Her preoccupations were strange, her obsessions mocked, her claims neither believed nor entirely disbelieved. For herself Violet was as much Edward VII’s daughter as anyone’s. She had no other proof of paternity. When George VI died in 1952 Nancy Mitford wrote to a friend, ‘Violet has plunged into a deuil d’Andromaque1 but then she is one of the family’.
In life as well as writing she dealt in metaphors, games, conundrums. After her mother’s death she employed a French servant called Alice. This Alice, she said, was Proust’s cousin and the mistress of a Russian grand duke. Violet behaved toward her like a needy, demanding, deprived child. Alice dressed her, looked after her money, instructed the other servants, was her surrogate mother, nursemaid, confidante and lady-in-waiting. Vita visited St Loup in March 1949 on her way to Spain to see the birthplace of her grandmother Pepita. She was alarmed at Violet’s behaviour:
It reminds me of BM. It’s really more than a little mad. She curses her [Alice] all the time. If I spoke to Rollo [her Alsatian dog] like that he would run away and never come back. She (Alice the maid) poured it all out to me this morning, says her health is breaking down (V even wakes her up at all hours of the night) and that she will have to leave. Of course V doesn’t believe it but the day will come when Alice will really go, and I don’t know what V will do without her. It’s a sort of lust for power I think: she must have someone to bully.
Alice did not leave, though her job went beyond any rational concept of service. She wore the mantle of the other Alice who was at a king’s beck and call. She was chic and charming in a way that Violet was not, humoured her mistress as if she was ersatz royalty, and in a paradox of who was servant and who was served, ruled at St Loup and the Ombrellino.
For Violet had, as Vita knew, behind the neediness, bad behaviour, display and parade, an abundance of heart, a compensatory generosity. ‘I don’t want to go, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t,’ Vita said to Harold of her visit to Violet’s tower, a reciprocal visit which she felt obliged to make. But Violet met her at the Gare du Nord, made her chauffeur Henri drive slowly because Vita was afraid of speed, filled her bedroom at St Loup with flowers from Florence: anemones, ranunculi, gardenias, carnations. ‘She is,’ Vita wrote, ‘surprisingly kind’.
St Loup gave her a feeling of recognition, a sense of home. She was surprised Violet was such a ‘good hausfrau’ though the atmosphere was chaotic: random instructions to servants, the sudden sacking of the chauffeur, various helpers from the village floating in and out. She drank champagne in Violet’s garden room painted with murals of Scotland. The chef cooked a delicious meal. There were wild violets and cowslips in the woods. She went with Violet to Provins. ‘It is her Cranbrook’ – Sissinghurst’s town – she told Harold. ‘You would be amused to see her calling first at the butcher and then at the charcutier and then at the patissier.’ In Paris at the flower market Violet bought her primrose roots to smuggle home. They walked to a little restaurant and the food was divine.
Mindful of the past they shared, the home they never had and her quarrels with Sonia, Violet said she would like Vita to have St Loup when she died. Vita was pleased and flattered: ‘my love of St Loup is genuinely for its own sake – as well as yours’ but apprehensive that it ought to go to Sonia and her children. Violet said they would neither want it nor appreciate it. Beyond her desire to disinherit her sister, the legacy of her tower at St Loup was a way of manifesting her love of Vita and France, the true aspects of her life.
Vita visited again with Harold the following year. Violet did everything to make their stay pleasurable: tuberoses and writing tables in their bedrooms, zabaglione and delicacies to eat, a wallet for Harold, a bag for Vita. From her own tower and in the safety of letters, Vita thanked her. She wrote of the bonds of childhood and passion ‘such as neither of us will ever share with anyone else’.
Oh, you sent me a book about Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Thank you darling, generous Lushka and you gave me a coal-black briquet. It lights up into the flame of love which always burns in my heart whenever I think of you.
Their talisman ring was she said on her table on its customary piece of lapis lazuli
which reminds me to remind you of the promise you made as you held it in your hand. I should be really bitterly hurt if you didn’t tell me – you know what – in advance, and if I were to learn it accidentally from somebody else.
The ‘you know what’ was presumably about not falling in love with anyone else.
Violet was fifty-six and there was no danger of it. But though love was a past secret, a private pain, there was still a need for present displays. She trailed as fiancés sundry princes, marquises and counts. Betty Richards, her lover at East Coker during the war years, advised against Prince Rolphe de Faucigny Lucinge as a spouse:
I do hope that you will not have a change of heart and marry Rolphe … I feel sure that marriage would be fatal; no darling, you deserve something better than R. and I don’t say this just because he hasn’t got any money; were I well off I should never mind the idea of someone
