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

at Westminster Cathedral, then lunched at the Berkeley with Ladye’s sister whose husband, Lord Clarendon, had died the previous year. In the afternoon they all went off to the zoo then back for tea at Emmie Clarendon’s house in Cambridge Square.

Una Troubridge, Ladye’s cousin, was there. ‘For very good reasons I was deeply depressed and very lonely’, she said of herself. She thought John good-looking with beautiful eyes and a raffish smile. ‘It was not the countenance of a young woman but of a very handsome young man.’ John was dressed in white, with a small hat with white feathers that fanned back. She was holding a miniature fox terrier she had bought the previous week. (It was returned to the breeders when it developed eczema.) In the evening she and Ladye drove Una home to her rented flat in Bryanston Street, Marble Arch. They stopped for supper with her and her mother, Minna Taylor. They talked about Annie Besant, Christianity and life in other worlds. Una approved of John’s prejudices and religious fervour, ‘I had met for the first time in my life a born fanatic’, she later said.

She then began to ‘drop in’ on John. She was twenty-eight, John thirty-five, Ladye fifty-eight. They talked of sculpture, literature, religion, life. Una came for coffee and stayed for lunch, to tea and stayed for dinner, to breakfast and stayed the night. She described Ladye as her friend as well as cousin. ‘I had always liked and admired her’, she wrote. None the less she had, she said, ‘as much consideration for her or for anyone else as a child of six’. Ladye’s chances of a workable life with the woman she loved ended with the arrival of Una. Her diary became a catalogue of her own discomforts, Una’s intrusion, John’s betrayal.

Una’s plight was desperate when she encouraged John’s raffish smile and beautiful eyes. She had venereal disease and an unwanted daughter from a husband twenty-five years older than herself whom she neither loved nor liked and whose court martial by the navy the previous November had been front-page news in the papers.

She had married Captain Ernest Troubridge in 1908 when she was twenty-one. Her father, Harry Taylor, had died the previous year, leaving her without money or a home. His estate of under £700 was willed to her mother and scarcely covered his debts. There had been ‘great mutual devotion and affinity’ between Una and her father. She competed with her mother and elder sister Viola for his affection. She said they were ‘like devoted brother and sister’, that he was the one in the family who loved her. He called her his ‘own sweet little Una’ and fretted when she was ill. She called him Harry, admired his height – he was six foot two – his snowy white hair, civility, culture and charm.

In fact, he was improvident with money, away half the year and intellectually unremarkable. For twenty-two years he worked as a Queen’s (then King’s) Foreign Service messenger. His job was to carry despatches in a bag from the Foreign Office in London to ambassadors in embassies in Teheran, Madrid, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Constantinople and St Petersburg. His annual pay was £300 and he travelled fifty thousand miles a year.

It was a sinecure but nothing more. Una in childhood saw her parents struggle to keep their heads ‘just above the waters of really grim privation … Every unforeseen expense involved days and weeks of anxiety, pinching, scheming and going without necessities.’

Both her parents had aristocratic antecedents and a sense of privileges lost. Minna Taylor was ruled by propriety. She liked to remind the world that the second Baron Castlemaine of Westmeath was her grandfather, that the Florentine families of Tealdi and Vincenzo were cousins, if much removed. She would hire a private carriage while stinting on food. Una despised her for being vain and self-centred and accused her of favouring Viola. John said ‘there was no affinity or bond between Una and her mother’. They shared though a desire for money, a ruthless vanity, a concern for status.

From childhood Una remembered rented rooms, her parents’ ‘unceasing’ quarrels, landladies, lamb chops with greasy gravy and then ‘a dingy London house with two rooms on each floor and steep stairs in between’. It was the family home at 23 Montpelier Square in Knightsbridge. Summer holidays were spent with an aunt who bred chickens in Hertfordshire or an uncle who owned a dairy farm in Essex. Only when ill was Una indulged. Instead of the grease and shepherd’s pie, there was chicken broth and calves’ foot jelly, the attentions of a doctor and nurse, a hired carriage and convalescence by the sea. This equating of illness with privilege gave her a lifelong passion for minor ailments and their use to gain attention.

Her father, despite his modest income, financed her artistic ambitions. He was the son of Sir Henry Taylor, diplomat, poet and essayist, and a friend of the painters G. F. Watts, Edward Poynter and Edward Burne-Jones. Una remembered sitting, aged five, on Edward Poynter’s knee while he drew pigs and narrated their adventures. She was taught to dance by Mrs Wordsworth at the Portman Rooms and had private piano and singing lessons, though her voice ‘had a tendency to wobble and quiver’. When she was thirteen her father paid for her to study at the Royal College of Art. Sculpture was her special subject and she did much-praised statues and busts. She dressed in theatrical clothes, aspired to be a famous sculptor or singer, dropped her given name, Margot Elena Gertrude, and chose Una Vincenzo for its imposing ring.

When he was forty, her father got tuberculosis. He was sent to sanatoriums in Sussex and at Pau in France for the last four months of his life. He died on 5 March 1907, three days before Una’s twentieth birthday. She went to Florence to stay with her mother’s wealthy relatives, the Tealdis, in their villa Sant Agostino. Like Radclyffe Hall