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

valued, loved, encouraged, needed. On their departure day they watched from the hotel through a telescope for their boat, the SS Habsburg, to dock in the port. They sailed on to Lisbon with first-class board in the captain’s cabin. They arrived in pouring rain, lunched at the hotel where Byron wrote Childe Harold, went to a bullfight, visited monasteries and churches and hired an interpreter to help them buy hats. After a week, with lots of bothers with luggage and the parrot, they travelled on to Paris in the Sud Express.

Such poems as John wrote reflected her love of Ladye and life with her. In London in May she took her next volume to Bumpus. Called Poems of the Past and Present, edited, compiled and revised by Mabel, they were about her and dedicated to her. They told of John’s rootlessness before meeting her and the fulfilment she had brought. They spoke of Mabel’s blue eyes, beloved hands and the flowers and graveyards of Tenerife. The litany of the Catholic Church became ‘A Rosary of Love’.

By all dead lovers’ tears and pains

I swear I love thee,

By all their joys and glad refrains

I swear I love thee.

By all the lovers that still live,

I swear I love thee,

By all they take and all they give,

I swear I love thee.

By all my youth and passion’s might,

I swear I love thee

By all thy beauty and delight,

I swear I love thee.

By Love himself, his holy flame,

I swear I love thee,

By those I loved ere thy love came,

I swear I love thee.

And so on for fifteen verses. Reviewers gave teatime praise. The Lady said ‘many fair and gentle thoughts are gracefully expressed by Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall.’ The Daily Express called her ‘a poetess with a very charming gift’. The Daily News talked of ‘neat statements of the woman’s point of view’.

John and Ladye’s intimacy was exclusive and the old life faded away. King Edward VII, ill with bronchitis, died at midnight on 6 May 1910. Ladye and John wore black, offered mass for him and watched his funeral procession. John had a miniature of him mounted in a black Wedgwood pendant for Ladye to wear.

Then George became ill. In August he stayed with them at Clifton Cottage, Sidmouth. John composed Spanish songs on her mandolin. ‘Her accompaniment is different every time she tries it’, Ladye wrote to. Cara. Ladye and George sang the vocal parts, ‘and the parrot Mr Povey squealed with joy and excitement’. But George was weak on his legs, had swollen ankles and bladder problems, his mind wandered and he put Devonshire cream in his tea.

On 2 October they went with him and Ladye’s sister-in-law, Nelly Hatch, to a concert at the Albert Hall where Louise Kirkby-Lunn sang Ladye’s setting of John’s ‘Ode to Sappho’. The next day Mr Povey died, Grandmother Diehl, who was seventy-nine, had a stroke and George sank into delirium. His sister Lady Strachey and Emmie Clarendon sat with him. Dr Pardoe operated on his prostate and a Dr Grosvenor said he ‘held out hope’. John divided her time between her grandmother and Ladye.

On 18 October in the early morning Grandmother Diehl died. She had asked to be buried in the family grave in the old cemetery in west Philadelphia. John went with her mother and the coffin to Southampton, saw her and it on to the Atlantic liner, then hurried to Ralston Street. George was rambling and scarcely conscious. He was given intravenous heroin. Ladye held his head and urged him to eat a beaten egg. Kelly, his barber, came to shave him. John, Ladye and Cara went to Westminster Cathedral to pray for him. He died at ten past six in the evening of 24 October.

He was despatched to a chapel of rest in Woking and given a memorial service at St Peter’s Church, Eaton Square. The house at Ralston Street, disinfected and left with agents, fetched a high rent as it was coronation year. The solicitor, Mr Johnson, sorted out George’s will, investment papers, pension and shares. Ladye benefited by £400 rental income a year, the house and £8,000 capital. As consolation for her bereavement, John bought her a mauve coat and a Pekinese called Fuji and promised her a villa in the sun.

Within a month they and their maids were on their way to the south of France, Alassio, Bordighera, Corsica. They were away six months, a seemly absence. Their itinerary precluded sorrow and Ladye’s diaries and letters suggested happy times. With Dolly Diehl married and Grandmother Diehl and George Batten dead, nothing it seemed could now separate her and John from each other and their pledge of eternal love. She wrote of walks in the mountains where the air smelled of pine and eucalyptus, of waves breaking in a sirocco wind, of drives through moors and meadows full of flowers, of their search for a villa for John to buy and of picnics in the sun.

The Bobby Clarkes, as Ladye called them, joined them in Alassio. ‘They seem very happy together’, she wrote to Cara. ‘He looks like a bald cherub. She is much improved in every way and seems now to appreciate Johnnie and all her kindness in a way she never did when she was living with her.’ He had a ‘wonderful’ telescope, and in the garden of the villa by moonlight John and Ladye looked at the stars.

They considered themselves married. John, once the perfect suitor, was now the perfect spouse. In London she leased a large Chelsea flat, 59 Cadogan Square. They furnished it with antique mantelpieces, oak tables, blue Italian pillars for Ladye’s bedroom shrine and Dresden china birds. John plied Ladye with presents – a black-and-white bead evening gown, a brocade evening cloak with crimson lining and hood, a black chiffon and voile dress for the afternoons, a diamond safety pin, more strings of pearls.

In Malvern she sold Highfield, which Ladye had thought bleak, and bought the White Cottage, which was thatched and cosy with roses over the porch.