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

Such was Una’s projection. It was her own eyes that were clear, happy and triumphant if not blue. She was delivered of a wonderful weapon of revenge. She had described their triangle with Evguenia as like a classical image of purgatory. To the company of Sisyphus eternally pushing a rock up a hill and Tantalus reaching for unreachable fruit, could now be added Una, for ever taunting Evguenia with money promised but not to be acquired.

Next day Una wrote in her diary: ‘My John is dying. She is going where I shall not see her or touch her hand or hear her beloved voice again until God allows me to join her.’

The truth of why John changed her will in Una’s favour within days of dying is not told in Una’s diary. The new will was a document of befuddled faith, drugged exhaustion, or extraordinary change of heart. It gave a lie to the nine corrosive years of their triangle, the letters John had written to Evguenia, her obsession with her, her possession of her, her promises to her. It drew a line under the scenes John had had with Una about her, the depth of hatred Una felt for Evguenia, her pathological resentment of her, the stream of poison and vitriol that she poured out about her day after day, for nine long years.

Evguenia wrote of how two days before John died she and Una stood either side of her deathbed. John united their hands over her and said, ‘You must be friends and live happily. I have provided for you both to live in comfort if not in luxury, but you Evguenia, must ask Una’s advice.’ Evguenia protested that she was a grown-up woman of forty. ‘John smiled and patted my hand. I did not say anything any more as she was very, very weak that day. It was only a couple of days before she died.’

John was sixty-three. She knew she was dying. She had with Una a ‘last talk’ in which she said, ‘You’ll be good to that Russian I know.’ No doubt Una said, Trust me. In this talk Una obtained John’s permission to destroy the manuscript of The Shoemaker of Merano. She pleaded that it was about John’s love for Evguenia, destructive of their legend and too autobiographical to be art. But John had called this book the best of her work. Una gave a reciprocal promise that she would destroy her own diaries because of the criticism they contained of Evguenia.

Una described John’s dying days as a time of joy and fulfilment. This, she said, was John’s Calvary. Suffering was her penance, an opportunity ‘to wipe out a thousandfold every moment of pain you ever caused me’. For nine years John had been beyond her control. Inoperable carcinoma of the bowel made her pliant. Her weakness gave Una scope for the breathtaking reconstruction of reality at which she excelled. ‘There was never an hour when I would not in my passion of love and pity and adoration have kissed the poor wounds that tortured and humiliated you even as those saints kissed the pitiful & wonderful wounds of Christ.’

Una was exhilarated, ‘for ever certain that nothing and no one, except by my own act, could ever come between us or mar our unity’. Never, in life, had Una achieved such certainty of possession. Now she could control John and turn her into pure legend. In these dying days, in an opium haze, only Una had ever, could ever, would ever belong to John. ‘Today she said suddenly to me, “I want you, you, you. I want only you in all the world.”’

They several times received Holy Communion together, with Una kneeling by John’s bed. Notes dictated to Evguenia and signed Your John did not signify:

She looked up at me saying, I put Your John, but of course I’m not her John, I’m entirely yours. Only it wouldn’t be kind to change it and might arouse a feeling of jealousy, if you don’t mind my doing it.

Needless to say I reassured her, touched to my soul that she should regard such trivial things as possibly hurting my feelings.

Since 1934 John had written 576 letters to Evguenia, her Piggie Hall. They were all signed Your John. Same Heart, she called her. If they were all duplicitous Evguenia had been gravely cheated. But now, at the end, if John could not be sure to whom she belonged, Una would be sure for her. Absolute possession was in her grasp. ‘Never in all our twenty-eight years together has she given me such perfect assurance that of everyone on this earth I only am necessary to her. I alone have her entire love and devotion.’

Radclyffe Hall went into a coma on 6 October. Evguenia visited in the evening and stayed half an hour. ‘John does not want her or anyone but me’, Una wrote. ‘My voice was the only one that reached her brain.’ Micki Jacob called but Una refused to let her see John. ‘I said that she had no right to prevent me.’ Una replied that she had every right.

Dead and laid out, John looked, Una thought, like a medieval ivory carving of a saint, or like an airman or a soldier who had died of wounds. ‘Ivory clear and pale, the exquisite line of the jaw, the pure aquiline of the nose with its delicate wing nostrils, the beautiful modelling of eyelids and brow. Not a trace of femininity; no one in their senses could have suspected that anything but a young man had died.’

God, supposedly, was in His senses. What reason could He find to refuse admission to the pleasure ground of paradise to this man, this husband, this war hero even, devoted to his wife for close on thirty years, who had confessed and repented the transgression of infidelity.

‘You were all mine when you went’, Una wrote of John. As was all the money – £118,000 excluding book royalties. Una