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

She had no interest in Andrea, no intention of going near the Troubridges even if invited, which she was not. She offered no present, no involvement, no practical help.

Andrea sent a twenty-five-page letter to her mother. She would like her to be at her wedding but she asked her to retract her insults. She had heard said some pretty awful things about her and John, but wanted not to believe them. Una burned her letter and did not reply. She referred to her as the ‘grim outcome of an old and diseased father and a young and diseased mother. It would have mattered less somehow if a really nice personality had been born of the union. This affair has been the last illusion and the last disillusion I shall endure on her behalf.’

Andrea wrote again. She did not want to arrange her wedding over her mother’s head but she needed to make plans. Una replied with a copy to Tom Troubridge: she withdrew none of her criticisms, she would not be attending, not least because Andrea had made a disgraceful scene in her house.

Minna intervened for Andrea. Una told her that she too should not attend the wedding. Minna replied that it was a duty to be there. Una hung up on her whenever she phoned. ‘She was my mother before she was Andrea’s grandmother’, she wrote. ‘It is her duty to support me in a moral issue. She must of course as always for her own satisfaction, dress her inclinations in trappings of high moral colour.’ Which was what Una for her own satisfaction always did.

Una ‘retired from the whole affair’. At a first night of Finished Abroad, Andrea and Toby Warren were standing at the back of the stalls. Neither Una nor John greeted them. Una commented on how fat and plain her daughter’s face was, and how ‘slatternly and unwashed’ the man she was going to marry.

Spite was provoked by her daughter’s marriage, and a loathed reminder of past life. Andrea sent her a printed invitation. Her wedding would be on 15 November at St Mary’s Church in Cadogan Gardens and afterwards at Tom Troubridge’s house in Egerton Gardens. ‘I shall merely ignore the communication’, Una wrote. She instructed her bank to pay over £267 held in trust for Andrea and she sent a diamond ring given by Minna for her long ago.

I shall not be present as she has deliberately made it impossible for me to be so. And John, who has kept a roof over her head since she was five, has not been invited. Sufficient reason were there no other to preclude my attendance. The reception will be given by Tom Troubridge, my stepson, who, for six years, ever since he learned that his father had infected me with a venereal disease, has never missed an opportunity of insulting me. Well, Andrea is 23, a grown woman, and I have done my utmost for her ever since her birth and now is the end. She will go her, way and I will go mine. She becomes, if anyone’s, her husband’s responsibility and I do not expect to have any further contact with her.

Una was like steel. Life ricocheted off her. Old resentments found new targets. Bonaventura did not return to Rye, for which she gave thanks in Brompton Oratory to Sir Thomas More. Father Wendelin Braun was assigned to fill his place in January 1934. Radclyffe Hall went to see him about getting back her special pew. He was in his slippers by a blazing fire, taking snuff and eating sweets. He said he was glad if she and Una were resuming attendance at the church but that he had been instructed to refuse them reserved seats.

Radclyffe Hall told him that he was excluding the principal benefactor of the church. The matter would not rest. She would go to the Bishop, the Archbishop, the Pope. She would speak to the press, sue for defamation of character. Father Braun forwarded a letter from her to the Provincial, who did not reply.

John became ill. Preoccupied about who was sitting in her seat at church, she seemed defined by abandonment: no mother, no father, no gender, no book and now no pew at St Anthony’s. The slightest obstacle made her cry. Her skin was grey, her eyes tired, she looked emaciated and her pulse raced. Dr Montague Curtis warned her that she would have a breakdown if she did not take care. She got a boil on her nose and Una feared this would lead to blood clots on the brain. Her volume of short stories was published by Heinemann to faint praise and no real interest. The American fan Miss Lugsch sent a bioscope of Chicago views that broke in the post. John put the package, unopened, into a bucket of water supposing it to be a bomb.

Una pleaded that they get away for the summer, that they have a complete rest. She reserved rooms in the Hotel des Thermes in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne for 25 July. They would travel via Paris, have their thermal baths then go on to Sirmione in Italy, to the lake and mountains where their friend the novelist Naomi (‘Micki’) Jacob had a villa. Mabel Bourne was to care for the Forecastle while they were away. Charlotte was given to Lord Tavistock who had an aviary. John now found her intolerable. She shrieked and whistled, moulted everywhere and made a loud pinging sound when she ate.

SAME HEART

29

The intolerable load

They left London on 21 June 1934 with their paraphernalia of trunks, Mitsie the dog and Gabriele the canary. Paris was hot and airless. At the Sacré Coeur they lit candles by the memorial stone John had bought for Ladye and bought pious bibelots for the success of their cure – a faun drinking holy water, a sacred heart blessed by a priest.

They had a ‘marvellous lunch’ with Romaine who now had an apartment in rue Raynouard