A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  Arcachon is a town of two parts. The Ville d’Hiver occupies the upper sloping streets that abut the hills covered with pine trees, gorse, heather and ferns. The lower section, the Ville d’Eté, is built along an extensive sandy beach where the sea is not really the sea at all but an enormous saltwater lake, sixty-eight miles round, a fertile bed for growing oysters. It is an idyllic stretch of water for sailing and fishing, connected to the ocean in the Bay of Biscay by one very narrow opening. Pepita had grown up with Málaga’s combined benefits of sunshine and dry air, and she was once again living in a place viewed by the sick (and hypochondriacs) as a huge free pharmacy. Nowadays, Arcachon is a magnetic seaside town for both families and sailors. In Pepita’s day, it was a haven for the consumptive; its air was impregnated with the resin of pine trees, while sea bathing and saline water, assumed to be good for the lungs, counteracted the worst effects of tuberculosis. An English doctor, James Henry Bennet, visited the resort in the early summer of 1868 while writing a guidebook to healthy climates for the tubercular patient. But Bennet’s attention was soon diverted by the activities at the beach, as he was struck by the emancipated attitude of the French towards bathing. The doctor was fascinated by the accomplished confidence with which novice swimmers of all ages took to the water, at first using ‘corks or gourds tied under their arms’, while the more experienced ‘discard all such aid’.

  ‘Ladies and gentleman,’ observed Dr Bennet, ‘put on their costumes in the privacy of special elevated cabins that were placed at some distance from the shoreline.’ Emerging from the cabins they added ‘broad brimmed straw hats and wide waterproof capes’, which would be taken off by the bathing attendant at the water’s edge. ‘This costume,’ he remarked, ‘like all picturesque costumes makes the young and the pretty look younger and prettier but certainly does not set off to the same degree the more matronly of the lady bathers.’ Men, dressed in their own multicoloured sailor-like costumes, spoke freely with their fellow lady bathers in their semi-disguise of ‘black woollen drawers that descend to the ankles and a black blouse or tunic descending below the knees and fastened at the waist by a leathern girdle’. At first Dr Bennet found this ‘aquatic mingling’ of the sexes to be ‘an infringement of the laws of propriety and decorum’ but he quickly came to believe that British sea bathers, for whom segregated swimming was rigorously enforced up and down the English coast, could learn something from their relaxed French counterparts.

  This quiet fishing town, though becoming a pharmaceutical and touristic haven, was still unobtrusive enough a retreat for members of the rich elite to conveniently house their inconvenient mistresses. Pepita’s house, the Villa Pepa in the Ville d’Eté, sat in one of the most desirable positions in the centre of Arcachon, straddling the land between the sea and the long inner road, the Boulevard de la Plage. Pepita advertised her superior social standing as ‘Countess West’ in the magnificent twelve-foot gates that she placed within the railings that ran the length of the large garden. Two white-painted letters, ‘S’ and ‘W’, were proudly entwined at the top of the curly ironwork. But the locked gates suggested not only wealth and position but imprisonment. It was a long way from the simple freedom of Calle Puente. Monsieur Desombre, the local builder, was commissioned to make the grand railings and the matching coroneted and monogrammed gates on both the beach and the street sides of the property and to add another two floors to the house. The whole thing was finished off with a handsome Chinese pagoda. Desombre also built a gardener’s cottage, a stable and two bathing huts on the perimeter of the garden on the beach side. But the lavishness of the property neither fooled Pepita’s Roman Catholic, lip-curling neighbours nor endeared her to them. They had learned of the dubious marital arrangement of the new occupant of the Villa Pepa and they did not approve.

  Each morning Pepita, tiny and haughty, would glide past the disapproving locals, the long train of her black lace-ruffled dress stretching out behind her like the black wake of a small boat. Running beside her, the younger children struggled to keep up, while Victoria held her mother’s long plaits high to prevent them from dragging in the dusty streets. Not willing to trust others with her money, not even the town’s bank manager, Pepita walked with a noticeable limp as her purse, stuffed with gold coins and banknotes and strapped to her thigh, banged against her knee beneath her long skirts, giving her the security of knowing that her fortune was safe. On warm summer days the family would emerge from behind the gates to play on the beach. Max and Victoria, dressed in navy-and-white sailor hats, the ribbons floating down their backs, would sit beside their mother as she trickled sand through the silky drawers of the smaller children, laughing with them as the fine grains tickled their toes.

  Lionel came to spend time with his young family four or five times a year, or more often if he could leave his work at the Legation in Madrid and then at the embassy in Paris. His visits were anticipated with huge excitement. Pepita, singing her favourite song, ‘Plaisir d’Amour’, would instruct her children to tie cherries onto the branches of the trees of their garden and, still agile, dress up in her old lacy dancing clothes and kick up her legs to reveal tiny black satin ballet slippers, her expression reflecting that sexy imperiousness with which the packed theatres of her youth had been so familiar. Lionel could not refuse Pepita anything. His initials were on her gate, his surname was on her visiting cards, and finally he even agreed to put his name on the birth certificates of the last three children Pepita bore him. But he was defying the law. Divorce remained as out of the question for a Catholic in France as it was for one in Spain. And despite Catalina’s best efforts a few years earlier to annul her daughter’s marriage, Oliva was still dancing, still breathing, still Pepita’s husband.

  However, during Lionel’s long absences life became more difficult for his mistress as she became exposed to the full force of the disapproval of smart Arcachon society. The sort of small-town introspection that inspired Balzac’s 1832 novella Le Curé de Tours was here directed at a woman who seemed to flaunt her adulterous state, as her crocodile of children, born of ‘père inconnu’, followed her down the street. The British chaplain who lived opposite the Villa Pepa reluctantly acknowledged that on the rare occasions he permitted himself to look in Pepita’s direction, he could see ‘the remains of former beauty’ but could not ignore the impression that ‘she was at that time stout and rather coarse looking’. On most days when he saw the coroneted gates swing open, he would cross over to the other side of the boulevard with a slight shudder and walk on.

  Photographs taken only ten years after Pepita had danced like ‘a bird in the air’ show her wearing a floor-length cream dress, a substantial expanse of fleshy embonpoint exposed, and provide some justification for the chaplain’s assessment of her expanding figure. The shuttered windows and defensive iron railings of the Villa Pepa added to the isolation and notoriety of the ‘Countess West’ entourage. Although she tried to make friends with the British community, respectability continued to elude her. The monogrammed visiting cards lay rejected and unused between their fine dividing layers of yellowing India paper. Speculation of every variety fizzed around her, from non-payment of bills and wages to inappropriate relationships with members of the lower orders. There were suggestions that she drank too much – alcohol emerging for the first time in this family story as the unreliable companion and perfidious comforter of all lonely people – and that she even allowed four-year-old Flora to wash her hair in the leftover dregs of champagne.

  The only people who would speak willingly to Pepita were her servants and the hungry poor, who, in an act of charity, were often welcomed into the Villa Pepa for a meal. Victoria later boasted that her mother’s ‘kindness and gracious manners made her generally beloved’, as she gathered people around her who she believed would not judge her. During Lionel’s long absences from Arcachon, neighbours talked. The notoriety of Villa Pepa always threw up something new about which to speculate. News spread that Monsieur Desombre regularly accompa
nied the countess on outings in her carriage and was entertained at the Villa Pepa, invited to look at her photograph albums, to stay for dinner and to smoke his daily cigar in her company. And her suspiciously dependent friendship with Monsieur Henri de Béon, the solicitous assistant stationmaster at the Bordeaux railway station, only intensified the chatter. Soon there were rumours that Béon did more than advise the countess on railway timetables and provide a courteous helping hand when Pepita and her children were boarding the train. The rumours amplified when Monsieur Béon was appointed as Pepita’s personal ‘superintendent’ and often stayed the night at the Villa Pepa. The curtain of trees in the garden was not quite thick enough to disguise the sight of Pepita wandering about in the morning ‘en négligée’, prompting neighbourly support for the absent British aristocrat and the conviction that he would have every right to throw Béon into the deepest part of the Bay of Biscay.

  If the stigma of her adulterous state was humiliating for Pepita, it was baffling for her children. A low wall divided the Villa Pepa from the Johnstons at Villa Mogador. The Johnstons were wealthy wine merchants, one of sixteen English families living in Arcachon who would have nothing to do with the phoney countess. Minna and Bella, the little Johnston girls, were under instruction not to communicate in any way with the children from the Villa Pepa, though they would surreptitiously whisper over the wall. Victoria was well aware of the rule, if confused about the reason behind it. A little farther along the beach, the crenellated casino was approached by a red-carpeted staircase, the building splendidly decorated in imperial colours of purple, scarlet and gold. One day Pepita defied the stares and took Victoria to the casino’s children’s ball. Nervous in her best frock, Victoria climbed the grand staircase holding her mother’s hand. Once she was inside, not a single person spoke to her or danced with her and, she said, ‘We felt very much out of it’. The shame of the experience remained with her all her life. A joint photograph of Pepita and Victoria at about age six shows the firm-jawed determination of the elder and the dependent sweetness and affection of the younger; a portrait of a mother and daughter in isolation, reaching out to each other for protection and companionship.

  Pepita’s sense of alienation deepened still further when the town’s Catholic priests refused her the twin comforts of absolution and Communion. Eventually the priest at Notre-Dame d’Arcachon took pity on her and told her of a place where she might find spiritual reassurance. Pepita set out in her carriage with Victoria to the tiny village of Le Moulleau, where the dramatic red-brick Notre-Dame du Moulleau stands on top of a small rise and looks out to the sea. It is known as the sailors’ church. Before embarking on a long journey and knowing they might not see their homeland for some time, sailors would spend their last hours in this place, then look back at the building from the ocean in the hope of one last blessing before losing sight of land. At the back of the church a little path leaves the bright sunlight behind and pushes into the shadows. Soon the noise of traffic recedes, and the visitor is engulfed in birdsong. When I visited this beautiful place recently, I found a sense of peacefulness there that I was quite unprepared for. No wonder it became Pepita’s secret asylum from the painful ostracism of the Arcachon elite. Here she could be left alone to pray. It seemed to me a place where, if only briefly, she might have been truly happy.

  But at no point during her time in Arcachon did Pepita send for her own mother, their once powerful alliance and ‘excessive’ love having dwindled away, at first with Pepita’s full-blown independence and then with her commitment to her growing family. There was no coming together later in the way that a grandmother might have hoped. The relationship between Catalina and her grandchildren was nonexistent. Perhaps Pepita and her mother had quarrelled again? Perhaps Pepita had allowed herself to forget about Catalina? Or perhaps Pepita feared that her mother’s impulsive, unrefined, madcap presence in Arcachon and habitual attempts to derail her daughter’s life, would only deepen the dubious reputation of the inhabitants of the Villa Pepa? Perhaps she suspected that the joint presence of Catalina and Pepita would have given Arcachon society a wonderful excuse to make their exclusion of the West family complete? Perhaps Pepita felt that her mother’s exuberant, excitable vulgarity would show up her own humble origins and erode her precarious reputation still further? Whatever the reasons, without any documented or eyewitness evidence, it is difficult to explain fully the collapse of this intense relationship and the apparent harshness with which Pepita rejected her devoted mother. However strong the family compulsion to analyse our history and draw conclusions about generational patterns, no explanation for the rupture of the relationship between Pepita and her mother is given in any of Victoria’s later written or oral reminiscences. And Victoria’s own daughter, Vita (whose biography of Pepita and Victoria was inspired in part by innumerable conversations with Victoria), did not include any reason for Catalina’s failure to visit Arcachon.

  Although Pepita continued to speak affectionately about Oliva to her children, she did not receive or invite a visit from her husband either, the split engineered by Catalina proving irrevocable emotionally if not legally. From time to time Pepita would send Oliva money, for which he wrote to thank her. But he remained in Spain, having helped himself to the contents of the abandoned Casa Blanca, growing overweight but continuing to dance and to teach the young ballerinas of Andalusia, until the tragic news reached Arcachon that cancer had ravaged his tongue. The silence that had been growing between Pepita and the country of her birth and the most important figures of her young life was now complete.

  * * *

  During the summer months when the climate brought warmth if not social acceptance, it was easier to ignore discomfort, but during the icy Arcachon winters, when boredom was pervasive and the wind swirled across the beach, life for the West family was less enjoyable. Even the indigenous invalids felt the monotony, drugged by the sedative emitted from the resinous fir trees, listless through gazing at the evergreen trees, trapped by the muddy roads. Sometimes Pepita would escape the claustrophobic atmosphere and take the children to visit Lionel in Paris, but he had at last been forced to make the demarcation clear between his growing professional responsibilities and his complicated private life. Despite Pepita’s pleas, Lionel refused to take her to a fête at the Tuilleries, denying her the excitement of being presented to the Empress Eugénie. The children were forbidden from visiting Lionel at the embassy and from making friends with local children playing in the Champs Élysées, for fear of compromising their father by advertising their existence. Paris could present even more of a social trap than Arcachon.

  But in February 1871 Lionel spent a happy few days at Villa Pepa, looking forward to the birth of another child. Three weeks later, on 6 March, three telegrams containing ever more desperate bulletins from Stationmaster Béon reached Paris at short intervals. The baby boy, Frédéric, had not survived. Pepita herself was dangerously unwell. Lionel rushed from Paris to Arcachon. On 11 March Pepita’s bedroom was in near darkness when Lionel came through the door too late and saw the mother of his children lying on her bed, a crucifix clasped between her fingers, the embalmed waxy figure made young again, beautiful but unreal, by the local chemist. The body of the baby had been placed beside her, confirmation that his arrival had been the cause of her death. Sitting in the gloom of the shuttered house, barely able to understand what had happened, was Pepita’s confused and frightened eldest daughter. Lionel knelt beside Victoria, shattered by the shock of losing the woman who had died with his name on her lips, paralysed by guilt that, as the father of this dead baby, he was responsible for Pepita’s death and distraught that he had not arrived in time to say goodbye to the woman whose death certificate stated she was his wife.

  Having given instructions to Pepita’s loyal friend, the builder Desombre, to make a coffin ‘for a lady who enjoyed the position of my wife’ and to fulfil her request by digging her grave in the garden by the Villa Pepa’s small chapel, Lionel left the town. But he
had unwittingly abandoned her to the town’s unforgiving authorities, who dealt with all women of ill repute in the same way. Pepita enjoyed no privileges in her position as the mistress of a British diplomat. Lionel’s request for her burial at home was declined by the church and the city officials. An application for an exception to be made reached the offices of the Pope himself but was also rejected. So Pepita was buried on an unusually cold and snowy day, denied a headstone to mark her place in the vast, identity-smothering city cemetery.

  No record exists of any arrangements that had been made by Pepita for Catalina’s old age. With the lack of communication between them, Pepita’s financial generosity had also come to an end. While she was helping out the poor of Arcachon, she had ignored the needs of her own mother. A few years after Pepita’s death a distressing report reached Lionel. An elderly couple had been spotted selling groceries from a room in the backstreets of Málaga. Catalina and Lopez had apparently shrunk away, leaving behind the splendid House of the Royal Peacocks (had Pepita reclaimed the house as her own and sold it?) and returning to the hardship of a long-ago life, but one that no longer held its original gaiety and optimism. Later still, Catalina was reported as being observed in ‘an old furniture shop, greatly changed and simply clad’, managing once again the sale of old clothes, as well as an array of second-hand junk. The bright, maternal Catalina, the ‘zest’ behind her daughter’s triumphant career, had returned to extreme poverty, her demeanour, in the words of Catalina’s cousin, a man who sold fruit from the back of a donkey, ‘crestfallen’ and ‘decayed’. Catalina died alone and disappointed, deprived of a relationship with her grandchildren and many years after losing all contact with Pepita, the daughter whom she had adored.