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

The promise to Una had not meant much. ‘Inversion alas what things are done in thy name that would be perversion a hundred times over were they heterosexual’, Una wrote in her diary. She was glad to get back to Rye. The garden was lovelier than she had remembered it, a mass of zinnias and dahlias. The house was welcoming and smelled of wood fires.

Distance and home did nothing to lessen John’s obsession. ‘You alone seem real – all the rest are dreams’, she wrote to Evguenia. Round her neck she now wore a Russian cross, on her desk were two photos of Evguenia, in a locked box her letters. All her plans were to do with the logistics of their next meeting.

Evguenia had a nursing assignment in Zurich in October. She was to look after a Russian princess who had a new baby. She would then come to England in November, second class on the train, first class on the boat. John would meet her at Folkestone. They would stay three nights at the Grand Hotel then go alone to the Talbot Street flat in London. ‘The hotel is so nice and we shall have peace,’ John wrote to her, ‘no servant, no telephone, no nothing but ourselves. Darling that does seem to me like Heaven.’ Una was to stay in Rye. John wanted to show Evguenia the Forecastle, so they would join Una there just for a night: ‘I do wish she’d lend it to us as I love it so much – but this she won’t do I’m sure and neither would I in her place.’

John described herself as excited as a schoolboy. Una, she felt, was being remarkably compliant. Evguenia needed appropriate clothes, so she sent her money. She also needed a visa for the visit as she had no citizenship. Una wrote to the Home Office and was despatched to the Passport Office to give the necessary guarantees. ‘As I have some standing as the widow of an admiral,’ she wrote to Evguenia, ‘I have stepped in and taken a hand.’

In London John sent the curtains in the Talbot Street flat to be cleaned, ordered wine, a new suit and shirts, found out what plays were on and slept with Evguenia’s letters under her pillow. But for Evguenia the more the build-up of tension, the phone calls from Una about her visa and the exigency of the arrangements, the more she pulled back. Perhaps the Russian princess would need her to stay in Zurich, perhaps the baby would get ill. John lost her temper. She ‘raved about the flat like someone demented’. ‘Soulina I need you more than these lesser people’, she wrote with her startling self-importance. The Russian princess was a drunkard, she pitied her husband and child.

John wooed Evguenia with money. She wanted to know how much she needed a week. ‘It is natural and right that I should keep you. We have just got to talk finances when we meet.’ She sent travel instructions for the umpteenth time and enclosed a £20 banknote. Una, she told her, was being ‘a perfect brick’, though who knows what Evguenia made of the cliché.

She might have made it such red hot hell but instead she is doing her best to be friendly. She sees that the thing is too deep to be broken … She has accepted the situation and really I think she has all but stopped fretting. She is ever so much happier now that she has made up her wise & clever mind to accept the inevitable.

For which seeming sagacity, John said she thanked the Lord on her knees.

30

A trois

John was waiting on the pier’s edge at Folkestone. ‘She would have come nearer were it at all possible’, Evguenia said. Three glasses of champagne on an empty stomach in the Grand Hotel and John was drunk. ‘I feel crazy sometimes remembering our days and nights at Folkestone’, she later wrote. She declared herself madly in love, reborn, revitalized. This was like first love. ‘No face seems beautiful to me but yours, no voice seems beautiful to me but yours. I am only half alive when we are apart.’ She would do anything for Evguenia, her Royal Chinkie Pig, her Darling most Chink Faced Little Tartar. She wanted this love to last for ever and beyond: ‘I feel an overwhelming desire to be with you day and night, both in moments of passion and in moments of rest that come after passion, and in moments of that simple companionship that we two are able to enjoy so much together.’

As for the wife back home in Rye: ‘I am not and I have not been for years the least in love with Una. I feel a deep gratitude towards her, a deep respect and a very strong sense of duty.’ But now she belonged to Chinkie Pig. ‘Only you can make me feel alive. You are my rest, my joy and my ultimate justification.’

‘We were both mad happy’, Evguenia said of their early months together. Materially it was agreeable to be so treated, adored and indulged. Suddenly there was money for everything: clothes, first-class travel, taxis, any luxury she desired. There was even money for her friend Lysa when she became ill. But John wanted a lot in return. ‘John was very impatient. If she wrote a letter she wanted the answer to her questions before the letter could even reach the addressee.’ These questions were possessive, dictatorial, anxious. ‘I must be all to you or nothing’, she told her Chinkie Pig.

Alone in Rye Una prayed a great deal. She said the Angelus two or three times a day, and thought of Mabel Batten and the symmetry of their plight:

All that I did to hurt her she has repaid in almost exactly similar circumstances. I was utterly selfish and cruel to her, partly it is true in ignorance but partly in the crude egotism of youth and personal desire.