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

Una:  Tell her I’ll stick to it all right.

Ladye thought Troubridge’s absence was ‘the best thing all round’. She was more conformist these days and wanted appearances upheld. When Una had her hair cut short and the nape of her neck shaved, Ladye fingered it and gave an ethereal shudder. She preferred Una’s ‘medieval fashion’ of plaited knobs over the ears. She again warned John never to cut hers. She would not speak to her if she did.

Behind the idiocy of it all was the terror of an abandoned child. Like a child, Radclyffe Hall turned shadows into substance, imagined a fantasy mother who would always love her and a fantasy world that was always safe. A wafer could become the flesh of Christ and Gladys Leonard, Ladye.

Radclyffe Hall could, as she chose, recreate the world. Death was life, she was a man and reality was in her control. Events could not ‘render it intolerable’. Her perfect woman was always there, mother, lover, friend, ‘the woman one would long to protect while coming to in turn for protection’.

Boundaries blurred between now and then and between herself and Una. The drama of psychic possession in Maida Vale had a parallel in Chelsea. John merged eternally with Ladye and Una merged into John. John’s psychical research notes were all about Ladye. Una’s diary was for and about John. If John left her supper, went to the dentist, had a cold, bought a sweater, Una noted it down.

It became unclear which of them was hearing Ladye rapping on the wardrobe and why Una should want to know about it quite as much as John. They wrote up notes together, instructed the typist and read books on other worlds. They planted roses and rhododendrons by the Highgate mausoleum. Only John’s temper tantrums drew a temporary sharp divide. ‘J very depressed & in vile temper. Not a nice evening and I cried much after I was left alone’, was an aggrieved diary entry of Una’s in February 1917. When Una mis-set the alarm clock, John’s fury was ‘almost too miserable to bear’. When she left their notes at Mrs Leonard’s, John ‘raged with fury and distress’. But mostly Una did what was wanted and John’s dependency grew. After the storms she was sweet, ‘& I just love her anyway’, Una wrote. And John, who had a dependent heart, felt gratitude. ‘Where would I be without my Squiggie’, she said and meant.

Living in separate quarters was inconvenient for their work. But sharing a house might seem to exclude Ladye and there was Troubridge’s leave to consider. When they worked late at Una’s house, John stayed the night. If it was Swan Walk, Una slept on a couch. And then John caught measles and Dolly Clarke feared for her baby. John stayed with Una, who nursed her. In gratitude, John gave her a sapphire and diamond ring and then a feather eiderdown and ‘a lovely model gown’ from Sheba’s of Sloane Street. And she added a codicil to her will bequeathing all clothes and personal things to her. ‘It meant so much to me’, Una wrote.

It meant even more to her that they should share a home. On 15 February 1917 her landlady, Mrs Gregory, told her to be out of the house in Royal Hospital Road by noon. She objected to lesbian goings-on. Una found 42 St Leonard’s Terrace nearby. John helped her settle in but left at ten p.m. ‘Very much depressed at new start in another squalid little lonely abode, but one must just do one’s best and go on. I am very, very tired’, Una wrote in her diary.

In spring John braved the flat at Cadogan Court, leased for herself and Ladye. She needed Una’s constant presence and support. They transcribed their notes, took meals together, walked the dogs. Una again moved to be close by. She signed a lease on an unfurnished house at 6 Cheltenham Terrace. John bought two Cromwellian oak chairs and an oak refectory table for it. When there was an air raid in July, Una ran into the street to look for John, who that night told her she loved her very much.

Una wanted to stay with her for all eternity. She knew the strength that lay in seeming weak, the power her acquiescence held. John always worried when Una was ill. Knowing John read her diary, Una teased for sympathy: ‘I often wonder how one can go on living feeling as ill & done in as I do. And I sometimes wonder if anything really bad is the matter. I never seem to be out of pain of some kind.’

If Ladye found eternal devotion by dying, then so would Una. She too saw floating caterpillars as well as sparks of light. ‘Heart attacks’, colitis, cystitis, headaches, were all recorded along with the gusts of wind, the bumps and bangs that were communications from Ladye. Looniness cocooned their lives. Una felt ‘so dematerialised’ she could neither speak nor eat her lunch. She was five foot five but weighed seven stone. The ‘puffs of air’ she felt on her hands called for appraisal by Crichton-Miller. She complained of feeling ‘odd & restless & uneasy as if someone were trying to get at me’.

She and John began to communicate telepathically, had identical thoughts about the canary, stoked the fire when the other was about to do it. Una hummed the tune that was in John’s mind. Andrea, on a rare visit from boarding school and foster care, caught their mood. She told her mother she ‘had seen Our Lord Our God sitting on her pillow in the night’. John chain-smoked Dunhill cigarettes and in the drawing-room at Cadogan Court saw Ladye sitting on the sofa in a petticoat doing up a shell-pink blouse. In April 1917 she said that psychical research was the only thing that mattered to her and that her life’s work was to become a medium.

11

A very grave slander

Communicating with Ladye had its dull