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

for eight hours had excruciating pain. Nightingale, late in the day, made an ‘agonizingly painful’ rectal examination. He said there was an almost total obstruction which might be haemorrhoids and ‘might be something more serious’. He wanted her to go to Barnstaple hospital. Una insisted on London. But none of the hospitals would let her have a bed too and she would not be separated.

With John’s money she could buy what she wanted. She booked a suite at the Ritz, five guineas a day for two bedrooms, sitting room, bathroom and wc. A Daimler ambulance was to take them there on 11 April. Nightingale said to Nurse Baldwin, ‘I don’t envy you the journey tomorrow.’ Late at night he pushed painkillers through the letterbox of the Wayside. Una found them at four in the morning.

The landlord Jack Hancock helped get John into the ambulance. The journey to London took seven hours. At the Ritz Dr Armando Child said a colostomy was inevitable. He returned with a surgeon Cecil Joll. He told John he would operate next day at a private nursing home in Hadley Wood run by Lady Carnarvon. He said it might be a temporary colostomy but he could not say more until he had opened her up.

Evguenia went to the Ritz that night. In the morning Father Geddes from the church at Farm Street anointed John. In the afternoon Una, Nurse Baldwin and Evguenia took her to the Hadley Wood nursing home. Joll operated at nine in the evening after his hospital work was done. It took him thirty-five minutes to do a colostomy. The anaesthetist was a Mr McGill. Joll then told Una the cancer was widespread and inoperable. He said if John pulled through, she would for a time feel better than for a long while.

Had John died on Lady Carnarvon’s operating table, Evguenia would have been a rich woman. By the terms of John’s will, probated in 1938, she had, as she told Evguenia in many letters, made ‘ample provision’ for her. She had left her ‘a substantial income’. But John lived another six months. Una did not write regularly in her diary during those months. What happened in them was clear from later entries and from copies Evguenia kept of her letters to Una.

John was seven weeks in the Hadley Wood nursing home. The place had ‘gone to pieces’, it lacked even rudimentary management, nursing was non-existent and John was the only and last patient. It suited Una, who had total control. John was in great pain. She had a second operation, ‘a terrible dilating operation’ Una called it. Una never left her. She slept on two armchairs by her bed. Her vigilance was unflagging:

When you began to retch I would run to fill up the glasses with bicarbonate and water, while you waited in patient misery for the agonizing spasms to begin and continue till they exhausted you.

I harried and urged you to get up, to lie on your side in bed, to move, to eat. I said your muscles would never get strength while you lay on your back, always, like a crusader on a tombstone. And you were hurt and angry … How I wish that Joll had told me honestly that your case was utterly hopeless and that I could let you do as you wish.

Joll had told them both that she had inoperable cancer, a clear appraisal. It would have helped had someone insisted on efficient nursing care.

How far Una harried and urged John about Evguenia, played on her anxieties of how she could not be trusted with money, would squander it on rash projects then be left vulnerable and ill, is not recorded. But her past and what followed indicted her.

Lady Carnarvon sold her run-down nursing home. John was moved to a ‘ghastly’ place in Primrose Hill, then to the London Clinic and then at the beginning of August to a flat Una found in Dolphin Square, 502 Hood House.

John’s demise was protracted and terrible. She was given Omnopon, an opium preparation, and Diamorphine – heroin. Her body, Una said, was wasted, shrunken and disfigured. She ‘scarcely knew day from night in the interminable cycle of hours of pain and sickness’. She unceasingly voiced her desire to die and thanked God when each day and each night was over. She told Una she was only sticking this illness for her sake. It was as if she needed her permission to die. Una had become her trial. She was always there and gave John no chance to see Evguenia alone.

Armando Child told Una that she would break down if she kept this twenty-four-hour vigil. He also, more accurately, told her she was as strong as an ox. At the end of September he said John was dying and would go any day or more likely any night.

On 28 September Una summoned Harold Rubinstein to the Dolphin Square flat. John revoked her previous will which gave Evguenia a substantial income and made another. It was very short:

I appoint Margot Elena Gertrude Troubridge (known as Una Vincenzo Troubridge) to be Sole Executrix of this my Will and I Devise and Bequeath to her all my property and estate both real and personal absolutely trusting her to make such provision for our friend Eugenie Souline as in her absolute discretion she may consider right knowing my wishes for the welfare of the said Eugenie Souline.

It was witnessed by Armando Child and Nurse Sailes, who was Nurse Baldwin’s sister. Radclyffe Hall’s signature of endorsement sloped backwards as it used to when she was a child and she had hyphenated her name. Una was ecstatic.

I saw your eyes as they looked at me after you had made your will and said, ‘I’ve left you everything’, the clear, blue happiness and as it were triumph in them. I think you realised how it crowned me and set me for ever before everyone, alone and apart as the one you had chosen, loved, proved and trusted,