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

Violet, dispossessed, was back in the land where she had always been unhappy. She described herself as ‘fundamentally sad and homesick’, bereaved at being separated from her tower, language, country. ‘People were very kind; they forebore from questioning me; it was as though I was in mourning for an unmentionable relation.’

She stayed first at Pat Dansey’s London flat then moved to Coker Court in Yeovil, Somerset, home of Dorothy Heneage. Dorothy, in her sixties, lived with an older companion, Miss Darnell, in a regulated atmosphere of fastidious habits, antique furniture, Persian rugs, views of mature gardens. Violet was given the room she first stayed in when she was seventeen. She was grateful but claustrophobic, called life at Coker Court a ‘rehearsal of old age’ and herself ‘a cosmopolissonne if ever there was one’.

She and Vita made contact again. ‘Curious how war has drawn the strands of our lives together again,’ Vita wrote:

I was so worried about you when France collapsed; I couldn’t bear to think of you in danger and distress. One travels far, only to come round to the old starting point. I realised then that we might still be sitting on the leather fire-seat at 30 Portman Square, when I went home to Hill Street saying to myself ‘I have a friend. I have a friend.’ And thousands of other things as well.

She wrote seductively of Sissinghurst, white owls flying across the orange moon, her garden of green vistas, her pink tower and less seductively of constant air raids and bombs. She wanted Violet to visit but was afraid she would find it painful ‘since, as you say, I believe my tower must have some affinity with yours’.

Violet equivocated, turned down the offered dates, agreed to Wednesday 28 August 1940 then phoned without notice to say she had to be in London with her mother and to rearrange for the 31st. ‘I am quite absurdly pleased at the thought of your coming here’ Vita wrote – while telling Harold she devoutly hoped Violet would not come. She prepared the scene, put out gramophone records they once played together. Violet again cancelled at the last minute and said she was going back to Coker Court. Vita was both disappointed, ‘a real disappointment’, and relieved:

The very sound of your voice on the telephone upsets me. I loved you and I think you loved me. Quite apart from our three years of passionate love affair we had years and years of childhood love and friendship behind us … It makes you dear to me. It makes me dear to you …

We have loved each other too deeply for too many years and we must not play with fire again. We both upset the other’s life, we mustn’t do that again.

She hoped Violet would come another time, ‘yet in a way I don’t want you to come’. Both were afraid. Violet, more self-protecting now, hoped to meet on neutral ground, a village in Somerset perhaps. She did not want to arrive at Sissinghurst, dispossessed of her tower, language, friends and way of life. It had always seemed that Vita kept her world intact while she was stripped of hers.

Vita was rooted in her Kent home, ‘How horrible towns are … they all seem to me a mad system of life,’ more hating of confrontation, cautious with her lesbian affairs, careful never to distress Harold who had proved such a permanent support. She asked nothing from him that she knew he could not give, did not complain if troubled or in pain.

She and Violet delayed meeting, circumvented, cancelled. They wrote letters of affection – for those at least were safe. They used their old romantic sobriquets Mitya and Lushka, remembered the gardens at Carcassone, the owls at Duntreath. In October Violet heard St Loup was occupied by German soldiers. Pity me a little, she asked Vita in French. ‘I mind for you more than you will believe,’ Vita replied. ‘I translate it into terms of my own tower and can’t imagine anything more grievous.’

After twenty years of silence and four months of circumvention they met for lunch at the Red Lion in Pulborough, Sussex, on Thursday 15 December. As ever despite their towers and castles, they had no place to go.

Violet was forty-six, Vita forty-eight. It was a quest for the past. They said that interim loves had been ephemeral. Violet tried to pick up their love despite its corrosion by time. It had, she said, two dimensions, ‘the Greek tragedy sort and the childhood friendship sort’. That evening Vita stayed with an aunt nearby and wrote to Violet of their meeting. She had felt as though ‘the wings of the past’ were beating around her:

Yes it was good to see you – and the absurd happiness of having you beside me in the car – even the sudden pain of saying goodbye to you was vivifying … I told you I was frightened of you. That’s true. I don’t want to fall in love with you all over again, or to become involved with you in a way that would complicate my life as I have now arranged it. I definitely don’t want to become involved in the intrigues which ‘an affair’ with you would entail. Besides, it wouldn’t be just ‘an affair’. It would be a resumption of what you rightly call a Greek tragedy and I don’t want that …

We simply couldn’t have this nice, simple, naif, childish connexion without it turning into a passionate love affair again … You and I can’t be together. I go down country lanes and I meet a notice saying ‘Beware unexploded bomb’ so I have to go round another way. The unexploded bomb is you, Lushka.

It was a love letter that belonged to the past, an echoed renunciation, fair because Vita knew that life as she had ‘arranged it’ excluded Violet, sad because of passion denied, unfair because Violet was not an unexploded bomb or a fox or witch,