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

life for herself but John ‘made me take part in your life, even while I was trying to get away in order to work & to be independent’. And now life with her husband was far from harmonious. They got on each other’s nerves in one small room with no privacy or comforts. She had to provide for him. He could only find menial work because his English was so bad. He had worked in Walls’s Sausage factory and then on night shifts packing Peak Frean’s Biscuits. It was not like being with John, who had spoiled her immensely. John, she said, were she alive, would come to her rescue. She asked Una to help her buy a house.

‘My dear Evguenia’, Una replied:

I shall not attempt to deal with the entirely fictitious and imaginary deathbed scene which you have evolved, or with your enumeration of promises that John never made. You have doubtless brooded over this matter until you can no longer distinguish the false from the true. But as regards your renewed request that I should enable you with use of my capital to buy a house and launch a boarding establishment …

John, she said, would not had she lived have continued helping Evguenia. Evguenia’s atrocious behaviour and ingratitude would have precluded such help. But she, Una, would probably go on giving her £100 a year and Evguenia should count herself lucky.

Evguenia remained resentful at how different life would have been had she received her inheritance. She repeatedly tried to winkle out of Una some of what she felt was due. The prospect of Una’s derision and high moral tone did not deter her. In 1951 she asked her to help pay off an overdraft of £475 she had incurred to buy a house at 35 Russell Road W14. To deflect trouble, Una wrote to Evguenia’s bank manager and paid £300 of the debt. She told him she had no legal obligation to Mrs Makaroff and that this payment did not mean she should be regarded as a guarantor. She wrote one of her cutting letters to Evguenia telling her not to apply to her for payments of debts that were not her concern.

Evguenia’s affairs and even thoughts of Radclyffe Hall were now of distant interest to Una. She had become absorbed in the life of an opera singer, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni. ‘To hear him is one of the greatest pleasures I can have.’ His, she said, was ‘the greatest voice of the age, greater than Chaliapin’.

She met his wife Vittoria Serafin on Sunday 25 March 1951 at a cocktail party she had gone to with her gay men friends. It was given by an American music agent, Rock Ferris. Una had arranged to go to Milan at Easter to hear Parsifal at La Scala and Vittoria and Rossi-Lemeni would be there too. Vittoria said she would take Una to her husband’s rehearsals of Lucrezia Borgia. ‘It looks as if I should make my way a bit into the coulisses of La Scala,’ Una wrote in Letters to John, ‘& meet some of the singers, which will be as interesting as anything can be to me nowadays.’

She stayed in the same hotel as the Rossi-Lemenis, the Regina, and sent them a note inviting them to dinner at Giovannino’s restaurant. She went to his rehearsals, he gave her two of his records, they lunched together and he asked her to help with the translation into Italian of Emperor Jones in which he was to play the lead in Rome the following January. Una was flattered. ‘I am having a small but real part in a production of great interest.’

She stayed on in Milan weeks longer than she had intended, worked at the translation and helped choose his press photographs. At the first night of his Lucrezia Borgia, she shared a box with Vittoria and had supper with them both after the performance. She acquired all his records, read his poems and went to seven operas at La Scala but paid for only two. By the time she returned to Florence, it was agreed she would help with his next production too.

Bit by bit she immersed into his world. At Bologna she heard him singing Mefistofele and stayed at the Baglioni Hotel with him and Vittoria. She dealt with his fan mail, helped him with publicity and followed him to opera houses in Ravenna, Rome, Milan, Genova, London. She heard him sing Don Giovanni, Boris Godunov, Bloch’s Macbeth. She wrote of his peerless art and said she listened to him singing ‘with her very soul skinned’.

She became his confidante over his emotional problems with his Russian mother Xenia Makedon and with Vittoria, whom he was to divorce. ‘It is a blessed thing that he wants and depends on me’, Una wrote in Letters to John. ‘He loves me more than his mother.’ She called him Nika and was part mother and part flirt. She viewed herself as the stable influence in his life. ‘Nika could not do without me, would never be able to do without me.’ She gave him John’s cufflinks of cabochon sapphires, went to cowboy films with him, went to rehearsals, told him he was always right. He gave her a gold and coral charm of a hand. He became her point of fixation and worship. She sat with him until he slept, spoiled him, slavishly served him, rubbed his feet and massaged his head and back with an electric vibrator:

When we were alone in the two big armchairs he suddenly thrust his feet into my lap & when I smiled and rubbed them and kissed one of them, he did a lovely thing. He showed me his heart with both hands & threw it to me three times then said, ‘Ma tu sai che lo faccio solo per scherzo [but you know I am only joking].’

Like opera, like the ceremonies of the church, her devotions were performance, ritual and display. Una was in service again on terms singular