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

it hell if she stayed or tried to leave. She found out what Evguenia wanted then made sure she did not get it. She referred to her as a swollen sheep tick, a mass of blubber, a white slug, an insignificant amoeba, a bloated Tartar polypus. She urged John to cut her allowance to £200 as a means of keeping her in line and to write to Harold Rubinstein about changing her will.

When Evguenia said she was going, John got ‘cardiac pain’. Una went to the police. The Chief Inspector told her Evguenia could not move unless John appointed a deputy guarantor, with police consent, to act for her. This guarantor must live in the same town or village as Evguenia and accept financial and all other responsibility for her. ‘So there goes another thread from Florrie’s garment of emotional blackmail. She must do exactly as John appoints.’

Evguenia ‘launched a broadside’ against Una. Her jealousy, she said, was intolerable. She wrote to the Home Office and was granted leave to apply for national work. But she needed a reference from John. Una told her ‘it was our duty to inform the Home Office that Evguenia had twice been in a sanatorium. No government or concern would want to risk an outbreak of tb.’

Dr Anderman was again called. He said Evguenia was fit to work anywhere.

We demurred pointing out that she had broken down formerly and that John was therefore worried at her having applied to the Home Office and giving her as a reference. He was most insulting, implying that John might wish to speak ill of her in order to prevent her obtaining national work away from Lynton. When John told him he had no business to make such implications he left the house.

Una took John to the police station. The police reiterated that no application for residence from Evguenia would be entertained without John’s permission.

In June 1941 Germany invaded Russia. Una hoped they would mutually exterminate each other. At mass she felt inspired by the ‘unearthly beauty’ of the nuns singing ‘like angels’. Confession, though, seemed a waste of time with Father Parkin ‘yawning with boredom over her trivial sins’ and telling her to say the Apostles’ Creed once more. Adept at working the black market, she got vegetables, chicken, sugar, chocolate, boiled sweets. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘we may as well have them as leave them to the Jews at the Valley of the Rocks Hotel, who fall like locusts on any supplies, ready to outbid any gentile.’

When Churchill announced the alliance of Britain with the Soviet Union, John and she resolved that at the war’s end they would leave England, never to return. ‘Henceforward we, a Christian people, are the allies of the openly professed Godless Russians.’

Una refused to speak to Evguenia or be civil to her in public. She seemed now to control John who became alarmingly limp about any effort. All John looked forward to in the day was to go down to Evguenia’s lodgings for an hour. At the end of July, Evguenia told her she had obtained a police permit of absence for a fortnight and was going to Oxford with a friend for a holiday. John became faint and lightheaded. A Dr Nightingale told her she had an anxiety neurosis. John asked if he would pass her for life insurance and he replied that he would not. Una put it all down to ‘the USSR Destroyer Florrie’. She thought it ‘simply inconceivable’ that Evguenia could go away knowing John’s condition and her own ‘pallor and emaciation’, how single-handed she had to list the laundry, groom and exercise the dogs, clean the birds, mince the meat, prepare the bread sauce.

Charlotte the parrot developed a monotonous and persistent whistle. She kept it up for hours on end. Una covered her cage to shut her up, so Charlotte spent most of her time under a blanket in the dark.

John feared Evguenia had gone for good. She went to her lodgings to see if she had taken her belongings. She had not. On her mantelpiece was a letter. Evguenia had asked Mrs Widden to give it to John on her sixty-first birthday on 12 August. It thanked her for her goodness and generosity and expressed the hope that one day she would understand Evguenia better.

Evguenia returned to Lynton on the last day of her two-week police permit of absence. John called to see her. Evguenia told her she hoped to do an engineering training in Gloucestershire, organized by the government who gave placements after it. John hurried back to Una:

I advised John and for once she took my advice and put her foot down flat sending by Mrs Hancock a note to the effect that it was only fair to make it quite clear that if Florrie persisted in attempting any unsuitable schemes such as that proposed her allowance would not be reduced but would cease all together there and then.

Evguenia then asked John if she wanted in writing to disclaim any financial responsibility toward her. John assured her that she did not. But Una wanted just that. She sensed she was winning this protracted battle. Income tax was ten shillings in the pound. John’s wealth was not what it was. Sex and money were John’s expressions of power. If Evguenia had neither, the relationship might break.

John’s eyes got worse, with ingrowing lashes and a kind of crusty conjunctivitis. In August 1941 she went to Bath to see a Dr Tizzard. He chainsmoked, was a seceded Catholic and dabbled in spiritualism and psychic things. ‘We think he is unquestionably inverted,’ Una said. He intended somehow to cut away the skin round John’s lashes. He was going to do one eye at a time under local anaesthetic with a week in between.

John and Una took a twin-bedded room at his Church Street Medical and Surgical Home. They also had a room at the Francis Hotel for Pippin the canary who had gone bald and Jane the