The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (interesting novels to read txt) 📕

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.

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