‘In losing my mother I lost everything’ Violet wrote in her memoir, Don’t Look Round. ‘Any little success I may have had is dedicated to her.’ She wrote of the
unwanted licence of loneliness. Oh to be hemmed in by frowning family obstacles … I can do what I like, go where I wish, there is no one to say me nay.
She was free but it had come too late. She did not now know how to choose a direction. Her one fierce attempt at flight failed. Like the bird in the glass picture her mother gave her she was lost without the cage of her mother’s eyes, or without her mother’s arm on which she had for so long been made to perch.
TWENTY
Mrs Keppel died without seeing her great-granddaughter Camilla, born to Sonia’s daughter Rosalind in July 1947. She was too unwell to travel and Sonia said England was ‘glacially cold’, with no heating allowed in hotels ‘or anywhere’. She had no prescience that Camilla would follow the Keppel trail and choose as her lover Bertie’s great-grandson Charles, another Prince of Wales.
Mrs Keppel would have been delighted had Camilla married Charles not Captain Andrew Parker-Bowles, an army man like George. But given her respect for social appearances and discretion, her powerful intervention when her own daughter revealed a revisionist sort of love, she would have viewed with disdain the way Prince Charles, his princess and mistress made public their muddle over sex.
‘Things were done much better in my day,’ she said in 1936 when Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry Mrs Simpson. She would have said so again in the 1990s when Prince Charles and his wife separated and told the nation of their loveless marriage, infidelities, breakdowns, inadequacies and family pressures.
Briefed by Mrs Keppel the Prince of Wales would have had sex with Camilla on the side, said, if asked, that of course he loved his wife and would never have used a cellular phone. She would have packed her great-granddaughter off for a tour with Captain Parker-Bowles and advised Lady Diana’s entourage to send her to take the waters at Aix for her bulimia nervosa and unacceptable emotional state.
For concomitant with her notions of the divine precedence of kings, queens and royal mistresses went expectations of codes of perceived behaviour for families of the ruling class. Mrs Keppel understood that unless the semblance of royal marriage was kept alive, other undemocratic myths might in time die: the myth that love was the prerogative of husband and wife, that a ruling class deserved by rights to be served and deferred to by an underclass, that jewels, tiaras, castles and vast tracts of land should by birthright go to the titled few.
Discretion was her synonym for concealment, semblance mattered not substance, the worst of fates was to be déclassé. It was socially acceptable to be mistress or widow, but not lesbian or divorcee. Mrs Keppel kept the social apple cart intact. Her daughter and great-granddaughter helped topple it in their way.
Violet and George Keppel went to London after Alice’s death. Violet, wanting comfort, contacted Vita and hoped to go to Sissinghurst. On 20 November 1947 Harold in London heard that ‘Pawpaw’ was in bed at the Ritz with pneumonia. ‘Blessed pneumonia great are thy mercies,’ he wrote to Vita. He did not want to sleep under the same roof as Violet. ‘I refuse absolutely to be left alone in our cottage with Violet. I would rather walk the fields all night.’
Pawpaw died two months after his wife, thus sparing Harold either fate. The Times obituarist wrote of George Keppel’s splendid looks, exquisite manners and ‘benign geniality’:
Admiring as we do in him so many of the characteristics of the generation which he personified, we may well question whether we have not something more to learn from its gentle courtesy and code of behaviour than in these perplexing times it is the fashion to admit.
Sonia got divorced the year her parents died. She and Violet were the main beneficiaries of their mother’s will. Violet was to have use of the Ombrellino for life, then it was to pass to Sonia and her children. Its contents were to form a family fund divided on a percentage share. Violet wanted to defer the sale of the contents, to keep the villa as it was, a memorial to her mother, and to emulate her as châtelaine. Her mother had stamped the place with inimitable style and this she wished to preserve.
Sonia wanted her share of the capital raised. She was unsparing. She insisted on the valuation and sale of every picture, garden statue, wall-panel, doorknob, carpet or rug. Anything Violet kept she had to buy at current value from the family trust. Violet was to be left with the shell of a mansion, the spirit of her mother gone. She sent worried and unhappy letters to friends. ‘I wish Violet had some responsible relation,’ Vita wrote to Harold. ‘But there is only uncle Archie and he is eighty.’.
Violet asked Sonia to agree to leave some of the villa furnished, pointing out she would have all of it in time. ‘Darling I am terribly sorry,’ Sonia replied. ‘But I have never agreed to a “furnished bit”. It just isn’t on and would lead to endless complications.’ She applied for export licences and pushed the sale along.
Violet listed furniture, tapestries, statues she felt were intrinsic to the Ombrellino. ‘You do realise don’t you,’ Sonia told her, ‘that the total value of these (as I think highly injudicious) eliminations wld amount to £13,760.’ Violet wanted to keep her mother’s bed and a picture of an Edmonstone ancestor by the Scottish portrait painter Sir Henry Raeburn. Its saleroom value, Sonia told her, was £3200.
Christie’s advised
