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

mother scorned Visetti for not providing for her in the style she desired. Using her father’s fortune, which her mother coveted but was denied, Marguerite controlled her lovers and punished her mother with the money at her command.

In her early twenties, at her great-aunt Mary’s house in Knightsbridge, she met Jane Randolph, her mother’s cousin. She viewed her with a conqueror’s eye:

I had never seen anything so fascinatingly slender and so adorably ugly as the woman who stood before me … Her shoes were perfectly cut I noticed and her ankles clad in transparent black silk stockings. Her whole body conveyed an impression of suppleness … But it was her face that was the most arresting thing about her for it was so frankly ugly. Oval in shape with a rather large mouth, projecting teeth, a blunt nose and pale blue eyes set far apart and masses of chestnut hair wound round a small head and you have one of the more perfect examples of the fascination of personality that some plain women possess.

Jane Randolph was ten years older than Marguerite. She lived in Washington, had three children, two boys and a girl and a husband on business in London. She liked England, stylish clothes and a good time and was sailing home in a fortnight.

I wondered angrily about her husband and utterly resented his possession of her. I said as much and she laughed. O Bob she said, he’s not too bad, he’s only rather a bore at times and he’s dog poor, that’s the worst of him.

It was not the worst of him from my point of view. Possibly the only thing in his favour.

Marguerite was undeterred by husbands. She invited Jane Randolph to the theatre, then saw her each day for what remained of her stay: ‘She was quite a new type of woman to me, completely at her ease.’ On Jane’s last day in England they rode together in a carriage in Richmond Park. It was a spring evening and the park looked pretty in the setting sun. Marguerite seized the moment and her cousin:

I was tongue tied and could only glare helplessly into her pale eyes. She turned a calm face toward me and did not resent my grip on her arm … ‘I know’ she said in her slow southern drawl. ‘I guess you needn’t tell me because I know.’

‘And if you know’ I said angrily ‘what in heaven’s name are you going to do about it?’

She did what a girl’s got to do. Soon after her return to Washington, Jane Randolph’s dog-poor bore of a husband dropped dead. Marguerite went out there and provided for her and for her children’s education. She bought a car and had a gun and a bulldog called Charlie for protection. They toured the Southern states and ‘shared all kinds of youthful escapades’. When Marguerite went into hospital to have impacted wisdom teeth removed, Jane Randolph slept in an adjacent bed.

After a year, Marguerite brought her surrogate family to live with her and Grandmother Diehl in the Kensington house. She also bought Highfield in Malvern Wells, Worcestershire, a large bleak stone house with stables, six acres and uninterrupted views of the Severn Valley. She kept dogs and horses and had her own guns. (Violet Hunt was sardonic about how she punished the rabbits.) She described herself as ‘free to make my own life, free to go where I please’. Like her father, she was ‘mad about hunting’ and rode with two packs, the Ledbury and the Old Croom, ‘tough sporting packs that it took you all your time to keep up with’.

Those were carefree days, the pure air, the wide and beautiful landscape, horses, and, although one loved animals not too much imagination when it came to the fox. Cruel and yet intensely alluring … After a hard day’s hunting, a poem dashed off haphazard, because a rhyme was hammering on my brain like a tune.

These poems read as if dashed off haphazard. The countryside around Malvern figured in them, the hills called Raggedstone, Wind’s Point, Hollybush and Worcester Beacon, the views of the River Severn and the Wye, the churchyard at Eastnor. Marguerite wrote of kisses, sunsets, autumn tints, the moon and the pain of love. She hinted obliquely at trysts and liaisons. Pronouns stayed unrevised and she still signed herself Marguerite Radclyffe Hall. One, dedicated ‘To …’, spoke of a dreary cold city that would become like summer ‘Decked with sweet, perfuming flowers’ were a certain person there. And ‘On the Lagoon’:

A gondola, the still lagoon;

A summer’s night, an August moon;

The splash of oars, a distant song,

A little sigh, and – was it wrong?

A kiss, both passionate and long.

Wrong or not, she was not going to stop it. On her next visit to the States, while still living with Jane Randolph, she started a love affair with another cousin, Dolly Diehl, daughter of her mother’s brother William. Dolly was in her teens and had the familiar fair-haired, blue-eyed looks of the Diehls. She inspired a more masterful aspect of Marguerite’s muse:

If you were a Rose and I were the Sun

What then, little girl, what then?

I’d kiss you awake when day had begun,

My sweet little girl, what then?

I’d waken you out of your valley of dreams

And open your heart with my passionate beams

Till you lifted your face to my ruddiest gleams

My own little girl, yes then.

The passionate beams and ruddy gleams had a sadomasochistic undertow of domination and compliance. Behind Marguerite’s financial protection was a manipulative view of sex. Jane Randolph remarried – Harry Caruth, a wealthy Texan. She and her daughter Winifred remained players in the Diehl drama of warped love between mothers and daughters. For years Marguerite wrote to Winifred about Maria Visetti’s viciousness. Winifred wrote to Marguerite of how unloved she felt by her own mother Jane. Maria Visetti wrote to Jane of how ill-used she was by Marguerite.

Dolly Diehl danced to the tune of this drama. She went to live with Marguerite and