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

side. She was fixed up in the ultimate Grand Hotel, was well and loved John more than ever, but the relationship lacked life. Sessions with Gladys Leonard took a different tack.

Radclyffe Hall hoped to publish her research in the journal of the Society for Psychical Research. The Society required ‘evidential proof’ of the existence of the dead. Its members needed to show that they had subjected their hypotheses to empirical tests.

For Radclyffe Hall, the emphasis shifted from grief about Ladye to documenting what she was up to. Daily life revealed her. Her ubiquity took her onto the bookshelves and the ceiling, up the drainpipe, into the tea leaves and the shifting glass. As an earthling, Ladye had loved idleness – hours in bed with milky drinks, hot water bottles and a book. Now she was everywhere. Sortilege evoked her. Una saw her in a large, luminous patch in the shape of a Zulu shield hovering over John’s bed. Both heard her scrabbling in the cupboard. She moved cushions in the night. John talked of the ‘three of them’, a trinity of paranormal interaction.

Their curiosity about Ladye tested Mrs Leonard’s ingenuity. In session after session they scrutinized the significance of places beginning with P or people beginning with S, jewellery of a certain colour, random words or phrases, any of which might indicate past or present familiarity with some person or place known to Ladye. The quest was on a par with George Batten’s obsession with acrostics which Ladye had so deplored. It was not, historically speaking, the way she had liked to pass her time.

Feda engaged them in ‘book tests’ to show Ladye’s all-pervading powers. Near the top of page 152 of the nineteenth book on the left on a shelf at the height of Una’s skirt pocket John would find a message from Ladye. She was led to Orval, given to Mabel Batten by its author Owen Meredith. ‘Almost though not quite at the top of the page’ were the words ‘today, tomorrow, yesterday, forever’. Equally successful, supernaturally speaking, was Feda’s directive to two-thirds down page 108 of the sixth book from the window on the shelf at the height of John’s knee. It was The Old Curiosity Shop and John found ‘talked of their meeting in another world as if he were dead but yesterday’.

Most of it was hopeless. In Una’s flat the twenty-eighth page of the twelfth book from the left, on the shelf level with the window ledge, in the room with the longest shelves, was Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson volume 2, Navy Records Society, 1902. All its pages were uncut and the text too tedious to pursue. And the assurance that they would find a message to do with golf on page thirty-six of The Science of Peace, which dealt entirely with the sins of Germany in provoking the First War, was perhaps more the fault of Troubridge’s reading matter than Mrs Leonard’s clairvoyant skills.

In page after page of John’s recorded notes, twenty-four archive volumes, she struggled to make correlations that taxed her intelligence and hopes. It was a relief when she was led to Spirit Intercourse by H. MacKenzie and there on the title page were the words, ‘There is no chance and no anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.’ A relief too when on page thirteen of First Steps to Nursing: A Manual for Would Be Probationers she found the lines: ‘Even without training this woman is a boon and blessing to her suffering friends in an emergency’ – evidence that she had saved Ladye’s life in that Oxford car crash.

This quest for Ladye was a full-time occupation. It meant that Una was always with John. She did not claim the central place in her affections; it was enough to have all her time. Once she was foolish enough to be scathing about Ladye’s appearance in a photograph on John’s desk. Wrath followed and her tears. She did not do it again.

Sir Oliver Lodge invited them in January 1917 to stay at his house in Birmingham. In the evening they sat round an oval table with linked hands. The spirits rapped, the table tilted and the wine glass swirled. John had a nosebleed and went to bed. Lady Lodge grew tired. Alone with Una, Sir Oliver dazzled her with psychical phenomena until one in the morning. ‘So very interesting & a great & adorable man.’

These psychical pursuits clashed with the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Radclyffe Hall became a bane to priests. Convinced of her own closeness to God, she tested them with Feda, plane three and lesbian love. The Father Confessor at Brompton Oratory was a ‘veritable torment’ to her. The ‘prospect of a break with the church preyed on her mind’. Father Warwick refused to allow a memorial tablet to Mabel Batten on the wall of his church at Malvern Wells. Una went from priest to priest, hoping to find a sympathetic confessor. She called it ‘an errand of mercy rewarded by complete failure’. Then Father Thurston, recommended by Oliver Lodge, told Radclyffe Hall that if she kept an open mind about alleged phenomena she was doing no evil. She replied that ‘as an educated woman and serious investigator’ she would not ‘submit herself any longer to tirades on the subject in the confessional’.

Nor could Ladye’s daughter Cara accept her mother’s posthumous preoccupation with John. Mabel was not tapping on her wardrobe, sitting on her sofa or comforting her in the night. Jealous, she went to see Mrs Leonard. She said that she and her mother had been like sisters whom Radclyffe Hall was now doing all in her power to divide. She asked for sittings with Feda.

Her request was a problem. Gladys Leonard profited from Radclyffe Hall at a guinea a go, plus extras of jewellery, clothes, accommodation expenses and paid holidays. She did not want to lose her most lucrative client. She gave Cara a single