Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West. Matthew Dennison

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, her treatment of her daughter hardly differed from her behaviour towards her husband or her father. In each case she preferred to jeopardise affection rather than yield control.

      Until Vita was four, Knole was home not only to her parents and her grandfather, but also her Aunt Amalia, ‘very Spanish and very charming’ in one estimate,³⁸ remembered by Vita only as ‘a vinegary spinster … [who] annoyed Mother by giving me preserved cherries when Mother asked her not to’.³⁹ (She annoyed Victoria more with her constant requests for money. The women were temperamentally incompatible and ‘endless rows and quarrels’ made both miserable.⁴⁰) Also in the great house, hugger-mugger within its far-flung walls and ‘rich confusion of staircases and rooms’,⁴¹ lived Vita’s other families: four centuries of Sackville forebears, ‘heavy-lidded, splenetic’,⁴² preserved in heraldic flourishes and the rows of portraits in which Vita would glimpse ‘our faces cut/ All in the same sad feature’;⁴³ and Knole’s servants and retainers. All influenced the small girl in their midst.

      From the outset of her marriage, Victoria Sackville-West had set about rationalising Knole’s running costs. By 1907, she would successfully reduce the annual household expenditure by a third to £2,000.⁴⁴ She did so while retaining a staff of sixty, including twenty gardeners; their combined wage bill cost her father and afterwards her husband a further £3,500.⁴⁵ Few of these servants were known personally to Victoria, Lionel or Lord Sackville, or even recognised by them by sight. To Vita, free to explore regions of the house her parents seldom visited, they formed an extended kinship.

      ‘As a mere child, I was privileged. I could patter about, between the housekeeper’s room and the servants’ hall,’ Vita recalled in an article written for Vogue in 1931. ‘The Edwardians Below Stairs’ examines the elaborate staff hierarchies of her childhood. It also demonstrates how much of Vita’s time was spent among Knole’s servants, whom she knew by name, who shared her games and who omitted to lower their voices or silence their gossip in front of the dark-haired little girl who moved among them so easily. ‘I could help to stir the jam in the still-room or to turn the mangle in the laundry; I could beg a cake in the kitchen or a bottle of cider in the pantry; I could watch the gamekeeper skinning a deer or the painter mixing a pot of paint; my comings and goings remained unnoticed; conversation and comment were allowed to fall uncensored on my childish ears.’⁴⁶ As Vita wrote of Sebastian and Viola in The Edwardians, ‘As children in the house, they had of course been on terms of familiarity with the servants, particularly when their mother was away.’⁴⁷ So it was in her own case.

      On the surface Vita’s childhood world was one of order and stability. Foresters cut timber and sawmen sawed logs – different lengths for different fires. Melons, grapes and peaches ripened in hothouses. Victoria’s guests enjoyed clean linen sheets daily; the flowers in their rooms were rearranged with similar frequency. Extravagance was endemic, splendid in its excess – as Vita remembered it in The Edwardians, ‘the impression of waste and extravagance … assailed one the moment one entered the doors of the house’.⁴⁸ It contributed the necessary note of magnificence to this feudal environment of fixed places and shared loyalties. For Knole and its denizens, the world of 1892 appeared to differ from that of 1592 only in refinement and ease: given the estate’s modest income, it was a gorgeous charade. On the shell of Victoria’s pet tortoise, as it shuffled between sitting rooms, glittered her monogram, a liquid swirl of diamonds. It was a fantastical detail, afterwards appropriated by Evelyn Waugh in the lushest of his novels, Brideshead Revisited.

      That the childish Vita should take for granted these insubstantial cornerstones of her parents’ existence is inevitable. Her memories indicate something more, a window on to Vita’s position as Knole’s only child: at home upstairs and downstairs, nowhere fully at home, everywhere proprietorial, keenly aware of her connection to the house and its history – as she herself offered, ‘Small wonder that my games were played alone; …/ I slept beside the canopied and shaded/ Beds of forgotten kings./ I wandered shoeless in the galleries …’⁴⁹ Knole dominates all Vita’s memories of her childhood. She regarded it as her own munificent present and disdained to share it; later she would claim that a house was ‘a very private thing’.⁵⁰ It was also an irresistible compulsion and seeped into so many of her thoughts. ‘At the centre of all was always the house,’ she wrote in an early story: ‘the house was at the heart of all things.’⁵¹ It occupied voids left by the absence of more conventional emotional outlets. That she learned early on that one day she must relinquish it, that as a girl she was prevented from inheriting what she already considered her own, served only to quicken those feelings which transcended ordinary love, feelings which went too deep to be put into words, so deep that throughout her life she hardly dared examine them.

      A journalist in Vita’s lifetime described Knole as ‘too homely to be called a palace, too palatial to be called a home’⁵² – an outsider’s view. For Vita, even as a child, Knole was more than either home or palace. It was a living organism, ‘to others dormant but to me awake’:⁵³ she lavished upon it the quick affection children usually reserve for their parents. ‘God knows I gave you all my love,’ she wrote later, ‘Scarcely a stone of you I had not kissed.’⁵⁴ ‘So I have loved thee, as a lonely child/ Might love the kind and venerable sire/ With whom he lived,’ she claimed in a poem she dedicated to Knole.⁵⁵

      Finding her way through passages and galleries, crossing courtyards, peeping into workshops and domestic offices, what was Vita looking for and what did she see? Why did she give over her days to wandering and exploring, save for the pleasure of escaping her nursemaid or eluding her mother? At times, the connection she forged with Knole was the strongest bond of her life: to strengthen her conviction of reciprocity she endowed the house and its park with human attributes. ‘I knew thy soul, benign and grave and kind/ To me, a morsel of mortality,’ she wrote self-consciously, the СКАЧАТЬ