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

Evguenia sent boiled sweets, urged her to attempt a little more each day and arranged to spend holidays with her. She told her she was finding shorthand difficult but had made friends in Oxford.

Una described herself as ‘simply stuttering with anxiety’ at the prospect of her visit. John cheered up because of it. Evguenia slopped over her with a lot of soft soap, Una said. When she left, John became depressed again. She pined for past time and asked Evguenia to pray for her. ‘Don’t you remember how you & I went to the Easter mass in the Russian church in Florence? That seems a very long time ago and to think about it makes me want to cry a few tears which are strictly forbidden me as you know.’

She kept harking back to her mother’s neglect of her in childhood. She told Una she was still in love with Evguenia and wanted her to come to Lynton. ‘Oh how weary I am of these four walls,’ she wrote, ‘& how I do long for a breath of fresh country air with Royal Chinkie Pig very pompous & self-important taking me for a walk! Can’t you see it with its crown over one ear & its hoofs polished?’

When John was well enough to return to Lynton, Evguenia arranged to take her holiday, go down in advance, prepare things at the Wayside and to be there to meet her. En route she stayed for three nights at the Rembrandt. While there she and John had a row. As Una put it: ‘the dreadful creature stood at the foot of John’s bed, fat and pasty and bloated, her eyes glinting like boot buttons a sneering smile on her blubber lips while she bullied my miserable John.’

The substance was that John again began insisting that Evguenia live in the same county, if not the same town. Evguenia again said she could not and would not. She had to be free to go where there was available work. At Una’s instigation John then had a letter delivered to her: if she insisted on living in a different county her allowance would be cut to £100 a year, and this amount would be dependent on her letting John know her address at all times.

Evguenia replied that she would keep herself. John panicked. Una then wrote a letter that began ‘Evguenia’ and was signed ‘Una V. Troubridge’:

I think it only right to repeat what I have already told you. Lord Dawson warned me that John had been in a very low state when she fell ill, that she had been ‘very, very ill’, that her convalescence could only be a very lengthy one. He is sending her to Lynton to recuperate & if in such circumstances you decide to go away without keeping her informed of your address (& this at a time when air raids are frequent) and if the strain breaks her down & she dies it will be your doing & on yr. conscience all yr life.

Evguenia replied that she would always let John know her address. But she did not go to Lynton. She took a job with the Red Cross in Basingstoke, 160 miles away. John longed for her. She asked her to wear an identity disc inscribed with Radclyffe Hall and the Wayside address. And she asked to be given as next of kin. ‘Always do this my little, little Piggie because that is what I am to you … You can bandage my soars a little if you will definately promise always to give me as your: Next of Kin. Promise this darling, because you do know, don’t you, that I am your next of kin.’

It was cold at the Wayside. Una slept in the same bed with John and counted the number of times a minute she breathed in and out. She pulled out her ingrowing eyelashes with the aid of a magnifying glass and a mirror fixed on her forehead. John could not eat the milky puddings, ox tongue, calf’s head and sheep’s head brawn she proffered. She began smoking again, said she had lost her hold on life and could not clearly recollect past events. She broke her other ankle and had her leg in plaster of Paris up to the knee. For long hours she sat in dull depression, knitting a patchwork blanket or staring into space. On a day when she could not find a business paper she threw things out of cupboards in a desperate way.

Una had a nightmare in which John was a man in a gloomy bedroom. A creature covered in bandages came in and threatened them both. She woke to find Jane had diarrhoea and wanted urgently to get out of the house.

None of Evguenia’s jobs lasted. After nursing at Basingstoke she moved to Evesham in the West Midlands working for the BBC World Service on French and German broadcasts. She visited Lynton to tell John about it and urged her to be pleased. She would get £300 a year plus bonuses. But John fretted until two in the morning. Una overheard her telling Evguenia that after the war she wanted them all to go to Florence with a view to settling there. But when Una said she longed for Italy, John would not commit herself unless Evguenia would come too.

John felt like a prisoner and looked forward to nothing. She worried about enemy planes over the Midlands and was fearful that Evguenia might go out without a raincoat or rubber boots. She got paler, thinner and weaker and seemed like an empty shell. Her eyes were sunk in her head and she was cold even in a warm room. ‘And all because that dough faced idiotic moron makes her indifference brutally obvious and because she has taken a job which makes it impossible for them to meet more than once or twice yearly.’

On days when the postman brought no letter, John closed off with depression. Una felt overwhelmed that