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

‘How I wish you could see this cottage’, Ladye wrote to Cara. ‘I know you would like it as much as you disliked Highfield. It is really very comfy.’ She called it ‘a perfectly darling big cottage’. It cost £1,500 freehold and was set in the hills. It had a steep sloping garden, beautiful views, a walnut tree with a seat built round it. There was a garage for John’s new car, a field for Judy her horse and a separate cottage for two of the servants. Ladye furnished her bedroom with a cream carpet, yellow curtains, an Italian four-poster bed, Indian paintings and portraits of George and Johnnie.

They planted fruit trees and flowering myrtle and had a terrace made. To complete family life, they bought a Yorkshire terrier called Claude, and Otero, a French bulldog. They rescued Rufus, a collie from Battersea Dogs’ Home, and acquired a parakeet with clipped wings. John prided herself on her affinity with animals, impulsively acquired them and championed their rights. But she demanded alarming deference and punished them or gave them away if they failed to obey. Claude disappeared into the Malvern Hills when she ‘whipped him severely’ for running in front of a cart and not coming when called. He was found but wanted nothing to do with her. And the parakeet was judged spiteful and returned to the shop when it took an opportunistic nip from her finger.

Ladye sang John’s songs at concerts, arranged their musical settings with Robert Coningsby Clarke and Mr Cuthbert Wynne and prepared her fourth volume of poems, Songs of Three Counties, for publication. Socially they mixed with other lesbians of their class who had money and cultural interests. They went to Ethel Smyth’s ‘suffragette concert’, saw ‘clever pictures’ by Romaine Brooks at the Graphic Gallery and motored with Toupie Lowther to Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex, the estate of her brother, Claude. The Princesse de Polignac, a wealthy patron of the arts, came to tea with her lover Olga de Meyer, wife of the society photographer Adolf de Meyer who had taken Mabel’s photograph in 1880.

The wider world only lightly impinged. They deplored the prolonged miners’ strike, the scarcity of coal, an exhibition of ‘mad futuristic paintings’ at the Bath Club and the militancy of suffragettes. 1913 was the year when, on Derby Day, Emily Davison died by throwing herself under the King’s horse. In London, suffragettes smashed windows and chained themselves to railings. John wrote and Ladye edited a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette:

Sir

Have the Suffragettes no spark of patriotism left that they can spread revolt and hamper the Government in this moment of grave national danger? According to Mrs Pankhurst they are resorting to the methods of the miners! Since when have English ladies regulated their conduct by that of the working classes? But indeed up to the present the miners have set an example of orderly behaviour which the Suffragettes might do well to follow!

I was formerly a sympathiser with the cause of female suffrage, as also were many women who, like myself, are unrepresented, although taxpayers. Women who are capable of setting a revolutionary example at such a time as this could only bring disgrace and destruction on any Constitution in which they played an active part.

Yours, etc.,

A Former Suffragist

Such worries as they had were domestic. There was the day the engine of John’s car caught fire and the day the water pipes burst. She and Ladye fussed over each other’s safety and health. They nursed sore throats and avoided draughts. When Ladye had trouble with her teeth, John painted her gums with tincture of iodine. When she was breathless, she took her to a heart specialist – he prescribed amyl nitrite. When John had her haemorrhoids excised, Ladye stayed with her in the Devonshire Street Clinic in London.

John had the security she said she wanted, the safe harbour of her fantasy. She was loved and protected with a fortune to spend, servants, pets, a circle of friends, a flat in town, a house in the country. Reviewers praised her poems. The pain of childhood was over, the Visettis no more than ghosts. She fretted when her mother sent a telegram about financial problems and fretted even more when, with Alberto, she stayed at the White Cottage. But they left after a few days and it seemed the past was dead. If some dark magnet had not drawn her, she might have kept intact all she now had and redefined her life with Ladye’s calmness and ease.

7

If I can fix something for Ladye

In 1912 John was formally received into the Roman Catholic Church. She took the baptismal name of Antonia and chose St Anthony as her patron saint. Bishop Butt confirmed her at Westminster Cathedral. Ladye was her sponsor. Money bought privileges in a number of churches: the personalized pew at the front of the congregation, the inscribed rood, tea with the priest.

They made a pilgrimage to Rome. They stayed in the Grand Hotel de Russie and dined with the Bishop of Nottingham. They went to confession and mass in St Peter’s and bought triptychs, gilt angels and an alabaster Madonna. ‘Johnnie is pink and happy and delighted with everything and so am I,’ Ladye wrote to Cara, ‘barring Roman feet which are as bad as Homburg ones. St Peters was more wonderful than ever yesterday … I adore Italy so that I’m always happy here.’

For a financial consideration, Pope Pius x received them in a ‘semi-private audience’ at the Vatican. ‘Only eight people in a little camera.’ He gave them signed pictures of himself, blessed them in a tired voice and looked ‘inexpressibly sad and ill’.

They say he suffers agonies of intense gout. He has a very kind face but none of the dignity of the last Pope who loved the pomp and ceremonies which this one is bored by. He is always longing for the sea, can’t remember his clothes are white and is always wiping