The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  She tried, while Evguenia was ill, to prevent her from having any visitors except herself and Una. Such strictures drove Evguenia wild. She called John a tyrant, threw poker chips and magazines across the bed, accused her of trying to keep her friends from her and threatened to discharge herself. John pleaded and cajoled:

  For my poor sake be patient and good, for my poor sake put up with the boredom of having to be taken care of for a time, for my poor sake try to be a good patient. There is only one frame that I ask you to be in & that is the frame of my utter devotion. You can only take care of me in one way and that is by taking care of yourself because I am you – my Evguenia.

  But Evguenia did not want to be John. Even less did she want to be married to Una. Dr Fuller, her doctor at the American Hospital, warned her to take care. He advised against her nursing or doing any strenuous work. He said the best thing for her, because of her history of tuberculosis, would be to spend the next three winters in a southern climate from October to May. John told him she would arrange this. Fuller told Evguenia it was an offer she should not refuse.

  And so Evguenia was trapped. And Una too. They set off in March 1936 for Grasse, near Cannes and for the warmth of the South of France. Evguenia, wrapped in a fleecy Jaeger rug, travelled first class with John. Una went second class with the canary, the cockatoo and the dogs. Even before they arrived at the Park Palace Hotel, Evguenia wanted to return to Paris. ‘And here we are,’ wrote Una, ‘in the back of beyond, John scanning her pass book with anxiety to see how it is standing the racket of all we are spending on this girl, The Sixth Beatitude left to launch itself.’

  John’s anxiety over Evguenia’s illness billowed into neurosis. Una called it ‘overprotective solicitude’. All John’s thoughts revolved around whether Evguenia had gone out without a coat, sunshade or umbrella, had she opened or closed her window, had she rested and taken her temperature, was she wearing a vest. John was, Una said, a sick nurse and a slave, dancing attendance. She hired a succession of doctors: Bestier, Mineshoffer, Pouynayou. At night she took Nurinase to make her sleep. She did no work.

  Tuberculosis or not, John wanted to go on having sex with Evguenia. Una was terrified of her becoming infected. She urged her to ask the doctors if kissing was safe. John was evasive with them. To her circuitous questions Pouynayou said that he would not let Evguenia kiss a small child. Una feared John would die. She felt upstaged. Illness was her province. She coughed up mucous streaked with blood. The doctor told her to take calcium and only have one cup of coffee a day.

  Evguenia accused John of murdering her personality and of using money to bully her. She pleaded that she could not stay shut in a room all day with the windows closed. She said she was entirely redundant and asked only to do idiotic things. Una did everything of significance. Una ordered the cars and reserved the rooms. And at every opportunity she insulted and marginalized Evguenia. To strangers she referred to John as mon amie and never bracketed her with Evguenia as mes amies. If she, Evguenia, wrapped a parcel, Una redid it. When she darned one of John’s socks, Una darned it again. It was all intolerable. She needed to work. John told her she must not and could not. Nursing was out because of her illness and ‘thousands were clamouring for any other job available’.

  Evguenia said that this triangle had caused her tuberculosis. She had never heard of a mistress being expected to put up with living with the wife. Una treated her like a dog, looked at her as if she was dirt whenever they were alone, snubbed her whenever she spoke and listened at the door when she was with John. When she dropped her napkin in the restaurant, Una picked it up with two fingers and an expression of repulsion. Love, she told John, meant doing what the other person wanted. And she wanted John and Una to go away and leave her, or at least let her go back to Paris on her own. She started packing. John locked her in her room.

  John, always at a loss to understand another’s point of view, talked of Evguenia’s ‘Una complex’. She suspected her of wanting to get to Paris because she had a man there. Una thought this unlikely ‘because she was so unattractive and with the exception of an old professor and an anaemic Russian bookseller nobody could be in love with her’.

  John warned Evguenia that unless she behaved she would put her in a sanatorium and if she tried to leave it her allowance would be cut. On a day in April when they set off together for a walk, John returned alone in a taxi ‘white, grim and monosyllabic’, then had her tea with her eyes fixed on the hotel entrance.

  Una bided her time, watched, needled and blamed. She feared Evguenia was intent on ousting her and having a life à deux with John. ‘With Ladye’s help please God she will not succeed. But she goes on trying and making John feel she will never be satisfied in conditions which include me.’ She kept up her lament about their smirched union and went with John to a sermon on the indissolubility of marriage. Evguenia got drunk on her own.

  With Una, John alternated between resignation and rage. ‘If you’re thin because you think I’ll leave you then get fat because I won’t’, she said. At other times she called her a curb and a bridle and said she would go away with Evguenia when and as often as she wished.

  There were days of relative calm when they drove by Rolls-Royce to Cannes and lunched on lobster, chicken, strawberries and white wine. They toured the Vosges and breathed the mountain air. But for them all it was three months of hell.

  Back in Paris in June it was eighty-nine degrees in the shade. John and Una booked in at the Vouillemont, Evguenia went to her flat. She spoke of coming alive after being a prisoner at Grasse. John thought that only her caring for someone else could explain such unkindness. She planned to visit unexpectedly to see what she was up to.

  Paris gossip columns made reference to the trio lesbienne. Albert de Flament in the Revue de Paris thought the young Russian always in the company of Radclyffe Hall and Lady Troubridge was the third person alluded to in the dedication ‘To Our Three Selves’ in The Well of Loneliness. ‘Did I survive all the smears for this?’ Una exclaimed. John feared Evguenia would leave her because of such publicity. Natalie and Dolly Wilde asked about the meaning of ‘Our Three Selves’.

  To placate Una, and for the sake of a public who did not notice, John lunched alone with her at Pruniers. Una did not eat and complained that John cared only about Evguenia’s feelings, not hers. John told her again that she was in love with Evguenia without whom she had no life.

  But Evguenia after two years of tension was less keen to have sex. On 22 June John called unannounced at her flat. Evguenia was alone but not pleased to see her. John’s violence erupted. It equalled her mother’s. She trashed the flat. She destroyed things she had given Evguenia, tore up photographs of herself, some of her letters, her own books. She broke the frames of pictures and etchings, cut up the crocodile bag she had given her for Christmas. In the desk she found only letters in Russian which she could not read. ‘She appears to have wrecked the whole place with incredible strength and persistence’, Una wrote in her diary. ‘But I think she had had long and sore provocation.’ Next day, Dr Fuller asked if they had had a peaceful time in Grasse.

  There was summer to consider – where to go. John suggested St Odile, a religious retreat. As ever, Evguenia’s lack of documents was a problem. John decided to adopt her to give her nationality. She wanted to be Evguenia’s next of kin, her mother perhaps, or her father, or her husband. Una thought her parenting aspirations would be viewed with suspicion. She asked Dr Fuller if he knew of any ‘respectable Englishwoman’ who would adopt Evguenia for £300. He suggested one of his patients. Rubinstein quashed the plan. He told John adoption did not confer nationality in either America or England.

  They set off again in July, this time in a hired car, with a trunk each, seven pieces of hand luggage, a dog, its basket and two birds. St Odile was full of tourists and dogs were not allowed. They moved to the Grand Hôtel de Bains du Holswald, 600 metres up in the Vosges. There were green meadows, canteen food, ‘bourgoisie’ and torrents of
rain. They moved to the Grand Hôtel des Trois Epis, 700 metres above the valley of Munster. Una was fed up with it all.

  In the two years since Bagnoles we have hardly been out of hotels. Paris, Beauvallon, Sirmione, Padova, Venice, Grasse, Cannes, Trois Epis, packing and unpacking in hotel bedrooms, fitting our possessions in inadequate accommodation, bargaining for prices and scanning large bills with anxious eyes, eating in uncongenial dining rooms, over-rich and unwholesome hotel food. A dreary perspective behind us and ahead of us for many months to come. A beloved home of our own which for all the good we get out of it is non-existent.

  She was forty-nine, John fifty-five, Evguenia thirty-one. John would not return even for a few weeks to England until she felt sure that Evguenia was cured. She said she did not care if the Forecastle burned down. Una told her she was abrogating her genius and must stop living like a satellite in the orbit of ‘this wretched girl’. Total sales, worldwide, of The Sixth Beatitude were only 6,249. Una deplored ‘this strange and sudden incursion of the sex element from this Russian mediocrity’ and pined for how she and John once lived. She read again The Ladies of Llangollen and evoked ‘the great fight of The Well for themselves and all their kind’.

  A letter was forwarded from a woman commissioned by Mrs Visetti to write a life of Alberto. She asked John to describe the influence of her stepfather on her career and to offer ‘any suitable anecdotes’. Una told Rubinstein to reply that John forbade mention of her name in the book and to remind the woman that John’s letters were controlled by copyright: ‘We cannot allow her to be made ridiculous in connection with that dreadful, cretinous, lecherous old man, or any lies to be published concerning his fictitious influence.’

  For a few days John and Evguenia went away alone to Ballon d’Alsace. They enjoyed each other’s company, walked and took photographs of medieval buildings. But then John worried that Una would be fretting. She could not choose between them and she hurried back to Una. ‘Had things been different my life might have been so contented, so peaceful’, she told Evguenia, without focusing on what those things might be. ‘I could not do much for her but be there’, Evguenia said. ‘She needed me like water, like air, it seems, and yet she would not give allowance for my own feelings when I was cooped up with them both. She knew that she was asking too much, I suppose, in the very deepest of her heart, but would not admit it to herself.’

  Back in the hothouse of Una’s hostility and Evguenia’s discontent, John broke down. She cried when her morning coffee came without milk. She was pale and intermittently weak and exhausted. She walked like an invalid with trembling legs. Her eyes were inflamed and Una made a great display of bathing them. She spoke of life having defeated her and rounded on Una whose reproaches, jealousy and stranglehold she said made life hell.

  Una fought back. She was, she said, totally cut off from normal life and had no one to talk to for advice. John would have to accept that she could not be calm and cheerful, that she would have to be superhuman not to mind. Twenty years’ mutual fidelity had not prepared her to expect or endure all this. She dreamed she was a nun being stoned to death in Rye, suspected, wrongly, of having sex with the priest. His name was Father Martin but she called him Henry. He kissed her on the mouth which she felt to be wrong. ‘We shall be apart in body but together in spirit’, she told him, then was carried into the house of a woman who let her die there out of charity.

  In September news came via Rubinstein that Mrs Visetti had a fractured hip, was in a Derby nursing home and needed money. She asked that none of her news be passed to her daughter. She just wanted her to pay her medical expenses.

  John had become as adrift as her father, Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall. She had no plans other than where to go for the sake of Evguenia’s health and no strategy for resolving or ameliorating the emotional chaos she had created. Evguenia seemed robust, all infection gone. As ever, she longed for Paris but was now financially dependent on John. John wondered where they would all spend the winter. She thought of Merano in the Italian Alps. Una wrote to the Park Hotel about rooms. Evguenia did not want to go. ‘What a woman she has fallen for,’ Una wrote, ‘hard as granite, shallow as a dish and without the elementary rudiments of gratitude or affection.’

  In September they went to Paris to have medical check-ups with Dr Fuller and to get a visa for Evguenia. They travelled via Freiburg, Colmar, Strasbourg. They went through Germany because Evguenia’s mother had been German. Una was surprised not to see more swastikas or the Führer’s picture. She thought him less in evidence than the Duce in Italy.

  X-rays taken in Paris showed Evguenia’s lungs were clear. Dr Fuller recommended that she take life easily and do no work. Of John he said there was nothing organically wrong with her, but she ‘took Miss Evguenia too seriously’. He prescribed hormone injections for her, perhaps because of the menopause. Una resented the intimacy of Evguenia administering these.

  John was ‘delirious with joy’ when Evguenia was granted an Italian visa valid for a year. She took her on a shopping spree for clothes for the snows and the Dolomites and had her measured for silk pyjamas. ‘Oh yes but I love you deeply, deeply. You are rooted in my innermost being and I cannot tear you out if I would – were I to do so I should bleed to death – One heart – same heart – and no help for it, it seems.’

  In October the three of them made their disconsolate way by train to Merano with ever more luggage and Gabriele d’Annunzio, the now-moribund canary. At Verona they had one of their terrible rows. Evguenia said her room was dark. John found her leaning out of her window in the rain. Evguenia would not shut the window or put on her coat and muffler. Una tried to drag her from it and close it. Evguenia pushed her away and told her to get out of her room. Una replied, ‘It is not your room but John’s and I shall go when she tells me to and not before. John is too tired and too ill to be tormented any more and I simply won’t have it.’

  They rowed for two hours. Una said Evguenia abused, baited and tormented John. Evguenia said she could not stand all the restrictions; she had to see her friends. She could not go on in this threesome, it was unbearable living with Una. If she had any living soul to go to she would have left long ago. John said, ‘You have always known that I cannot leave Una. Do you want to give me up?’ Evguenia said, ‘On your conditions, yes.’ John pleaded that she did not have sex with Una. Evguenia said she did not care whether she did or not. Una told her that she herself suggested John make this clear when Evguenia’s illness ‘debarred her from physical life’.

  ‘She sneered and remarked, Debarred? I wasn’t debarred. As though her illness had been in that respect a welcome respite. In fact she spared John no hurt, insult or humiliation.’ Una thought it inconceivable that she would have to go on seeing Evguenia or speaking to her. ‘At least I need not behave in future in any way as though I had any liking for her.’

  In Merano Evguenia enrolled for a course in German and Italian at the Berlitz school. John feared she would catch germs from the other students and wanted her to have private lessons at the hotel in a room heated by a stove. There was a row about that, too.

  Evguenia began spitting blood again. John had cystitis, an abscess under a tooth and a nervous spasm in her eyes. The lashes on her lower lids curled inwards and scratched against her eyeballs. The doctor pulled the lashes out but they grew again. She seemed to be having a complete breakdown. Una blamed that beast of a woman.

  They went to mass for the Duce in the Duomo and joined the Fascist processions through the town. The Italian waiters in the hotel dining hall gave the three of them the Roman salute and preferential service. The hotel was ‘teeming with jews’, refugees, Una said, from the Führer’s sweeping out of undesirables. At night Fascisti shouted catcalls and rang bells outside. ‘Fascist anti-bolshevism is turning its attention to these communist jew elements’, Una wrote in her diary. ‘I’m inclined to think they may be right but we must have our rest at night.’

  The English papers were full of the King’s p
roposed abdication so that he could marry Mrs Simpson. Una saw a parallel with the intrusion of Evguenia. ‘The king is captured, like my John, by a worthless woman with whom he is infatuated.’

  ‘God bless the Duce’, Una said and sent him a photograph of himself which she asked him to sign. John and she deplored the civil war in Spain. ‘So long as this terrible anti-God bolshevism continues it must be met with and conquered by force’ was the view they both held. For 120 lire Una bought a rifle for one of the ten-year-old moschettieri in Merano to learn to use. Her name was engraved on the barrel and it was given to a boy named Norberto Roeregger.

  It may shock one’s spirit to see children taught to use a rifle, but I have lived to see the alternative – children taught to forget God and never to know Him, to see priests slaughtered and nuns raped and infamous blasphemy rampant, and I have come to believe the world does not know how to use or accept pacifism and the armed crusade must of necessity come first.

  Their Christmas tree that year was in Evguenia’s hotel room, the customary creche for Christ was in John and Una’s. They went to mass in the unheated Duomo and sat in the front pew. John gave Una onyx and gold cufflinks in the shape of the fascio – a bundle of rods and an axe. To Evguenia she gave cultured pearls. Una gave Evguenia handmade Tyrolean shoes. Evguenia gave Una an embroidered nightgown case. John said to Una, ‘My darling Squiggie thank you for being on earth.’ They watched the sun set behind the snow peaks and John talked of them all making a home in the Florentine hills.

  OUR THREE SELVES

  33

  An empty fiction

  Una wept with pride on the day in January 1937 when a soldier came to the hotel and delivered the signed photograph of the Duce. Mussolini had dedicated it to Lady Troubridge. John had it framed in Fascist colours and they drank the Duce’s health in vermouth. A week later they both wept with sorrow when the canary Gabriele d’Annunzio died. John wrapped him in a lace handkerchief and Italian flag and buried him with a medal of Notre Dame de Lourdes in the garden of the Sisters of the Holy Cross in Merano.