her love. She was ostracized and panic-smitten. Her mother stayed abroad a further month with Sonia. When she returned she would not speak to Violet. George Keppel wanted Violet out of Grosvenor Street and to go there only by invitation. In letters to Vita, Violet returned to her key theme of social hypocrisy. ‘What a dreadful thing is marriage,’ she wrote:

I think it is the wickedest thing in the universe. Think of the straight, clean lives it has ruined by forcing them to