Obituarists in the Star, The Times, the Morning Post wrote of her fine voice, charms, and friendship with Edward VII. John had her embalmed and on her corpse laid a silver crucifix blessed by the Pope and gold medals of Our Lady of Lourdes and St Anthony. The funeral was on 30 May. A requiem mass was held in Westminster Cathedral. Those attending were listed in The Times: ‘The French Ambassador, the Dowager Countess of Clarendon, Lord Cecil Manners, Rear Admiral Troubridge, Mrs Austin Harris and her tall young daughter Miss Honey Harris, Mrs George Marjoribanks and Miss Hatch’ and many more. Una, though a cousin and friend who ‘had always liked and admired her’, stayed away.
John spent grandly on the paraphernalia of death. She bought a catacomb chamber the size of a small chapel in Highgate Cemetery. It had pillars and Mabel Veronica Batten chiselled in stone above its cast-iron gate. Inside were four shelves. Ladye’s coffin lay on one. Two of the others were reserved for John and Cara. The fourth was ‘for the sake of a proper balance’. As the years passed the question of whose remains should be housed in this inner sanctum became the test of intimacy.
The paint was scarcely dry at 22 Cadogan Court. Nothing had been unpacked. John left the Vernon Court and went to stay with Dolly Clarke. Consumed with guilt and grief, she poured out anguished letters to Cara:
I don’t understand things … Because she has gone I am no longer all myself. Some day the riddle will be solved, in the meantime I can only wonder … How can I ever hope to be happy again, I can only wait and try to live a decent life and to please her word in all things in case I did not always please her before. If I had many faults and sins then perhaps this will be an offering for them. I don’t know, I can’t see clearly. The only thing I do see is that I must never fail her. From now on no interest shall ever lower her memory for me. There shall not be seen a shadow to come between us. I am waiting for some work to turn up and expect that she will guide me.
In her will, a ‘long and conversational document’ for which John had criticized her, Ladye voiced fears that after her death Cara and John would feud: ‘it would grieve me greatly should they grow less friendly or lose sight of each other when I am no longer on this earth’. Cara, Emmie Clarendon and others close to Mabel were not sympathetic to John’s grief. Goodwill toward her was scant. They saw these burial displays as care that had come too late. They wanted Mabel to be buried with George. They had observed and deplored the advent of Una, the way this had spoiled Mabel’s life. They believed that the tension this caused contributed to her death. They went back to calling John Marguerite and invitations faded away.
‘I have tried to dismiss the outrageous gossip that is unworthy of the devotion of your mother and me’, John wrote to Cara. But she could not dismiss her own guilt:
The thing that hurt me when she died was the terrible idea that any peevish words of mine had caused the attack … I shall never forgive myself that I allowed her to be annoyed over Una’s constant presence … I only hope that my beloved Ladye never thought that any ones wishes except hers were being consulted about our flat.
‘Her passing was the shock of my life’, she said. ‘In losing her I lost a shield between myself and the world.’ The loss uncovered old insecurities of abandonment and of that childhood memory of a coffin in the ground. She looked forward to death with ‘the certainty of reunion’ and said her youth and will to live had died too.
Nor was Una a consolation. She seemed like a malevolent accomplice. ‘Her grief was overwhelming and intensified by remorse,’ Una wrote. ‘She was submerged by an all-pervading sorrow … She blamed herself bitterly and uncompromisingly that she had allowed her affection for me to trespass upon her exclusive devotion to Ladye, that she had brought me so closely into their home life, thereby marring the happiness of Ladye’s last months on earth.’
Una’s strategy was to serve and wait. She destroyed her diaries for the years 1915 and 1916, her own evidence of Ladye’s humiliation. For herself, she was ‘desperately miserable at what looked like an almost total shipwreck of our happy relationship’. John did not now want to see her. There were accusations and rows. Una developed what she called ‘an old heart affection’ – palpitations and a racing pulse – a sure way to capture the concern, time and attention of the woman whom she was determined to have.
TWONNIE
10
The eternal triangle
Mabel Batten had loved Radclyffe Hall in a devoted way. She compensated her for the miseries of childhood, encouraged her ambition and tolerated her temper. She was punished for her pains. Cara took away her mother’s diaries. John asked to borrow the last one ‘for a few days’. ‘I have a great desire to read it’, she said. There, detailed, was her unfaithfulness and the unhappiness it had caused.
She justified herself to Cara, said that she had given the best eight years of her life to Ladye, ‘and although other people took my surface interest twice during that time, they never touched my soul or penetrated into my mind’. Una knew the details of this surface interest. There was a complicity between them, a share of guilt and they ‘frayed each other’s nerves’ when they met.
But John could not bear ever to be alone. A night in the unlived-in flat at Cadogan Court was an intolerable reminder. ‘The confusion there is past all belief’, she wrote to Cara. She stayed with Dolly Clarke and her baby daughter at Swan Walk and at a country house in Purton, Wiltshire.
Una wanted to be with her, even if that meant no more than misery shared. She rented a house at 13 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, because it was near Swan Walk. Her ‘heart affection’ and the threat of its untreated consequences alarmed John, who took her for a week to the Royal Victoria Hotel at Llanberis in Wales. ‘It was lonely and beautiful,’ Una wrote, ‘and we went to the top of Snowdon and trailed round Caernarvon Castle … but it was not a success.’
John’s thoughts were all of Ladye. She kept her clothes and possessions and did not accept that her death meant extinction. ‘She is so very much alive. The idea that such a personality could cease to exist is too absurd.’ She spoke of killing herself to be with her, but feared that might confound their chances in heaven. She wanted to reassure her, resume ordinary communication, justify her relationship with Una and be forgiven if she had transgressed.
Wherever Ladye now was John determined to find her. And wherever John now went Una was going to follow. The Church was too philosophical with its ideas of heaven deferred, its exhortations to prayer, piety, submission to the will of the Lord and a long wait before all was revealed. John wanted to get in touch right away.
She paid for the help of a medium, a kind of warden of an extraterrestrial missing persons bureau. The first they went to, Mrs Scales, was unsatisfactory. She had two lots of triplets and three lots of twins, was unwell, hard up and distracted. She went into a sweaty trance, failed to evoke anyone or thing in the least like Ladye, said ‘horrible things’, had an attack of ‘neurotic mania’ and was in both their views ‘hysterical with erotic tendencies’.
Una then contacted Sir Oliver Lodge, former President of the Society for Psychical Research. He had a credibility Mrs Scales lacked. He was Principal of the University of Birmingham, a Fellow of the Royal Society and author of various works on lightning conductors, electrons and the universe. His book, Raymond or Life and Death with Examples of the Evidence for Survival of Memory and Affection After Death, was selling fast. It went into six editions in 1916. Hundreds of soldiers were being killed each day and it was bought by the bereaved.
Raymond was Sir Oliver’s youngest son. He qualified as an engineer but volunteered in September 1914. He became a second lieutenant in the South Lancashire regiment and was sent to Ypres. He was the kind of young man Radclyffe Hall encouraged to enlist with her recruitment speeches and leaflets. His was the active service she said she wanted for herself.
In letters home, Raymond wrote of the ‘unending vista’ of war, enteric dysentery, dead horses and dead men ‘once smelt never forgotten’. He was he said ‘pi
gging it’ in the trenches, shot at and shelled. He saw his friends killed by sniper fire; his servant had his leg blown off and his best friend, Fletcher, was hospitalized because his ‘nerves were all wrong’. His captain acquired a German helmet and had it cleaned out because ‘part of the owner was still inside it’. The German prisoners included an officer aged sixteen ‘and student types with spectacles, poor devils I do feel sorry for them’.
‘I should think that never in this world before have there been so many men so fed up’, he wrote. He asked his father to send morphia tablets because when men got hit in the morning, they had to wait until dark to be moved. He asked for a book about the stars and for some cocoa and he complained of rats and mice. He said he valued his primus stove and stone water jar and that at the war’s end he would like a simple room with the view of a garden.
By 6 September 1915 he was sleeping in wet clothes in a dugout swimming with water. ‘Great happenings are expected here shortly and we are going to have a share’, he wrote. And then his captain sprained an ankle falling from his horse and Raymond was put in temporary command of C Company. ‘Hope not for long. Too responsible at the present time of crisis.’ A week later he wrote, ‘You will understand that I have the Company to look after and we are going into the front line trenches this evening at 5 pm.’
Sir Oliver received the familiar telegram:
The King and Queen deeply regret the loss you and the army have sustained by the death of your son in the service of your country. Their Majesties truly sympathise with you in your sorrow.
Raymond had been hit about midday on 14 September. Telephone wires were cut and no one could get a doctor. He died the next day. Lord Kitchener expressed sympathy too.
Nothing in Raymond’s letters sought consolation in the sky. Rather, he inferred that people might behave better on earth. But irrationality was fashionable. War had made life awful. Sir Oliver, like Radclyffe Hall, consoled himself with a notion of paradise where Raymond now resided. To communicate with his son he paid for sessions with mediums. He documented his findings and submitted these to the Society for Psychical Research in Hanover Square.
The Society prided itself on its standards of investigation and research and the status of its members. Among its former presidents were Bishop Boyd Carpenter, Canon of Westminster and Chaplain to the Forces; Professor Gilbert Murray, author and classics scholar; Lord Rayleigh, Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge and Mr Gerald Balfour MP, brother of A. J. Balfour, the Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905.
Sir Oliver’s favoured medium was Gladys Leonard of Maida Vale. Through her he met again with Raymond. Sir Oliver ascertained that Raymond was happy, lived in a house ‘made from emanations from the earth’ and had a girlfriend with long gold hair and a lily in her hand. Raymond regularly visited his parents at the family home, Mariemont, at Edgbaston outside Birmingham. He came at night when they were in bed. ‘The air is so quiet then.’
Sir Oliver advised Radclyffe Hall to join the Society and go to Mrs Leonard. He offered a solution to her problem, a way for her to bring guilt, grief and loss into her control. She set about communicating with Ladye with obsessive application. ‘The idle apprentice,’ Una said, ‘was metamorphosed by sorrow into someone who would work from morning to night and from night till morning, or travel half across England and back to verify the most trifling detail.’
Writing was forgotten. Here was her work, the channel for ‘superfluous energy’, her full-time occupation. Between 1916 and 1920 evidence of Mrs Leonard’s ‘possession’ by Ladye was her overwhelming interest. She and Una went each week, sometimes five times a week. Every session was minuted, typed and analysed. They amassed an archive of paperwork and employed a full-time secretary. Una read aloud about discarnate spirits, mediumistic trances, Ostensible Communicators and Ostensible Possession. John hired a private detective in case Mrs Leonard cheated by unpsychical visits to the Public Record Office. Their findings were collated, analysed and sent for scrutiny to Sir Oliver.
John wanted to get close again to Ladye. Una wanted to usurp Ladye and get close again to John. She went along as recorder, witness, whatever John asked. She was needed at the sessions. It was the eternal triangle. The arrangement assuaged John’s conscience. She and Una were together not for pleasure, desire, or themselves, but only to serve Ladye. Una concurred. All she cared about was not to be parted for a morning or a night. Seances with Mrs Leonard had a parallel with hypnosis with Crichton-Miller. Both were a relinquishing of responsibility, a pseudo-submission to a higher power.
Gladys Leonard lived in a three-room basement flat at 41 Clifton Avenue, Maida Vale, west London. She kept her seance room hot and a red light glowed in the window. Mediums, she said, are extremely sensitive, highly strung individuals. Before going into a trance she got pins and needles and felt herself to be swelling to an enormous size. Clear, dry weather was important for ‘psychical manifestations’. On foggy days communication from the dead was difficult.
She wrote an autobiography, My Life in Two Worlds. In it she posed the question, ‘Are Our Loved Ones to be thought of only as Yesterday’s Sunbeams?’ Her answer was ‘a resounding No!’ She acquired special powers at the age of eight. A member of the local church died and Gladys had recurring visions of ‘radiantly happy people’ in green valleys. Happy Valleys, she called them, and was surprised others could not see them too.
In her teens Gladys went to spiritualist meetings where ‘discarnate spirits from the other side’ manifested themselves through mediums. A fat man with protruding eyes talked in the voice of a girl of seven. A middle-aged woman inhabited by a North American Indian kept giving bloodcurdling howls. On her twenty-seventh sitting Gladys was inhabited by Feda, a thirteen-year-old Indian girl who had apparently married Gladys’s great-great-grandfather then died in childbirth in 1800. Feda told Gladys that together they could do great things.
For money, Gladys worked as a repertory singer and actress. Throat troubles and the extraction of all her teeth impeded her career. She married Mr Leonard who was also an actor with throat troubles and profound deafness in his right ear. Money was short and they made do in a succession of nasty lodgings. In spring 1914 in a spiritualist paper, she advertised private sittings. Three people turned up for the first session. In a trance Gladys saw the murdered King of Serbia holding a bloody cannon ball. Six weeks later war started: ‘I understood then the purpose for which I was needed. I was to be used to prove to those whose dear ones had been killed that they were not lost to them and the dead had never died.’
The bereaved, the grief-stricken and the deranged came to her. She had an undoubted facility for saying what they liked to hear. She preferred them relatively sane and well-heeled. Oliver Lodge became a client in 1915 and sent other sitters via the Society for Psychical Research. ‘Where would my work have been without Sir Oliver Lodge’s help?’ Gladys Leonard asked.
In August 1916, John and Una made their way to Maida Vale, determined to meet again with Ladye. Gladys Leonard was wearing a blonde, wavy hairpiece and had applied a lot of face powder. Una had her notebook ready. Mrs Leonard made a noise like the air coming out of an inflatable cushion. She stared and seemed catatonic, then sweated, writhed, clutched Una’s shoulder and joggled her arm so that she had difficulty writing. Ladye was possessing Feda and Feda was possessing Mrs Leonard.
Feda talked through Mrs Leonard in a squeaky foreign voice. She said ‘pletending’ and ‘tly’ instead of pretending and try. She described Ladye’s hair, eyes and dimpled skin. Ladye, it was ascertained, was velly well. Feda explained the topography of the brave new world she was now in. The dead go to a plane, one to seven, that fits their earthly interests. There are ‘houses, gardens, meadows, woods, lakes’. Artists paint and singers sing. Ladye was on plane three. Jesus Christ was on plane seven. She had been up to visit him a few times – in a group, or gloop. She lived by herself though her visitors were numerous and she saw George often. He was very well, too. She had a nic
e home: a stone house with French windows, wide entrance hall, heavy furniture, coloured cushions, a garden with ‘heaps and heaps of flowers’ and a horse with a soft mouth and ‘naughty little ears’. The ground was springy for horseriding; ‘You will love it when you come.’
She looked pretty, cheeky and bright and about thirty years old. She kept up her singing and guitar playing. She assured John that she had not suffered when she died. It had only been a little blood clot on the brain. All her disabilities were gone: no high blood pressure or arterial sclerosis. She was not lonely on plane three and thought it the best one for John because of all the dogs and horses. She did a bit of voluntary work in the day among the ‘poor souls who had just left their physical bodies’, then she went home, took off her clothes and had a lie down.
John found the reassurance, relief and absolution that she wanted. Ladye was alive and well and blooming in a better world. Questions to Feda yielded replies that rendered irrelevant guilt or grief. Ladye forgave her any carelessness or neglect before that fateful brain haemorrhage; nothing could interfere with their eternal life together. In a few years they would be reunited ‘like a needle to a magnet’. (Una butted in that she wanted to die too if John was to ‘go over’ soon.)
Una was now marginalized and punished daily. If Ladye had endured jealousy because of Una’s constant presence, Una, in the nature of triangles and nemesis, was to have her measure of it meted out. She became witness and scribe to a relationship of incomparable consummation. Earthbound, Ladye had seemed wheezy, pleasant, indolent. Now she was infallible and still in love with John, or ‘Twonnie’ as Feda called her.
‘Hold your face to one side Twonnie, she wants to kiss you’, Feda said to John. Ladye caressed Twonnie, advised, admonished and expressed concern and undying love. She worried about her haemorrhoids, her nose going red in the cold, acidity in her stomach and the disgraceful way she swore. And she could see Una’s fibroids and told her to get them sorted out. Una wrote it all down. If she was slow with her note-taking, John was sharp and told her to abbreviate more.
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Page 10