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

style. She filled her time with writing, flirtations, travel, conversation, company. The days of Rebellion were over. As in her stories possessions triumphed over love. She was caught in a quest for status, a craving to impress. To her chosen country she brought the hedonism of her mother’s world, of the Edwardians whom she satirized but did not reject.

Behind the mask she seemed ill at ease, her flirtations false. She was bright and sparkling in society, depressed in private. Phobic about being on her own, she spent inordinate time on the telephone, would not sleep in a house or apartment alone, yet could not say of what she was afraid. She was a chronic insomniac – ‘I am sleep’s beggar, grateful for a yawn’ – and said that in the small hours of the night the word ‘déclassé’ confronted her ‘like a gamekeeper’. She panicked about growing old, had her face lifted, her hair permed, coloured, curled, was for ever powdering her cheeks and painting her lips.

She and her mother now wrote letters of devotion. Her mother called her ‘darling Titten’, ‘precious Luna’, sent her money, paid the bills. After a stay by her mother at St Loup Violet sent a love letter, cloying, adoring:

Little love

… I could not bear you to go, every minute we spent together was perfection. It is months since I have known such happiness. You can’t think how much I admire you, my own precious, you are all the world to me, and I could not live without you.

    God bless you and keep you, my sweet.

            Your adoring Titten

Best love to Papa and Uncle Archie.

Her mother referred to Violet’s novels as ‘writing’ in inverted commas. Literary and oblique and so often in French, she took scant interest in them. To readers they seemed inconsequential, like the slight relationships of lords and ladies who lived in grand mansions and fooled with love. Philippe Jullian said her characters came straight from her address book, ‘the rich and fashionable with their hangers on’. Her novels, he said, were like dinner parties in a rich mansion:

During the evening the smartly dressed and witty guests from time to time let drop a remark that suggests that they too know what it is to love and suffer. But however intense their emotions it is hard not to think that a longish cruise or plans for a party or two would not lighten their mood.

Her style sparkled with cleverness, irritated and concealed. She littered her prose with foreign quotation. Her readers did not know that she coded into her work her experience of lesbian passion, emotional betrayal, self-division, riches as rivals and the leitmotiv of lost love. She dealt in word games, paradoxes, conundrums and parried and played with the lies and truth. ‘Trust no one,’ she said in old age to her friend and executor John Phillips.

After Broderie Anglaise she again wrote in English. In Hunt the Slipper her hero has Nicolson names – Nigel Benson. He is middle-aged, ‘feminine’, married, safely adulterous. Caroline, his lover, wants to break the secret, cause a scandal. ‘She had none of the frivolity of the older generation,’ Violet wrote with a swipe. ‘Latent in her mind was the theory that the world was well lost for love’s sake.’

‘I want to throw everything away for your sake,’ her alter ego says:

I could so easily dispense with luxury … You think that the lover has the romantic part. You’re wrong: a lover … is a convention. But what is not a convention is a husband who is also a lover.

Violet knew the convention of infidelity well: from the King despite the pomp and promises of royal marriage; from her mother in her boudoir of flowers, there with the King while her husband was out. With Vita she had hoped for unconventional fidelity, for a partner who was also a lover.

In conversation and writing she switched with facility from French to English and weakened her style by intertwining the two – Broderie Anglaise and Echo in French, Hunt the Slipper and Tandem in English. She interlaced her unimportant plots and slight characters with epigrams and apophthegms – a sort of conversational spice:

‘I wish we could have children without the mothers. A kind of masculine virgin birth.’

‘She is the last representative of a milieu to which she never belonged.’

‘Her bones were joss-sticks, her eyes were by Fabergé, her heart, made out of Venetian glass, was a pretty toy.’

But she moved into a cultural limbo, her books not translated, her worlds divided, her print runs small, her readership split. She had no need to make her writing pay. She said she wrote each morning for a couple of hours but as the day passed her brain went woolly. She thought of herself as naturally indolent, without particular talent, deferred to Vita – a bestselling author – as the better writer, though her own style was sharper, her wit quicker, her intelligence more acute.

In 1930 Vita with her mother’s money bought Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, a parallel to St Loup. It was a ruin set in seven acres of land. Its single intact fragment was a high square tower with adjoining turrets. The place, said Vita, ‘caught instantly at my heart and imagination. I saw what might be made of it. It was Sleeping Beauty’s castle.’

The creation of Sissinghurst and its gardens was her shared enterprise with Harold. He stayed the week in London and caught the Saturday train to Kent. In letters to each other they wrote of its reconstruction: moat walls, ponds, Tudor fireplaces, courtyards. But the tower was her citadel, sequestered, closed to her family. In thirty years her son Nigel visited her there twice. ‘Chacun sa tour,’ Violet said when she saw it.

‘I will not pretend,’ Violet wrote after Denys’s death, ‘that after a year or two had elapsed I was not seriously tempted by the thought of remarriage.’ It was one of her teasing sentences, not quite a lie. She was tempted by the thought and display of