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

and had a reputation as a ladies’ man. As far as Mary Jane knew, he was unmarried. He was a founding professor of the Royal College of Music in London and a respected teacher. Photographs of his successful students lined his studio walls: Louise Kirkby-Lunn, Muriel Foster, Keith Faulkner. He had studied at the Milan Conservatoire, had played duets with Charles François Gounod, written a life of Verdi and a three-act opera, Giselda.

A maverick character given to status fantasies, ‘a touch of “the grand manner” went with his every word and action’. He claimed his father had been an Italian landowner with a castle in Salano, Dalmatia (in fact, he was the village organist). He said he had received music scholarships from the governments of Austria and Italy and a knighthood from the King of Italy and that he was attached to the court of Napoleon III.

He had wide-set brown eyes, a straight nose, closely clipped beard and dapper clothes. Mary Jane was impressed by the glamour of his artistic reputation, his smart clientele, his innumerable love affairs and broken engagements. ‘She felt as she mounted the altar steps that she did so over the prostrate form of countesses, marchionesses and duchesses. This man, or better still this lion, was seemingly chained at last. The end of the chain was firmly held in her ridiculously small hand.’

She wanted social position from this, her third marriage. She wanted a salon, parties and invitations. Visetti was expansive, generous and well paid by the standards of the day. He earned fifteen shillings an hour teaching at the College, had private pupils and was conductor and director of the Bath Philharmonic Orchestra. Madame Maria Visetti, as she now called herself on her visiting cards, assumed the air of a patron of the arts and ‘held forth confidently on subjects of which she knew little’.

Marguerite, told of the forthcoming marriage only months after her parents’ divorce, was bewildered. She had met Visetti twice. You’ll have a real father now, her mother said. Marguerite insisted Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall was her real father. She was told not to mention his name and that he was dead. Is he really dead, is he under the earth, she asked. I wish he were, her mother replied.

Sent with Nurse Knott to Sidmouth in Devon, Marguerite lodged for three months with a fisherman’s family while her mother and Visetti went to Bruges for their marriage and honeymoon. Marguerite described herself as ‘seething with surprise and resentment’, ‘heavy with rage and bewilderment’ that her mother should have saddled her with this ersatz father and deprived her of her real one. She resolved ‘never to admit the interloper for one moment into her heart’. She wrote a letter to Radclyffe asking if she could come and live with him, but did not know where to send it.

Again the countryside consoled, the Devon town, the long tree-lined road from the station, the cliffs, rough sea, the rocks and sand. ‘It was a place to dream in, all dappled sky and waves and fishing boats with brown spray-flecked sails.’ She then joined her mother and stepfather in Bruges, where Visetti was organizing a music festival. She spent most of the time in bed with chronic asthma.

When they returned to London they settled in Visetti’s large house in Earl’s Court, 14 Trebovir Road. Grandmother Diehl came over from Philadelphia to complete the family. The house was elegant. The drawing-room had a polished oak floor and panelled walls. In a corner stood a black harpsichord, there were plants in copper jars, a goldfinch in a large cage. Madame Visetti imposed her taste: a carpet, nick-nack tables, photographs in silver frames, pink cushions, a pink brocade cover for the harpsichord. She spared his studio. Specially built, it filled what had been the back garden and had a domed skylight, teak floor, a performance platform with a balustrade of blue and gold, a Bechstein grand piano, an organ, high mirrors and long low divans. ‘Here then the great man held his famous operatic classes. Hither came shoals of soulful young aspirants among whom were a few who in the not very distant future would become famous on the boards of Covent Garden.’ Here, too, the great man seduced a succession of his students. His marriage was a cover. It gave him the semblance of respectability, but he made no adjustment to his former life.

His sexual overtures were directed at his ten-year-old stepdaughter, too. She told no one of his behaviour until she was in her thirties and living with Una Troubridge, who was to be her partner for twenty-nine years. To her she recounted ‘in a voice devoid of emotion’ details of Visetti’s ‘improper advances’. They ‘made quite an impression on his unhappy little victim’, Una said. After Radclyffe Hall died, Una wrote a biography of her. In the first draft she referred to ‘the sexual incident with the egregious Visetti’ but omitted this for publication, ‘lest we have psycho analytic know alls saying she would have been a wife and mother but for that experience’.

The paragraph that followed this deletion described a ‘pathetic’ photograph:

A faded shiny carte-de-visite obviously taken to exploit the ‘paternal’ affection of Alberto Visetti. John [as Marguerite was later to call herself] a very thin, bony little girl of about ten, very unbecomingly dressed and with all the appearance of an unloved child, standing awkwardly beside the seated Visetti, already getting rather portly, the epitome of smug self-satisfaction and conceit.

This ‘interloper’, whom she had resolved never to let into her heart, forced his attention on her body. In adult life she referred to Visetti as ‘my disgusting old stepfather’. For herself, she never had any sexual impulse toward a man.

The Visetti marriage turned into another travesty of family life. Madame Maria Visetti was as violent as Mrs Mary Jane Hall. One of Visetti’s pupils spoke of her ‘belabouring’ Marguerite round the head and pulling her hair. Nurse Knott was dismissed when she criticized her for leaving