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

misunderstood and I should expose myself to its being said either that I feared her or that I was “fond of her” & I have no doubt of what he meant by that latter implication!’

Through Rubinstein Una arranged a seven-year covenant to pay Evguenia £100 a year. This, Evguenia was told, might be renewed but only if Una wished to do so or felt she could afford it. At Christmas, also via Rubinstein, Una sent her £1 and a ‘little non committal note’ on a card of Millais’ Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop. For John’s sake, she said she ‘must try to help the poor demented creature’.

Una rejoiced in the revised terms of her relationship with John. With her death ‘the focus changed completely’. In life she had controlled her career, now she planned to control her legend. Evguenia of course had the bombshell of her letters. She owned them but copyright over publication rested with Una. Una intended to use money as a lever ‘to make Evguenia remain quiet and behave herself’.

Una, in posthumous possession, adopted the appearance of the woman through whom she had for so long lived. She wore John’s clothes. She had her jodhpurs and cavalry cord breeches altered to fit. ‘I wear your poplin shirts and ties, your stockings, your shoes, your Jaeger dressing gown, your cardigans, your berets.’ For everyday she wore John’s grey tweeds, for best her blue tweeds altered by Aquascutum, her blue poplin shirt, her blue Ugolini tie, her cufflinks, her emerald and diamond tie pin, her key chain. Like John she developed a callous on her finger from wielding a pen. Like her she kept everything exceedingly tidy. In bed she covered herself with the patchwork blankets John had knitted and sewn.

At Communion the priest put either two wafers or one very thick one on Una’s tongue. She took it as ‘a sign of grace’. ‘It was the story of the two palms over again.’ Visiting Highgate Cemetery, she noticed with approval that the floor of the catacomb was clean, the altar crucifix and candlesticks dusted, the ceiling blue. But a bunch of immortelles had been laid on the altar at the foot of the crucifix and a holly wreath left there with ‘an absurd card’. Una threw it all out and told the porter that no one was to have the key to the vault and no offerings but hers were to be allowed. Her marriage was inviolable now.

Nor were flowers to be laid any more on anniversaries of Mabel Batten’s death. Ladye’s grave was, Una thought, ‘merely a necessary repository and had nothing emotionally to do with either of us’. If in life John’s affections had been equivocal in death she belonged to Una:

nothing ever for a moment succeeded in dividing us from one another, nothing ever was able to come between us even in the flesh and how much more so is that true now that there is only my negligible flesh in the way and how gloriously more so when as the angels we shall be free of all flesh & know ourselves into one for ever.

Fusion through love and sex might have eluded Una but she would achieve it through death. Death was her element. Life’s temptations and griefs were beyond Radclyffe Hall’s reach. ‘Thank God you are safe, safe, safe,’ Una wrote of her, ‘nothing can hurt you, neither rumbling doodlebugs, nor unseen & unheard terrors from the stratosphere, you cannot be killed or much worse maimed or blinded, so I can’t fear for you, and you, now knowing all of God’s will & purpose can’t fear or grieve for me.’

It was the ultimate release from responsibility. The words of William Penn held resonance for her: ‘They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies.’ Una had great recompense – worldly wealth and the sanctuary of heaven. Off she went to lunch at Pruniers with Andrea – oysters and scrambled eggs, but the oysters were tasteless so she complained to the manager.

Maria Visetti, who was ninety-one, heard of the death of her daughter when a resident at the Viennese Hotel in Hove, where she now resided, asked her if she had seen the Telegraph. ‘She showed me the Deaths and wondered if it was a relation of mine, of course when I saw “author” I knew. I told the woman I did not think so.’ Una had not told her that John was ill. ‘How she dared to show me such disrespect I cannot think’, Mrs Visetti wrote to her niece, Jane Caruth. In an obituary she saw that Marguerite had suffered for six months with cancer. ‘It has upset me more than I like to think. The Troubridge woman told me nothing and to the last ignored me.’

Mrs Visetti’s anxieties then focused on money. She was appalled that Una was the sole executor of the will and she herself not named in it. Decades of bitterness over her divorce settlement and at what she saw as her daughter’s profit at her expense spilled out:

all these years she has been using money which really belonged to me. This was her last chance to give it back. Marguerite had such power and from a money point of view treated me so badly. All along the line I was cheated. It was all wrong. She had not an ounce of my blood in her. She was Radclyffe through and through, morally and mentally.

Through her solicitor, Mr Woodbridge, Mrs Visetti, like Evguenia, challenged the will. Her doctor, Dr Horsford, phoned Armando Child. He too asked if Radclyffe Hall was compos mentis that week before she died. Armando Child again said that in his view she was.

Mrs Visetti then tried ‘the human touch’. In December 1944 she wrote to Una regretting negotiations had ‘got into the hands of lawyers who only see facts’. She said Marguerite had always promised her £300 a year. Una considered the letter blackmail. She told