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

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