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

acquired a Bakst chiffon dinner gown in scarlet and two shades of purple. They heard the music of Debussy and Stravinsky, saw the dancing of Nijinsky and Karsavina and the set and costume designs of Bakst and Benois.

At Malvern they searched out antiques for the White Cottage – a marble-topped gilt washstand, a bookcase for Ladye’s dressing-room. They sang Spanish songs under the walnut tree, went to flower shows, lunched at the Horny Old Arms. Both were inordinately proud when in June a ‘very eulogistic’ letter about John’s poems came from the author and literary critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. And equally proud when ‘Desert Love Songs’ and ‘The Blind Ploughman’ were sung at the Queen’s Hall on 23 November 1913.

But joy and ease went from their relationship. John lost weight, did no writing, had bursts of temper and violence. Ladye was depressed, had angina attacks and high blood pressure. Her diary, formerly buoyant, became a litany of discomforts and disappointments. Her ankles were swollen, her teeth gave her pain. She hated John being away, was mortified by this betrayal. More and more she lost things – a skunk fur in a taxi, a brooch, then a ring.

On 20 July they dined with Winnaretta Singer – the Princesse de Polignac. She read aloud from her manuscript about travels to Lesbos. ‘John very upset afterwards with remords de conscience’, Ladye wrote in her diary. ‘I get no sleep at all.’ Remords de conscience did not prevent John from spending the next afternoon with Phoebe Hoare. Or the next and the next and the next. At the week’s end she was so tired she fell asleep after dinner, then went to bed at ten. Ladye felt wretched and sat alone, her swollen feet wrapped in damp flannels.

At Malvern in the summer months, John felt confined. She was ‘furiously angry’ when the dog Otero broke a glass. She beat him. Ladye felt faint in the night and could not sleep. Next day, on 22 August, to commemorate five years since those nights at Ostend, she gave John a diamond pin. ‘John seemed all right again and was very loving and made me feel happy.’

It was a fleeting feeling. John then left for Southbourne and a week with Dolly Clarke and Phoebe Hoare. Ladye invited her brother George and his wife Nelly to stay and had a dismal time with them. On the evening of Saturday 30 August, she met John at the station. ‘We talked far into the night. I got no sleep till 4 a.m. Felt depressed and breathless.’

Nocturnal talks were salt on wounds. In the morning they missed mass. It rained for a week. Otero, judged unmanageable, was destroyed. Ladye asked John to visit Cara with her. Though John was supposed to feel ‘almost’ like the father of Cara’s expected child, she refused and went again to Phoebe. Then she scuppered the spring holiday plans. They had agreed on Málaga. Ladye loved Spain and was looking forward to it. Now John wanted to go to San Remo, where Phoebe would be at Bel Respiro, her mother’s villa. Ladye again lay awake worrying until half past four in the morning.

It was not a situation she could resolve. She had nowhere to turn, no wish to live alone. She was not used to being marginalized. She had always ‘accepted homage as a matter of course’. No homage was on offer now and her flirtatious days were done. There was a symmetry in the way she had treated George. She had let him know that though she would not leave him he was too old for her, not sexy and often dull. She had farmed him out to family friends, left him in the care of the maid while she was having fun.

Recession and talk of impending war added to the gloom. The miners’ strike dragged on. John and Ladye dined in the library to save coal and had a succession of colds. At Aspenden Hall at Christmas John was uninterested in other guests and dissatisfied with her dressing-room. ‘Felt very pleased that this horrid year was finished’, Ladye wrote in her diary on New Year’s Eve. ‘Not a happy year and felt delighted when 1914 set in.’

Oliver Hoare wanted this unorthodox affair of his wife’s to end. In January 1914 John had an ‘interview’ with him and Phoebe. Its agenda was not divulged but on 1 February she and Ladye left for a two-month holiday. Away from provocation Ladye felt restored. At the Sports Club, Monte Carlo, she played roulette and talked to Mrs George Keppel, another lover of the previous King. At Tamaris at the Grand Hotel, she and John had large interconnecting bedrooms and a ‘gorgeous view over the sea’. The sun shone, the food was good, she enjoyed their itinerant life and had John’s exclusive company. But things were not the same and they were not the couple they had promised to be. Ladye knew, as she copied John’s latest eulogies of desire into literacy, that they were not inspired by her:

Thy beauty burns me as a breath of fire

When thy hands touch me, all the world is compassed

Within the limits of their slender whiteness.

Where may I hide from this destroying rapture,

From this swift longing that engulfs my being?

Dolly Clarke joined them. She was practically penniless and complained that her husband was ‘parsimonious’ towards her. John increased her allowance and invited her to live with them in Malvern. They all sailed to Genoa then Florence. It was John’s first visit there. ‘It leaves Rome far behind’, she wrote to Cara. ‘It has remained in the middle ages. One feels a strange and yet familiar aura of the 15th and 16th centuries the moment one sets foot in the streets. As I know that I lived in the 15th century myself it appeals to me strongly.’

She also knew that she was really a man and loved by God. She had the key to preternatural knowledge and hers was an invincible view. She