A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  But in the library at Knole I came across another photograph that had not been pasted into the official record book, which confirmed not only that Young Lionel had finally persuaded Victoria to give in but that she was not regretting the decision. The newly engaged pair are oblivious to the cameraman, suddenly unmistakably tactile, Lionel’s arm enfolding Victoria close while she rests her head on his shoulder in a gesture of complete physical intimacy.

  Lionel released all Victoria’s long-held inhibitions. She had finally found a man to lift her out of the dependence of daughterhood and into her long-delayed physical maturity. It was as if a stabled racehorse had suddenly been set free into open pasture. Victoria’s diary tells the story of the accelerating daring with which she allowed Lionel a first glimpse of her bare foot, and then a proper kiss in a blush-concealing tunnel on the train. Lionel stepped up his postal artillery from Germany in accordance with their mutually mounting passion as he marked his letters in numerical order from the day of their engagement until reaching number twelve when he wrote: ‘It is a month ago today since I told you in the KB [King’s Bedroom] and tomorrow it will be four weeks since I first kissed you on the lips and when I first taught you that you were a little more passionate than you thought – how gradually it all came about and how we used to learn something new every day till the grand climax that evening in the armchair in your room … but there is still something better to come than —’ and then one apparently incriminating word has been heavily crossed out by Victoria before the sentence ends ‘on the dear old seat in the garden.’ If you hold the paper up to the light, you can just make out beneath the looped, black-inked barbed-wire fence that the word, rather disappointingly, is ‘spoonings’.

  The news of the engagement went down surprisingly well with the family. Young Lionel’s immediate relations were pleased that Victoria had agreed to bring up any children of the marriage as Protestants. And Old Lionel was as happy as he had ever managed to be, knowing that while he was gaining a son-in-law, he was nevertheless keeping his favourite daughter. The wedding presents were carefully noted down on receipt by the bride and groom in separate lists, Lionel’s far longer than Victoria’s, and were displayed for the guests to marvel at in the drawing room. The Chinese minister in Washington sent a cloak of Tibetan goat, the Prince of Wales gave Victoria a pearl-and-diamond horseshoe brooch, Flora presented her with a gold quill pen with diamonds and Amalia a silver pepper grinder, and from Old Lionel there was an exquisite diamond tiara.

  The wedding took place on 17 June 1890. Huge arrangements of lilies decorated the bridal route that ran along the passages, through the galleries and the halls, from Victoria’s bedroom. Eventually the bride, dressed in white satin and wreathed in old lace, arrived at the small private chapel where John Donne, the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet, had often preached during the twenty-five years that he was a vicar in Sevenoaks. The town baker had made a spectacular two-foot-high wedding cake, intended to be an exact model of the house, in sponge. No one was tactless enough to point out that it looked nothing at all like the house. Sevenoaks High Street was decked out in bunting and the local schoolchildren threw roses at the nuptial carriage as the newlyweds went off to France on honeymoon. I choose to think, or at least to hope, that the sexy few weeks preceding her wedding day meant that Victoria eventually married out of happiness and that she treasured the memories of the day. Not long ago I found a cardboard box at the bottom of a forgotten metal filing cabinet in the attic at Sissinghurst. On the lid was Victoria’s signature in her large handwriting. Carefully wrapped inside pages of old newspaper was the spray of orange blossom that she had worn pinned to the sleeve of her wedding dress. The blooms were now paper-fragile and colourless, dusty and scentless, but preserved by Victoria just like her mother’s precious fans. However, the existence of the box may have been nothing more than Victoria’s habit of keeping markers of moments, an extension of the family compulsion to record events. The cupboards and drawers and attics of my life have always been crammed with notebooks, childhood drawings, photographs, paintings, Christmas cards, and all manner of mouldering hats and wedding veils. We seem powerless to resist the urge to make an archive, even if it means the occasional tendency to tip over into cluttered sentimentality.

  * * *

  In France the newlyweds discovered the best thing about married life: a mutual exhilaration for uninterrupted sex. Victoria could not get enough of it. Overcompensating for many years of self-imposed denial, she described in her diary how she threw herself into a life of delayed sexual abandonment. She could hardly believe her luck when she realised that no one could prevent Lionel from coming into her bedroom anytime she or he liked. Without intending any puns, she described in her diary how he spent hours ‘filling me with such intense pleasure I would not have cared if the ceiling had fallen down’. The cultural highlights of the chateaux of the Loire all but passed them by as they travelled in a state of rapture from hotel bed to hotel bed, barely seeing the light of day, let alone any architectural wonders. Victoria’s only distraction from Lionel’s attentions came during her visit to the Villa Pepa at Arcachon, as she walked through the rooms where her mother had once sung in French of the pleasures of love, saw Pepita’s portrait still hanging on the walls and, as she confessed to her brother Max afterwards, was ‘overcome by emotion’.

  When the honeymooners returned, their newfound enthusiasm continued to run riot. They were insatiable, grabbing any time of the day or night in which to indulge themselves. Mrs Knox the housekeeper was required to turn a blind eye to the fact that a previously reliable mistress now could not bring herself to leave the helter-skelter of the marital sheets and was sometimes late for appointments by forty minutes. Nowhere on the estate, inside or out, proved a deterrent to lovemaking. They would escape to the outside benches, the enclosing walls of the vegetable garden, the romantic part of the garden known as the ‘Wilderness’, where there were any number of old beech and chestnut trees to hide behind, and the miniature apple orchards, beneath which they found a camouflage of iris, snapdragon and larkspur. They disappeared into honeysuckled thickets and ducked behind the old interior brick walls. It was possible to avoid the twenty gardeners who cared for the pleasure gardens as well as the conservatories that supplied the house with peaches and grapes, but there was no escape from dozens of silent spying witnesses, the ceremonial stone Sackville leopards that stood on every corner of every part of the building.

  Inside the house, the temptations of their feather-mattressed bed, the four posts reaching as high as the ceiling, were challenged by the number of alternative pieces of furniture and rooms on and in which to make love, including sofas, baths and even the locked storeroom where the Knole fire engine was kept. In their own bedroom Victoria would rub her bare feet along a black sheepskin rug that made her skin give off sparks at the merest touch. Predictably, ‘the electric game was a delight to Lionel’, while an occasional night in a London hotel with modern beds was exciting ‘a cause de spring mattress’. Lionel’s ‘Baby’, Victoria’s nickname for her husband’s valiant penis, rarely flagged under the demands imposed upon it. Victoria integrated this time-consuming activity into her life with impressive ingenuity, managing to sit on the lawn in front of the house embroidering a fire screen of the Chateau de Blois, one of the few buildings they had actually managed to see on honeymoon, while concealing from any passing gardener that she was simultaneously playing with ‘Baby’, which, from excessive overuse, was in ‘chronic condition’. Lionel employed every superlative when boasting to his brother Charlie of the ‘dream of beauty’ that joined him in this lust fest, leaving Charlie no imaginative challenge in visualising Victoria’s incredible physique.

  She has the most lovely drawers and nightgowns and to see her undress and display all her charms is enough to make me mad. She is most beautifully made – has the most lovely olive skin and superb hair. Her breasts are too delicious for words, round, firm and soft with two darling little butto
ns which I adore kissing. She has the most magnificent hips and legs with the most ravishing little lock of hair between them which is as silky and soft as possible. Farther I must tell you she is the very incarnation of passionate love. We go to bed awfully early and I often undress her – I unbutton her dress at the same time caressing her under her stays – I lift up her skirt over her head taking good care to feel her on the way.

  Inevitably, there was little time for study, but when Young Lionel failed his Foreign Office exams no one seemed to mind much, especially Victoria and her husband. It meant there would be no posting abroad and also they would have more time to spend in bed now that the pressure to do any work had been lifted. Although all of society was keen to invite the newly married couple to balls and parties, and although Victoria felt obliged to take part in the dancing and shooting programme that was part of the upper-class way of life, she infinitely preferred spending time at Knole engaged in whichever occupation suited her best, such as ‘walking and sticking stamps on, reading, playing the piano, and making love’.

  With the emphasis of life firmly on the physical rather than the cerebral, Victoria occasionally missed the intellectual energy that had fizzed at the legation in Washington. A few months after her wedding she wrote in her diary, ‘L. says that I talk a lot and I do as I am always trying to keep the conversation going at meals, which I dread. I think there is so little small talk in England.’ For a while, however, the euphoria of the passionate early days of marriage, running the house and fulfilling her wish to be an exemplary wife made her happier than she had ever been before. But as Victoria’s role as a wife consumed her, she began to fail the pledge she had made to Max to continue to devote time to their father. As Old Lionel’s naturally reserved nature deepened, he withdrew first from playing gooseberry to his daughter and son-in-law and then from all but essential social contact.

  Later that year Victoria was not surprised to discover that she was pregnant. Throughout the following months she was convinced that the baby would be a girl and announced she would give the unborn child her own name, because although she herself had been christened Victoria, she had loved her mother’s habit of calling her Pepita. Having witnessed the early stages of Pepita’s fatal struggle with childbirth firsthand, Victoria had rewritten her will and had taken the precaution of writing Lionel a loving letter to say goodbye. But she was unprepared for the agony that built during her twenty-hour labour. When the actual moment of birth eventually approached, the torture was almost intolerable and she could not prevent herself from yelling at poor Lionel as he desperately struggled to ease a reluctant cork out of the bottle of sweet-smelling chloroform. The physical endurance of having a baby was so traumatic, sending her ‘affolée’, or momentarily insane, that Victoria was convinced she would die. Eventually, on 9 March 1892, a daughter, Victoria Mary, was born. The name was shortened at once to Vita so that the mother and daughter could be told apart. Victoria knew at once that she would never put herself through such a dreadful experience again, risk repeating the fate of her own mother, allow her beautiful figure to become distorted once more by pregnancy or succumb to a double-chinned, middle-aged appearance like Pepita had. She was fearful of the way children age their mothers. Her friend Daisy Warwick, a one-time mistress of the Prince of Wales and mother of two, agreed. ‘We were good mothers in those days,’ she said, ‘but preferred to keep our children young, for the younger generation would date us and time was the one thing we could not control.’

  However, when Victoria had recovered from what she referred to as ‘the horrors’, and from her surprise and relief at surviving the shattering experience of childbirth, she fell in love with her baby. As Victoria concentrated her attention on the child, she felt such ‘intense happiness’ that even when Victoria was sixty, she viewed Vita’s babyhood as ‘one of my happiest recollections’. She was captivated by her little hands and tiny sneezes, thought of Vita as a ‘live doll’, relished her absolute dependence on Victoria, found her enormously entertaining, and was astonished when she said ‘Dada’ at only six months old. Enchanted, she watched her child totter through the Green Court followed by a pair of male attendants – a footman in powdered wig and her grandfather – both poised to catch the little girl should she fall.

  Vita’s birth reinforced the change in relationships in the house as Victoria’s transition from wife to mother further eroded the time she had formerly reserved for her father. For the first time she began to behave selfishly towards the man who had relied on her so heavily since the day she had arrived in Washington as his hostess and support. Old Lionel’s reclusiveness became even more marked with the birth of Vita. He developed a fierce antipathy towards all visitors. As soon as a telegram arrived alerting the household that guests were on their way from London, Old Lionel would rush to Sevenoaks station and take the next train in the opposite direction. His beard grew ever more biblical as he hid away in a study that contained little more than a wasps’ nest preserved under glass and a battered chair, reflecting on his youth, on his professional work as a diplomat in legations around the world and on his happiness as the lover of a famous dancer, and trying to forget his shame at his expulsion from Washington. At times his love for Pepita returned with new vigour. One day he saw the tiny Vita hanging off Victoria’s long, unpinned plaits, just as Victoria had once clung to her own mother’s famous hair, and he shouted at his daughter, ‘Never let me see that child do that again!’, his voice combining anger with pain. But despite the evident desolation of her father, Victoria frequently lost her patience with a man she now found to be ‘contrary in every way’. Plaintively, Old Lionel would ask, ‘What do I do?’ as Victoria made obvious her irritation with him. In her memoir of her mother, Vita described the little ‘flick’ in Victoria’s voice that betrayed impatience, and Victoria herself confessed to her diary that ‘Papa gets on my nerves terribly and rubs me the wrong way all the time. He can’t help it poor man, as there is not an atom of sympathy in his nature.’ As a witness to these scenes, Old Lionel’s distress ‘burnt’ into Vita’s mind. And as Victoria became ever busier running the house and the estate and caring for her own daughter, Young Lionel, who shared none of these roles, also began to feel marginalised.

  Since Vita’s birth there had been no more high jinks on the Knole furniture or behind the garden walls. Memories of the trauma of childbirth, and the fear of joining the statistical one in ten women who made up the average maternal mortality rate during childbirth, had not evaporated. Victoria remained terrified of becoming pregnant again despite her determination not to. Although she and Lionel continued to make love for the next year or two, the frequency diminished with Victoria’s failure to trust the sickly smelling cocoa butter, the slimy sponges soaked in quinine, the glutinous spermicidal jellies or any of the other new but reliably unreliable choices of contraceptive methods. Nor had she forgotten Lionel’s ungainly struggle with the chloroform bottle, the only painkiller available to counteract such agony. Victoria consulted her cooperative doctor and it was with a sense of mourning for the exhilaration of the past as well as secret relief for the present that Victoria broke the news of the doctor’s advice to Lionel. They must abstain from sexual relations. The risk of conception without total abstinence was too great. And another pregnancy was out of the question, Victoria explained, because the doctor had diagnosed her ‘circulation as extremely low and [her] nervous system out of order’.

  Where were Victoria’s friends when she needed them? Where were her aunts, her brothers, who might have warned her of the implications of this decision? One of her sisters, Flora, was still living in Paris and they had grown apart, and Amalia, who had continued to live at Knole for a while after Victoria’s marriage, had become resentful of Victoria’s dominant role in the house and the sisters had fallen out badly. Victoria even kept a list of all Amalia’s irritating habits, including telling lies, being ungrateful, being extravagant and gossiping. During the time when Victoria’s relationship with You
ng Lionel had excluded all others, she had neglected to preserve other intimate relationships, either with siblings or with women friends. Now, when she needed advice about such a personal matter, there was no one to turn to other than the doctor, who told her whatever she wanted to hear. The inevitable consequences of the absence of physical companionship, an essential part of most marriages, were set in motion.

  Victoria’s sexual desertion of Young Lionel prompted his desertion of her. Lionel was six years younger than his wife and with his highly charged sex drive he began to look for diversions. During the 1890s a series of titled and married women volunteered to become Lionel’s partner in bridge and tennis. An opera singer called Olive Rubens had become a favourite and she and her husband, Walter, were invited to take up residence in the Old Laundry building at Knole which Lionel converted into a comfortable apartment. Soon Olive began to drive Victoria mad by practising her out-of-tune arias loudly and at great length outside in the Pheasant Court beneath Victoria’s bedroom window. And as Lionel retreated still further into the impressively deep cleft of Mrs Rubens’s embrace, early middle age began to erode Victoria’s fragile self-confidence, the physical changes falling severely on a woman whose beauty had been celebrated for twenty years. Just as her mother had never fully lost the extra weight she had gained with each pregnancy, so Victoria found her figure thickening in the years following Vita’s birth.

  In the face of Olive Rubens’s growing influence, Victoria herself began to feel lonely. She had begun to dine alone, indulging in a new passion for fresh air and insisting on eating outside, even in the middle of winter, a tray on her knees, half submerged beneath snowflakes. Lionel remained inside in the warmth with Olive. In order to distract herself, Victoria embarked on a commercial adventure, a stationery and knickknack shop in London’s Mayfair called Spealls. Although her zeal for salesmanship would have made her Spanish grandmother proud, Victoria’s new-found preoccupation with her upmarket shop in South Audley Street brought its own problems. There were constant rows with the Spealls staff, customers and suppliers. Lionel tried not to show his exasperation with this new obsession. He was accustomed to her exulting in stealing writing paper and envelopes from hotels and country houses where she was a guest and pretended to share her excitement that the lavatory paper she pocketed from the Harrods ladies’ room absorbed ink beautifully. He had not criticised her preoccupation with used stamps (many of which continue to flutter from the bottom of the grey tin trunks stacked in the attics at Sissinghurst that contain some of her most precious papers). He feigned interest in the bookplates she commissioned for book titles of every conceivable category: the one with the illustration of sundials for sticking into books about sundials; the drawing of Chenonceau intended for all books on the chateaux of the Loire. But there were limits. Lionel refused to become involved with the recycled Christmas cards, the sprigs of holly, parcel-packed sleighs, frosty robins, baby Jesuses in cribs that Victoria meticulously cut out and pasted into albums. Vita tried to please her mother by joining in the cutting and pasting exercise, but when she proved to be a failure at home craft agreed to compose mottoes to stick onto the base of ashtrays that proved popular sellers in the shop. Occasionally Vita’s tolerance would also give way as she swore that she couldn’t ‘hear the word Spealls once again without screaming’.