A House Full of Daughters Read online

  However, not long afterwards it all went wrong. Catalina began to whisper to whoever would listen that Oliva was turning out to be an unfit husband for such an exceptional child. She implied that the new groom felt uncomfortable at being outclassed on the dancing stage by his pupil. But the friends and neighbours who had witnessed the stifling dependency between Catalina and her daughter suspected the real truth behind Catalina’s sudden disapproval of the man she had appointed as her son-in-law. The predictable emotional backlash had hit the possessive Catalina as the consequences of her matchmaking became clear. Catalina suspected that her son-in-law had usurped her position as the most important person in her daughter’s life.

  Unprepared for the sense of loneliness and jealousy she would feel following her daughter’s marriage to the lowly dancing teacher, Catalina panicked. Incapable of preventing her throttling maternal love from sabotaging Pepita’s own happiness, Catalina had fallen into a paradoxical parental trap by simultaneously wanting the best for her daughter while being disinclined to lose her. Only three months after the wedding, Catalina suggested to Pepita that Oliva had already been unfaithful to her. Allowing her shocked daughter to absorb the news of Oliva’s treachery, Catalina then took Oliva to one side and informed him that his wife had betrayed him with another man. Astonishingly, despite a complete lack of evidence, both Pepita and Oliva believed her. Catalina’s meddling had momentarily paid off, as the shaken pair began to live apart. But Catalina had forgotten how well she had taught her daughter the importance of ambition. As Pepita’s reputation and popularity grew, she emerged not only from her wrecked marriage but from under the thumb of the wrecker.

  2

  Pepita

  Independence

  As Pepita got richer, she became grander. Her fame and wealth as a dancer prompted unpredictable swings between indulgence and neglect of the intrusive, possessive and devoted Catalina. During a short stay in Granada, Catalina and Manuel Lopez left the city, alarmed by the lethal presence of cholera, which riddled the congested streets and which in one particularly bad epidemic in 1845 had resulted in the deaths of over a quarter million Spaniards. For safety, Pepita, the still dutiful if often absent daughter, moved her mother and quasi-stepfather to a substantial new house in the central square of Albolote, a small country town a few miles from Granada.

  Catalina celebrated her splendid social and financial elevation by arriving at the Casa Blanca in a suitably ‘fantastic equipage’ led by a ‘unicorn’. Delighted by the amazement that her account of such fabulous transport inspired in anyone who would listen to her, Catalina would eventually give way and explain that ‘unicorn’ referred to the horn shape formed by two horses led by another. However, Catalina’s developing taste for the extravagance funded by her newly rich daughter was real enough and continued to swell as she indulged herself in lovely clothes, beautiful linens, a personal maid and elegant furniture. Each Sunday before Mass, a pair of large, matching velvet armchairs would be carried with some ceremony by Catalina’s servants into Albolote’s church and placed at the head of the congregation at the high altar to ensure that the villagers were aware of the hierarchical order of things. As the congregation glared, and Lopez consulted his splendid new gold watch, his fingers laden with rings, Sunday mornings in Albolote began to resemble a night out at the theatre rather than a morning spent in devotion. Eventually the priest put his foot down. He banned the chairs, and the affronted Catalina never entered the church again. But while Catalina was all too visible in Albolote, the provider of all these riches, Pepita herself, was usually nowhere to be seen.

  Dancing continued to supply the passport that lifted Pepita out of the confines of maternal control and across the barrier of the Pyrenees. She began to accept bookings in theatres all over Europe, causing a sensation wherever she went. Audiences clamoured for the newly established ‘Star of Andalusia’ to prove that her hair, her implausibly magnificent crowning glory, was not fake. To a roar of approval, one by one she pulled out the pins that held the much-admired locks in place, allowing her hair to descend in a waterfall to her knees as she enchanted sell-out auditoriums in Bordeaux, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Berlin, Stuttgart, Vienna, Budapest, Prague and then triumphantly in Paris and at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. Cartoonists showed men whipping fresh flowers from the garlanded headdresses of their exasperated wives and hurling them with uninhibited enthusiasm in the direction of the stage, aiming for Pepita’s outstretched arms. I treasure the much-thumbed, four-page programme of piano sheet music for La Madrileña that Pepita once gave to a pianist in Vienna in 1853 so that he could provide her with her favourite performance music. The cover drawing shows Pepita in her dancing costume, her hair streaming down her back, castanets in her upraised hands. She is a terrifically impressive sight.

  Abandoned and frustrated in Spain, with only the self-aggrandising Lopez and the curious neighbours for company, Catalina found herself edged into the margins of her daughter’s life. Explaining to the villagers that her daughter was away ‘triumphing in Europe’, Catalina ensured that her outward pride remained undimmed, boasting ‘in confidence’ to her new friends in Albolote of her daughter’s financial generosity and of the distinguished suitors that competed with one another for the chance to court the lovely dancer. Several of the residents of Albolote remained gratifyingly impressed, at least for a while, by Catalina’s increasingly elaborate anecdotes and were left in no doubt that ‘la estrella de Andalucía’ was intimately acquainted with some of the most distinguished members of European society. Sumptuous dinners at the Casa Blanca would be interrupted the moment that Pepita’s frustratingly unrevealing letters arrived. The cursory news would be read aloud, and every detail, however scant, savoured as the letter was passed from hand to hand. Some villagers were led to suspect a close association with royalty, although they understood that discretion prevented Catalina from divulging identities. Rumours involving the Emperor of Germany were not denied, despite the fact that no such person existed. Perspicacious villagers stated years later that they had privately congratulated themselves in detecting ‘traces of an inferior origin’ in the garrulous Catalina, the Gypsy turned ‘bourgeoisie’ for whom nothing but an emperor would suffice as escort for her daughter.

  Expensive telegrams had been delivered to theatres all over Europe containing appeals from mother to daughter to visit the splendours of the Casa Blanca but it was a year before Pepita came home. The drama and pomp surrounding the arrival of the twenty-five-year-old star in the summer of 1855 formed a lifelong memory for those small children who lived nearby. The brass band from the adjoining village set up its enormous drum on Catalina’s terrace, and the boisterous welcoming party, complete with a lavish banquet that concluded with ‘chocolates, sweets and liquors’, went on until the break of dawn. Never, it seemed, had a mother made her pride in her daughter more obvious. Pepita rose to the occasion, playing her part as the embodiment of feminine charm and seduction, taking the hand of one especially shy young villager and leading him onto the floor for the dance of his lifetime. With one flounce of her gorgeous gown of rose-coloured silk raised at the front to display an elegant leg to best advantage, her delicate feet slippered in gold brocaded velvet, and with four or five extravagant rings on her left hand and two more on her right, she taught him to dance a waltz. Not bothering to temper the flamboyant passion that she displayed onstage to something more suitably restrained for a parlour in a small Spanish town, and aware that every eye was on her, she moved with the assurance of a predatory jackal. The glitter from the diamonds in her ears was reflected in the eyes of her awestruck dancing partner, who told his friends later that he thought he ‘should have died of ecstasy’.

  Pepita stayed with her mother for two months, laughing, dancing, calling on the neighbours, admiring their gardens, delighting in their little fish ponds and showing off to her many female visitors her lovely jewels, including an emerald brooch in the shape of a lizard. Before they left, they would be rewarded
with a little memento, a signed portrait of Pepita herself. By the end of her stay, most of Albolote’s well-appointed drawing-room walls boasted a lithograph of their local star. She made friends with all the children who lived nearby, and caused the local lads who found her ‘dangerously’ attractive to swoon that ‘her tout ensemble took away sleep’. She paid her mother’s bills, smiled with teeth ‘as white as ivory’, enchanted everyone she met and above all made Catalina happy. When Pepita occasionally withdrew into her own room, the glitter dimmed, and a sense of solemnity, even sadness, would shroud the house before she reemerged and it was time to dance once more. Her sombre moods were as mysterious to her mother as the recipient of the long letters Pepita wrote in the privacy of her room. Alert to her mother’s compulsive romantic plotting, although never quite clear what part Catalina had played in the break-up of her marriage to Oliva, Pepita concealed the details of her romantic life from Catalina. Unknown to Catalina, Pepita had fallen in love.

  * * *

  Lionel Sackville-West was a twenty-five-year-old attaché in the British Legation in Germany. A reserved young man with a substantial beard, impressive sideburns, and a battalion of intimidating aristocratic relations at home, he was on holiday in Paris in October 1852 when one night at the theatre he spotted Pepita sitting in the stalls. Already aware of her fame, Lionel was stunned, even hypnotised, by the sight of her. Her voluptuous mouth, her oval eyes bright beneath the curve of her eyebrows and the ‘love-lock’, as Vita described the curl of dark hair that rested on her cheek, were not the only assets to attract his attention. Her figure was set off by graceful shoulders, dimpled arms and small, delicate hands. She combined the agility and slimness of a top dancer with an endearing womanly roundness. He persuaded a friend who knew where Pepita was staying to take him to the Hôtel de Bade for an introduction, not, as Lionel later recalled, ‘to a fast woman, but to an artiste and a lady and a danseuse’.

  That night Lionel’s virginal reserve vanished, and he later admitted, in respectfully oblique terms, that he had indeed visited Pepita ‘with the intention of its leading up to that object’, although he also swore that ‘the actual fact came about at her solicitation’. For the next seven days and nights the door to Pepita’s hotel room remained closed and locked from the inside. And for the next four years, with Pepita’s career at its height, Lionel and Pepita stayed in hotels all over Europe under their own names, mutually untroubled that their indifference to gossip might affect Lionel’s public position as a young diplomat with prospects. When challenged later about his lack of caution, he admitted, ‘I cannot tell you whether it was known in the hotels that I was passing the night with her; there was no secrecy about it whatever. I gave my name at the hotels.’ Friends and colleagues thought privately that he had lost his mind. Pepita, on the other hand, had landed once again on her feet.

  Lionel was the fifth son of the fifth Earl De La Warr, younger brother of and, more important, heir to the childless Lord Sackville, owner of Knole, one of Britain’s grandest and largest stately houses. The financial security and the material privilege that Lionel brought Pepita were a world away from free dancing lessons. But they could not formalise their relationship. In Britain, the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 allowed women to divorce on the grounds of adultery, but in Spain the right for women to divorce and remarry was not legalised until 1932. As Lionel followed his lover from capital to capital to see her dance and to share her bed, an ever widening circle of concierges and room-service waiters in Europe’s grandest hotels knew about the intimate relationship between the British aristocrat and the Spanish dancer. But Lionel kept his romantic life a secret from his family while Pepita ensured that Catalina remained equally unenlightened. Three years after the door to her suite in the Hôtel de Bade had shut behind them, and two years since her last visit home, Pepita wrote to tell her mother that she would be coming to stay, this time for an extended visit.

  Catalina had moved once again. After the difficulty with the armchairs in the church, the disapproval of the priest and the waning of the community’s indulgence of the unpredictable couple, Catalina and Lopez had pronounced themselves disenchanted with Albolote and had set out to find a new property on the outskirts of Granada. Buena Vista, also known as the House of the Royal Peacocks for its indigenous collection of the exotic beasts, was even grander than the Casa Blanca. Surrounded by two vineyards and beautifully kept lawns, Buena Vista sat at the heart of its own substantial estate. The house faced onto a courtyard where a fountain played cheerfully and from which a bronze statue of Pepita dancing el olé emerged soaking wet but triumphant from the splashing water. The explanation for the quietness of Pepita’s arrival and the absence of drums and clashing cymbals, in contrast to the drama of her last visit, was soon apparent. On 20 May 1858 Pepita’s first child, a son, was born, and Catalina’s smothering motherly spirit was once again allowed to flourish. When Pepita had difficulties with breastfeeding, Catalina was the embodiment of maternal concern, arranging for the baby to be suckled for the first nineteen days of his life by her own maid, who had herself just given birth to her eleventh child. The birth certificate credited Pepita’s husband, Oliva, with the child’s paternity despite the common knowledge that he and Pepita had been separated for six years. Pepita did not dismiss her mother’s hopeful enquiries about whether the baby was in fact the child of the fictional Emperor of Germany. She allowed Catalina to speculate that a secret, albeit illicit, marriage might already have taken place despite Pepita’s still-legal connection to the long-departed Oliva.

  The baby was christened Maximiliano and known in the family as Max, although his middle name was Leon, the shortened Spanish version of Lionel. As Pepita had been heard boasting that her best jewels were a gift from a prince of Bavaria, and when the ‘sponsor’ of the child was officially recorded as ‘Duke Maximilian of Bavaria’, a cousin of the ruling family of that country, the obvious conclusion was tempting. But Pepita refused to confirm her mother’s suspicions. She stayed at Buena Vista for six more months until Catalina’s old jealousy inevitably returned. Frustrated by the way motherhood occupied Pepita’s time and by her own inability to discover the identity of her grandson’s father, Catalina quarrelled violently with her daughter, and Pepita left at once.

  The neighbours continued to sniff scandal as the loquacious Catalina, stung at her exclusion from her daughter’s confidence, tried to bluff her way through Pepita’s sudden departure by explaining that Max was now ‘short-coated’, as opposed to being confined to baby dresses, and was therefore old enough to accompany his mother abroad as she returned to the stage. Neither the neighbours nor Catalina knew that Pepita had gone straight to join Lionel in Germany, but in retaliation for her rejection, Catalina persuaded a friend of Oliva’s to attempt a reconciliation between her daughter and son-in-law. As soon as Pepita was told of the proposal, she suspected Catalina’s meddling, though, in order to maintain her mother’s ignorance about Lionel, she wrote her a letter announcing that she would be coming to Paris and that maybe a meeting with Oliva would be possible. On receipt of the letter Catalina changed tactic, suddenly unable to resist the possibility of an emperor as a replacement son-in-law. The only inconvenience was Oliva. He must be disposed of. And Catalina knew an ideal potential assassin. She was surprised and also a little hurt when her son, Diego, recently returned from abroad, proved as uncooperative as his sister and refused Catalina’s lucrative commission to carry out Oliva’s murder.

  All Catalina’s best efforts either to derail or to promote her daughter’s romantic life had failed, and the secret affair between Pepita and Lionel continued to deepen. Lionel remained publicly reticent, even taciturn, but in private he was unrestrainedly sexually passionate and undeniably sexually potent. Over the next few summers he either bought or rented a series of sumptuous villas for his mistress and their son at Heidelberg, Turin, Lake Como, Arona, Genoa and Lake Maggiore. Eventually Pepita gave way, confident by now of the security of her relationship with
Lionel, and allowed Catalina to meet and be impressed by ‘the tall fair good-looking and handsome man, of a distinguished appearance’ with whom her daughter lived. On 23 September 1862 Catalina and Manuel joined Lionel at his splendid apartment in Paris near the Arc de Triomphe, where Lionel and Pepita’s second child, a daughter, Victoria Josefa Dolores Catalina, was born. The baby herself was often called Pepita, the Spanish diminutive for Josephine, by her mother – an indication of how close Pepita felt to her daughter.

  For two more years her career remained Pepita’s priority. But as her energy for dancing began to fade, so the relish and physical stamina with which she addressed herself to caring for her children gathered momentum. She discovered that motherhood fulfilled her, and her indulgence of the children was rewarded by their devotion, especially that of Victoria, who slept in her mother’s bed, just as Pepita had slept with Catalina when she was a child. The family expanded with speed as four more children appeared in quick succession in the nursery of Max and Victoria. Eliza, born in 1865, did not survive childbirth, but the others did. Flora arrived in November 1866, Amalia fifteen months later, in 1868, and finally Henri, sixteen months after that in 1869. And with the expanding family came a further shrinking of Pepita’s need for Catalina. She no longer travelled across Europe or made visits to Spain, and in the summer of 1866 Lionel bought her a house at Arcachon, near Bordeaux, in the southwest of France. The town was near enough to Madrid, where Lionel was now First Secretary at the British Legation, a train ride from his apartment in Paris and above all a place where Pepita and her five illegitimate children could live in healthy and discreet contentment.

  * * *

  The train journey from Bordeaux to Arcachon is about thirty-five miles and, allowing for the many stops en route, and the intersections across country lanes, it takes city dwellers today a little over an hour to reach the seaside town, just as it did when the railway was built in 1857. The landscape outside the window alters with every bend in the track as the train winds through the once swampy wasteland of Landes, huge pine forests and extensive woods of oak, poplar and chestnut cultivated over the past few centuries, through which wild boar used to snout before being shot by hunters out for sport on frosty autumn mornings. Near the coast, vast acres of bright green vineyards producing some of the most delicious wine in the country alternate with buttercup-speckled meadows, small villages of beamed houses, ancient churches and isolated farmhouses. In the winter months when Pepita lived in Arcachon, shepherds tending their flock and dressed in leather jerkins would stand on stilts to prevent themselves from sinking into the treacherous mudflats, seeking out from their commanding height any sheep that had become lost and entangled in the marshy bushes. On arrival at Arcachon railway station, I discovered that it is still necessary, as it was in Pepita’s time, to cross the track before stepping up onto the platform, where nowadays a bus instead of the old horse-drawn cabs waits to take passengers and their luggage the short distance into the city centre.