Vita Longa

Mary-Kay Wilmers

• Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West by Victoria Glendinning
  Weidenfeld, 430 pp, £12.50, September 1983, ISBN 0 297 78306 8

‘Contemplating a worn piece of green velvet on her dressing table, I felt my whole being dissolve in love. I have never ceased to love her from that moment.’ The person who said that was known as Christopher St John, though her real name was Christabel Marshall. We know how she felt about the object of her passion, Vita Sackville-West, because she kept a ‘love-journal’ in Vita’s honour. Miss Sackville-West, who had recently (and most unusually) been abandoned by another woman, allowed Miss St John to hold her hand. She even allowed her, Victoria Glendinning reports, to accompany her in her car ‘all the way’ to Tonbridge: in Tonbridge Christopher was put on a train back to London. But on the way out of London – on the Westminster Bridge Road, to be precise – Vita had ‘stretched out her left hand’ and told Christopher that she loved her, and when they got to the station in Tonbridge Vita parked the car in a side street and gave Christopher ‘a lover’s kiss’. (‘I never knew unalloyed bliss with V. except on that November day.’) The lover’s kiss was followed by ‘one night of love’. Then it was all over.