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

see you?’ In another letter she wrote that John was the biggest love in her life. More often she voiced worry that it was all somehow wrong.

She said she would prefer their love to be ‘pure and vital’ and ‘only spiritual’. John asked if this was because some man had given her an emotional shock, ‘even if this falling in love with me has been your first deep experience of love’. She told her to have the courage to accept her fate, view John as the Giver and the Master, do what she said and hold her head high.

John would be in Paris on Sunday 30 September on her way back to England. She would take Evguenia to lunch at twelve-fifteen on 1 October. They would then go back to Evguenia’s apartment at rue Sarcey. ‘You shall tremble in my arms which even you, even you must admit does not constitute either a rape or a “seduction”.’ Evguenia was to keep free all afternoons and evenings throughout John’s ten-day stay. She was to say how much money she needed so as not to have to work for the hospital at this time. ‘Money there is and money I will send if only you will tell me how much you need.’

Evguenia panicked. At the end of August she wrote that she might have to go to America two days after John arrived. A rich elderly patient, Mrs Baker, ill with all sorts of things, always asked particularly for her to nurse her when she travelled.

John responded with rage. She instructed Una to write to Evguenia. She arranged to go to Paris earlier. Mrs Baker ‘appears to have more claim upon you than I have’, she wrote. Evguenia was not to run about for Mrs Baker – doing her shopping, cashing her cheques, holding her hand. ‘If you’re anyone’s slave you’re going to be mine.’ She warned her to keep to their schedule and to keep her diary entirely free for those days in Paris:

Now listen Souline – do you know who I am? I am really a very well known author whose career is watched by a very large public, and as such I am naturally a busy woman … I think it essential that I should remind you. You have fallen in love with Radclyffe Hall, not with Mary Jones or anyone like her, and Radclyffe Hall has a standard to uphold. I am so madly in love with you that you can force me to lower that standard by worrying me the way you have done, by making me utterly unfit to work by your own inability to stop being vague. Are you going to make me lower my standard, or are you going to help on my work by giving me a minimum of peace and comfort? By giving me those ten days I ask for?

She could not concentrate on her new novel. Evguenia must do better. She would have to learn to love. ‘I shall have to teach you.’

I haven’t deserved this at your hands – to be pushed aside for someone else, to be treated as less than this other person when I have given you all I have to give of love, and you saying that you love me – that I am the biggest love in your life. What in God’s name does it mean, beloved?

In Paris on 23 September Una noted in her diary that John went out at eleven-thirty in the morning and returned just before midnight. In subsequent letters John made clear what went on. They spent the afternoon in Evguenia’s room. She was in a state of terror. ‘I found you a virgin and I made you a lover. I have made a new discovery through you. I find that to take an innocent woman is quite unlike anything else in life.’ She called it ‘perhaps the most perfect experience’. She wondered at Evguenia’s ‘ignorance of physical passion’, told her the ‘trouble’ she showed was entirely nerves and that she did not ‘get a normal reaction’ because she was ‘desperately nervous’ – ‘remember how you fought me, my darling!’

At supper Evguenia ‘sat all crumpled up and in despair’. John fed her, ‘as though you were a child and consoled you and reassured you as though you were a child … I was your first lover. Through me you are now no longer a child. Wonderful yes but terrible also – terrible because so achingly sweet.’ At midnight John went back to Una. She felt bad about leaving Evguenia but next day she was again in her room and for each of the ten days of her stay. ‘Step by step – very quietly, I led you towards fulfillment. And this has made you doubly mine.’ John told Evguenia the facts of life as she saw them. ‘All the facts of life I believe I have told you.’ She omitted one or two things about how to get pleasure but would make those clear in time.

‘Very often I would do something which was not what I wanted but I knew John liked me to do it and I usually gave in’, was Evguenia’s view of the exchange. It was an uneasy seduction. There was a touch of the Miss Ogilvies about it. It seemed to have echoes of the unwanted advances of Alberto Visetti, the misery of Marguerite as a child. It was enough to make the grand old men of England get out their gallows and gibbets.

‘You woke me up,’ John wrote to Evguenia, ‘you little stray dog who had no collar, you little white Russian who had no home … let me be your love, your home and your country. Beloved – please adopt my heart as your country.’ This heart was feudal territory and desperate with need. ‘Same Heart’, John called Evguenia. ‘You are not your own any more, you are mine.’ The three selves had become four. Evguenia received quantities of cash, an emerald ring, clothes, a