Behind the Mask Read online

  Vita and Roy Campbell shared a weakness for bravado. ‘We never kiss but vaster shapes possess/ Our bodies: towering up into the skies,/ We wear the night and thunder for our dress,’ Roy wrote in his poem, ‘We are Like Worlds’. Vita would discover that they also shared a weakness for sexual jealousy. Roy had fallen in love with Mary Garman at first sight, describing the experience as an ‘electric thrill’; his was a possessive, aggressive, angry love and his ideas of marriage, he explained later, were ‘old-fashioned about wifely obedience’.125 Vita had read and partly admired the collection of poems Roy Campbell published in 1924, The Flaming Terrapin, which she discussed in letters to Virginia. The book failed to sell. With an income of £20 a month following the death of Roy’s father, a baby, Anna, and a three-year-old daughter Tess, the Campbells struggled financially. Vita turned their heads, Virginia reprimanded her afterwards, ‘with her silver, and her coronets, and her footmen’.126 Cynically Mary referred to Vita as ‘our latest acquisition … the daughter of Lord Sackville’.127

  As May gave way to June, Vita continued to work on Twelve Days. She began her short biography of Aphra Behn, which she completed in nine weeks despite the inevitable disturbances of Ben and Nigel’s summer holidays, visits to and from Dottie at Sherfield and Virginia at Rodmell, a daily tally of lunch and dinner invitations. At the end of August she and Harold heard to their horror that the Foreign Office intended sending Harold to Budapest (he refused the posting and was ordered to Berlin instead); both worked out their uncertainty about the future through gardening. Vita decided to spend the £100 she received for the Hawthornden Prize on 16 June on new plantings of hazel and poplar in the woods at Long Barn. Observing her daughter’s appearance of happiness at a similar moment of quietus, Victoria imagined she had glimpsed emotional tranquillity after recent tempests. Darkly she noted then: ‘She seems contented now, but the Volcano is there, ready to burst into flame, I am sure.’128 In the summer of 1927 Victoria was proved right.

  The previous August, Vita had reassured Harold that her friendship with Virginia was not about to develop into one of her ‘muddles’. ‘I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that’s all,’ she wrote, referring to a visit to Rodmell earlier in the summer. In stark terms she explained, ‘I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings, because of the madness.’129 Harold praised her restraint: ‘it’s not merely playing with fire; it’s playing with gelignite’.130 If Vita wanted physical stimulation – and she invariably did – she needed to look elsewhere.

  What Victoria mistook for settledness was lingering discontent. In Tehran at the end of February, Vita had reflected on an unhappy month: ‘Very depressed all this month owing to 1) inability to write, 2) fear of Hadji continuing in diplomacy. The Foreign Office says he will have to come back in September for another year. God help us! I had hoped to find him disgusted with exile and social duties, but it is quite the contrary.’131 Vita’s assessment fell wide of the mark. Harold’s diary records a morning during Vita’s second visit to Tehran when he woke up ‘with a conviction that I shall chuck the diplomatic service. I have been fussing and worrying about this problem for months.’132 Nothing came of his first attempt at change. An interview with Sir John Cadman, chairman of Anglo-Persian Oil, failed to produce the hoped-for offer of a job in the company’s London offices. It was Vita’s hopes, as much as Harold’s, that were dashed.133 With plenty to occupy her, Vita did not immediately focus her attention on the Campbells following their meeting in the post office. Mary went to Long Barn for tea a fortnight after the first dinner invitation; three weeks later, she and Roy returned to dinner, this time in company with Vita’s cousin Eddy and Bloomsbury writer David Garnett. Roy dined alone at Long Barn in July and, on 22 August, Vita went for tea with Mary. That invitation was reciprocated within less than a week; three days later, Mary appeared at Long Barn in the evening and she and Vita went for a walk. In Vita’s diary she remained ‘Mrs Campbell’.

  And so it might have continued, if Mary had not declared her hand as Vita drove her to the station on the morning of Friday, 2 September. Unsettled and evidently surprised, Vita frittered the following day in idleness, ‘unable to read or write, upset about MC’.134 Ten days later, the women had become lovers: the volcano burst into flame and Vita, as she imagined herself later, was straying again in ‘whispering galleries …/ That like a sea-cave or a fluted shell/ Reverberate with love’s whole ocean swell’.135

  Vita was heroic, reckless. ‘Love’s the lion that with golden eyes/ Shames the unruly pack and makes them cower,’ she trumpeted with the braggadocio that came naturally to her in the grip of one of her béguins.136 Then Nigel came down with influenza and a temperature of 102. For a single night Vita parted from Mary. At considerable risk of detection, they spent the following night together at Long Barn – in the small room next door to the room into which Vita had moved Nigel. The next night she and Mary again had sex in the room beside Nigel’s. It became a repeating pattern: Mary spending nights with Vita whenever Roy went to London – and neither woman told their husband. ‘I have just acquired a new friend who takes up all my time while Roy is working,’ Mary wrote obliquely.137 Vita was excited and persuaded herself that her excitement was love: Mary’s feelings ran deeper. Like all Vita’s lovers until Evelyn Irons, there was a neediness in Mary Campbell. She told Vita that she was ‘sometimes like a mother to [her]. No one can imagine the tenderness of a lover suddenly descending to being maternal. It is a lovely moment when the mother’s voice and hands turn into the lover’s.’138

  Their idyll lasted two months. On 1 October, after the beginning of the school term, the Campbells moved into Ben and Nigel’s cottage, to live there rent-free. Five weeks later, Roy told Vita he knew about their affair. It was a tit-for-tat announcement: in the same breath he revealed his own affair with Geoffrey Scott’s old flame, Dorothy Warren. Later his mood changed and a frightened Mary briefly returned from the cottage to Vita. That night, Roy’s threats alternated between suicide and murder. It was the beginning of what he later called a ‘comically sordid and silly period’; he denounced ‘vice’ as ‘a sort of obligation for board and lodging’.139

  Without revealing her own part in the affair, Vita wrote to Harold in Berlin, updating him on the progress of the Campbells’ rapidly unravelling marriage. ‘I think he is absolutely crazy. I feel most frightfully sorry for Mary. He went for her last night with a knife.’140 Three days later, Vita reported, his anger was more focused. He had offered Mary two alternatives: a suicide pact on the one hand, both of them slashing their wrists with Roy’s razor; on the other, Roy’s own suicide or his return to South Africa. Mary allowed herself to waver. Uncontrite, she was anxious only to be reunited with Vita and ‘naked except for a covering of your rose leaf kisses’;141 Vita congratulated herself on the calming effect on Roy of her own presence and her arguments in favour of moderation. Meanwhile Harold, contemplating his marriage long distance and distracted by lunch in Berlin with Noël Coward, stuck to his conviction ‘that our love and confidence is absolute’.142 On the evening Mary fled from Roy’s anger, Dottie was at Long Barn. She kept watch through the night with a shotgun across her knee. ‘Gin-soaked, a shot-gun in her clutches/ The Fury was a future duchess,’ Roy commented later in verse.143

  Vita confided the truth of the ‘muddle’ to Virginia, whose response was sharply critical. ‘I felt suddenly that the whole of my life was a failure,’ Vita wrote of her chastisement.144 She had failed to reckon with the importance attached by Bloomsbury to relationships: in Vita’s tangled amorousness, Virginia saw only bungling and an inability to commit herself wholeheartedly to any single individual (herself included). Privately Virginia admitted that she was jealous; she told Vita she hated being bored, but gave herself away in her letters: ‘heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell’.145 Virginia knew of the night Vita had recently spent with Mary Hutchinson, Clive Bell’s former lover; she suspected the young actress Valerie Taylor, who had
fallen in love with Vita and kept her talking late into the summer nights, or dressed up as Byron for Vita’s titillation. Confronted by Virginia’s disappointment, Vita cried, admitted her incapacity for ‘creating one single perfect relationship’, and swiftly reassured herself: ‘Well, at least I won’t create any further mistakes!’ It was a vain hope.

  Roy dropped his plans to divorce Mary and wrote soberly but resignedly to Vita that he was tired of trying to hate her. ‘I realise that there is no way in which I could harm you (as I would have liked to) without equally harming us all. I do not dislike any of your personal characteristics and I liked you very much before I knew anything. All this acrimony on my part is due rather to our respective positions in the tangle.’146 He and Vita agreed to a halt in Vita’s affair with Mary and a semblance of normality was restored. Vita frenziedly wrote sonnets about Mary (‘a sort of catharsis,’ she explained to Harold147), Mary began her painting of Long Barn and Roy internalised his anger. He would mine its rich seam to devastating effect in what he called ‘a satirical fantasy in verse’, The Georgiad, published in 1931. Although the satire of The Georgiad roves widely through the Bloomsbury Group, Harold and Vita feature prominently. Roy’s depiction of the ‘frowsy poetess’ Vita – ‘too gaunt and bony to attract a man’ – indicates the damage Vita had inflicted on his sexual vanity.148 With some justification, the poem deprecated Harold and Vita broadcasting on the radio ‘about married life,/ As if their life were one protracted kiss,/ And they the models of connubial bliss’.149 As late as 1952, Vita declined an invitation to a Foyle’s lunch for Stephen Spender ‘because I didn’t fancy the idea of meeting Roy Campbell’.150

  With a degree of understatement, Harold had recently warned Vita that she lacked a happy touch where married couples were concerned. He resisted reminding her of this warning and instead did his best to restore her equilibrium. He countered Virginia’s criticism by pointing to their marriage as proof of her ‘genius for durable relationships’, indicated as well her relationships with Dottie, the children, her parents. In the middle of December, Vita spent five days with Harold in Berlin, letters of protest from Mary following in her wake; on her return she persuaded Roy to go on living in the cottage. To her diary Vita confided that she was ‘very depressed at leaving [Harold] alone in that beastly place [Berlin]’; her dislike of the German capital would grow.151 Neither Harold nor Vita had any idea that one of Vita’s ‘durable’ relationships was about to end, with long-lasting consequences for Vita. At the relatively young age of sixty-one, Lionel was weeks away from death.

  Lionel Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville, died on 28 January 1928 of pericarditis (inflammation round the heart). Knole passed by ancient right to Vita’s Uncle Charlie and his American wife, Anne, whom Vita loathed. Bar a handful of occasions, she would never return and so her mythologising of Knole became complete: it was the house of her memories, the house in her dreams, a region of fantasy and her own perfect panacea. ‘I dream quite often about Knole. I dream about the deer galloping down the stable passage, their hooves rattling on the wood boards,’ she wrote in her Dream Book. ‘I like this dream. I like any dream that takes me back to Knole. I wish I dreamt oftener about Knole … I wish I did. It used to be a sort of substitute for not going there.’152

  Lionel had been attended by Sir Thomas Horder, a ‘short, friendly specialist in cancer and heart disease’ with a roster of royal clients, and nursed at Knole by Olive Rubens and Vita, who described him as suffering ‘agonies of pain’.153 Victoria’s wretchedness at his death focused at first on these nursing arrangements: it was Vita, henceforth labelled ‘the Vipa’ in her mother’s diary, who bore the brunt of her anger. Vita made arrangements for Lionel’s funeral and his burial in the family chapel at Withyam church: cart horses drew his coffin. She also answered more than three hundred letters of condolence and conceived a novella, The Death of Noble Godavary, about heredity, inheritance and the destruction of an ancient family home by an outsider of mixed blood (like Victoria, and indeed Vita herself). ‘It is a dismal affair for her,’ Virginia wrote to Eddy Sackville-West, son of the new Lord Sackville and now heir to Knole; ‘and your aunt’s [Victoria’s] behaviour could only be tolerated in an Elizabethan play. That she might take a dagger to her own throat or drink broken glass is rather my hope.’154

  Virginia’s thoughts were running on Elizabethan history. At the time of Lionel’s death she reported herself ‘hacking rather listlessly at the last chapter’ of Orlando.155 Its publication in October would offer Vita consolation of sorts in this year of dispossession when Knole slipped irretrievably from her grasp. ‘When she left the house behind the old carthorses, she went for ever,’ Virginia reported Vita telling her in the aftermath of Lionel’s funeral. Virginia was sympathetic if detached: ‘Can one really be in love with a house?’156 But Orlando made good Vita’s symbolic return.157

  Accurately Harold told Vita that it was a book ‘in which you and Knole are identified for ever, a book which will perpetuate that identity into years when you and I are dead’.158 Vita described it as containing ‘romance, wit, seriousness, lightness, beauty, imagination, style’.159 Since all those qualities belong not only to the novel but to Orlando himself, she could not help but be flattered. Virginia’s diary records Orlando’s critical reception and its commercial success: she does not dwell on Vita’s reaction. Perhaps she knew she could take her excitement for granted, so accurate is her realisation of Vita’s mythomania. Photographs of Vita were included among Orlando’s illustrations – Vita as a portrait by Lely, as a Victorian and in modern times, beside a five-bar gate at Long Barn; she was its dedicatee and identified in reviews. Lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall, who did not know her, wrote to Vita on 16 December 1928 after seeing her, ‘it must have been you because it was someone who looked so exactly like Orlando’.160

  To Virginia, Vita signed her ecstatic, admiring, respectful letter of thanks for a special leather-bound copy of the novel, which arrived a day ahead of publication, ‘Orlando’. In September the women had spent six days together in France, as a result of which Vita considered that both she and her friendship with Virginia had been regenerated (Virginia, by contrast, spent much of the time missing Leonard, but concluded that Vita was not as unintelligent as she had assumed). During the summer, Vita had signed her notes to Mary Campbell with the same alias. Orlando helped Vita face the altered reality of life without Knole after her father’s death; in providing another mask in her romantic armoury, it helped her to escape again into unreality.

  Of the two readers who complained about Orlando to Vita, Victoria railed against what she interpreted as Virginia’s lesbian agenda and her desire to separate Vita and Harold, and Mary lamented the passionlessness of Virginia’s portrait. ‘Orlando is too safe too sexless and too easy-going to be really like you, but then I am thinking of him as he appears to me … Ah an entire book about Orlando with no mention of her deep fiery sensuality – that strange mixture of fire and gloom and heat and cold – seems to me slightly pale.’161

  Vita’s relations with both women were in a state of flux. In the third week of February, while Roy remained incapacitated following an operation for appendicitis, Vita had resumed her affair with Mary. There were passionate nights and more poems on Vita’s part, but the giddiness of first infatuation had passed. In April, Roy left the cottage for Martigues in the South of France; like Geoffrey’s initial parting from Sybil, it was understood as a trial separation. Roy wrote to Mary constantly, imploring her to join him. On 11 May, Mary did so. She was still in love with Vita but recognised now, like other lovers before and after, the gulf between her own feelings and Vita’s. As ever, Vita channelled her feelings into the safe containment of the written word. King’s Daughter, published in 1929 and the last of Vita’s collections of verse, captured the lights and shades of this vanished béguin: ‘Time was our banker once …/ Now he’s turned sour, and our account does edit.’162 Harold disliked the poems’ overt lesbianism and advised against
publication; Virginia overruled his reservations. Vita also wrote a short story based on the affair for a women’s magazine. The Roy of the story, treated sympathetically by the narrator, shoots himself.

  There would be no similar disappearance on Victoria’s part: instead, a hiatus in relations between mother and daughter. This came about on 18 April 1928, the short-term cause a ‘terrible scene’ in the office of the Sackville family solicitors.

  For too long Victoria had exploited the money that came to her from Seery as an unwieldy instrument of power. Houses, jewels, Rolls-Royce motor cars, furniture, tapestries, gardeners, school fees and tax bills all fell within the remit of her munificence when she wished it. But her character was mercurial: the fairy godmother was also a witch. On this occasion Victoria’s fury focused on twelve extra pearls she had added to the pearl necklace that was Vita’s posthumous twenty-first birthday present from Seery. She surprised Vita at Pemberton’s, signing documents. Amid floods of ‘the vilest abuse … like a mad woman, screaming Thief and Liar, and shaking her fist at me till I thought she was going to hit me’, Victoria demanded the return of her dozen pearls.163

  ‘She was made to take the pearl necklace from her neck, cut it in two with a pocket knife, deliver over the 12 central pearls [and] put the relics, all running loose, in an envelope the solicitor gave her,’ an incredulous Virginia noted in her diary.164 Victoria had retreated to the comfort of her Rolls-Royce. Vita followed her. Outside, amid the clangour of the London street, she broke apart the necklace and handed over the pearls. Victoria screamed that she hated her, hoped she would die then and there, that very minute, standing in the street, run over by a bus. Then she sent her secretary after Vita into Pemberton’s office to demand the return of all the other jewels she had ever given her: they were to be brought to her room at The Savoy the following morning and Vita would wait outside in the corridor while Victoria made her inventory. Vita agreed to their return, but refused to be treated ‘like a servant’ in a hotel corridor. When the breathless Victoria began to abuse Harold, Vita took refuge in a taxi. The episode lasted from 12.30 to 2.15, almost two hours of unremitting invective, and created a rift that lasted until February 1930, when, symbolically, Victoria returned to Vita the twelve contested pearls. Of greater significance to the Nicolsons than the shortening of Vita’s pearl necklace was Vita’s decision to give up the allowance Victoria paid her. At a single blow, Harold and Vita found not only Vita’s pearl necklace but their income drastically reduced.