Behind the Mask Read online

  Vita had met Geoffrey Scott before she saw him in Rome with Gerry and Dottie in the autumn of 1921 – in Florence, in 1909, while travelling with Rosamund Grosvenor. Geoffrey Scott was married, the author of a highly praised architectural monograph, The Architecture of Humanism, published in 1914; tall, humorous, darkly attractive behind round spectacles, melancholic for all his easy wit. Financially he was supported by his wealthy wife, Lady Sybil, younger daughter of the Earl of Desart; they lived in Fiesole, in Michelozzi’s fifteenth-century Villa Medici, amid manicured formal gardens. Three years into their marriage, in 1921, the Scotts had embarked on a trial separation: Geoffrey had fallen in love with another woman. His was a chequered romantic career, with numerous affairs before his marriage to Sybil Cutting and a reputation for philandering. Contemporary slang denounced him as a ‘bounder’; Vita would call him Tinker. As much as Vita, he was driven by desire and a kind of recklessness over consequences. Like Vita, he understood the perils of love.

  At the end of July 1923, Geoffrey left Italy for London, his third appearance in Vita’s life; his purpose was Vita herself. He was working on a biography of eighteenth-century novelist Madame de Charrière, The Portrait of Zélide, while Sybil completed translations of four of Madame de Charrière’s novels, also for publication; in 1926 the former won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In addition Geoffrey Scott was a poet. A Box of Paints: Poems was published in November 1923 to enthusiastic reviews. It included the lines: ‘I locked the gold Sun with a key/ That lasting joy might dwell with me;/ The sun did scorch my hands and feet/ But to my heart refused his heat;/ So the swift flame with captive rage/ Consumed me in his glowing cage.’ In London that summer and subsequently with Vita in Italy, Scott failed to heed his own warning; Vita herself fell fleetingly in love with him. From the ruins of Dottie’s marriage to Gerry, Vita stepped open-eyed into another passionate liaison. Inevitably she withdrew once the love she had demanded in turn exacted its own demands; again the béguin was temporary. It was Geoffrey who eventually found himself consumed by the ‘captive rage’ of love’s flame. Sybil divorced him. He lost wife, wealth, reputation and failed to win Vita.

  Before that, Vita and Geoffrey spent a week together in the Lake District (Ben and Nigel were safely out of the way in Brittany with their French governess, Mademoiselle Nadré, known as ‘Goggy’). In the autumn they met again in Florence, where Vita arrived ahead of Harold. In Florence, the Nicolsons stayed with the Scotts at the Villa Medici. By the time of Harold’s arrival, thanks to a combination of Florentine moonlight and overwrought emotionalism, Vita had fallen in love with Geoffrey and he with her, much to Sybil’s distress. Vita confided in her mother. Victoria’s anxiety was balanced by healthy enjoyment: she was certain that sex with Geoffrey would successfully banish memories of Violet. Vita and Geoffrey discussed The Portrait of Zélide and the long poem that would become The Land; Geoffrey referred to them as ‘our book’ and ‘our poem’. Shared literary aspirations nourished the lovers. After parting, they wrote to one another daily; Geoffrey fretted over Sybil’s reaction. On her return to Long Barn, Vita wrote emolliently to Sybil, a gesture in which worldliness and unworldliness combined in equal measure. Like a lover in a story, sincere in her role play, Vita offered to renounce Geoffrey. Sybil was temporarily placated. Her equanimity did not survive Geoffrey’s return visit to London in the New Year.

  ‘At 3.30 Geoffrey rang me up to say he had arrived,’ Vita wrote on 10 January 1924. ‘At 7 he came for me, we dined at the Berkeley; and came back here afterwards; a bewildering and not very real evening. Rainy London; taxis; champagne; confusion.’27 The following day she took Geoffrey to Knole. Geoffrey and Dottie were among guests at a lunch party on 15 January, which Vita described as ‘uncomfortable … by reason of the tension between Aprile [Dottie] and Geoffrey’.28 On Sunday 20 January, Vita took Geoffrey to Knole again, in company with Harold and Ben: in her diary she listed her companions in order ‘Geoffrey, Harold, Ben’. The following night she stayed on at Knole, alone with Geoffrey; they dined and lunched together in the week ahead and, on 31 January, following a furious argument with Victoria over a plate warmer, Vita noted Geoffrey’s ‘consolation’ in her diary. On 1 February, at a lunch party, Vita ‘talked to Sybil [Colefax] and tried to enlist her help in diminishing talk about me and G’.29 Three days later she took Geoffrey in Harold’s place to a PEN Club dinner after Harold had to ‘chuck at the last moment as he has to do a draft on the relations of France and England for Ramsay McDonald’.30 On 7 February, after an afternoon alone together at Ebury Street, Geoffrey bought Vita a ring. And so it continued for another week.

  Vita understood the symbolism of the ring, understood the direction of Geoffrey’s thoughts – and maintained the pattern of frequent meetings. It was surprising behaviour given her stated ‘confusion’ and typical of what Harold regarded as Vita’s ‘muddled’ approach to her love affairs. As he wrote to her later, ‘I have every confidence in your wisdom except where this sort of thing is concerned, when you wrap your wisdom in a hood of optimism and only take it off when things have gone too far for mending.’31 Vita could have stopped seeing Geoffrey, just as she could have resisted parading him in front of literary London at a PEN Club dinner only days after asking for help to quash gossip. In the latter aim she failed anyway. In her letters written from Florence she had confided too much to Victoria; now she introduced Geoffrey to her mother in person. And Victoria, even when her relationship with Vita was not riven by arguments of the plate-warmer variety, was dependably indiscreet. Once Geoffrey returned to Sybil in the middle of February, his cause was lost. As Violet had discovered, Vita’s loyalty seldom survived physical separation: she excelled at epistolary equivocation.

  Geoffrey came back to England and Vita in the summer. His visit to Long Barn, cut short by Vita and Harold’s imminent departure for the Dolomites, was unsatisfactory: his furious reaction to Ben and Nigel bursting into his bedroom to find him naked, changing for dinner, is indicative of his unsettlement. Harold was similarly unhappy about developments. He told Vita: ‘I dislike Geoffrey because: a) he talks better than I do; b) he worries you; c) he has a yellow face & sits up late & is flabby; d) because he is more emotional than I am, and because you are impressed by emotion.’32 Geoffrey would continue to worry Vita in his letters for the remainder of the year. As in Vita’s relationship with Violet, their correspondence took on a one-sided quality: all the urgency, ardour and – increasingly – suffering, belonged to Geoffrey. Vita responded either inadequately or with careful promises that she must have known she would not keep. Only Victoria took pity on Geoffrey. She found him ‘so unhappy’ before his return to Italy that she treated him to lunch: ‘I think I cheered him up with lobsters stuffed with caviar.’33 But she signalled her approval of Vita’s growing detachment by cancelling her loan on Ebury Street and offering Vita and Harold £500 a year towards its running costs; she also offered to clear Harold’s tax debt. It was a symbolic gesture.

  Like Violet, Geoffrey found it impossible to accept the obvious explanation for what he interpreted as Vita’s contradictory behaviour: her initial insistence on his wholehearted surrender followed by an unexplained withdrawal once that surrender had been granted. ‘To ask for a possessive lover, and do everything to show him he “possesses” nothing, is not only damnable, it’s idiotic,’ he wrote to her.34 It was an inconsistency Vita would never resolve, this need for abject submission that contained within itself the seeds of her disillusionment. ‘It made love richer to have something saved up for a later day. One did not give everything out at once. An essential of love was to keep something in reserve always,’ she wrote in Grand Canyon in 1942.35 But Vita did not encourage reserve in her lovers, and she consistently attracted those whose need was to give everything out at once, prostrating themselves completely, helplessly, childishly. Geoffrey had decided that Vita did not share the sexual excitement that for him was as fundamental to their relationship as their literary communing. He told her
she responded to the appearance of emotion. It could not be otherwise given the element of play-acting that shaped her receptivity to the idea of love.

  Throughout the spring of 1925, Vita’s diary records her meetings with Geoffrey; in April, in Venice with Harold and Ben, she spent her mornings with the man she knew now she would never marry. Despite Sybil’s decision in May to file for divorce, and Geoffrey and Vita’s shared fear of Vita being cited in proceedings, they continued to meet in London that autumn, not only in the privacy of the Nicolsons’ Ebury Street house but publicly, in restaurants like the Criterion. Vita’s progress on The Land was well advanced: current muddles did not prevent her from describing life as ‘too exciting altogether’. One particularly good day she wrote seventy-one lines of her poem – ‘a record I think?’.36

  At the end of the year her mood changed again: Geoffrey was threatening to kill himself; Vita explained his visit to Long Barn in October as ‘very much against my will’.37 On 29 December he telephoned Vita in the evening ‘in a state of hysteria (or so it sounded)’. Her response was one of bafflement, compounded by disappointment that, having allowed him fruitlessly to destroy his marriage, they could not ‘have remained good friends’.38 The following day she described him starkly as ‘very sinister’. If he threatened physical violence on that occasion, it would not have been the first time: afterwards Vita claimed that Geoffrey had once nearly strangled her.

  Again it was Harold who saved Vita from her predicament. On 24 September 1925, he told Vita he had been posted for two years to Tehran, beginning in November. Excited by the idea of Persia, though still hostile in general to Harold’s diplomatic career, Vita decided to join him in the New Year. The day before she left, on 19 January 1926, she had a farewell lunch with Geoffrey. They were not alone. Also present was Dorothy Warren, a niece by marriage of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Dorothy was in love with Geoffrey. She was also in love with Vita. There were suggestions of history repeating itself: Violet and Pat Dansey all over again, one lover replaced by their substitute. This time Vita reacted differently. She had learnt at least one lesson. Dorothy’s importuning, her shyly insinuating letters, irked her.

  Later that year Sybil divorced Geoffrey and married in his place the writer Percy Lubbock. ‘A memory, a bird flown,/ A wild bird’s claw prick in the moon,/ … love is so,’ Geoffrey had written in A Box of Paints. So it proved. In October 1927, he travelled to the States as first editor of the James Boswell Papers, which had recently been bought by American businessman Colonel Ralph Isham. He did not marry Dorothy Warren. Vita discouraged further contact, writing to Harold on 28 June 1926: ‘Geoffrey writes but I have refused to see him, and he has accepted that. He now writes me sentimental letters about “Remember what I was once …”’39 Despite her dislike of sentiment and her relief at having extricated herself, she may have taken his injunction more to heart than she realised. Long after his death, Vita claimed that Geoffrey was one of the two people she missed most (the other was Virginia Woolf). In the meantime she avoided Dorothy, whose reappearance in Vita’s life four years later proved equally unwelcome.

  Vita had remained close to Dottie during her affair with Geoffrey. She did not confide in her: their own relationship was too recent for that and she recognised Dottie’s jealousy, which she discussed with Geoffrey. Vita’s principal confidante remained her mother, notwithstanding upheavals brought about by frequent arguments. Given the complexity of her emotional life, Vita needed a confidante. A third liaison, conducted in tandem, ended so badly that, at the beginning of 1924, Vita reported herself ‘hav[ing] moments of wishing most people at the bottom of the sea’.40 It ought not to have happened.

  On the table beside her bed in her flat in Cumberland Mansions in Bryanston Square, Pat Dansey had a copy of Vita’s second volume of poems, Orchard and Vineyard. It was signed ‘with love from DM’.41 ‘DM’ was Vita, the book her gift to Pat, Pat’s name for Vita ‘Dark Man’.

  ‘“That brilliant creature Vita Sackville-West” is a darling, I think, to have sent me her book of poems. I am dreadfully proud to have been given them. Vita, thank you a thousand times,’ Pat wrote on 12 November 1921. ‘I spent the whole of last night dreaming about you. I expect it was because I had taken your poems to read in bed. Queer dream it was too …’42 Two months later Vita and Pat became lovers. In both cases, their motives contained traces of cynicism.

  Pat was the confidante and chaperone Mrs Keppel had sanctioned for Violet and, until Violet’s letters to Vita ceased in November 1921, the women’s go-between. A niece of the last Lord Fitzhardinge, she spent formative years in medieval splendour at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, living with her childless, elderly, ‘crochety ogre’ of an uncle. Physically diminutive, she was self-willed, with an active fantasy life; she may have been, as Lord Northumberland described her, ‘not quite right in the head’.43 She found a degree of emotional fulfilment early on with Joan Campbell, a granddaughter of the Duke of Argyll, who would remain nominally her partner for life. Her emotional volatility matched Vita’s own but she was less adept than Vita at regulating her feelings. Her friendship with Violet included an overt sexual dimension – she described inventing ‘the most erotic pastimes to appeal to [Violet’s] taste’.44 She was determined that sex would also play its part in her relationship with Vita.

  Vita’s relationships invariably encompassed an element of manipulation, Vita herself alternately villain and victim. She first met Pat in 1918 with Violet; afterwards, we know, in the spring of 1920, Pat travelled with Vita and Violet from Verona to Paris. Pat’s loyalties were initially clear. Once the lovers had parted, she kept open a channel of communication between them; she sent Violet money, cigarettes, press cuttings of Vita’s poems. Then something changed. Pat’s covering notes to Vita, included alongside Violet’s letters, which she forwarded, set out to drive a wedge between the women: she described Violet as deceitful, given to trickery and lies; spitefully she suggested that Violet could only ‘ever be happy in being unhappy’.45 Slowly, insidiously, Pat attempted to usurp Violet’s position in Vita’s thoughts. It is a measure of Vita’s own unhappiness that she apparently failed to spot, or chose to overlook, Pat’s feline duplicity.

  Pat was well equipped to claim Vita’s attention. Not only was she her last link with Violet, with whom she remained in love, since 1917 she had been privy to all of Violet’s confidences about Vita. Pat had listened well. She wooed Vita exactly as Violet had unwittingly instructed her, and seduced her, as Violet had, with a fantasy of herself, the image of the Dark Man: she was strong, handsome, masterful. ‘I do wish, Vita, that when you come to see me you could manage to look ugly,’ she wrote. ‘You make me forget all the important disagreeable things I want to say.’46 Just to be certain, she wrote to Vita pointing out, in a safely roundabout way, that she was in love with her; afterwards she whispered that Vita attracted her ‘in a way which I cannot describe’.47 Beside her copy of Orchard and Vineyard stood a framed reproduction of Vita’s portrait by William Strang, the picture painted while Violet had sketched in the background of Strang’s studio. For Vita the transition from Julian/Mitya to Dark Man was easy.

  Like Violet and Geoffrey, Pat gave Vita a ring. She went one better and gave her two rings, one of diamonds, the other emeralds. With lover-like abandon she showered Vita with presents: Champagne and Sauternes from the cellars at Berkeley Castle; oranges from South Africa and flowers from the South of France; a fountain pen; a Burberry mackintosh; she described a Daimler coupé she meant to buy her. She absorbed herself wholeheartedly in Vita’s life, ‘your dogs, cats, garden, books, children, husband and mother!’.48 She gave Vita a copy of the Arabian Nights, perhaps hoping to kindle Vita’s memories of Scheherazade and that rainy October evening in 1918 when, following a matinée of Rimsky-Korsakov’s ballet, Vita first transformed herself into Julian. Then, in December 1922, Pat declared herself terminally ill and promised to leave everything she owned to Vita; Vita described her as ‘the queerest fish I ever came a
cross’.49 That Christmas, Pat joined the family party of Vita, Ben, Nigel and Victoria at Victoria’s huge house in Brighton (Harold was in Lausanne, at an international conference debating the future of Turkey). It was the same month Gerry Wellesley moved out of Sherfield Court.

  There was a desperate quality to the scale of Pat’s generosity. Like Victoria she exploited the magpie lure of her gifts to bind Vita closer to her. She offered Vita the very concession Violet had failed to make good: a sham marriage as a screen for their continuing liaison. Pat was in the grip of a sexual infatuation every bit as strong as Vita’s for Violet or Violet’s for Vita. Even the thought of their lovemaking unsettled her: ‘hot waves rush all over me. Little electric needles of sensation prick all through me.’50 Vita’s own feelings, muddied from the outset by her unresolved love for Violet and the less assertive dependency of Dottie, were characteristically slippery. The poem she wrote for Pat, ‘Black Tarn’, lacked the urgency and earthy directness of her poems to Violet, a lengthy description of a hill walk, terminating in ‘a pool in a crater’. It is a poem about a landscape, which never fully makes the leap to examining Vita’s own interior landscape. Even its central metaphor of climbing beyond the familiar and ‘leaving a discontent/ With the lake in the valley, and the road beside the lake,/ And the dwellings of men, the safety, and the ease’ makes no reference to Pat herself, much less to happiness, love, exaltation, desire.51 The pool in the crater is suggestive: it too falls short of becoming the sexual symbol it first appears. Nor is it, the poet insists, the only pool in those ‘rough, negative hills’. Inevitably Vita would soon make good that threat.

  By the summer of 1923, Geoffrey Scott vied with Dottie and Pat for Vita’s attention. From Florence in November, Vita wrote to Pat explaining that she had fallen so hopelessly in love with Geoffrey that she could no longer go on seeing her. Her letter inspired desolation swiftly followed by fury. Unlike others among Vita’s lovers, Pat would not be content to slake her rage in silence. She demanded the immediate return of all her presents and refused Vita’s easy reassurances. ‘I centralised on you for three solid years as my life, and you just shut me off bang! stranded,’ she wrote.52 In the New Year, Vita’s diary reported alarming developments: ‘Quarrel with Pat in full swing; letters exchanged, she threatening lawsuits, and I being rather pompous.’53 Vita discussed her latest ‘muddle’ with Harold, ‘and finally wrote her a conciliatory letter’. Harold resisted blaming Vita and Vita avoided blaming herself. Instead she described her mood as one of boredom.54 She followed up her letter with a short meeting two days later, which she described as ‘perfectly amicable’, and pursued her tottering relationship with Geoffrey.