Her attitude to Ladye changed. She was less patient with her pains and limitations. At Viareggio she told her she expected her to house-keep when they returned to England. She complained when they visited a Mrs Brock in a fifth-floor flat and Ladye was carried up the flights of stairs in a chair. Offended by the insinuation of indolence, Ladye became breathless and slept badly. At Monte Carlo John gambled and lost money. Distressed, Ladye mislaid things – her rosary in the casino, the jade button from her ermine tie.
In London, they resolved to be less exclusive and to socialize more. They left a great many visiting cards. They lunched with Sir Edward Elgar, played poker with Ernest Thesiger and had tea at Rumpelmayers with the Princesse de Polignac’s sister-in-law, Isadora Duncan. In an endeavour to be industrious, Ladye interviewed cooks and pasted recipes into George’s recipe book. To cheer herself she bought a black and mauve lace afternoon frock at Lavenders. She and John went to a lecture by Annie Besant on India and theosophy and were delighted at the good reviews Songs of Three Counties received. At the end of the year, at an Arabian Nights ball, Mabel was the Lady of Baghdad, John her Persian slave boy.
But for John the hedonism of this privileged life had palled. She pleaded unchannelled energy and the gulf in their age. In May 1913 she lunched with Phoebe and Oliver Hoare. Phoebe was a close friend of Dolly Clarke. Her husband was the younger son of Sir Samuel Hoare of Sidestrand Hall in Cromer, Norfolk and, like his father, a partner in the family bank of Barnetts, Hoare & Company of Lombard Street. She married him in 1906, the year Radclyffe Hall ‘fell head and heart and soul in love’ with Mabel Batten. They lived at Gloucester House, Park Lane and had no children. John invited them both to Tosca at the Opera House and Phoebe to lunch at the Berkeley. On 15 June they all four went to Ascot. John wore a Fortuny cloak of black and gold.
And then John and Phoebe began to meet alone most afternoons. There was an understanding between them that each had partners to whom they were committed. But it mattered to John that she was preferred to the cuckolded husband, that she succeeded where he failed. For Ladye, the days of grace were over, the great devotion tarnished. For this was an affair, with the usual ingredients of excuses, absence, disappointment and pain.
Phoebe’s meetings with John took place on weekdays at Dolly Clarke’s house when Oliver Hoare was at the bank. It was more problematic for John. Ladye was always at home. ‘I never kept anything from her,’ she said after Ladye’s death, ‘and I never told her an untruth except for once.’ Such openness was a mixed virtue. Unattached to a commitment to sexual loyalty, it had a lacerating edge. It meant Ladye was treated to details of John’s infidelity.
‘Every appointment, every engagement, was made with the proviso “if I can fix something for Ladye”’, John said. Such parity assuaged her conscience. Ladye would visit people whom she did not want to see so that John should not feel discomfort or guilt. While Ladye complained of a boring time in Hampstead with Sir Edward and Lady Elgar, John took Phoebe Hoare to dinner and to Within the Law at the Wyndham’s Theatre. While John lunched with Phoebe at Swan Walk, Ladye lunched with Mrs Draper and Betty Carstairs. Often John brought home a placatory gift – a carved emerald ring, a diamond pin – or made some compensatory gesture when she returned.
Phoebe had the status of mistress. She was an aspect of the construction of the personality of John. When the first Mr Batten was alive, John was the romantic poet, the virile lover, Ladye her perfect woman whom destiny made her meet. After his death, for four years her role was the better husband, provider of an ideal home, ‘true grit … a real poon … so kind and darling’. She wished to father children. Both declared themselves ‘thrilled to the bone’, ‘wildly excited’, when in 1913 Cara became pregnant with her third child. They hoped for a boy. ‘Johnnie almost feels like the father’, Ladye the grandmother wrote.
Time passed and with an emphasis on domestic comfort the town and country house, the winters in the sun, Ladye became the ideal mother, always there, encouraging of talent, forgiving of wayward behaviour. But John was no longer ‘as wax in her hands’, nor so kind and darling, nor quite the real poon. Twenty-four years younger, she was more the rake, the roué, the Rat, ‘blatantly and crudely unfaithful’. But unlike Mary Jane Hall, Ladye kept faith with her man.
The semblance of their life stayed intact. They still went to mass at Brompton Oratory, lunched at the Ritz, dined at the Hyde Park Grill. Both were caught by the Russian craze when the Ballets Russes came to Covent Garden in spring 1913. Ladye acquired a Bakst chiffon dinner gown in scarlet and two shades of purple. They heard the music of Debussy and Stravinsky, saw the dancing of Nijinsky and Karsavina and the set and costume designs of Bakst and Benois.
At Malvern they searched out antiques for the White Cottage – a marble-topped gilt washstand, a bookcase for Ladye’s dressing-room. They sang Spanish songs under the walnut tree, went to flower shows, lunched at the Horny Old Arms. Both were inordinately proud when in June a ‘very eulogistic’ letter about John’s poems came from the author and literary critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. And equally proud when ‘Desert Love Songs’ and ‘The Blind Ploughman’ were sung at the Queen’s Hall on 23 November 1913.
But joy and ease went from their relationship. John lost weight, did no writing, had bursts of temper and violence. Ladye was depressed, had angina attacks and high blood pressure. Her diary, formerly buoyant, became a litany of discomforts and disappointments. Her ankles were swollen, her teeth gave her pain. She hated John being away, was mortified by this betrayal. More and more she lost things – a skunk fur in a taxi, a brooch, then a ring.
On 20 July they dined with Winnaretta Singer – the Princesse de Polignac. She read aloud from her manuscript about travels to Lesbos. ‘John very upset afterwards with remords de conscience’, Ladye wrote in her diary. ‘I get no sleep at all.’ Remords de conscience did not prevent John from spending the next afternoon with Phoebe Hoare. Or the next and the next and the next. At the week’s end she was so tired she fell asleep after dinner, then went to bed at ten. Ladye felt wretched and sat alone, her swollen feet wrapped in damp flannels.
At Malvern in the summer months, John felt confined. She was ‘furiously angry’ when the dog Otero broke a glass. She beat him. Ladye felt faint in the night and could not sleep. Next day, on 22 August, to commemorate five years since those nights at Ostend, she gave John a diamond pin. ‘John seemed all right again and was very loving and made me feel happy.’
It was a fleeting feeling. John then left for Southbourne and a week with Dolly Clarke and Phoebe Hoare. Ladye invited her brother George and his wife Nelly to stay and had a dismal time with them. On the evening of Saturday 30 August, she met John at the station. ‘We talked far into the night. I got no sleep till 4 a.m. Felt depressed and breathless.’
Nocturnal talks were salt on wounds. In the morning they missed mass. It rained for a week. Otero, judged unmanageable, was destroyed. Ladye asked John to visit Cara with her. Though John was supposed to feel ‘almost’ like the father of Cara’s expected child, she refused and went again to Phoebe. Then she scuppered the spring holiday plans. They had agreed on Málaga. Ladye loved Spain and was looking forward to it. Now John wanted to go to San Remo, where Phoebe would be at Bel Respiro, her mother’s villa. Ladye again lay awake worrying until half past four in the morning.
It was not a situation she could resolve. She had nowhere to turn, no wish to live alone. She was not used to being marginalized. She had always ‘accepted homage as a matter of course’. No homage was on offer now and her flirtatious days were done. There was a symmetry in the way she had treated George. She had let him know that though she would not leave him he was too old for her, not sexy and often dull. She had farmed him out to family friends, left him in the care of the maid while she was having fun.
Recession and talk of impending war added to the gloom. The miners’ strike dragged on. John and Ladye dined in the library to save coal and had a succession of colds. At Aspenden
Hall at Christmas John was uninterested in other guests and dissatisfied with her dressing-room. ‘Felt very pleased that this horrid year was finished’, Ladye wrote in her diary on New Year’s Eve. ‘Not a happy year and felt delighted when 1914 set in.’
Oliver Hoare wanted this unorthodox affair of his wife’s to end. In January 1914 John had an ‘interview’ with him and Phoebe. Its agenda was not divulged but on 1 February she and Ladye left for a two-month holiday. Away from provocation Ladye felt restored. At the Sports Club, Monte Carlo, she played roulette and talked to Mrs George Keppel, another lover of the previous King. At Tamaris at the Grand Hotel, she and John had large interconnecting bedrooms and a ‘gorgeous view over the sea’. The sun shone, the food was good, she enjoyed their itinerant life and had John’s exclusive company. But things were not the same and they were not the couple they had promised to be. Ladye knew, as she copied John’s latest eulogies of desire into literacy, that they were not inspired by her:
Thy beauty burns me as a breath of fire
When thy hands touch me, all the world is compassed
Within the limits of their slender whiteness.
Where may I hide from this destroying rapture,
From this swift longing that engulfs my being?
Dolly Clarke joined them. She was practically penniless and complained that her husband was ‘parsimonious’ towards her. John increased her allowance and invited her to live with them in Malvern. They all sailed to Genoa then Florence. It was John’s first visit there. ‘It leaves Rome far behind’, she wrote to Cara. ‘It has remained in the middle ages. One feels a strange and yet familiar aura of the 15th and 16th centuries the moment one sets foot in the streets. As I know that I lived in the 15th century myself it appeals to me strongly.’
She also knew that she was really a man and loved by God. She had the key to preternatural knowledge and hers was an invincible view. She felt an affinity to Florence, ergo she had lived there in a previous life. She was a changeling from another age. What she wrote, who she was, whom she loved, were controlled by a higher power.
More temporally, holiday life frustrated her. Ladye was not enough. John missed Phoebe Hoare and resented being away. Thin and nervous, she criticized all plans and complained of ‘superfluous energy’ which she could not channel. ‘Travelling grows more uncomfortable and expensive every year. I think I simply hate it. What one endures in stuffy trains, filthy hotels and bad food is surprising.’
They got home to a stack of bills and the same domestic grief. Ladye was with Cara on 12 May for the birth of her granddaughter Karen. John was back with Phoebe. At Ascot a Miss Blomfield tried to speak to the King about women’s suffrage. Ladye had shingles and could not enjoy the racing. She lunched in one tent with General Upperton and Major Balfour, John lunched in another with Phoebe.
In London, John caught mumps. She banished Ladye to the Cadogan Hotel, partly to keep her safe from contagion, more out of a desire to be alone. A week later she rented a studio in Tite Street. She said it was a private place to work, but it was also a private place for her tryst.
Politics broke into this impasse like a tidal wave. At the beginning of August Germany declared war on France and Russia. The banks stopped paying out gold and men were mobilized. There were rumours of the requisitioning of trains for troops. London streets were full of territorial soldiers with ‘droves’ of horses to be shipped to the battlefields. John wondered if her horse Judy would be wanted. At night the city looked ‘sad and unusual’ with searchlights and darkened streets.
Bobby Clarke enlisted and Dolly worked for the Red Cross Hospital in Paignton, Cornwall. Phoebe and Oliver Hoare moved to Berkshire. John and Ladye packed up 59 Cadogan Square, leased it to Mr and Mrs Hamilton Bell, sacked the parlour maid and Ladye’s personal maid to save money and moved to Malvern.
John talked of turning the White Cottage into a home for wounded soldiers. She said she wanted to enlist, fight and, if needs be, die. ‘Had I been able to leave Ladye I would have done war work abroad.’ In her mind’s eye she was in uniform, shrapnel-scarred and adorned with medals. It was for Ladye she refrained. Or so she liked to think. ‘Once, when I suggested going to Serbia, she worked herself up into such a panic that I gave up all ideas of it.’
Foiled and stuck in Malvern, John did what she was best at – told others how to behave. She wrote and printed recruitment leaflets then drove round the town with Ladye distributing them. She scorned an ‘odious schoolmaster’ who was against his son enlisting and she put up Kitchener’s poster ‘Your Country Needs You’ on the walls of the White Cottage. When a passer-by annotated these, she wrote a fulminating letter to the Malvern Gazette: ‘What manner of men have we in these parts? Their women should be ashamed of them. Mr M. Radcliffe Hall.’
‘Recruiting is going up here’, Ladye wrote to Cara on 13 September. ‘It is largely due to Johnnie’s efforts. She made a really thrilling speech to women at Castle Morton without any notes. It simply poured out with no effort. I was quite taken aback at her eloquence.’
They took clothes for Belgian refugees to the Red Cross and went to lectures on home nursing and bandaging. John gave money and books for wounded soldiers and offered beds for them at the White Cottage. No soldiers arrived. And she and Ladye knitted mittens, socks and mufflers: ‘Johnnie knits too beautifully,’ Ladye wrote, ‘so evenly they look almost machine made. My efforts are much more unprincipled and vague!’ Johnnie’s efforts were short-lived. Such activities, she said, bored her. Her fantasy was as a frontline hero, not a caring sister, knitting, bandaging and giving comfort to men.
War brought her affair with Phoebe Hoare to an end, separated her from Dolly Clarke, curtailed her first nights at the Opera House and winters in the sun. Stuck in Malvern in Ladye’s exclusive company with the daily news of carnage, opportunity seemed to dim. She published a last book of poems, The Forgotten Island. Though unrhymed, ‘a new departure for me and one in which I took great interest’, they were as ever pastoral or about love, its passions, transience and pain. Composed at the piano, or to a tune on her mandolin, designed to be sung by ladies at afternoon recitals or teas, they were suddenly anachronistic in a cruel world and the volume sank without trace.
Then came another trial which precluded the recapture of their happy days. On 21 September John and Ladye went to London to finalize the subletting of their flat. Norman Serpell, their chauffeur, was to drive them to Malvern next day. They had a 22-horsepower Hooper limousine and they piled their luggage – a great deal of it – on its roof. Garry, the maid, travelled with them. They stopped for lunch at the Mitre Inn in Oxford and left at about three p.m. At the Burford crossroads, seventeen miles on, a small car driven by a Mrs Lakin, who was with her sister and niece, crashed into theirs. Serpell was travelling at twenty-five miles an hour, had the right of way and had sounded his horn. Their car smashed into a wall, knocked down one and a half tons of it and scattered the luggage.
The maid was stunned, Serpell hysterical and Ladye seriously hurt. Carried unconscious from the car, she had concussion, head wounds, broken ribs, and damaged vertebrae. She was taken to a Mrs Pigott at Burford Hill House. A Dr Cheattle shaved and stitched her head and Cara’s lover, Frank Romer, came from London with two nurses. For ten days she was very ill. On 1 October she was moved by ambulance with John and Dr Cheattle to the White Cottage.
The focus of life then became Ladye’s headaches, wounds, temperature, aches and pains. She was in a wheelchair. She could not wear a hat and wound chiffon round her head to hide her shaved hair. John took her to Birmingham hospital to be X-rayed. The cost of doctors, nursing, heat treatments and massage was high.
John built a shrine to the Virgin Mary on the back wall of the White Cottage in gratitude for the sparing of Ladye’s life. The priest came and blessed it. And then, with passionate attention to detail, she collected and collated the evidence needed to sue Mrs Lakin: statements made at the time, photographs of the crossroads, the damaged wall and car.
She saw her London solicitor, Theodore Goddard, and waited for the trial.
At the White Cottage the ritual was mornings in bed and lunch at one. At three, they set out for Malvern for Ladye’s massage and steam bath. They had tea at the confectioner’s, returned home at six, then rested until dinner at seven-thirty. John was now trapped. As consolation, she turned to what was to be her life’s work – writing prose. She began with short stories. Like her fantasy of self, these had a Messianic edge. Heavily parabolic, cautionary, they aspired to prophetic heights. Written without irony, their illiteracy was stark. Her childish handwriting sloped backwards. Clichés peppered each page. It was as if she chipped her stories out of the stones of dyslexia, cliché and childhood pain.
Their winter holiday was at the thermal baths at Llandudno in Wales. John pushed Ladye’s bathchair along the sea front and together they took the spa waters. It was a far cry from the sunny beaches and starlit nights of Tenerife. Back at the White Cottage, Christmas was quiet. John had yet another cold. Ladye wrote to Cara, urging her to get out into the world and to have some fun before her life, like her mother’s, became devoid of pleasures. ‘Last day of a sad year’, she wrote in her diary on New Year’s Eve in a shaky, scarcely legible hand. ‘Vale 1914.’
8
Roads with no signposts
Ladye read John’s stories aloud to visitors to the White Cottage. Ernest Thesiger, invalided home from the trenches of France, heard the first. Called ‘Out of the Night’, it was about a poet dying of hunger and driven by the ‘compelling, devouring vampire of genius’ (spelled jeaneous or geanous) to write the greatest religious poem of the century. ‘It will go all over the Christian world.’ He writes in a prostitute’s bedroom. The night is rough, her heart is soft, she takes him in and gives him pencil and paper. The priest she brings to his bedside as he dies gives the poem to a grateful (greatfull) publisher. The prostitute conceals her trade to protect the jeaneous’s reputation.
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Page 7