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

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,