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

after nine years, with John sixty-two and herself fifty-five, ‘this dreadful alien woman’ still ruled their lives.

Evguenia lost the BBC job after a few months. She had found it arduous, could not hear clearly through earphones and her English was not good enough. John was relieved. She increased her allowance to £300 a year again with no conditions. But she asked her to avoid cities and in particular London because of fogs, air raids and her lungs.

For herself, her only travel was to London to see doctors and dentists. She had more teeth out, more X-rays. Una took her to a service for the sick in Horseferry Road Church, held simultaneously with one in Lourdes. John sat near the altar with the ailing and moribund. In the afternoon they bought a cockatoo called Victoria from Harrods. It was winged but had not lost the instinct for flight and it kept toppling over. It was soon described as a vulture and given to the vet at Taunton.

As Christmas 1942 approached John’s thoughts were of Evguenia’s visit. A driver was to meet her train at Barnstaple on 15 December. Una was sent out on missions to acquire turkey, plum pudding and black market delicacies. But then Evguenia suddenly got a job with the Foreign Office. ‘I have had very many disappointments in my life but never one quite so bitter as when I got that telegram’, John wrote to her. ‘I saw myself as one returned by the skin of my teeth from the grave and no RCP here to welcome me back.’

Evguenia was not allowed to divulge the nature of her work, or where she was living. Letters from her arrived opened by the censor. Letters to her were addressed to a box number at Western Central District Post Office, London. ‘What has happened seems like a mad kind of blackout’, John wrote. She watched for the postman, phoned a mutual friend Marjorie Hatten for news and worried that Evguenia might be sent overseas.

On Christmas Day Evguenia asked Mrs Widden to deliver white chrysanthemums and a pot of white heather to John. ‘I am touched to the heart’, John said. Father Parsons, the new priest, came to lunch and ate the Christmas fare and drank the Australian burgundy.

In January 1943 the weather was cold, with snow and icy rain. Una foraged for food. She plodded to the shops and the market for sheep’s heads, liver, kidneys, tripe and tongues, rabbits, ox tails and cows’ heels. She bought black market cream and chickens and gammon rashers and Golden Syrup from the nuns. John wanted none of it. She was extraordinarily tired, had no appetite, kept running a temperature and had both constipation and diarrhoea. Dr Manners was repeatedly called. He told John not to leave her room.

Evguenia saved days of leave so that she could visit at the end of February. She reserved her room at Mrs Widden’s. John wanted her to have all meals at the Wayside. Una complained that she had no ration book and she was not going to allow her John’s butter and sugar. John wanted to give her their chocolate.

While John stayed in the warm Una went alone in a north wind to meet Evguenia. She waited for three buses. Evguenia was not on them. She had gone straight to Mrs Widden.

There a veritable spectacle awaited me. Her hair permed into a dry frizz, sticking out wildly behind one ear, behind a slouch hat imitating that of the Canadian army. The hair, moreover, is now dyed a golden auburn and when the hat was later removed was seen to have become so thin that it is combed over an almost bare scalp. She now makes up her lips in the derrière de poule style. The eighteen-guinea coat is a dyed cat. She has grown very much fatter.

Delighted to see her, John stopped being an invalid. They went shopping and had coffee with women from the badminton club. Excluded, Una sat by the fire and remembered the ‘dreadful and desolate days’ when John and Evguenia were together in Paris and she was alone.

The memory of when John’s one thought was to find all her relaxation and pleasure away from me. I still feel a sick little sadness when, as soon as this heartless and worthless woman comes over the horizon, I feel that John wants to know me safe and well but not there. That when I am there her pleasure is spoiled. It is just the feeling that while to me she is all sufficing and my sun rises and sets only on her, to her there is still attraction in this worthless creature. She still thrills to the slightest most patronising expression of affection or interest and sits gazing lovingly at her really repellant face.

Evguenia read John’s manuscript of The Shoemaker of Merano. She asked for a signed photograph of her and wanted to know when they could meet in London. She feared John had cancer. She had tried on a previous visit to talk to Dr Nightingale but was made to feel she was meddling. ‘I sealed my mouth ever since’, she said. Dr Anderman, sacked by Una for his frankness, was no longer consulted.

John cried when Evguenia left. Una busied herself getting a boiling fowl, a dozen eggs, pork chops and clotted cream, but John could not stand the sight of any of it. She felt sick and had ‘agonizing haemorrhoids’. Nightingale advised a barium X-ray of her gut. Una summoned a Dr Harper from Barnstaple who diagnosed a severe chill, which Una thought she had got from going to early mass in an unheated church.

Nights became a misery of pain. John was alternately dosed with kaolin and laxatives. Una got no sleep. She hired Nurse Baldwin, a policeman’s wife, who called her My Lady. Evguenia wrote letters of anxiety and affection which John read again and again. She asked Una to write really nice replies but Una wrote nothing.

On 9 April 1943 John