Behind the Mask

by Matthew Dennison

  A consignment of ‘moth-eaten but superb’ carpets from Victoria’s house in Streatham inspired Harold to reflect on the inconsistencies in their lives. ‘It is typical of our existence that with no settled income and no certain prospects, we should live in a muddle of museum carpets, ruined castles, and penury.’114 Most lasting among Victoria’s gifts would be two lead vases with covers and eight bronze urns from the gardens of Bagatelle, two of which were sold after the war; Victoria also sent the statue of a bacchante that stands today at the head of Sissinghurst’s Lime Walk. Less pleasing to reflect on was Roy Campbell’s overtly hostile and dangerously transparent verse satire, The Georgiad. Its publication in 1931 added to Vita and Harold’s dissatisfaction. Wisely, the Nicolsons responded to its very public drubbing with silence.

  The woman who startled Vita out of her ‘ordered, rational’ state was a journalist eight years her junior. Simply dressed, eschewing make-up, with her short hair and strong face, she was boyish in appearance; she possessed none of Mary’s gypsy wildness or Hilda’s earnest diffidence. Her name was Evelyn Irons. They met in a drawing room in Belgrave Square. Vita had accepted a request to read to an invited audience from The Land. Briefly, afterwards, Evelyn, who was the editor of the Women’s Page of the Daily Mail, attempted to interview Vita: she found herself reduced to a daze by what she regarded as ‘headily emotional stuff’ and the questions she wanted to ask Vita eluded her. When she set off to return to the office, Vita followed her. Vita suggested lunch at Harold’s flat in King’s Bench Walk. Evelyn’s response was contained within a letter full of the questions she had failed to ask in Belgrave Square. Vita replied: ‘I really do hate newspaper stunts and try to keep away from them as much as possible,’ ignored Evelyn’s questions and again suggested lunch – ‘to show me you forgive me’. Evelyn accepted.

  Two days later, on 6 March, Evelyn went to Sissinghurst and stayed the night. By evening it was cold, the moon glinted on frozen turf, made reflections in the lake, silvering the willows, the outlines of wild ducks; Evelyn admitted to herself that she had fallen in love. She invited Vita to a party in the flat in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, which she shared with her lover, Olive Rinder. Vita took olives. Evelyn offered drinks, issued a challenge: ‘I suppose you know that I’m desperately in love with you.’

  Not since Lord Lascelles and Ivan Hay had Vita resisted the aphrodisiac of being loved. Evelyn’s visits to Long Barn and Sissinghurst became a routine, a weekly occurrence, usually on Fridays. She left on Saturday mornings, ahead of Harold’s return. Vita insisted on secrecy: like Violet before her, Evelyn balked at its constraints. For her part, Olive Rinder encouraged Evelyn’s romantic truancy; she too was halfway to falling in love with Vita. Once, Vita cooked the first Sissinghurst asparagus for Evelyn: she steamed it in a syrup tin over a primus stove. The two women worked together in the garden: Evelyn’s photographs show Vita in a spotted shirt, belted at the waist, over breeches, or a shapeless dress of indeterminate colour like an overall, with gardening gauntlets and a spaniel in attendance. In her new novel, Vita called her heroine Evelyn. It was a lover’s joke. For all her desirability and attractiveness as a character, Evelyn Jarrold in Family History is decorative, feminine, trivial: her dressmaker, Mr Rivers, is ‘in the habit of saying that few of his clients could afford to look both picturesque and chic, but that Mrs Tommy Jarrold was one of the exceptions’.115 Evelyn Irons was bored by clothes and would shortly leave the paper’s Women’s Page; her interests were serious, hard-hitting. Neither picturesqueness nor chicness interested her any more than they interested Vita. She would never, like the fictional Evelyn, make herself foolish in love.

  Reversing the roles she had shared with Pat Dansey, Vita bought Evelyn extravagant presents – a monogrammed leather writing case for her own daily letters; a suitcase filled with silk pyjamas; a diamond watch. She loved Evelyn extravagantly too and deluged her with poems. But her instinct erred. In a poem written in May called ‘Warning’, Vita suggested that the springtime of love contained within it seeds of its autumn decay: ‘love’s revenges their fruits for us shall bear/ The darkened fruits of passion so fresh in spring begun’.116 Possibly she anticipated the cooling of her own passion and was preparing the way for her disentanglement.

  When it happened, it would be Evelyn who disentangled herself from Vita, not vice versa, Evelyn’s the passion that cooled. In Family History, which she had finished by the beginning of July, Vita attributes to the fictional Evelyn characteristics she must have recognised as her own. Of Ruth, who is secretly in love with Evelyn, we read: ‘She had no illusions as to the depths of woman’s cruelty where love or vanity were concerned. Evelyn, she knew, had a cruel and ugly side to her nature. She stated it in those terms, crudely, going no further, and not realising that in Evelyn she had to deal with an exceedingly complex and passionate temperament.’117 In the novel, those Vita-like characteristics contribute to Evelyn’s superiority over Ruth; in Vita’s relationship with the real Evelyn, cruelty on the latter’s part was inadvertent and Vita lost the upper hand. She was defeated by a greater love.

  Before that, at the end of September, Vita and Evelyn went to Provence. They visited Tarascon, Arles, Nîmes, Les Baux. In Nîmes, both were revolted by the spectacle of a bullfight: the Spanish instincts of Pepita’s granddaughter were tempered by that English side of her duality which revelled in rabbits, budgerigars, her dogs and their puppies. In the ruined hilltop village of Les Baux, the combination of Evelyn, love, autumn sun and the beauty of the setting inspired Vita to further poetry. Vita concealed from Harold that she was not alone – ‘Their absolute seclusion … invested their secret love with idyllic colours,’ she wrote in Family History.118 When he found out, Harold dubbed it ‘Lez Boss’. After the Violet debacle, he could be excused his displeasure at the idea of Vita and a girlfriend in France.

  The holiday was a success: Vita wrote, Evelyn took photographs; they made bonfires from dried lavender and the aromatic cones of cypress trees. Vita was expansive, unguarded. ‘Oh northern mists of doubt and fear,/ You are not here, you are not here,’ she wrote.119 She made jokes about her adventure with Violet, and Harold and Denys’s dash by plane to Amiens; she talked about Mary, also about Hilda and Dottie who had found common ground in their shared loss of Vita and forged a surprisingly warm friendship from that unpromising beginning. Vita referred to them jointly as ‘The Sicilian Expedition’ after a holiday the two had shared on the island. Later, they returned the favour. Given the difficulties certain to arise from Evelyn already having a partner, Hilda and Dottie referred to her as Vita’s scrape. The label stuck and Vita adopted ‘Scrape’ as her name for Evelyn. Once Vita also became Olive Rinder’s lover, early in 1932, she rapidly found herself in a triangle of conflicting jealousies, a scrape indeed. That this was entirely of her own making, she was honest enough to admit, both to herself and to Evelyn, apologetically, when the latter found out; less apologetically she told Evelyn that she was ‘more than ever convinced that it is possible to love two people’.120 Again she did not tell Harold (the third person she loved). Instead she wrote cryptically to Virginia (a fourth love object): ‘Life is too complicated, – I sometimes feel that I can’t manage it at all.’121 Virginia replied with concern, but Vita declined to explain herself. Nor did she hasten to resolve the increasingly acrimonious tangle in which she had embroiled Evelyn and Olive. That would be left to Evelyn’s defection.

  In the meantime, Vita used her poems to impose conditions on Evelyn: ‘Love thou but me …/ … with my own cipher [I] would imprint thee,/ That thou should’st answer to my single voice.’122 It was her habitual refrain, insisting on unswerving devotion, regardless of the mobile and omnivorous character of her own emotions. In a poem written at Les Baux, she promised to love Evelyn until death: in practice she interpreted to suit herself Gibran’s injunction about making bonds of love. She acknowledged to Evelyn that her poetic promises sounded like ‘threadbare vows’ and denied that they were such. They were, and
the intensity of her feelings proved typically evanescent. So too did Evelyn’s. In Evelyn’s case, her feelings for Vita were knocked sideways by a coup de foudre at a party on 14 July 1932.

  Evelyn fell in love with an older woman with ‘features cut like a Greek intaglio’, Joy McSweeney: Joy would remain Evelyn’s partner until her death in 1979. With a degree of trepidation, Evelyn told Vita of her change of heart in the first week of August. Coming on top of a disastrous Cornish holiday in Lamorna, where Vita, Evelyn and Olive had argued bitterly, Evelyn’s revelations cannot have surprised Vita. Vita was regretful nevertheless. On 11 August, she sent Evelyn a poem, which she published in her Collected Poems the following year. ‘Do not forget, my dear, that once we loved,’ she wrote in ‘Valediction’. ‘Remember only, free of stain or smutch,/ That passion once went naked and ungloved,/ And that your skin was startled by my touch.’123 Those memories, with their unapologetic emphasis on the physicality of their love, were alive and real for Vita.

  Vita did not comment on Evelyn’s transferral of her affections. Although she described herself as ‘very revengeful when I love’,124 a tendency she had proved before in hotel rooms in Paris and Amiens, she was sensible enough to accept defeat and write out her unhappiness in verse. She clung to the memory of Les Baux and would invoke it in her occasional letters to Evelyn, which continued for the rest of her life. Her American lecture tour provided welcome distraction. On her return Vita took a deliberate step away from the dangerous, talkative, disloyal world of newspapers and bohemian London parties into the safety of her tower at Sissinghurst; she planted water lilies in the lake and Iris kaempferi by the moat.125 In the future, other helpers than Evelyn would work alongside her in the garden.

  But Vita remained stung, unexpectedly on the defensive. Although her retreat appeared to be endorsed by advice Harold received from Lord Eustace Percy on the couple’s return from America that ‘serious people ought to withdraw from life nowadays’, she wondered if in fact she had any choice.126 In an unpublished diary poem written in May 1933, she described herself as ‘a broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection’ and asked ‘What have I to give my friends in the last resort?/ An awkwardness, a shyness and a scrap,/ No thing that’s truly me.’127 Eventually she took cover in her writing, explaining her feelings in what would become her next novel: ‘In her immature philosophy, the first tenet was to shut yourself away in a stony fortress and then to consider what system of bluff would best defend you against the importunities of the world.’128 It was St Barbara’s philosophy, passive, discreet: far removed from the cavalier swagger that remained a part of Vita’s self-identity.

  Vita compartmentalised her life. It was a form of pragmatism, her means of juggling conflicting loyalties. It also, at times, represented a genuine failure of imagination. ‘It is almost as hard, in Persia, to believe in the existence of England, as it is, in England, to believe in the existence of Persia,’ she wrote in Tehran in 1926.129 At times that ‘blindness’ extended beyond England and Persia to Vita’s dealings with people. Her emotional life was seldom simple. In 1931, she had fallen in love with Evelyn, encouraged Olive Rinder to fall in love with her, remained hurt at what she saw as Virginia’s abandonment, worked alongside Hilda and written and gardened at a furious rate. Her support for Harold and her sons was boundless in theory but circumscribed in practice by these multiple claims on her time and energy.

  Harold had joined the staff of the Evening Standard on 1 January 1930. Before the month was out, he knew that he had made a mistake, disliked journalism, slithered into depression. That depression lingered. His aversion to Grub Street dented his self-esteem. His early dreams with Vita taunted him. In January 1913, apprehensive about her dislike of diplomacy as a profession and a way of life, Vita had begged Harold to reassure her that ‘the truth is a rose-coloured story culminating in you and me making a State entry into Delhi on an elephant with a golden howdah, and you receiving deputations of Indian princes’; in May 1926, the Nicolsons’ butler George Horne, known as Moody, confided to Vita that he shared the same dream for Harold.130 Harold soon discovered that Lord Beaverbrook’s gossip columns were a far cry from following in the footsteps of his Uncle Dufferin as Viceroy. Distaste for journalism lay behind his decision to join Sir Oswald Mosley’s New Party in January 1931 and stand as a parliamentary candidate in October; Virginia described his political opportunism to Vita as ‘rash, foolish, perverse, incalculable’, as indeed it proved.131 Predictably the collapse of New Party hopes in the 1931 elections had also dealt a body blow to the party’s paper, Action, and Harold was forced to use his own money to settle some of the journal’s outstanding debts. With a degree of accuracy, he noted in his diary at the end of the year, ‘Everything has gone wrong. I have lost not only my fortune but much of my reputation.’132 In the short term, he would remain equally preoccupied with both.

  With his financial prospects ‘so black that I groan to gaze into the abyss’, Vita visited Harold’s bank on 23 December 1931 and successfully ‘extract[ed] an unwilling loan from them’.133 Harold acknowledged Vita’s role in his life as one of calmness, comfort and consideration; he omitted to mention the lack of interest in either politics or journalism which had caused her to fall asleep the night they sat beside the fire discussing his future: ‘When I reach the point where I picture myself riding on an elephant at Delhi, I find that for the last half-hour she has been asleep.’134

  Airily Vita reassured her husband that he could make £2,000 by writing a novel; it was still less than the income she had forsworn from Victoria. Vita’s admiration for Harold’s writing was sincere and wholehearted. In her diary in January 1924 she had described herself as ‘so impressed with [the] vividness’ of his Byron: The Last Journey, which she read as proofs. ‘I like his lucid mind, and his ease of expression. He is like a person who knows how to use a scythe,’ she wrote to Virginia.135 Her dislike of the bulk of the careers open to Harold was equally sincere. In addition, Vita struggled to take seriously any mention of the precariousness of their finances. In March 1932, Harold described her reaction to just such a conversation: ‘Our discussion is interrupted by a sudden desire on her part to take the Blue Train to Biarritz, or why not Syracuse, or why, if one has got as far as that, not to Greece or the Lebanon? I point out that we CANNOT AFFORD IT – THAT WE ARE POOR PEOPLE THESE DAYS.’136

  But Vita was not listening. She parried Harold’s misgivings with her proposed new plantings for the front of Sissinghurst, ‘a wall of limes, framing the two gables and the arch, and following on to a poplar avenue across the fields’.137 For the considerable sum of £5, she bought four large yew trees for the courtyard. ‘We found them in a nurseryman’s garden, to which they had just been transplanted from Penshurst churchyard. The parishioners of Penshurst apparently thought them too gloomy and threw them out. They were old trees but they were just what the courtyard at Sissinghurst demanded and we chanced it.’138 At further expense the trees’ roots were thoroughly doused with bull’s blood during planting. From the same nurseryman Vita acquired a neglected climbing hybrid perpetual rose that was afterwards identified as Souvenir du Docteur Jamain. It remained one of her favourites. In August 1957 she described it with customary lushness as ‘nostalgically scented, meaning everything that burying one’s nose into the heart of a rose meant in one’s childhood, or in one’s adolescence when one first discovered poetry, or the first time one fell in love’.139 Harold’s warnings affected Vita glancingly: she was never constrained by the ordinary or the small scale. ‘It is always possible to paint any picture in dark colours, but that means that one has left out the essential part,’ she wrote later. ‘Life depends largely on how you take it.’140 Her boldness was a tonic to Harold. When Vita was away, his confidence faltered.

  During Vita’s absence in Provence with Evelyn, Harold identified in his diary ‘what it is that makes us so indispensable to each other’. He focused on four points: their respect for one another; their ability to relax completely
in one another’s company; their stimulation of one another and the harmony of their togetherness.141 He highlighted Vita’s understanding; he did not refer to love, either given or received. And he never forgot Vita’s underlying dislike of marriage as an institution, of which she had given him ample proof. ‘I know you loathe marriage and that it is not a natural state for you,’ he wrote on their twenty-first wedding anniversary in 1934.142

  Vita’s financial phlegmatism appeared to be rewarded by the success of the couple’s American lecture tour at the beginning of 1933. This benison was followed by another in the autumn, when Vita received a letter from her French bank announcing a balance of £2,600. It was not enough to assuage Harold’s fears completely. ‘Unless we begin to make more money by books, we are in for a very difficult time. This is for me a constant anxiety,’ he wrote on 31 December. Both Harold and Vita knew that they were playing a waiting game: Vita would become a wealthy woman on Victoria’s death.

  Naturally less anxious about such things than Harold, Vita was wrestling with different anxieties. Once Evelyn had set up home with Joy McSweeney, Olive Rinder was homeless: suffering from tuberculosis, she was too weak to support herself by working. Vita’s financial support exceeded her emotional benefactions. She recognised that Olive, like Violet before her, had seen through her: the picture Olive painted of Vita was less heroic than Violet’s. ‘You do like to have your cake and eat it, – and so many cakes, so many, a surfeit of sweet things,’ Olive had written to Vita on 11 January 1932.143 It was a repetition of Pat Dansey’s criticism about Vita’s deluded play-acting as ‘a romantic young man who treats women badly’. Again the accusation of selfishness, however deserved, was unwelcome. Vita asked Evelyn to go on visiting Olive, but Evelyn had broken free. In the years to come, neither Olive nor Vita would see her often. Vita found a bungalow for Olive. Olive’s letters to her were pathetic entreaties. For Vita the spell was broken. The depression that had assailed her early in 1931 returned.