Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West. Matthew Dennison
the same eager, loving young woman who had confided to her diary with cosy delight, ‘Every day the same thing, walking … reading, playing the piano, making love’; still capable of enchantment.19 With her hooded dark eyes and hair that tumbled almost to her knees, she was lovely to look at. In the right mood, she was exhilarating company. Like Juliet Quarles in Vita’s novel The Easter Party, ‘she was irresponsible, unstable, intemperate, and a silly chatterer – but … under all these things she possessed a warm heart’.20 In time the combination of beauty, wealth and position encouraged less attractive facets to her character, but this illegitimate daughter of a poor Spanish dancer had yet to forget her good fortune in marrying her cousin. Hers was the zeal of a convert, leavened at this stage with apparently boundless joie de vivre: she embraced with gusto the life of an aristocratic chatelaine that had come to her like the happy ending to a fairy tale. As she herself repeated with justification, ‘Quel roman est ma vie!’ (My life is just like a novel). No one ever persuaded her to relinquish the heroine’s role.
Victoria’s year consisted of entertaining at Knole, country house visits and extended Continental holidays; her favourite days were those she spent alone with Lionel. These were leisurely days of flirtation and passionate lovemaking, of arranging and rearranging the many rooms she thrilled to call her own. She papered one room entirely with used postage stamps and made a screen to match. She installed bathrooms, the first for Lord Sackville, one for herself and another for Vita, close to the nursery. Along the garden front of the house, she rearranged furniture in the Colonnade Room to complete its transformation into an elegant if draughty sitting room. Its walls were painted in grisaille with grand architectural trompe l’oeil; seventeenth-century looking glasses and silver sconces threw light on to deep sofas. There Vita’s fifth birthday was celebrated with a Punch and Judy show; Vita dressed on that occasion with appropriate smartness in ‘an embroidered dress with Valenciennes insertion over [a] blue silk slip’, the sort of dress Victoria herself might have worn.21 As would her daughter, Victoria Sackville-West exulted in her splendid home. ‘Everybody says that I 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 real character of Knole,’ she claimed for herself.22 Knole became her passion and filled her with a pride that was essentially vanity; she delighted in her ‘improvements’ to its vast canvas. ‘No one knew how, when the day was over and the workmen had gone home, she would lay her cheek against the panelling, marked like watered silk, and softer to her than any lips,’ imagined one of her observers.23 She had no intention of allowing motherhood to unsettle a routine that suited her so admirably. Inevitably, her manner of life affected her daughter.
Vita’s first Christmas was spent in Genoa. It was a family party of Victoria, Lionel, Lord Sackville, Vita, and Vita’s nurse, Mrs Brown. After Christmas, Mrs Brown took Vita to the South of France to stay with Victoria’s former chaperone, Mademoiselle Louet, known as Bonny; Lionel and Victoria continued on to Rome. Vita’s parents did not cut short their travels in order to celebrate her first birthday in March 1893: they were more than 1,600 miles from their baby daughter, in Cairo. In subsequent years they exchanged Cairo for Monte Carlo, their destination for Vita’s third, fourth and sixth birthdays. On those occasions Vita remained at Knole. On 9 March 1896, Victoria enumerated in her diary her losses and winnings, and those of Lionel, at the Casino: only as a parting shot did she note ‘Vita is four today.’ She did not suggest that she missed her daughter or regretted their separation; on the same day two years later, she admitted: ‘I think so much of my Vita today.’24 Every year there were visits to nearby London and a trip to Paris in the spring, ‘with the chestnut trees coming out and the spring sunshine sparkling on the river’.25
Accommodated within this routine, Vita’s childhood was by turns permissive and repressive. From infancy she was frequently left alone at Knole with her shy and silent grandfather. Lord Sackville believed in fairies. Morose and uncommunicative in adult company, he enjoyed the companionship of a tame French partridge and a pair of ornamental cranes called Romeo and Juliet, who accompanied him on his walks outdoors. His presence in Vita’s early years was benign if detached. Together they played draughts in the hour after nursery tea: as time passed, a shared antipathy to parties and smart society types sharpened their bond. Vita endeavoured to please her grandfather: ‘She is very busy gardening and cultivates mostly salad and vegetables for her Grand Papa,’ noted Victoria when Vita was eleven.26 Nurses and governesses oversaw Vita’s days; they were overseen in turn by Victoria, whose volatility ensured that none remained long at their post and that each dismissal could be traumatic and painful for Vita. When Vita was five, ‘Nannie’ was dismissed for theft. The truth was somewhat different. After the unexplained disappearance of three dozen quail, ordered for a dinner party, Victoria decided that Nannie had secretly consumed the entire order and acted accordingly.
With her parents abroad, as soon as she could walk Vita was free to lose herself in the self-contained fastness of Knole. She remembered ‘[splashing] my way in laughter/ Through drifts of leaves, where underfoot the beech-nuts/ Split with crisp crackle to my great rejoicing’.27 She climbed trees and stole birds’ eggs. She ran wild in ‘wooded gardens with mysterious glooms’ and on one occasion she fell into a wishing well. Indoors, even the frayed and faded curtains of Knole’s state rooms possessed a peculiar power of enchantment over her. After nightfall, beginning as a small child, she wandered through the rooms with only a single candle to hold fear at bay. Hers was a playground like few others.
The company of her mother, ‘maddening and irresistible by turns’,28 was predictably more stringent. Victoria’s sharp tongue was quick to wound, particularly on the subject of Vita’s looks, which proved an ongoing source of disappointment. ‘Mother used to hurt my feelings and say she couldn’t bear to look at me because I was so ugly’:29 it was Vita’s hair, with its stubborn resistance to curling, that exercised Victoria above all. She may have spoken more from pique than conviction – on 20 February 1903 she recorded in her diary, ‘The drawing of Vita by Mr Stock is finished and is quite pretty, but the child is much prettier and has far more depth and animation in her face;’30 it was all the same to Vita. Vita subsequently categorised her mother ‘more as a restraint than anything else in my existence’,31 but as a small child she delighted her with her quick affection and her loving nature. ‘She is always putting her little arm round my neck and saying I am the best Mama in the world,’ Victoria wrote on 1 August 1897.32 Vita grew up to regard her mother as compelling but incomprehensible: she dreaded her unpredictability and her ability to humiliate with a look or word. ‘She wounded and dazzled and fascinated and charmed me by turns.’33 Mutual misunderstanding coloured their relationship almost from the first: Vita was probably thinking of her mother when, in an essay about art composed in her late teens, she wrote, ‘It is possible, and indeed common, to possess personality allied to a mediocre soul.’34 In one letter, written in a round, childish hand, Vita implored Victoria to ‘forgive me. Punish me, I deserve it, but forgive me if you can and please don’t say you are sorry to have me and go on loving me.’35 Vita learned from Victoria that so-called loving relationships could embrace indifference, pain and even hatred, and that equality was not assured between partners in love. As she wrote in 1934 of one particularly mismatched couple in her novel The Dark Island, ‘She liked him, yet she hated him. She was surprised to find how instantly she could like and yet hate a person, at first sight.’36 For Vita that model of loving and hating existed in the first instance not in stories but her family life. It was a dangerous lesson.
It was Victoria, not Lionel, who administered punishments, and Victoria who ordered Vita’s life. When Vita was five, Victoria forced her to eat dinner upstairs: ‘she is always eating raw chestnuts and they are so bad for her’.37 Instead she insisted on simple food typical of nursery regimes of the period; Vita’s particular hatred was for rice pudding. The following year, Vita was again punished by dining upstairs: the six-year-old tomboy with the post office savings account had escaped her nursemaid in Sevenoaks in order to buy herself a ball and a balloon. Accustomed to extravagant flattery and naturally autocratic in all her relationships, Victoria inclined to high-handedness: where Vita was concerned she expected obedience. As it happened,