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

of not being recognized in literature. Sheila Kaye-Smith called at the Black Boy after mass but made no comment on her complimentary copy.

Then Cape’s American company went bankrupt. The news sparked Radclyffe Hall’s rage. She called him a dirty blackguard and a skunk. She told him he had ruined The Well of Loneliness in England and now The Master of the House in America. She said she would make his name stink for what he had done to her. He ‘went the colour of weak lemonade’ and murmured ‘don’t threaten me’.

John went home and went to bed. Snow blizzards shrouded Rye and nine cases of smallpox were confirmed. She read books about chiromancy, necromancy and black magic and tried to read the future in her coffee grounds. When she dropped a log on her toe Dr Hartley called to take an X-ray. Life was not how she wanted it. The church did little to console her. Father Bonaventura had, she felt sure, gone mad. He made obscene remarks and bothered the nuns. She suspected him of stealing the money she gave to the church. The paintings of the stations of the cross for which she gave £225 only cost £160. He refused to heat the church and ‘spoiled’ mass for her by racing through it in twenty minutes. She did not want to have communion with him. He got Mabel Batten’s name wrong and would give no date for when the church would be consecrated. Moreover, he omitted to feed the church dog, Rodney. John and Una instructed the vet to take the dog away and organized meetings to oust Bonaventura. As John saw it, he was an unsatisfactory servant who ought be sacked.

Worn out and thin, in June 1932 she and Una went to Bath to take a cure. They travelled with the dogs Mitsie and Jane, Gabriele the canary and Bertha the maid. Their rooms in the Empire Hotel looked out over the weir. They walked in the botanical gardens and in the evenings Una read aloud The House by the Bay and Parsons Nine. They had pine baths, diathermy and sunlight treatment.

They went on by train to Brighton and the Grand Hotel. Una saw Dr Conran because of her heavy periods. He prescribed iron injections and referred her to Dr Seymour, a gynaecologist. He advised a hysterectomy to remove fibroids. Una and John hurried to London to Alfred Sachs and a surgeon, Mr Prescott Hedley, who both confirmed the diagnosis and treatment. Sachs said had it not been for her ‘married history’ of venereal disease he would have recommended ‘radium treatment’.

After much packing and praying she was admitted to a private hospital in Welbeck Street. Andrea visited, looking distressed. Una was touched by her concern. Minna, aged seventy-three but dressed like a girl, brought flowers. Una was taken to the operating theatre on 6 July 1932. She had her relic of Saint Celine sewn to her nightdress. Prescott Hedley took out her uterus, cervix and appendix. He left her ovaries and fallopian tubes. John, in a room at the Welbeck Palace Hotel opposite, had acute indigestion from worry.

28

Give us a kiss

It was births in the back rooms of the clinic, hysterectomies in the front. The contrast imprinted on John’s mind. Una, centre stage, made all she could of her illness. Her focus was her own pulse, temperature and urinary habits. John’s affairs faded into the shade. Two nurses attended day and night, friends sent flowers – three bunches from Audrey, three from Andrea, two from Ida Wylie, one from Sheila Kaye-Smith (‘2 dead sweet peas and a withered rose’) and countless of course from John, who ‘went through days and nights of terror and anguish. What she has been in this illness no words even of her own living pen could describe. My whole soul rises up to bless her in a love which seems incredibly increased a thousandfold.’

John saw virtually no one but Una for three weeks. She regretted missing the Smallhythe show and feared she would never work again. She scrutinized Una’s stitches, commiserated with her pain, knelt with Father Collingwood beside her bed and thanked God for sparing her from death. She took in her bed jackets, peaches and lemon-yellow carnations and sat with her day after day. It was reminiscent of Ladye’s demise.

After a month they left for a fortnight’s convalescence in Brighton. They travelled by Daimler with Sister Richardson, whom Una called ‘nanny’. At the Royal Crescent Hotel another nurse and a Dr Cummings were waiting to minister. Una got a vaginal abscess, infected gums, haemorrhoids then shingles.

John pushed her in a bathchair along the seafront and spent long hours sitting in deckchairs. She hated the constraints of invalidity and the Brighton crowds or, as Una called them, ‘the subhuman, seething mass of weekend tripper Jews’. Herself menopausal, John was having hot flushes and not sleeping at night. She mourned the poor reception of her book, feared her talent had left her and worried about what to write next. Cape was now a blackguard, Jew, and unscrupulous villain. His autumn list trailed a book he was publishing by Chartres Biron.

It was a relief to return to Rye. Not that all was well there. Bertha swore at Mabel Bourne, was fired and out of the house by noon. Jane the spaniel was on heat. Una’s mother came to lunch which she refused to eat because she had had a rock cake at the station. They took her to see Dodo’s garden and the church. Bonaventura, unshaven, red and dishevelled, leered at her and kept saying ‘put me among the girls’.

Minna told John that Andrea was hard up, had a cough and could not afford to see a doctor. She asked her to pay for her to see Montague Curtis. Una, furious with her mother for ‘trying to make John responsible for a woman of 22 who had consistently rejected her wishes and advice’, packed her off home in a