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

For ten days she lay paralysed and speechless. John thought she divined from her eyes and ‘inarticulate sounds’ a recognition of herself and the desire to say something important to her alone. Aware that Ladye was dying, she craved her forgiveness. She appealed to the doctor to work some alchemy and make her speak. He volunteered an injection of amyl nitrite, but feared it might finish her off. Ladye stayed silent and died on 25 May.

Obituarists in the Star, The Times, the Morning Post wrote of her fine voice, charms, and friendship with Edward VII. John had her embalmed and on her corpse laid a silver crucifix blessed by the Pope and gold medals of Our Lady of Lourdes and St Anthony. The funeral was on 30 May. A requiem mass was held in Westminster Cathedral. Those attending were listed in The Times: ‘The French Ambassador, the Dowager Countess of Clarendon, Lord Cecil Manners, Rear Admiral Troubridge, Mrs Austin Harris and her tall young daughter Miss Honey Harris, Mrs George Marjoribanks and Miss Hatch’ and many more. Una, though a cousin and friend who ‘had always liked and admired her’, stayed away.

John spent grandly on the paraphernalia of death. She bought a catacomb chamber the size of a small chapel in Highgate Cemetery. It had pillars and Mabel Veronica Batten chiselled in stone above its cast-iron gate. Inside were four shelves. Ladye’s coffin lay on one. Two of the others were reserved for John and Cara. The fourth was ‘for the sake of a proper balance’. As the years passed the question of whose remains should be housed in this inner sanctum became the test of intimacy.

The paint was scarcely dry at 22 Cadogan Court. Nothing had been unpacked. John left the Vernon Court and went to stay with Dolly Clarke. Consumed with guilt and grief, she poured out anguished letters to Cara:

I don’t understand things … Because she has gone I am no longer all myself. Some day the riddle will be solved, in the meantime I can only wonder … How can I ever hope to be happy again, I can only wait and try to live a decent life and to please her word in all things in case I did not always please her before. If I had many faults and sins then perhaps this will be an offering for them. I don’t know, I can’t see clearly. The only thing I do see is that I must never fail her. From now on no interest shall ever lower her memory for me. There shall not be seen a shadow to come between us. I am waiting for some work to turn up and expect that she will guide me.

In her will, a ‘long and conversational document’ for which John had criticized her, Ladye voiced fears that after her death Cara and John would feud: ‘it would grieve me greatly should they grow less friendly or lose sight of each other when I am no longer on this earth’. Cara, Emmie Clarendon and others close to Mabel were not sympathetic to John’s grief. Goodwill toward her was scant. They saw these burial displays as care that had come too late. They wanted Mabel to be buried with George. They had observed and deplored the advent of Una, the way this had spoiled Mabel’s life. They believed that the tension this caused contributed to her death. They went back to calling John Marguerite and invitations faded away.

‘I have tried to dismiss the outrageous gossip that is unworthy of the devotion of your mother and me’, John wrote to Cara. But she could not dismiss her own guilt:

The thing that hurt me when she died was the terrible idea that any peevish words of mine had caused the attack … I shall never forgive myself that I allowed her to be annoyed over Una’s constant presence … I only hope that my beloved Ladye never thought that any ones wishes except hers were being consulted about our flat.

‘Her passing was the shock of my life’, she said. ‘In losing her I lost a shield between myself and the world.’ The loss uncovered old insecurities of abandonment and of that childhood memory of a coffin in the ground. She looked forward to death with ‘the certainty of reunion’ and said her youth and will to live had died too.

Nor was Una a consolation. She seemed like a malevolent accomplice. ‘Her grief was overwhelming and intensified by remorse,’ Una wrote. ‘She was submerged by an all-pervading sorrow … She blamed herself bitterly and uncompromisingly that she had allowed her affection for me to trespass upon her exclusive devotion to Ladye, that she had brought me so closely into their home life, thereby marring the happiness of Ladye’s last months on earth.’

Una’s strategy was to serve and wait. She destroyed her diaries for the years 1915 and 1916, her own evidence of Ladye’s humiliation. For herself, she was ‘desperately miserable at what looked like an almost total shipwreck of our happy relationship’. John did not now want to see her. There were accusations and rows. Una developed what she called ‘an old heart affection’ – palpitations and a racing pulse – a sure way to capture the concern, time and attention of the woman whom she was determined to have.

TWONNIE

10

The eternal triangle

Mabel Batten had loved Radclyffe Hall in a devoted way. She compensated her for the miseries of childhood, encouraged her ambition and tolerated her temper. She was punished for her pains. Cara took away her mother’s diaries. John asked to borrow the last one ‘for a few days’. ‘I have a great desire to read it’, she said. There, detailed, was her unfaithfulness and the unhappiness it had caused.

She justified herself to Cara, said that she had given the best eight years of her life to Ladye, ‘and although other people took my surface interest twice during that time,