Lord give me patience in tribulation and Thy grace truly to say Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The things that I pray for good Lord give me the grace to labour for. Amen.
And labour she did, though resolutions of kindness disappeared into the ether. Una was a formidable foe. Her determination was absolute. She had clung too long to the host for her tendrils to be prised free.
John took Evguenia to Rye for a night on 15 November. They arrived early evening. Una had set the scene. ‘I made the Forecastle put on all its war paint for Souline to see.’ Log fires blazed, rooms were lit by candlelight, there were flowers in jugs and pewter vases. In the dining-room Una’s shrine to Our Lady of Pity was lit by a tall red candle ‘with red carnations in the chalice and yellow chrysanthemums before her’. None of it, Evguenia knew, was for her benefit. It was a warning to back off.
‘A trois’ became a much-used phrase, as familiar as Our Three Selves. A trois they had tea and dinner, lunch at the Mermaid and visited Smallhythe. Evguenia was their protégée, a Russian refugee in their care. In the evening John took her again to the Folkestone Hotel.
Evguenia went back to Paris on 17 November. They were to be apart six weeks. John poured out desolate letters. ‘I feel as though the whole of me was bleeding, as though something vital had been torn away – and this wound will go on bleeding & bleeding until our next meeting, Soulina. Dearest –’
She kissed the bed Evguenia had slept in, gazed at her photograph and longed for letters. ‘You have made me a stranger to what was once my life, for now I have no life apart from you who have become my life – you greatly adored little Chink-faced Russian.’ At night she lay listening to the doleful sound of fog horns on the sea that separated them. She worried that Evguenia would drink spirits, or go out without galoshes. On a day when no letter came, she worried so much that Una phoned the American Hospital in Paris to check Evguenia was there.
This life that was now no life – life with Una – needed sorting out. Its determining rules had been violated. There were scenes which left them both shattered. There was a storm and Una felt as troubled as it. ‘Very sad and unhopeful. Fruitlessly thinking of happier days.’
Evguenia was John’s consolation for the trial of The Well of Loneliness, the failure of The Master of the House, the dead end of her feelings for Una. She said Evguenia had brought her back to life and because of her she could again work. But she needed Una to affirm this work. All that Una now did was with a view to ousting Evguenia. She used the novel John was writing, Emblem Hurlstone, as a weapon. She read it aloud and called it ‘the futile frittering of a bogus book, an excuse for writing about Evguenia’s mannerisms and characteristics, the man’s reactions to them and his passion for her’. Set in Sirmione, it was about a man liberated by the death of his mother and his love for a younger woman. Una undermined it. She told John it lacked inspiration and urged her to abandon it.
Una pretended affection for Evguenia. She sent her linen handkerchiefs. Evguenia reciprocated with preserved fruit. John told Una, ‘You are the wide river of my life. The others are tributaries.’ She believed that somehow they could be a family of three. It was the kind of family she knew: warring, manipulative and incestuous. Its bonding was to do with possession, sex, money and control. Roles were questionable. None of them was sisterly. Una was a mother from hell, Evguenia a difficult daughter, John a dubious father. If à trois was husband, wife and mistress, Una wanted preferential rights. She was resentful when the doorbell rang and John said to her, ‘Soulina there’s someone at the door.’ Evguenia complained of feeling like a stray dog, of not knowing where she belonged.
Evguenia now wore the ring John gave her. She was told to tell Mrs Baker it came from Una. John encouraged dependency and exerted control. Evguenia’s rent and the concierge’s wage were paid by banker’s order, she had an allowance of £10 a month, she was to use Petrol Hahn on her hair – ‘Honest darling, your hair is almost non-existant’ – she was not to use red lipstick, wear grey or green or stay out late.
John’s ‘heart turned over’ when Evguenia got a Christmas cheque from Mrs Baker. And she panicked that a Franco-Russian military pact might lead to her expulsion from France. She asked Rubinstein to get English naturalization for her. He said she would need five years’ residence before it would be considered. He thought France would grant citizenship if she kept working at the American Hospital. With it, she could visit England for months at a time.
John could not now tolerate being alone with Una. Christmas at the Forecastle was a ritualistic affair: candles and plum pudding, a crib and angels on the tree. Una at her twentieth midnight mass with John prayed for a resolution of her difficulties. ‘The way out is quite beyond my unaided guidance.’ John prayed for citizenship for Chinkie Pig.
They both went to Paris in January 1935. John wanted to arrange Evguenia’s French naturalization and find her a flat that would reflect her new status. ‘Una wants to come with us,’ she told her: ‘She adores looking at flats & houses. I think that it will be kind of you if you let her come around with us – it will give her a lot of fun & pleasure.’
Evguenia met them at the Gare du Nord. They all stayed at the Hotel Lutétia in boulevard Raspail. John gave her presents of satin trousers, stockings, pyjamas, a beret, scissors in a red leather case, an ivory hand mirror. They had supper à trois then Una went to bed with chest pains and breathlessness. ‘I am perpetually anxious these days and with good cause. I live in a state of fear of what more will have to be met and suffered. This girl is being brought right into our lives, daily and hourly, so our old and treasured companionship, à deux, hardly seems to exist.’
She hoped that the more John saw of Evguenia the sooner she would tire of her. She scrutinized Evguenia to find fault: she was dull, childish with no looks, no brain, ‘madly in love with John as is only natural’. She found John’s ‘doting infatuation’ intolerable, the way her eyes followed Chinkie Pig about, the way she registered her every word and action: ‘the devotion that for twenty years was all mine, overflowing for someone else, and a woman years my junior who has never been to John all that I have been. It hurts and hurts and is never for one waking moment out of my mind and heart.’
John promised not to leave Una alone all day and night. They would see friends together. But promises were glancing words. Natalie rang, wanting to see them. Una told her John was testing a secretary. She visited alone. Nadine Wang, Natalie’s cook, chauffeur, secretary and lover was there. She had been a colonel in the Chinese army. Romaine was in America and Natalie planned to join her. Dolly Wilde called in, ‘haggard and much aged by her career of dope’. John and Evguenia joined them all for supper. Evguenia was explained as a friend in need of help. A trois they went to a party of Natalie’s, to the ballet Spectre de la Rose, to dinner at Antoine’s with Sergei Lifar, to a Russian gala of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music.
John spent mornings with Una. She fussed about her heart and how emaciated she looked, told her not to go out in the cold, and to eat soup. ‘I don’t want only to be of interest when I am ill’, Una wrote. ‘which I sometimes feel is the case.’ She wished she had died in 1932 after her hysterectomy with the peaceful conviction that love was intact. John phoned her from Evguenia’s flat and sent plants and flowers to the hotel. They were tokens of guilt. When with Una she longed for Chinkie Pig.
Her mind never seems to leave the girl for a moment. It is Russia, the Russians, the Soviet, the old Russia, Russian music, Russian art, Soulina, her looks, her clothes, her voice, her opinions, her naturalisation, her past, her present, her future, all roads lead back to the same name and face. If we look in shop windows, what would suit her, if we go out anywhere, would she have liked it, and what a pity she was not asked. When she went today, I just frankly had my cry out.
Una heard a thud from the hotel wardrobe and thought it must be Ladye sympathizing. She then had her soup, corrected proofs and walked the Paris streets.
Una had always lived v
icariously through John. Now she lived vicariously through John’s relationship with Evguenia. At sessions with Mrs Leonard she had suffered the intensity of John’s relationship with Mabel Batten. Now she suffered the intensity of her relationship with Evguenia. Alone together neither talked of anything else. Behind the humiliating of Una, itself a strange projection, was a test of strength, a battle for control. John had never spent a day or night alone. Her personality was precarious. She needed Una’s validation for everything she did. Una had not served Mabel Batten, she had usurped her. She intended to do the same with Evguenia, however long it took.
John told Una that she would not leave her, that she wished to be with her yet not with her, that her own pleasure was marred by Una’s unhappiness. Una told John that she loved her entirely, faithfully, exclusively, that in all the world nothing and nobody counted except for her. ‘But how can I not suffer and be unhappy when after all these years of perfect union she imports a third and dotes upon her?’
Una was not going to leave or be left. She was not going to relinquish the money and lifestyle that were hers. She called herself the fixed star. However ghastly life had become, ‘everything else shrivels away in comparison to fear of separation’. John said to her, ‘the girl has me physically absolutely’. Una translated this as an attraction that would pass.
Often she accompanied John to Evguenia’s door. ‘It always seems all wrong, a sort of illusion when I walk or drive away leaving her with someone else and every time it makes me unhappy afresh.’ She went to the British Consul to obtain an annual visa that permitted Evguenia to visit Britain as often as she wished for a month at a time. ‘So there is another obstacle removed by me.’ She walked back to the hotel with a constricted chest, ‘as if there was a string round it’. She went with John to a solicitor Georges Hollander at 41 rue Condorcet to try to arrange Evguenia’s French naturalization. She helped choose a black brindle bulldog called Boulinka as a present for her. It had distemper and was sick on Evguenia’s bed.
What was planned as a stay of ten days in Paris extended to two months. John talked of residing in France, of going to the Riviera, of Evguenia getting work there. Una feared the financial and emotional dependency John was encouraging. She thought her demoralized by idleness. John disliked to be reminded of work or her literary career. She was no longer interested in Ladye, Mrs Leonard, or religion, except to ask St Anthony for help with Chinkie Pig’s naturalization, and she never now read a book or wanted Una to read to her. ‘Holy Mother of God, where will this thing end and where is it leading us?’ Una wanted to know.
John told her, ‘You’re quite right, I really don’t want to do anything in the world but play around with that girl.’ Una marvelled that the greatest living English novelist, whose whole life had been dedicated to genius, beauty, loyalty and profundity, could be in thrall to ‘a completely uninteresting, no worth little mediocrity, who even sometimes goes so far as to criticise her and find fault with her in my presence’. Evguenia, she said, ‘has no idea that she has been privileged to touch the hem of greatness’. She lacked ‘even the dawning of an understanding of genius’. Evguenia had suggested John write a film script to make money. John said she found her refreshing. Which Evguenia was. It had proved a trial for Radclyffe Hall to try to live up to Una’s projection of her. Perhaps it was like living a lie. Perhaps playing around with this girl made her feel more real.
The plans John made extended to winter and beyond. They were all built round Evguenia, her problems with visas and statelessness, the need to be with her. Una, who feared separation for even a day, was to tag along. She was to shuttle between England and Paris then go with them to the South of France for an indeterminate time. Before leaving Paris for London and Rye, John remarked that Evguenia’s clothes were shabby. Una helped choose a model coat from the Samaritaine de Luxe and half a dozen hats to be sent to Evguenia’s flat for her to try on.
31
How long O Lord, how long
Alone in London with Una at the end of March, John inveighed against the climate, traffic, theatres. She gave up the London flat to save on rent and servants’ wages. ‘O for the south and you, sunshine heat and you’, she wrote to Evguenia. ‘Don’t you know that I am keeping myself free in order to be near you?’ She saw her accountant and stockbroker and found she would pay no income tax if she stayed out of England nine months of the year. She arranged for the bank to increase Evguenia’s allowance to 2,050 francs a month and told her not to let her Russian friends wangle the money out of her. In daily letters she fussed that Evguenia must eat two hot meals a day, keep her flat well heated, wear her fur coat, not sleep with her head near the window, travel on buses or go to cinemas, must ‘beware of polotics and of all those fools who meddle in polotics’ and ‘remember she was a White Russian and hold her tongue’.
Evguenia must also hold her tongue about what she was up to with John. She now played table tennis with Natalie’s lover Nadine Wang. ‘Please, oh, please be jolly cautious what you say to her or before her. She is the person above all others who simply must not suspect our relationship. Via her and Natalie it would be all over Paris in 24 hours.’
‘France and Russia can do no wrong’, Una complained. John told her she wanted to be free of any ties that separated her from Evguenia. In London the two of them shopped for their journey south à trois: trousers, panamas and shirts for John who had put on weight and could not get into last year’s clothes, a brick-red dress for Evguenia, a white rabbit coat for Una.
Una was glad to go home to Rye if only for four weeks. Mabel Bourne had lit fires, the garden was full of daffodils, narcissi and primroses. Una dared to hope that what had been her life might be restored. She woke to birdsong and to sunshine on the pear blossom and the marsh. Together she and John gardened and went to mass. But one morning she caught her crying because she was missing Evguenia so much. John asked her if she would keep the house if she ‘lost’ her. Una supposed she meant by death. It would be her only possible refuge, she said. Her heart palpitated. Dr Curtis was called and prescribed bromides.
Disheartened by Una’s criticism John gave up on Emblem Hurlstone. She began The Sixth Beatitude which featured Rye landscapes and their working-class neighbours in Hucksteps Row. There was no hint of Evguenia in it and Una thought it inspired. ‘God has spoken and I feel we shall come to a safe port.’ She read it aloud and praised the descriptions of marshland and river, the snow over Rye, the smallpox epidemic, the demolition of cottages.
Life fleetingly seemed back to normal. ‘I scarcely dare to think it though, or set it down.’ John bathed in Una’s enthusiasm, called her ‘the womb of my spiritual children’ and said she owed her career to her. She warned Evguenia of the competition: ‘I wonder how you would endure being with me when I am working at this terrific pressure? I am irritable – I can’t eat my food, and sometimes I just fly out over nothing. I know this you see, but I simply can’t help it. Una has had to endure it for years.’ Evguenia offered to type the manuscript. Una kicked out. ‘If she was to trespass on that ground also I might as well retire or offer my services to an orphanage.’ She was the architect of John’s career, her amanuensis, reader and muse.
Fear of abandonment haunted her. The trials of John’s childhood became hers. The Sixth Beatitude was, she sensed, a valediction. John did not now want Rye if Evguenia was not there. They packed for France:
Lord how every fibre of me shrinks and winces about this fortnight ahead when I shall be left alone to think and think. And then after a bare month it will begin again. And John petting and spoiling and pandering to moods and holding her hand …
O please God bring me back with John some day to this darling cottage with perfect and complete union between us two and Ladye and no intruder or outsider between us.
Evguenia met them at the Gare du Nord. John had reserved rooms for them all at the Hôtel Lutétia. She disappeared with Evguenia as soon as they arrived. Una was left alone to think and think. John would
not leave her, but she did not want to be with her. She wanted her there and yet not there and to approve of a relationship that excluded her. Una’s strategy was to watch, wait and erode. She accompanied them whenever she was allowed. With nuance and glance she let Evguenia know how intolerable she found her. She sniped at her while adulating John.
All that John paid for she sought to control. She had loved Evguenia in her uniform of service, her starched white coat and cap, evocative of Nurse Knott. But she disliked her taste in civilian clothes. Now Una was there, siding with John, undermining Evguenia’s appearance, letting her know by look, innuendo or with startling rudeness that her preferred hat ‘accentuated every defect of her face, its breadth and flatness and the heavy square jaw’.
Evguenia had her adenoids out before the journey south. A trois they selected her suite with bathroom and lavatory at the private clinic of Dr Ruand. Una ‘grieved thinking of the communal wc, only one on each floor, for my 16 guinea room in Welbeck Street’. Una was Lady and Wife: Evguenia should not have parity when it came to lavatories.
Evguenia lay in her private rooms with her nose bandaged. John sat by her, plagued the doctors, bought her grapes, strawberries and a gramophone, played their favourite song ‘The Very Thought of You’, hired a night nurse. ‘She hovered over me like a hen over her chickens but too much so,’ Evguenia wrote. Back at the Lutétia Una complained endlessly of the violation of the perfection of their union, warned that she, Una, was ‘the perfect complement of John’s being’ and urged that a brake be put on money spent.
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Page 31
