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

mother fired her English governess Miss Ainslie and hired Hélène Claissac. Moiselle, as Violet called her, came from Paris and suggested a life other than seduction, entertaining and bridge. A Republican, she was, Violet said,

my first (and salutary) contact with French intellectual integrity, so remote from the breathy beatitudes Miss Ainslie would exhale over some cliché attributed to a member of the Royal Family.

She ‘did not give a fig for riches, rank, renown’. Introduced to Bertie, she shook his hand. He responded with ‘a Gallic kiss’.

In spring 1905 Portman Square was redecorated. Sonia went to the Alingtons at Crichel, which she hated. Violet, aged ten, went to Paris for three weeks with Moiselle, Aunt Jessie and Hornsby, a manservant.

She kept a diary which later she annotated and gave to Vita Sackville-West. She stayed in the Hotel Belmont, ate in its restaurant, met in the day with Moiselle’s niece Germaine. She walked in the Champs-Elysées ‘it was too lovely, all the horse-chestnut trees were out and smelt so nice’, in the Bois de Boulogne, the Jardin d’Acclimatation, the Jardin des Plantes where Bertie as Prince of Wales had propositioned whores. She visited Nôtre-Dame, the Louvre, Napoleon’s tomb, the Musée de Luxembourg, the Musée de Cluny, the Musée Carnavalet, the Panthéon. She climbed the Arc de Triomphe, bought hats and hairpins in the Bon Marché, ate chocolate eclairs, drank iced lemonade at Rumpelmayer’s and was given a privileged view of the visit of the King of Spain. This Paris visit was a liberation, a relationship to a place where she felt she belonged. She determined to live there one day and to speak French without accent.

But the city was not entirely hers. Mother crossed the Channel to be with the King. Bertie was there to affirm England’s allegiance to France and dissociate himself from his nephew the Kaiser’s claims to ‘world-wide domination by the Hohenzollerns’. Mrs Keppel stayed again at 2 rue du Cirque. She swept into Violet’s life, bought dresses for her, took her to Fontainebleau and told her how the Empress Eugénie had asked to meet her and shown her the pen with which Napoleon I signed the Act of Abdication, which was not the pen shown to tourists. She wove a fabrication of personal anecdote and unmatchable charm round Violet’s city then swept away to meet the King. ‘The great lost the power to impress,’ Violet wrote of her mother’s anecdotes. Mother was of the inner sanctum where greatness lay. Where she went, history was made.

*   *   *

Missing from Violet’s life was friendship with children her own age. Cleverer than her sister she kept to herself, shunned children’s parties, snubbed her contemporaries. But then one afternoon in the winter of 1905 ‘of a sudden everything changed’.

She allowed herself ‘to be dragged to a tea-party at Lady Kilmorey’s’ at Aldford Street, Park Lane. Lady Kilmorey’s daughter had a broken leg. Violet went to talk to her. By the bedside was another equally unsociable girl, tall, gawky, ‘most unsuitably dressed in what appeared to be her mother’s old clothes’. They were drawn to each other. (‘It seems to me so significant that I should remember with such distinctness my first sight of her,’ Vita wrote fifteen years later.) Violet remarked on the flowers in the room. Vita ignored her. Violet was piqued but tried again.

Back home she asked her mother if she might have the girl to tea. Mrs Keppel agreed and wrote to Vita’s mother. The invitation was accepted. Vita visited Portman Square.

They sat in the dark by the fire in George Keppel’s sitting room (‘he was never in at this hour’), dangled their legs over the leather fender, talked of their ancestors and books – stories of adventure and romance with passionate heroes and unequivocal feelings: The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Quentin Durward and Ivanhoe. Violet alluded to the pleasures of Paris. Vita confided about her dogs, rabbits and the magnificence of Knole, her country home. In the hall when she left Violet kissed her goodbye. In her bath that night Vita sang to herself, ‘I’ve got a friend.’

SEVEN

‘One never loves more passionately than at the age of ten,’ Violet wrote in her fifth novel, Hunt the Slipper. To her friendship with Vita she brought her childhood hopes and dreams. ‘Everything changed.’ ‘Don’t you see you are perfection to me as I am to you,’ she wrote. She idolized Vita and bombarded her with letters ‘which became more exacting as hers tended to become more and more of the “yesterday-my-pet-rabbit-had-six-babies” type’. All that winter they delved into each other’s inner world. ‘I’, said Vita, ‘who was the worst person in the world at making friends, closed instantaneously in friendship.’

The word friend resounded for them both. It meant intimacy, filled a need: for Violet, who scorned her sister, viewed her mother as queen, was bewildered by the King and served by hired staff; and for Vita, an only child with a capricious mother and the strange weight of her relationship to Knole, the Sackvilles’ family home at Sevenoaks in Kent.

Violet was invited to stay. Even as a child she knew Knole was the key to understanding her friend:

Vita belonged to Knole, to the courtyards, gables, galleries; to the prancing sculptured leopards, to the traditions, rites and splendours. It was a considerable burden for one so young. No wonder she wrote about rabbits.

Virginia Woolf sensed, when she fell in love with Vita twenty-four years later and wrote Orlando for and about her, that Vita inhabited Knole more crucially than her own body. Violet aged ten felt the resonance of Vita’s past:

It was necessary to see Vita at Knole to realise how inevitable she was. Knole was committed to produce a Vita. Generations of Sackvilles, heavy-lidded, splenetic, looked possessively down on their offspring … These selfsame features, painted by Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Lawrence, emerging from a ruff, a ‘jabot’, a ‘choker’, occurred in each generation …

Duntreath and Portman Square were lesser homes. Knole was the setting of true splendour. It epitomized the