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

with her husband Penrose Fry in nearby Northiam at ‘Little Doucegrove’, a sprawling oast house.

Rye was accepting, English and eccentric. These friends wrote books, painted pictures, worshipped the Lord and pottered in their gardens. John and Una fitted in and vowed they would never leave. They were perceived as a respectable married couple. ‘We desire order and fidelity and the privilege of a religious and legal bond’, Una wrote. Horrified by an article in the Twentieth Century advocating sexual freedom, she burned the magazine before the servants saw it.

‘Isn’t Rye heavenly’, E. F. Benson said. ‘Long may the grass flourish between her holy cobbles.’ Help was there for John and Una when Tulip haemorrhaged and died in May 1931. John wept all day, buried her in the garden and had a marble headstone made. Christopher St John said her heart ached in sympathy. She gave John and Una a key to the Smallhythe garden so that they might freely visit. E. F. Benson hoped there would be a future life for dogs. Mrs Leonard confirmed that Tulip had gone straight to Ladye. (A discarnate influence was helping her write her autobiography, My Life in Two Worlds.)

New friends replaced the old. Toupie Lowther fell from grace for claiming to be the inspiration for The Well of Loneliness. Gabrielle Enthoven was dropped for ‘repudiating her own kind when opportune to do so’. She had urged discretion and camouflage from her new friend Wilma. ‘She’s a rat and we have no use for her,’ Una wrote and blamed her for the failure of Chéri. John wanted to drop Audrey as her agent, but did not know who else to trust.

Radclyffe Hall’s enthusiasm for socialism was brief. She despised Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Prime Minister. In a broadcast to the nation he called for sacrifices. Income tax was at five shillings in the pound in 1931, the bank rate went to six per cent and Britain left the gold standard. Radclyffe Hall’s investment income was halved. She worried about her gilt-edged securities, her failed shares in American Railroads and her mother who would not economize. To save money, she used coke mixed with anthracite in the boiler and to make money she bought another house, the Santa Maria in Rye, supervised its refurbishment, put stored furniture in it and rented it out.

Una described Rye as haunted by peace. She loved the rainbows over the marsh, the blossom, the primroses. The focus of her days was buying the marmalade and a book on pewter and reading aloud The Ladies of Llangollen, which had just been published. Radclyffe Hall was again the master. Children were not sure if she was a man. She worked long hours at her book about martyrdom. A ship’s bell hung above her chair in the dining room and she rang it to summon the servants. A tailor from Brighton called to measure her for her smoking suits and breeches.

There were flowers in the vases, fires in the hearths and the oak furniture gleamed. But all was not right. John was a bundle of nerves. She felt exhausted and faint, had frequent colds and headaches and her eyes hurt. When her throat was sore, Una touched it with a relic of St Blaise, the patron saint of throats, which did not make it better. She was prescribed bromides, told to get fresh air, to rest and to cut down on cigarettes. Una ordered fourteen pipes and a long cigarette holder from Dunhill for her.

John’s troubles seemed deep and Una could not allay them. The house stifled her. Chapter 39 of The Master of the House would not materialize. A blowfly buzzed in her room; the church bells pealed; the Salvation Army banged tambourines. She was disturbed by the chatter of the servants in the kitchen, the stoking of the stove, Una’s wireless, sounds of music from the monastery. Trippers looked in at the window and parked their cars too close to the house. Una printed a card in large letters: ‘Please do not park in front of my house. Una the Lady Troubridge.’ John stuck it on windscreens.

Una asked herself whether any book in the world was worth what John was going through. She thought her nervous state was because Ladye was coadjutor, so John was in constant physical proximity with a ghost. Everything made her anxious. She found endless fault with Mr Breeds, the builder working on the Santa Maria. He sent ‘a very insolent letter’ saying he could waste no more time or trouble over the place. She worried about her mother. Audrey checked in the phone book that she was still at her address in Phillimore Terrace, Kensington.

As ever there were problems with the servants. Winifred Hales, the secretary, was railed at for leaving her key in the front door, then fired for wanting a holiday. ‘Poor old Mary’ the parlour maid, found talking to herself in the kitchen late one night, was dismissed in the morning. Her replacement, Violet Evans, was three-quarters of an hour late coming down. She had been sick. Una diagnosed pregnancy. Violet was despatched and replaced by Bertha and by Quilter, a parlour man.

Una fussed about her own health, her periods and piles. A letter from Andrea in June 1931, saying she was in love with an actor and wanted to have his children, sparked a pathological response. ‘I long to own some bit of immature childhood’, Una wrote in her diary. ‘I loathe the swelling breasts and calves, the incipient moustache of adolescence.’ Now forty-five, dressed, like Radclyffe Hall, in mannish clothes, when she overdid the blue rinse on her cropped grey hair it turned a rich purple. Una commended the respectability of their long marriage. She and John grumbled about small matters, held hands and admired the marsh and the sunset.

Andrea was told to explain herself by return of post or Una would send Harold Rubinstein to investigate and would encourage Tom Troubridge to decrease her allowance. Andrea was nearly twenty-one. Una