Pepita’s eldest daughter, Victoria, was eight years old. I was the same age when my own grandmother died, and I remember well the confusion, mystery and impossibility of it all. I remember seeing my own father weep and experiencing that first, faint insight into what the world-altering nature of the death of a parent might feel like.
3
Victoria
Bargaining
The years that followed the sudden death of Victoria’s mother and her near-abandonment by her father were desperately lonely ones. All gaiety and indulgence vanished in 1871 together with Pepita’s long black maternal skirts, under which Victoria and her brothers and sisters had so often taken refuge from the hostile adult world. Illegitimate, motherless and with a father suddenly thousands of miles away, Victoria West had effectively been orphaned overnight.
In my family parents always seem to be escaping when their children need them most. Lionel had accepted a diplomatic posting to Buenos Aires, the remoteness of South America an antidote to his life in Europe, where he would otherwise be reminded of Pepita and his responsibilities towards his sons and daughters. At first Pepita’s grieving children remained at Arcachon in the care of the assiduously helpful Monsieur Béon and his mother, but after two years the Béons and the children moved to Paris on Lionel’s instruction. The eldest child, Max, was sent away to school in Bordeaux while Victoria went to board at the Parisian convent of St Joseph in rue Monceau. Now eleven years old, almost illiterate and wholly unaccustomed to domestic rules, she was no longer known by her family nickname Pepita but as Mademoiselle Quarante-Deux, the number marked in ink on her black uniform. Nuns taught her the names of French rivers and the geography of French principal towns, while the Béons were paid handsomely by Lionel to look after the three younger children. During the holidays, when Victoria and Max joined the others, Victoria willingly assumed the parental role that her absent father imposed on her. ‘You are a big girl now,’ he wrote to her from Argentina, ‘and I greatly count on you, my dear daughter, to take care of the family.’
Victoria had learned from her mother’s example how to look after her sisters and brothers, and her resilient temperament prevented her from accusing Lionel of abandonment. She responded cheerfully to the letters he sent to her from Argentina, full of implausible stories about the lions and tigers he had stalked and shot on his adventures and of promises that one day he would teach her to ride. She expressed such faith in his eventual return that Lionel grew increasingly fond of her in his absence. But he came rarely to Paris, making just two visits during the seven years Victoria was at St Joseph’s. Although she disguised her disappointment and unhappiness well, the rigours of a Paris convent could freeze the soul. Years later Victoria would describe her painful memories of the nuns’ constant supervision, the discipline and the lack of human kindness. She missed Arcachon, she missed the warmth of the sun, the comfort of laughter, the company of her brothers and sisters, and she missed her mother. As Victoria reached puberty, she had to confront alone the mysteries and terrors of adolescence. Fainting from the coldness of the convent and reduced to whispered prayers imploring God to supply some warmth, the pupils were harshly rewarded for their complaints with extra lessons, compulsory early-morning church services and rigorous walks. During the holidays the Béons issued sinister warnings. There were secrets she was better off not knowing. Victoria was not to mention her mother’s name. She was not allowed to play with any of the children of the Béons’ friends who came to the house. She was not allowed to stray into the streets alone, as a Spanish dancer called Oliva might be waiting there to kidnap her and claim her as his own daughter. And there were unexplained complications having to do with her irregular birth certificate that delayed her confirmation and caused the Roman Catholic–raised Victoria much distress. From the earliest age she had followed the example of her mother that faith mattered, even if the practice sometimes proved elusive.
When the elderly Madame Béon died, Flora and Amalia joined their sister at the convent, Max was sent to learn farming in South Africa, and Henri, the youngest child, was enrolled in a lycée. But nine years after Pepita’s death an unlikely Mary Poppins appeared. The kindly, clever and gutsy Marion Mulhall, married to the Irish editor of South America’s English-language newspaper, had travelled with her husband extensively across that continent, unruffled by torrential rain, disease, dead horses floating in rivers, the British slaughter of tigers and the capture of live alligators for sport. Mrs Mulhall was the distinguished author of two books, From Europe to Paraguay and Matto-Grosso and Ten Years of a Lady’s Travels in the Pampas, and had befriended Lionel in Buenos Aires. She was a robust character, but also sympathetic to his circumstances and offered her help.
In the summer of 1880 Mrs Mulhall arrived in France with her husband and Lionel. They gathered up the three girls and Henri and took them all across the Channel to the Mulhalls’ house in West Sussex. Lionel breathed a sigh of relief. The children spoke only French and Spanish, but Mrs Mulhall contrived in a jumbled mixture of foreign languages and hand gesticulations to get Victoria on her own during the Channel crossing, where she spilled the beans about the girl’s unconventional parentage. Up until that moment no one had told Victoria that her parents weren’t married. ‘This was a great shock and surprise to me,’ Victoria wrote in her diary, and for a while she kept the news from Max and her sisters. But in order to protect her adored little brother, Henri, from discovering his parents’ secret from the boys at Stonyhurst, his new Jesuit boarding school in Lancashire, she thought it kinder to give him the shocking facts herself. The news of the illegitimacy got out at once, and Henri’s life at school as a strange child who did not fit in was made relentlessly miserable. And Victoria was not there to look after him.
Gradually a collection of previously unknown English aunts and uncles variously rejected or embraced their new nieces and nephews. Lionel’s brother, the Earl De La Warr, lived near Grasslands, the Mulhalls’ house in Sussex, and welcomed the children to his own home at Buckhurst, while their Knole uncle, Lord Sackville, refused to have anything to do with them. On Mrs Mulhall’s advice Victoria was sent to a school in Highgate to learn English, and while she was in London, she met her father’s two formidable sisters. The inquisitive, powerful but friendly Countess of Derby was the first to call. She quickly became appreciated as their protective aunt Mary. Years later Victoria told her daughter, Vita, that during those uncertain days Aunt Mary ‘seemed the best disposed to us of the world’, but when tea was over at Derby House and the butler announced the arrival of Aunt Mary’s ferocious sister, Bessie, the Duchess of Bedford, the children were whisked from the room. Unlike her disapproving sister, Aunt Mary continued to watch Victoria carefully and was pleased with what she saw. The shy young girl was becoming a delightful and rather beautiful young woman, conducting herself with dignity and charm and all the other complimentary embellishments that were desirable in a Victorian lady.
* * *
In June 1881, a decade after Pepita’s death, Lionel, whose good reputation had been rising steadily within the diplomatic profession, was made the British Minister to the Legation in Washington, D.C. Political power and influence were controlled by Congress and by the hugely rich senators, with their walking sticks twirling in front of them, their dandy frock-coats swinging out behind, their superiority evident in the gracious manner with which they received respectful nods thrown in their direction by passers-by. The increasing significance of diplomacy depended on establishing relationships, either through what one contemporary called ‘the cardboard exchange’ of printed cards with credentials or through social intercourse. The foreign offices of Europe still considered a posting to Washington to be a second-rank appointment and ‘a hardship post’, but although not yet equal to its counterparts in Paris and Berlin, the role was gathering significance. Lionel was expected to be the host at influential receptions and parties, and a new minister who had shown no inclination to marry was in need of a hostess. Aun
t Mary knew at once how to help her wifeless brother out of his social dilemma and approached the matter by starting right at the top.
When Queen Victoria was consulted about the prospect of a young, half-Spanish, illegitimate daughter becoming the chatelaine of the British Legation in Washington, she was not only amused but instantly sympathetic to the idea. Victoria West had been lucky. Since leaving Paris she had fallen into not only the hands of a well-connected aunt but those of the British sovereign with whom she shared a name. Now young Victoria’s character and potential social standing in America’s capital faced the even more rigorous inspection of the arbiters of Washington society, a four-strong committee of the wives of the President, the Secretary of State, the Undersecretary of State and the leading Republican senator. Aunt Mary had done her work well. Victoria West’s impeccable references came from impeccable sources. No committee could ignore the recommendation of a British queen. The nineteen-year-old girl was given the go-ahead to cross the Atlantic in December 1881 and join her father at the legation in time for Christmas.
In 1792 General Washington had decided that the city to which he gave his name should become the country’s capital and had invited Pierre L’Enfant, a young French civil engineer, to lay out a grand street plan. There had been little money to maintain L’Enfant’s splendid parks and the impressive but costly canal that had taken more than two decades to complete, but in 1865, four years after the beginning of the Civil War, Washington embarked on a decade-long facelift. However, according to the social historian Patricia O’Toole, the city still ‘oscillated between the pretentious and the primitive’. Squalid areas of poverty, crime and prostitution were juxtaposed with streets on which well-off inhabitants drove, walked and strolled and which had been widened, paved and lined with thousands of leafy, shady sycamore trees, bringing distinction and elegance to the city. Carriages manned by uniformed footmen rumbled through the streets of Georgetown above the eighty miles of sewers that had been built with great speed and little skill between 1871 and 1874. Plumbing remained basic, and in the summer heat the place stank. As a sign that things were changing, the most infamous brothel of the Civil War, Mary Ann Hall’s establishment round the corner from the Capitol building and facing Maryland Avenue, had been turned into a women’s health clinic, although the indefatigable Mary Ann continued to ply her trade until 1886. Her obituary in The Evening Star lamented her departure as one ‘who knew her sterling worth’. The smallpox and typhoid epidemics that had raged through the population during the war had still not been totally eradicated. President Chester A. Arthur found potential staff wary of coming to the city for fear of malaria. The late president James A. Garfield’s son caught the disease, and in March 1882 Lord George Francis Montague, the Third Secretary at the British Legation, keeled over from diphtheria at the age of twenty-seven. There had been talk of moving the entire capital to less swampy, less dangerous ground in St Louis, Missouri.
Twenty years after the beginning of the Civil War, the city had begun to hum if not yet to buzz with social life. In July 1881 President Garfield had been assassinated four months into his first term of office by a delusional voter, but by the time that Lionel arrived in November, Arthur’s new administration was well under way. Lionel moved straight into 1300 Connecticut Avenue, the British Legation’s new red-brick building on the corner of Connecticut Avenue and North Street, only a few minutes by carriage from the White House. Ten days later the wife of a former secretary of state and an unignorable social pacesetter, Mrs James Blaine, pulled out all the stops and gave a magnificent dinner party with Lionel and the new president as joint guests of honour. Carriages were not called until midnight and the evening was considered a terrific success. When Victoria disembarked in New York from Cunard’s SS Bothnia a month later and joined her father in Washington, Mrs Blaine was the first person Lionel took her to meet.
The newly vamped and liberal-minded city impressed the writer Henry James, who had just completed his novel Portrait of a Lady and had returned after six years of travelling to find the place ‘informal, familiar, heterogeneous, good-natured, essentially social and conversational, enormously big and yet extremely provincial, indefinably ridiculous and yet eminently agreeable’. In 1863 Washington, D.C., had passed its own law to abolish slavery three years before the rest of the Southern states – where such iniquity was still seen by some as sanctioned by God and as the backbone of the nation’s economy – gave way. During the 1870s and 1880s Washington was as advanced in its view of women’s place in society as Spain was backward. In 1872 Victoria Woodhull, a thirty-four-year-old spiritualist, Wall Street financier and newspaper founder, had stood as the first female candidate for president of the United States, campaigning for women’s freedom to marry, divorce and have children and to establish equality without restriction by law. But just before the election she was arrested and charged with obscenity. Her account of the adultery of a senior political minister had pushed the tolerance of the government too far. The electoral count revealed that she had apparently received no votes at all, but the total absence of support prompted speculation that the result was a fix. The possibility of a woman assuming the highest office had at least been suggested, and many considered and some hoped that it would not be many years before a female candidate won. Washington was a good place for a woman to make her mark in the late nineteenth century, and it was her womanhood that propelled Victoria West into a position of recognition and power.
The fascination in Victoria’s birth, class and upbringing was in sharp contrast to the prejudice that had confronted Pepita in the stuffy backwater of Arcachon. While Washington society could also be snobbish and judgemental, there was a consensual agreement that energy, manners and, above all, the good looks of a young woman qualified her for acceptance. And if that sort of young woman had made some sort of alliance with a well-placed older man, there was nothing to prevent her from becoming the more formidable of the pair. Henry James understood the phenomenon. ‘Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them,’ he said, ‘and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.’
The scrutiny directed towards the minister’s daughter turned swiftly to approval, and Washington should not have had to look hard for the reasons behind the inexperienced Victoria’s surprising sophistication and self-assurance. She was the daughter of a woman who had always risen to the occasion, whether convincing the theatres of Europe to employ her or mustering some dignity with which to challenge the spite and prejudice that characterised Arcachon society. But Victoria was admired foremost for the loyalty and support she demonstrated towards her father. She had been her mother’s daughter; now she was her father’s, basking in the reassuring security of ‘filia-philia’, the unique bond that comprises father-daughter love. Retaining her innocence and a childlike quality, Victoria also displayed the dignity of a much older and more experienced woman. But by manipulating the restraints imposed on her by the ostensibly subservient roles of daughterhood and femininity, she benefited from the arrangement that she had, in effect, negotiated with her father. Just as Pepita had profited financially and, in part, socially from her association with her powerful lover, so Victoria began to derive her public authority, whether consciously or not, from apparently surrendering it to her father. Mother and daughter had both made patriarchal bargains, agreements that were to remain fundamental to the practical and emotional structures of their lives. For most of my life I regarded this arrangement with suspicion. It is only recently that I have begun to realise that it is not perhaps an arrangement from which other women, myself included, are immune.
Outside the legation, Victoria managed her acceptance into Washington’s smartest dining rooms with a knowing intelligence, beginning not with the powerful men, but with their wives. Her initial reserve appeased the competitive instinct that thrived between Washington�
��s most influential women. Shyness was considered a commendable quality in one so young. Precocity would have threatened the position of those who did not have youth and beauty on their side. And she had one further asset. Washington was a city shot through not only with feminism but with Anglophilia. In America the popularity of a well-born Briton had been rising ever higher since 1860, when five thousand eager people gathered outside the Prince of Wales’s Chicago hotel, anxious for a glimpse of the bulky regal silhouette through the bedroom window blinds. The language of the British upper class was imitated in person and in print. A character in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth pronounced that it was ‘a deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up’. The British propensity for taking exercise, for relaxing, for enjoying life, for simply ‘watching a bumble bee blunder in and out of the flowers’, as one popular social commentator remarked, was the subject of envy as well as curiosity. The eccentricity and glamour of the nation’s capital appealed at once to the newly arrived Victoria, and she shone. Within weeks she had managed to overcome any disapproval of what she called ‘the blot’ of the illegal circumstances of her birth. The press loved her and she loved them loving her. She has ‘beauty, charm, modesty, grace, clothes and taste’, they wrote of Victoria, who began a lifelong habit of pasting flattering comments into her scrapbook, highlighting her favourite lines in red-penned exclamation marks. One journalist thrilled her by writing that ‘her style of beauty is more Castilian than Anglo-Saxon’, as did another’s discreet reference to her unorthodox parentage: ‘Miss West’s harsh English angles are rounded off by the graces of her Spanish mother.’
A House Full of Daughters Page 5
