The Disinherited

by Robert Sackville-West

  From January 1899, Henry was to receive an allowance of £2 a week, to be collected from a bank in Paris, Messrs Demachy & Sellière, to ensure he lived abroad. This was never enough. By the spring, he was working at Le Petit Bleu, a newspaper, where, he told his father, he was ‘giving entire satisfaction’. He asked him for 300 francs to furnish and pay the first three months’ rent on a small room he had found not far from his place of work. It would help a lot because, as he continued, ‘I am half fed and half clothed and with a roof over my head that has no comfort, and in consequence feel but unfit for the terrible uphill work before me.’

  At the same time, Henry was evidently up to something. In December 1898, he had written defiantly to Max: ‘Don’t make any mistake, I am far from crushed as people are wont to believe, and you will see me come out on top before many years are over.’ Max’s predicament was as tragic as Henry’s. In February 1899, he was forced to sell his failing farm for £3,000, the proceeds being invested by his trustees to provide him with an income of £180 a year, on top of the £150 he received from his father. As Max acknowledged, his ‘painful position’ owed a good deal to his own ‘carelessness’, but it had also been brought on by ‘a succession of misfortunes’, such as the rinderpest epidemic which killed his cows. This highly infectious virus swept through southern Africa in the 1890s killing, in a couple of years, around ninety per cent of cattle, buffalo and related species from the Horn of Africa to the Cape.

  In April, Max’s eldest son Lionel died from a brief illness at school, aged fourteen years and eight months. The black-bordered ‘In Memoriam’ card he sent his father bore the words of his son’s last prayer: ‘God have mercy upon me, Gentle Jesus take care of me.’ ‘I am broken-hearted,’ Max wrote. ‘He was such a handsome, refined, bright boy & would have been 15 years of age in a short while. He was more like my friend & my companion than a son. My God, I wish I had gone instead of him.’ Just six months after his son’s death, Max applied to the courts in Natal for the surrender of the remainder of his estate on the grounds of insolvency (the proceeds from the sale of the farm were in the hands of his trustees, and therefore could not be claimed by his creditors).

  At the creditors’ meetings, Max’s assets comprised some agricultural implements that were to be put up for auction at his former farm, plus a pitiful collection of items now stored at his house in Loop Street, Pietermaritzburg: namely, one deer head, one aviary, one bicycle, one mealie crusher, three saddles, one churn, eleven head-stalls, one pack saddle. Max himself could not bear to go near his old farm, as he wrote to the receiver, ‘because it is so deeply associated with my boy who is dead, who died in such heartbreaking circumstances. The spot where he lived happily with us for 15 years, would remind me of him at every turn; I should expect almost to see him round every corner & it would finally break my heart.’ Max’s liabilities included outstanding school fees for his children and, pathetically, a debt for £31 19s 3d for the young Lionel’s memorial in the cemetery in Pietermaritzburg. Max also owed the undertaker. As he wrote to the receiver, ‘My child is lying in the cemetery & the very ground is not paid & I am enduring the tortures of it.’

  Flora was in a poor way, too. She had no idea what was to become of her, and at the moment, as she wrote to Victoria, she did not even have enough to pay for her next meal, ‘mais c’est un détail, et je n’insiste pas’. Seeing that her sister was in such ‘great distress’, Victoria continued to send Flora small sums of money, as she waited for her divorce to be settled: £25 in November 1898, and £10 a couple of months later, towards the rent of her new apartment, at 42 Rue Galilée. Although not far geographically, the lodgings were a world away from the smart apartments in the Avenue Matignon and the Rue Clément Marot, where she had started her married life.

  The proceedings of the Salanson divorce are fascinating for the light they throw on the characters, and rackety behaviour, of the two protagonists, and for the predisposition of the court itself. Gabriel’s evidence of Flora’s adultery was based on two letters written by Mme Salanson, which could leave ‘no shadow of doubt on the nature of the relations she enjoyed with the two people cited’. And yet Flora’s claim of an affair that Gabriel had had in 1895, while accepted by the court, was seen as purely retaliatory, a direct response to Gabriel’s suit. Flora’s other grounds for divorce were seen as ‘vague and irrelevant’. Yes, the couple may have suffered considerable financial embarrassments, reeling from one piece of bad luck to another, pursued by their creditors; but ‘regrettable’ though these were, the court judged that Flora could not lay the blame for them on Gabriel. It was, rather, Flora’s extravagance and Gabriel’s inability to restrain her that were responsible. Gabriel was simply weak and improvident and should never have tolerated his wife’s ‘attitudes équivoques’ and ‘familiarités déplacées’. He should have snatched her from this ‘milieu des moeurs faciles, élégant et malsain, où elle se plaisait’, the ‘fashionable and unhealthy world of loose morals, which she so enjoyed’. In granting the divorce, the court found in favour of Gabriel, awarding costs against ‘la dame Salanson’, and granting custody of their son, Lionel, to Gabriel.

  A Miss Effie Mackenzie Evans, gossipy Paris correspondent for the New York Herald, acted as a go-between between Flora and Victoria. Effie evidently believed that the Sackvilles would pay the expenses of Flora’s lawsuit, and was taken in by Flora’s threats that if they did not, she had two men who would. ‘Flora is always threatening Miss Evans to go to the bad!’ Victoria wrote in her diary. To that end, Effie encouraged Victoria to meet Flora. A draft of Victoria’s letter rejecting the idea survives: ‘I have come to the conclusion that, as I can do no more, it is quite useless having an interview which will be most painful to both F. & me as I am still dreadfully hurt by all the things she and her sister & brother have done for many years . . . I have shown her that I am not revengeful & that I am willing to be friends at a distance but please don’t ask me to meet her.’ Victoria did not want to see Henry either, ‘who pesters me all the time with his letters. I had quite an unpleasantness last night with Lionel about my charming brothers & sisters. I am afraid they will be the cause of a good deal of unhappiness in my married life & my relations with L. That is the worst of it.’ How prescient she was.

  Effie hoped that she could keep ‘Flora in hand until she [was] on her feet again’, and that a change of climate and surroundings, away from Paris – and, in particular, away from Henry – would help Flora get her strength back. ‘The sooner she can get away from him the better for everybody,’ she told Victoria. Effie also hoped that, when she had told Flora all she had discovered about the past, Flora would ‘never again allow herself to be so deluded’. ‘If Flora does not now realise how much you have done for her I certainly do. I wrote her that from all I could judge that Henry’s place and the best one for him was to go and live with Béon!’

  But Effie’s gossip eventually got the better of her. At an interview with Lionel in February 1899, she told him that she was convinced Henry was not Lord Sackville’s son and, even more scandalously, that he had ‘the worst designs on Flora’. When Flora got to hear of this charge about her relations with Henry, she threatened Effie with an action for slander, and asked her for 10,000 francs. Furthermore, Flora planned to come to London to confront the Sackville family, and to find out what ‘will be done for her’. Effie warned ‘that very evil consequences will be the result. That if money is not sent her to come that she will get it “another way”. She seems to have lost confidence in my friendship and I am very very sorry to be so misjudged . . . I have been brought into this unfortunate affair and I am too fond of Flora – malgré tout – and am too sorry for her miserable and helpless state of affairs not to continue in doing all I can for her and from my sincere convictions of right and wrong.’

  In April 1899, Victoria recorded in her diary, with a frisson of horror and sisterly contempt, Effie’s report that Flora was looking very ‘rich and prosperous’, and living ‘in a fine
appt. & is a common prost[itute]’. Flora had not, in fact, fallen so far, but had become more of a courtesan, like her mother, dependent on a succession of men, as her illegitimacy, her recent divorce, and her lack of independent means pushed her ever closer to the margins of society. Nevertheless, Flora still hoped that Victoria would intercede with their father to give her enough of a pension to enable her to ‘vivre honorablement’, accepting any condition that he might wish to impose. She knew that Papa had every right to be severe, but believed that she had been punished enough and would like to be pardoned. She was desperate to be free, and to assume her maiden name again.

  Amalia moved in similar social circles to Victoria, where she continued to spin her ‘tissue of falsehoods’ to shared friends and acquaintances – the Sitwells at Renishaw, the Herberts at Llanover. But she did so at a less exalted level, obliged to leave her modest rooms in Ebury Street when the rent went up, or to rely on her father to pay the doctor’s bills when she was ill in the summer of 1901 and had to have an operation on her ear. The worlds of the other siblings were more distant.

  And yet, their very different trajectories often intersected. In March 1899, while Victoria was in Paris, she spotted Henry driving around the city in a very smart carriage with a man. The following year, she was in Paris once again, to visit the Exposition Universelle, or World’s Fair. With around 51 million visitors, the exhibition was the most widely attended event of its kind to date, and it had the effect of pushing up the price of accommodation. Henry was forced, as a result, to complain to his father how the rent for his little room in the Rue d’Edimbourg had doubled, and to ask for his pension to be raised for the duration of the exhibition. Victoria, by contrast, was staying in the Rue Laffitte, and being wonderfully entertained by her new friend, Sir John Murray Scott. In July, she visited the British Pavilion, where ‘all the Knole things’ were on show.

  Each of the exhibition’s participating nations had been invited to erect a pavilion, with the British one, according to The Times, being designed to ‘give a perfect example of a Jacobean house, such as might be the home of an old English family’. Knole was the chief inspiration for the interior. The staircase and landing were a direct copy of the house’s Great Staircase, which had been built in the early seventeenth century, with the Sackville family’s heraldic leopards perched proudly on the newel posts. The Long Gallery, overlooking the Seine, was modelled on the Cartoon Gallery at Knole, with an almost identical ceiling and chimneypieces, and copies of the X-frame chairs of state arranged along the walls. The British Pavilion attracted 600,000 visitors. One can only wonder whether Henry was among them, strolling through the replica rooms of a house he believed was his, but from which he had recently been physically evicted.

  While she was in Paris, Victoria did not see Henry, or Flora, who was now divorced and living in the Rue Galilée. Since her former husband had stopped giving her an allowance, she was threatening ‘to settle in London & start a bonnet-shop with her name & Sackville West on the door!’ Although Victoria wrote ‘very kindly’ to her (as she could not help feeling sorry for her), Flora replied that she did ‘not want my affection, but my money’, and repeated her threat to come over to England as a milliner.

  Flora was now threatening again to go on the music hall stage, to perform ‘Poses Plastiques’, or tableaux vivants. Dressed in skintight, pinky beige body stockings that left little to the imagination, actresses posed as biblical or mythological figures that provided no more than the thinnest veil of respectability to the frankly erotic nature of their art. ‘That will never do, as she would have to be in tights,’ wrote Victoria. ‘It must be stopped at all costs.’ Victoria would not see her sister, but when Flora visited England in 1901, ‘the poor wretched thing’ had an interview with Victoria’s husband instead, at her ‘miserable lodgings’ on the attic floor of 45 Gower Street. ‘Lionel says she shows much better feelings now,’ wrote Victoria. ‘She calls herself Miss Sackville-West! She sees little Lionel Salanson once a week in Paris.’ Flora was asking for an allowance of £365 a year, like Amalia’s, and for Papa to pay off her debts, which amounted to around £400, in return for which she promised to live peacefully in Paris.

  Flora wrote to Victoria after the meeting, thanking her for some money she had sent, ‘qui est of a great help just now’, and telling her that she was now going to try to live ‘tranquillement’ and to give up her idea of going on the stage. However, knowing that Papa never did anything without asking Victoria first, she hoped that Victoria might be able to get him to help with her debts. The ‘most pressing’ of these consisted of 1,897 francs for tapisseries, 835 francs for the landlady, and 3,000 francs for her lawyers; and she duly received £110 from Papa. ‘I am really grateful to you,’ she wrote to Lionel, ‘for I am sure you managed the whole thing to help me.’ In a letter to Victoria, Flora acknowledged that, although she had many faults, she was not ‘une ingrate’ and would never forget the help she had received from her sister.

  It did seem, for a time, that Flora had accepted her lot and decided to stay in Paris, although early in 1902, Victoria received an anonymous letter, warning that Flora was coming to England shortly to induce the Sackvilles to sell some of their paintings and replace them with copies. Rumours continued to reach Victoria that Flora was consorting with a string of unsuitable young men, French counts, and American businessmen, with the relationships often foundering on the twin obstacles of money and religion.

  Henry was pleased that Flora was at last divorced, and ‘rid of the man that brought about this very sad family quarrel’, as he wrote to Victoria. He thought this was now the perfect time, ‘while Father is still with us and in good health, that we should be all brought together again and form one link as before’, and asked Victoria who is so ‘clever and intelligent’ to settle the quarrel. What he really wanted was money. In 1900 he wrote to his father, announcing his engagement to a penniless young woman. Could his father raise his pension so that he could live quietly with his wife and bring up a family, possibly in Belgium or Italy where life was cheaper? Or was his father determined to prevent him living honourably and ‘d’obtenir dans ma vie brisée les seuls soulagements et la tranquillité [finding the first comfort and calm in his life so far]?’ Henry did not receive a reply and wrote again the following year, in April 1901. He still wanted to get married and ‘to retire in some quiet spot where I may obtain as a compensation for my present very sad existence, a dear heart that will help me to forget all my past and present sufferings, for you are aware that my life is a most wretched one and that I have terribly suffered both bodily and mentally’. As it would be impossible, claimed Henry, for him to take a wife on his existing means, could he have the same allowance as Amalia? This time, his father acknowledged Henry’s letter, adding ‘I do not wish to see you’, and forwarded the letter to Victoria, who was in Spain at the time. ‘I send you a letter from Henry,’ he explained; ‘He has written to me also wanting me to give him as much as Amalia has to enable him to marry! The old story . . . What a bother he is.’

  In the spring of 1904, Victoria was staying with Sir John Murray Scott on one of her annual trips to Paris (‘Toujours shopping!’ she wrote). Her dentist told her that Amalia was in town, and she heard from somebody else that Flora was still leading ‘a regular disreputable life!’ Papa was there too, but so afraid of bumping into Henry that he rarely ventured out. The whole family then, except Max, was in Paris. But the worlds in which they each moved – the beau monde, in which Victoria thrived, and the demi monde (at best) in which Flora lived – had diverged completely. After dinner one evening at Prunier, ‘the oyster place’, Victoria went on to the theatre to watch the Spanish actress ‘La Belle Otero’ dance. As Victoria complained in her diary: ‘she had no chemise or stays on & one could see her figure quite plainly, through the opening of her chemisette; I have never seen anything like that before!’ (And she probably had a point, since Otero’s breasts were said to have inspired the twin cupolas of the Carl
ton hotel in Cannes.) Victoria was characteristically blind, however, to the irony of her remarks, given that Flora kept aspiring to a career not dissimilar, and that Otero, like Victoria’s mother Pepita, had been born in Spain and presented herself to her adoring public at Folies Bergère as an Andalusian gypsy.

  See Notes on Chapter 7

  8

  Skulduggery in Spain

  In the spring of 1901, Victoria visited Spain for the first time. Unlike her daughter, Vita, for whom the country was later to become a place of high romance, Victoria was not favourably impressed. There was ‘so little to buy’, she complained, and Madrid struck her as being ‘wretchedly poor’; the capital’s central square, La Puerta del Sol, was very disorderly, ‘full of people loafing about all day’. The Alhambra in Granada was similarly disappointing – ‘We expected a much grander building’ – and the streets of the city were ‘smelly & shockingly paved’. She was disgusted by a bullfight in Seville.