Matthew Dennison - Behind the Mask - The Life of Vita Sackville-West

Swayed by such feelings, and in an attempt to shield her husband and her daughter from scandal, Victoria had written to the Scotts’ counsel on the eve of the trial, ‘ Do Spare Them , and attack me as much as you like.’ 15Her plea fell on deaf ears. Her victory involved the very public airing of family secrets she had hoped to conceal; even Lady Connie was called on to give evidence. Among unwelcome revelations were those concerning the Sackville finances, aspersions on Victoria’s own morality and rapacity, and an exposé of Lionel’s relationship with Lady Connie, with all the associated inferences to be drawn about the Sackvilles’ marriage. In Leicester Square, the Alhambra Theatre, home of popular music-hall entertainment, staged a musical revue based on the trial. One of Victoria’s maxims confided to Vita was, ‘One must always tell the truth, darling, if one can, but not all the truth; toute verité n’est pas bonne à dire .’ 16With hindsight, it sounds like closing the stable door when the horse had already bolted. The public display of the Sackvilles’ dirty linen offended every stricture of aristocratic Edwardian conduct: it would mark them for the remainder of their lives. Both Lionel and Victoria paid a high price for the latter’s hard-fought riches. As Vita wrote afterwards, they would realise ‘that innocence was no shield against the pointed fingers of the crowd’. 17

Yet rich Victoria undoubtedly was. Disregarding Sir John’s unspoken wish that she transfer the contents of the rue Laffitte apartment to Knole, Victoria sold them en bloc to French antiques dealer Jacques Seligmann for £270,000. They were dispersed across the globe, the memory of their rich assembly confined to a short story, Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour , which Vita published in 1932. ‘There were silence and silken walls, and a faint musty smell, and the shining golden floors, and the dimness of mirrors, and the curve of furniture, and the arabesques of the dull gilding on the ivory boiseries.’ 18

Extravagant as she was covetous, Victoria settled down to living off the interest on the sum of £150,000. The capital itself became part of the Sackville Trust, in accordance with the terms of her marriage settlement. Only Vita emerged from the courtroom unscathed. Jurymen and journalists had discovered that Sir John had called her by the pet name ‘Kidlet’. Harmless enough, the label stuck.

In her diary for 7 July, Vita wrote briefly in Italian: ‘Triumphant day! All finished!’ 19She invested the short word ‘all’ with considerable feeling. Her mother’s ‘triumph’ concluded what threatened to be costly legal action with a magnificent windfall. It also brought to an end a troubling five-year period in which the Sackvilles had been continuously involved in, or threatened with, court proceedings.

Three years earlier, in February 1910, Victoria had found herself with Lionel and, briefly, Vita, in London’s High Court. In order to defend her husband’s inheritance of the Sackville estates and title in preference to her brother, Pepita’s son Henry, Victoria was forced publicly to attest her own illegitimacy and that of her siblings. The Daily Mail called the case ‘The Romance of the Sackville Peerage’. It was anything but a romantic interlude for Victoria. Proud and spoilt, she habitually masked deep embarrassment about the circumstances of her birth behind ferocious snobbery. Had it not been for her greedy possessiveness towards Knole, she would have found it a more painful experience. Her mother and father were dead, her husband unfaithful and indifferent to her. In the cold light of the High Court she battled the treachery of her brother Henry and her spiteful, disaffected sisters Amalia and Flora. Only one of Pepita’s surviving children, Victoria’s brother Max, kept clear of the fray. As in the Scott case, Victoria and Lionel won. Knole remained theirs. They retained too the Sackville title, which assured the illegitimate Victoria the respect and deference she craved. In Sevenoaks, their victory was celebrated with a public holiday. They returned to Knole in a carriage drawn by men of the local fire brigade. Bouquets covered the seats. Defeated and deeply in debt, Henry subsequently committed suicide. Expenses associated with the case cost the Sackvilles the enormous sum of £40,000.

In a poem called ‘Heredity’, written in 1928, Vita Sackville-West asked: ‘What is this thing, this strain,/ Persistent, what this shape/ That cuts us from our birth,/ And seals without escape?’ To her cousin Eddy she would write: ‘You and I have got a jolly sort of heredity to fight against.’ 20Dark shadows clouded Vita’s adolescence. On two occasions, crises in the life of her family became public spectacles, she herself – as ‘Kidlet’ – an unwitting heroine of the illustrated papers. Exposed to public gawping were the sexual foibles of her parents and her grandparents, and a world in which love, sex, money and rank coexisted in a greedy system of barter and plunder. Set against this was the feudal loyalty of Sevenoaks locals, the splendour of life in the rue Laffitte, where Seery entertained European royalty, and the majesty and mystery of Knole itself. It was, for Vita, a varied but not a straightforward existence: courtroom exposure of its flaws increased a tendency to regard herself as distinct and apart, which began in her childhood. Ultimately she longed to retreat from view. Inheritance became a vexed issue for Vita, and one that dominated chapters of her life and facets of her mind. Over time she regarded heredity as immutable and inescapable, but unreliable. This in turn coloured her sense of identity: an element of bravado underpinned her stubborn pride. She did not struggle to escape. Her understanding of her inheritance – temperamental, physical, material – shaped the person she became.

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