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

in Mrs Keppel’s vast room and she coughed all night. At Mount Stewart, Newtownards, County Down she was horrified that Lady Londonderry dined in trousers, worked to keep the place going and had no maid. There were children staying in the house ‘& alas, in my passage!!’ She longed to get to Aix, had nothing to do, could not walk at all she coughed so much. ‘So I stay mostly in my own room which is lonely.’

Towards the end of the war Chips Channon gave a dinner party at which Mrs Keppel was the anachronistic showpiece:

She looked magnificent in black sequins and jewels and her fine white hair and gracious manners are impressive. She is so affectionate and grande dame that it is a pity she tipples and then becomes garrulous and inaccurate.

It was a pity for her liver too which was not functioning properly. Neither her back pain nor the swelling in her legs would ease. Her ‘nice doctor’ said she would be ‘all right in a few days’, that her constant bronchial colds came from the dust of London. She had her hair curled in a ‘permanent’ which took four hours, went with beloved Archie to Bournemouth, stayed in the Palace Court Hotel, spent mornings in church and breathed a bit better in the sea air.

In the summer of 1945 Violet wrote to Vita saying she would soon be going back to France and would like to stay a weekend at Sissinghurst before she left. Her previous departure from Vita and England had been humiliating. This time she wanted to leave by choice and with self-respect. ‘Oh God Oh God Oh God I don’t want Violet here. But how on earth could I get out of it?’ Vita wrote in panic to Harold. ‘O tempora mutandi … how pleased I should have been once, and now just dismayed.’

Violet did not stay with her. The embers were not raked. She needed France. ‘The landscape I had been starving for flowed into view.’ Paris was more beautiful than she remembered. She booked in at the Ritz: ‘the place looked normal enough save that there were no carpets or curtains’. Diana Cooper, whose husband Duff Cooper was now British Ambassador in Paris, held a party for her at the Embassy. Helen Terré drove her to St Loup. The butler, servants, gardener were there to greet her. Antoinette d’Harcourt and Gilone de Chimay had hidden away her valuables and these were safe. Some books had been taken, ‘cherished bibelots were missing, German inscriptions were scrawled all over the walls, they had kicked in my Chirico and my Dufy…’ She had, though, got off lightly, was still mistress of her mansion, châtelaine of her tower.

But until she renewed residency and ‘stabilised’ her French account she could not afford to stay. Currency restrictions meant she could only take £75 out of England. While her mother sorted out such mundane matters Violet returned to the London Ritz. Mrs Keppel worried about fitting her and her maid in over the Christmas period. ‘Those Conferences on Education’ were ‘taking up every corner of London’. And in January 1946 there was to be the wedding of Sonia’s daughter Rosalind to an army man, Bruce Shand.

Mother made many trips to Mr Williams at the Midland Bank, Pall Mall, to sort out various accounts and ‘nesty eggs’ for ‘darling Titten’. Violet finally returned triumphant to Paris three months after that. Her mother’s letters urging caution over money went unheeded. ‘Except I live on capital I don’t know what will happen,’ Mrs Keppel wrote. She was horrified to hear that Paris was smart:

Surely they ought not to spend money on fashions. I am not going to buy a single dress. I can’t as I have no coupons, so when I do arrive in France I shall be like a char, but I would rather look like that!!!

Violet would rather not look like a char. Nancy Mitford wrote to Diana Mosley of a gala she went to in May 1946 with Duff Cooper and Jacques Février,

suddenly Jacques seized my arm & I thought would break it & I saw the following apparition: Violet practically naked to the waist and smothered in birds of paradise. Oh could you all have seen. She also hired a regalia of jewels from Cartiers.

Violet was back, as startling as any of the bejewelled grandes dames she satirized in her novels. A Mr Fitzgerald couriered money from England for the refurbishment of the tower, Mrs Keppel bought her a car and was ‘filled with despair’ at not being able to do more. ‘I could have given you a large sum to keep you for some years.’ She grieved at not being able to send a cheque for her birthday,

now you are domiciled in France it is not allowed. It breaks my heart not to send you anything & I had a nice little one ready for you, but now you must either come over for it & spend it here or wait till I meet you in France which I hope to do on the 8th of August.

For Mrs Keppel her fifty-three-year-old daughter was now her pride and joy, a chip off the old block, always socializing, always on parade. There was usually some man in tow, an amourette, for advertisement and show: ‘What did you mean’ her mother asked, ‘when you said to Doey in your letter to her “Alas poor Pomeroy”! so I suppose that is all off!!!’ She was disconcerted to get a letter which had no ending ‘except about manure for St Loup & there was no loving messages & it was not even signed. Darling what has happened to your letters?’

Mrs Keppel’s plan for the summer was to stay with Violet in Paris, go on to Aix-en-Provence for a ‘cure’, meet her again there and they would travel to Florence together. She worried about how to circumvent the £75 currency restriction to pay for her trip. ‘England is perfectly right of course to stop