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

very depressed.’ John was now ‘so changed’ towards her. She was always irritable and never wanted to go anywhere alone with her, but wanted to be alone with Una.

This was not, as with Phoebe Hoare, an affair with prescriptive limits, contained by regard for marriage. Una had left Troubridge in all but deed. A determined woman, she wanted to oust Ladye and have John to herself. She was ‘completely under the spell of her enthralling personality. All I knew or cared about was that I could not, once having come to know her, imagine life without her.’ The Admiralty offered her a passage to Belgrade to join Troubridge. She declined. ‘I hate exile from the intellectual and artistic pursuits of London’, was her excuse. ‘I dread a stagnation that may end in atrophy.’ Even Andrea, aged five, was now an encumbrance and an intrusion. Alone with her, Una felt cooped up.

A month after meeting John, in September 1915, she asked Crichton-Miller if he would foster Andrea at Bowden House and see that she went to mass. Crichton-Miller declined. He suggested a Miss Prior, who lived at Roxeth Head nearby:

There are three old ladies, the youngest of whom is about sixty in the shade. There were four recently, the fourth died of excessive senility last summer … For the last ninety years they have specialised in taking care of Anglo-Indian children … Their terms might be a little high, but whatever they charge, I think you could be sure of getting good value. They would be enormously impressed by the fact that Andrea was a Roman Catholic and would be more likely to find fault for the fewness of the services attended than for the number of them!

It was a strange environment for a psychiatrist to recommend for a small child. Andrea was passed like an unclaimed parcel to whoever would have her for a while.

To Ladye, John rationalized her infidelity. She assured her she would never leave her – but nor was she going to change. She talked again of ‘superfluous energy’ and Toupie Lowther’s ambulance unit. In late September she took both her and Una to the Watergate Bay Hotel near Newquay in Cornwall. Ladye, unfit for cliff walks and beach games, was left on her own in the hotel. ‘Talked till very late with John after we went up to bed’, she wrote on 2 October. She dreamed that her eyes were on fire and that while she watched from a river bank John drowned. She woke shouting and bathed in sweat.

In a move that compounded Ladye’s insecurities, John sublet both the London flat in Cadogan Square and the Malvern house. The war had reduced her income, but it was her habit to move out of places as impulsively as she moved in. Their furniture went into store and she took a suite of rooms at the Vernon Court Hotel in Buckingham Palace Road. Ladye’s bedroom had views over the palace gardens. They were pleasant quarters, but with no sense of home. Una hung her Nijinsky drawings in John’s sitting-room.

Ladye still had time with John: shopping at Selfridges, lunch at the Savoy Grill, a matinée of Gladys Cooper in Please Keep Emily. They prayed together at the Oratory and Ladye read aloud to her in the evenings. But there was an underlying loss of expectation from the relationship, a revision downward of trust, a death of hope that past happiness would ever come again.

On Ladye’s fifty-eighth birthday on 27 October, John took her to lunch at the Ritz. She gave her a travelling cushion, a gift she was to have no occasion to use. A few days later, she took Una on a jaunt to Taplow to buy her a bulldog called Juno. Ladye lunched alone, feeling ‘done up, sad and rotten’.

And then on 29 November John went alone with Una to the White Cottage. They were supposed to compile an inventory of the furniture and contents before the tenant, Mrs Lygon, moved in. They went by train to Malvern, then took a carriage. It was a damp misty day, the house was warm from the anthracite stove burning in the hall. The servants had gone. It was the first time Una had seen the White Cottage. It was the kind of home she had never had and the home she wanted with John. The date was significant, another anniversary:

I can shut my eyes now & recall the luncheon she had prepared for me – & trying to eat while I summoned my resolution to leave immediately – & all that followed, & in the evening our walking along the valley road to where the lights ended & the hedges began – & so back to the White Cottage with a bond forged between us.

They were both, she wrote, ‘breaking troth’ to their partners, though troth to Troubridge did not amount to much and she summoned no resolution to leave. She justified herself by her relative youth: she was thirty years younger than Ladye. For Mabel Batten, from the evidence of her diaries, Una’s intrusion was a disappointment that compromised her to the core. John perhaps intended an adventure, a respite from boredom, one more conquest on a par with those of her father. She was ambivalent about Una. ‘How do I know if I shall care for you in six months’ time?’ she said. But she gave her a platinum ring engraved with their names and she had fashioned another destructive triangle and incestuous circle.

Una intended that John should care for a lifetime and more. She rented an artist’s studio in Tite Street, Chelsea. John was her principal subject. Drawing her and making a sculpture of her were pretexts for being with her all day. She read aloud the manuscript of Michael West and all John’s short stories. She noted her grandiose ambition, her vulnerability and need for praise. This prose mapped the psychological terrain Una intended to claim.

Una had a fervour to serve. In Florence when