By January 1913, on her sister Viola’s recommendation, she was having treatment with a Harley Street psychotherapist, Dr Hugh Crichton-Miller, author of Hypnotism and Disease and Treatment by Hypnotism and Suggestion. A smooth man, consulted mainly by ladies with money, time and unsatisfactory husbands, Crichton-Miller founded the Tavistock Clinic for Functional Nervous Disorders in London and ran a large private nursing home on his fourteen-acre estate, Bowden House, at Harrow on the Hill. (Viola was unhappily married to a journalist, Maurice Woods. ‘It is horribly tragic,’ Crichton-Miller wrote of her to Una with less than professional confidence, ‘to be sacrificed and broken to a thing [her husband] that is all brain and no heart’.)
Crichton-Miller was another father figure, the ‘higher power’ which Una sought. She paid to find from him the ‘evolution, spiritual development and kindness’ her husband failed to provide. He told her she was ‘repressing some big complexes’ and that her self-confidence would grow when she learned the power of thought control. ‘Confidence in yourself is the goal to be aimed at’, he said. He wrote to her while she was away, taught her ‘self-inducing hypnosis’, which she practised in twenty-minute sessions twice a day, hypnotized her into unconsciousness for no very clear reason and sent large bills to Troubridge – thirteen guineas a week plus ‘incidental expenses’.
Psychotherapy absorbed her in 1913. In her diary she chronicled her ‘seances’ of loss of consciousness and the psychology textbooks she read – The Psychology of Suggestion by William James, Hypnotism by Albert Moll. Troubridge sent unhappy letters, asking her to join him in Malta. Which she was in no hurry to do. Happier without him, she did drawings and etchings, took singing lessons, bought a gramophone and sang along to records. She sculpted a head of Nijinsky, who was dancing with the Ballets Russes in London. She saw him in Sylphides and Scheherazade and he sat for her at the Royal Ballet School in Drury Lane.
She delayed going out to Malta until March 1914. Troubridge met her on his barge and paraded her as the Rear-Admiral’s wife. She lunched on board the Enchantress, watched him playing polo and dined with ambassadors and their wives. Her respite was to take singing lessons, go to rehearsals and first nights at the Malta Opera House, read Quo Vadis in Italian and Principii Elementari di Musici by Federico Parisini and do etchings. By the end of the year, she had finished her Nijinsky sculpture, modelled seven heads and done seventy-five drawings. She had heard The Pearl Fishers ten times, Tosca three, Rigoletto twelve and La Bohème fifteen.
Troubridge objected to her artistic and intellectual pursuits. He was unimpressed when the Daily Malta Chronicle commended her ‘cultured voice of remarkable range and sweetness’. He wanted her to focus her life on him and urged her to regard art and singing as ‘diversions’. ‘I have never really wished you to work at anything that would occupy you away from me’, he told her. ‘I would much rather you were not engrossed in anything else.’
Marriage to Una proved a trial for him. She was neither deferential nor malleable nor even pleased to see him. Her intellectual energy undermined him and she warred with his family. But the 1914 war proved a greater trial and undermined him more. At its outbreak in August 1914, Winston Churchill was the First Lord of the Admiralty. Troubridge, a Rear-Admiral, was in command of a fleet of armed ships in the Mediterranean. Early in August, he was instructed to intercept two enemy cruisers, the Goeben and the Breslau. These ships had bombarded ports at Philipville and Bone, escaped, sailed on to Messina and were heading for the Dardanelles.
Troubridge’s squadron had four cruisers with nine-inch guns. The two German ships had eleven-inch guns. He aimed to close on them in darkness then fight them at first light. He pursued them on the night of 6 August. He hoped for mist and rain, but the night was clear. By four a.m. he considered that he was too far away from them and that at first light his ships would be in unequal danger from their superior guns. He gave up the chase and returned to the Adriatic.
The Goeben and Breslau sailed on unchallenged to the Dardanelles. Turkey had joined with Germany against the Allies. Russia’s access to the Black Sea was sealed off by these ships. Battles in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia and the Middle East followed with huge loss of life. According to Churchill, the incident brought ‘more slaughter, more misery and ruin than has ever before been brought within the compass of a ship’.
An exhaustive inquiry was held, fuelled by Churchill’s anger and contempt. Troubridge returned to England in September to give account. Una travelled with him. The papers were full of it and there was a photograph of her in the Tatler. Troubridge asked the Admiralty for a trial by court martial in an endeavour to clear his name. ‘He did forbear to chase HIGM’s ship Goeben being an enemy then flying’ was the charge. The hearing was from 5–11 November 1914. It was a secret affair, conducted by other admirals and led by Sir Leslie Scott, KC. There were daily sittings, including Sunday. Una took to her bed for the entire proceedings. Troubridge was ‘fully and honourably’ acquitted of blame. But though technically absolved he lived with the taint of cowardice. It was not a war where rational retreat was commended. Those who were thought honourable died in the fight.
For four months he was not asked to return to his ship or given another appointment. To avoid an imminent question in parliament as to why, Churchill summoned him in March 1915 for an interview. He did not look up from his desk when Troubridge entered, nor did he ask him to sit down. He said, ‘Troubridge, I have an appointment to offer you, but as it is in the forefront of the battle, I think you may not care to accept it.’
Una asked her husband how he responded to this insult. ‘He said to me, “I am a naval officer and I reminded myself that discipline must be preserved. I told the First Lord that I was ready to accept any appointment that would be useful to my country in time of war.”’ He was sent to Belgrade to command the forces defending the Danube. It was a post that banished him to obscurity. He never went to sea again ‘and he was fanatically a sea sailor’. It was a post, too, that banished him from his wife. If adversity is the testing ground of love, she failed. Months of his enforced company and the social stigma she felt he had inflicted on her played on her nerves and provoked her headaches. Any residual interest she had in him evaporated. She offered no sympathy, no further support. ‘Think of my pride’, he had said when he asked for trial by court martial. Una thought of herself. His absence gave her space to pursue Radclyffe Hall, a social humiliation to Troubridge that inspired him with rage, called for revenge and barred him from London life.
9
Chenille caterpillars
Ladye chronicled every meeting between John and Una. Her diary was her testimony to the betrayal of trust: ‘Una here to breakfast. She lunched with John and saw The Man Who Stayed at Home. I took Cara to see Romance and we had tea out. Una to dinner as usual. I slept badly and felt very depressed.’ John was now ‘so changed’ towards her. She was always irritable and never wanted to go anywhere alone with her, but wanted to be alone with Una.
This was not, as with Phoebe Hoare, an affair with prescriptive limits, contained by regard for marriage. Una had left Troubridge in all but deed. A determined woman, she wanted to oust Ladye and have John to herself. She was ‘completely under the spell of her enthralling personality. All I knew or cared about was that I could not, once having come to know her, imagine life without her.’ The Admiralty offered her a passage to Belgrade to join Troubridge. She declined. ‘I hate exile from the intellectual and artistic pursuits of London’, was her excuse. ‘I dread a stagnation that may end in atrophy.’ Even Andrea, aged five, was now an encumbrance and an intrusion. Alone with her, Una felt cooped up.
A month after meeting John, in September 1915, she asked Crichton-Miller if he would foster Andrea at Bowden House and see that she went to mass. Crichton-Miller declined. He suggested a Miss Prior, who lived at Roxeth Head nearby:
There are three old ladies, the youngest of whom is about sixty in the shade. There were four recently, the fourth died of excessi
ve senility last summer … For the last ninety years they have specialised in taking care of Anglo-Indian children … Their terms might be a little high, but whatever they charge, I think you could be sure of getting good value. They would be enormously impressed by the fact that Andrea was a Roman Catholic and would be more likely to find fault for the fewness of the services attended than for the number of them!
It was a strange environment for a psychiatrist to recommend for a small child. Andrea was passed like an unclaimed parcel to whoever would have her for a while.
To Ladye, John rationalized her infidelity. She assured her she would never leave her – but nor was she going to change. She talked again of ‘superfluous energy’ and Toupie Lowther’s ambulance unit. In late September she took both her and Una to the Watergate Bay Hotel near Newquay in Cornwall. Ladye, unfit for cliff walks and beach games, was left on her own in the hotel. ‘Talked till very late with John after we went up to bed’, she wrote on 2 October. She dreamed that her eyes were on fire and that while she watched from a river bank John drowned. She woke shouting and bathed in sweat.
In a move that compounded Ladye’s insecurities, John sublet both the London flat in Cadogan Square and the Malvern house. The war had reduced her income, but it was her habit to move out of places as impulsively as she moved in. Their furniture went into store and she took a suite of rooms at the Vernon Court Hotel in Buckingham Palace Road. Ladye’s bedroom had views over the palace gardens. They were pleasant quarters, but with no sense of home. Una hung her Nijinsky drawings in John’s sitting-room.
Ladye still had time with John: shopping at Selfridges, lunch at the Savoy Grill, a matinée of Gladys Cooper in Please Keep Emily. They prayed together at the Oratory and Ladye read aloud to her in the evenings. But there was an underlying loss of expectation from the relationship, a revision downward of trust, a death of hope that past happiness would ever come again.
On Ladye’s fifty-eighth birthday on 27 October, John took her to lunch at the Ritz. She gave her a travelling cushion, a gift she was to have no occasion to use. A few days later, she took Una on a jaunt to Taplow to buy her a bulldog called Juno. Ladye lunched alone, feeling ‘done up, sad and rotten’.
And then on 29 November John went alone with Una to the White Cottage. They were supposed to compile an inventory of the furniture and contents before the tenant, Mrs Lygon, moved in. They went by train to Malvern, then took a carriage. It was a damp misty day, the house was warm from the anthracite stove burning in the hall. The servants had gone. It was the first time Una had seen the White Cottage. It was the kind of home she had never had and the home she wanted with John. The date was significant, another anniversary:
I can shut my eyes now & recall the luncheon she had prepared for me – & trying to eat while I summoned my resolution to leave immediately – & all that followed, & in the evening our walking along the valley road to where the lights ended & the hedges began – & so back to the White Cottage with a bond forged between us.
They were both, she wrote, ‘breaking troth’ to their partners, though troth to Troubridge did not amount to much and she summoned no resolution to leave. She justified herself by her relative youth: she was thirty years younger than Ladye. For Mabel Batten, from the evidence of her diaries, Una’s intrusion was a disappointment that compromised her to the core. John perhaps intended an adventure, a respite from boredom, one more conquest on a par with those of her father. She was ambivalent about Una. ‘How do I know if I shall care for you in six months’ time?’ she said. But she gave her a platinum ring engraved with their names and she had fashioned another destructive triangle and incestuous circle.
Una intended that John should care for a lifetime and more. She rented an artist’s studio in Tite Street, Chelsea. John was her principal subject. Drawing her and making a sculpture of her were pretexts for being with her all day. She read aloud the manuscript of Michael West and all John’s short stories. She noted her grandiose ambition, her vulnerability and need for praise. This prose mapped the psychological terrain Una intended to claim.
Una had a fervour to serve. In Florence when she had watched the initiation ceremony of a novice into a closed order of nuns, she had wished she was the girl. She lauded what she saw as subordination of self to the highest power. If she served Radclyffe Hall as disciple and vestal virgin, she could subsume her own personality yet achieve glory. She would also have a lot of money and no responsibility. She liked first nights, travel, ‘beautiful clothes and the opportunity for wearing them’. And sexually, after Troubridge, she was through with men. John was a quasi-man without the misery Troubridge’s attentions brought.
‘London like a Christmas card under deep snow’, Ladye wrote as the year came to an end. Relationships were wintry too. On Christmas Eve the three of them went to midnight mass. John gave Ladye a pink, fur-lined Chinese wrap and gold hatpins. Ladye gave her a wrist-watch, a prophetic gift, for time was running out. She felt ‘depressed and very sad’. ‘Una spent all New Year’s Eve with us till 10.45 pm. John and I saw the troublesome year 1915 out together and both felt depressed. Vale 1915!’
Nor did Ladye hail 1916 as happy or new. For the first week of it, John went with Una to Tunbridge Wells. They booked in at the Wellington Hotel. Ladye sang ‘Mother England’ at tea parties, lost her fox fur muff, ‘lunched and dined alone and slept badly’. It poured with rain, there were gales and a tree came down in the garden of the White Cottage and killed Mr Hooper the gardener.
Rear-Admiral Troubridge arrived in London in February. He had not seen his wife for nine months and wanted her evasions explained. He expected her to meet him at the station but, with a sudden headache and sore throat, she went to bed at the Vernon Court Hotel. He saw at her studio the marble head she was sculpting. He made what he would of her reluctance to be alone with him, her immersion into the life of this woman called John. He dined with them all at the Vernon Court, went without Una to the wedding of his daughter, Mary, and slept at his club. His career seemed uncertain and his pay had been halved.
Una told him she was not going out to Belgrade and that she would stay married but only in name. She reminded him she was still being treated by Crichton-Miller for ‘neurasthenia’ and by Alfred Sachs for venereal infection. Perhaps to avoid the possibility of divorce, he was received into the Catholic Church on 27 February. Ladye had ‘a long and quiet talk’ with John about the implications of it all.
Thomas Troubridge, Una’s stepson, arrived without warning at the hotel. He urged Una to return to his father, accused her of humiliating him and warned that scandal would rebound on her. She hinted at revelations that would damage him more than forbearing to chase enemy ships.
Tension infected them all. John was ‘excessively irritable’ with Ladye and harangued her when she was quarter of an hour late arriving at Una’s studio. Ladye felt ‘too wretched’. John talked of taking Una and Andrea abroad with them as soon as the war allowed and she was gloomy when Dolly’s baby, Jacqueline, was born. The atmosphere was ‘sad beyond words’, Ladye wrote. ‘Felt chilled bodily and mentally … Thought seriously of going to live by myself.’
She was too unwell for humiliation and upheavals. John signed the lease on a new flat at 22 Cadogan Court and decided to sell the White Cottage when the tenant offered to buy it. She and Ladye talked over these plans until one-thirty one morning. John assured her that the new flat was for the two of them, but Una was involved at every stage. ‘Wish I felt stronger and more able to work’, Ladye wrote in her diary. Una helped choose the wallpapers, the stove for Ladye’s bedroom, John’s bed from Barkers. Ladye was offended when, at Una’s prompting, John took a room down the corridor as her bedroom, not the one adjacent to her own as she had hoped and they had agreed.
To get away she went for a week to the Grayshott Senacle Convent in Surrey. With a regime of prayer and early nights, spared Una’s constant presence and in the company of nuns, she felt better. While she was away, John took Una to Malvern to
arrange the sale of furniture from the White Cottage. She wrote Ladye a ‘darling but depressed letter’ about parting with the place. It had been their shared home for five years.
On 29 April Ladye complained that black specks floated across her eyes as she tried to read. Next day it was ‘chenille caterpillars’. Her oculist ‘found nothing seriously wrong’. She was tired, breathless and her pulse was ‘intermitting’ when the three of them supervised moving the furniture from 59 Cadogan Square to 22 Cadogan Court.
On 13 May they all went to a Red Cross concert. They heard pieces by Elgar, and Agnes Nicholls sang ‘To the Fallen’. Next day John again took Una to Taplow. Juno the bulldog was not up to par and was to be swapped. Ladye went alone to midday mass then lunched with Cara and showed her the new flat. John and Una were tempted to spend the night in Skindles, a fashionable hotel near Maidenhead. They eventually went back with the new dog to Una’s flat. The phone was ringing when they arrived. Ladye was vexed that John was so late for dinner. John returned reluctantly to the Vernon Court. She vented her anger at Ladye for curtailing her movements and constraining her freedom. Her tabasco temper had a poisonous fire. Ladye rose from the dinner table, complaining of pins and needles down her right side and of acute chest pain. She then collapsed. John could not get their doctor so she phoned Una, who went to the hotel. Ladye had had a cerebral haemorrhage. Next day she scrawled in her diary with her left hand, ‘Another stroke’.
For ten days she lay paralysed and speechless. John thought she divined from her eyes and ‘inarticulate sounds’ a recognition of herself and the desire to say something important to her alone. Aware that Ladye was dying, she craved her forgiveness. She appealed to the doctor to work some alchemy and make her speak. He volunteered an injection of amyl nitrite, but feared it might finish her off. Ladye stayed silent and died on 25 May.
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Page 9