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

Evguenia was to stay a month. Una decorated the Forecastle with holly and mistletoe and filled a stocking for her with smelling salts and sugar mice. Evguenia gave Una two icons and a card: ‘May every saint protect you and keep you well and happy.’ Five Rye neighbours came for Christmas dinner – mock turtle soup, turkey and plum pudding. Una mused on how much Evguenia had that once was hers. ‘All the glamour, emotion and romance that no longer is attached to me’.

On 27 December Audrey phoned to say Harcourt Brace would only offer $500 for The Sixth Beatitude. John became furious with Una for discussing the weakness of her career in America in front of Evguenia. ‘She was grey and shaking with anger.’ She said she would never forgive her and that all her affairs were to be taken out of her hands. She and Evguenia then went to the cinema. Una stayed at home, lying down.

On New Year’s Eve the Rye bells tolled out the old year and pealed in the new. In the Forecastle John, Una and Evguenia each wrote a wish on a scrap of paper. They set fire to their wish with a candle flame, let the ash drop into a glass of champagne then drank it. It was, Evguenia told them, an old Russian custom.

32

His name was Father Martin but she called him Henry

John could not endure a day without Evguenia. Una could not endure a day without John. At the Tour d’Argent in Paris for Evguenia’s birthday lunch on 9 January 1936, they had caviare, duck with pineapple, then pancakes. Una irritated John by not eating any of it. The bill was 300 francs. Back at Evguenia’s flat, Judith Horn, an English friend of hers, ‘common as dirt’ in Una’s view, called by. ‘I say,’ she said. ‘Have you come into a fortune or is someone keeping you?’

That night they toured the clubs, the Monte Cristo, the Melody Bar, Le Monocle and drank cocktails and brandy until five in the morning. Una disparaged it all. She honed her invective. It was profligate pleasure, inferior cabaret with tarts and negresses, Evguenia was a Tartar Torturer, a stubborn little bitch, a coarse-minded brutal lying little gold-digger, a currant-eyed anthropoid, an incubus. Never, though, did Una elect to let her out of her sight. If John was going to hell, so was she.

‘I have noticed,’ Una wrote of Evguenia at the Hotel Vouillemont, rue Boissy d’Anglas, ‘she more and more tries to avoid doing things à trois and seldom will come here like she used to do. She says she is shy of meeting me when they have been making love, and this, together with her announcing she will not dine with us in the evenings, leaves me with the alternative that John dines with her at her flat. John has promised that she will not allow such a situation to establish itself.’

At her flat Evguenia reiterated her grievances to John. She could not bear being a kept woman, an appendage to her and Una. She wanted to take a degree at the Sorbonne, do a secretarial job, start a chicken farm. She said John wanted a meek little subordinate to hang on her every word and ‘lie down like a tart whenever she wanted her physically’. John cried to Una about such an insult. Una berated Evguenia, called her an ingrate, a primitive who grabbed everything costly then cut John to the core.

On occasion, at Una’s insistence, she and John visited friends without Evguenia. Both were surprised by Gertrude Stein who arrived at Natalie’s ‘with an enchanting white poodle named Basket, a completely simple unaffected elderly Californian with delightful Red Indian eyes, a stout figure, dowdy clothes, a brick red face and melodious voice, an arresting intelligence, her manners perfect, her views kindly and clever, a charmer, and both John and I fell for her in one heap.’

With Natalie they went to tea with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at their studio in rue de Fleurus, ‘where they live in a bedlam of unframed canvasses by Picasso and others of his ilk’. John and Una failed to find a painting to like. They were offered bitter tea from Java which neither of them drank. ‘And much pleasant talk went on beneath the Cubist dementia. Then John saw me home and went off to have it out with Evguenia’ who was in bed, feverish and spitting blood. X-rays revealed a shadow on her lung. She was admitted to hospital with suspected tuberculosis. John was terrified she would die. Proofs arrived of The Sixth Beatitude but she took no notice of them. She vowed that if Evguenia’s health required it, she would spend the rest of her life in some place like Sirmione and never go near England again.

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,