Behind the Mask Page 14
Harold wrote to Vita in Cornwall of the loneliness of London Sundays and his hatred of being a bachelor; he suggested drowning himself in the Thames.79 Vita wrote to Victoria, her letters light, voluble, misleading. ‘We live on boiled eggs … but we are very happy, and the sophisticated Violet is getting quite refreshingly simple. Today we went to Hugh Walpole’s cottage, he is not there, but he said we were to use his sitting room and borrow his books.’80 Meanwhile ‘sometimes’, wrote the sophisticated Violet, ‘we loved each other so much we became inarticulate, content only to probe each other’s eyes for the secret that was secret no longer’.81 Their relationship was rapturous in its physicality. In a poem written in French, Vita celebrated Violet’s twin roles as companion and lover: ‘In the heavy fragrance of intoxicating night/ I search on your lip for a madder caress/ I tear secrets from your yielding flesh/ Giving thanks to the fate which made you my mistress.’82
A precedent had been set for a pattern that would repeat itself over the next three years: Vita and Violet escaping to an inaccessible lovers’ hideaway with Harold’s assistance, Harold at the same time critical but endlessly forgiving; Vita physically, emotionally and mentally absent from Harold, reassuring him of her love as she indulged another love, and exacting from him his own similar reassurances; Violet, like a novelist or playwright, creating and enforcing roles for herself and Vita, slaking Vita’s thirst for drama, manipulating her (even if subconsciously) in order to perpetuate their escape into romance.
If visual sources can be trusted, Vita’s sexual awakening in the spring of 1918 constituted a form of self-discovery. On 12 June, Vita gave the first of six sittings to Dumbarton-born painter William Strang. Strang’s portrait, for which Victoria refused to pay, claiming she had commissioned a much smaller image, is justly celebrated. Lady with a Red Hat contrasts with de László’s portrait of eight years earlier. Both are theatrical images, which owe something of their drama to bold contrasts of light and shade; in both Vita adopts a role. But while the sfumato extravagance of de László’s painting lacks conviction, Strang’s picture of modernist hauteur depicts a sitter who has taken possession of her own iconography. Loosely, Vita holds a book. Its red cover matches the red hat which was Victoria’s inspiration for the commission, after Vita wore it with a matching red dress. The hooded Sackville eyes, dark and glassy pinpoints, ignore the viewer. Gone is the beseeching of the earlier painting. Strang’s Vita is aloof in her confidence, comfortable in the self she presents unblinkingly. It was an image Vita herself liked enough to send as postcards after its purchase from the Grosvenor Gallery by a museum in Glasgow. Harold shared her enthusiasm, describing it as ‘so absolutely my little Mar [the Sackville word for ‘little’ or child, which became Harold’s name for Vita]: she’s all there – her little straight body, her Boyhood of Raleigh manner, and above all, those sweet gentle eyes which are so familiar to me’.83 On first glance it is an image of swagger, the ‘splendid … dauntless’ Vita of Violet’s puppetry. Throughout Vita’s affair with Violet, Harold would continue to insist on her gentleness. It was his way of reminding her of the other side of her duality, her place in his life.
Like Raleigh himself, Vita had other journeys to make before her ship returned to shore. In July, she and Violet travelled to Cornwall again. Vita read Sex and Character by the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger. Weininger’s book, published in English in 1906, makes a clear division between male and female, characterising women as passive and illogical in contrast to active, productive, creative, logical, rational men. It was a thesis guaranteed simultaneously to infuriate Vita and to confirm her in her attachment to her theory of her own duality and, in particular, to the masculine side of her nature; passages in her copy are heavily annotated. She underlined Weininger’s statement: ‘All that [men] care about is that their work should glitter and sparkle like a well cut stone.’84 Vita would never only care about her work, and she wrote in the margin beside Weininger’s claim that ‘when [women] marry they give up their own name and assume that of their husband without any sense of loss’, ‘I disagree’.85
Already, according to Vita, something had changed by that second trip to Polperro. She herself now suspected their affair was ‘an adventure, an escapade’ and unlikely to last (an opinion she would change).86 Outside forces clamoured. Letters followed Violet to Cornwall from Denys Trefusis in France. Vita believed Violet hardly knew him; at first she was not jealous. But Violet was playing a double game.
Throughout the summer, Violet had written to Major Denys Robert Trefusis of the Royal Horse Guards, veteran of Ypres and the Somme. Mrs Keppel lay behind it; the Trefusises were well connected, if lacking in cash. Violet’s mother had made it clear that Violet must marry: she was not a woman to brook resistance. Inspired by her mother’s example, Violet envisaged an arrangement in which she and Vita, both provided with understanding husbands, would continue their affair from the safety of their positions as respectably married women. She even told Vita so. Via letter she flirted with her battle-scarred but honourable victim. To make good her fantasy she reinvented Denys in her imagination as a male Vita. She described him as ‘an Elizabethan. He had a pale arrogant face … It was impossible to look better bred, more audacious. Slim and elegant, he could not help dramatizing his appearance … he made the most ordinary clothes appear picturesque.’87 Aligning Denys with the new Vita of Strang’s portrait, Violet claimed that he was ‘intrepid, rebellious … adventurous, exciting’. She told Vita they would be friends. The reality, as Violet knew by the time she wrote that description, was somewhat different.
Vita and Violet discovered swiftly that accommodating their relationship within the routines of ordinary life would be more difficult than they had foreseen. Vita had a whole life separate from Violet, the world of Long Barn and Ebury Street, the nursery, the Foreign Office, her poetry; Violet remained firmly beneath her mother’s watchful gaze. Just as Harold and her sons made demands on Vita, ditto Mrs Keppel and Violet. Denied time together, both became irritable and unhappy. Vita resented the well-upholstered social round she and Harold pursued in leisurely Edwardian fashion. They argued: Vita disparaged Harold to Victoria, accusing him of physical coldness; in public Harold was uncharacteristically snappish. Violet’s letters oscillated between hope and despair, building fantastic castles in the air, or operatic in their tearfulness. She was less resilient than Vita, whose tone of ‘profound indifference and nonchalance’ chilled her.88 She found that the more heated the argument, the greater Vita’s apparent withdrawal: like Victoria berating Lionel, Violet mishandled Vita’s horror of confrontation. A new note entered their correspondence: Violet’s repeated protest against the dishonesty of dissimulation. Vita’s reply no longer exists. In her adolescent writings, the possibilities of dissimulation had thrilled and sustained her.
Diplomatic, assuasive and mindful of his own part in triggering this crisis in his marriage, Harold offered Vita a compromise: ‘a little cottage in Cornwall or elsewhere’ for hidden liaisons. He assured Vita that it would ‘be hers absolutely, and she can go there when she likes and be quite alone and have whom she wants. Then the Padlock [promise] is that Hadji never goes there and can’t … even know when she is there or who she has got with her.’89 Vita ignored his offer. She knew that it represented the very outcome Violet dreaded most – a severance inadequately leavened by snatched illicit nights together – and perhaps, at that point, one she also disdained. Over and again Violet insisted to Vita the inevitability of their union, willing her to give in. She could not conceive of sharing Vita, limiting their love to hidden assignations. She wrote that she wanted, ‘not only the physical you, but your fellowship, your sympathy, the innumerable points of view we share. I can’t exist without you, you are my affinity … my twin spirit. I can’t help it! no more can you! … Nous nous completons [We complete each other].’90 She railed at the furtiveness of their liaison. Their dashes to Cornwall had already given rise to ill-natured gossip. Such speculation increased th
eir troubles. They must quash it – or run away from it. They responded with recklessness.
On 11 October, after a matinée performance with Violet of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade – appropriately a story of the seductive and redemptive power of storytelling – Vita returned to Ebury Street and changed into men’s clothes. She took a taxi to Hyde Park Corner. There she met Violet and, like lovers (which of course they were), the two women strolled the streets of Mayfair in the autumn darkness. Vita smoked a cigarette, her confidence in her disguise gaining by the minute. She had become Violet’s ‘Julian’. At Charing Cross, they took a train to Orpington in Kent and stayed the night in a boarding house as husband and wife. In the interests of verisimilitude, Vita deepened her voice to talk to their landlady. ‘Oh, the wet dark evening at Hyde Park Corner!’ she exclaimed in her diary. ‘Then down here … This is the best adventure.’91
‘Nothing is an adventure until it becomes an adventure in the mind,’ Vita wrote later.92 So it was with this dazzling, dangerous other life as Julian. It was the culmination of all Vita’s years of play-acting; she was back in the attics of Knole performing Chatterton in Emily’s improvised breeches and shirt, only now the drama ended happily. Vita felt heroic, liberated: what struck her most forcibly was how natural it felt. The next morning, ‘Julian’ and his ‘wife’ went to Knole, where Vita changed into conventional clothes in the stables. ‘There are other ways [than love] of resolving the confusion of life into some kind of synthesis,’ Vita wrote in Gottfried Künstler in 1932. ‘Gottfried resolved it simply by becoming another person.’93 In Vita’s case that other person was a facet of herself that she had always recognised.
Orpington proved to be a dress rehearsal for events ahead. That month, Violet faced the challenge of Denys’s leave. He had told her he loved her in a letter written on 1 September; he was waiting for an answer. Before his return to his regiment on 26 October, he proposed to Violet in person. He knew by then something of the complexity, if not the full unorthodoxy, of the situation in which, unwittingly, he found himself. Like Vita before her, Violet responded evasively. As often as she could she struggled to escape Denys for Vita; Mrs Keppel easily outwitted her. Denys left London for Paris. Before the Armistice was declared, he ‘was cheered and acclaimed … by two regiments for his magnificent daring and skill’; the following summer he received the Military Cross.94 Ironically it was Denys’s presence in the French capital which persuaded Mrs Keppel to agree to the next step of what Violet termed ‘the Great Adventure’. On 26 November, Vita and Violet set off for France.
By then, an affair which had begun so happily was sullied by acrimony, mistrust and bad behaviour. Both Harold and Violet had attempted to enlist the sympathies and support of Vita’s mother. Harold had told his mother-in-law that Violet intended to destroy his marriage; Violet told Victoria that Harold stifled Vita’s creativity and that Vita cared more for her literary ambitions than for Harold. Victoria listened to Harold and discussed with Vita his performance as lover. Later she confided to her diary the extent of her bafflement: ‘If [Violet] was a man, I could understand, but for a woman, such a love beats me.’95 In a spirit of calculated mischief she enlightened Violet about a husband’s sexual needs. Persuaded of Victoria’s support, Harold continued to treat Vita with tolerance and agreed to help obtain for Violet as well as Vita passports and the necessary papers for travel. Victoria’s disclosures reduced Violet to something like hysteria; her previous knowledge of sex had evidently been scant. Now there must be a new condition to her marriage to the war hero Trefusis, an understanding that their relationship could not be consummated. Vita for her part had stopped wearing her wedding ring. On the eve of their departure for the Continent the women argued, as they would continue to. In a poem called ‘Dissonance’, Vita attributed the strains in the relationship to other people: ‘Clamour has riven us, clamour and din.’ She did not shy from the extent of those strains: ‘the closer we clasp one another, the further apart [we] remain’.96 But four months passed between Vita’s departure with Violet and her return, four months in which they were frequently very close indeed.
Their time was spent in Paris, in Avignon, St Raphael and Monte Carlo. From the outset their progress was fanciful, imaginative. They were Vita and Violet, Julian and Eve, Mitya and Lushka, reality and unreality in constant elision. They dressed up, they wore disguises, they effected a lovers’ patois based on Romany – a sot to the dream they shared of Vita as a gypsy king. Around themselves they wove fictions: in addition to Challenge, Vita’s poems about Violet, ‘Eve’ and ‘Eve in Tears’. Eve is ‘fickle as the flame/ And sweet as music irresponsible’; she possesses superhuman power: ‘You wept, and all the music of the air/ … Was stilled.’97 It was a delicious, shared delusion, which Vita would ultimately reject. It was also a delusion facilitated by less romantic realities. Vita and Violet’s bohemian idyll was made possible by Vita’s income from the Sackville estates and Violet’s allowance, paid for by investments made for Mrs Keppel on the instructions of Edward VII. They made good their shortfall by pawning jewels, taking £130 from Harold and a loan from Gerald Wellesley, heir to a dukedom. At Monte Carlo, they were forced to change their hotel in a hurry after a fracas when Julian danced in public with Eve; Harold described such antics as ‘vulgar and dangerous’ in a letter unusual for its sternness. Correctly Harold accused Vita of muddle-headedness: Vita appeared confused even about her feelings. Her diary recorded the unequivocal ‘hate life … wish I was dead’; in the confession that became Portrait of a Marriage, she painted an alternative picture: perfect happiness, perfect love, perfect Violet. Whatever the truth, Vita and Violet’s French leave suggests elements of calculated performance and a degree of uncontrived narcissism on Vita’s part: this was the moment when, on a day-to-day basis, she lived out her theories of her duality. Months later, on her final trip to France with Violet, she wrote to Harold: ‘You are good and sweet and lovable, and you are the person I loved in the best and simplest way; but there is lots that is neither good or simple in me, and it is that part which is so tempted.’98 So long as she was playing a part, Vita was happy. She was tempted by a vision of herself as much as by Violet.
They remained away for Christmas, gambling in the Casino at Monte Carlo, while Harold spent the day alone at Knole with the Sackvilles, Ben, Nigel and eccentric composer Gerald Berners, a curious Father Christmas substitute for two small boys.99 In January, Vita failed to join Harold in Paris for the beginning of his work at the Peace Conference. At home, baby Nigel was described as having forgotten who his mother was. Harold had read Marie Stopes’s Married Love, in an attempt to convince Vita of the value he attached to her happiness; when she ignored his letters, he embarked on an affair of his own with Victor Cunard and ensured that Vita knew about it. By the time of her return in March, Vita had exhausted the patience of both her parents. Although she admitted that she was to blame, she was appalled by the coldness of her mother’s fury. She described Victoria as looking at her ‘with eyes of stone’; Harold encouraged her to ‘recover your confidence in yourself, and your serenity in life’.100 In the short term, there was to be no escape from the consequences of her actions. In the summer of 1919, Vita sacked Ben and Nigel’s nanny after the latter walked about Sevenoaks Weald dressed in a suit belonging to Harold.101 The inference was clear, and Vita was not prepared to be made ridiculous.
On 21 March 1919, Violet told Vita that she and Denys Trefusis were no longer ‘even on friendly terms’.102 It was an unfortunate development in the light of the formal announcement of their engagement, which happened five days later. Vita read it in a newspaper in Brighton, where, with the assistance of architect Edwin Lutyens, whom she called ‘McNed’, Victoria was converting three enormous townhouses into one even larger house as a retreat from Knole and Lionel’s antipathy. Vita almost fainted when she saw in black and white confirmation of what she already knew. It was proof of the continuing strength of her feelings. Vita escaped to Paris, where Harold would r
emain until June assisting with the peace talks; inevitably Violet’s letters pursued her. After travelling to London in May for publication of Heritage (the novel was widely and favourably reviewed; Collins issued a reprint in July), she returned to Paris. It was two days before Violet’s wedding and Vita, who had promised to elope with Violet the following day, symbolically snatching her from the altar, did not trust herself. ‘I shall do something quite irretrievable and mad if I stay in England,’ she told Harold by way of explanation as she set off to rejoin him.103
Vita reneged on her promise to Violet. As it happened, the ‘something quite irretrievable and mad’ took place not in England but France. For on Denys and Violet’s arrival at the Paris Ritz, Vita abducted Violet. She took her to the Hotel Roosevelt, a less opulent setting, and roughly, unthinkingly, madly, had sex with her. ‘I treated her savagely, I made love to her, I had her, I didn’t care, I only wanted to hurt Denys.’104 The real hurt to Denys occurred the following day, when jointly the two women confronted him and, at last, told him most of the truth. Violet informed him of their plan to elope.