Years after their affair, Vita described Violet in The Death of Noble Godavary (1932): Sophisticated way beyond her years, Violet grew up in a succession of grand homes and had travelled widely. Violet called him ‘Kingy’ and he would come to their home for afternoon tea for the rest of his life. When she turned four, her mother, Alice Keppel, famously became the mistress of Albert (Bertie), the Prince of Wales, later to become King Edward VII. Violet had aristocratic connections on her father’s side. Vita was proud of her gypsy blood too: her grandfather Lionel, the third Baron Sackville, had fallen in love with Pepita, a ballerina from Andalusia. The Sackville family went back to William the Conqueror and in the sixteenth century they were made Earls of Dorset. Vita had grown up at historic Knole, built in 1455 on a thousand acres and said to contain fifty-two staircases. Their first topic of conversation was their ancestry, which would have given them plenty to talk about.
They had originally met in 1905 when Vita was thirteen and Violet was eleven, while visiting a mutual friend with a broken leg. The object of her passion was her friend Violet Keppel (later Trefusis). Although they observed the curfew of marital sex, only two days before it was due to expire, Vita entered into a tumultuous affair. In 1918 the ruin of Oscar Wilde was still fresh in people’s memories and Harold’s liaisons risked his career as a diplomat, his social position and their marriage. Since marrying Harold in 1913, her earlier attraction to women had waned and she had happily focused on her writing, her family, house and garden. They had two sons and up to that point she had regarded Harold as a ‘sunny harbour’ and her marriage as ‘open, frank, certain’. He called them boffes de gait é, ‘a jolly vice’ that would not interfere with their marriage or their love for one another.
He was also forced to confess to Vita that there had been other such indiscretions.
He had been put under doctor’s orders to abstain from sex for six months due to a venereal infection, following a fleeting encounter with a man. When Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicolson had been married for four and a half years her husband was obliged to have a difficult conversation.
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