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

would be to spend the next three winters in a southern climate from October to May. John told him she would arrange this. Fuller told Evguenia it was an offer she should not refuse.

And so Evguenia was trapped. And Una too. They set off in March 1936 for Grasse, near Cannes and for the warmth of the South of France. Evguenia, wrapped in a fleecy Jaeger rug, travelled first class with John. Una went second class with the canary, the cockatoo and the dogs. Even before they arrived at the Park Palace Hotel, Evguenia wanted to return to Paris. ‘And here we are,’ wrote Una, ‘in the back of beyond, John scanning her pass book with anxiety to see how it is standing the racket of all we are spending on this girl, The Sixth Beatitude left to launch itself.’

John’s anxiety over Evguenia’s illness billowed into neurosis. Una called it ‘overprotective solicitude’. All John’s thoughts revolved around whether Evguenia had gone out without a coat, sunshade or umbrella, had she opened or closed her window, had she rested and taken her temperature, was she wearing a vest. John was, Una said, a sick nurse and a slave, dancing attendance. She hired a succession of doctors: Bestier, Mineshoffer, Pouynayou. At night she took Nurinase to make her sleep. She did no work.

Tuberculosis or not, John wanted to go on having sex with Evguenia. Una was terrified of her becoming infected. She urged her to ask the doctors if kissing was safe. John was evasive with them. To her circuitous questions Pouynayou said that he would not let Evguenia kiss a small child. Una feared John would die. She felt upstaged. Illness was her province. She coughed up mucous streaked with blood. The doctor told her to take calcium and only have one cup of coffee a day.

Evguenia accused John of murdering her personality and of using money to bully her. She pleaded that she could not stay shut in a room all day with the windows closed. She said she was entirely redundant and asked only to do idiotic things. Una did everything of significance. Una ordered the cars and reserved the rooms. And at every opportunity she insulted and marginalized Evguenia. To strangers she referred to John as mon amie and never bracketed her with Evguenia as mes amies. If she, Evguenia, wrapped a parcel, Una redid it. When she darned one of John’s socks, Una darned it again. It was all intolerable. She needed to work. John told her she must not and could not. Nursing was out because of her illness and ‘thousands were clamouring for any other job available’.

Evguenia said that this triangle had caused her tuberculosis. She had never heard of a mistress being expected to put up with living with the wife. Una treated her like a dog, looked at her as if she was dirt whenever they were alone, snubbed her whenever she spoke and listened at the door when she was with John. When she dropped her napkin in the restaurant, Una picked it up with two fingers and an expression of repulsion. Love, she told John, meant doing what the other person wanted. And she wanted John and Una to go away and leave her, or at least let her go back to Paris on her own. She started packing. John locked her in her room.

John, always at a loss to understand another’s point of view, talked of Evguenia’s ‘Una complex’. She suspected her of wanting to get to Paris because she had a man there. Una thought this unlikely ‘because she was so unattractive and with the exception of an old professor and an anaemic Russian bookseller nobody could be in love with her’.

John warned Evguenia that unless she behaved she would put her in a sanatorium and if she tried to leave it her allowance would be cut. On a day in April when they set off together for a walk, John returned alone in a taxi ‘white, grim and monosyllabic’, then had her tea with her eyes fixed on the hotel entrance.

Una bided her time, watched, needled and blamed. She feared Evguenia was intent on ousting her and having a life à deux with John. ‘With Ladye’s help please God she will not succeed. But she goes on trying and making John feel she will never be satisfied in conditions which include me.’ She kept up her lament about their smirched union and went with John to a sermon on the indissolubility of marriage. Evguenia got drunk on her own.

With Una, John alternated between resignation and rage. ‘If you’re thin because you think I’ll leave you then get fat because I won’t’, she said. At other times she called her a curb and a bridle and said she would go away with Evguenia when and as often as she wished.

There were days of relative calm when they drove by Rolls-Royce to Cannes and lunched on lobster, chicken, strawberries and white wine. They toured the Vosges and breathed the mountain air. But for them all it was three months of hell.

Back in Paris in June it was eighty-nine degrees in the shade. John and Una booked in at the Vouillemont, Evguenia went to her flat. She spoke of coming alive after being a prisoner at Grasse. John thought that only her caring for someone else could explain such unkindness. She planned to visit unexpectedly to see what she was up to.

Paris gossip columns made reference to the trio lesbienne. Albert de Flament in the Revue de Paris thought the young Russian always in the company of Radclyffe Hall and Lady Troubridge was the third person alluded to in the dedication ‘To Our Three Selves’ in The Well of Loneliness. ‘Did I survive all the smears for this?’ Una exclaimed. John feared Evguenia would leave her because of such publicity. Natalie and Dolly Wilde asked about the meaning of ‘Our Three Selves’.

To placate Una, and for the sake of a public