Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, Diana Souhami [the ebook reader TXT] 📗

December 1961 Vita mentioned in her daily letter to Harold ‘a slight touch of that gastric flu’. She thought it would last twenty-four hours. It lingered. She wrote of ‘tiresome tirednesses’, her tower room was cold. She was operated on for cancer but without success. Harold kept to his schedule and went down to Sissinghurst on the weekend train. In too much pain to move, she went on with their ritual of daily letters but in a faint illegible scrawl. His replies – about daily events and who he had lunch with at the Beefsteak – compounded the virtues of fortitude and loyalty and the fatal omission of a vocabulary for suffering or desire.

She died on 2 June 1962. Her body was taken to the vaults of the chapel at Knole. Harold returned the doge’s lava ring to Violet as Vita asked in her will.

‘Do you know Mitya,’ Violet had written to her in 1920,

that my only really solid and unseverable lien with the world is you, my love for you? I believe if there weren’t you I should live more and more in my own world until finally I withdrew myself inwardly altogether. I’m sure it would happen.

She found no workable alternative to that lien. She lived alone without it in her mother’s house and her fantasy castle, the terraces, statues and daunting rooms all hers. When she travelled to London she stayed at the Ritz in her mother’s world.

As she became more frail her fiancés gave way to nephews, gay young men without much money, impressed by her theatre, status and display. The writer and artist Philippe Jullian was ‘in favour and out, then in again’. Then a playwright friend of his, Jean Pierre Grédy, then an English writer, Quentin Crewe. She kept her escorts, admirers, her pretenders to the throne. Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, a retired diplomat, travelled with her and tried to please. John Phillips, a young American in Florence, was intrigued by her, cared for her, played her quasi-romantic flirtatious games.

Her health declined from 1963 on. In summer that year she again broke her hip. ‘Approaching seventy, Violet looked eighty.’ Sleep eluded her so she took barbiturates, broken bones pained her so she took analgesics. ‘With a single glass of champagne she could appear completely befuddled.’ At a New Year’s party at the Ombrellino in 1967 when the guests were assembled and the table laid with the silver-gilt sturgeon at its centrepiece, the gold-plated cutlery with the monogram of Catherine the Great, the Venetian crystal, the Meissen china, she made her entrance on the arm of her butler. Brightly rouged, glittering with diamonds, vague with drugs, she sat at the head of the table ‘on a sort of bishop’s throne’, ate nothing and said to everyone and no one, ‘I’m alone, so alone.’

She died at the Ombrellino of a malabsorption disease in March 1972. She wasted away in her mother’s bed. The funeral gathering included ‘the Florentine aristocracy and Queen Helen of Romania’. Some of her ashes were scattered on her mother’s grave in the cemetery, I Allori, near Florence. The rest were scattered below her tower at St Loup.

In her will she dispersed all the worldly goods acquired by her mother with the King’s help – an emerald here, a picture there. She gave grandly to those who were kind to her in the last years of her life: St Loup and its contents went to John Phillips, her apartment at the rue de Cherche-Midi went to her nurse who sold it to Andy Warhol. Ombrellino reverted to her sister who sold it. It became a trade centre used for official and civic functions.

As for Violet’s heart, the struggle it made, the denial it endured, she asked that it be sealed in the medieval wall of the monks’ refectory at St Loup. On the wall is a plaque, a valediction in French: ‘Violet Trefusis 1894–1972, English by birth, French at heart.’ Before she died she wrote the lines

My heart was more disgraceful, more alone

And more courageous than the world has known.

O passer-by my heart was like your own.

She chose as her epitaph, ‘She Withdrew’.

Notes

ONE

1. Wife of the Prime Minister from 1908–19: ‘She is stone white with the brown veiled eyes of an aged falcon’, Virginia Woolf wrote of her (4 June 1923).

FIVE

1. In 1995 this photograph was used by the Royal Mail on their 25p stamp – alongside the profile of Queen Elizabeth II.

ELEVEN

1. Glinka’s opera, A Life for the Tsar.

TWENTY

1. The mourning of Andromache, heroine of Homer’s Iliad, whose husband Hector was killed by Achilles.

Sources and Bibliography

Most of Violet Trefusis’s papers are at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Some, including letters from Alice Keppel and Sonia Cubitt, are with Violet’s executor, John Phillips. The Sackville/Nicolson archive is at the Lilly Library, Indiana University; other papers, including letters from Pat Dansey to Vita Sackville-West, are with Nigel Nicolson. Letters from Denys Trefusis to his sister Betty and to his uncle the Honourable John Schomberg Trefusis are with his niece, Phyllida Ellis. Published collections of letters from Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson and Virginia Woolf, are acknowledged below.

Most are collected

Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska & John Phillips, (Methuen 1989)

One thing I did

Pat Dansey to Vita, August 1921 (Nigel Nicolson)

You are going to tell

quoted in Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (Longman 1981)

I am bold enough

ibid

It is a love story

Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage (Orion Books 1992)

pernicious influence

Vita and Harold: the Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, ed. Nigel Nicolson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1992)

intolerable conduct

Nigel Nicolson to John Phillips, 31 August 1976

I wish Violet was dead

Harold to Vita, 9 September 1918, Vita and Harold

I cannot help that

Nigel Nicolson to John Phillips, 18 December 1972

I HATE the furtiveness

Violet to Vita, undated 1920 (Beinecke Library)

Part One: Queens and Heirs Apparent

ONE

There were three

The