The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📗

a grim horror that must be seen to be believed, her bedclothes and night-clothes soaked with stains of unmistakeable origin and odour. She refuses to wear the proper pads saying they make her look stout. Her drawn and raddled face plastered with paint. Her girlishly curled hair, her allusions to things a decent old woman should have forgotten, her preoccupation with things of vanity and the body. The will to live at every cost. It is no affair of mine.

Going home in the car, Una asked John, ‘Do you think I could get like Minna?’

John felt disconnected from it all. She thought only of Evguenia. ‘I cannot go anywhere or do anything without it seeming to have some bearing on you.’ The Beauty of the moon over the marsh and on the sea that separated her, hurt her. ‘Everything I see I refer to you in my mind – wanting to share it with you.’ She tried to be less possessive. She was pleased when Evguenia went walking in the Alps with Lysa, but she was jealous too. She feared that by some chance Evguenia might re-meet a young man she once had loved. When the papers gave news of a train crash in France with forty dead, John felt physically sick.

With Una she now had less than half a life. Loyalty meant no more than not leaving her. Una became a mass of insignificant symptoms of illness. John viewed her with pity and anxiety and called her a burden. Her life was letters to and from Evguenia, Evguenia’s visit in September, their reunion in Florence in the autumn.

And Evguenia, it seemed, was missing her and wanting to be with her. John referred to her dear, tender and consoling letters. Evguenia told her how she was more calm and normal because of separation from Una, of how she missed John’s weatherbeaten face and the comfort of her love. ‘If only Johnnie would appear on the path’, she wrote when she went walking in St Malo with Lysa. She asked what John wanted for her birthday on 12 August. ‘There is nothing you can give me,’ John replied, ‘except a baby Chink made by me. When we come together again in the Autumn then you shall give me my birthday present – clasped in my arms my beloved.’

John was ‘beside herself with joy’ when on 25 August Humbert Wolfe at the Home Office granted Evguenia an annual visa that allowed her to stay in England for six weeks at a time. She had taken him to lunch at the Berkeley. Even her anti-Semitism faltered. ‘Never again will I speak against the Jews for Humbert is a Jew.’ It seemed like an omen of freedom. Evguenia was to come on 28 September ‘to your John’s own country England!’ They would spend a night at the Lord Warden Hotel in Dover, then go to Brighton for a week together. John spoke of it as their honeymoon and bought a silk dressing-gown for herself in anticipation. ‘Thank you good & kind saints Anthony and Expedite for answering John’s prayers. Oh I bless you and cherish you my own little stray white Russian who has found a place in my heart.’

But the saints had a different agenda. On 26 August John slipped on the doorstep at the Forecastle. She fell with her right ankle under her. She was in great pain. Una and Annie the maid got her upstairs to bed. Una could not get hold of the doctor. He did not arrive until midnight. He said there was no broken bone and advised cold compresses. John’s main thought was to spare Evguenia anxiety. She wrote reassuring letters. ‘Nothing matters but your love and your darling sympathy.’ X-rays taken six days later revealed multiple fractures. She was taken by stretcher and ambulance to the London Clinic. A Dr Taylor tried to reset the bones under anaesthetic. John became very ill. She vomited for six hours.

Andrea phoned the news to Evguenia, who wanted to come and take care of John. John wanted very much to see her. ‘If only the door would open and you would come through it. Separation in illness is past all bearing.’ She feared Evguenia might leave her if she became a mass of ailments. Una did not leave her for a second. She seemed to consume her now she was hurt. She kept saying, ‘I suppose if Evguenia had been here she would have known we ought to have had an x-ray at once.’ Her fussing irritated John. ‘She finds fault with me at every turn’, Una wrote in her diary. ‘It has been a hard day and an unhappy one.’

Evguenia came a week earlier than planned. Una met her at Victoria Station and set about making her life intolerable. Evguenia wanted to take presents for John to the clinic. Una said there was no time to get them from her luggage. To eclipse Evguenia’s flowers, she filled John’s room with pale pink rosebuds. She dashed out for the fondants Evguenia forgot. She made a great display of replacing the engraved platinum wedding ring John had given her in 1915 and which had split. She asked John to put the new ring on her finger. ‘When I have left you, God have you in his special care and bless the ring I have put on your finger’, John said.

Evguenia found reasons not to sit with them all day. She chose to eat at her hotel, saying she liked the food. Una told John this was proof that Evguenia was uncaring, selfish and self-centred. John burst out about the atmosphere Una created. She wept with grief at the prospect of losing Evguenia. ‘My every thought is with you,’ she wrote to her. ‘Oh don’t feel jealous of Una – don’t.’ She walked in the corridor of the clinic but was exhausted after it, her pulse too high.

In Rye Una had the cobblestones in the lane by their house