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

seen, the legal and social ramifications of illegitimacy would for a period dominate the married life of Lionel and Victoria Sackville-West: their affection did not survive the struggle. In turn, Vita’s own life would be shaped, indeed distorted, by her inability as a daughter to inherit her father’s title and estates. In the early hours of 9 March 1892, wind buffeted the beeches of Knole’s park, ‘dying in dim cool cloisters of the woods’ where deer huddled in the darkness;⁷ the grey walls of the house, which later reminded Vita of a medieval village, stood impassive. All was not, as Vita wrote glibly in the fictional account of Knole she placed at the centre of The Edwardians, ‘warmth and security, leisure and continuity’:⁸ in her own life it seldom would be. There were very real threats to the security of her infant world. In addition, it was ‘continuity’ that demanded the perpetuation of that system of male primogeniture which was to cause her such lasting unhappiness. She once claimed for Knole ‘all the quality of peace and permanence; of mellow age; of stateliness and tradition. It is gentle and venerable.’⁹ But that statement was for public consumption. On and off, what Vita expressed publicly and what she felt most strongly failed to overlap. She was born at Knole, but died elsewhere. She would struggle to reconcile that quirk of fate.

      In the short term, within days of her birth, baby Vita’s left eye gave cause for concern. Boracic lotion cleared up the problem and Victoria Sackville-West complacently committed to her diary the similarity between the blue of her daughter’s eyes and those of her great-uncle by marriage, Lord Derby. A smoking chimney in Vita’s bedroom resulted in her being moved back into her mother’s room. It was a temporary solution. Victoria’s diary frequently omits any mention of her daughter, even in the first ecstatic days which she celebrated afterwards as more wonderful than anything else in the world. Her thoughts were of herself, of Lionel, of how much she loved him. Most of all she recorded the extent of his love for her. It would be more than a month before she witnessed for the first time Mrs Patterson giving Vita her bath, a sight that nevertheless delighted her. In the meantime she rested, cocooned and apparently safe in her husband’s adoration.

      These were happy days, as winter gave way to spring and Vita made her first sorties outdoors. She was accompanied on these excursions by Mrs Patterson, by her father or her grandfather, Lord Sackville. As the little convoy passed, clouds of white pigeons fluttered on to the roof, startled by the opening and closing of doors. ‘You have to look twice before you are sure whether they are pigeons or magnolias,’ Vita remembered.¹⁰ March faded into April and ‘underfoot the blossom was/ Like scattered snow upon the grass’;¹¹ in the Wilderness, close to Knole’s garden front, daffodils and bluebells carpeted the artful expanse of oak, beech and rhododendron. Sometimes, indoors, Vita was placed on her mother’s bed, with its hangings embroidered with improbably flowering trees, ‘and I watched her for hours, lying or sitting on my lap. Her little sneezes or yawning were so comic. I hugged her till she screamed.’ At other times, husband and wife lay next to one another with their baby between them. When Vita cried, Lionel walked up and down Victoria’s bedroom, cradling her in his arms. In time, when Vita had learnt to talk, ‘she used to look at each of us in turn and nod her head, saying “Dada – Mama –”. This went on for hours and used to delight us.’¹²

      These are common enough pictures, albeit the surroundings were uncommonly sumptuous. The air was densely perfumed with a mix of Victoria’s scent (white heliotrope, from a shop off the rue St Honoré in Paris), potted jasmine and gardenias that stood about on every surface, apple logs in the grate and, on window ledges and tables, ‘bowls of lavender and dried rose leaves, … a sort of dusty fragrance sweeter in the under layers’: the famous Knole potpourri, made since the reign of George I to a recipe devised by Lady Betty Germain, a Sackville cousin and former lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne.¹³ Such conventional domesticity – husband, wife and baby happy together – is unusual in this chronicle of fragmented emotions. ‘She loved me when I was a baby,’ Vita wrote of her mother in the private autobiography that was published posthumously as Portrait of a Marriage.¹⁴ In her diary, which she kept in French, Victoria described her baby daughter as ‘charmant’, ‘adorable’, ‘si drôle’: ‘toujours de si bonne humour’ (always so good humoured). On 17 June, she and Vita were photographed together by Mr Essenhigh Corke of Sevenoaks. But it was Lionel’s name, ‘Dada’, that Vita uttered first. It was 4 September. She was six months old.

      Victoria’s diary charts Vita’s growth and progress. Some of it is standard stuff. There are tantalising glimpses of the future too. On 19 April 1892, Victoria opened a post office savings account for her daughter. Her first deposit of £12 was partly made up of gifts to Vita from Lionel and Lord Sackville. The sum represented the equivalent of nearly a year’s wages for one of Knole’s junior servants, a scullery maid or stable boy. Until her death in 1936, Victoria would continuously play a decisive role in Vita’s finances: her contributions enabled Vita to perpetuate a lifestyle of Edwardian comfort. Later the same year, Victoria introduced her baby daughter to a group of women at Knole. Vita’s reaction surprised her mother. Confronted by new faces, she behaved ‘wildly’ and struggled to get away. It is tempting to witness in her response first flickers of what the adult Vita labelled ‘the family failing of unsociability’.¹⁵ In Vita’s case, that Sackville ‘unsociability’ would amount to virtual reclusiveness.

      The faces little Vita loved unhesitatingly belonged to her dolls. Shortly after her first birthday, Victoria made an inventory of her daughter’s dolls. It included those which she herself had bought at bazaars, a French soldier and ‘a Negress’ given to Vita by Victoria’s unmarried sister Amalia, as well as Scottish and Welsh dolls. ‘Vita adores dolls,’ Victoria wrote. In the ‘Given Away’ column of her list of expenses at the end of her diary for 1896, she included ‘Doll for Vita’, for which she paid five shillings. It is the only present Victoria mentions for her four-year-old daughter and contrasts with the many gifts she bestowed on her friends, her expenditure on clothing and the sums she set aside for tipping servants. Happily Vita could not have known of this imbalance. The following year she was photographed on a sturdy wooden seat with three of her dolls, Boysy, Dorothy and ‘Mary of New York’. Wide-eyed, Vita gazes uncertainly at the viewer. She is wearing a froufrou bonnet reminiscent of illustrations in novels by E. Nesbit; her ankles are neatly crossed in black stockings and buttoned pumps. She was two months short of her fifth birthday then and had ceased to ask her mother when she would bring her a little brother;¹⁶ she was still too young to be told of Victoria’s fixed resolve that she would rather drown herself than endure childbirth for a second time. Vita’s dolls had become her playmates and surrogate siblings. She had quickly grown accustomed to being alone: eventually solitude would be her besetting vice. For the moment her favourite doll was tiny and made of wool: Vita called him Clown Archie. He was as unlike ‘Mary of New York’, with her flaxen curls and rosebud mouth, as Vita herself, though there was nothing clown-like about the serious, dark-haired child. There never would be.

      By the age of two, Vita was a confident walker. Earlier her grandfather had described to Victoria watching her faltering progress across one of Knole’s courtyards. On that occasion a footman attended the staggering toddler. In the beginning, Vita’s world embraced privilege and pomp. ‘My childhood [was] very much like that of other children,’ she afterwards asserted, itemising memories of children’s games, dressing up and pets.¹⁷ She was mistaken. Granted, there were universal aspects to Vita’s formative years: her love for her dogs and her rabbits; her fear of falling off her pony; her disappointment at the age of five, on witnessing Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession from the windows of a grand house in Piccadilly, that the Queen was not wearing her crown; her frustration at her parents’ strictures; even the ugly, homemade Christmas presents she embroidered for Victoria in pink and mauve. Too often her childhood lacked a run-of-the-mill quality. Hers was a distinctive upbringing, even among her peers. Its atypical aspects shaped her as a person and a writer; shaped too her feelings about herself, her family and her sex; shaped her outlook and her sympathies, her moral compass, her emotional requirements.

      The trouble lay mostly with her mother. At thirty, recovering at her leisure from her confinement, Victoria Sackville-West remained beguilingly contrary; she had not yet been wholly spoiled. On the one hand she was capricious