A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  The evening began with an enormous woman, sitting on a chair and singing what seemed like an interminable requiem, wailing and wringing her hands in a voice like a trombone. And then the Gypsy dancers themselves arrived with the ‘bony architecture of their features and the tragic dignity of their sunken eyes’ displaying the wisdom of experience. Entranced by ‘the strangely undulating and sinuous figures dancing with a curious intensity in which there was no thought of anything but rhythm and dancing’, she was most thrilled by the dancers closest to her own age, those creatures who were ‘divinely young, elusively adolescent’. One very young couple particularly magnetised her, ‘as fine and graceful as a pair of antelopes … tawny and beautiful’, as they clung to each other, waiting their turn to dance, ‘suspicious and alert as though the outside world threatened the affinity between them’. When they eventually took to the floor, ‘an undercurrent of truth running with a snarl between them’, their performance reeked of a sexuality stripped down to a fundamental simplicity, the heightened concentration of such undiluted passion transcending anything trivial or lustful, and infused with ‘purity and beauty’. This sense of freedom was infectious, absorbed at a deep level by Vita herself, who was apprehensive of the potentially restricting consequences, both emotional and physical, of the impending legal contract with Harold.

  On her return, Knole rather than Harold deepened its hold on her. Vita began to feel that with marriage she would be losing more than she would gain and took to her bed with depression. She had not done enough living to give up her freedom; she was in love with and often in bed with a woman; the prospect of marriage was beginning to feel like a trap. Her mother’s intrusive self-pity at Vita’s impending departure was both infuriating and a factor in her struggle to make the right decision. Victoria was always hard to ignore. ‘Mother used to come to my room holding a little green bottle of disinfectant to her nose and saying that there were three hundred steps between her room and mine and what a bore it was feeling one had to go and see someone who was ill.’ And then circumstances tilted Vita back further in her mother’s direction.

  During the summer of 1913, with the engagement still in place, Vita was overcome with admiration and pride for the courage and bravado with which her mother defended herself in the witness box during the trial over Seery’s will and developed ‘a new worship for Mother’. Victoria, recently and hugely rich thanks to Seery and the courts, seized her opportunity and took Vita shopping in Paris, buying her a daughter’s ransom’s worth of diamonds and emeralds, hoping she could still somehow retain her power over Vita. Victoria held a controlling advantage over her daughter that Catalina had lacked. She had money: Seery’s money. Having suffered the deaths of a father and a surrogate father, and having lost the love of her husband to Olive Rubens, Victoria tried to keep Vita with her for as long as possible, wheedling the loyalty out of her with a diamond necklace, cluttering up further Vita’s indecision about whether she belonged more to her parents, her home, or the young man she was due to marry on 1 October. In The Edwardians, Vita’s own conflicting behaviour emerges in the mind of her alter ego Sebastian. ‘He had, apparently, no opinions but only moods – moods whose sweeping intensity was equalled only by the rapidity of their change.’

  Two weeks before the wedding Harold remained deeply worried about Vita’s fluctuating feelings for him, although he was unequivocal about his for her. Echoing Lionel’s double-bluffing technique to a once ambivalent Victoria, Harold wrote to his fiancée: ‘You do not care nearly as much for me … I don’t mind really, as all I want is for you to let me adore you.’ His simple request unravelled the cat’s cradle of anxieties and arguments that were driving Vita to distraction, and although she wept for an entire hour the night before the wedding ‘thinking of Knole’ and the impending loss of her liberty, the following morning the storm of uncertainty over her marriage had passed, at least for a while.

  Wearing gold brocade and a long veil of Irish lace, Vita was married by the Bishop of Rochester in the chapel at Knole, just as her parents had been twenty-three years earlier. The bridesmaids were Harold’s sister Gwen and a distraught Rosamund Grosvenor, Vita’s ex-girlfriend, jilted by Vita only days earlier. Walter Rubens played the organ as accompaniment to his wife, Lionel’s mistress, Olive Rubens. Olive had been practising for days, horribly audibly and increasingly shrilly in the Pheasant Court, and on the big day she dressed in a gown of chestnut-red velvet edged with skunk and sang an aria by Gounod, Victoria’s own favourite composer. As Victoria sulked upstairs in bed, Olive warbled and Rosamund wept, Vita wrote, the bridal couple’s eyes met as if to say ‘that this was the most tremendous lark out of which they must get the most fun possible’. Afterwards there was a huge party with four duchesses and all the jurors from the Seery trial. The newlyweds took a train to lovely Coker Court in Somerset, which had been lent to them for the first night of their honeymoon, and Vita wrote in her diary that the wedding had been ‘a great success’.

  Victoria recovered in time to instruct the official press photographer to delete the figure of Rosamund entirely from the wedding pictures and write in pencil at the bottom, ‘Can’t be published without being much altered especially the nose’, a slashing pencil mark running right across Vita’s offending protuberance. Mothers of daughters with Sackville blood are famously sensitive about the disfiguring effect of the large hereditary nose. But there was more of an explanation to Victoria’s angry behaviour than dissatisfaction with Vita’s appearance. Three months after the end of the Wallace Collection trial Victoria had lost the companionship of her only child. As Vita embarked on her own adult life, independent of her parents, Victoria felt bereft.

  Not long after Vita’s wedding, Victoria went to Paris to sit for the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Her diary describes the pain of the realisation that her daughter was no longer hers. ‘R was so kind to me today when I broke down talking about Vita. When he saw my eyes full of tears he got up and came to me with his hands full of terre glaise [clay] and knelt in front of me and said “pauvre amie, comme vous souffrez de son absence car vous l’avez faite et fabriquer a votre gre mais c’est naturel qu’elle doit quitter car elle aime son mari”1 and the old dear was looking up with so much sympathy and kissing my hands so respectfully.’

  * * *

  On 6 August 1914, three days after the outbreak of war, the ominous sound of the trains at Sevenoaks station taking hundreds of young men across the Channel could be heard across the park. That evening at Knole Vita gave birth to a son. Childbirth was nearly as hazardous in 1914 as it had been twenty years earlier, and it was especially so, it felt to Vita, within her own family. The experience had not only traumatised her mother but it had been responsible for the death of her grandmother. As Vita went into labour at ten o’clock that night, Victoria took up her position in a chair outside the closed bedroom door. Not until seven the following evening did Vita allow her to come in. The feeling of hurt and exclusion was inevitable. There was a fight between mother and daughter about the baby’s name, with Victoria insisting on Lionel, and Vita on Benedict. Victoria sulked, screamed and threatened. ‘If Vita prefers the name Benedict to her mother’s love she is welcome to it’ was the message delivered to the new mother. ‘I think she is crazy,’ an exhausted Vita said to Harold. Just one year later Vita was apprehensive but excited at the prospect of the birth of a second child, ‘certain of a sister’ for Ben. The baby was due at the end of September but by the end of October, nearly five weeks late, there was still no sign that the baby was ready to arrive. Eventually, on 1 November, Vita was put under anaesthetic for five hours and the nine-pound baby was delivered. The little boy, a second son, had died before there had been a chance of life.

  Physically Vita was left black and blue from the ordeal. Emotionally she was desperately shaken, her need for Harold never greater. ‘It isn’t so much that I grudge all the long time or the beastly end as everybody thinks,’ she wrote a month later to Harold in London. ‘I mind him being dead b
ecause he is such a person … I can’t bear to hear of people with two children. Oh Harold darling why did he die? Why, why why did he? Oh Harold I wish you were here.’ In January 1917 a third son, a survivor, my father, was born in London, but Vita’s ability to make sons felt particularly poignant both to Victoria and to Vita. Ben and Nigel had both arrived in the wrong generation, too late to inherit. If sons had been born to Victoria, the ownership of Knole would have remained within Vita’s immediate family instead of moving to Lionel’s younger brother, Charlie, and then to his son, Eddy, Vita’s cousin. Even better, if Vita herself had been born a son, the house would have remained hers. However, for as long as Young Lionel was alive, and even though she had moved away, Vita still considered herself to be the child of Knole.

  Soon after their marriage the Nicolsons bought Long Barn, an ancient house, with claims to have been the birthplace in 1422 of William Caxton, the inventor of the printing press. Long Barn’s appeal for Vita was threefold. Not only did it boast its own literary-historical associations, but it was only a mile away from Knole and had the potential to make a lovely garden. For the next ten years, she visited her feuding parents almost every day. And as her role as go-between grew more demanding, her position as daughter of the house remained as strong as ever.

  At the beginning of the war, Victoria was still not ready to accept that Lionel’s affair with Olive Rubens had become a permanent arrangement. But when Lionel joined the West Kent Yeomanry and went away to fight in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, things changed. With his first experience of professional leadership, Lionel at last found the self-confidence that Victoria’s dominant personality had made impossible. And this new-found confidence emerged in the courage he demonstrated in his private life. The ambivalence with which he had been behaving towards his wife and his mistress at last reached a conclusion. One day in May 1919 Victoria caught her husband in an embrace with Olive beneath the tulip trees ‘kissing like any soldier and his girl in the park … an occupation that was not much in accord with their both saying to me that their friendship was purely platonic’. She announced she had suffered enough. She was leaving.

  Victoria’s departure coincided with Vita’s own romantic crisis. In 1919, when her two sons, Ben and Nigel, were aged five and two and Harold was a junior delegate attending the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles, Vita ran away to France with Violet Keppel. Violet was engaged to be married to Denys Trefusis, a friend from childhood. But Violet intended the move to be permanent. The two women were madly, overwhelmingly, dangerously in love with each other. Meanwhile, the tension between Lionel and Victoria had been stretched to the point of rupture. Responding to desperate pleas from both Vita’s husband and her mother, Vita and Violet returned home briefly. Vita tried to comfort her parents during the weeks when her own marriage was also on the point of complete annihilation, but her awareness of the responsibilities of daughterhood and occasionally her love for Harold and the boys were the only fleeting considerations that interrupted her and Violet’s plans. ‘I spent a miserable weekend going up and downstairs carrying messages between my parents’, she wrote in May 1919 as her mother loaded up seven luggage vans with her possessions and left Knole forever.

  During Vita and Violet’s short stay at home, Violet married Denys, a distinguished major in the Royal Horseguards who owned a pilot’s licence. As soon as the two wives left the country again, swearing that this time they would never return, Denys and Harold hired a rudimentary aeroplane, and, with Harold shivering in the passenger seat, the two husbands chased their wives across the Channel to Amiens, where Harold, tipped off by his suspicious mother-in-law, challenged Violet’s disingenuous oath to Vita that she and Denys had never been to bed together. Violet confessed the truth and Harold brought his betrayed and furious wife home by train.

  Lionel and Olive in the meantime were relieved of Victoria’s presence. Victoria moved permanently to Brighton but refused to divorce her husband and allow him to marry Olive, even though after Walter’s death from tuberculosis in 1920 she was free to do so. But there was no such respite for Vita. After Victoria left Knole, she imposed on her daughter a further twenty years of blackmail, alternating blame with neediness while Vita responded with pity, affection, financial dependency, exasperation and guilt. In January 1928 Young Lionel became ill with a flu that developed into an inflammation around the heart. His death came quickly. Victoria remained in Brighton, shaken and excluded. With rare but exemplary discretion, Olive moved out at once and did not reappear for the funeral. And for a few extraordinary days Vita had Knole to herself at last, the solitary chatelaine organising a funeral, a daughter making autonomous decisions that needed no ratification from anyone, a daughter at last in charge at Knole. This was the culmination of the bargain she had made with herself as a child. She would allow herself to love the place in return for the chance to seize it as her own for a while, even though she knew she would eventually lose it forever. If the time of total possession was brief, it was worth having.

  But within the week the huge mental strain that had been building up within Victoria over many years, stretching back even to the death of her mother, finally reached its climax and she fell apart. Isolated and offended that she had not been included in the final farewell to her husband, she let loose all her anguish in a wail of anger and despair. On a piece of blue paper torn from an exercise book that I found hidden among Vita’s things, Victoria’s huge and chaotic black writing covers both sides of the page. Referring now to Vita as ‘Vipa’, Victoria expelled all her misery, hurt and isolation, the letter to Vita a cry of deep hurt about being thoroughly neglected not only during the last three weeks of Lionel’s illness but during the last three years: ‘You are a selfish, callous, ungrateful child to the best mother anyone could have ever had.’ Vita was at a loss about how to handle her mother’s breakdown and at first tried to treat her with as much gentleness as she could. But in April Victoria stormed unannounced into the office of the Sackville-Wests’ lawyers in London, where she knew Vita was discussing Lionel’s will. There, in front of the astonished assembled legal team, and using ‘the most dreadful language’, she accused her daughter of stealing all the family jewellery. Vita followed her mother into the street where Victoria had retreated to her parked Rolls-Royce, a victim shuddering with hurt one minute and a lunatic yelling abuse at her daughter through the open window the next. After being called a liar and a thief, to the entertainment of every passer-by, Vita stood in front of the Rolls and cut up a precious and disputed pearl necklace with scissors as her mother watched, powerless and fuming, from her car window.

  After the dreadful scene in the street Victoria refused to speak to Vita for nearly two years, communicating with her only through her grandsons. Although Vita maintained her end of the silence, she continued to feel guilty, aware that ‘she must be feeling very lonely, somewhere in her strange heart’. Throughout her life there had always been times when a brief whiff of heliotrope, a click of the delicate fingers, could hypnotise Vita all over again and break her latest resolve not to trust her unpredictable mother. Their reconciliation during the Christmas of 1929 proved that nothing had changed between them. Victoria remarked that although Vita appeared ‘very handsome’ it was the ‘regrettable moustache’ that detracted from her beauty and that despite her ‘beautifully waved’ hair, she had become ‘stout round the hips and looks exactly as if she was enceinte’. Victoria’s critical habit was as vibrant as ever but Vita remained steady, instinctively forgiving even while Victoria’s mental neuroses and paranoia deepened. Soon her mother’s physical health began to deteriorate as diabetes and heart problems depleted her strength. Victoria would sometimes answer the door in a nightgown fastened by a priceless emerald-and-diamond brooch from which, in case of emergency, she had hung a threepenny whistle from Woolworth’s. Often Vita would find her mother still in bed but barely visible, submerged beneath half-eaten jars of Fortnum & Mason’s best pickled peaches, tins of truffles, cans of foie gra
s, soap from Coty, boxes of old stamps, bottles of cherry brandy, a fly whisk and piles of books written by Vita. Not once did Vita stop loving her. The day after Victoria’s death, on 30 January 1936, she wrote in her diary that she felt as if she had been ‘hit over the head with a mallet’.

  Orphanhood and physical displacement fractured the existence of an only child with a particular loneliness that persisted, unassuagable by anyone, not even a loving husband nor any number of lovers. For a few years Vita’s annual diary entry on 9 March, her own birthday, continued to record how much she missed her mother. In the late summer of 1936 when the Spanish Civil War began to tear Pepita’s motherland apart, Vita began to write her book about her grandmother and mother. Eventually she recovered from the deaths of her parents but never from the loss of Knole. With her mother’s death the final childhood link to the place she loved above all others had gone. She could not bear to return there, even though her uncle had given her a key to the garden gate. After the National Trust took on part ownership of Knole, Vita wrote with emphatic conviction that ‘it will never be the same – never, never the same – never, never, never’. Four years after her mother’s death, the suicide of Vita’s greatest friend Virginia Woolf only heightened her isolation. But Virginia had left Vita a precious legacy. In 1930 Vita had made her own personal claim on Knole with the publication of The Edwardians, her best-selling fictional memoir of her upbringing. But it was Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s delicious and daring work of magical realism, inspired by Vita, that identified her with Knole in a way with which primogeniture could never interfere. The character of the title travels through several centuries, with everything, including his own sex, changing as he crosses the boundaries of time. The constant of the story is the presence of the great house, which has always been and – if fiction is to be believed in the way it should be – always will remain his family’s home.