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

session. Deaf and with an ear trumpet, Cara shouted questions about her mother at Feda. Feda writhed and in a tortured voice complained she could make no contact with Ladye. She got through to George Batten instead, who told his daughter to go to a different medium.

Cara felt insulted and fobbed off. Her son Peter had been wounded in France and she was sure her mother would want to console her. She wrote to Una, asking her to use ‘tact and good help’ against the monopolizing by John of her mother’s ghostly time. When that failed she wrote ‘disagreeable’ letters. She was ‘outrageously rude’ and there were ‘painful scenes’. She made swipes about Crichton-Miller’s patients being lunatics, said she had taken a ‘spirit photograph’ of her mother which she would not let them see and was disparaging about their research endeavours. An attack on Mrs Leonard’s ‘necromantic practices’ appeared in the Daily Mail. Someone had tipped the editor off and he sent journalists for a sitting at Maida Vale.

There was gossip and acrimony. Dolly Clarke sided with Cara. She disliked the way Una monopolized John and chased everyone else away. Una called Dolly crude, her hands coarse and her baby immensely fat. And she encouraged John to stop her allowance. Phoebe Hoare sided with Dolly and when Una and John called on her in May 1917, would not see them. She sent an ‘insolent’ letter, went on holiday with Dolly and spread it about that Una neglected Andrea.

And there was Troubridge. On his summer leave John and Una told him about their commitment to each other through their shared work of psychical research. Afterwards Una felt tired and sick, ‘now it was all over’. They had arranged to meet him for lunch at the Savoy next day but he did not show up. They took Andrea to Southbourne for a seaside holiday while he stayed in London. John again told Una she loved her very much.

Troubridge left for Greece on 26 August 1917 with few residual hopes for his marriage. He had disliked Una’s interest in singing and sculpture because it took her attention from himself and his children. Now she was in a lesbian relationship with a woman she called John and spent all her time communicating with her dead cousin who had been this woman’s lover. It was an outrage and he thought she had gone mad.

Radclyffe Hall’s money made it possible for Una to leave him. Troubridge acknowledged that her ‘means were very much larger than his own’. In November Una rented a furnished house, Grimston, in Datchet near Windsor. It was in her name though John paid most of the expenses. She told Troubridge it was away from London air raids and safe for Andrea. She did not explain that she lived there with John, that Andrea was fostered out to Ida Temple, a local dog breeder, and that Mrs Leonard had a bungalow nearby.

‘Unpleasant letter from T as usual’, Una noted in her diary in January 1918. ‘Owing to this interest, you have completely dropped your relations and mine’, he wrote. ‘This interest’ was more Radclyffe Hall than psychical research. He knew from his sisters and from Viola and Minna that Una’s true passion was not for Mabel Batten’s bumps and gusts. He thought Radclyffe Hall was immoral and had lured Una from him and Andrea.

Una did not care what any of them thought. ‘Their offence to me was destructive’, she wrote of them all. ‘They did their utmost to diminish my beloved.’ Shared life with John became increasingly hermetic. Socially Ladye had been easy and reparative, Una was sharp and divisive. Nor did Grimston suit John. It was small and she was disturbed by noise. Una had to make the breakfast. There was no space for servants or a live-in cook. And John disliked Andrea staying and the untidiness of her toys. Sometimes she made generous gestures – she bought her a bicycle – but she had no affection for her.

‘I’ve married Ladye and I’ve married you’, John said equivocally to Una in January 1918. They fought more than newly-weds ought. After one bout John had to ‘resort to a Ponds compress’ and Una bruised her back. Next evening Una read aloud all Ladye’s 1916 diary, ‘a sad occupation and painful’, she said.

They submitted their joint research paper ‘On a series of sittings with Mrs Osborne Leonard’ to the council of the Society for Psychical Research. The secretary, Isabel Newton, called them ‘investigators of whom the Society expects great things’. Radclyffe Hall was asked to read it at a Society meeting. It was over two hundred pages. She read the first part on 31 January 1918 at the Society’s rooms in Hanover Square. Gerald Balfour was in the chair. The audience learned how MRH (Marguerite Radclyffe Hall) and UVT (Una Vincenzo Troubridge) had gone anonymously to a medium Mrs Osborne Leonard, how Mrs Leonard went into a trance, her normal voice thrust aside by Feda her Control, herself possessed by an ‘Ostensible Communicator from the other side’ whose resemblance to MRH’s dear friend MVA (Mabel Veronica Batten – the A was to protect her identity) was unmistakeable. Radclyffe Hall told them how Feda describedMVA’s clothes, hair-do and voice, the houses she and MRH had lived in together, their holidays in Tenerife, the car accident at Oxford, their thermal baths and poetry, the domestic minutiae of their shared lives. She then gave a description of MVA’s living arrangements on plane three and evidence of her continued communication with MRH and UVT through raps, book tests, lights on the wardrobe and worse.

After the reading one council member, St John Lane Fox-Pitt of South Eaton Place, pioneer of incandescent lamps for municipal street lighting, left the room in disgust. Apart from him, it was all highly commended. Balfour said Una was the finest recorder he had ever known. For the second half of the paper to be read on Friday 22 March, the Society rented the Steinway