The Disinherited

by Robert Sackville-West

  What’s more, he had stopped consulting Victoria about the rearrangement of certain rooms: ‘Formerly, he never moved a table without consulting me. Now, his mistress does what she likes.’ Particularly hurtful was the removal from his bedroom, in deference to Olive, of the two photographs of Victoria aged four and twenty-three, which had been hanging there since 1889, and which were now left lying around on the floor in the passage outside. Victoria was feeling so unwanted, like ‘an unpaid housekeeper’, that were it not for her social position and her ‘duty to Knole’, she ‘should gladly go’. ‘Married life under these circumstances even in a magnificent house, is miserable work. I feel absolutely miserably unhappy and I want to go away miles & miles from Knole and put some great barrier between him and me. A quoi bon to struggle on,’ she asked herself, when all that she could see was ‘a long vista of years with that misery ahead’.

  In a letter to Vita, written years later, Victoria wondered how she could have put up with Olive being such a regular visitor to Knole, often in the company of her husband, Walter, and all ‘that scale-singing that went on for hours in the Court, when I was still in bed’ (Olive was a singer by profession). By 1918, Walter was ill with tuberculosis (he died two years later), and Victoria had his room disinfected every time he left Knole, for fear that her grandsons, Nigel and Ben, would catch it. There were fresh suggestions that the Rubenses should be installed in a flat in the Green Court, with Walter becoming manager of a tapestry-weaving firm based in the Stables. One of the other Knole properties suggested was the former School House, in the nearby village of Godden Green. When Victoria went over to view it in the spring of 1919, she suffered ‘un serrement de coeur’ to see ‘la Maîtresse’ about to be installed so close. ‘Enfin! il me faut prendre mon parti et tâche de tout comprendre et de tout pardonner . . .’

  As she entered her fifties, Victoria was being relieved of her roles as wife, mother and chatelaine of Knole by her husband’s heirs and by his mistress. She also felt that she was being edged out of family events, including my own father’s christening in March 1919. She had asked Olive ‘point blank’ not to attend, ‘as she was not a relation’, but Olive went all the same. ‘It is too bad of L. and O. as they know how much I mind the Aunts gossiping and all the neighbours seeing her at the party. Still, I won’t make a row. A quoi bon,’ she concluded resignedly.

  The following month, Victoria arrived at Knole unexpectedly one Saturday afternoon, and discovered Lionel and Olive in each other’s arms, kissing under one of the tulip trees in the garden, ‘just 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’. On 17 May, when Lionel had ignored her request not to have the Rubenses to stay the following week (on the grounds that Walter was so infectious), Victoria finally decided to leave Knole. Lionel, she thought, ought to have considered ‘his wife’s wishes in her own home, where she has done so much & where I was absolute mistress for 20 years, till Papa died . . . I am really too unhappy here since the evil day that he fell in love with Olive, who has unconsciously changed him.’

  The final insult had been finding them under the tulip tree. ‘Oh! The misery and the humiliation of these 6 years! I love Knole & the possession of the finest place in England. It was so uncomfortable & different when I went there in 1889 & I have made it so comfy and brought it back to healthy life like if it had been a sick child. But I am so unhappy with L. & his systematic treatment of me, that I had better go. And I shall go on Monday.’ On Monday, escorted by her friend, the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, she duly left her ‘beautiful and beloved Knole’. Victoria believed that after her departure, ‘poor old Knole [was] doomed henceforth’.

  Victoria found a fleeting visit to the house on 13 August, in order to pack her possessions, ‘most painful’: ‘I simply could not go near the garden or in any of the rooms except my bedroom.’ Some of the servants told her that ‘Knole is lifeless and quite dead without me, that I have made, by my absence, all the difference in the world . . . I left my beautiful Knole without looking back once. I had to harden my heart & I feel more than ever that this chapter of my life is closed.’

  It wasn’t. For Victoria had already established, through the family solicitors, that she could go to Knole whenever she liked. On another occasion, as she described to Vita, she

  spent a dreadfully sad afternoon at Knole of which I took final farewell. I don’t think I shall ever go there again. I was stupid enough to feel a serrement de coeur when I passed through the dining room, to see one solitary place. But then I remembered, as a palliative, all the méchancetés and deep wounds I had received and I [went] on in to the old French Library and that part of the house where I had lived since 1889. Going through my clothes was also very painful; finding the dress he proposed to me in, and my wedding dress and orange blossoms. Well, let us draw a veil over all this, child.

  She did not like the way changes were being made to the decoration of particular rooms, finding the reception rooms, and especially the Colonnade, ‘very stiff’. She heard that Lionel had told Harold he was ‘glad that Knole was his at last & he could do what he liked there! (as if I had ever prevented him to do so!)’

  Although returning to look at her old belongings made her feel ‘like a ghost’, Victoria kept going back to make lists of things to take with her to the house she had bought in Brighton. Each time, she insisted that she would never spoil the rooms of ‘my dear old Knole’ by taking away too much, and hinted that this visit would be her last. She even suggested, a couple of years later, taking Knole for a couple of months every summer, while Lionel was away shooting and fishing. ‘If Lionel refuses,’ she argued, ‘he puts himself in the wrong as I have done nothing to deserve that my dear old house should be shut from me altogether.’ But Lionel, as she had probably anticipated, obligingly put himself in the wrong by not taking her up on the offer, since two months a year was not long enough; he wanted a full-time tenant.

  Knole has always inspired a sense of ownership in its inhabitants, however transient their stay. This has often taken the form of a competition for the person who loves and understands it the best, or whose legacy is most enduring. Now that Victoria had left the house, the struggle to establish – or erase – her legacy was on. She had been helping the American Charles Phillips with his two-volume history of Knole and the Sackvilles. In 1920, Mr Phillips told Victoria that when he had shown her husband a draft of the last chapters of his book, describing Victoria’s installation of electric lighting and bathrooms at Knole, Lionel had simply crossed through those passages with his pencil. ‘How petty!’ Victoria complained. ‘I am part of the history of Knole, having lived there 31 years and having done a lot for Knole in every way.’

  She returned to this theme in the ‘Book of Happy Reminiscences for My Old Age’ that she added to her journals on 23 September 1922, her sixtieth birthday. She recalled, for example, the first delightful years of her marriage, when she drank ‘at the Cup of real Love till I felt absolutely intoxicated . . . I have had the most perfect happiness with Lionel that any woman may wish for or expect from a man, being her husband or her Lover. He was both to me during those ten years.’ But the other source of great happiness in her life had been Knole. She had inherited from her mother, she wrote, her ‘love of beautiful things and of great comfort’ and then ‘had a fine field to work upon at Knole’. Her husband may have wished her contribution to be forgotten, but she described how she had ‘made Knole the most comfortable large house in England, uniting the beauties of Windsor Castle with the comforts of the Ritz and I never spoilt the old character of Knole’.

  Reflecting many years later on the different ways in which she and her parents related to Knole, Vita perfectly captured her mother’s legacy. For Vita, love of her birthplace ‘transcended’ her love ‘for any human being’. Her mother, however, never ‘felt like that about Knole; not quite; not as my father did. She never got its values r
ight; one could not have expected that of her. She was too Latin, somehow; too unreal; too fantastic altogether; too un-English. She exploited it for the wrong reasons; invented stories which were really not necessary to enhance the authentic legend. But still, it was her home, and in her own way she added her own legend to its grey historic walls.’ Although Victoria made Vita and her father clench their fists in silence whenever she talked about Knole, Vita could now see that ‘she contributed beauty to it in her own way, and influenced people, and showed them beauty in a way which mightn’t be truthful, and mightn’t be ours, but which was certainly her own, and was not the less gracious for that’.

  At the time of leaving Knole, Victoria was still an attractive woman, with the smoothest of complexions. Like her mother, Pepita, she had grown rather fat – she was particularly fond of pâté de foie gras, steak with sauce béarnaise, soufflés, fine clarets, and always a glass or two of Château d’Yquem to round things off – but she disguised her embonpoint with her stylish choice of clothing. As her daughter’s lover Violet Keppel recalled, ‘her voluminous, ambiguous body was upholstered, rather than dressed, in what appeared to be an assortment of pattens, lace, brocades, velvets, taffetas’. There was always something exotic – foreign – about her, for she never lost her French accent or was fully assimilated into English society. The other thing people always remembered about her was the perfume she wore, leaving a trail around the house of essence of violet or heliotrope ordered from Paris. But what they remembered most, of course, was her charm – albeit manipulative. ‘I must get my friends moulded in my way or else I can’t get on with them,’ she wrote in her diary. Vita recalled a friend of hers who had compared her to a ‘powerful dynamo generating nothing’. The problem was ‘there was no driving-belt attached to her whirling wheels’.

  Victoria’s idiosyncratic taste extended to her houses, too. Like Pepita, she had a passion for acquiring and renovating properties. She had bought her first bolt-hole in Brighton in 1918, ‘an impossible barrack’ in Sussex Square, according to Vita, consisting of three houses knocked into one. The result, after spending £50,000, was ‘a great echoing mausoleum of a house’, with twenty-four bedrooms. She also owned two houses in London, the Hill Street property she and Lionel had bought with Seery’s help, and a house in Ebury Street she had bought for Vita and Harold. By 1923, she was tiring of her Brighton house, and bought a smaller villa, White Lodge, on the cliffs overlooking the English Channel at nearby Roedean, and commissioned Edwin Lutyens to remodel it.

  There was even what Vita described as a ‘short but unfortunate period’, in 1929, when she owned a house in Streatham, ‘a singularly hideous villa of yellow brick, which for some reason she said was like an Italian palazzo’. For all her taste in interior decoration, Victoria never shared her daughter’s horticultural expertise. When Vita was coming to lunch with her one day in the Streatham palazzo, Victoria realised that the garden looked a little bare – so she simply planted £30 of artificial flowers in order to ‘buck’ things up.

  Victoria remotely monitored the comings and goings at Knole from her clifftop villa, furious, for example, to hear that Olive had sat in the front row of the Great Hall at a concert put on for the estate staff: ‘It is too bad of Olive to appear brazenly before all the servants and workpeople of our Estate, & bad of Lionel to ask her or sanction her.’ Nevertheless, she continued to refuse Lionel a divorce (he had even threatened to cite Lutyens as co-respondent). She did not want the ‘fine’ family name being dragged yet again through the scandal of a court case. But more than that, she simply could not contemplate having ‘that woman at Knole in my place . . . indeed NO to that terrible and quite unnecessary humiliation of that snake in the grass in my place at Knole’. ‘Olive,’ she wrote to Vita, ‘is not the proper person to be at Knole’; it made Victoria ‘sick’ to think that it could have been a gardener, rather than her, who had come upon Lionel and Olive in that dreadful compromising position in the garden. It was only because they had begged her to avoid a scandal that she had not left that very night. ‘I left soon after, though!’ And although it was she who had left, Victoria always felt that she had been driven away from the home in which she had lived first with her father and then with her husband for the past three decades: ‘yes, it was my home and I had done all I could for it . . .’

  On a visit to Penshurst in 1922, Lizzie de Lisle told Victoria how much everybody wanted her to return to Knole, and asked her if she could not forgive Lionel. ‘I said it was not a case of forgiving him,’ Victoria replied, ‘but that he did not want me, and I had just read some of Vita’s book on Knole (which she will publish in the autumn) and every Sackville had always dismissed peremptorily his wife or his mistress, and alas Lionel was no exception.’

  When Lionel and ‘the bountiful womanly Mrs Rubens’ came to play tennis at Long Barn, where Virginia Woolf was staying with Vita in 1927, Woolf described my great-uncle: ‘He is a smooth worn man, inheriting noble nose & chin which he has not put much into himself; a straight young-looking man, save that his face has the lack lustre of a weak man whose life has proved too much for him . . . I found him smooth and ambling as a blood horse, but obliterated, obfusc, with his great Sackville eyes drooping, & his face all clouded with red and brown.’ Six months later, this ‘decayed, dignified, smoothed, effete’ man was suffering from health complications caused by influenza. Victoria still resented the presence at Knole of the ‘snake in the grass’ and felt that she should be there instead to nurse her dying husband. It also brought back painful memories of her own father’s death twenty years before. ‘I am not wanted,’ she wrote; ‘I feel sad that they must torture him, as they tried to torture my poor O’Mann, and in the same room!’* Her sorrow did not stop her, however, from having her maid ring Knole, where her husband was on his deathbed, to say that she too had had a dreadful day: she had been thoroughly disturbed by the housemaid sweeping the carpets.

  ‘The day I became a widow’ is how she began her diary for Saturday 28 January, 1928, the day of Lionel’s death. ‘So the end has come after 15 years of misery.’ The repercussions were to be wide-ranging.

  Victoria hated the idea of her brother-in-law Charlie’s second wife, Anne, taking over Knole. Anne was an American divorcée and former actress, described by Victoria’s friend, the illustrator George Plank, as a ‘bed-to-worse young lady’. ‘What a mistress for Knole! and no money,’ wrote Victoria. In any case, Charlie was thinking of living abroad. ‘The whole thing to me is too dreadful on account of my beloved Knole and what it means to the ruin of that lovely place which Vita can’t inherit unless Eddy makes a rich marriage.’

  This was most unlikely since, as Victoria knew, Eddy preferred young men to women. Equally unlikely was Victoria’s hope that the entail might be broken, to enable Vita to inherit Knole, which Vita ‘adores and which she would adorn much better than Anne or Eva!’* Victoria claimed to have heard a rumour of an even more improbable plan – or was this purely wishful thinking on her part? – that Vita should divorce Harold and marry Eddy, her first cousin (just as Victoria herself had done), in order eventually to become Lady Sackville.

  Instead, Victoria offered to rent Knole from Charlie for a couple of years – and was rather put out when he refused. She squabbled with him, too, over the return of some items of Knole furniture (seven van-loads had travelled to Brighton), and claimed that Lionel’s estate owed her money for ‘loans’ she had made her husband during their life together. As Eddy wrote to Virginia Woolf, ‘there seems no end to her [Victoria’s] stylised behaviour. I hear from Raymond [Mortimer] that she is busy spreading the most unkind stories about us all & our treatment of her; meanwhile she writes to us all in turn, to get round us. She has now claimed part of the family regalia &, if she doesn’t get it, will no doubt try to hew every bathroom tile out of Knole, since she put them there. What a woman!’

  Charlie was evidently under the impression that Vita was siding with her mother, and so, in an attempt to calm family
tempers, Harold wrote to Charlie a few months after Lionel’s death: ‘Any such impression would be completely false . . . We are dealing with a lunatic [Victoria] who will stop at nothing to gain her revenge. We must therefore all stick together if Knole is to be protected. And we shall stick together. Best love to Anne. She must think she has married into a rather eccentric family.’

  Vita, too, felt disinherited. It was with a certain insincerity that she wrote to her cousin Eddy, the heir apparent, after her father’s death: ‘Knole is now to you what it used to be to me; but I know you love it as much as I do.’ Years later, in a letter to Eddy, she acknowledged that the house had always been ‘an awful and deep block. I suppose my love for Knole has gone deeper than anything else in my life. If only you had been my brother this block wouldn’t have occurred, because I shouldn’t have minded in the least if you had succeeded to Dada, in fact, I should have liked it.’