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

On 17 March 1922 Mrs Keppel summoned Pat Dansey to lunch at 16 Grosvenor Street with an aunt of Denys’s, Daisy de Brienen and ‘two or three other old Grosvenor Street haunters’. She instructed her to arrive early, stay until all other guests had gone, then drive George to the City. The purpose of the lunch was to discuss a dinner party Mrs Keppel was to give for Denys in Paris. This was to be her ‘touching reunion’ with him, their first encounter since his defection the previous year, her public sanction of Violet’s relaunched marriage.

The party took place in April and went off ‘fearfully well much to V’s disgust,’ Pat told Vita. Denys, after a technical hitch, was again Violet’s husband. The status quo was restored. Violet, who had always loved Paris, was there, living in a smart apartment, speaking flawless idiomatic French, married to Denys Trefusis. Occasionally they ‘gave makeshift dinner parties’. Sometimes they travelled together to Amsterdam, Brittany, Venice, Monte Carlo.

Mrs Keppel’s money eased the day. She found him a remunerative office job and financed his and Violet’s move to an apartment at 7 rue Laurent Pichat in the sixteenth arrondissement. Pat’s brother Henry helped Violet find it. He said it was ‘extremely nice’. At Mrs Keppel’s request he supervised the financial arrangements. Pat retrieved Violet’s dispersed pictures, tapestries, rugs, furniture and sent them from Folkestone by van. Sonia thought such things of Violet’s as she had acquired were now hers and was annoyed at parting with them.

‘I have to go and see Mrs K.,’ Pat wrote to Vita:

Ugh! All the things that V wants she thinks may be at G. Street. So ‘will you go and ask Mama’. Why hasn’t the silly said where they were before? It would have saved endless unnecessary bother. Mama won’t want the bother of finding them.

Pat Dansey was still ostensibly Violet’s friend, ally, confidante, her link with the past. Through her Mrs Keppel kept check on her daughter’s affairs. When Violet wired Pat that she was in debt and low on funds, Pat conferred with Mrs Keppel who made the necessary transfers of cash. ‘I do hate these tangles,’ she wrote to Vita on 10 March from the flat in Bryanston Court that Joan Campbell had given her:

The part I hate most is having that old terror George Keppel here for hours on end. I do dislike it so … Darling, please treat what I have told you about V’s difficulties as private. It is all a curse but only to be expected.

Pat, courier, counsellor, go-between, reassured Mrs Keppel that she was a true friend to Violet, doing all she could to help. Violet could always rely on her, always stay with her in London. Thus Mrs Keppel was free to cruise to Greece, Italy and the East without more stigma from her daughter, more fear of scandal, bubbling back home.

Neither Mrs Keppel nor Violet knew that Pat now wrote Vita daily declarations of love on stationery stamped with her seal – a witch on a broomstick captioned ‘All Have Their Hobbies’. Nor did they know that by her bed was a framed photograph of the painting of Vita by William Strang and a copy of her poems Orchard and Vineyard inscribed ‘with love from DM’.

Violet, cuckolded again, confided to Pat her problems with Denys, his affairs, their debts, her loneliness. She longed, she said, for the old happy days when she had stayed as a young girl with Pat at Berkeley Castle. She asked if they might go there for a summer holiday:

I will go as your maid, secretary, chauffeur, anything. Alas! Alas! In any case, even if we can’t go there couldn’t we go somewhere lovely? I long for the country and peace!

‘Well! I’m damned!’ wrote Pat to Vita:

Darling, she might have second sight and have guessed you and I were planning to go to Berkeley. I suppose she would kill me with anger if she knew.

Pat was ‘fearfully careful’ to keep Vita’s letters out of sight when Violet visited. ‘I even burn the envelopes so as she should not see your handwriting.’ When Violet accused her of taking Vita’s side she denied this but next day wrote:

Darling if V was not so conceited, so wrapped up in herself, she might have guessed last night that I had more than affection for you!… O my darling DM … I simply must see you …

Vita was, Pat told her, only ‘the second person ever who has really attracted me in a way which I cannot describe’. She ‘missed her dreadfully’ when separated, was jealous she might return to Violet.

In a game of whispers and deceptions she derided Violet. To increase her own standing with Vita she implied Violet schemed and deceived in promiscuous relationships:

Surely from old days Denys knows the trick of V saying she is with me when she is not. Her falseness simply appals me … I saw Henry [her brother] in London and his description of V in Paris is positively alarming.

She stressed Violet’s impracticality. ‘All Violet’s and Denys’s things were stolen in Venice … I think we’ve heard the same story before … She’s a hopeless woman … Mrs K wrote me an awfully funny letter on the subject…’ She let Vita know when Violet travelled to Munich with Gerald Berners and someone referred to only as ‘M’. She told her when Violet asked to borrow £100. ‘I am sure it is blackmail money … If it was bills she would tell me I think. It is probably blackmail to do with M.’

She had, she said, received from Rebecca West a letter about Violet ‘too dangerous to send through the post’.

She bought Vita a Burberry mackintosh, sent her crates of Mumm Cordon Rouge, said she had seen ‘such a nice Daimler’ coupé she was ‘crazy to get’ for her, told her to order – on her account – anything she wanted for the Long Barn garden, flattered her writing talent, ‘you can