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

12.30 and we will lunch there alone together, just you and I. After lunch we will go back to my hotel where I shall have a sitting room and there (if you are willing) we will spend the afternoon. We shall be quite alone … Take care of yourself and know that I am counting on this meeting in Paris as I have counted on few things in my life.

John booked in at the Pont Royale on 24 July. Evguenia sent a note of welcome. ‘Darling Yes I am here in Paris,’ John replied, ‘and it seems so strange that only a few weeks ago I did not know that Paris meant you. I want to come to you. It’s red hell to be here and not to be able to see you until the day after tomorrow and then only for a few hours.’

Within days it was red hell to be with Una. ‘John gave my ex-nurse lunch at La Perousse’, she wrote in her diary on 26 July. ‘I am sorry for the poor child who is lonely and not happy.’ Soon she was lonely, not happy and sorry for herself. All afternoon John stayed closeted in an adjacent room. Evguenia, terrified, ate nothing at lunch. At some point she said, ‘Do you want to kiss my mouth?’

And your darling lips were so firm and protective, so chaste and so competent to protect, so unwilling to give, so unwilling to respond. Why you kissed me like a sister or a child – or were you really experienced and not intending to do otherwise? Once, just once your lips gave way a little, a very little.

Darling lips and chaste kisses were a start. When they parted, Evguenia said, ‘I can’t believe that this is the last time I shall see you.’ Even before leaving for Sirmione John’s letters gushed out:

I am tormented because of you, and this torment is now only partly of the senses – but is now an even more enduring thing and more impossible to ease – my sweet, because it is a torment of tenderness, of yearning over you, of longing to help you – of longing to take you into my arms and comfort you innocently and most gently as I would comfort a little child, whispering to you all sorts of foolish words of love that has nothing to do with the body. And then I would want you to fall asleep with your head on my breast for a while, Soulina, and then I would want you to wake up again and feel glad because I was lying beside you, and because you were touching this flesh of mine that is so consumed by reason of your flesh, yet so subjugated and crushed by my pity, that the whole of me would gladly melt into tears, becoming as a cup of cold water for your drinking. And if this is wrong then there is no God, but only some cruel and hateful fiend who creates such an one as I am for the pleasure that he will gain from my ultimate destruction. But there is a God, make no mistake, and I have a rightful place in His creation, and if you are as I am you share that place, and our God is more merciful than the world, and since He made us, is understanding and He knows very well what the end will be, seeing what you & I cannot see, knowing why you & I have been forced to meet, and why this great trouble has come upon us. Soulina I implore you to cling to this belief, because without faith our souls will be undone at this time of all but unendurable suffering …

Something tells me that all this was meant to happen, that we shall meet again, that our love will last, that our mutual desire the one for the other is only the physical expression of a thing that is infinately more enduring than our bodies. Surely Soulina, you must feel this too? Otherwise why did I let you go from me even as you came – I, who needed you so and who could have made you incapable of resisting, could have made you no longer want to resist? For you are not a woman of ice and this I well know, my little virgin, and I agonized to take your virginity and to bind you to me with the Chains of the flesh, because I had & have so vast a need that my wretched body has become my torment – but through it all my spirit cries out to you, Soulina, and it tells you that love is never a sin, that the flesh may be weak but the spirit is strong – yesterday it was my spirit that saved you. Must I always save you? I do not know. I cannot see far beyond this pain.

John told Evguenia to lock up this and all such letters. She told her that Lady Troubridge had been very wonderful, sent her love and would write to her from Sirmione.

Lady Troubridge was not very wonderful for long. By the time they arrived in Sirmione she was sweating in her sleep, thin as a grass blade and praying for help to Our Lady of Victories. When John announced she was going to see Soulina in Paris in October on their way back to Rye she went haywire. She forbade it. She reminded her of her hysterectomy, of every illness she had ever had, of Dr Fouts’ warning that she must avoid all emotion. She told her she had been married to her for eighteen years, had stood by her through the obscenity trial, given her all of her interest, all of her love, all of her life and now she was going to die. ‘After a scene which lasted all night, she suddenly hurled herself onto the floor and looked as though she were going demented. I