John divided her time between them. But keeping them separate was not what she wanted. She could not abide by it. This was her family and she thought it ought be united. She cried when Evguenia had a cold and refused to come to Lungarno Acciaiuoli to be looked after. She wanted her to work as her secretary, ‘that way you would have earned your £300 a year and I would have been spared hearing that you want your own money. You are mistaken if you think that Una would have opposed your working as my secretary. Only of course you would have had to let her help you a bit to get into the work and this I suppose you would not have liked.’
The American publisher Covici-Friede invited John to write her autobiography. At first Una encouraged this to divert her from The Shoemaker of Merano. She typed twenty pages of Forebears and Infancy, but then went off this idea too. She feared revelations about women whom John had loved and wanted none of it aired. She told her to ‘write the thing privately for eventual publication after we are all gone’. John protested that the Merano book contained her best style and writing and she wanted to dedicate it to Evguenia. Una objected with corrosive persistence: it was not a true idea, it lacked inspiration, John would make no progress while Evguenia was in her life.
Every task except writing to Evguenia is a burden. She does not answer letters to the public. She does nothing about her translations or reprints. All her ideas vanish into thin air. All is dead sea fruit. God only knows when the phoenix of her talent will rise again from the ashes of the ruin. Art is a jealous goddess and does not admit of a divided allegiance.
Una and Art went hand in hand. She described herself as fostering John’s talent ‘with night and day care and solicitude’. It was only elements of this talent she would foster. All that opposed her she would in time destroy. She undermined The Shoemaker of Merano and called it too personal. It was life, she said, of a worthless sort, not art. But all of Radclyffe Hall’s writing was autobiographical. She seldom invented. The Shoemaker of Merano explored the hold of one person over another. It was without religious zealotry and on a par with The Unlit Lamp.
Una could not deny or destroy John’s letters to Evguenia. Into them went the voice of desire that the government forbade, her complex fractured personality, her obsessive love, her intolerance of the will of others and, after many destructive years, her slow disillusion with how the world was.
John packed her suitcase each week and went to stay with Evguenia. It was no solution. The problem was about commitment and trust. And Una pursued her. She complained that she was compromised in the eyes of their Florentine friends and her cousins, the Tealdis. She went to mass at the Santa Trinità and prayed for John’s release from purgatory and her restoration to genius and honour. She phoned to let John know she had bruised her leg after falling over a tramline in the via dei Fossi. Life, she said, was now made up of lies and subterfuge ‘and I a lover of truth compelled to be a master dissembler’.
February was the ninth anniversary of the concordat between the Vatican and the Fascist party. At 18 Lungarno Acciaiuoli they hung out the papal flag. John and Una went to a Wagner concert at the Communale. They heard the music Hitler listened to while composing his speeches: the Meistersinger prelude, the Parsifal prelude, Das Rheingold.
In Florence there was elaborate road mending, decoration of the streets and preparations for a visit of the Duce and Hitler. The Commune fixed flag irons to John and Una’s windows. Una loved the beflagged streets, the swastikas, the black banners with the gold fasces, the heraldic devices on stathes tipped with gold spears and axe heads.
Their neighbour, Signor Lumbroso, was put in prison for three years. He had circulated an anonymous pamphlet protesting against Hitler’s visit and plan to annexe the Tyrol. ‘Horrified recipients rushed off with it to the Questora’, Una said. It was traced to Lumbroso’s typewriter. Una called him a fool or a knave and commended the Duce’s planned legislation against Jews: ‘they have been found to be at the back of all the centres of anti-fascism. The truth is that as citizens of any country they are impossible and cannot be trusted.’
John went with Evguenia to the station to see Hitler’s train pass through. With Una from the windows of their apartment she watched the cordons of soldiers and blackshirts, the military processions, the police on motor cycles and then, standing in a slow-moving car, the Duce and Hitler, the Duce ‘with the kindest most beautiful smile on his face’. She and Una yelled Duce Duce until they could yell no more.
In England Anthony Eden resigned from the Cabinet and was succeeded by Lord Halifax. Europe seemed in turmoil and on the edge of war. John too was in turmoil. She lost all confidence. She pleased neither Evguenia, Una nor herself. Her eyes tormented her and she walked with a limp. She had lower back pain and looked ill. She was tense when the phone rang and slept only with drugs.
Neither work nor love now anchored her. She believed she had sinned as when she was with Ladye and that the purgatory she felt herself to be in was payment due. ‘I would like to sleep for a very long time,’ she told Evguenia, ‘& then wake up near Ladye who was always so patient, so kind & so wise.’
In April Evguenia called in a state to see John, asked Una to leave them alone, then read out a letter from the French authorities. She was no longer eligible for French citizenship because she had left France within three years of making her application. John’s protection, her ignorance of French domiciliary law, her insistence that Evguenia live in a warm climate, had all conspired to spoil her chances. Miserable and contrite, John prayed in seven churches and to her relic of the true cross.
Evguenia went back to Paris in June, angry at what she saw as the destructive consequences of John’s control. She took and failed the entrance exam for the Sorbonne, then resumed nursing at the American Hospital so as not to lose her work permit. Though her pay was only thirty francs a day plus lunch, she stayed at the Hôtel Vouillemont in rue Boissy d’Anglas, wore pearls and designer suits and subsidised her Russian émigré friends.
John hated Florence without her. The flat which had seemed so perfect to Una was now too hot for John. The noise of an ice-making machine in a nearby restaurant stopped her working or sleeping. She was infected with restlessness. As in the previous year, she proposed that she and Una spend the summer in Rye. Evguenia would come for a holiday, then they would all winter in Florence. Evguenia could have her separate flat and do a course at the university.
For herself and Una she found a new flat at 8 via dei Bardi. It had marble floors, amazing views, an immense study and loggia. She took a lease on it from October on and wrote to Evguenia that she would adore it. It was so much the flat for a writer, she said, and wished they could live in it together. It was cheap because its owners, the Mortaras, were Jewish and hounded out of Italy.
Evguenia replied that she would not return to Italy in the winter and that never again would she live in the same town as Una. She intended to resit the entrance exam to the Sorbonne in November. She wanted her own home and a life for herself. Their relationship would have been different had John been free but she was not. John had this splendid flat with Una. The situation was impossible and she could not cope with Una’s hatred. John implored and cajoled:
Can we never get away from Una and think only of ourselves? Even if she did hate you, which I absolutely deny, can’t my adoration for you make up for any hatred in the world? What does it matter so long as we two love each other? Oh, I know that it would be happier for you if my circumstances were different – if I were free; I know this and I sympathise with all you feel: but am I to be sacraficed to my circumstances? No my honey-sweet, you cannot, you will not do this thing. Why can’t we be at peace – Oh, give peace to your poor John who loves you. I can’t eat, or sleep, let alone work, for my heart is never certain or at rest. Would it help at all if you tried to look upon me as a man who was already married when we met? Had I been a man I should have married Una and then met you and loved and loved you and forced you to love me back – as I have done. The result wo
uld have been that I could not have divorced a faithful Una even had I wished to. She on her part would never have divorced me, she is a Catholic & would not divorce Troubridge. So our situation would have been much the same as now, only with more scandle. There are many people living à trois here in this very town, I find, but they generally all manage to keep on terms. That is all you need do, just be on terms with Una. She matters so little to you really, you know – I do feel you give her undue importance …
There were conundrums, lies and leaps of logic. Una imputed Evguenia with cunning tactics. She thought her stance a ploy to get John for herself. Una knew that the problem of their triangle was now irresolvable. The point of its resolution had passed. Now, no side of it worked without the other. Una feared that if Evguenia left, John would be so desolate and their own relationship so intolerable she would have to let John go. John, when Evguenia withdrew, found it impossible to be alone with Una. She vented anger and disappointment on her. She told her she intended spending six months of the year with Evguenia.
Then my nerve went after these four weary years and I cried and stormed as I never thought or meant to do and could not get my control, while John raged that she would go away with Evguenia whenever she felt inclined. That she was going to Paris, would live there, that Evguenia should not be asked to live where she did not like.
Thus the well of woefulness. And the games people play.
The Forecastle seemed dead and the garden empty of flowers. Annie the maid was dour and there were moths in the carpet and in the rugs of the car. John did not want even to unpack. Her consolation was that Evguenia had agreed to join her for a fortnight’s holiday. She was to take her to Malvern, the place where she liked to declare love to her women, where she had lived with Dolly Clarke, then Mabel Batten and where with Una she had ‘broken faith’ with Mabel Batten in 1915.
Contrite that she had caused Evguenia to lose her chance of French nationality, she battled with the Home Office on her behalf. She told them Evguenia would never depend on the state because she guaranteed her in every way. She saw Harold Rubinstein and changed her will to make ample provision for her after her own death. Una professed to be glad. ‘I should not like any eventuality to leave the matter in my hands and so compel contacts I should rather avoid.’
John willed half her capital to Una and Evguenia. Dividends from the other half were to serve covenants for Mrs Visetti and the medical needs of them all. After the death of her beneficiaries that half of the capital was to go to the Sisters of the Poor Clares in Lynton.
At Smallhythe Edy Craig asked where Evguenia was. John said she was coming over on 15 August and that she was going away alone with her for a fortnight. She said Malvern was ‘too high’ for Una. Edy replied that it was not high at all. She wanted to know if John planned to leave Una. Olive Chaplin wondered how John would manage without her. ‘It was all to me inexpressibly humiliating, painful and degrading’, Una wrote.
John humiliated Una as she had humiliated Mabel Batten twenty-three years previously. It was hard to believe there was not some level of intended punishment, some score to settle, some test of acceptance or equation of revenge. When she left to meet Evguenia, Una spoke of writing to her while she was away. John said, ‘You aren’t going to pursue me with letters are you?’ Such notes as John then sent were instructions to a secretary. Una was to return John’s revised will to Rubinstein, check with the Home Office about Evguenia’s visa, check with Cook’s about Evguenia’s ticket to France. Alone at Rye Una found philosophical consolation. She interpreted events to suit herself and she apportioned blame:
I shrink under the consciousness that to outsiders we are just one of so many couples where the male dashes off to fresh fields and the female remains at home, enduring because she must, and trying to hide her hurts. And yet what is known, and will be assumed, is not the truth either, for no one will ever realise that in John fidelity and faithfulness go hand in hand. The physical never mattered to me anyway after the first misery and in any case was so small a part of our mutual devotion that it could be ruled out. Her spirit, through all the storms and suffering and angers, and through all Evguenia’s unceasing efforts to detach it, has been faithful to mine and this must be my consolation.
It was a stark admission. And it was just not true that Evguenia had pursued John. John’s efforts at detachment were on her own account.
On John and Evguenia’s return they all went to the Home Office. ‘Lord what a jam, jews, jews, jews waiting to know how and where to find refuge’, Una wrote. John convinced a Mr Perks that Evguenia was her ward and a major beneficiary of her will. An unconditional visa was granted that gave her resident alien status. John was euphoric. ‘I have no words to express my gratitude to God’, she said. But over tea Evguenia lamented how she had wanted a French passport and French nationality. She said she would have been all right if left to manage her own affairs. Una said, ‘Well you didn’t seem to have managed very well when we met you.’ A row followed.
Evguenia went back to France with Europe on the verge of war. The Duce expelled all Jews from Italy. John and Una listened on the wireless to Hitler at Nuremberg. ‘This stupendous and terrible pageant’, Una called it. They heard again the overture to Wagner’s Meistersinger, the shouts of ‘Heil, Heil, Heil’. ‘He is an hysteric,’ John wrote to Evguenia, ‘I think an epileptic, a patriot in the extreme sense of the word and a fanatic.’
Chamberlain went to Munich to appease Hitler; ‘God bless Chamberlain’, Una said. There was mobilization on land and sea. Gas masks were distributed in Rye. John lost pounds in weight worrying about Evguenia. She appealed to her to come to Rye at once. Roosevelt appealed to Mussolini and Hitler to settle disagreements by discussion. And then on 29 September Chamberlain, Mussolini and Hitler signed the Munich Agreement. War seemed to have been averted.
John and Una left for Florence within days. Evguenia met them in Paris. She had filled their rooms at the Vouillemont with flowers. She seemed resigned to working as a nurse as the price of independence. John had a small growth on her lip which a Dr Ries excised. She smoked eighty cigarettes a day but no biopsy was taken.
In Florence bells pealed and the air was like champagne. John and Una marvelled at the cheapness of everything and the elegance of their flat in via dei Bardi. They bought furniture for what seemed like no money: a fourteen-foot sofa in blue damask, a twelve-foot Renaissance refectory table, a Venetian carved and painted bookcase. They acquired a poodle called Fido, which had pustules between its toes and which hated their other dog, Mary. They displayed their photographs of Mussolini, d’Annunzio, themselves, Ladye and Evguenia, the ivory statues of St Anthony and the usual votive offerings. But John, when unpacking, found that a textbook on flowers of the Dolomites had been left in Rye. She blamed Una. She became grey, incoherent and gasping with rage. She threw things round the flat, gripped Una by the shoulders and threatened to throw her into the street.
Evguenia wrote reiterating what she had tried so many times to say. She would not be coming to Florence for the winter. John had her book to write. They would only quarrel and accuse each other. Evguenia truly wanted to change their relationship. John went into black misery. She cried for two days. Her eyes were bloodshot, the lids puffed out. She wanted to go to Paris. She sent a wire asking Evguenia at least to write, at least to let her know where she was. Una with ‘sheer hatred’ rang Evguenia. Evguenia then wrote that if John wished she would come for a few days, as Una suggested, but what purpose would it serve?
She came from 13 to 20 November. John booked her a room at the Gran Bretagne. On an evening together there Evguenia told truths that it hurt John to hear. She was more normal than John thought and she did not want to have sex with her any more. She felt uncomfortable at being in a same-sex relationship and wanted if possible to marry a man. She hoped they would stay friends, go on seeing each other and writing letters but she was adamant about not being in the same town with Una for more than brief periods. John sho
uld accept that she herself was not free.
John went to Una in despair. Only involvement with a man could explain such rejection. Evguenia must be having an affair with a Russian soldier. She wanted to kill him. She herself was not going to live without sex, she would get it where she could and did not care who with. Una told her she was fifty-eight and should exert self-control or she would make life hell for herself. They got to bed at two in the morning.
Una was worn out. She could not bear to witness John’s suffering and abasement, ‘the pain of her caring so intensely for another, the ever recurrent doubt how can her affection for me be anything but a habit and a sense of duty. Would she really care deeply if it were I whom she must lose? Life is no easy road to travel these days.’
John said she wanted to spend Christmas at the bottom of the Arno. There was to be no tree, no presents, no festivities of any sort. The lavatory overflowed, Mary was given away for yelping and incontinence and Pearl Buck won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Then Evguenia wrote that because John sounded so depressed and was ‘pig pining’ so badly, she would come out at Christmas, take her holiday and stay into the New Year. Una felt panic and despair. ‘In the weeks to come I shall owe any hours alone with John to Evguenia’s wish to be away from her or with others.’
John resurrected. She wired money to Evguenia, bought presents for her, filled the place with decorations and food: smoked salmon, anchovies, artichokes, turkey, mince pies, plum pudding, cake, marrons glacés, oranges, tangerines, bananas, grapes. ‘I do not think that even Evguenia will manage to consume it all’, Una wrote. ‘John urges me to get more and more.’
Evguenia was to arrive on Christmas Eve. At ten thirty in the morning she phoned from Torrino to say that snow in the mountains had delayed the train and she would not get to Florence until five thirty. Una had a heavy cold. She and John went to the station to check out this information. They were told no train would arrive until six forty-five. John would not believe this and insisted they go back to the station at five-thirty. She sat in a warm anteroom drinking rum grogs while Una ‘paced up and down the platform in the blast’. A train arrived at six, but Evguenia was not on it.
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Page 35