The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  These elements were her mother and Agnes Nicholls. Mrs Visetti became vicious with envy. Lavish with money whatever its source, she felt this fortune by rights was hers. She was determined to benefit from it. Marguerite resisted her and rows ensued. ‘I had no intention of allowing my mother to handle my estate and she had every intention of doing so.’ The first row was over the capital the divorce court had initially awarded Mrs Visetti which she had foregone to ensure Marguerite’s inheritance but now wanted to claim. The second was about the way she and Alberto Visetti had spent thousands of pounds of Marguerite’s maintenance fund on themselves.

  Marguerite turned to Agnes Nicholls who now seemed always to be at the house. ‘She had grown essential to my existence’, Marguerite wrote. Agnes was Alberto’s prodigy, had lessons with him daily and he defended all she did and said. She joined the family on visits to Pontresina in Switzerland with Arthur Sullivan, a winter music festival in Dresden, a festival in Prague with Dvoˉák. Mrs Visetti resented her presence and influence but Agnes tried to act as go-between for her and Marguerite. She appealed to each of them to see the other’s point of view.

  Marguerite wanted independence and to travel abroad. Mrs Visetti asked Walter Begley to forbid her to leave home until she was twenty-one. Agnes Nicholls supported this. When Marguerite asked why, she cried, accused her of wanting to break their friendship and kissed her on the mouth. Marguerite felt ‘pleased, revolted, terrified and a sense of being trapped. From that moment I felt that Agnes and I shared a secret. In many subtle ways she made it evident that she felt this too. There was a great bond between us and I grew less restless and more content to remain at home.’ Sex and money made a potent mix. She was no longer just the queer little kid. She was rich, which was power in itself.

  That winter, Agnes Nicholls had late lessons at Trebovir Road. She was the last pupil of Visetti’s day and he often invited her to dinner. If the weather was cold he feared it might harm her voice and he insisted she stay the night. Marguerite thought Agnes manoeuvred these invitations. ‘I used to watch for a certain look in her eyes across the dinner table. I never failed to find it there. It was a strange look, half warning, half invitation. Then I would grow restless glancing continually at the clock, waiting for the hour when we would say goodnight and part outside my door.’

  Their rooms were opposite at the top of the house. The moment for which Marguerite waited was when they paused on the landing and said awkward goodnights. She wanted ‘the thousand sweet intimacies’ that she supposed lay behind Agnes’s closed door. ‘I wanted to possess her and ignorance gave a sharper edge to my desire.’ She wrote of the pleasure of ‘those weeks spent hovering on the brink’, waiting on the landing, listening, watching the light under the door.

  It took manoeuvring to get from hovering on the brink to between the sheets. They went out together, identified with lovers in the park, the themes of songs and operas. ‘The end came suddenly without any warning.’ After a matinée and tea in town, Agnes returned to Trebovir Road for dinner. There was dense fog, so she stayed the night. At the top of the house she and Marguerite parted without the usual hesitancy. Agnes closed her bedroom door. Marguerite undressed, ‘seized with a sense of elation’. On the landing she paused, looking at the strip of light under the door. ‘Come in kid,’ said Agnes and then, when Marguerite got into bed with her, ‘you ridiculous child why didn’t you come before?’

  4

  The pearl necklace she gave me

  Marguerite left Trebovir Road when her inheritance came within her control. Her mother attacked her for going out with Agnes Nicholls. She pulled her hat and a clump of hair from her head, called her vile, filthy, corrupt, depraved, against nature and against God and hit Grandmother Diehl when she intervened.

  Money was more incandescent than sex. Assessing her finances with a solicitor, Marguerite found the Visettis had overspent on her trust fund by £12,000. She challenged them, said her education had been a patchy affair of cheap governesses and that she did not see how her inheritance had been spent to benefit her.

  Mrs Visetti was provoked by it all. Her machinations over the Case had backfired. Radclyffe’s daughter, whom she despised by virtue of his paternity, had scooped the lot and was reluctant to give her any. From then on Mrs Visetti made many financial demands. Marguerite dealt with these crisply but with no particular generosity. She used money to control her mother, made her an annual allowance of between £200 and £300 and called her to account as to why she should give her more.

  She leased a house in Church Street, Kensington, near the Gardens and Hyde Park. She moved in with her grandmother, furnished the place with antique oak furniture and the oil paintings of her father’s forebears and used it as a base for adventure and travel.

  The affair with Agnes Nicholls petered out. Independence made Marguerite less tolerant of the patois French and affected gestures, or less consumed with interest in her lover’s vocal cords. As Una Troubridge was to put it, ‘the Lord had not designed her to be a satellite’. Agnes Nicholls went on to sing at Covent Garden – her debut in 1901 was as the Dew Fairy in Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel; she had a long association with the Sadler’s Wells Opera, and Edward Elgar and Hubert Parry wrote parts especially for her in their choral works. She married the composer and accompanist Hamilton Harty. They had a successful musical partnership but the marriage failed. In later years Marguerite took other lovers to hear Agnes Nicholls sing Brünnhilde and Sieglinde at Covent Garden.

  With money, freedom and her sexual orientation clear, Marguerite changed her image. She preferred to be known as Peter, a sobriquet that did not stick. She swept her hair back from her face, wore tailored clothes, wide-brimmed hats and plain but expensive jewels. She was opinionated and vulnerable. There was a humourless directness about her, an inability to dissemble, to be other than she was or to see another’s point of view. Her solemn, misspelt prose was childlike, riddled with clichés and written in a rounded, backward-sloping hand. She collected stamps, rode horses, hunted foxes, kept dogs and budgerigars.

  Unmistakeably lesbian, she was not going to pretend a passing interest in men. ‘Man is vile to her and I believe that is why she will never marry’, the novelist Violet Hunt wrote of her. Eighteen years older than Marguerite, Violet Hunt was the author of Tales of the Uneasy and The Wife of Altamont. A friend of Henry James and a lover of H. G. Wells, she was famed for her Pre-Raphaelite looks and, later, for a scandalous affair with the writer Ford Madox Ford.

  She was a neighbour of Marguerite’s in Campden Hill, Kensington. Marguerite adored and wooed her:

  Perhaps even now you are thinking me impertinent as you read this letter. I can’t help it Violet, I must risk that. If I can’t always say the things I am feeling when we are together it is because you have built a brick wall around yourself and I must not venture to get inside it. No doubt you have many good reasons for wanting it to be there. I have never met anyone who could so repulse affection as you can in your own sweet way. If you are angry with me what can I say except that I am so fond of you? I will never bother you to read this sort of thing again.

  ‘She loved me so hotly poor darling’, Violet Hunt wrote. ‘She used to write and say that I erected a brick wall between her and me. Why brick, I would say nervously, but I knew. I was always full of someone else. And I wear the pearl necklace she gave me …’

  Marguerite locked in to attraction then wooed with determination. What she wanted she felt she should have. Her lovers had no money of their own. She used hers for seduction, allowances and gifts. She bought her way into their beds. If one spurned her she fixated on another. Caught in a family psychodrama, some were related to her mother. They seemed to form links in a transference chain. Her mother scorned Visetti for not providing for her in the style she desired. Using her father’s fortune, which her mother coveted but was denied, Marguerite controlled her lovers and punished her mother with the money at her command.

  In her early twenties, at he
r great-aunt Mary’s house in Knightsbridge, she met Jane Randolph, her mother’s cousin. She viewed her with a conqueror’s eye:

  I had never seen anything so fascinatingly slender and so adorably ugly as the woman who stood before me … Her shoes were perfectly cut I noticed and her ankles clad in transparent black silk stockings. Her whole body conveyed an impression of suppleness … But it was her face that was the most arresting thing about her for it was so frankly ugly. Oval in shape with a rather large mouth, projecting teeth, a blunt nose and pale blue eyes set far apart and masses of chestnut hair wound round a small head and you have one of the more perfect examples of the fascination of personality that some plain women possess.

  Jane Randolph was ten years older than Marguerite. She lived in Washington, had three children, two boys and a girl and a husband on business in London. She liked England, stylish clothes and a good time and was sailing home in a fortnight.

  I wondered angrily about her husband and utterly resented his possession of her. I said as much and she laughed. O Bob she said, he’s not too bad, he’s only rather a bore at times and he’s dog poor, that’s the worst of him.

  It was not the worst of him from my point of view. Possibly the only thing in his favour.

  Marguerite was undeterred by husbands. She invited Jane Randolph to the theatre, then saw her each day for what remained of her stay: ‘She was quite a new type of woman to me, completely at her ease.’ On Jane’s last day in England they rode together in a carriage in Richmond Park. It was a spring evening and the park looked pretty in the setting sun. Marguerite seized the moment and her cousin:

  I was tongue tied and could only glare helplessly into her pale eyes. She turned a calm face toward me and did not resent my grip on her arm … ‘I know’ she said in her slow southern drawl. ‘I guess you needn’t tell me because I know.’

  ‘And if you know’ I said angrily ‘what in heaven’s name are you going to do about it?’

  She did what a girl’s got to do. Soon after her return to Washington, Jane Randolph’s dog-poor bore of a husband dropped dead. Marguerite went out there and provided for her and for her children’s education. She bought a car and had a gun and a bulldog called Charlie for protection. They toured the Southern states and ‘shared all kinds of youthful escapades’. When Marguerite went into hospital to have impacted wisdom teeth removed, Jane Randolph slept in an adjacent bed.

  After a year, Marguerite brought her surrogate family to live with her and Grandmother Diehl in the Kensington house. She also bought Highfield in Malvern Wells, Worcestershire, a large bleak stone house with stables, six acres and uninterrupted views of the Severn Valley. She kept dogs and horses and had her own guns. (Violet Hunt was sardonic about how she punished the rabbits.) She described herself as ‘free to make my own life, free to go where I please’. Like her father, she was ‘mad about hunting’ and rode with two packs, the Ledbury and the Old Croom, ‘tough sporting packs that it took you all your time to keep up with’.

  Those were carefree days, the pure air, the wide and beautiful landscape, horses, and, although one loved animals not too much imagination when it came to the fox. Cruel and yet intensely alluring … After a hard day’s hunting, a poem dashed off haphazard, because a rhyme was hammering on my brain like a tune.

  These poems read as if dashed off haphazard. The countryside around Malvern figured in them, the hills called Raggedstone, Wind’s Point, Hollybush and Worcester Beacon, the views of the River Severn and the Wye, the churchyard at Eastnor. Marguerite wrote of kisses, sunsets, autumn tints, the moon and the pain of love. She hinted obliquely at trysts and liaisons. Pronouns stayed unrevised and she still signed herself Marguerite Radclyffe Hall. One, dedicated ‘To …’, spoke of a dreary cold city that would become like summer ‘Decked with sweet, perfuming flowers’ were a certain person there. And ‘On the Lagoon’:

  A gondola, the still lagoon;

  A summer’s night, an August moon;

  The splash of oars, a distant song,

  A little sigh, and – was it wrong?

  A kiss, both passionate and long.

  Wrong or not, she was not going to stop it. On her next visit to the States, while still living with Jane Randolph, she started a love affair with another cousin, Dolly Diehl, daughter of her mother’s brother William. Dolly was in her teens and had the familiar fair-haired, blue-eyed looks of the Diehls. She inspired a more masterful aspect of Marguerite’s muse:

  If you were a Rose and I were the Sun

  What then, little girl, what then?

  I’d kiss you awake when day had begun,

  My sweet little girl, what then?

  I’d waken you out of your valley of dreams

  And open your heart with my passionate beams

  Till you lifted your face to my ruddiest gleams

  My own little girl, yes then.

  The passionate beams and ruddy gleams had a sadomasochistic undertow of domination and compliance. Behind Marguerite’s financial protection was a manipulative view of sex. Jane Randolph remarried – Harry Caruth, a wealthy Texan. She and her daughter Winifred remained players in the Diehl drama of warped love between mothers and daughters. For years Marguerite wrote to Winifred about Maria Visetti’s viciousness. Winifred wrote to Marguerite of how unloved she felt by her own mother Jane. Maria Visetti wrote to Jane of how ill-used she was by Marguerite.

  Dolly Diehl danced to the tune of this drama. She went to live with Marguerite and their mutual grandmother in the Church Street house and at Malvern. They travelled in France, Italy and Germany. On the face of it they were cousins with Marguerite the chaperon. But it was a sexual affair with incestuous inflection outside the accepted terms of relationship.

  Marguerite drew her lovers into her compulsive inner world with its core of Oedipal revenge. This inner world informed the poems she wrote. In 1906 she paid to have a collection of them published by John and Edward Bumpus of Oxford Street. It was a slim volume, Twixt Earth and Stars, dedicated to ‘My Inspiration’. She gave her poems elliptical titles: ‘You’, ‘Remember’, ‘What a Pity’. Behind doggerel and clichés of sunlight and flowers, ran declarations of pain.

  Oh the awful pity of it all,

  That I ever learned to care for you

  That we ever chanced to meet at all

  Since we neither of us could be true.

  Her rhymes were simplistic, her psychology complex:

  My love is a bird with a broken wing,

  Alone in a stormy night;

  My love is a lark that forgets to sing

  And dies with the morning light.

  Her view of society was received and conventional. Presiding over the world was the benign figure of God the Father, as if from a stained-glass window on the ultimate landing of a rented home.

  And perhaps the Recording Angel

  May wipe out the faults of years

  With the hem of His shining garment

  Grown damp with a sinner’s tears

  The Evening Standard commended her ‘sincerity and sweetness’, the Queen wrote of her ‘vigorous, joyous youth, thankful for the right to exist in such a lovely world’ and The Lady said she had ‘real feeling and the power to express it’. No reviewers picked up on the sexual content behind the little rhymes, the possessiveness of the ruddy gleams or that the kisses might be between women. In later years, Radclyffe Hall said she thought the reviewers must all have been fathers ‘and thus tolerant of effervescent youth. I was so embarrassingly frank in that volume, my fraicheur and my egotism leave me most amazed – they also make me hot all down my spine … Youth is so embarrassingly frank about its own supposed emotions.’

  In August 1906 Marguerite and Dolly went to Homburg to see the women’s tennis tournaments. The Wimbledon champion, Dorothea Chambers, was playing against a friend of theirs, Toupie Lowther. Toupie – Marguerite called her ‘Brother’ though her real name was May – had driven herself there on ‘execrable’ roads in her 40-horse-power Merce
des. She was large, renowned for her lobs and said to have a man’s stroke and a man’s strength and a temperament ‘hopelessly unsuitable to lawn tennis’. She was the daughter of a naval captain and the sister of a Conservative MP. A science graduate and one of the first women to own a motorbike, she lifted weights and was a fencing champion, too. Her affairs with women were stormy and her style flamboyant. She left written instruction for her body after death to be laid out for four days. If, in the view of two doctors, she was still dead, they were to cut her jugular vein, cremate her corpse and strew its ashes to the wind.

  Marguerite and Toupie booked in at the Savoy. Also there was another of Toupie’s friends, Mabel Veronica Batten. She was with her husband George and her maid Susan Attkins. She was bored. The Savoy was not the dazzling meeting place of ten years past when Edward, Prince of Wales, heir to the English throne, had wooed her in its tearoom and her bedroom. She was now fifty, George was seventy-four. Their rooms were on separate floors. ‘Father is quite happy’, she wrote to Cara, their only child:

  He has found several old men he knows and goes down in the morning on his own to the springs. I went this morning but unless I meet some amusing people I really think I shall not get up regularly … Oh you never saw such sporks of people! Not one interesting person have I viewed except a Spanish beauty and an unknown young man who looks like an explorer.