Behind the Mask Page 15
Once, Violet had flirted with the handsome Major Trefusis. She had procrastinated, bandied evasions, issued conditions. She had scorned his repressed, well-behaved, musical family and ignored the extent of his emotional vulnerability in the aftermath of what he called a ‘disastrous war’. She had postponed their wedding, rebuffed his patient affection. She had allowed him to be the plaything of her mother’s scheming in the desperate hope that the prospect of marriage to Denys would force from Vita the tangible commitment she repeatedly avoided. Throughout it all, Denys had kept faith with an idea of something lovable in Violet; when she drew his portrait during their engagement, he interpreted it as a speaking gesture. Only now, with his eyes finally opened to the true nature of her love for Vita, did Violet allow him to dislike her as she deserved. Confronted by these women who had used too many words, shared too many charades, exploited too many romantic fictions to imbue their passion with legitimacy and grandeur, his most powerful response was wordless. He turned so white that Vita thought he was going to pass out. Yet she was not moved to pity. That night, in a gesture of deliberate provocation, she dined alone at The Ritz. Violet watched her from her suite. Behind Violet stood Denys. He was crying. He would take his revenge by destroying all of Vita’s letters to Violet.
If Denys was in a position to think clearly, he could not have anticipated that it would be Harold who would next help Vita and Violet in their plans. Vita returned from Paris to Long Barn. She was like Clare Warrener in Grey Wethers, unable to settle down to her ‘suitable’ marriage, but tortured by the thought of making good her bolt for freedom: ‘She returned, of course; every time she duly returned.’105 She immersed herself in Challenge and the garden; at an auction in July she bought an additional thirty-three acres next to Long Barn, with two cottages and standing timber.106 Her occupations were symbols of the two halves of her life, both of them more easily managed in the absence of her co-players. Of the experience of writing Challenge she wrote to the absent Harold that she was ‘playing gooseberry to the oddest couple’;107 of the garden she sent tempting, lyrical descriptions which belied the tumult into which she had plunged both Harold’s life and her own, and reassured him of the solidity of her long-term commitment to him. ‘I wonder what else in the garden you will want to hear about,’ she wrote in June. ‘I went out and walked round it to see – and have come back determined that another year we must have masses and masses of flowers.’108 It was letters of this sort, with their promise of ‘another year’, which persuaded Harold to agree to Vita’s suggestion late that summer that she again go away with Violet. The excuse this time was a trip to Greece as research for Challenge. Later, one of Vita’s fictional alter egos regretted gardening as a taming of ‘uncultivated’ nature.109
Vita and Violet did not reach Greece. Instead they lingered in Paris, Vita again dressed as Julian, and afterwards travelled south to Monte Carlo. Vita had suspected her passion was on the wane but quickly learned she was mistaken. ‘There was no abatement, rather the reverse, in our caring for one another; there was no abatement either in my passion for the freedom of that life.’110 Again Violet implored Vita to commit herself to her irretrievably; again, presumably, Vita agreed. In Monte Carlo in December, she and Violet again decided on an elopement. This time Vita’s nerve held. Bluntly, she told Harold of her plans. He was predictably distressed and, reunited for Christmas, they temporarily resumed their life together, going through the motions of family celebrations and failing to discuss either their present or their future. It was characteristic of the whole muddled interlude. Vita had partly surrendered to Violet’s demands; simultaneously she refused entirely to relinquish Harold who, for his part, ignored their predicament when they were together and, in his letters when they were apart, chided Vita in one sentence while, in the next, assuring her of his limitless forgiveness and Violet’s poisonous reprehensibility. At times Vita pleaded with Harold to demolish all of Violet’s arguments and win her back by sheer force of love and daring: ‘I long for weapons to fortify myself with,’ she told him.111 Grand gestures were more in her line than his: she concluded that he mistook the seriousness of the ongoing crisis. The well-intentioned intervention of Harold’s mother served only to prove to Vita how much better suited she was to Violet’s company. Vita dispatched the now completed manuscript of Challenge to William Collins and, on 3 February, she and Violet left London for Lincoln. Their purpose was again research for Vita’s writing, in this case the fenland setting of The Dragon in Shallow Waters. In that angry and brutal novel, only the landscape itself emerges unscathed from the quarrels of men.
‘Like a great bowl opened to the gold-moted emptiness of heaven the country lay, recipient of the benediction,’ Vita wrote of the Lincolnshire wolds irradiated by spring sunshine.112 In February 1920, at Lincoln’s Saracen’s Hotel, Vita felt no corresponding benediction. She blanked Violet’s attempt to explain to her that she and Denys had each broken their vows – Denys to Violet, Violet to Vita; it was unclear how far their attempts at sex had gone and Vita was not listening anyway. Instead Vita ‘urged [Violet] so much’ to go back to Denys.113 Violet refused. Within a week the women were again in France. From Dover they travelled separately, as they had arranged, Violet crossing first. Vita made the journey with an unexpected travelling companion in the form of Denys Trefusis. Also with her in spirit was Harold, to whom Vita wrote constantly, updating him of her movements and her plans. Denys had followed Violet to Dover but instead found Vita; he refused to leave her without first seeing Violet. All this Vita reported to Harold. Even with her resolve apparently at its strongest – ‘You think that you will win,/ But that’s just where you are wrong, wrong, wrong,’ she wrote of an unnamed opponent, presumably Denys, in a hastily scribbled poem en route to meet Violet114 – Vita maintained the lifeline to her other life of husband and home.
What happened next has become a byword for unhappy farce. Amid the to-ings and fro-ings, the angry mothers and grieving husbands, the hotel bedrooms and station buffets, the boats and trains and a plane, which play their part in this staccato narrative, the underlying emotional struggle can fade from view: we should not lose sight of it. Vita and Violet’s plan was to meet in Amiens. In the aftermath of the First World War it was a suitably battle-scarred setting. Denys decided that Amiens was as good a place as any for his own final showdown with Violet: he intended to offer her a last chance to return with him and resume their tattered marriage. But Violet, whose life, like Vita’s, had been sheltered by wealth and position, had never previously travelled without a companion – at the very least her maid or chauffeur. The experience frightened her. She deposited her luggage at Amiens’ Hôtel du Rhin and returned to Calais to await Vita there. She found her, with Denys, in the station buffet. Surprised but undeterred, all three comforted themselves with chicken and Champagne. It was, Vita admitted, a ‘ludicrous situation’.115 Denys suggested ‘that we should all three live together in Jamaica growing sugar!’.116 Extreme nervous tension contributed a brittle sort of humour. They spent the night in three adjoining rooms and, the next day, continued to Amiens.
No sooner had Denys arrived in Amiens than he left. He knew, he said, that Violet had rejected him and, in tears, he returned to London. In London, Mrs Keppel had other ideas. Rejecting Denys was not an option she would countenance for Violet. She found a two-seater aeroplane. On the morning of St Valentine’s Day – though the date lost its significance in that welter of conflicting emotions – she arranged that Denys fly to Amiens and reclaim his wife from her lover. Thanks to Victoria’s intervention, Harold accompanied him. Two husbands and two wives confronted one another in the Hôtel du Rhin. Their strongest emotions were hatred, shock and anger. The first belonged to Violet, directed at Denys. The second and third were Vita’s. Swiftly she passed from one to another. Violet’s treatment of Denys shocked her: what she learned of Denys’s treatment of Violet angered her to the extent that she could no longer bear to look at either of them: ‘I had to go, I should
have killed her if I had stayed an instant longer.’117 It was extreme sexual possessiveness which goaded Vita to fury: she learned at last that the man she had cuckolded had attempted to return the favour. Frantic with rage she departed for Paris with Harold, with whom she had also argued; at a distance Violet and Denys followed them. That evening, Denys told Vita that her suspicions were unfounded: he had not slept with Violet. ‘Broken with misery’, Vita allowed herself to be partly mollified; although she did not admit it, it was her vanity that had been hit hardest. The next morning Violet and Denys embarked on their journey to the south and continuing unhappiness for Violet.
Five nights later, at the Casino de Paris, Vita was briefly distracted from her angry misery. She saw ‘the most lovely woman, almost entirely naked, but so lovely that one forgets to think of anything but her sheer perfection’.118 In fact Vita had no desire to forget anything bar the horror of that hotel showdown in Amiens. She reread Anna Karenina and wallowed in the proofs of Challenge. The publishers requested a change of title; Vita chose Endeavour, fully aware now of the sheer hard work of such crises of the heart. The novel was not published in Britain until 1974. Victoria had decided ‘the book will give rise to gossip’; she wanted Vita to cancel its publication. To persuade her, she enlisted the help of popular novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes. On 15 March 1920, after a long discussion, Mrs Belloc Lowndes did as Victoria wished and arranged a meeting with Vita. ‘She [Mrs Belloc Lowndes] wants me to cancel it,’ Vita recorded in her diary, ‘says, if L [Lushka] were dead, would I publish it, etc. This hits me – gossip I don’t care a damn about. Mrs Lowndes is kindness itself. So I give it up.’119 It was Victoria who paid William Collins £150 to cover the expenses of the printed book and recover Vita’s rights.
Within days of her interview with Mrs Belloc Lowndes, Vita set off for Avignon. There she was reunited with Violet. They had been apart for six weeks and immediately quarrelled. They travelled to Cap d’Antibes, Bordighera and San Remo, where Vita described Violet as ‘horrible to me all day, and makes me very miserable and exasperated’.120 They travelled to Milan, then by Orient Express to Venice. In Venice, Violet’s spirits revived, with a corresponding effect on Vita; after a day, reality bit. ‘It is horrible,’ Vita wrote. Their next stop, after a lengthy delay, was Verona. From Verona they returned to Paris. Harold met them for the return crossing to Dover. For much of their journey they had been accompanied by Pat Dansey, a friend of Violet’s, authorised by Mrs Keppel as a chaperone: birdlike in appearance, stuttering, obsessive, ultimately duplicitous. Despite the volatile atmosphere, in which no one appeared to advantage, Pat was falling in love with Vita. It was an added complication, typical of the climate of confusion and unreality which seemed to surround Vita; later she and Pat would become lovers. Moments of intimacy for Vita and Violet were few. ‘Sanctuary should exist on earth;/ Some private place, where life may be./ … For boisterous love and puppy mirth,’ Vita wrote afterwards in an anti-hunting poem, ‘To Any M.F.H.’; she may have been thinking as much of hunted lovers as foxes.121 In the spring of 1920, Vita and Violet struggled to find any ‘private place’: much of the boisterousness and ‘puppy mirth’ of their love had vanished. They had shunned, and eventually forfeited, secrecy.
On 17 April, one week after her return to Kent, Vita entertained Mrs Belloc Lowndes at Long Barn. They spent ‘most of the day talking’ and Vita found the older woman ‘almost unbelievably nice and kind’.122 At the latter’s suggestion, Vita returned to her writing. She described the effort poignantly as disconsolate, but the weather was ‘windy, showery, cold’ and there were limited opportunities for gardening. By the end of the month she had persuaded herself her gift had vanished: ‘O my good Lord! I can’t write nowadays. It drives me wild to remember my fluency of once upon a time – ten or twelve sheets a day! And as for poetry, it’s gone, gone, gone from me.’123 It came back early the following month when Vita spent a whole day in bed and wrote two poems. ‘Distinctly more cheerful in consequence,’ she noted.124 The return to any semblance of normality was fitful; there were setbacks along the way. A cruise with her father on Sumurun, the yacht Victoria had bought for Lionel after her victory in the Scott lawsuit, and the present of an elkhound puppy from Harold, went some way towards restoring her equanimity. She was rebuilding her life.
In September, Vita finished The Dragon in Shallow Waters. Violet read it the following month and dismissed it as ‘coarse’.125 Neither woman appears to have questioned Vita’s choice of subject matter, but this shilling shocker tale of brothers Silas and Gregory Dene had a curious aptness. ‘They lived in a double-cottage; Gregory with his wife in one half; Silas and his wife … in the other … Of the two brothers Gregory had been deaf and dumb from birth, and Silas blind.’126 Their physical impairments mean that each brother is incomplete: only when they are together do they function fully. That idea is emphasised by their occupation of twin halves of the same house. Silas and Gregory also embody opposing character traits, the former violent and destructive, the latter patient, thoughtful, creative. That neither is wholly believable as a character is due to Vita having attempted to depict the dualities of a single nature in two different people. Remote as the fictive Denes’ lives are from Knole and the Sackvilles, The Dragon in Shallow Waters is another of Vita’s attempts to work out in fiction uncomfortable aspects of what she imagined to be her own character. She wrote the novel at a moment of crisis, when that schism seemed more than usually real and powerful to her. Vita’s towering fury in the hotel at Amiens, when she learned, as she thought, that Violet had deceived her by sleeping with Denys, became Silas’s loathing for his brother: ‘Silas appeared to be possessed by a senseless, impersonal fury of destruction. She thought she might as well argue with the unleashed elements as with Silas.’127 The act of writing helped resolve parts of the crisis: the novel’s very existence is proof that, for all the savagery of her feelings, brutal Silas–Vita had not destroyed creative Gregory–Vita. Despite Violet’s reservations, it was to Violet that Vita dedicated the novel. She offered no explanation of its contents. The madness had passed. Vita retreated behind what Victoria called her ‘beautiful mask’. Like Lady Anne Clifford, whose diary she would shortly reread, she ‘strived to sit as merry a face as [she] could upon a discontented heart’.128
Vita would travel abroad with Violet once more, for two months at the beginning of 1921: she departed within days of assuring Harold that she had refused Violet’s invitation. There was a valedictory quality to parts of this final sojourn. It could not be otherwise. In July 1920, Vita had begun writing the ‘confession’, which subsequently formed the basis of Portrait of a Marriage. The very act of ordering her thoughts sufficiently to form a coherent narrative imposed distance, however artificial. In her account of those events which had left her, as she acknowledged, unfairly ‘safe, secure and undamaged save in my heart’,129 Vita attempted complete candour: she discounted the distortions both of Violet’s letters and Harold’s.
Evidently Harold did not share Vita’s certainty of an end of the affair. The letter he wrote to her on 8 February was determined and emphatic, and he threatened to leave her if she failed to return to Long Barn within a fortnight of the letter’s receipt (she didn’t and he didn’t). At the same time, resorting to memorable imagery, Harold continued to attribute all blame to Violet: ‘I know that when you fall into V’s hands your will becomes like a jelly-fish addicted to cocaine.’130 Vita returned to Harold on her birthday in March.
In the past Vita and Violet had had recourse to flame imagery in their descriptions of their shared passion: ‘The eager muscles of your throat were bare,/ The candid passion lit you like a flame,’ Vita wrote in 1919.131 By 1921 the flames burned less dangerously. For Christmas 1920, Vita gave Violet a fur coat: Violet was struck more forcibly by the coldness of Vita’s manner on the telephone.132 (Later, Vita exonerated herself from such accusations on the grounds that she hated the telephone.133) The flame had not died, Vita simply grew more adept at i
gnoring it. The other side of her nature reasserted itself. She bought Ben a pony for his birthday; she revelled in the seven puppies produced by her elkhound Freya. She pictured herself ‘bewildered and uncertain between … my two lives’: she chose ‘my house, my garden, my fields, and Harold’.134 This was the Vita who had once written to Violet about rabbits. If Violet had had access to Vita’s diary, with its focus on puppies and whelping, she would have known the extent of her defeat. But she was never completely vanquished. In 1940, the women met again after an interval of eighteen years. ‘We must not play with fire again,’ Vita wrote to Violet on that occasion, holding her lover firmly at arm’s length.135 She reverted to former imagery. Her letter betrays fear and the power of a fugitive infatuation.
After their last trip to France that spring of 1921, the tsunami of Violet’s letters to Vita dwindled and dried; all the triumphalism, the grandiloquence, the daring were past, meaningless now in the light of Vita’s rejection. At intervals in the future Vita would resume the rhetoric of heroism that was so essential to her self-esteem. ‘Better to fall with such reverberation/ That nation looks aghast across to nation,’ she proclaimed in typically vaunting mode in her poem ‘Reddín’ in 1926; other lovers would admire in her the venturesome qualities that Violet had thought she glimpsed. Vita mostly deceived herself. By the autumn of 1921, worn out with misery, her only wish was for respite. How much she allowed herself to dwell on Violet’s misery is questionable.
Her thoughts drew solace from what she described possessively as ‘my Saxon weald! my cool and candid weald!’.136 She had received a jolt from Lionel’s attempt, in April, to find tenants for Knole. An advertisement in Country Life highlighted ‘a family suite of sixteen bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, nine reception rooms and a billiard room, tennis lawns and a covered squash court … everything to make … a convenient country house of our own day’, but failed to attract serious interest. The threat of dispossession, albeit temporary, returned Vita to her senses.137 ‘I have been absent,’ she wrote in a poem dedicated to Harold. ‘I have found unchanged/ The oaks, the slope and order of the fields.’138 It was by way of being an apology, also a reassurance to herself.