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

had many of the characteristics of a man. ‘She liked to control situations. And she was in control of her life.’

Not everyone was impressed. The American writer Henry James thought the King an ‘arch vulgarian’ and the relationship between him and Mrs Keppel no more than ‘carrying on’ in an undignified manner, ugly, vulgar and frivolous.

And Virginia Woolf in her diary was less than flattering when she met her in March 1932. Mrs Keppel, by then, was past her prime, lived most of the year in a villa in Florence and in London stayed in a furnished suite at the Ritz. ‘Oh dear,’ Virginia Woolf wrote,

I had lunched with Raymond [Mortimer] to meet Mrs Keppel; a swarthy thick set raddled direct (My dear she calls one) old grasper: whose fists have been in the money bags these 50 years: but with boldness: told us how her friends used to steal, in country houses in the time of Ed. 7th. One woman purloined any jewelled bag left lying. And she has a flat in the Ritz; old furniture; &c. I liked her on the surface. I mean the extensive, jolly, brazen surface of the old courtezan; who has lost all bloom; & acquired a kind of cordiality, humour, directness instead. No sensibilities as far as I could see; nor snobberies; immense superficial knowledge, & going off to Berlin to hear Hitler speak. Shabby under dress: magnificent furs: great pearls: a Rolls Royce waiting – going off to visit my old friend the tailor; & so on

Mrs Keppel was not jolly or extensive in 1918 when her daughter Violet suffered for love. Love in her view had no rights when it disrupted or confused the mores of her class. Her sort were aristocrats, political rulers with pedigree wives, owners of castles, houses, fields and forests, employers of legions of servants, makers and arbiters of the law, close to the Crown and close to God.

She intervened in her daughter’s life on a startling scale to ensure that propriety and appearance prevailed. ‘How can one make the best of anything,’ Violet wrote to Vita, ‘that revolves on lies and deception?’ Her mother’s way was through charm, discretion and deference to the social code. Vita as a child was taught the habit of concealment: ‘toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire’ her mother would say. Violet trailed the words in the memoirs she dedicated to her own mother and which revealed little of her life.

In 1944 – by which time Violet was plump, false and middle-aged – Cyril Connolly gave her a copy of his book, The Unquiet Grave. She scored in red the lines,

We love only once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving … And on how that first great love-affair shapes itself depends the pattern of our lives.

From the testimony of her letters, her memoirs and her life, it is not entirely clear whether Violet’s first great love affair was with her mother or with Vita, or whether, like the serpent and its segments, the diamonds and the lovers’ knot, they coiled their way into one.

TWO

Violet did not know who her father was, though she was sure he was not her mother’s husband George. In adult life she claimed to be the daughter of Edward VII. She shared his temper, impatience and louche appetites and looked like him and his descendants, particularly his great-granddaughter Princess Margaret and Count Raben of Denmark who was rumoured to be his illegitimate son.

She did not confront her mother on the subject – toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire – but she viewed her blood as royal. It became an obsession and a joke. The assumption had a child’s logic. Her mother’s life revolved around the King. All her sexual charms were for him. Mama lived in a blaze of glory and perpetual tiara because of him. He was the man Violet saw coming from her mother’s bedroom, not George Keppel, a shadowy figure whom she in no way resembled and with whom she had no rapport.

‘Who was my father?’ she wrote to Vita Sackville-West in 1919:

A faun undoubtedly! A faun who contracted a mésalliance with a witch, or rather the other way round!… ever since I was a child I have had the vague obscure terror of being ‘taken away’ claimed by someone or by something … that is partly why I hate being alone.

Maternity was not in doubt. Alice Frederica Edmonstone, known to her husband as Freddie, was born in 1869 at Duntreath Castle near Loch Lomond, Scotland. In aristocratic tradition her forebears acquired the castle and its land as a royal gift. It was the wedding present, in the fourteenth century, of King Robert III of Scotland to his daughter Mary, when she married Sir William Edmonstone. It was inherited, father to son, from then on.

Violet as a child went to Duntreath every summer with her mother. The place, she felt, reflected her mother’s past. ‘Here I can breathe freely and live freely – sympathetic hills surround me on all sides.’ There were streams, roe deer, kestrels, a Highland train with a cinder track. The castle, set between twin hills, Dumfoyne and Dumgoyne and built round a courtyard, had four corner pepperpot towers. The courtyard bell tolled for meals. Inside were smells of cedarwood, tuberoses, gunpowder, mince. There was a medieval staircase, a gunroom, billiard room, armoury, a dungeon with stocks and thumbscrews, an Oak Room supposedly haunted by the Dumb Laird whose ghost was said to crouch over the fire making gurgling noises. ‘The atmosphere of the place was complex, half medieval, half exotic.’ It formed Violet’s sense of what living quarters should be like.

For Alice, Duntreath was home. Violet described her as

in many ways typically Scots. Intelligent, downright … she loved a good argument … she was one of the most consulted women in England; she was certainly one of the funniest.

Alice’s married sisters lived in Edinburgh, Perthshire, Stirlingshire. Their mother, Mary Elizabeth Parsons, was born in Ithaca, a daughter of the