The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  Una and John went on ahead to the Riviera. Una carried Evguenia’s bulldog on to the train. The heat would not turn off in their compartment and the dog was not allowed in the restaurant car. At the Golf Hotel, Beauvallon Una bartered for rooms: an interconnecting suite with balconies, sea views and a private bathroom for herself and John, a small room with no balcony, no bathroom, for Evguenia.

  With John Una sunbathed and put on weight. She made herself indispensable and marvelled at chapter eleven of The Sixth Beatitude. She also kept up corrosive comment about Evguenia, called the affair trivial and banal and said that soon John would be ‘obligated to support the girl entirely in complete idleness’. She read Evguenia’s letters and hated John writing with a pen given by her. At night she lay contemplating ‘an endless future of John talking, writing, telegraphing and obsessing about this girl’.

  Evguenia did not want to leave Paris. She wrote of thoughts that came like black demons into her mind. She said she might have a nursing contract and that if she came she could only stay a month and would prefer to be in a pension and pay for herself. There were also problems over her work permit and identity card.

  John would not brook opposition:

  Pull yourself together Soulina … I am writing a Book. I love you and I need you – I can’t be happy here until you come. I’m the first artistic brain-worker that you have known intimately I think – and so probably you don’t understand the tension in which we creative people live during the time of creation. But you’ve got to try to understand it, my darling. No more cold discontented letters, please … Do you want to ruin a piece of fine work? … I do not want you to work before you join me … I gave plenty of money … What’s this rot about a pension and your only coming to me out here for a month and you paying for yourself – its the damnedest rot.

  You mustn’t play me up beloved. You belong to me now and I mean to have you … If I had you here I’d kill you with kisses … Someone has got to be the Master, my child, and I am going to be that person. There is only one will and that is John’s will.

  If John was the lesbian role model, if the ‘eyes of inverts worldwide were on her’ and ‘looked to her as their leader’, they were in for a tricky time. To ‘save John’s aching hand’, Una wrote telling Evguenia to go at once to the authorities about her travel permit, to get a doctor’s certificate for the vacation and to telegraph her progress.

  John met Evguenia on 14 June. They spent a night at the Hôtel Continental, St Raphael in rooms booked in Lady Troubridge’s name. Alone at Beauvallon Una went to the beach, put flowers and lavender water in Evguenia’s room and ‘marvelled at the infatuation my John can feel at this girl with a negroid face and eyes like currants’.

  There was the sun, the sea, the full moon, starry skies and palpable hate. The strain on Evguenia told. Caught in their stifling familiarity, she could not stand Una’s constant presence, her pulling of rank and putting her down, her sycophancy to John. She pointedly went out of earshot when Una read aloud John’s work. One morning John asked Una to go with Evguenia to the hairdresser while she herself worked. ‘The young girl shut me up very firmly when I began to explain to the assistant that the hair had been spoiled by permanent waving and must be treated carefully’, Una wrote in her diary. Evguenia went off on her own to explore Cannes. John searched for her, ‘berserk’ with worry. At dinner John told her not to eat a green plum. Evguenia ignored her. John ‘lost all control, leapt to her feet, slammed the table and shouted at her to leave the dining room’. Una said she would not have quarrels at mealtimes. John told her to shut up.

  On the beach, while Una watched, John talked to Evguenia in undertones, disappeared with her into the bathing cabin on the pretext of fetching things, caressed her ankles or hands. They all bathed naked. Una noted high shoulders, a thick waist, knock knees, feet spoiled by shoes, thin hair of no colour. ‘Beyond excellent teeth and a nice smile there is nothing at all.’

  Each night John elaborately got ready in clean pyjamas then made some pretext about needing to go and put Petrol Hahn on Evguenia’s hair. ‘Oooh I hate this camouflage, these transparent devices which are so unworthy of us both. I said suddenly, Why call it that darling? You’re going to sleep with her every night and I suppose it’s natural or does you good, or seems to. You know it and I know it.’

  John told Una she should take Evguenia into her life as she had done. Relationship for John was an aspect of self, three selves, four selves, one self. Una was an aspect of mirror image. What suited John must suit Una. That was the agreement of twenty years. John only saw things from her own point of view. She wanted to be alone with Evguenia. Una’s discontent ‘always spoils it a little’. At night, Una cried herself sick. She saw no way out of this snarl.

  I am always coming across things that hurt, the door I must not open, the letter I must not read, the thing I must not say, the caresses that are given elsewhere and not to me. She is the holiday the excitement and the pleasure and I am the tired old routine who offers nothing now. And John almost seems to expect me to dote on the girl as she does. The girl who fills my place in her arms. And God knows I wish her well, but He also knows how glad I should be if the girl were unharmed and John cured of this mania never to set eyes on her again.

  Thus à trois. There were occasional social evenings with Colette, Maurice Goudeket and Jean Cocteau, or Natalie and Romaine at their pinewood villa Trait d’Union at St Tropez. There was a party with Mimi Franchetti who invited Una to ‘have a little scandal’, there was champagne on the Princesse de Broglie’s yacht. But life’s dimension for John, Una and Evguenia was a claustration of watchfulness, jealousy and offence. Una dreamed of being turned out by John at three in the morning and told to return to England alone without a sleeping berth.

  All summer of 1935 they were closeted together floating through France and Italy from Grand Hotel to Grand Hotel. They moved from the Riviera to Sirmione. It was the same stinking air. This affair was in its second year. At the Albergo Catullo Una rebuked John for petting Evguenia at lunch. ‘She is unconscious of how far this infatuation carries her.’ John said she must have happiness and peace. She now shared a room with Evguenia. Una was beside herself and feared scandal.

  Their friend Micki Jacob, author of The Loaded Stick, No Easy Way, Honour’s a Mistress and Leopards and Spots, thought Una beautiful and spent a night in the garden under her window ‘pining with love’. Of Evguenia she said, ‘I simply loathe your young friend, she is a complete bitch.’ Una thought her disloyal to John and sent a scathing letter via Anita the maid.

  Evguenia missed friends of her own age and wanted to return to Paris. ‘John looked upon me as a child. She wished me to be a child. And she would not let me go away from her even for an instant. She wanted me to be constantly with her, near her. She said everything tasted better, seemed brighter when I was there and yet at the same time she coerced me.’

  Una wanted no independence. Evguenia cherished hers. She aspired to do something with her life, to study at the Sorbonne or start a business. She said that she loved John. She liked the style and plenty that now graced her life. But she could not tolerate being enclosed with Una, the constant attention, John’s obsessive caring, Una’s loathing. Three months with them made her ill. Her lungs began bleeding and she had eczema.

  Men were being conscripted in Italy. John bought black shirts for Una and Evguenia and they all wore Fascist ribbons in their lapels. Una called the Duce ‘the only great leader in the world today’. In her view he had every right to invade Abyssinia, ‘a barbarian, pagan country incapable of developing its own resources’. Italy, as she saw it, was small, and expansion essential to provide labour for its unemployed. She and John deplored opposition from Britain and the ‘dunderhead’ League of Nations. John called it ‘Black Monday’, ‘The Day of Shame for England’ when sanctions were imposed. She feared European war might separate her from Evguenia.

  Micki Jacob did not share their enthusiasm for the Duce. She was
Jewish, large, wore tweeds and clubbish ties and liked a drink. Una called her ‘openly and indiscreetly disloyal to fascism’.

  John hoped d’Annunzio would see her again. He sent gifts of onyx and topaz and a letter that began ‘Darling little sister’. John walked with Evguenia in his gardens with waterfalls, sculptures and an open-air theatre, but she did not intrigue him enough and no further meeting took place. John Holroyd-Reece told her d’Annunzio had ‘an obsessive fantasy about raping a virgin or any unwilling woman’.

  Una longed for Rye.

  Why are we not living at the Forecastle in peace, she working and I helping her as I always have with reading aloud and keeping worry and disturbance from her and both of us enjoying our ordinary pleasures, reading books, going to the theatres, entertaining, caring for animals and doing our small charities. It was never dull or dreary God knows. We shared the same tastes, had the same friends, and the common interest of her work and career and of our aims to do what we could to help our own kind.

  Una pondered their shared trials: Ladye’s death, the Fox-Pitt attack, The Well of Loneliness prosecution. ‘None of them once I knew John really loved me could really strike at the heart of me. But now the enemy has made its way into my innermost thoughts.’ In a succession of hotel rooms she rowed about ‘blemished fidelity’ and ‘those ethics which in The Well she tried to enunciate for others’. She rowed too about money. ‘Keeping a penniless young woman with a healthy appetite and luxurious tastes and a fierce disinclination to work is a large order.’

  ‘All my eggs dear Lord in that one basket’, Una wrote. She resisted and complied. Back in Paris she helped find a new flat for Evguenia – in rue d’Armaillé near the Place de Gaulle on the fourth floor. It was large and sunny with central heating. Una helped choose wallpapers and furnishings, then lunched alone. Evguenia loved the flat but one morning was forty minutes late returning to it. John and Una waited, John in an anxious rage. ‘You don’t seem to realise Johnnie that I have things to do’, Evguenia said. John threw books about the room. This, Una again hoped, was the beginning of the end.

  In October she and John returned to Rye. ‘Home to fires and candlelight.’ John finished The Sixth Beatitude. It had taken her six disrupted months to write and she called it her best book. Heinemann gave £1,000 advance for it. Audrey offered it to Harcourt Brace in America.

  Evguenia was to join them at Christmas. John found eight weeks’ separation intolerable, said she loved her more and more every day and controlled her every move with letters, phone calls, wires. Boulinka got diarrhoea. Evguenia had to get up to take him out in the night. John urged her to chain him in the bathroom, return him to the vet. Evguenia resisted. She liked the dog. John insisted. She said she had kept dogs all her life. Boulinka would be happier in kennels, he could not bond to one person. Evguenia suggested giving him to her friend Lysa. John would not agree so Boulinka went back to the vet. Evguenia was depressed at the loss. John thought her response ‘too childish’.

  Evguenia dreaded Christmas at Rye and ‘Una’s reactions’. John told her to remember Una was Irish and too old to change. She warned the walls of the house were thin and they would have to act ‘like sister and mother’. Evguenia wrote of wanting peace, and freedom from nerve strain. ‘Just now it seems if someone came and soothed me and took me away far, so far that not one human foot has ever been there – I’d say yes and follow’, she wrote.

  At first John thought Evguenia’s depression came from drinking spirits. She then panicked, phoned at half-hour intervals, feared she was with a man, and turned nasty:

  You belong to me, and don’t you forget it. You are mine, and no one elses in this world. If I left you for 20 years you’d have to starve. No one but me has the right to touch you. I took your virginity, do you hear? I taught you all you know about love. You belong to me body & soul, and I claim you. And this is no passing mood on my part – its the stark, grim truth that I’m writing.

  Much of the truth was stark and grim. Mrs Visetti was eighty, had pernicious anaemia and was in a London nursing home. Una bought a black suit – just in case. ‘My poor old mother’s death will not cause me grief’, John told Evguenia. Mrs Visetti’s doctor thought she would rally, return to the hotel where she lived, and ‘drag on for an indefinate time’. John knew nothing of her mother’s affairs. ‘Me she so hates & has all along, that I dare not question her. I don’t know who her solicitor is, or indeed if she has one … She’s so cruel – so terribly cruel Evguenia – no mercy on anyone in this world, and violent over nothing and filled with hatred.’

  John arranged a mass for her mother at St Anthony’s Church. Father Wendelin had taken over from Bonaventura. Una said he was fat and flabby with watery eyes. She and John had a session with Mrs Leonard, whose husband Freddie had died. Mrs Visetti, she told them, would not last long.

  In the Births column of The Times Una saw she had a grandson, Nicholas Vincenzo Troubridge Warren. Not knowing Andrea’s address, she sent a congratulatory telegram care of Tom Troubridge’s wife. Andrea replied to it so Una visited her. She was in two sparse London rooms. Her husband earned £4 a week with an advertising firm. She did her own housework and sheets were drying over the bath. She made no mention of John, who waited in a taxi outside. For Una one visit was enough to satisfy her curiosity and compound her prejudice: ‘The Warrens and the Troubridges will see that the child lacks nothing it really needs and I personally shall take no further interest in the menage.’ She then drove with John to Dover. John wanted to inspect and reserve the best rooms at the Lord Warden Hotel for when Chinkie Pig arrived.

  Evguenia was to stay a month. Una decorated the Forecastle with holly and mistletoe and filled a stocking for her with smelling salts and sugar mice. Evguenia gave Una two icons and a card: ‘May every saint protect you and keep you well and happy.’ Five Rye neighbours came for Christmas dinner – mock turtle soup, turkey and plum pudding. Una mused on how much Evguenia had that once was hers. ‘All the glamour, emotion and romance that no longer is attached to me’.

  On 27 December Audrey phoned to say Harcourt Brace would only offer $500 for The Sixth Beatitude. John became furious with Una for discussing the weakness of her career in America in front of Evguenia. ‘She was grey and shaking with anger.’ She said she would never forgive her and that all her affairs were to be taken out of her hands. She and Evguenia then went to the cinema. Una stayed at home, lying down.

  On New Year’s Eve the Rye bells tolled out the old year and pealed in the new. In the Forecastle John, Una and Evguenia each wrote a wish on a scrap of paper. They set fire to their wish with a candle flame, let the ash drop into a glass of champagne then drank it. It was, Evguenia told them, an old Russian custom.

  32

  His name was Father Martin but she called him Henry

  John could not endure a day without Evguenia. Una could not endure a day without John. At the Tour d’Argent in Paris for Evguenia’s birthday lunch on 9 January 1936, they had caviare, duck with pineapple, then pancakes. Una irritated John by not eating any of it. The bill was 300 francs. Back at Evguenia’s flat, Judith Horn, an English friend of hers, ‘common as dirt’ in Una’s view, called by. ‘I say,’ she said. ‘Have you come into a fortune or is someone keeping you?’

  That night they toured the clubs, the Monte Cristo, the Melody Bar, Le Monocle and drank cocktails and brandy until five in the morning. Una disparaged it all. She honed her invective. It was profligate pleasure, inferior cabaret with tarts and negresses, Evguenia was a Tartar Torturer, a stubborn little bitch, a coarse-minded brutal lying little gold-digger, a currant-eyed anthropoid, an incubus. Never, though, did Una elect to let her out of her sight. If John was going to hell, so was she.

  ‘I have noticed,’ Una wrote of Evguenia at the Hotel Vouillemont, rue Boissy d’Anglas, ‘she more and more tries to avoid doing things à trois and seldom will come here like she used to do. She says she is shy of meeting me when they have been making love, and this, together w
ith her announcing she will not dine with us in the evenings, leaves me with the alternative that John dines with her at her flat. John has promised that she will not allow such a situation to establish itself.’

  At her flat Evguenia reiterated her grievances to John. She could not bear being a kept woman, an appendage to her and Una. She wanted to take a degree at the Sorbonne, do a secretarial job, start a chicken farm. She said John wanted a meek little subordinate to hang on her every word and ‘lie down like a tart whenever she wanted her physically’. John cried to Una about such an insult. Una berated Evguenia, called her an ingrate, a primitive who grabbed everything costly then cut John to the core.

  On occasion, at Una’s insistence, she and John visited friends without Evguenia. Both were surprised by Gertrude Stein who arrived at Natalie’s ‘with an enchanting white poodle named Basket, a completely simple unaffected elderly Californian with delightful Red Indian eyes, a stout figure, dowdy clothes, a brick red face and melodious voice, an arresting intelligence, her manners perfect, her views kindly and clever, a charmer, and both John and I fell for her in one heap.’

  With Natalie they went to tea with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at their studio in rue de Fleurus, ‘where they live in a bedlam of unframed canvasses by Picasso and others of his ilk’. John and Una failed to find a painting to like. They were offered bitter tea from Java which neither of them drank. ‘And much pleasant talk went on beneath the Cubist dementia. Then John saw me home and went off to have it out with Evguenia’ who was in bed, feverish and spitting blood. X-rays revealed a shadow on her lung. She was admitted to hospital with suspected tuberculosis. John was terrified she would die. Proofs arrived of The Sixth Beatitude but she took no notice of them. She vowed that if Evguenia’s health required it, she would spend the rest of her life in some place like Sirmione and never go near England again.