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

Spaniel. Una filled the nursing-home room with flowers. She seemed in her element, ‘our two narrow beds awaiting us’. She had her own platinum needle for injections ‘in place of the communal fishhook’ and supplies of calves’ foot jelly and Brands Essence.

Evguenia, she told John, could not possibly visit. There was not a room for her in the whole of Bath, and any tears or movement of John’s facial muscles might lead to scarring. Evguenia wrote every day, often twice a day. ‘If you want me of course I will come’, she said. John dictated to Una daily letters for Evguenia. Una amended these as she felt fit. ‘I write daily to the brute giving her reports and details to which of course she is completely indifferent if she troubles to read them.’

Tizzard operated on 25 August and said the eye must stay tightly bandaged for five days. John vomited, her eye haemorrhaged, she was in pain and the bandage kept getting soaked in blood. Una antagonized the staff. She phoned Tizzard while he was in the operating theatre. When the nurse tried to sit John up, Una said,

I am sorry Miss Goodrich, I have spoken to Mr Tizzard on the phone, and he says the patient is not to be moved until he comes. She looked as though she would kill me and said, very violently, Lady Troubridge I must speak to you, come outside this room at once. With a word of reassurance to my poor John I followed her, and she flew at me, and said I was presuming on her authority and she would not have it. I replied, quietly, that I was very sorry if I had transgressed against etiquette but that in each emergency the haemorrhage, the vomiting, moving the patient, I had had no alternative. The first two occasions she was unobtainable and no one else would consent to call up the surgeon. The third time Mr Tizzard had given definite orders. Then she demanded that I should use the visitors’ telephone and not the dialling one and I replied that I had only been told two days ago of its existence or I should never have spent threepence each on twopenny local calls. Fearing that she would vent her spleen on John or turn me out I apologised profusely for having been in the right.

When she said she did not know why Tizzard was making all this fuss about this operation, I replied, ‘I think Mr Tizzard realises what it would mean to his career if one of the best known writers in England left this house with her eyes damaged by his surgery. I am bound to say that she had no reply.

John’s eye was a mess. Given a mirror she was incredulous and felt she had been disfigured for life. The scar was inflamed, the lid sagged and did not close when she slept. The lashes started growing in again, the eye still twitched and she still had conjunctivitis. Nor as time passed did it heal. She was not going to let Tizzard touch her other eye. She was prescribed hypnotics, bromides and barbiturates. Una applied an ointment called Pancovaine with a glass rod.

Back at the Wayside Evguenia left cakes and chrysanthemums for John’s return. She called every day to be as helpful as was allowed She was working in an army canteen and had made friends with a Mr Benn, ‘a very distinguished man of letters’, she called him. He told her positive things about ‘communism and the new re-born Russia’.

I was happy to hear someone so certain about the outcome of the war because the Russians would push the Germans back. My political views were non-existent but if anyone said something silly about Russia it was always galling for me to hear. I suppose one never forgets the country where one was born.

John was adamant that she must not see Mr Benn. The police, she said, were watching him for subversive Bolshevik activities and Evguenia had now done for herself socially in Lynton. Evguenia reminded her that ‘we Bolshevists are now the allies of England.’ She was needled by condescension to her refugee status, the jibing about Russians being a primitive race. At the Wayside she said only fools failed to understand what the Soviet Union was trying to do. John said, ‘May I ask if you are calling me a fool?’ Evguenia said, ‘No it’s that woman there who is a fool.’ John said, ‘You must not speak of Una like that.’ Una said she would summon Dr Nightingale if Evguenia did not leave. Evguenia said she was welcome to do so, she was going to Oxford on 18 November, she had rented a room in a house where there was no telephone, she intended doing a course in interior design or perhaps shorthand and typing and she would go without her allowance if it came to it.

John wept which made her eyes ‘like raw meat’. Una gave her barbiturates and prompted her to send a letter to Evguenia chastizing her for her friendship with Mr Benn, her provocation about Oxford, her ‘deliberately and with full medical knowledge doing her utmost to make a scene’ and cutting her next month’s allowance by £5.

Then follows endless and unceasing discussion of Evguenia. What will she do, or not do. Can she be prevented. Should she be prevented. Is she being misunderstood. Why can’t she be contented. Couldn’t she work here. And so on, and so on, until exhausted and drained once more by this insignificant amoeba, the writer of The Master of the House, The Well of Loneliness, Adam’s Breed, and I, a woman of no mean intelligence and some character stagger to bed, though not to sleep.

Next day John lost all control with Una. It was her fault if anything happened to Evguenia. She, John, would never get over it. She ordered her from the room and sent Ivy the maid with a note for Evguenia asking her