The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  At the town’s celebrations to mark the eighteenth anniversary of the founding of the Fascist party, she and Una were given prominent seats. Their table was draped with the Italian flag. Una was thanked for the presentation of her rifle, the moschettieri fired blanks, drums rolled, there was much denouncing of the Bolshevik enemy and chanting of Duce Duce Duce. Una wrote in her diary: ‘The teaching fascism gives these children is moral, honourable, courageous and self sacrificing, and the crucifix is there on the wall in the Casa Ballila and in the refectory a prayer to God in great letters.’

  Una practised her Italian with a pro-regime nun called Sister Suoraghebarda. They lamented that Hitler lacked the Duce’s religious conviction. John was appalled when the British government invited Haile Selasse, Emperor of Abyssinia, to the coronation of King George VI.

  Despite her enthusiasm for the Pope and the Duce, John felt uprooted. Tired of hotels, she wanted a home but only if Evguenia was with her. Caring for her while she was ill had strengthened her affection for her. ‘I want her with the burden of her distress’, she said to Una. Una wanted ‘to be two and not a crowd’. She longed to be at the Forecastle but not with ‘a disappointed and melancholy John’ pining for her Chinkie Pig. Una would not hear of Evguenia joining them in Rye. She would sooner float anonymously round Europe living out of suitcases. At least in England the legend she had promoted was intact. Evguenia fantasized about studying medicine at Oxford or Cambridge. Una, she said, ‘knew very well how to persuade John not to let me do it’.

  Evguenia did not want to leave John in any permanent way. She talked of an invisible thread that bound them together, a spiritual and physical link, a definite union. ‘No matter where I was I could always come back to her.’ But Una’s sport was to deride her. She called her a ‘glutinous embryonic creature’, chronicled everything she ate, watched ‘with horror’ as she dipped her spoon into cream, mocked her efforts at typing letters for John. Evguenia said she wished she had bottles and bottles of vodka to drink.

  The more goaded Evguenia was by Una, the more she tried to break free from John. When she rejected John, John rejected Una. The more habitual their contact, the more reflex their responses. John told Una that she had clung too tight, that she should have stayed in Rye and let her go to Paris every fortnight to be with Evguenia.

  I pointed out that such a programme would have reduced our home and union to an empty fiction and would have meant that we would have lost one another for if I was to be neither wife nor companion she knew it would mean returning home merely to work and await the next spree. Annie the maid could fill my place.

  Una had not minded reducing Mabel Batten’s home and union to an empty fiction, then refabricating the story in a meretricious way. She grieved to see John haggard and trapped but she would never relinquish her, not for a day. She endured it when John accused her of spoiling the relationship with Evguenia. She endured hearing her say she wished she had let her have the Forecastle and money and left her. Una lost John in all but the habit of partnership. Mabel Batten might have cracked under the insult of such rejection, but not Una. She would maintain her position as wife and companion. Her determination to win never faltered.

  News of their mothers reached their hotel. Mrs Visetti was eighty-three and depressed by her financial difficulties and at living in a cheap London hotel. Her doctor wrote to John and offered to try to effect a reconciliation. Una replied, asked for more details and suggested Mrs Visetti move to a convent home.

  From Andrea Una heard that her own mother had cancer of the rectum and had had a colostomy. Viola asked Una to pay half the medical expenses. ‘I cannot and I will not’, was Una’s response. It was grisly, she said, that Minna was ‘crazy to live at any price’. She had not seen her mother for four years, she told Viola. Minna had never done anything for her financially or in any other way. It was up to Viola to care for her now she was desperate. ‘I am terribly sorry for mother but she is Viola’s mother and not mine.’

  John began a new book The Shoemaker of Merano. She smoked thirty-five cigarettes a night as she worked. Una became spiteful when, by the second chapter, the wife in it was Evguenia. But John’s consolation, as Evguenia slipped from her control, was to bind her to her in fiction. She promised Evguenia that never again would the three of them live under the same roof. ‘I think of what might have been but what is not. Could there have been friendship between you and Una?’

  ‘If you want to live in Italy you may’, John said to Una. In spring they all moved to Florence. They booked in at the Hotel Gran Bretagne. The rate of exchange was good and John was exempt from paying tax in England. The plan was to stay until it got too hot in summer. Evguenia would then go to Paris, and John and Una to Rye. Evguenia would join John for a holiday in England, then they would all return to Florence in October.

  John found a flat for the autumn. It was in Lungarno Acciaiuoli, overlooking the Arno. It had French windows, parquet floors, timbered ceilings, a fine view, maids’ rooms and a large bathroom. Evguenia made it clear that under no circumstances would she live in it too. John’s chief wish was that Evguenia should winter with her in the warm. ‘My chief wish,’ Una wrote in June, ‘is to get home as quickly as possible and have a rest from Evguenia and her surly nigger face.’

  Paris, by contrast to Italy, was expensive. Natalie, Una thought, ‘talked a lot of half-baked nonsense about the tyranny of fascism and of the Catholic church’. Evguenia renewed her work permit for nursing. John felt threatened and feared such independence would separate them: ‘Don’t you think you have a right to rest on your oars?… You have earned the security that has come to you. This is the way I see it my beloved. You owe me nothing but love, if you feel that you can still give it.’

  It had become difficult for Evguenia to manage without John. Her quest for naturalization was more convoluted than ever. It now involved some back-door deal and the payment of 6,000 francs. To renew her Italian visa, to gain a visa for England, required payments and guarantees. Evguenia was uncertain about where to go or what to do. She was depressed at committing herself to September in Rye or winter in Italy. She wanted a holiday with her Russian friends. She wanted Paris and work, but not as a nurse. She wanted not to leave John but to see her without Una.

  John found parting from her for eight weeks and returning to Rye unbearable. On the journey she spoke only of her. She sent a wire from the ship, stopped at Rye post office to send a telegram, then spent a day writing to her. ‘This was our home coming after a year and a half’, Una said. ‘The cottage looks more lovely than ever,’ John wrote to Evguenia, ‘and were you here I could be in heaven, but heaven is not for such as me – at all events not on this earth.’

  She was in limbo with Una:

  Oh Evguenia, Evguenia – there are no words to express what I feel. I can only say to your half of our heart: ‘Love me, cling to me, understand me. Understand my love, my desire to protect, my anxiety, my poor broken life.’ No one on earth can know all this but you, since you are the reason for my joy and sorrow. Ten o’clock and no letter from you.

  She dreamed of a future where Evguenia too lived in Rye in a house of her own. As ever, she shared this dream with Una. Una trod on it hard. She would not have John visiting Evguenia at all hours and ‘scandal among our own class and the working people’. They had an ‘angry discussion’. Una asked St Anthony to ‘rescue John from the tentacles of this sterile and intolerable predicament’.

  Una filled the house with sweet peas and roses, read aloud the 15,000 words John had written of The Shoemaker of Merano and tried to recapture past time. She hoped their resumed social life would oust the significance of Evguenia. They went to the Smallhythe barn show – scenes from Shakespeare and a buffet supper. Edith Evans was Mistress Page and Sybil Thorndike King John. A small fire broke out backstage and there was an adder somewhere under the seats. John found concentration difficult. The ‘Smallhythe lot’ seemed older. Edy Craig was in a wheelchair. Vita Sackville-West looked
‘stout and crimson’. Christopher St John had recovered from her passion for her. Ethel Smyth seemed frail and very deaf. Tony Atwood was excited because the Tate Gallery had bought one of her pictures.

  Una invited Olive Chaplin and her new lover, Lucy Gower, to dinner at the Forecastle. Olive was now fifty. Lucy was twenty-seven, called herself Lucian, wore a man’s lounge suit and ‘looked like hell in it because she was fat’. Una gave them cocktails, iced consomme, roast duckling, apple sauce, peas, new potatoes, cherries with syrup, brandy and cream, 1924 Châteauneuf du Pape and then liqueurs. Olive got out her Tarot cards. She said John’s future lay over the water and that Una was not happy.

  Andrea visited for a day. She had no work and her marriage had failed. Her husband drank and had lost money in property deals. Una continually called Andrea, Evguenia, which disconcerted John: ‘She seemed incapable of doing otherwise. Every few minutes it was Evguenia this and Evguenia that until at last I said: “My dear your child’s name is, or used to be Andrea!”’

  Andrea went with Una to visit Minna. She was living in Slough in the ‘dreadful little villa with hideous furniture’ of her aunt by marriage, Audrey Nash. The pictures on the walls were by her aunt’s two stepsons, Paul and John Nash. Minna Una described as

  a grim horror that must be seen to be believed, her bedclothes and night-clothes soaked with stains of unmistakeable origin and odour. She refuses to wear the proper pads saying they make her look stout. Her drawn and raddled face plastered with paint. Her girlishly curled hair, her allusions to things a decent old woman should have forgotten, her preoccupation with things of vanity and the body. The will to live at every cost. It is no affair of mine.

  Going home in the car, Una asked John, ‘Do you think I could get like Minna?’

  John felt disconnected from it all. She thought only of Evguenia. ‘I cannot go anywhere or do anything without it seeming to have some bearing on you.’ The Beauty of the moon over the marsh and on the sea that separated her, hurt her. ‘Everything I see I refer to you in my mind – wanting to share it with you.’ She tried to be less possessive. She was pleased when Evguenia went walking in the Alps with Lysa, but she was jealous too. She feared that by some chance Evguenia might re-meet a young man she once had loved. When the papers gave news of a train crash in France with forty dead, John felt physically sick.

  With Una she now had less than half a life. Loyalty meant no more than not leaving her. Una became a mass of insignificant symptoms of illness. John viewed her with pity and anxiety and called her a burden. Her life was letters to and from Evguenia, Evguenia’s visit in September, their reunion in Florence in the autumn.

  And Evguenia, it seemed, was missing her and wanting to be with her. John referred to her dear, tender and consoling letters. Evguenia told her how she was more calm and normal because of separation from Una, of how she missed John’s weatherbeaten face and the comfort of her love. ‘If only Johnnie would appear on the path’, she wrote when she went walking in St Malo with Lysa. She asked what John wanted for her birthday on 12 August. ‘There is nothing you can give me,’ John replied, ‘except a baby Chink made by me. When we come together again in the Autumn then you shall give me my birthday present – clasped in my arms my beloved.’

  John was ‘beside herself with joy’ when on 25 August Humbert Wolfe at the Home Office granted Evguenia an annual visa that allowed her to stay in England for six weeks at a time. She had taken him to lunch at the Berkeley. Even her anti-Semitism faltered. ‘Never again will I speak against the Jews for Humbert is a Jew.’ It seemed like an omen of freedom. Evguenia was to come on 28 September ‘to your John’s own country England!’ They would spend a night at the Lord Warden Hotel in Dover, then go to Brighton for a week together. John spoke of it as their honeymoon and bought a silk dressing-gown for herself in anticipation. ‘Thank you good & kind saints Anthony and Expedite for answering John’s prayers. Oh I bless you and cherish you my own little stray white Russian who has found a place in my heart.’

  But the saints had a different agenda. On 26 August John slipped on the doorstep at the Forecastle. She fell with her right ankle under her. She was in great pain. Una and Annie the maid got her upstairs to bed. Una could not get hold of the doctor. He did not arrive until midnight. He said there was no broken bone and advised cold compresses. John’s main thought was to spare Evguenia anxiety. She wrote reassuring letters. ‘Nothing matters but your love and your darling sympathy.’ X-rays taken six days later revealed multiple fractures. She was taken by stretcher and ambulance to the London Clinic. A Dr Taylor tried to reset the bones under anaesthetic. John became very ill. She vomited for six hours.

  Andrea phoned the news to Evguenia, who wanted to come and take care of John. John wanted very much to see her. ‘If only the door would open and you would come through it. Separation in illness is past all bearing.’ She feared Evguenia might leave her if she became a mass of ailments. Una did not leave her for a second. She seemed to consume her now she was hurt. She kept saying, ‘I suppose if Evguenia had been here she would have known we ought to have had an x-ray at once.’ Her fussing irritated John. ‘She finds fault with me at every turn’, Una wrote in her diary. ‘It has been a hard day and an unhappy one.’

  Evguenia came a week earlier than planned. Una met her at Victoria Station and set about making her life intolerable. Evguenia wanted to take presents for John to the clinic. Una said there was no time to get them from her luggage. To eclipse Evguenia’s flowers, she filled John’s room with pale pink rosebuds. She dashed out for the fondants Evguenia forgot. She made a great display of replacing the engraved platinum wedding ring John had given her in 1915 and which had split. She asked John to put the new ring on her finger. ‘When I have left you, God have you in his special care and bless the ring I have put on your finger’, John said.

  Evguenia found reasons not to sit with them all day. She chose to eat at her hotel, saying she liked the food. Una told John this was proof that Evguenia was uncaring, selfish and self-centred. John burst out about the atmosphere Una created. She wept with grief at the prospect of losing Evguenia. ‘My every thought is with you,’ she wrote to her. ‘Oh don’t feel jealous of Una – don’t.’ She walked in the corridor of the clinic but was exhausted after it, her pulse too high.

  In Rye Una had the cobblestones in the lane by their house paved and smooth carpet laid in the house. Evguenia proved an indispensable nurse. She helped John manoeuvre the stairs and cheered her. ‘I can’t lean on a flea like Una’, John said. ‘I seem to get on John’s nerves’, Una wrote. ‘It is difficult to believe that she cares for me at all or that I have any reason in her life.’

  Insult provoked Una. She again belittled John’s new book, told her it was as worthless as Emblem Hurlstone and that Ladye would flood her with the real book when the time was right. John cried at such discouragement. By damning her writing and her love of Evguenia, it was as if Una was draining her of life.

  Because of visa restrictions, Evguenia went ahead to Paris on 24 October. John and Una followed with a Nurse Bright. There were gales on the Channel and the Golden Arrow was delayed. Mary the dog got bitten by an Alsatian. At the Gare du Nord, Una and the nurse could not get John and her wheelchair off the train. John had lost strength in her undamaged leg and seemed in a state of collapse. A porter said they would all end up in a siding.

  In Paris Dr Fuller said John was nervously exhausted and Una in a hysterical state. They could not get four adjacent sleeping berths on the train for Italy until 10 November. John worried that the weather was too cold for Evguenia. In Florence they all booked in at the Hotel Gran Bretagne. Evguenia kept to her room, studied after breakfast and went to bed at eight-thirty in the evenings. Una beat on her door and told her she was neglecting John. Evguenia felt she wanted to scream.

  She found a flat for herself in the via dei Benci. It was on two floors of the Palazzo dei Fossi and had several small rooms and a blaze of sun. John began walking with difficulty and
with the aid of two sticks. She had no enthusiasm for moving with Una to their flat at 18 Lungarno Acciaiuoli. Una was energetic at furnishing it. John’s only interest was in Evguenia’s place. She could not bring herself to speak to Una and recoiled if Una touched her. ‘She denigrates and ignores me and tells Evguenia how wonderfully she gives medicine or plumps a pillow.’ John implored Una to be nicer to Evguenia. ‘Whatever she is she is as she is and good or bad I need her.’

  They all had stuffed turkey for Christmas and their usual prayers. On New Year’s Eve Evguenia took offence at Una’s insults and flounced out back to her flat. John asked Una to phone and persuade her to return. When Una complied, she thanked her for being so generous.

  34

  Never mind Una

  John’s inability to choose between Una and Evguenia seemed like manipulation. She was omnipotent but dependent as a child. She bought two bullfinches, one for Una, one for Evguenia. She called them Caterina and Bambino and put them in a cage. When they started pecking each other to death she separated them.

  For a while in Florence it seemed as if compromise was achieved. Evguenia studied Italian, art and typing, liked her flat and invited students back to it. Una sniped. ‘Of course this “study” is all balderdash and will lead to nothing ever.’ But it was from a distance and Evguenia was spared her perpetual presence. And John no longer insisted that she share her every waking hour.

  Una had a perfect apartment in her favourite city. She decorated it as a showcase of status. If not quite a home with John it was a triumphalist snook at Evguenia. John assured her she would never leave her but she asked her nastily if she intended wearing sandals until she was seventy, and when she wanted her shoulders massaged told her to get Maria to do it. Una thought of all John did so eagerly for Evguenia, even frictioning her hair to make it grow.