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

‘rather embarrassing’, ‘like speaking a foreign language that one has known bilingually and not used for years’. The vocabulary was atrophied, locked in the past, not to be used again. Violet took Vita’s bedroom, they did not share it. The next day she lost her belongings and missed her train from Maidstone station.

In London she dined, cautiously, once or twice with Harold – on 24 February 1943 with the former Secretary of State for War, Hore-Belisha, the Princesse de Polignac and a French general who had escaped the Gestapo. ‘It was an amusing dinner,’ Harold wrote to Vita. A month later at lunch at the restaurant Boulestins he introduced her to René Massigli, French Ambassador in London. ‘She was at her most charming and gave me a bunch of violets for my buttonhole,’ Harold said. Violet phoned Vita to say she had enjoyed lunch and liked Harold very much. ‘Well the pattern of life is odd,’ Vita wrote.

She was not a siren now, nor a fox, witch, seductress or squirrel. She had no power to disturb or destroy. I wish Violet would not seek always to be amusing,’ Harold wrote to Vita:

She irritates me by repeating as her own jokes which have been made a thousand times … Violet – I tremble to say so – might become a bore. But she is a good old sort none the less.

Vita bridled. It was a choice of words that washed away the past. ‘To describe her as “a good old sort” is really the queerest choice of epithet I have ever heard.’

No one could now make Violet out. She was always on parade but eluded her audience. Marie Belloc Lowndes who in 1920 was persuasive at getting Challenge scrapped met her during the war at a weekend party at Trematon Castle, Saltash:

Violet’s maid unpacked for me beautifully. She said dolefully ‘My lady calls me “Jones”. But my name is Matilda’ – so I said ‘You shall be Matilda to me!’ Violet is 52, looks and dresses like 28 …

She is a fascinating talker and companion. To me it is extraordinary that of the many women who have spoken to me of Violet Trefusis, not one gave me even the smallest inkling of what she is like. Even as a talker she is extremely individual. I expect this irritates people for she likes ‘holding the floor’… Her love of France seems to me one of the honestly true things in her astonishing nature …

She cried when describing her flight from Paris with the Princess de Chimay. Constant heavy machine guns … They broke their flight at Milly Sutherland’s house [widow of the Duke of Sutherland], apparently deserted. But then they found her in an upper room, dressed, and with all the jewels she could put on her person, waiting for death; as a huge ammunition dump close by was to have been blown up. It was – but not before they had forced her to leave. It was the strangest narrative to which I have ever listened, and it lasted about 2 hours.

… In the middle of dinner a man rang up – she was gone a good 10 minutes – only consolation of host was that she did not make the call. She makes a great many. I do wonder who her father was. She really has la joie de vivre. I suppose that quality in her mother enchanted Edward VII.

Her mother’s joie de vivre had waned. Her back troubled her and her cough. James Lees-Milne saw her at a party of Lady Crewe’s early in 1944, hobbling round the room smoking from a long cigarette holder:

She is rather shapeless, with hunched shoulders, a long white powdered face. She was gazing with mournful eyes as though in search of something.

She wanted the war to end and old customs somehow to be restored. ‘Archie says I must keep my slippers by my bed so I don’t tread on broken glass in case of an air raid,’ she announced – this Archie being Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air. She craved the sun on the terraces at the Ombrellino, the tables of Monte Carlo, to go to Aix for a cure, to be reassured by all her bank managers. England held little for her or Violet now. For them both grand romance was dead. They needed the consolation of their villas and towers under brighter skies.

On Violet’s birthday in June 1944 her maid brought news of the liberation of Paris. In her mind’s eye Violet saw

the blue letter boxes of Paris, the undulating Art Nouveau lettering of the Métro stations … the blue blouses of the porters, the little girls with gold rings in their prematurely pierced ears, the concierge’s crocheted shawl, her fat sated cat … I heard the clang of the porte cochère, the imprecations and hootings of the taxi drivers … It was too good to be true.

In October she received the necessary visa from Gaston Palewski, then Chief of Staff to General de Gaulle. ‘My dear friend, naturally your presence is part of Paris. Respectfully yours,’ he wrote. That same month a soldier, Hamish Sinclair-Erskine, who escaped the German army and walked through Italy to the Allied lines, called on Mrs Keppel at the Ritz. He told her the Ombrellino was intact, ‘even the Chinese pagodas’.

There were restraints on the immediate resumption of pleasure. It was not discreet for a King’s lady to hurry back to an enemy country. There were currency restrictions, income tax, rationing, frozen accounts. ‘Please darling try & live cheaply,’ she wrote to Violet.

Times were not at all what they once had been, old friends were scarce, there was rationing, egalitarianism, a servant problem. Her maid, Williams, went for a month’s holiday ‘& I have a kind little fool who does not even wind my watches’. George’s valet, Pearman, was taken to hospital with a complete breakdown. ‘I don’t think he will ever come back so Papa has no one’. At Sheffield Park near Uckfield, Sussex, there was no heating