‘Today is the anniversary of her mother and she minds’ Vita wrote to Harold on 11 September. She did not like the climate created by Violet’s gay friends, Jean de Gaigneron – Harold’s lover in 1919 – ‘who is so waspish’, ‘Princey’ – Prince Rodolphe de Faucigny Lucinge – and Philippe Jullian. ‘I feel they all dislike each other.’ She was hauled off to an ‘incredibly boring’ cocktail party given for a youth congress at the French consulate. There were ten guests for lunch at the Ombrellino, more for dinner. The next day they were supposed to lunch at the villa of the Marchese Torrigiani near Lucca. At the last minute Violet said she was not coming, Vita and the three men were late setting off, they had difficulty finding the place and had been expected for tea, not lunch. It was all chaotic. The Marchese coped and was unsurprised but Vita wanted desperately to go home to Sissinghurst and never to visit again.
Violet was brittle in body and mind. Osteoporosis led to painful breaking of bones. She broke a femur tripping on a step at the theatre, a shin when she fell from a chair. She had her hip pinned with a perspex plate. It left her with a limp and she walked with a stick. She began to resemble a dowager duchess, plumes waving, tapping her cane. She had her hair permed into girlish curls, took strong painkillers, the occasional barbiturate.
She passed on everything she heard with rococo embellishments of her own, claimed her novels were coast-to-coast bestsellers, that she knew everyone of importance, had been courted by the world’s leading statesmen, poets, musicians. The Swedish ambassador told James Pope-Hennessy she was a war heroine who had been parachuted into France every week, which was how she broke her bones and why she was given the Légion d’Honneur.
Her messiness and chaos, her constant painting of her face, seemed to signal inner distress. Nancy Mitford called her Auntie Vi, said she was ‘the ruin of a small evening. She made up her face ten times at dinner. I counted.’ The photographer Cecil Beaton found she had retouched his photos of her with the same impatient approximation she gave to painting her face. Parting from Vita at a station in July 1952 aged fifty-eight she said, ‘Oh now in five minutes time you will have disappeared and I shan’t feel safe any more. No sanctuary left.’
Many of her traits went into the haughty egocentricity of Lady Montdore in Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. Harold Acton said:
One can almost hear Violet remarking like Lady Montdore ‘I think I may say we put India on the map. Hardly any of one’s friends in England had even heard of India before we went there you know.’
At the Ombrellino after her mother’s death Violet took centre stage. Always her mother’s understudy, she had learned the script, knew the moves and attitudes but her performance was caricature. She was too intelligent, too caustic and disappointed for it to be otherwise. The true spirit of Edwardian hypocrisy eluded her. At heart she grieved the price it made her pay. Hers was anachronistic impersonation, disconcerting parody. Like her mother she tended to take ambassadors to one side to say she was worried about China or Japan but she delivered the lines like a spoof.
The Duc d’Harcourt in his memoirs included a Proustian pastiche of Violet at her mother’s villa, rejuvenating when royalty was among her guests, forgetting her cane and her limp, pushing her way to their side and executing curtsies to uncertain kings and princes. The laugh was on them and on her. Her childhood question, ‘Mama why do we call Grandpapa “Majesty”?’ had never been answered. It held resonance of sexual duplicity, concealment and the absurdity of pomp. She had wanted something quite other for herself. ‘I have crushed down the vision of life with you,’ she had written to Vita, ‘but always it remained at the back of my mind, so wide, so open, a life so free.’
Unloved and unloving in her mother’s grand mansion she made her own risible majestic display of majesty. She contrived outlandish protocol whereby she would come into dinner on the arm of some Pretender only when all her guests were assembled, like Edward VII in his day. She sat at the head of table, on her right the French Ambassador, some duke on her left:
The magnificent vermeil plate was massively displayed … Lady Enid Browne sat on the main table because she was descended from the Earls of Chesterfield and Stanhope. Her neighbour, the Marchese Valdamara Fioravanti, who sold his honey to everyone in Bellosguardo, had his place there too. He used to keep an enormous pet crocodile in the bath. His mother had it murdered, stuffed and encrusted with jewels then kept it in a state bed in a guest room. The Marchese was eccentric but a Knight of Malta …
Once when she noticed there were thirteen at table she thought it unlucky and peremptorily sent the French Consul home. After dinner she summoned her guests in order of rank to sit and amuse her, dismissing them if they palled. Egocentric, pretentious and artificial she seemed like an exiled Queen in Wonderland, a parody of her own parodies of materialism and loss. Her visitors were cast in roles she contrived, walk-ons in some glittering comedy of manners, perfected by her mother, travestied by herself.
She drew God into her games. At the church of St Mark’s in the Via Maggio she inherited her mother’s roped-off pew and embroidered cushions – front row, right of centre aisle. In church, bronze plaques commemorated her mother and George Keppel. Like Mrs Keppel approving the day’s menus, in advance of Sunday worship Violet would summon the vicar, the Reverend Church, to the Ombrellino to consider hymns and prayers. He waited in her salon drinking her whisky until she made her entrance.
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On 14
