A day or two after meeting Mrs Blaine, Victoria and her father dined at the socially intimidating home of the historian Henry Adams and his wife, along with their ubiquitous friend Henry James. Despite their powerful position in society, the Adamses were refreshingly unstuffy, preferring their guests to tap on the window with an umbrella than announce themselves at the front door, and delighted when a visitor came by unannounced for a cup of tea. Although Victoria had little formal conversational experience, the Adamses loved her ‘charming foreign accent, so pretty and so elegant’. Eliza Dolittle–like, she had scored another hit. But there was one more hurdle to clear.
The White House was famous within society for its shabby interiors and revolting food. Mrs Adams had barely survived the dreary teetotal administration that had preceded President Arthur. She had been poisoned by the Potomac water served to the guests instead of champagne and appalled by the pretentious presidential china, declaring that ‘to eat one’s soup calmly with a coyote springing at you from a pine tree is intimidating and ice cream plates disguised as Indian snowshoes would be aesthetic but makes one yearn for Mongolian simplicity’. But everything was changing under the incoming regime. Chester Arthur, the tall, elegantly dressed, newly elected, recently widowed president, had turned not to a daughter but to his sister Mary to act as his social hostess, and Henry Adams reported that the new president was possessed of ‘social charms we now understand to be most extraordinary’.
There was something both stylish and romantic about Arthur, who invited the fashionable jewellers Tiffany & Co. to help with the redecoration of the fusty, cockroach-infested White House rooms. The multicoloured glass screen that Tiffany designed for the entrance hall was a sensation. Everyone agreed that Arthur had demonstrated impeccable taste when he instructed that the Green Room be adorned with exotic plaster birds and that silver walls imprinted with golden flowers and a shimmering sky-blue ceiling be installed in his own ‘sleeping chamber’, as the press described the presidential bedroom. The White House cellar was stocked with the finest of fine wines and the kitchen was presided over by a first-class French chef. Those who previously would have done anything to get out of a social summons to the White House would now do anything to receive an invitation to dine there.
On New Year’s Day 1882, two weeks after her arrival in Washington, Victoria and her father attended a reception at the newly decorated mansion. Wearing a deep-green day dress and a matching hat, her long hair held up loosely with combs, her waist the slimmest in town, her eyes the darkest blue, her lashes the longest, Victoria walked up the steps to the White House on the arm of her father, splendid in his diplomatic uniform of blue tailcoat and gold lace cuffs. The other sober-suited and conservatively dressed guests, already assembled in the velvet-curtained Red Room and unable to compete with such a combination of youth and glamour, could only stare. The press were enchanted all over again. A year later Victoria was invited with her father to return to the presidential mansion for a state dinner. The sixteen-stone wife of a senator who was shown to a sturdy chair on the left of the president was disconcerted to see that the illegitimate daughter of the British minister had been seated on his right. Upright, slim and elegant, Victoria took her place with confidence, and with the sort of smile that could soften the hardest of hearts, she turned to greet the president. Arthur’s heart dissolved. The senator’s wife sat silent and ignored, counting the carnations in the huge arrangement on the table in front of her, as the president devoted his attention to his young companion. Dinner was barely over before he could contain himself no longer. Would Miss West do him the honour of becoming his First Lady? Finding it impossible to respond with the solemnity that the president clearly expected, Victoria burst out laughing. ‘Mr President,’ she replied as soon as she had composed herself, ‘you have a son older than me and you are as old as my father!’ But the proposal was genuine, making its way into the carefully enumerated list of suitors in Victoria’s book of reminiscences, and serious enough to alarm the government into issuing a denial on 23 February 1883 under the headline THE PRESIDENT NOT TO GET MARRIED: SPECIAL REPORT TO THE WORLD. The official statement continued: ‘The story that the President is engaged to Miss West is absurd and without foundation’. But the denial only confirmed that Victoria had made her way to the top of Washington society.
* * *
During her first year in Washington, Victoria turned the British Legation into one of the most sought-after places to be seen in. She was a natural hostess, respectful to the distinguished and solicitous to those shy guests who came to the legation expecting to be ignored. She was vivacious and warm, in contrast with her father, who, colleagues concurred, ‘had an unusual power of silence’, and was regarded as aloof and, even worse, dull. Victoria ran the large house and its squadron of servants with the efficiency, authority and leadership of a hospital matron. The flower arrangements were exquisite and the meals delicious. Each day Victoria would visit the Central Market on Pennsylvania Avenue that provided rich and poor alike with Chesapeake Bay crab and terrapin, while the surrounding woods and farmlands ensured that the stalls were loaded with wild duck and turkey, pheasant and partridge, asparagus and tomatoes. America was the land not only of the free but also of the plentiful, at least in Washington. Victoria was given guidance by her new friend Mrs Blaine, whose menus included ‘oysters on the shell, mock turtle soup, broiled chicken and fried potatoes, sweetbreads and peas, asparagus, Roman punch, partridge and salad. Ices, charlottes, jellies, sweetmeats.’ Invitations to a Legation Ball, each attended by five hundred guests, were passports to social success. At one of them the always popular Henry James, greeted by his hostess in a dress of pale pink tulle over pale pink satin and sashed with pink silk, exclaimed, ‘You see in what a roseate vision Washington appears to me!’
Two years after Victoria’s arrival, her sisters – Flora, aged seventeen, and Amalia, fifteen – were at last allowed to leave the hated convent in Paris and join their father. As each sister came of age, Victoria threw them a coming-out party. No one forgot the Highland Fling Ball, because Victoria had arranged reeling lessons in advance for all those who did not already know the steps. No one forgot the evening when departing guests were presented with a going-home gift of a tiny ribboned nest of hummingbirds. Ravenously hungry young men fell in love with Miss West when, ignoring Washington protocol, she directed them straight to the dining room instead of the ballroom. Wilting wallflowers never forgot their gratitude for her tactful coaxing from the corners of the ladies’ room before being fixed up by their hostess with a dashing dancing partner. Victoria’s popularity soared not only among Washington’s plainer debutantes but also with the ‘mightily grateful’ less affluent young men when she banned the practice of sending bouquets during a ball. This expensive habit had become so excessive that while the popular girls tied the flowers round their waists, entering the ballroom, according to Victoria, ‘looking like a maypole or a Christmas tree’, the also-rans sat dejected, conspicuous by their lack of floral embellishment. Victoria began to assert her growing influence as a trendsetter more forcefully. No one objected when she stopped admitting being ‘at home’ to the tiresome Washington habit of indiscriminate dropper-inners who would arrive at teatime unannounced to trap the bored hostess behind her teapot. Her aversion to those strangers who insisted on the intimacy of a handshake was shared by many, so she started the fashion for wearing gloves or carrying parcels to avoid such contact. Soon the number of unexpected and unwelcome visitors across town began to dwindle and a doffing of the hat replaced the hated handshake.
The years Victoria spent in Washington offered her a better sort of finishing school than any mother could have arranged, and she knew it. A long time later she told her grandson Nigel that those seven years were ‘the greatest triumph’ of her life, when everything was full of hope and nothing was tarnished and her innocence had not been tainted by cynicism. And yet for all her beauty and dash, originality and sense of fun, she did not succ
umb once to romance during those seven years. It was not for lack of candidates. According to her Book of Reminiscences, thirteen besotted hopefuls other than the President had presented themselves for marital consideration. Several Wall Street hotshots visiting the capital from New York were on Victoria’s ‘Romantic Proposals’ list of ‘Ceux qui m’ont demandé en marriage jusqu’á juillet 1890’ (‘Those who had proposed marriage to me up until July 1890’), as was an obsessed Russian diplomat and an infatuated French cheesemaker. Phra Darun Raksu, a member of the Siamese royal household, did not even make the list, but only because Victoria never gave the besotted diplomat an opportunity to ask her the question. One similarly lovesick admirer regretted that his advanced age put him out of the running. In his seventy-seventh year the spurned poet Robert Browning wrote Victoria a wistful card. ‘Miss West. J’ai vu trop tard la parfaite beauté.’ He had encountered her beauty too late. Cecil Spring Rice, known as Springy and a junior secretary at the legation, who years later wrote the words to the hymn ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’, was in despair at the failure of his youthful pursuit of Victoria. ‘You have one great fault that I can neither forgive nor forget,’ he wrote. ‘It is simply that you like other people better than me.’ He could do nothing to alter the flippancy with which she treated his love for her. ‘You play with it and manage it like a seagull the winds; on which he floats but which never carries him away.’
The newspapers hinted that Victoria was ‘no longer a bud’ but they were wrong. She convinced herself that her responsibilities as a daughter prevented her from falling in love, writing to her elder brother, Max, ‘I am so happy with Papa and help him in so many ways that I prefer to stay with him and take care of him’. She also claimed in her diary she had not been tempted by any of the men who ‘laid siege’ to her because ‘I can’t trust any man enough. They are always so spoiled by Society and club life.’ Baron Carl Bildt, the chargé d’affaires at the Swedish Legation, was the only one who came close to breaking her resolve. He would whisk her in his buggy ‘with great dash and speed and chic along the flowering avenues of Washington’. She enjoyed the outings so much that she nicknamed him ‘Buggy’. But when she realised that he wanted more than a gay companion, she backed away. Sex had been responsible for her mother’s social ostracism and the consequences of sex had been responsible for her mother’s death. Sex alarmed Victoria. Although she could be a skilled and ruthless manipulator of men’s feelings, she was content for now to have her flirtatiousness reciprocated but without any commitment on either side. She had been put off all thoughts of physicality by Eugénie Louet, her official ‘companion’ and unofficial lady-in-waiting. Eugénie, known as Bonny, had begun working for the West girls in England and had become Victoria’s closest confidante. She brimmed with French wisdom about the ways of the world and was happy to fulfil a quasi-maternal role. But her honest and full-blooded explanation of the facts of life confirmed Victoria’s resolve never to get involved with a man on such a horrifying basis.
* * *
When Lionel was not needed at his office, he travelled across the country with Victoria, father and daughter chaperoning each other. In Virginia they visited the church at Jamestown where in 1613 Pocahontas, the daughter of an Indian chief who married an English tobacco planter, had been baptised.Victoria was so enthralled by the romance of the story that she prised loose a brick from the church wall and turned it into a cherished paperweight. In Baltimore they stayed at Cylburn, a Victorian mansion owned by Jesse Tyson, a fifty-five-year-old, wispy-moustached Quaker, the hugely rich owner of chromium, copper and iron mines, a pig breeder and a teetotaller who kept champagne in his medicine chest, with which he dosed all visitors who ‘showed the slightest sign of fatigue’. His tireless but unsuccessful pursuit of Victoria lasted six years although his lavish silver ornaments for her dressing table were gracefully accepted. Lionel and Victoria went sleighing and tobogganing in Ottawa, where Victoria wrapped herself against the cold in a sealskin jacket and matching hat. They joined a large party of international diplomatic, royal and financial guests on a train owned by Henry Villard, the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Queen Victoria sent her regrets that she would not be spending six weeks travelling to the edge of America’s final frontier, thus she missed the Indian war dance in Montana where one of the inebriated face-painted dancers pointed to the lovely English girl as she prepared to leave and suggested, ‘You go? Me go.’ He had to be restrained from climbing aboard Victoria’s carriage in his attempt to accompany her on the rest of her journey.
The Wests rode the Northern Pacific Railroad to Seattle, where an ox was roasted in their honour. In Vancouver the British fleet greeted their arrival with a welcoming cannonade. They camped in Yellowstone Park, pitching their tents around an enormous campfire, where Victoria persuaded their German companions to sing the famous, rousing patriotic song ‘Die Wacht am Rheim’, before the expedition culminated in the excitement of seeing a climactic eruption of the geyser Old Faithful. Even the natural world seemed irrepressible in Victoria’s presence.
* * *
In 1884 Chester Arthur announced he would not stand for re-election because of ill health. His successor was the Democrat Grover Cleveland, and the British minister was seen to switch allegiance seamlessly from one president to the next, as he was professionally required to do. But Lionel’s charmed life and that of his three illegitimate daughters was suddenly jeopardised by Lionel himself. A farmer living in California, a naturalised American of British descent named Charles F. Murchison, wrote to Lionel out of the blue for advice about how he might vote when Cleveland stood for re-election in 1888. Murchison was eager to know which presidential candidate would best represent England’s interest in the Anglo-American dispute over Canadian fishing rights. Victoria cautioned her father to have nothing to do with the letter and managed three times to talk him out of sending a reply. But one day when Victoria was out of town Lionel defied her advice and posted the letter. Murchison’s sweet-talking words, flattering the British minister as the ‘fountainhead of knowledge’, proved to be the saccharine lining of a trap. Murchison was revealed to be a fake, in truth a Republican trickster called George Osgoodby. With his ill-judged letter to the fictitious Mr Murchison giving his own private, biased views on Grover Cleveland and the Democratic candidate’s likely pro-British policy, Lionel had broken the cast-iron rule of a professional diplomat’s having political neutrality. The British press led on the story, with huge capital-letter headlines.
THE BRITISH LION’S PAW THRUST INTO AMERICAN POLITICS
THE FOREIGN OFFICE ASTONISHED
THE SCREECH OF THE EAGLE
SACKVILLE SACKED
A man whose mild manner and discretion had endeared him to many, even those who, according to his granddaughter Vita, considered him ‘as tightly shut as an oyster’, had suddenly lost his job through saying too much. But Lionel and Victoria were once again in luck. A month after the scandal hit the headlines, Lionel’s childless brother died, leaving the Sackville title and Knole, his huge house in Kent, to Lionel, making it publicly convenient for Lionel to arrange his return to England with his daughters.
At first the Sackville-West family spent an indulgent six months in Cannes, where a fellow holidaymaker, the Prince of Wales, took such a shine to Victoria that he invited her to sit beside him in the casino and to dance with him at the Monte Carlo club. Eventually the family boarded a ship for England. As July gave way to the heat of August, Victoria was invited to stay with a relation of her De La Warr cousins at their house near Southampton, overlooking the Isle of Wight. As she sat down for lunch on the Capabilty Brown–designed lawn, wearing a tight-fitting bodice and a skirt of a pale yellow-striped satin, Victoria felt pleased with her appearance. ‘Yellow suited me being rather dark,’ she explained matter-of-factly in her memoir. ‘And I had in my hair a wreath of ears of wheat a la Cères.’ And then a young man with beguilingly hooded eyes appeared in front of her on the lawn. He was twenty-tw
o years old and his name was Lionel Sackville-West, exactly the same as her father’s. But this Lionel was her first cousin. At dinner that evening, under the seductive gaze of his steady conker-coloured eyes and ‘his charmingly gentle smile’, Victoria recognised the unmistakable glint of desire. ‘I felt much disturbed,’ she wrote nearly forty years later in her memoir, as for the first time in her life she momentarily forgot about being a hostess, a proxy-mother and even a daughter.
4
Victoria
Loyalty
While Pepita’s celebrity was emphasised to me as a child, it was her daughter’s beauty that I envied. At home we have two drawings of Victoria. An observer invited to guess her age in the more finished of the two is usually a decade out. Perhaps the fashionable French Edwardian artist Paul Helleu succumbed to her coquettish manner, his eye distorted and dazzled by her appearance. Or perhaps he was simply working out his commission with characteristic tact, Helleu being a painter chosen by all society ladies of a certain age for the charming manner in which he consistently allowed them a young and flawless complexion. But his likeness of Victoria is not wholly hagiographic. Her face was famously unlined, desirably velvety, the envy of her contemporaries and a source of pride to Victoria herself. Throughout her life she felt no need to wear makeup and boasted of the unmarked delicacy of her skin. She was diligent in ensuring that her image would be remembered and not only in photographs and on canvas. Among the fads of the rich Victorian determined to preserve a record for future generations were obelisks carved from glass that copied a face in profile. Victoria was especially proud of this likeness – the smooth-lined nose, graceful neck and expressive lips reproduced in the intricate column of meticulously carved crystal that glitters on my desk. A life-size cast of an exquisitely fine-boned hand always lay on a table in the sitting room at Sissinghurst, and in the Musée Rodin in Paris a marble sculpture of her head, inclined to one side, shows a woman in no doubt of the seductive power that resulted in those thirteen or so proposals of marriage during her years in Washington. Even her favourite white heliotrope perfume was rumoured to be laced with an elusive essence of hypnotic desirability.
A House Full of Daughters Page 6