Seery was in love with Victoria but he also adored Vita, treating her, Victoria noted in her diary, ‘like a daughter’, while in return Vita thought of him as the perfect fairy godfather. She loved him at once for being ‘exceedingly charming and exceedingly stout’. Soon after their first meeting he gave her a longed-for cricket set and she responded in the most appreciative way she knew, by including him in her 1901 handwritten will, bequeathing him her claret jug, her whip and her treasured khaki uniform. ‘Of all human beings he was the most kindly, the most genial, the most lovable and the most grand-seigneur,’ she wrote years later.
Every spring Vita went with Victoria to spend two months in rue Lafitte. As a child, Vita felt she was entering an ‘enchanted refuge’, a way of life left behind long ago where knives for sharpening quill pens lay on writing tables next to the sand sifters that dried and blotted the ink. She had only to pull on a thick silk tassel for one of the male servants, in their wasp-like yellow-and-black-striped waistcoats, to arrive at once and fulfil her every whim. In the dining room, where a huge silver bowl ‘the size of a foot bath’ spilled over with a conservatory’s profusion of lilacs, roses, irises, tulips, carnations and lilies, cobweb-laced bottles of exquisite wine were brought from the cellar and poured with the respect worthy of a High Mass. When her mother left to shop with Seery’s money in the showrooms of Paris’s great couturiers, Vita was left alone in this extraordinary place to commandeer an ancient wheelchair and spin herself through the silk-hung rooms that became as familiar to her ‘as bread, milk, water, butter’.
When the city became too hot in the oppressive summer heat, Seery and his companions would travel the few horse-drawn miles and escape to the sixty acres of the Bois de Boulogne. The tiny pink-and-white chateau of Bagatelle, with its huge garden in the centre of the park where French kings had once hunted bears, formed another part of Seery’s Wallace Collection inheritance. The house had originally been built in a three-month twinkling in 1777 for Marie Antoinette and provided Vita and her mother with the ideal place for a lavish picnic. As Seery ‘rolled and billowed along on disproportionately tiny feet’ and kept the flies away by flapping his large silk handkerchief, Vita kicked off her shoes and ran barefoot through the grass of Bagatelle’s lovely garden.
But her mother always had the greater claim on Seery, and with the precarious assembling, dismantling and rebuilding of all these relationships, Vita grew to rely on the undemanding stability that she found in a fifth but inanimate presence. From the earliest age Vita felt herself to be the daughter of Knole. The area within the stone walls that enclosed the deer park made up the landscape she loved best and to which she belonged. As an adult she described the sense of enthralment she felt on arriving at the house. She wrote of her continuing happiness on moonlit evenings and in the autumn mist at seeing the buildings ‘emerging partially from the trails of vapour’, and hearing ‘the lonely roar of the red deer roaming under the walls’. Knole would capture the heart of any child, with its portraits framed in gold and topped with coronets, its silver furniture, and its heraldic leopards that stare down imperiously on the courtyards from their elevated position on the huge leaded expanse of roof. It certainly captured mine when, for a few months when I was seven years old, we were lent a small house within the park. The vast attics, with their ornate ceilings and the planked floors made from entire bisected tree trunks, had provided an opportunity for exercise on wet days for centuries of silk-skirted women. The attics were now crammed with long-discarded paintings, clothes, furniture and treasures like the spotty rocking horse that had been the plaything of the 4th Duke of Dorset a hundred years before. The glorious tapestries with medieval hunting scenes inspired the stories and plays and full-length novels that came to absorb so much of Vita’s time. From the age of twelve she would hide away in the wooden summer house that overlooked the Looking Glass Pond in the garden and write.
Indulged in her ‘only child’ role, Vita was accepted, welcomed and loved as integral to the place by all those who worked there. The hierarchical protocol that discouraged all but essential mingling of upstairs with downstairs was abandoned for Vita, who tasted cake mixture in the kitchen, watched the gamekeeper skinning a deer for the chef, helped the Knole painter mix paint, chatted with the under maids and became girl-confessor to the anxious carpenter whose son was leaving the family trade to become a chauffeur. She spent long hours hanging around with Hicks the butler, who could bring a still-life painting of fruit and oysters to life by plucking a grape from the canvas and then unclenching his fist to pop the real thing into the child’s mouth. Only once did a genuine oyster slither into the palm of his hand, a magic trick that left such a trail of slime in his grasp that Hicks swore he would never repeat it.
Later, and increasingly fancifully, Vita personified Knole, categorising it as the longest relationship of her life and the one of which she was most proud and most protective. In adulthood she thought of Knole in terms of a guardian rather than of a lover, because unlike any of her lovers, Knole remained indispensable. It inspired her, rooted her and nourished her, its ancientness fundamental to her sense of self in what felt like an increasingly ‘uneasy century’. Knole was a source of continuity, a dependable parental presence, reassuring her about where she belonged. In her undated and unpublished ‘Book of Dreams’ she admitted to a puzzling nightmare that recurred throughout her life during which Knole caught fire. ‘I have never dreamt about Sissinghurst catching fire; only Knole,’ she wrote, the destruction of that place her greatest fear. She was in no doubt that her relationship with Knole ‘transcended her love for any human being’.
However, an invisible guillotine lurked, waiting to sever Vita from her visceral connection to the great house. Vita had been born a girl. And primogeniture, the ancient law largely affecting the aristocracy, dictated that the inheritance of a title and its associated property could only be handed down the male line. As a privileged, isolated daughter, ‘without a brother or sister to knock the corners off me’, she was the victim of a deceptively inconsequential ‘defect of birth’. Vita had always known of the inevitability of her enforced rupture from Knole, and it was made all the more painful by the knowledge that it would simultaneously accompany the death of her beloved father. By allowing herself to fall in love with Knole she knew that ultimately and inevitably, when the ownership zigzagged to her male cousin, her heart would be broken. But she took the risk, considering it worthwhile. Inhibited by society’s restrictions on their gender, Pepita, Victoria and Vita all developed ways to control a world whose structures attempted to deny them that control. Pepita achieved it through her dancing and her alliance with Old Lionel. Victoria managed, led by the example of her mother, by allying herself to strong men. But Vita’s intentions were established from the earliest age. She would seize the controlling power for herself. She would ally herself to Knole for as long as possible. She would immerse herself in the knowledge of its ancient stone and in its history. She would identify herself with the place. And even when she would one day be forced to leave it, she would never compromise her independence with another human being. She would take instruction from no one. She would remain as self-contained as Knole itself.
* * *
For the first two decades of her life, at least outwardly, Vita conformed to the expectations of her class. Following the conventions of her social position she was educated initially at home partly by governesses but more comprehensively by herself in Knole’s splendid library, where all of English literature and English history opened themselves up to her curious mind. She was sent for a while to Miss Woolff’s day school in London, where she made friends with two of the other pupils, Rosamund Grosvenor and Violet Keppel. In 1909 Vita came out as one of the year’s most prominent and surprisingly unreluctant debutantes. Although as a child she had fought for equality among her playmates, a feminist within her rarefied world, Vita’s was an existence in which only men were encouraged to distinguish themselves, and even if they fa
iled to do so, were forgiven. It was a world full of prejudice and restriction in which women were not expected to excel in anything much beyond the twin necessities of beauty and fecundity. But society’s expectations of daughters were changing, even within Vita’s class, as women’s growing determination for public influence was voiced by educated female writers, activists, reformers and politicians. Vita’s deep-seated confusion, her sliding out from definition, was derived from her concurrent pride, participation and revulsion for the fading society that had begun to crumble before the First World War. Virginia Woolf identified 1910 as a pivotal year, a time when ‘human character changed’, when the bourgeois certainties of the nineteenth century were collapsing in the ascendant onslaught of modernism and the attendant power of the ego. In 1910 Edward VII died and Manet’s and Gauguin’s paintings in the post-Impressionist exhibition in London caused old ladies to faint in horror. But despite Vita’s partial attempts to separate herself from convention, neither she nor her parents held any expectations that she would follow a professional career.
After her regular ‘slumming’ expeditions to London’s East End in 1910, where she joined her well-born peers in ladling out soup to the poor, Vita would return home to Knole by carriage to dine off Georgian family silver, eating meals prepared by the family chef and served by the family butler. There were dinners at the Ritz and opulent balls in the private ballrooms of London’s grandest houses, and for a while Vita found herself having fun while secretly admitting her enjoyment to be shaming. ‘N’est-ce pas dégoûtant d’être snob,’ she wrote in her diary before dressing for an evening at Blenheim. Even so, Vita was an aloof oddity among her suitors, ‘the little dancing things’, the young men of noble birth and heirs to Britain’s statelies that her parents hoped hopelessly might make a match with her. She was an intimidating figure, partly because her shyness was interpreted as disapproval, and partly because, at the heart of her, the disapproval was itself genuine. These characteristics were as obvious to a grandchild (me) fifty years later as they must have been to anyone hoping to capture the love of this imperious but eligible young woman in 1910.
* * *
Vita was not yet ready to abandon youthful dependence entirely. During the course of the next five years two dramatic and draining legal cases almost shattered Victoria’s physical and emotional stability and required all of Vita’s daughterly compassion and patience. Both cases concerned brothers and sisters. One was Victoria’s successful bid to uphold Seery’s will. But the other caused her the deeper pain and was also of greater concern to Vita.
The ‘Inheritance trial’ came to court in February 1910, a year and a half after Old Lionel’s death, and centred on the legitimacy of Victoria and her brothers and sisters. If Max as potential male heir could prove his father had married Pepita, Knole would belong to him and not to Young Lionel. If Victoria defended her husband’s right to retain Knole, she would necessarily be drawing attention to her adored mother’s amorality. She had to decide whether her loyalty lay with her dead mother or her husband. Did her desire to retain her deep attachment to Knole outweigh the shaming option of publicly confirming her own illegitimacy along with that of her brothers and sisters? Would a decision to support her husband’s claim to Knole outweigh her protective love of her mother? Guilt lurked whichever way she turned. Young Lionel was not sympathetic. He did not understand her dilemma or care ‘how much I mind my poor mother being made out an impropriety’, as Victoria put it, ‘or how I want everything to be done to stop throwing mud at her’.
Eventually Victoria decided to fight for her husband’s inheritance and the right for herself, Young Lionel and Vita to continue to live at Knole. During the trial, even though she was never called to take the stand, newspapers were once again captivated by Pepita’s daughter. They were enchanted by ‘her deep sapphire eyes, her soft dark brown and wavy hair and her well proportioned figure which falls into harmonious curves’. They also fell for Vita, the only child of the house. Vita at first faced the publicity with reluctance, feeling like the target at a fairground game, but was soon surprised to find herself enjoying the attention, ‘like royalty – only without the disadvantage of royalty whose functions go on day after day, year after year’.
After six days the case was won by Young Lionel, the illegitimacy of Victoria and her siblings confirmed. The carriage transporting the victorious Sackville-West family was filled with bouquets of orchids and lilies, divested of its smart pair of cobs and, accompanied by cheering crowds, pulled on ropes by the brawny firemen of Sevenoaks. Bond, the family coachman, remained in the driving seat, his top hat at its familiar jaunty angle but his whip and indeed his own role redundant, the horses absent from the end of his reins, his expression betraying how foolish he felt. When they turned the final bend of Knole’s long driveway, the Sevenoaks Horticultural and Floral Society presented Vita with a bouquet of lily of the valley, and the coachman’s wife gave her a box of chocolates. Vita had become so famous that an envelope bearing an American stamp and sparingly addressed to ‘Kidlet, England’, the name Seery and subsequently the press had affectionately given her, was delivered to Knole unerringly by the postman. As Vita sat with her parents in the horseless coach, she shared in the celebratory reprieve, profoundly happy that Knole was to remain her home for a while longer. Just like her mother before her, she continued to reject all enticements to marry, among them proposals from a British lord (Lascelles, the owner of the magnificent Harewood House in Yorkshire) and an Italian marchese (Orazio Pucci, whose Florentine origins, red roses and romantic invitations to the opera proved fleetingly persuasive), in favour of retaining her position as daughter of the house. But then she met Harold.
* * *
Harold Nicolson was a brilliant young diplomat, born a Victorian and belonging firmly within that world of certainties, a man who believed in hard work and optimism. Unlike her father’s courtship of her mother, Harold’s pursuit was intellectual rather than sexual, and therefore, to Vita, much more enticing. ‘Some men seem born to be lovers,’ she wrote, ‘others to be husbands. He belongs to the second category.’ But just as Victoria herself had been indecisive about accepting Lionel, so Vita was battered with conflicting arguments and emotions about her acceptance of Harold’s proposal. In 1913 Victoria’s influence over her daughter resumed its power. The prospect of Vita moving out of Knole reignited her maternal possessiveness and a manipulative scheming that would have made Catalina proud. Not only was she disappointed in Harold’s lack of money and title but, as her father’s daughter, she became obsessively anxious that Vita’s marriage to a diplomat would entail her own daughter moving abroad. For the next six months, while Harold was working at the embassy in Constantinople, Lady Sackville-West imposed a ban on all expressions of endearment in their letters to each other. Perhaps she remembered the passion in Lionel’s courtship letters to her and hoped any romantic feelings between Vita and Harold would not develop if they were not written down. She was wrong. Things happen when they are not written down. Even, or especially, in his absence, Harold was irresistible. Young Lionel wrote to his daughter on the news of her engagement in his quiet, understated and yet generous way: ‘You know how bad I am about saying things but I am glad to see you so happy, and it is rather nice being fond of someone isn’t it? And I have never minded in the least his not being a Duke.’
But although Vita was engaged to be married, she was not obeying the fidelity rules. For much of her early life Vita changed her allegiances as frequently as she changed her style. She used clothes to symbolise her shifting identities. Acting her way through the changing parts of her life, she dressed alternately as a wisteria aged eight, Alice in Wonderland aged ten, a debutante aged eighteen, a wounded male French soldier aged thirty and eventually in the wartime breeches and pearls of the land girls, which became the permanent uniform of her later adult years. Absorbed in a lifelong debate about her own defining personality, she used what she called her ‘duality of nature’ as a privat
e justification for unregulated behaviour and as an inexhaustible source for her writing. With the contrast of the dark complexion of her Spanish grandmother and the heavy eyelids of her father’s British antecedents, nothing fascinated Vita as much as herself. Proud of what she saw as her ambivalent nature, she was self-knowing enough to recognise the elements of her own moral inventory. Authoritative and yet irresponsible, passionately loyal and compulsively unfaithful, generous and selfish, briefly sociable and latterly reclusive, she was a woman riddled with the contradicting afflictions of a movie star – ego, self-doubt and neediness. And even as she accepted Harold’s proposal she was simultaneously allowing her affair with Rosamund Grosvenor to sizzle behind the backs of her parents and her fiancé.
Shortly after her twenty-first birthday, at exactly the age that Pepita had fallen in love with Lionel, Vita set out with Rosamund on a sexually charged visit to Spain, a country which felt partially her own. The trip was an affirmation of Vita’s Gypsy spirit and the greater lure for the adventure was not in fact Rosamund but Pepita. Vita was not too late to find people who remembered her grandmother. Old men spoke of how Pepita had mesmerised every onlooker as she walked down the street, with the curl of hair – her sortijilla – coiled high on her cheek, stroking the edge of her ear. Vita had inherited from her mother a dizzying infatuation for the dancer and recognised in herself a mirror image of Pepita’s tendency to tenderness and ruthlessness, commitment and inconstancy. One weekend Vita escaped from Rosamund and accepted an invitation to a party in the private courtyard of a house in Seville where flamenco dancers had been invited to perform.
A House Full of Daughters Page 10