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

Portrait of Zélide. On Saturday 24 November Pat received a letter from Vita saying she had fallen in love with him. This love, Vita said, was intense and spiritual and left no room for Pat.

Pat fainted when she read the letter, then sat until 5 a.m. in her sitting room with what she called a broken heart. Then she turned nasty. ‘I centralized on you for 3 solid years as my life,’ she wrote, ‘and you just shut me off bang! stranded.’ Vita was, she told her, vile, contemptuous, a coward, a bully, base and awful. God would, if he existed, one day punish her. She herself felt picked up, used and dropped. She called their three years an ‘episode’, accused her of motives of lust and money and returned such presents as Vita had given her – ‘I would sooner die than be beholden to anyone for a ½d stamp who has treated me as you have.’ She wanted the immediate return of all gifts bestowed – books, jewels, fountain pen, vases and more.

She had, she declared, always shown the greatest interest in Vita’s life, ‘your dogs, cats, garden, books, children, husband and mother!’ She had given her money and deep affection and was now on the edge of a nervous breakdown. She intended to shoot herself or jump out of a window and she asked Vita to look after her myrtle tree when she was gone. Worse, she threatened to appear at Long Barn in the small hours of the night and make a scene. Harold, she felt sure, was a just man who would discern the truth in all she had to say.

Scenes took place when Vita tried to placate her. ‘My darling,’ Pat wrote:

I do apologise for the hitting scene in the flat! I simply saw red when you talked to me of honour! I wasn’t going to have murdered you. Also sweet, let me warn you that you must never try to take a pistol away from anyone in that rough way! If it had been loaded it was bound to have gone off … I will show you the correct Daily Mail survival way of taking a pistol away from someone.

She sent reply-paid telegrams to Vita which went unanswered and she parodied Violet’s plight. ‘You have,’ wrote Pat, ‘always only considered your feelings, your wishes, your wants.’ Now, she said, she intended taking Vita to the Law Courts to ‘thrash the thing out there’. It would, she hoped, mean ‘ruination to your self and family’. She consulted a lawyer called Dixon and contrived a plan to make a public apology to Vita for having made her feel under ‘a great obligation’ toward Pat. This apology would, Pat said, rouse curiosity, require explanation from Vita and involve ‘washing much dirty linen’ in public:

I am going to tell my story. I shall tell the despicable way in which you treated me throughout, the way in which you played me off against DW [Dorothy Wellesley]. How you dropped me when it suited you. How miserable you made me and after my unhappiness you cruelly took me up again and then dropped me last summer with no fair explanation.

She threatened scandal on a scale to dwarf anything caused by Violet. She had, she said, heard from Lilly, a servant of Vita’s, that Vita and Dorothy Wellesley had been seen ‘in a very amorous position, D. with no clothes on’ and that when Dorothy acquired a black eye, Vita said she got it from walking in her sleep.

She made specious threats, tried peculiar bribes. She said the newspaper Morning Post had changed hands and she was now a principal shareholder. She offered to send her chauffeur round to Vita with £10,000 in cash, realized from these shares. Vita’s acceptance of the money would console Pat and dissipate her feelings of bitterness and hatred. Vita, disconcerted, wrote to Lord Northumberland, owner of the Morning Post, to see what was behind this convoluted story. It was, he replied, a fabrication:

She never bought any shares in the Morning Post nor sold any. I can’t imagine why she has told you this story … she has endeavoured to impose upon you in the most shameless way. I believe (but am not quite sure) that some years ago a lady of that name wrote to me in regard to anti-Bolshevik propaganda and I am informed by a friend that she was not quite right in the head.

Many women went through passion, anger, suffering in vain pursuit of Vita’s love. The strength of her pact with Harold meant lovers were marginalized and kept in place. Pat’s letters showed tense and unresolved conflict between propriety and desire. Sex – hot waves and electric needles – she maintained, as do many when jilted, should carry with it obligations of commitment.

With this idea Vita did not concur. Her sexual partners came then went – usually in anger, often with broken hearts and homes. Dorothy Wellesley’s marriage broke up in 1923. ‘I do not want to be dragged into this,’ Vita wrote to Harold, ‘either for your sake or my own. We have had quite enough of that sort of thing, haven’t we?’ Geoffrey Scott’s wife, Sybil, was ‘completely broken’ by his desertion. He gave up his job at the embassy in Rome in June 1924 telling Vita, ‘It was just one more barrier separating me from you.’ Dumped by Vita after a week or so, he was then adrift. Lady Sackville saw him at Long Barn and recorded he was ‘trembling all over’.

Harold was not threatened by this wreckage. It was Vita’s business how she behaved, he said, but he did not want to be drawn again into a ‘vortex of unhappiness’. Only Violet, ‘absolutely unscrupulous … waiting to pounce’ had the power, he believed, to do that.

All doors were closed against Violet. For a while she nudged at these then turned away. Paris was her second love. Paris had compensations. ‘I surrendered all my links with the past and began