She wanted social position from this, her third marriage. She wanted a salon, parties and invitations. Visetti was expansive, generous and well paid by the standards of the day. He earned fifteen shillings an hour teaching at the College, had private pupils and was conductor and director of the Bath Philharmonic Orchestra. Madame Maria Visetti, as she now called herself on her visiting cards, assumed the air of a patron of the arts and ‘held forth confidently on subjects of which she knew little’.
Marguerite, told of the forthcoming marriage only months after her parents’ divorce, was bewildered. She had met Visetti twice. You’ll have a real father now, her mother said. Marguerite insisted Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall was her real father. She was told not to mention his name and that he was dead. Is he really dead, is he under the earth, she asked. I wish he were, her mother replied.
Sent with Nurse Knott to Sidmouth in Devon, Marguerite lodged for three months with a fisherman’s family while her mother and Visetti went to Bruges for their marriage and honeymoon. Marguerite described herself as ‘seething with surprise and resentment’, ‘heavy with rage and bewilderment’ that her mother should have saddled her with this ersatz father and deprived her of her real one. She resolved ‘never to admit the interloper for one moment into her heart’. She wrote a letter to Radclyffe asking if she could come and live with him, but did not know where to send it.
Again the countryside consoled, the Devon town, the long tree-lined road from the station, the cliffs, rough sea, the rocks and sand. ‘It was a place to dream in, all dappled sky and waves and fishing boats with brown spray-flecked sails.’ She then joined her mother and stepfather in Bruges, where Visetti was organizing a music festival. She spent most of the time in bed with chronic asthma.
When they returned to London they settled in Visetti’s large house in Earl’s Court, 14 Trebovir Road. Grandmother Diehl came over from Philadelphia to complete the family. The house was elegant. The drawing-room had a polished oak floor and panelled walls. In a corner stood a black harpsichord, there were plants in copper jars, a goldfinch in a large cage. Madame Visetti imposed her taste: a carpet, nick-nack tables, photographs in silver frames, pink cushions, a pink brocade cover for the harpsichord. She spared his studio. Specially built, it filled what had been the back garden and had a domed skylight, teak floor, a performance platform with a balustrade of blue and gold, a Bechstein grand piano, an organ, high mirrors and long low divans. ‘Here then the great man held his famous operatic classes. Hither came shoals of soulful young aspirants among whom were a few who in the not very distant future would become famous on the boards of Covent Garden.’ Here, too, the great man seduced a succession of his students. His marriage was a cover. It gave him the semblance of respectability, but he made no adjustment to his former life.
His sexual overtures were directed at his ten-year-old stepdaughter, too. She told no one of his behaviour until she was in her thirties and living with Una Troubridge, who was to be her partner for twenty-nine years. To her she recounted ‘in a voice devoid of emotion’ details of Visetti’s ‘improper advances’. They ‘made quite an impression on his unhappy little victim’, Una said. After Radclyffe Hall died, Una wrote a biography of her. In the first draft she referred to ‘the sexual incident with the egregious Visetti’ but omitted this for publication, ‘lest we have psycho analytic know alls saying she would have been a wife and mother but for that experience’.
The paragraph that followed this deletion described a ‘pathetic’ photograph:
A faded shiny carte-de-visite obviously taken to exploit the ‘paternal’ affection of Alberto Visetti. John [as Marguerite was later to call herself] a very thin, bony little girl of about ten, very unbecomingly dressed and with all the appearance of an unloved child, standing awkwardly beside the seated Visetti, already getting rather portly, the epitome of smug self-satisfaction and conceit.
This ‘interloper’, whom she had resolved never to let into her heart, forced his attention on her body. In adult life she referred to Visetti as ‘my disgusting old stepfather’. For herself, she never had any sexual impulse toward a man.
The Visetti marriage turned into another travesty of family life. Madame Maria Visetti was as violent as Mrs Mary Jane Hall. One of Visetti’s pupils spoke of her ‘belabouring’ Marguerite round the head and pulling her hair. Nurse Knott was dismissed when she criticized her for leaving marks on her daughter’s body. Marguerite was bereft. ‘Nottie had become part of my life. Partings hold much that is tragic in them.’
‘For the sake of companionship’, in adolescence Marguerite was sent to Mrs Coles’ school at the end of the road. It was popular with actresses. Mrs Patrick Campbell’s daughter Stella went there, Ellen Terry’s daughter Edy Craig and the Vanbrugh sisters, Violet and Irene. Marguerite was often in trouble, ill and absent. She recorded ‘inflammation of the lungs’, ‘a good many painful poultices’, ‘days spent at home, days spent in bed and always missing the pantomime at Christmas. There seemed a fatality about it.’
Her spelling, as ever, put her to shame. One teacher made a point of reading out her mistakes in class. ‘“Now I wonder what this word can be” she would drawl then spell it letter by letter as I had spelt it.’ The only success she remembered was a prize – from the Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals – a certificate and book for a story about kindness to animals. Animal suffering was an abiding concern in her life. She identified with their helplessness. She had pets, the canary Pippin, a pug dog Joey, an Airedale Yoi. And grandmother ‘gave all she had in circumstances that were none too easy’.
Despite the tensions, life was privileged materially and artistically. The studio and house at Trebovir Road were filled with students. There were standards of excellence, expectations of achievement, careers carved through talent and work. There was music all day from ten in the morning. Marguerite said she wished, when she opened the front door, to be greeted sometimes by a sound other than singing.
Music helped her dyslexia. She improvised songs on the piano and her grandmother wrote down the words. On her own assessment these verses showed ‘not a vestage of talant’. They were about ‘Joey’, ‘Moonbeams’, ‘The New Year’ – ‘Oh innocent year your life’s begun, Who knows the sin ‘ere you are done.’ But she was encouraged. Her grandmother paid for their printing. Aged fourteen, Marguerite gave them as Christmas presents. Signed ‘Marguerite Toddles’ and dedicated to the composer of light operas Sir Arthur Sullivan, they were doggerel laced with despair:
Sing, little silent birdie, sing,
Why do you sit so sad?
For now is born the baby spring,
And all things should be glad.
Sullivan told her mother that Marguerite ‘had ink in her blood’. He taught counterpoint at the College and was Marguerite’s trustee. Another visitor, Arthur Nikisch, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, hearing her improvise at the piano, said she should be trained at the Leipzig Conservatoire. She believed that ‘had she wished she could have become a really great musician’. ‘Proximity of opportunity’, she said, blunted her musical career.
Maria Visetti grew disaffected with her new husband. Visetti kept a carriage with two horses, a groom, housekeeper and maids. Parties at Trebovir Road were frequent and lavish. Dvoˉák, Tchaikovsky and Elgar were guests. The family took cures and the waters at Homburg and Bagnoles, spent summers at music festivals in Italy, Dresden, Prague, Bayreuth. But Visetti’s friends spurned Maria and viewed his marriage as a disaster. ‘They did not like her kittenish flirtation any more than they liked her assumption of intellectual superiority … Politics, literature, science, painting and even music, she gave her opinion on all these with startling decision and a paralysing lack of understanding.’
Maria Visetti fretted at her unpopularity. She raged at his infidelities and accused him of humiliating her in front of the servants and of bringing his mistresses into her house. He called her nagging, manipulative and destructive and said she was ruining his
career. He had a way of pushing the end of his moustache into his mouth when agitated. His hands shook and he would go white with rage. She threatened scandal and said she would leave him. In their scenes he smashed the china and called her abominable and a devil. Both were profligate and spent beyond their income. There was a constant spectre of debt and they siphoned off money from Marguerite’s trust fund for their own use.
Marguerite hated them both, retreated inward and nurtured grandiose ideas of her own importance. ‘She knew she was different and at times it worried her. She tried to look this difference in the face, to grasp it and to give it a name, but it invariably eluded her. Whatever it was lay hidden out of sight within the depths of her innermost being.’
She viewed herself as misunderstood and special. Her room at the top of the house, long with low panelling, became a setting for solipsistic withdrawal. She kept her possessions in obsessive order, unlike her mother who left everything lying around. On a wall she hung a large wooden crucifix. The image of the martyr with the crown of thorns and driven nails, she felt, applied to herself. She imbued this room with a mix of religiosity, artistic ambition and sexual desire. At her desk she struggled with her poems and bits of prose – a description of a face in a crowd, or of a ship sailing.
Alone a great deal, she fantasized about being ‘a jeaneous’ and a lover. ‘I can scarcely remember the first time I fell in love. I think I was a lover even from my mother’s womb.’ She got by without parental affection but always pined with desire for some girl or woman – her piano teacher or a girl in a silk dress. Her mother, to whom she said something of these desires, told her she was perverted.
In later years she took characterizations for her novels from her formative years: daughters who are victims but who long for a life elsewhere; mothers like leeches; weak, shadowy fathers. And beyond these doomed characters she imagined a God who chose those who suffered, a mother who was gentle and loving, a dignified father of noble blood.
From her real mother, father and stepfather she learned the controlling power of sex – the passions it aroused, the anxieties and fears, its financial underpinning, its manipulations and betrayals, the way it could be used to create and spoil lives. From adolescence on, she added to the family drama with her particular portrayal of it too.
3
Come in kid
In her teens, Marguerite hung about the room next to Visetti’s studio where students met before and after lessons. It became her hunting ground. She heard them sing arias by Wagner, Verdi, Mozart and linked these ‘passionate declarations of love to their flustered faces’. Her ‘ardent temperament’, she said, ‘wallowed in an atmosphere of false emotion, of sensation called up at will to suit a role’.
Ardent wallowings took different forms. Sometimes it was Visetti and a favoured pupil, once she saw two girls kiss but more often it was a girl and a young man. Talk of liaisons and conquests fired her imagination:
I came to realise that the desires which had tormented my childhood and which I was told by my mother were wicked, were merely the usual feelings that animated most of my fellow beings, were indulged in as a matter of course and pandered to as the essentials of an artistic temperament. This was a great revelation and one which filled me with excitement.
She emerged from childhood seeking more complex consolation than kisses and chance caresses, though the desires that tormented her had been ordinary enough. They were to do with love and pleasure. But she wanted to free herself from the web of her mother’s malice and to kiss and hold hands with girls.
When she was fifteen she pushed up the sleeve of a student in a silk dress and kissed her arm. The girl laughed, seemed apprehensive but interested, so Marguerite kissed her on the lips. She ‘repeated the exercise at every opportunity’ – until the girl left to study in Paris.
Visetti’s star pupil, a soprano Agnes Nicholls, called her ‘a queer little kid’. Marguerite told her to shut up, felt embarrassed and went to her room. Visetti favoured Agnes Nicholls and promoted her career. He taught her for five years. ‘Next season what a triumph’, he would say. They flirted, she chafed him in bad French, he included her in the daily life of the house. She had won a scholarship to the College in 1894 and sung at Windsor Castle, with Queen Victoria in the audience, in Delibes’ opera Le Roi l’a dit.
She was plump: ‘her voluptuous figure appealed to my youth’, wrote Marguerite. She had white skin, blue eyes, auburn hair, a large appetite and ‘the voice of an angel, unlike any other’. Marguerite contrived to be always at the studio at the time of her lessons. She felt disturbed by her and by ‘the look in her eyes. These lessons became the focus of my existence. I lived for them, like the victim of a drug.’
By turns, Agnes Nicholls ignored and claimed her. If Marguerite flattered her, she appeared indifferent. If she flirted with the girl in the silk dress, Agnes became proprietorial, sent her on errands, gave her presents or told her to come and sit beside her. ‘And when I did sit by her she would sometimes slide her hand down where mine lay between us and I think it amused her to see the little shiver that her touch produced for she would bend forward to watch my face at such moments.’
Radclyffe Hall was intrigued by the compulsion and power of sex. This first adventure held components of domination, jealousy, manipulation and of humiliating Visetti. She still sought flirtations in the anteroom but it was Agnes Nicholls whom she wooed. ‘Her music and her thrilling voice stirred my passion unendurably … I longed to dominate her, to hurt her, to compel her, to kiss her mouth.’
Agnes Nicholls was to become a star. She won the College gold medal and at twenty was singing solo in concert halls and at music festivals. Marguerite went to all her recitals, waited for her in the artists’ room, held her bouquets, cloak and throat spray. She absorbed the aura of performance and fame, the ‘stagy compliments’ of other artists, ‘the hysterical outpouring’ of young fans, the ‘bold flirting’ of young men.
She felt like her ‘special property’. After concerts they drove to Agnes’s home in Putney. Marguerite sat close in the carriage, held her bare arm under her cloak, was her escort and swain. Agnes talked of herself. She lived, Marguerite said, in a world of her own creation. One night she was the prima donna, her career assured, wooed by men from the peerage. The next she was a failure, ungifted and without prospects. Sometimes she would weep: her performance had been a fiasco, she would never sing again, a top note had failed, the conductor had let the orchestra drown her voice, the music reviewer from The Times was there, he would give her a bad notice next day. At other times, she would brag of how she had amazed the audience that night, and could have sung for ever, had Marguerite seen Lord so and so – she could marry him if she liked but would not sacrifice her career for a man.
Marguerite was swept along:
I bobbed like a cork on the torrent. I could neither steady Agnes nor myself being only seventeen. I wept with her, rejoiced with her and grew daily more under her influence. If my people disliked this friendship they were too eager to pander to the star pupil to say so. Moreover I’m sure they looked on it as quite innocent which indeed it was at this time. It certainly interfered with my studies and developed in me an unwholesome craving for excitement.
Agnes Nicholls lived with her mother. Her father had managed a drapery business in the Midlands. He died leaving unexceptional funds. There was enough for her brother to go to Oxford and for her to study music. Alberto Visetti, proud of his tutelage, made no charge for her lessons and she was paid for her concerts. But she affected the airs of a grande dame, boasted of whom she knew, used French phrases, gestured in an affected way and was ashamed of her family, though she resented criticism of them.
Marguerite began to perceive herself as a suitor. She assumed a masculine chic and found that women responded to her. ‘They were even inclined to love me a little or at least to let me make love to them. This I did on every occasion and occasions were not lacking among my stepfather’s pupils.’
Agnes Nicholls encouraged other flirtations, but kept her own hold secure. And Marguerite grew more enamoured of her singing. ‘I believe the girl’s in love with her voice,’ Mrs Visetti said. ‘And it was so. I would have tramped half the world over to hear that perfect organ, so strong, thrilling, chaste and pure. To this day I cannot hear it unmoved.’ But it was not just that perfect organ, strong and thrilling. Nor was Marguerite’s interest chaste and pure. It was the prospect of sex that obsessed her thoughts, made her tramp from home and neglect her studies.
Diversion from this hot pursuit occurred in October 1898 when she was eighteen. Her father died of tuberculosis. He was forty-nine. She and Grandmother Diehl were called to the Station Hotel, Paddington. Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall had intended to winter at Cannes. He was thin and feverish with a chronic cough. He wanted to know about her studies and aims in life. He advised her to choose a speciality and stick with it, not spread herself thin as he had. He told her she was good-looking and asked her to send him a photograph of herself. He also told her that she would inherit his estate.
Marguerite did not see her father again. In Paris, a doctor advised him he was too ill for his journey to the sun. He turned back and died at the Lees Hotel, Folkestone, on 24 October. His death was ‘markedly lonely and tragic’, Marguerite said. An unknown person registered it and on the certificate misspelt his name and got his age wrong.
His will was administered by Walter Begley, his sole executor, the clergyman who had officiated at his wedding. Begley then took a protective interest in Marguerite. She questioned him about her father’s life, wanting to find a connection to herself, to counter her mother’s denigration and refusal ever to let her meet his family. ‘I only feel that I have missed something, some experience that I was meant to have that my father could have given’, she wrote.
In his will, Radclyffe left a diamond ring and an annuity of £100 to his and the housemaid’s daughter Mary Ratcliffe Farmer, all his mandolins and unpublished musical compositions to a Victoria Holloway who lived in Battersea, his paintings, books, pictures and sketches to Walter Begley. All the family money, by the terms of his own father’s cautious will, was to pass to Marguerite when she was twenty-one. Until then, she was to draw a generous allowance. It was a large inheritance for 1898, some £100,000. ‘There were some things I shall never forget and my sudden independence was one of them … I was free, free to go where I liked and do what I pleased, or at least so I fondly imagined. But in this I was reckoning without two reactive elements.’
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Page 3