The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  In January 1943 the weather was cold, with snow and icy rain. Una foraged for food. She plodded to the shops and the market for sheep’s heads, liver, kidneys, tripe and tongues, rabbits, ox tails and cows’ heels. She bought black market cream and chickens and gammon rashers and Golden Syrup from the nuns. John wanted none of it. She was extraordinarily tired, had no appetite, kept running a temperature and had both constipation and diarrhoea. Dr Manners was repeatedly called. He told John not to leave her room.

  Evguenia saved days of leave so that she could visit at the end of February. She reserved her room at Mrs Widden’s. John wanted her to have all meals at the Wayside. Una complained that she had no ration book and she was not going to allow her John’s butter and sugar. John wanted to give her their chocolate.

  While John stayed in the warm Una went alone in a north wind to meet Evguenia. She waited for three buses. Evguenia was not on them. She had gone straight to Mrs Widden.

  There a veritable spectacle awaited me. Her hair permed into a dry frizz, sticking out wildly behind one ear, behind a slouch hat imitating that of the Canadian army. The hair, moreover, is now dyed a golden auburn and when the hat was later removed was seen to have become so thin that it is combed over an almost bare scalp. She now makes up her lips in the derrière de poule style. The eighteen-guinea coat is a dyed cat. She has grown very much fatter.

  Delighted to see her, John stopped being an invalid. They went shopping and had coffee with women from the badminton club. Excluded, Una sat by the fire and remembered the ‘dreadful and desolate days’ when John and Evguenia were together in Paris and she was alone.

  The memory of when John’s one thought was to find all her relaxation and pleasure away from me. I still feel a sick little sadness when, as soon as this heartless and worthless woman comes over the horizon, I feel that John wants to know me safe and well but not there. That when I am there her pleasure is spoiled. It is just the feeling that while to me she is all sufficing and my sun rises and sets only on her, to her there is still attraction in this worthless creature. She still thrills to the slightest most patronising expression of affection or interest and sits gazing lovingly at her really repellant face.

  Evguenia read John’s manuscript of The Shoemaker of Merano. She asked for a signed photograph of her and wanted to know when they could meet in London. She feared John had cancer. She had tried on a previous visit to talk to Dr Nightingale but was made to feel she was meddling. ‘I sealed my mouth ever since’, she said. Dr Anderman, sacked by Una for his frankness, was no longer consulted.

  John cried when Evguenia left. Una busied herself getting a boiling fowl, a dozen eggs, pork chops and clotted cream, but John could not stand the sight of any of it. She felt sick and had ‘agonizing haemorrhoids’. Nightingale advised a barium X-ray of her gut. Una summoned a Dr Harper from Barnstaple who diagnosed a severe chill, which Una thought she had got from going to early mass in an unheated church.

  Nights became a misery of pain. John was alternately dosed with kaolin and laxatives. Una got no sleep. She hired Nurse Baldwin, a policeman’s wife, who called her My Lady. Evguenia wrote letters of anxiety and affection which John read again and again. She asked Una to write really nice replies but Una wrote nothing.

  On 9 April 1943 John for eight hours had excruciating pain. Nightingale, late in the day, made an ‘agonizingly painful’ rectal examination. He said there was an almost total obstruction which might be haemorrhoids and ‘might be something more serious’. He wanted her to go to Barnstaple hospital. Una insisted on London. But none of the hospitals would let her have a bed too and she would not be separated.

  With John’s money she could buy what she wanted. She booked a suite at the Ritz, five guineas a day for two bedrooms, sitting room, bathroom and wc. A Daimler ambulance was to take them there on 11 April. Nightingale said to Nurse Baldwin, ‘I don’t envy you the journey tomorrow.’ Late at night he pushed painkillers through the letterbox of the Wayside. Una found them at four in the morning.

  The landlord Jack Hancock helped get John into the ambulance. The journey to London took seven hours. At the Ritz Dr Armando Child said a colostomy was inevitable. He returned with a surgeon Cecil Joll. He told John he would operate next day at a private nursing home in Hadley Wood run by Lady Carnarvon. He said it might be a temporary colostomy but he could not say more until he had opened her up.

  Evguenia went to the Ritz that night. In the morning Father Geddes from the church at Farm Street anointed John. In the afternoon Una, Nurse Baldwin and Evguenia took her to the Hadley Wood nursing home. Joll operated at nine in the evening after his hospital work was done. It took him thirty-five minutes to do a colostomy. The anaesthetist was a Mr McGill. Joll then told Una the cancer was widespread and inoperable. He said if John pulled through, she would for a time feel better than for a long while.

  Had John died on Lady Carnarvon’s operating table, Evguenia would have been a rich woman. By the terms of John’s will, probated in 1938, she had, as she told Evguenia in many letters, made ‘ample provision’ for her. She had left her ‘a substantial income’. But John lived another six months. Una did not write regularly in her diary during those months. What happened in them was clear from later entries and from copies Evguenia kept of her letters to Una.

  John was seven weeks in the Hadley Wood nursing home. The place had ‘gone to pieces’, it lacked even rudimentary management, nursing was non-existent and John was the only and last patient. It suited Una, who had total control. John was in great pain. She had a second operation, ‘a terrible dilating operation’ Una called it. Una never left her. She slept on two armchairs by her bed. Her vigilance was unflagging:

  When you began to retch I would run to fill up the glasses with bicarbonate and water, while you waited in patient misery for the agonizing spasms to begin and continue till they exhausted you.

  I harried and urged you to get up, to lie on your side in bed, to move, to eat. I said your muscles would never get strength while you lay on your back, always, like a crusader on a tombstone. And you were hurt and angry … How I wish that Joll had told me honestly that your case was utterly hopeless and that I could let you do as you wish.

  Joll had told them both that she had inoperable cancer, a clear appraisal. It would have helped had someone insisted on efficient nursing care.

  How far Una harried and urged John about Evguenia, played on her anxieties of how she could not be trusted with money, would squander it on rash projects then be left vulnerable and ill, is not recorded. But her past and what followed indicted her.

  Lady Carnarvon sold her run-down nursing home. John was moved to a ‘ghastly’ place in Primrose Hill, then to the London Clinic and then at the beginning of August to a flat Una found in Dolphin Square, 502 Hood House.

  John’s demise was protracted and terrible. She was given Omnopon, an opium preparation, and Diamorphine – heroin. Her body, Una said, was wasted, shrunken and disfigured. She ‘scarcely knew day from night in the interminable cycle of hours of pain and sickness’. She unceasingly voiced her desire to die and thanked God when each day and each night was over. She told Una she was only sticking this illness for her sake. It was as if she needed her permission to die. Una had become her trial. She was always there and gave John no chance to see Evguenia alone.

  Armando Child told Una that she would break down if she kept this twenty-four-hour vigil. He also, more accurately, told her she was as strong as an ox. At the end of September he said John was dying and would go any day or more likely any night.

  On 28 September Una summoned Harold Rubinstein to the Dolphin Square flat. John revoked her previous will which gave Evguenia a substantial income and made another. It was very short:

  I appoint Margot Elena Gertrude Troubridge (known as Una Vincenzo Troubridge) to be Sole Executrix of this my Will and I Devise and Bequeath to her all my property and estate both real and personal absolutely trusting her to make such provision for our friend Eugenie Souline
as in her absolute discretion she may consider right knowing my wishes for the welfare of the said Eugenie Souline.

  It was witnessed by Armando Child and Nurse Sailes, who was Nurse Baldwin’s sister. Radclyffe Hall’s signature of endorsement sloped backwards as it used to when she was a child and she had hyphenated her name. Una was ecstatic.

  I saw your eyes as they looked at me after you had made your will and said, ‘I’ve left you everything’, the clear, blue happiness and as it were triumph in them. I think you realised how it crowned me and set me for ever before everyone, alone and apart as the one you had chosen, loved, proved and trusted, without rival or reserve.

  Such was Una’s projection. It was her own eyes that were clear, happy and triumphant if not blue. She was delivered of a wonderful weapon of revenge. She had described their triangle with Evguenia as like a classical image of purgatory. To the company of Sisyphus eternally pushing a rock up a hill and Tantalus reaching for unreachable fruit, could now be added Una, for ever taunting Evguenia with money promised but not to be acquired.

  Next day Una wrote in her diary: ‘My John is dying. She is going where I shall not see her or touch her hand or hear her beloved voice again until God allows me to join her.’

  The truth of why John changed her will in Una’s favour within days of dying is not told in Una’s diary. The new will was a document of befuddled faith, drugged exhaustion, or extraordinary change of heart. It gave a lie to the nine corrosive years of their triangle, the letters John had written to Evguenia, her obsession with her, her possession of her, her promises to her. It drew a line under the scenes John had had with Una about her, the depth of hatred Una felt for Evguenia, her pathological resentment of her, the stream of poison and vitriol that she poured out about her day after day, for nine long years.

  Evguenia wrote of how two days before John died she and Una stood either side of her deathbed. John united their hands over her and said, ‘You must be friends and live happily. I have provided for you both to live in comfort if not in luxury, but you Evguenia, must ask Una’s advice.’ Evguenia protested that she was a grown-up woman of forty. ‘John smiled and patted my hand. I did not say anything any more as she was very, very weak that day. It was only a couple of days before she died.’

  John was sixty-three. She knew she was dying. She had with Una a ‘last talk’ in which she said, ‘You’ll be good to that Russian I know.’ No doubt Una said, Trust me. In this talk Una obtained John’s permission to destroy the manuscript of The Shoemaker of Merano. She pleaded that it was about John’s love for Evguenia, destructive of their legend and too autobiographical to be art. But John had called this book the best of her work. Una gave a reciprocal promise that she would destroy her own diaries because of the criticism they contained of Evguenia.

  Una described John’s dying days as a time of joy and fulfilment. This, she said, was John’s Calvary. Suffering was her penance, an opportunity ‘to wipe out a thousandfold every moment of pain you ever caused me’. For nine years John had been beyond her control. Inoperable carcinoma of the bowel made her pliant. Her weakness gave Una scope for the breathtaking reconstruction of reality at which she excelled. ‘There was never an hour when I would not in my passion of love and pity and adoration have kissed the poor wounds that tortured and humiliated you even as those saints kissed the pitiful & wonderful wounds of Christ.’

  Una was exhilarated, ‘for ever certain that nothing and no one, except by my own act, could ever come between us or mar our unity’. Never, in life, had Una achieved such certainty of possession. Now she could control John and turn her into pure legend. In these dying days, in an opium haze, only Una had ever, could ever, would ever belong to John. ‘Today she said suddenly to me, “I want you, you, you. I want only you in all the world.”’

  They several times received Holy Communion together, with Una kneeling by John’s bed. Notes dictated to Evguenia and signed Your John did not signify:

  She looked up at me saying, I put Your John, but of course I’m not her John, I’m entirely yours. Only it wouldn’t be kind to change it and might arouse a feeling of jealousy, if you don’t mind my doing it.

  Needless to say I reassured her, touched to my soul that she should regard such trivial things as possibly hurting my feelings.

  Since 1934 John had written 576 letters to Evguenia, her Piggie Hall. They were all signed Your John. Same Heart, she called her. If they were all duplicitous Evguenia had been gravely cheated. But now, at the end, if John could not be sure to whom she belonged, Una would be sure for her. Absolute possession was in her grasp. ‘Never in all our twenty-eight years together has she given me such perfect assurance that of everyone on this earth I only am necessary to her. I alone have her entire love and devotion.’

  Radclyffe Hall went into a coma on 6 October. Evguenia visited in the evening and stayed half an hour. ‘John does not want her or anyone but me’, Una wrote. ‘My voice was the only one that reached her brain.’ Micki Jacob called but Una refused to let her see John. ‘I said that she had no right to prevent me.’ Una replied that she had every right.

  Dead and laid out, John looked, Una thought, like a medieval ivory carving of a saint, or like an airman or a soldier who had died of wounds. ‘Ivory clear and pale, the exquisite line of the jaw, the pure aquiline of the nose with its delicate wing nostrils, the beautiful modelling of eyelids and brow. Not a trace of femininity; no one in their senses could have suspected that anything but a young man had died.’

  God, supposedly, was in His senses. What reason could He find to refuse admission to the pleasure ground of paradise to this man, this husband, this war hero even, devoted to his wife for close on thirty years, who had confessed and repented the transgression of infidelity.

  ‘You were all mine when you went’, Una wrote of John. As was all the money – £118,000 excluding book royalties. Una slept the night beside the corpse ‘resting together in prone submission to the will of God, confident that nothing can ever divide us now’.

  MY JOHN, MY JOHNNIE

  38

  Mine for ever

  Una adapted well to John’s death and the inheritance of all her money. There were obituaries in The Times and the Telegraph. She arranged low mass at Westminster Cathedral and then a requiem mass at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Farm Street. About a hundred people attended, though few of the friends of former years. John’s coffin was placed next to Ladye’s in the vault at Highgate Cemetery. This did not imply their easy reunion. Una installed a marble slab inscribed with lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet ‘How do I love thee?’

  AND, IF GOD CHOOSE,

  I SHALL BUT LOVE THEE BETTER AFTER DEATH. UNA.

  She said if God came to her with the offer, You may have her back if you want to, she knew she ‘would have the strength to say, No, No, No, Lord. You keep her happy and safe for me’. The last decade with John had been extraordinarily punishing. All her love had been for Evguenia. With her dead and Evguenia so punished, Una was set free.

  She worked to regild the legend of their perfect love. ‘I feel I must leave an unequivocal record of our life and love, just as the Ladies of Llangollen did, to cheer and encourage those who come after us.’ John’s poor inverts, she felt, needed their role model of good relationship.

  Una called herself the ‘guardian of the lamp of John’s genius and our enduring love’. The first thing she did in this dual role was to burn The Shoemaker of Merano manuscript. ‘Such a decision rested exclusively with the writer herself and I had no alternative to that of honourably carrying out her wishes … I gave her my promise, and after her death I lost no time in carrying out that promise.’

  It was a heinous act. Worse than the consigning of The Well of Loneliness to the king’s furnace by Joynson-Hicks and his friends. They only delayed publication for twenty-one years. Una prevented it for all time. She left a fragment of the manuscript – about thirty pages. ‘There is nothing there to give away anything per
sonal & it is one of the loveliest things you ever wrote.’ It was enough to show the compelling tone of the writing, the fatal attraction of the main characters Ottfried and Ursule. Una also burned all Evguenia’s letters to John. She omitted to burn her own diaries, though when John was dying she had promised her she would do so. She could destroy John’s work but not her own. She had a great conceit about her diaries and enjoyed rereading and annotating them. They were, in her view, on a par with Pepys and she wanted their publication. Here she thought was ‘a fine record of a deep, loyal and lasting inverted love, and how triumphantly that love weathered all adversity’. And here, she said, chronicled as nowhere else, was the truth about John and Evguenia.

  My diary shows how entirely you subordinated your own desires to her needs, how when she became ill you became lovingly and eagerly her celibate nurse, night and day, how, in spite of my misery and jealousy I helped and supported you throughout. And how, in spite of your overwhelming infatuation for her, your deep and devoted love for me remained and survived it all … Darling, that record of mine must survive.

  And survive it did. After Radclyffe Hall’s death Una called her diary entries ‘Letters to John’. She addressed her in a tone of complicity as if certain of endorsement of all she said and did. John was now as Una thought she ought be. John, it now transpired, had thought Evguenia so dull she never knew what to talk about to her, but she was ‘fond of the poor mutt’. In her final illness ‘everything went completely into focus’. She and Una understood each other entirely. They decided to share the burden of Evguenia and ‘were perfectly happy over it’.

  Only Evguenia might contradict this version of events and Evguenia had no money or clout. Catholicism helped Una reshape the world. John had never been more all right than she was now: ‘You are with Him in Paradise. You are young, well, free and active. You can use your creative genius to its full extent and to the glory of God. It blossoms without obstacle. You are not lonely, you have me in your life.’ Una wished that they had had a ‘beloved and loving child of our own’ – a son, to whom eventually to leave all their treasures. She was not too forlorn about it. ‘It won’t matter when we are together’, she wrote.