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

she had watched the initiation ceremony of a novice into a closed order of nuns, she had wished she was the girl. She lauded what she saw as subordination of self to the highest power. If she served Radclyffe Hall as disciple and vestal virgin, she could subsume her own personality yet achieve glory. She would also have a lot of money and no responsibility. She liked first nights, travel, ‘beautiful clothes and the opportunity for wearing them’. And sexually, after Troubridge, she was through with men. John was a quasi-man without the misery Troubridge’s attentions brought.

‘London like a Christmas card under deep snow’, Ladye wrote as the year came to an end. Relationships were wintry too. On Christmas Eve the three of them went to midnight mass. John gave Ladye a pink, fur-lined Chinese wrap and gold hatpins. Ladye gave her a wrist-watch, a prophetic gift, for time was running out. She felt ‘depressed and very sad’. ‘Una spent all New Year’s Eve with us till 10.45 pm. John and I saw the troublesome year 1915 out together and both felt depressed. Vale 1915!’

Nor did Ladye hail 1916 as happy or new. For the first week of it, John went with Una to Tunbridge Wells. They booked in at the Wellington Hotel. Ladye sang ‘Mother England’ at tea parties, lost her fox fur muff, ‘lunched and dined alone and slept badly’. It poured with rain, there were gales and a tree came down in the garden of the White Cottage and killed Mr Hooper the gardener.

Rear-Admiral Troubridge arrived in London in February. He had not seen his wife for nine months and wanted her evasions explained. He expected her to meet him at the station but, with a sudden headache and sore throat, she went to bed at the Vernon Court Hotel. He saw at her studio the marble head she was sculpting. He made what he would of her reluctance to be alone with him, her immersion into the life of this woman called John. He dined with them all at the Vernon Court, went without Una to the wedding of his daughter, Mary, and slept at his club. His career seemed uncertain and his pay had been halved.

Una told him she was not going out to Belgrade and that she would stay married but only in name. She reminded him she was still being treated by Crichton-Miller for ‘neurasthenia’ and by Alfred Sachs for venereal infection. Perhaps to avoid the possibility of divorce, he was received into the Catholic Church on 27 February. Ladye had ‘a long and quiet talk’ with John about the implications of it all.

Thomas Troubridge, Una’s stepson, arrived without warning at the hotel. He urged Una to return to his father, accused her of humiliating him and warned that scandal would rebound on her. She hinted at revelations that would damage him more than forbearing to chase enemy ships.

Tension infected them all. John was ‘excessively irritable’ with Ladye and harangued her when she was quarter of an hour late arriving at Una’s studio. Ladye felt ‘too wretched’. John talked of taking Una and Andrea abroad with them as soon as the war allowed and she was gloomy when Dolly’s baby, Jacqueline, was born. The atmosphere was ‘sad beyond words’, Ladye wrote. ‘Felt chilled bodily and mentally … Thought seriously of going to live by myself.’

She was too unwell for humiliation and upheavals. John signed the lease on a new flat at 22 Cadogan Court and decided to sell the White Cottage when the tenant offered to buy it. She and Ladye talked over these plans until one-thirty one morning. John assured her that the new flat was for the two of them, but Una was involved at every stage. ‘Wish I felt stronger and more able to work’, Ladye wrote in her diary. Una helped choose the wallpapers, the stove for Ladye’s bedroom, John’s bed from Barkers. Ladye was offended when, at Una’s prompting, John took a room down the corridor as her bedroom, not the one adjacent to her own as she had hoped and they had agreed.

To get away she went for a week to the Grayshott Senacle Convent in Surrey. With a regime of prayer and early nights, spared Una’s constant presence and in the company of nuns, she felt better. While she was away, John took Una to Malvern to arrange the sale of furniture from the White Cottage. She wrote Ladye a ‘darling but depressed letter’ about parting with the place. It had been their shared home for five years.

On 29 April Ladye complained that black specks floated across her eyes as she tried to read. Next day it was ‘chenille caterpillars’. Her oculist ‘found nothing seriously wrong’. She was tired, breathless and her pulse was ‘intermitting’ when the three of them supervised moving the furniture from 59 Cadogan Square to 22 Cadogan Court.

On 13 May they all went to a Red Cross concert. They heard pieces by Elgar, and Agnes Nicholls sang ‘To the Fallen’. Next day John again took Una to Taplow. Juno the bulldog was not up to par and was to be swapped. Ladye went alone to midday mass then lunched with Cara and showed her the new flat. John and Una were tempted to spend the night in Skindles, a fashionable hotel near Maidenhead. They eventually went back with the new dog to Una’s flat. The phone was ringing when they arrived. Ladye was vexed that John was so late for dinner. John returned reluctantly to the Vernon Court. She vented her anger at Ladye for curtailing her movements and constraining her freedom. Her tabasco temper had a poisonous fire. Ladye rose from the dinner table, complaining of pins and needles down her right side and of acute chest pain. She then collapsed. John could not get their doctor so she phoned Una, who went to the hotel. Ladye had had a cerebral haemorrhage. Next day she scrawled in her diary with her