The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  They returned home to find she had rung from Pisa to say she would reach Florence at eight. They went again to the station. The train arrived at eight-thirty. Evguenia was wearing a fur coat and a hat that Una described as ‘a brown saucer crowned by two felt asses ears. She was not at all tired after 26 hours’ travel. She was laden with smuggled caviare, black bread, cigarettes and cucumbers. John was tenderly pleased that even as “only a friend” she had wanted to come to her.’

  35

  The rain pours down, the icy wind howls

  The holiday was not a success. Una described their life as like the classical view of hell: Sisyphus eternally pushing a rock up a hill, the Naiads pouring water into bottomless vessels, Tantalus reaching for elusive food. She made no mention of Cerberus, the monstrous dog, guarding the entrance to the lower world. Evguenia remarked that Una always echoed John’s views. Una told her to shut up. ‘The fat was in the fire. Torrents of abuse and accusations poured forth. She spat venom in John’s face. She ranted like a streetwalker.’ Una told Evguenia if she went on tormenting John she would write to Dr Fuller and queer her pitch at the American Hospital. On New Year’s Eve she counted the alcoholic drinks Evguenia had.

  John got laryngitis and lay on a daybed in her study. Una and Evguenia ate together at a table by her open door. In a curious scene, Evguenia whispered about Una in the third person: ‘Una won’t do it just because I suggested it. It’s enough for me to say anything for Una to contradict it. Una’s mean mean mean.’

  Evguenia, desperate to get back to Paris, said the visit had been a mistake. As she left she said, ‘Johnnie would you like me to stay?’ John replied, ‘Yes of course, but only if you really want to.’ Evguenia ranted again. Of course she did not want to stay, she wanted to go, to be free, free. Una made her life hell. She read her letters, pried into her financial affairs. As Evguenia slammed the front door Una wished her a comfortable journey. John puzzled about the outburst and thought it because of Evguenia’s limited command of English.

  Una wanted a break. John went with her to Viareggio and Lucca. Driven there by Tito their chauffeur they travelled with Fido the poodle, three birds and Maria the maid. John was thin, coughed a lot, had infected gums and ingrowing eyelashes. At the Hotel Astor their lavatory smelled and the radiators were lukewarm. John ate no food, sat looking into space and talked and talked of Evguenia. ‘You have held in your white hands the body and mind and soul of me’, she wrote to her. ‘You have been my desire, you have been all my thoughts, you have been in every prayer that I have prayed, for you I have bombarded the gates of heaven.’

  On the day they went to Lucca she was in despair. ‘The church was cold but not such as to explain her deadly coldness.’ She thought only of the time when she had been there with Evguenia. It was intolerable to return there with Una. They lunched at the same hotel. ‘Something very intimate has gone from my life – how can I explain? It is childish perhaps but many very little things have gone together with the one great, big thing. I feel bereaved.’

  Evguenia reminded John that from the first she had wanted ‘just to be friends’. She was herself lonely and felt anxious if she did not get a letter from John every day. But even if it meant foregoing her allowance she could not live à trois again. Una brought out the worst in her and she only felt normal in Paris. She moved to a pension in rue d’Armaille in the seventeenth arrondissement. Dr Fuller said she was well and could winter where she chose.

  John retracted the threat to make Evguenia’s allowance dependent on her wintering in Florence. She told her she wanted her to be secure, gave her stocks, shares, a War Loan and topped up her deposit account with 4,400 francs. She said she had made ample provision in her will and Evguenia would inherit a substantial income ‘unless you do something entirely outrageous which you will not, will you my darling?’ With Una, John would not commit herself to living anywhere unless Evguenia came too. She talked of a villa in Fiesole, a flat in Paris, a house in England though not in Rye.

  She urged Evguenia to get a British visa in case of war. ‘In war we aught to have the same country.’ More immediately she urged her to visit Florence for Easter. Evguenia agreed but only if she came with her friend Lysa.

  Pope Pius XI died and was succeeded by Eugenio Pacelli. John and Una thought him an accomplished statesman, a good fascist and on excellent terms with the Duce. They went to mass for his coronation and outside their windows flew the Fascist flag and the Union Jack on staves with studs and spearheads.

  Army recruits poured past their windows. ‘Italy is calling up class after class in an alarming way.’ John commended Hitler for ‘keeping order’ in Czechoslovakia and Chamberlain for taking the news calmly. Little nations, she wrote to Evguenia, were an ‘awful menace and as such cannot be allowed an existance’. Fascists, like pedigree griffons and upper-class congenital sexual inverts, were genetically superior. ‘Jews’, she wrote:

  Yes, I am beginning to be really afraid of them, not of the one or two really dear Jewish friends that I have in England, no, but of Jews as a whole. I believe they hate us and want to bring about a European war and then a world revolution in order to destroy us utterly … And what of Jew-ridden France, England & Russia? There will soon be no room for us Christians.

  She and Una subscribed to an English-language lending library. It was run by Lillian Baird-Douglas who thought people should be free to read what they chose, not just Fascist propaganda. She stocked literature banned by the regime. Una told her she should not keep books like Inside Europe on her shelves. Lillian said she did not understand how Radclyffe Hall could have written The Well of Loneliness and suffered its destruction and yet make propaganda for Fascism.

  Una withdrew their subscription, returned their library books via a friend, Maria Carolina, then lodged a formal complaint with the authorities about Lillian circulating Inside Europe. ‘We are clear of any complicity if there is any trouble’, she said. She then helped foster a rumour that Lillian was a drug addict and an alcoholic.

  John thought Hitler only wanted justice. ‘I don’t feel I care what he takes’, she wrote to Evguenia after he invaded Bohemia and Moravia. ‘I am too tired to react to anything.’ Una said the one hope for Europe lay with the Duce ‘who is both a genius and a good man’.

  In April Italy invaded Albania. Five thousand German troops passed through Florence for an unknown destination. Evguenia and Lysa arrived and John met their evening train. They all went to Fiesole and Siena. John wanted time alone with Evguenia. She booked a hotel room for a night at Montecatini, just for the two of them, and arranged a car. Evguenia saw it as an intended seduction. She thought the trip a bad idea and warned they would quarrel.

  John cancelled the room and the car, sat on the town wall at Volterra and cried. Lysa asked Una why John did not let Evguenia go. Evguenia, she said, had no other romantic involvement, but felt she had become like a drug to John. She loved her but wanted to be free to live life for herself. When Evguenia left for Paris she sent John a card, ‘Why quarrel when the sun is shining and the sky is blue? I am still of the same opinion, but I love you.’

  John had headaches and a pain that ran down her left arm. Dr Lapiccirella diagnosed high blood pressure, an underactive thyroid and ‘toxic poisoning of the aorta caused by nicotine’. X-rays revealed scars from childhood tuberculosis. He advised no cigarettes and a warm climate for winter. John became ‘skinless with nerves’ as she tried to stop smoking. Una blamed all her maladies on ‘that slug of a female who battens on her and cannot even write without bullying or distressing her. If she did not exist all other troubles could be overcome.’

  Evguenia asked Una’s cousin, Sandra Tealdi, to speak to Lapiccirella and let her know what was wrong with John. Sandra wrote to her in Paris:

  He told me to tell you that John is very ill with nerves and that she is in constant need of care. And would you believe it, Una phoned me the next day and Lapiccirella had told her that I had telephoned in order to know the news of John
. I felt the blood freeze in my veins, but thank goodness he hadn’t spoken to you and Una interpreted it as just a kind thing on my part. I beg you never to disclose a thing.

  Una’s tyrannical hold on John was common knowledge. John’s only escape was her obsession with Evguenia. It invaded her like a cancer. Her health broke down and her life spiralled out of control. As did Europe. There were rumours of German attacks on Corfu, Malta, Gibraltar, Egypt, Kenya. It was said that Hitler planned to invade Poland on his birthday. On 28 April John and Una listened on the wireless to a two-and-a-half-hour speech by him. He had broken agreements with Britain and Poland. He wanted control of Danzig and a German corridor through Poland. Una went to the British Consul to find out whether Fido could go with them if they had to leave Italy in a hurry. John made Tito their chauffeur get a Swiss visa.

  Evguenia returned the lottery ticket Una sent her as an Easter present. ‘I refuse in advance to participate in it’, she said. She wondered about starting a craft shop. ‘As I am getting older there is nothing else for me to do but to have something of my own.’

  John planned to go to Rye and sell the Forecastle. In four years she had spent little time there. It had proved to be, Una said, ‘the melancholy little house we built to be so gay in’. Andrea wrote that her son Nicholas was in an isolation hospital with diphtheria and had had two mastoid operations. Viola asked Una at least to write to Minna who was so very ill.

  John did not now read the newspapers. ‘What’s the good? Anyhow I am sick of it all.’ Her letters to Evguenia became unconfident and stripped of hope. ‘The sense of failiour is heavy upon me all too often these days.’ She felt lost and thought perhaps her broken health might lead to a path that must be followed.

  Giving up smoking was another bereavement. She took sedatives, chewed gum and craved nicotine. To take a cure she went to the Grotta Guisti, Monsummano, in Pistoia. She sat on a bench in a cave full of steam emanations then lay sweating on a bed and was massaged. She felt as if she was suffocating, came out in a virulent itching rash and had one of her spectacular temper losses when the nurse failed to give the cook her special menu.

  She and Una left for Rye via Paris at the end of July. Evguenia agreed to go with them to England for a month ‘unless something unforeseen happens’. ‘The flat is in dust sheets,’ John wrote to her, ‘and looks sad as do all homes about to be left for even a short time.’ They would meet at the Vouillemont for ‘our long talk about the future’. ‘Oh Piggie my heart is so terribly heavy sometimes when I think of you and all that might have been. NO – NO – I have not written that, please don’t take it up angerally when you answer this letter.’

  Evguenia looked fit. She was wearing a Burberry suit that cost her 1,750 francs, her hair was dyed red and she had bought a Topolino car. John would not travel in it and left a performance of Cyrano at the Comédie Française in panic at the thought of Evguenia in a crash. During their ‘long talk’ Evguenia told her she was going to study at the Sorbonne. She would see John often she loved her and did not want to lose her, but she had a sense of community in Paris with her Russian friends. She and Lysa planned to rent a little country cottage at Rambouillet for the weekends.

  Una sensed Evguenia was strong and her resolution real. Such confidence infuriated her. Evguenia’s freedom did not give her the victory she sought. It made her own life untenable. It pushed her toward a truth she would never accept: John was not, and had not been for many years if ever, ‘the least bit in love’ with her. She seemed to find life alone with her intolerable and not worth living. Una fought on, excelling with insults:

  I suspect Evguenia has native blood. The negroid nose and lips, the queer little eyes when asleep, she looks amazingly African. And of course her character. The lying and deceiving, the superficiality and unreliability and the indolence, all suggestive of the half or quarter breed. It may be some quite distant strain but I strongly suspect it is there.

  Evguenia feared John was seriously ill and asked to see Dr Fuller with her. At the end of the session she tried to speak to him without Una. Una would not allow it. ‘I cannot get over the impudence of her trying to prevent my speaking to him and saying John was her patient when she had left her to live or die.’

  In Rye John put the Forecastle on the market for £1,750 and accepted the first offer, which was for £1,500. She and Una had a session with Mrs Leonard who assured them there would be no war. Troubridge appeared, eighteen inches above Feda’s head, and offered Una sympathy and help. She clasped his hand in friendship. Evguenia spent most of her time with the Smallhythe trio, working in the garden. They liked her and found her obliging.

  Andrea came to Rye. After five years of marriage she was going to divorce Toby Warren. She said he took no interest in their son and that sleeping with a drunk was repulsive. She wanted to break free while young enough to marry again. She had left the Catholic Church as she would not take comfort from its rituals when she could not observe its teachings.

  At lunch in the Mermaid Evguenia tried to tell Una that John ought not drink spirits because of her blood pressure. Una said, ‘I can’t listen now Evguenia, I’m busy.’ Back at the Forecastle she pursued the remark:

  I knocked on Evguenia’s door and receiving no answer pushed it ajar and said, ‘Could I come in?’ to which she replied, merely, ‘Yes’, and I went in saying very quietly, ‘Now you are alone Evguenia, will you tell me what it was you wished to say about John?’ Immediately she was launched. ‘Oh no. I’m not going to tell you anything now.’ I replied, ‘O yes. You must tell me anything you know about John’s health. After what you have suggested you can’t refuse.’ There followed a perfect torrent of shrill vituperation. No sense to it at all. John drank too much, cocktails, spirits, wine, her blood pressure was high and her liver upset and I cared nothing what happened to her so long as I could oppose her, Evguenia. She mimicked me. ‘Oh I hear you. Darling have a glass of wine. Darling have a cocktail. Darling have another helping.’ John ate too much also, and more incoherent fury. Terrified that John should hear, and be dragged into a scene, I made for the door, saying we could not possibly have such an upheaval while she was ill. Whereupon the fury flung herself between me and the door, took me by the shoulders saying, between clenched teeth, ‘Oh no, you don’t leave the room,’ and threw me away from the door so that I nearly fell over. I recovered my balance and said with what dignity I could muster, ‘Evguenia, this is outrageous you cannot lay hands on me, and keep me from leaving a room in my own house. Let me pass please.’ In which she, bearing down threateningly upon me, raged, ‘Oh, can’t I! I ought to strike you! strike you! but now I’ve got you here, and you’re going to hear all I’ve got to say to you, and I would have you remember that I’m your guest, and it’s your duty to be civil to me.’ To which I replied, ‘I’m your hostess and I intend to leave this room,’ and going up to her I said, ‘Let me pass,’ and put my hand on her shoulder to push her aside. Again she seized me, and flung me away, wrenching my shoulder as she did so. Then I outwitted her, I leaned from the window and called, quietly, to Annie below, ‘Will you come up to the spare room as I have something I want to say to you?’ Annie came, and Madam was actually refusing to let her in, or me out, when John, who had heard me call Annie, suspected there was something wrong, and arrived on the scene and released me, only to be met by a fresh flood of abuse from Evguenia, who went downstairs and stood in the dining hall, shouting her fury and vituperation of me, with Annie an amazed witness.

  On 1 September Hitler invaded Poland. Two days later Chamberlain announced that Great Britain was at war with Germany. After the announcement, ‘God Save The King’ was played on the wireless and the air-raid sirens sounded in Rye. John, Una and Evguenia put their gas masks round their necks and moved their luggage to the George Hotel. Dodo Benson, who was the Mayor of Rye, came by wearing some kind of anti-gas outfit and a tin helmet. He did not know if it was a real air raid. The town was full of evacuated children. John collapsed with heart pains.r />
  On the church door was a poster, If Your Knees Knock, Kneel on Them. On 7 September men from Taylor’s Depository moved the furniture from the Forecastle. While they were doing so the prospective purchaser withdrew his offer. The following day Paris was evacuated because of the threat of German invasion. Application to leave England had to be made to the Home Office and took a month or six weeks to consider. A permit to land or travel in France had also to be obtained. The Treasury ruled that only cash and at a limit of £25 per person could be taken out of Britain. Travel was chaotic and the prospect of reaching a destination uncertain.

  ‘But for Mr Eden, the Third International and the Jews it would never have occurred’, Una said of the war. Evguenia was desperate to get to Paris. They all went to the French Consulate to see if a landing permit would be issued to her. There was a queue halfway across Bedford Square. Una flourished her title and got to the front of it. Permits for John and Una would take several weeks to obtain but Evguenia’s application would have to be referred to France and there was no saying how long this would take or what the outcome would be.

  John collapsed in tears. She had a terror of Evguenia going to Paris, of not knowing if she was safe, injured or dead. She feared Fido might be killed in an air raid or neglected. Una was on a high. Evguenia’s misery was her victory and Evguenia’s misery was intense. Una accused her of making John ill by threatening to return to Paris and said it was ‘sheer murder’. She addressed all her remarks to John and managed not to speak a word to Evguenia for three days. She now referred to her as Florrie, ‘alias Florence Nightingale because she don’t want to nurse and Flora McCossak, Bitch of the Steppes’. It had slipped her mind, in this Strindbergian nightmare, that Florrie was the name of John’s sister, who died three weeks after John was born. ‘Florrie is in a chronic rage that a world war has dared to interfere with her plans for a life of indolent futility with John’s money and her car in Paris.’