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

Vita, stooping to kiss her, jabbed her eye with a hatpin, Pat said she did not mind how many hatpins ran into her eye under similar circumstances for she was, she declared, in love.

As for the Nicolson marriage, Violet had discomfited it but no worse. Sex had found its marginal place. After Violet both Vita and Harold had affairs, she with women, he with men. These did not disrupt the form and fabric of all that made their marriage. If at times other hearts got hurt or even broken that was not a moral issue or a groundrule for change. Vita called her relationship with Harold ‘odd, strange, detached, intimate, mystical’. There was freedom in it and acceptance. She was unconcerned by his sexual relationships. He referred to the wreckage hers caused as the ‘muddles’ of his ‘little mar’. ‘I only feel that you have not got la main heureuse in dealing with married couples’ was as near as he got to criticism.

Later lovers learned their place with less display than Violet made. ‘After all,’ Harold wrote to Raymond Mortimer, ‘half a loaf is ever so much better than a whole one.’ He would, he said, like to go away with Raymond for weeks on end: ‘But I can’t and that’s the fly in the ointment.’ In December 1925 Raymond Mortimer wrote to Vita of his anxiety at not joining Harold in Teheran:

I do not remember ever having been so much disappointed over anything … everything now seems unutterably dreary … I felt childish and wanted to break things … of course the sickening thing is not to see Harold for so long. There is no one else I in the least want to go abroad with.

Vita wrote to Harold and tried to help them both.

Like Edward VII and Alice Keppel, Harold and Vita believed that the best life was marriage ‘plus liaisons’. Vita conceded a ‘smug satisfaction’ over the way they resolved what she called the claustrophobic contract of marriage. ‘It is only very, very intelligent people like us who are able to rise superior.’

Violet did not rise superior. She found it too difficult to be in love with a woman and to pretend to be married to a man. For her, marriage was a wicked sham. ‘It has ruined my life, it has ruined Denys’s … It has ruined not your life, but our happiness.’

She was the only one of Vita’s liaisons whom Harold truly loathed. ‘I do so dread that woman … I think she is the only person of whom I am frightened.’ In November 1922 when he heard she was visiting London he worried Vita might be mesmerized by that ‘panther sneaking about, waiting to pounce … and you my darling are so gullible and weak’. Vita sent him a telegram, followed it with a letter, gave him all the reassurance she could:

I curse myself for having told you she was coming to London, and so having given you even a moment’s anxiety.

Darling, my own darling, not for a million pounds would I have anything to do with V. again; I hate her for all the misery she brought upon us; so there … don’t worry, oh don’t, my little boy; word of honour, padlock [their word for ‘promise’], don’t. I wish I could convince you.

And above all, I would never have anything more to do with her; the boredom of it … and the lies … and the rows … oh no, no, NO. Even if you didn’t exist, you whom I love so fundamentally, deeply and incurably.

Oh yes, I know you will say, ‘But you loved me then, and yet you did.’ It’s quite true, I did love you, and I always loved you all through those wretched years, but you know what infatuation is, and I was mad.

So Harold as he travelled could safely write to Vita about the bonds of marriage and home:

And with it all a sense of permanence so that as you sit in your room tonight I shall think of you there, I dashing through the Île de France in a train. And I shall think of the Rodin, and the blue crocodile and the figure of St Barbara – and the London Mercury upon the stool. And it will be for both of us as if I were there, and love still hangs, as well as smoke, about the room.

… And please don’t run away with anybody without giving me time to get my aeroplane ready.

And Vita could reassure him that he was the one and only person for her in the world and give him news of the polyanthas, the roses, the chicken run, tennis court, strawberry beds and Irish yews.

FIFTEEN

‘How black is my future!’ Violet wrote to Pat Dansey. ‘I can hardly bear to think of it.’ She felt guilty and self-critical at the trouble she had caused:

I feel I am such a trial to everyone, a sort of drag on the family who are so different. Heaven knows I am trial enough to myself.

She took stock of what she described as a Greek tragedy, checked her feelings, made reparative moves toward her mother and, to salvage a vestigial social position for herself, kept the front of her marriage to Denys.

This marriage was a screen riddled with recriminations and scenes, but without it she was on her own in a foreign city. She and Denys shared what she called a ‘tiny flat’ in the rue Fourcroy but led separate lives. They made no attempt at partnership. Anti-bolshevik, absorbed in Russian counter-revolutionary politics, Denys mixed with Russian emigrés, even spoke French with a Russian accent, went to night clubs, had love affairs. Most nights Violet dined alone:

Denys would frequently ring up late in the day to say that he was not returning for dinner … I awoke to the fact that the wasp-waisted Caucasian dancers had more in common with him than I had.

When she asked if he was having an affair with a Russian model at Coco Chanel’s he said yes, he loved Ludmila, she