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

love’ with the art historian David Carritt, it was ‘the most overwhelming experience’ he had ever had, they wanted to live together. Vita wrote to Harold calling this a muddle and a disaster: ‘He is bound to fall out with D … and meanwhile there may have been a scandal which might involve both his jobs.’ He would lose his career and reputation – he was Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and editor of The Burlington Magazine – ‘for the sake of a clever little boy who is not worth the sacrifice. I will talk to him at the weekend whether he likes it or not.’ Discretion, so lauded by Mrs Keppel and her circle, spread its net wide, capturing more than social caution, tact, manners. It caught and spoiled aspirations, feelings of a quintessential kind.

Harold, asked by David Carritt for advice, replied:

If I were Plato and consulted I should say ‘This can never lead to happiness therefore it must be abandoned.’ But as I cannot bear to see Ben wretched I cannot give that answer.

Vita disliked David Carritt’s influence on Ben (as Harold had disliked Violet’s influence on Vita). She thought him cynical, hoped he would go abroad, deterred him from visiting Sissinghurst. She felt she had failed Ben, that he was too difficult for her. In his room she found a copy of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, his confession about his love for ‘Bosie’, Lord Alfred Douglas. She thought there was wisdom in it. Perhaps it put her in mind of her own confession, locked in a Gladstone bag. ‘How he paid for his follies,’ she wrote.

Down the generations came the same cry from Wilde, Violet, Vita’s son Ben, echoing the plea to legitimize these affairs of the heart, to view them as a valid choice, accord them social respect. For themselves Vita and Harold squared the circle and thought others could do so too. Vita was delighted when in 1955 Ben married another art historian, Luisa Vertova. The marriage lasted three years.

*   *   *

‘Poor Mor is out of everything,’ Mrs Keppel wrote of herself to Violet in June 1942,

but it is such a just punishment for she had, in times past, too much. Beloved Titten please be careful & not spend anything you can avoid. After this year I shall be able to do so little. Personally I am not going to buy anything.

All my love Sweetheart.

There was no word from the Ombrellino, telephone lines from Florence were cut. Mrs Keppel slept badly, thought this was because she went out so little, resolved not to rest in the afternoons in the hope of sleeping better at nights. Her ankles swelled up, her back ached, she suffered bouts of bronchitis from cigarettes and London fog. She saw her doctor often, drank too much gin and called the Ritz gloomy (though a typical wartime lunch menu was oeufs en cocotte, tournedo steak, meringues). ‘Isn’t the news awful,’ she wrote to Violet on 17 June, ‘Rommel gets exactly where he likes, we seem useless & only squandering lives for nothing.’ She began to sign her letters to Violet ‘Your old sad Mor’. ‘I do hope Darling you will have fun & see interesting people,’ she wrote.

She went to the country at weekends or when there were air raids. At Wherwell Priory, Andover, her abstracted hostess counted imaginary money in her pocket and spent much of her day in bed. Mrs Keppel played desultory bridge with Sir Randolph and Lady Baker from Blandford, Dorset, and Gracie Fields sang ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ on the wireless.

She stayed at Sonia’s house in Hampshire, but had no authority there. Sonia ruled, ‘Dear Doey thinks she is the cats whiskers in everything even to growing roses on chalk,’ Mrs Keppel complained to Violet. She found the place ‘fearfully cold’, Sonia was not getting on with her husband, the children talked and giggled at every meal, there was nothing much to eat, the last meal of the day was high tea at six ‘so we sit from 6.30 to ten doing nothing, except reading’.

Life was pared down. ‘Tell me what you are doing & if you miss me,’ she wrote to Violet. ‘I do you, every minute of the day & most of the night.’ There was no bitterness between them now. Violet was the preferred daughter, loved ‘more than anyone in the world’.

Like her mother Violet went to ‘endless parties’, teas, lunches, dinners. But though she imitated her she lacked her social ease, her effortless charm. She was too caustic, chaotic, different to be admired in the same way. She had a reputation for purloining anecdotes and jokes. Her wit subverted social certainties. At a cocktail party given by Lady Crewe she asked a group of elderly titled ladies if they were bisexual ‘answering severely on being answered in the negative, “Well you miss a lot”.’ At a tea party of Emerald Cunard’s James Lee-Milne described her as ‘a large, clumsy’ plain woman wearing a top-heavy hat and sitting in such a way that one could see a naked expanse of thigh’. She wished, he said, ‘to enchant, astonish, alarm; but I think she seldom tried to please’. A carapace of manner hardened round her.

She again summoned courage to go to Sissinghurst and agreed the visit for 4 May 1943 but, that morning, cancelled pleading a fever. ‘What a bore Violet wanting to come to Sissinghurst’ Harold wrote perhaps not knowing that it was at Vita’s persuasion. ‘She is all very well in London but Sissinghurst is not a guest house.’ Vita told him not to mention the visit,

because her mother would disapprove and she doesn’t want a row. I sympathise. Little Mrs George in a temper must be a formidable thing.

Violet arrived on 11 May and stayed one night. It was then that she said ‘chacun sa tour’, with pain at the fate of hers. ‘She has quite grasped Sissinghurst,’ Vita wrote to Harold. ‘As I knew she would.’ Vita called the encounter ‘extraordinarily unreal’,