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

but the woman who had loved her with single-hearted obstinacy. The last part of Vita’s letter scrawled across the page as her biographer Victoria Glendinning put it, ‘in the jerky, spidery way she wrote only when blurred by drink or tears’.

Violet knew that it was over, but in a spoiling war she sought to repair her past. She wanted friendship at least. ‘She sounds sobered somehow,’ Vita wrote to Harold. ‘I think she dreadfully minded the collapse of France.’

Violet turned to her mother and to her mother’s material preoccupations. There were problems when Mrs Keppel came to Coker Court. ‘They have no modern arrangements in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘No Aga stove, no gas.’ Servants if found she was sure would not get on with Dorothy. ‘They might come but they would leave the next day.’ She financed Violet’s move, in February 1941, to the nearby Manor House in the village of East Coker. Its owners were spending their war in Canada. A cook was found whom Violet coaxed to serve French food, a housekeeper, a ‘lady’s maid’. Dorothy Heneage helped decorate with Chippendale chairs, Chinese lacquer cabinets, pictures by Titian and Van Dyck. Violet invited Vita who did not visit – she said there was ‘nothing she would like better’ but they must not again depend on each other’s company. ‘We should miss it too much when again deprived of it.’

Violet made her extrovert mark on East Coker with weekend parties and visitors from France. She and her guests attended the village church and confused the vicar by arriving noisily and late. He then muddled the service and she said it was because he was in love with her. She started an affair with Betty Richards who told her in French that she loved her with all her heart, called her ‘my own darling foxy’, lived nearby at Hamlet House, Sherborne, and had been a model in Paris.

The Princesse de Polignac stayed, Gerald Berners, Gaston Palewski, Paul Reynaud’s Private Secretary, General Catroux. ‘I had known him when he was Resident in Morocco which is the French equivalent to being Viceroy of India,’ Violet wrote. Mrs Keppel said he was ‘by far the nicest man’ Violet knew. ‘What a pity he is married.’ Helen Terré stayed in October. She worked for the Red Cross in Vichy and had been wrongfully imprisoned in Holloway Gaol. From her Violet heard the Gestapo now occupied the tower at St Loup and had imprisoned Antoinette d’Harcourt.

Violet did book reviews for the Observer, articles for Horizon, worked at a novel in English, Pirates at Play, and Prelude to Misadventure, a memoir dedicated to the fighting French. Through Vita’s contacts – Hilda Matheson and Moura, Baroness Bulberg, mistress of Maxim Gorky – she broadcast for La France Libre which earned her the Légion d’Honneur after the war. But she lost confidence in her worth as a writer, turned from satire to anecdote, felt no one in England cared whether she wrote or not and opted for the social round.

She and Vita wanted to meet and not to meet, felt the pain of the past like pressing a bruise. ‘It upsets me to see you or hear your voice,’ Vita wrote:

I hate you for having this effect on me. I resent knowing that if I were suddenly to see a photograph of you it would disturb me for at least 24 hours. Damn you … you have bitten too deeply into my soul.

They discussed writing their story. Vita objected to the ‘loathsome example’ of The Well of Loneliness, thought she could produce a better novel, doubted she and Violet could collaborate, ‘It would be a one person’s book.’

I do feel that it is a great and new subject and I would like to do it. The vivid feelings that I have undergone throughout my life would make a worthwhile story of it. How much I would like to talk to you about this – quite dispassionately and with all the objective intelligence that you and I could bring to bear on it. I only wish that I could trust myself (and you) to come and stay with you.

    But I don’t, so I won’t.

            Yours, Mitya

Neither was ever overt, dispassionate or objective about this ‘great and new subject’. Both were caught by it and flung to the winds. Vita fantasized about drawing her adult son Benedict into her drama of the past. In a continued compulsion to bend her own gender she saw herself reflected in him:

Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee

Renews the lovely April of her prime

In 1941 he was in the army, stationed near Yeovil. She suggested he contact Violet:

She will amuse you, but you must beware of her. She is a siren (not the air raid sort). Her appearance will startle you, as she has lost her eye for make-up. She has the loveliest voice in the world; interlards her conversations with French slang so up-to-date that one doesn’t understand half of it; is a mythomane as well as being profoundly untruthful; is witty; is an extravagant and fantastic personality; is a bore in the sense that she loves living in a world of intrigues and is determined to involve one in them, is in fact one of the most dangerous people I know. You have been warned.

To Harold she wrote ‘I hope Ben won’t fall in love with Violet. He might you know. But I have warned him not to.’ The fantasy was projection. Ben was not going to fall in love with any woman, least of all Violet. He was twenty-seven, Violet, his godmother, was forty-six. When eighteen he confided to his mother that he was homosexual. She told him that it would not preclude his marrying. ‘Two of the happiest married people I know, whose names I must conceal for reasons of discretion are both homosexual.’ She said a home, belongings, marriage, roots were the essential way to happiness.

In his thirties, in 1948, Ben told her he had fallen ‘desperately in