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

their mutual grandmother in the Church Street house and at Malvern. They travelled in France, Italy and Germany. On the face of it they were cousins with Marguerite the chaperon. But it was a sexual affair with incestuous inflection outside the accepted terms of relationship.

Marguerite drew her lovers into her compulsive inner world with its core of Oedipal revenge. This inner world informed the poems she wrote. In 1906 she paid to have a collection of them published by John and Edward Bumpus of Oxford Street. It was a slim volume, Twixt Earth and Stars, dedicated to ‘My Inspiration’. She gave her poems elliptical titles: ‘You’, ‘Remember’, ‘What a Pity’. Behind doggerel and clichés of sunlight and flowers, ran declarations of pain.

Oh the awful pity of it all,

That I ever learned to care for you

That we ever chanced to meet at all

Since we neither of us could be true.

Her rhymes were simplistic, her psychology complex:

My love is a bird with a broken wing,

Alone in a stormy night;

My love is a lark that forgets to sing

And dies with the morning light.

Her view of society was received and conventional. Presiding over the world was the benign figure of God the Father, as if from a stained-glass window on the ultimate landing of a rented home.

And perhaps the Recording Angel

May wipe out the faults of years

With the hem of His shining garment

Grown damp with a sinner’s tears

The Evening Standard commended her ‘sincerity and sweetness’, the Queen wrote of her ‘vigorous, joyous youth, thankful for the right to exist in such a lovely world’ and The Lady said she had ‘real feeling and the power to express it’. No reviewers picked up on the sexual content behind the little rhymes, the possessiveness of the ruddy gleams or that the kisses might be between women. In later years, Radclyffe Hall said she thought the reviewers must all have been fathers ‘and thus tolerant of effervescent youth. I was so embarrassingly frank in that volume, my fraicheur and my egotism leave me most amazed – they also make me hot all down my spine … Youth is so embarrassingly frank about its own supposed emotions.’

In August 1906 Marguerite and Dolly went to Homburg to see the women’s tennis tournaments. The Wimbledon champion, Dorothea Chambers, was playing against a friend of theirs, Toupie Lowther. Toupie – Marguerite called her ‘Brother’ though her real name was May – had driven herself there on ‘execrable’ roads in her 40-horse-power Mercedes. She was large, renowned for her lobs and said to have a man’s stroke and a man’s strength and a temperament ‘hopelessly unsuitable to lawn tennis’. She was the daughter of a naval captain and the sister of a Conservative MP. A science graduate and one of the first women to own a motorbike, she lifted weights and was a fencing champion, too. Her affairs with women were stormy and her style flamboyant. She left written instruction for her body after death to be laid out for four days. If, in the view of two doctors, she was still dead, they were to cut her jugular vein, cremate her corpse and strew its ashes to the wind.

Marguerite and Toupie booked in at the Savoy. Also there was another of Toupie’s friends, Mabel Veronica Batten. She was with her husband George and her maid Susan Attkins. She was bored. The Savoy was not the dazzling meeting place of ten years past when Edward, Prince of Wales, heir to the English throne, had wooed her in its tearoom and her bedroom. She was now fifty, George was seventy-four. Their rooms were on separate floors. ‘Father is quite happy’, she wrote to Cara, their only child:

He has found several old men he knows and goes down in the morning on his own to the springs. I went this morning but unless I meet some amusing people I really think I shall not get up regularly … Oh you never saw such sporks of people! Not one interesting person have I viewed except a Spanish beauty and an unknown young man who looks like an explorer.

Mabel liked coining words. Sporks were unspeakably dull, poggers were flirtatious, sneevish was an irritable state of mind and poons were thoroughly good sorts and entertaining too. After thirty years of marriage to George, Mabel needed the company of poons. Marguerite arrived at the hotel on 22. August. Here, in Mabel’s view, was an undoubted poon. For them both this date would figure as an anniversary for the rest of their lives.

5

Sporks, poggers and poons

Marguerite described herself as ‘utterly unstable’ and ‘in a state of flux’ when she met Mabel Batten. She had no settled country, relationship or plan. She divided her time between hunting, travelling and chasing women. ‘I was as wax in her hands,’ she wrote in notes for an autobiography, ‘but those hands were entirely trustworthy. She was to become a spur to my work and from the first my true unfailing inspiration. She was a whole generation older, but of so gay and youthful a spirit, of so balanced, generous and masterly a mind, courteous, kindly and gallant a heart …’

Mabel Batten was a memsahib, a colonial expatriate, for whom marriage had been a financial and social necessity and sexual affairs de rigueur. Many men were acquainted with her gallant heart and youthful spirit. She secured their letters in boxes with combination locks. A green leather box opened at 1327, a grey leather one at 365. These letters made no reference to gallantry with women, but showed no fear of adventure. She was scathing about ‘elderly virginal scandalmongering’ and ‘dowdy second class gossipy old maids’. Used to the warmth of the Indian sun, she loathed the English climate and liked to winter in Morocco, the Canary Islands, or Monte Carlo.

Marguerite noticed that when Mabel and George breakfasted together in the Savoy gardens they had nothing to say to each other. They had married in Simla in 1875 when Mabel was