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

taking root in every recess of him like a perennial plant that blooms without any help from the gardener?

Alexa – what was she but a makeshift? A wearisome substitute, founded on renunciation. ‘From the ruins of my palace have I built my cottage.’

In bed with Alexa, Shorne imagines he is with Anne. He has a recurring dream of piercing her heart with a sword. As this buries into her flesh

it sent up on either side of the wound a little spurt of white foam … it was at once horrible and delicious … he would wake up feeling cheated and drained.

(Violet had read her Freud.)

He lives with his mother in the ancestral home, Otterways/Knole. Alexa/Virginia is in thrall to the trappings of the aristocracy. The place is a ‘whole little town’. Even pats of butter on the breakfast tray are stamped with the family coat of arms. Shorne shows her portraits of his ancestors: ‘one who wrote a sonnet to Queen Elizabeth, another who died of wounds at the battle of Agincourt’. Alexa is overwhelmed. Her own family

consists of nothing but respectable middle-class citizens, much too learned and rather sexless. Our only flirtations have been with theses and all we’ve ever carried away is an audience.

In comes Lady Shorne, fat and fifty, with a cruel mouth and beauty in decline. She wears a dirty old flannel dressing gown pinned with the family jewels – rubies, diamonds and emeralds galore. On her head, ‘pushed slightly askew by her curlers’, is her tiara. There is ‘something not quite right about this great lady’. Not quite right at all. She alludes to intimate matters with a mixture of clinical curiosity and prudishness, talks in non sequiturs, waits for no answers, makes malicious asides and inventories of her jewellery.

She is a wicked old courtesan, her fists in the money bags, obsessed with power, a caricature of Mrs Keppel, Lady Sackville and all matriarchs who undermine their children’s lives. Shorne is afraid of her. Under her spell he is the Cheshire cat’s smile, the bird on the painted-glass picture caged by her eyes. When pregnant she viewed his birth as an immediate pleasure and a distant threat: a pleasure because she ‘could bring him up according to the sacred principles of her antique dealer’s heart’; a threat because he would one day challenge her power.

Safe in French Violet was as rude as she liked. All that she dared not say to or about her own mother, or mothers in general, she levelled at Lady Shorne. Her materialism and lust for power destroys her young. Her huge property is her passion:

Her exclusive and fanatical nature, hungry for a ‘mission’ embraced the cause of Otterways with a fervour which in earlier times would have been directed towards religion and heavenly rewards.

Otterways, like Knole, the Ombrellino, Grosvenor Street, is the forbidding palace, the status fantasy that accords grandeur to its owner but excludes intimacy and love. Shorne learned from an early age ‘not to touch glass cases and to be careful with petit-point chairs’. In Paris he was left alone in his mother’s huge apartment in the rue St Honoré. His childhood was lonely, sumptuous and punctuated by the appearances of this big spider who dispensed refusals and permissions, ‘the second even more frightening than the first’. His compensatory relationship is his love for his cousin which mother destroys. She spies on him, tells lies, pieces together letters he has torn up, throws away Anne’s photograph.

In a disconcerting scene, whether fiction or fact, Shorne seduces Alexa in the Charles II bedchamber at Otterways. The room is cold, musty and smells of camphor. Objects in it come ghoulishly alive. The Mortlake tapestry shows Joseph trying to escape the caresses of Potiphar’s wife. The figures have swarthy faces and fair curls and ‘looked sinister, like victims of the plague wearing wigs’. Shorne lights all the candles and tells Alexa to lie down on the bed:

fainting with pleasure, she obeyed. Shorne lay down beside her, impatiently brushing aside the little bags of camphor on the bolster.

Soon he was muttering incoherent phrases she could scarcely understand: ‘I’m the master here! I’ll show her! How dare she…’

With a frankness and candour not equalled by Orlando Violet implied Vita had a sexual score to settle with her mother: that she used women sexually to be revenged on her, that materialism and possession extend to people, too. The scene echoes the sexual exchange between Vita and Violet in that Paris hotel the day after Violet’s wedding in June 1919 when, Vita wrote in her Confession, ‘I had her, I didn’t care, I only wanted to hurt Denys.’

Mother spies through the keyhole while her son has sex. When Shorne wakes in the morning he does not know where he is or with whom. Pinned to the bedcover is a note from his mother: ‘Don’t worry – you won’t be disturbed. I’ll explain to the servants.’

Alexa/Virginia sets the scene for Anne’s/Violet’s afternoon visit. Shorne has told her Anne is ‘ravishingly pretty’ but overweight. Alexa hopes she will be huge, peroxided and painted. She rehearses topics of conversation, rejects gardens, sport and clothes and decides on cars. Buicks. (Cars, according to Violet, were talked about by her own mother and Virginia Woolf on the one occasion when they met for lunch in March 1932. ‘Neither knew a thing about motors; both thought they were on safe ground discussing a topic on which they could bluff to their hearts’ content.’

Alexa has used Shorne’s version of his affair with Anne in her bestselling book, Conquest. Anne, Shorne told her, was false, flighty and only wanted the opposite of what she had. Shorne wanted to marry her. ‘Everything was signed and settled.’ Anne was affectionate, ardent. Shorne suspected nothing. And then, without warning, she left him in the lurch, because of her horror of anything irrevocable, her inability to commit herself.

Anne arrives. She is of medium height, plump, her eyes small and mocking, her mouth too big, her hands small, square-fingered, slightly stained