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

in London, she copied out her poems, catalogued them, corrected her spelling and suggested to Robert Coningsby Clarke, composer of ‘Mine Are Your Eyes’ and ‘If She But Knew’, that he use them as libretti. ‘Very soon it was born in upon me,’ Marguerite wrote of Mabel, ‘that I must work hard to be worthy of her friendship … What I am I owe to her. She criticised my work but so justly that I could not feel resentment … She took me and very gradually proceeded to rub off the sharp and ugly corners.’

For her part, Marguerite wooed with a style Mabel approved – money, poems, jewels and indulgences beyond the means or imagination of George. More than the men of her past, here was a true poon.

But Marguerite was still living with Dolly Diehl, who was financially dependent on her, only nineteen and without London friends. In spring 1907 they all took a holiday in Scotland. Violet Hunt went too. In Edinburgh, at the Royal British Hotel, Violet’s room was next to Marguerite’s. ‘She [Marguerite] used to come and sit on my bed in the clearest coldest Japanese kimono from Liberty with a streak of blue on the collar and her fine sandy auburn hair in a plait … the decent young girl of twenty five who knew the world in spite of her pigtail and robe of innocence.’

The atmosphere was tense. Marguerite curtailed her stay and went back to Malvern with Dolly. She said she had received letters about trouble with the servants and the groom was anxious about a horse.

She turned more and more to Mabel for kindness, acceptance and calm. She showed her work in hand, poems about the death of her love for Dolly.

A little shiver crept along my heart

For you and I were strangers, far apart

In ‘Ardour’ Mabel learned how ‘the new found splendour’ of love was for her.

In June 1908 with George and Dolly they rented a house in Sidmouth. This was when ‘the seeds were sown of their very deep future friendship’, Marguerite wrote. The garden had steps to the beach. They swam each morning, walked by the shore, sat on the rocks and wished they could be alone.

On 12 August, Marguerite’s birthday, she and Mabel took an impulsive holiday. They crossed the Channel in a small steamer to Ostend. A passenger, a Mr Brown, forced his company on them. They called him the Brown peril and froze him out. It was their first journey alone and it became a double anniversary in their chronology of important dates. The smart hotels were full. They booked in at a small place, played roulette in the casinos and returned to England as lovers.

Like Violet Hunt, Mabel then wore the pearl necklace Marguerite gave her. But she took this love very seriously. She had no history of lesbian relationship. It needed reconstruction to be acceptable. Visiting Marguerite’s London house, she thought how much like the portrait of her great-great-grandfather John Hall, a surgeon, Marguerite looked. From then on Mabel called her John.

More than a fond nickname, this was a symbolic rechristening. It released Marguerite from the hated name her mother had given her and from her discomfort at being a woman. It fed her fantasy and turned her mother’s curse into a boast. ‘You are Radclyffe through and through, not an ounce of your blood is mine.’ By reconstruction she was not the same gender. She was an English squire from a time-honoured family, with horses, hounds and a wife. For Mabel too it defined the partnership in society’s terms. It was John who opened the doors, carried the bags, hired the servants and of course paid the bills.

Mabel metamorphosed into Ladye. Her sister Emma married the widowed Earl of Clarendon after Edward Bourke, her first husband, died. Lord Clarendon owned 500 acres of Hertfordshire and Warwickshire and the ruins of Kenilworth Castle. Emma liked to parade the title Lady Clarendon. Ladye spoofed her sister’s pretensions and as Ladies are married to Lords let the world know that hers was no marginal partnership, no small-time affair.

John and Ladye they became and put themselves forward to society in the guise they contrived. Ladye praised John’s ‘positive and emphatic’ manner, understood her need for control and commended her financial acumen. But she did not make a macho man of her John. She indulged her childish tantrums, her liking for cocoa and loganberry jam. She complained that all her suits looked alike, urged her to wear ‘ornamental’ clothes and told her if she cut her hair short she would not share a house with her.

In autumn 1908 John paid John and Edward Bumpus Ltd to publish A Sheaf of Verses. Dedicated to ‘Sad Days and Glad Days’, she wrote of ‘mists of passion’ dimming her sight, the fire of kisses, throbbing of pulses, happy couples house hunting – ‘where shall we make us a cosy home’ – and the ‘potent ecstasy’ of kissing. Her muse had a comforting breast, submissive lips and delicate hands. John declared her allegiance to Sappho:

Canst thou forget us who are still thy friends,

Thy lovers o’er the cloudy gulf of years.

Reviewers saw no unacceptable affections in these poems. Robert Coningsby Clarke, Hubert Bath and Easthrope Martin set them to music to be sung at afternoon teas. The Daily Express recommended the Sheaf as a Christmas stocking filler and the Sussex Daily News said, ‘Very few living women poets are at all her equal.’

Ladye spent Christmas with Cara and her grandchildren at Aspenden Hall. John, hunting at Malvern with the Ledbury hounds, fell off her horse Xenophon when jumping a fence. The ground was soft, but she hurt her neck. Thereafter, she and Ladye had many conversations on the ‘supposing you had been killed’ theme. Ladye pleaded the case of the fox and urged her to give up hunting. John wrote a poem which began:

I looked on death a moment eye to eye

And knew him not so swift the vision came

So hard upon the