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

Somehow the Bank of England arranged a £500 transfer for her journey and she gave Betty Richards a cheque for £1000 to give to Violet. Violet travelled to Dover to meet her in the first week of August 1946. She described the visit as ‘a Keppel festival’ with herself ‘a breathless lady-in-waiting’. She arranged a lunch party with Duff and Diana Cooper, visits to Carlos de Beistegui’s chateau at Groussay and to exhibitions at the Orangerie and Musée du Trocadèro of artworks looted by the Germans.

But it was not her mother’s idea of a good time. Mrs Keppel was relieved when the visit was over. From the Hôtel Splendide Royal & Excelsior at Aix she wrote to George:

Paris was lovely to look at but I cannot like the French. Dear Bye [Violet] was so kind, but endless conversations in wonderful French which I cannot understand get thoroughly on my nerves.

She took mud baths and water dips and instructed George, Sonia and Harry all to bring soap, tea, sugar, coffee and two hundred cigarettes to the Ombrellino. George was to get these from the Ramadan Tobacco Co. Ltd, 84 Piccadilly, and to go and see Mr Williams at the Bank. ‘I am writing to him today to try & get me some money for Italy.’

Money did not buy sound medical advice. The doctor at Aix said there was nothing wrong with her, ascribed her weight loss and chronic backache to not eating enough, said her cough did not matter in the least, ‘Isnt that odd!! for I cough all night especially in the train.’

She found the expense at Aix enormous and had to curtail her ‘cure’ when the hotel closed in early September. Violet with an ‘ami’ was due to join her at the end of August but wired the day before to say ‘Ami is ill so cant come’. ‘I suppose it is all over like the rest,’ Mrs Keppel wrote to George:

I have always thought that the French think she is much richer than she really is, as she entertains them so lavishly at my expense, but I do hope she isn’t too unhappy. She may have cared for him.

The ami was Prince Rodolphe de Faucigny Lucinge who was after a rich wife. Nancy Mitford wrote to Gerald Berners saying Violet dropped him ‘because she says all his friends are dentists’:

She has now taken up with a chap called M. de Grand Guignol [Guido Sommi Picenardi, Marchese di Calvatore, who owned a ‘magnificent castle’ near Cremona and was recovering from a nervous breakdown] with whom she gave a cocktail party of great brilliance. Goodness I do love her.

The Keppel family reunited at the Ombrellino in early September. There was a drought and the water pump Mrs Keppel paid 10,000 lire for did not work properly. She supervised the restoring of the villa, employing new servants, getting a car, planting the gardens, then returned to London for Christmas while work was done.

Back at the Ritz she was angry when presented with a large bill of Violet’s. She wrote to her on 3 January 1947:

It is nearly all made up with the following list of things you have sent out for, cars, theatre tickets etc this is very surprising. Do you pay for your men friends to go out with you. Far better to stay in with me. Also dearest having your maid getting cash from George & putting it down to my bill. You changed your day of leaving so that had to be paid for. You know Darling I would give you all I have if I could but if the villa has to be built up, I simply can’t pay all these huge extras so I had to write all this. If I give up Italy I can quite afford your bills here. Everything has been paid don’t write to anyone here about it, they will only ask you not to come back.

Violet offered to send a cheque, but Mrs K said that she would only tear it up. She could not understand why Violet was not managing her money better when she had given her £1000 as a Christmas present and an extra £1000 a year on her allowance. ‘This year I must be most careful & am not buying a single thing.’ She stayed at Hall Place but found it fearfully cold. Her legs were so swollen she could hardly walk. Of Sonia who was having problems with her marriage she wrote, ‘I know nothing about what is happening between herself & her husband.’

She went back to Ombrellino for the spring of 1947 but not to enjoy the frescoed walls, the marble halls, imposing views of the Duomo and Palazzo Pitti, the grand dinner parties for which she was renowned. Her return was short-lived. Her Italian doctor diagnosed sclerosis of the liver and said he did not expect her to live. To Violet her mother seemed as beautiful, in control and charming as ever: ‘she will even make a success of her death, was my involuntary thought’. It was a complicated involuntary thought implying that her mother had made a success of love, money, friendships, life, while she herself had not. It implied, too, that her mother was indomitable, formidable and had set the stakes too high: ‘We were the inferior daughters of a dazzling mother … We had to live up to her, she had to live down to us.’

Mrs Keppel died on 11 September 1947. She was buried in the Protestant cemetery near Florence. In London her death was announced on the BBC. At a memorial service in St Mark’s Church, North Audley Street, those that were left of her friends – Dukes, Viscounts, Marchionesses and Earls – who defined themselves and society by their closeness to the Crown, heard tributes and prayers. Queen Mary ‘was represented’ though none of the royal family was there. Obituaries made discreet reference to Mrs Keppel’s intimate friendship