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

Evguenia left without giving Una an address. The £100 a year covenant was paid into her bank. Una asked the Information Bureau at Selfridges what a foreign nurse employed by the United States Army would earn. She was relieved that she had gone and hoped she had seen the last of her. She found that the best way to deal with her was not to think of her at all. She longed for Italy, cried when the Duce was murdered and turned off the news so as not to hear eyewitness accounts of conditions at Buchenwald concentration camp.

And then in July 1946 Evguenia sent her a letter saying she was married. Vladimir Makaroff, her husband, was a Russian emigré, a former cavalry officer. She had met him in Paris where he worked for the Russian Red Cross. ‘It was all settled in a moment’, she said. She had been in France once in September 1945 for two days and then for four days in June 1946. He was thin, not tall, and about fifty-five. He had lived for twenty years in Czechoslovakia but moved to France during the war.

Evguenia had not realized that she needed written authority from the United States Army to marry and so she had been court-martialled. She was going to bring Vladimir to England where at least ‘thanks to Johnnie’ she had resident alien status. Her husband hoped to find work but it would not be easy because he spoke no English at all.

‘God knows what she has picked up’, was Una’s reaction. She supposed he was a ‘worthless dud’. But the main thing was that Evguenia was his responsibility now. Una resolved to stop paying her the £24 a year fuel allowance, any medical bills or insurances. ‘This marriage closes the account except for the £100 a year as a purely grace offering’, she wrote. John, she reasoned, would have withheld even that given Evguenia’s behaviour since her death.

If it was martyrdom Radclyffe Hall sought, she had it now. Her work had been destroyed, her lover whom she had so wanted to protect was punished and the apostle in whom she had placed her absolute trust had betrayed her for thirty pieces of silver and more.

39

He is my occupation

At the war’s end Una’s thoughts turned to Italy ‘& a Christian climate, not this land of swamps and rain and wind and ice’. She figured that every self-respecting bird got out of England for most of the year and so, therefore, would she. People, for which as a species she had never felt warmth, all were fatally flawed. She thought them base and did not court their affection:

I can’t remember a time when every kind of thing wasn’t said of me. I ill-treated my step-children, I behaved disgracefully to my husband, and of course, since the publication of The Well I have been notorious & always shall be & no doubt when Evguenia came on the scene they all screamed with delight & hoped that it meant shipwreck for me & you and everyone, only it didn’t!

She wanted Italy ‘where no one talked at all’. After Radclyffe Hall’s death she lodged for a time with John Holroyd-Reece in his house off Chancery Lane. But she suspected him of being after her money and his house got bombed, so she went to stay with Etheline Cripps, who had been Teddie Gerrard’s lover in those far-off twenties days. Then for some months she was a guest with the Smallhythe trio in Rye. None of it was right. John Holroyd-Reece was ‘brutally unfaithful’ to his dying wife Jehanne. Etheline’s brother Roy was intolerable and offensive. When Mrs Urquhart came to lunch wearing fashionable clothes Roy said of her that she was a real woman, ‘not a damned half and half’. Una, in flannel shirt, John’s breeches, collar and tie, went to her room saying ‘Damn and blast your soul to hell’. Your brother, she told Etheline, is an insolent swine.

Viola she called a spiteful bore, ‘a hard woman and no kin to us in any way’. Viola asked if Andrea knew she would never inherit Radclyffe Hall’s money and was this punishment for some misdemeanour. Una thought it no business of hers.

Visiting Minna, Una perceived her as ‘a ghastly wreck, partially toothless, terribly emaciated, her speech almost unintelligible, dressed in a short sleeved low necked nightgown that increases the horror … As usual she begged to know if I loved her and of course I took her in my arms and assured her I did.’

Audrey Heath was now a ‘poor little ailing mouse’ who meandered in her speech, had walked into a lamppost in the blackout and was taken to hospital unconscious. Olive Rinder had ‘sparse, grey hair, yellowed by repeated curling’ and ‘washed-out, frightened eyes’. Cara Harris, Mabel Batten’s daughter, wrote saying she had been very ill and asking for photographs of her mother. ‘I will not let her have anything of Ladye’s’, was Una’s response. ‘She looked madder than ever with her dyed yellow hair when I saw her recently … I can’t risk resuming relations with her.’

Toupie Lowther invited Una to stay. Toupie, Una said, was drunk, lonely and dying of tuberculosis. At night she railed at God from her bedroom window for taking her wife Fabienne Lafargue De-Avilla from her. Fabienne was ‘tough, promiscuous, cruel’ and living with her ‘amant de coeur’, Liza, in a nearby cottage owned by Toupie. They were waiting for Toupie to die, so as to scoop her inheritance, Una wrote in Letters to John. ‘They want me, lonely and without your protection and with the money you left me.’ She was not going near. Toupie died on 30 December 1944. Fabienne then married and Liza ‘made a terrible fuss’. Una expressed ‘less than no sympathy’ for them all.

Before leaving England for what she knew would be for good, Una tried in June 1946 to