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

skulk and hide and intrigue and scheme, making of love a thing to be hidden and lied about … It is a wicked institution …

It has ruined my life, it has ruined Denys’s – he would give his soul never to have married. It has ruined – not your life, but our happiness …

Ever since I was a child I have loved you. Lesser loves have had greater rewards – you don’t know what you have been – what you are to me: just the force of life, just the raison d’être.

She moved with Denys into the Dower House, Sonning-on-Thames, but described the house as small, claustrophobic and haunted. Vita hated it too. ‘Hate seeing her in her own house – hate the hypocrisy of it.’ Denys told Violet he intended to please himself in all things, she had done nothing to please him, he would do nothing to please her. She feared if he left her she would be entirely alone and that if she angered him he would ‘estrange me from my mother for the rest of my days’.

Harold did not want Violet at Long Barn. Denys did not see why, if that was so, Vita should visit the Dower House. When Violet banished him so Vita could spend the night with her, he stayed at Grosvenor Street and threatened to give Mrs Keppel the reason. Vita lost the ring Violet had given her and felt miserable and superstitious about it.

She went sailing in mid-May with her father and Harold on the Sackville yacht Sumurun. ‘I can’t bear to think of you in a boat on the sea with Harold,’ Violet wrote. ‘It makes me quite frantic – the enforced intimacy.’ Harold went back to Paris and Vita booked in with Violet for two nights at a hotel in Sonning, near the Dower House.

Denys talked to Violet of killing himself. Mrs Keppel criticized him, so he kept away from her. He again wrote to her saying he wanted to end the marriage. Violet called him a ‘mercenary humbug’, accused him of saying awful things about her mother but when confronted by her ‘making up to her for all he was worth’. To Lady Sackville he said Violet was a liar, terrified of her mother, fond of money and social success. At a dance given by Lord Farquhar of Castle Rising, Kings Lynn, in June, he told Violet her mother had put a clause in her will disinheriting her unless she had a child. Mrs Keppel, he said, had willed most of her fortune to Sonia and the residue to him. In front of guests Violet called him ‘the most ill-mannered swine that ever walked the face of the earth’, asked for the key to the Dower House, which he refused her, and rushed out in her evening clothes.

She felt continually unwell, suffered palpitations, fainted at the Ritz and had all the symptoms of acute anxiety. Her doctor said she had an ‘irritable’ heart, advised rest, giving up smoking, a cure at Evian. She craved sleep in the day and at night woke bathed in sweat. On her birthday, 6 June, she received no card from Vita, no present from Denys. ‘I am twenty-six, passée, futile, pointless and – letterless.’ She still pleaded with Vita to choose: ‘You can’t do “la navette” any longer. We must have a “situation nette”.’ But she knew Vita had chosen.

Vita said their love had become ‘debased and corrupt’ and she could not trust her. Violet replied,

O Mitya, you can trust me, you must have seen what is at the bottom of everything – an incorrigible, insatiable longing to be with you – no matter where, no matter when.

In mid-July Violet had ‘a momentous interview’ at Grosvenor Street with Denys and her mother. Mrs Keppel insisted she stop seeing Vita until Sonia was married. Denys said that after that unless she lived with him as his wife ‘in the fullest sense of the term’ he would dissolve the marriage. There was a scene and Violet left the house. Vita was on holiday in the Beacon Hotel, Hindhead, longing to go home to Long Barn and peace, but Violet ‘was so distressed and seedy’ she felt she had to be with her.

There was no way out for Violet. All her relationships were in chaos. Pat Dansey said gossip had reached its pitch, no decent person would have her in the house. George Keppel maintained his refusal to speak to her and always went out of the room if she entered. He burned letters to her from Vita. Her mother wrote to say that if she tried to separate from Denys

I fear the scandal would be very great and you would be the laughing stock of the country, becoming Miss Keppel again … Even if you went for 6 months with Mrs Nicolson I could have nothing more to do with you.

Provided Violet did not go off with Vita she would agree to an annulment after Sonia’s wedding. She would have to stay away for five or six years ‘to live it down’. Mrs Keppel would take her to Jamaica and leave her there with a small allowance and Moiselle as a maid.

Violet lost all hope of continuing to live in England. ‘I know you realize how intensely and devastatingly I mind about my mother,’ she wrote to Vita:

I could not live in the same country as she was, to say nothing of Sonia, knowing that by living either with you (which would end in disaster) or near you, I will be insulting her more and more irrevocably, and making her hate me more and more each day. There is nothing to be gained and everything to lose by remaining in England.

Vita longed for peace. She wanted to go to Albania with Harold in August but Violet made such a fuss she cancelled. She finished her novel, set in Lincolnshire, The Dragon in Shallow Waters. Harold worked in Paris on the Treaty of St Germain and a biography of the