John had become as adrift as her father, Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall. She had no plans other than where to go for the sake of Evguenia’s health and no strategy for resolving or ameliorating the emotional chaos she had created. Evguenia seemed robust, all infection gone. As ever, she longed for Paris but was now financially dependent on John. John wondered where they would all spend the winter. She thought of Merano in the Italian Alps. Una wrote to the Park Hotel about rooms. Evguenia did not want to go. ‘What a woman she has fallen for,’ Una wrote, ‘hard as granite, shallow as a dish and without the elementary rudiments of gratitude or affection.’
In September they went to Paris to have medical check-ups with Dr Fuller and to get a visa for Evguenia. They travelled via Freiburg, Colmar, Strasbourg. They went through Germany because Evguenia’s mother had been German. Una was surprised not to see more swastikas or the Führer’s picture. She thought him less in evidence than the Duce in Italy.
X-rays taken in Paris showed Evguenia’s lungs were clear. Dr Fuller recommended that she take life easily and do no work. Of John he said there was nothing organically wrong with her, but she ‘took Miss Evguenia too seriously’. He prescribed hormone injections for her, perhaps because of the menopause. Una resented the intimacy of Evguenia administering these.
John was ‘delirious with joy’ when Evguenia was granted an Italian visa valid for a year. She took her on a shopping spree for clothes for the snows and the Dolomites and had her measured for silk pyjamas. ‘Oh yes but I love you deeply, deeply. You are rooted in my innermost being and I cannot tear you out if I would – were I to do so I should bleed to death – One heart – same heart – and no help for it, it seems.’
In October the three of them made their disconsolate way by train to Merano with ever more luggage and Gabriele d’Annunzio, the now-moribund canary. At Verona they had one of their terrible rows. Evguenia said her room was dark. John found her leaning out of her window in the rain. Evguenia would not shut the window or put on her coat and muffler. Una tried to drag her from it and close it. Evguenia pushed her away and told her to get out of her room. Una replied, ‘It is not your room but John’s and I shall go when she tells me to and not before. John is too tired and too ill to be tormented any more and I simply won’t have it.’
They rowed for two hours. Una said Evguenia abused, baited and tormented John. Evguenia said she could not stand all the restrictions; she had to see her friends. She could not go on in this threesome, it was unbearable living with Una. If she had any living soul to go to she would have left long ago. John said, ‘You have always known that I cannot leave Una. Do you want to give me up?’ Evguenia said, ‘On your conditions, yes.’ John pleaded that she did not have sex with Una. Evguenia said she did not care whether she did or not. Una told her that she herself suggested John make this clear when Evguenia’s illness ‘debarred her from physical life’.
‘She sneered and remarked, Debarred? I wasn’t debarred. As though her illness had been in that respect a welcome respite. In fact she spared John no hurt, insult or humiliation.’ Una thought it inconceivable that she would have to go on seeing Evguenia or speaking to her. ‘At least I need not behave in future in any way as though I had any liking for her.’
In Merano Evguenia enrolled for a course in German and Italian at the Berlitz school. John feared she would catch germs from the other students and wanted her to have private lessons at the hotel in a room heated by a stove. There was a row about that, too.
Evguenia began spitting blood again. John had cystitis, an abscess under a tooth and a nervous spasm in her eyes. The lashes on her lower lids curled inwards and scratched against her eyeballs. The doctor pulled the lashes out but they grew again. She seemed to be having a complete breakdown. Una blamed that beast of a woman.
They went to mass for the Duce in the Duomo and joined the Fascist processions through the town. The Italian waiters in the hotel dining hall gave the three of them the Roman salute and preferential service. The hotel was ‘teeming with jews’, refugees, Una said, from the Führer’s sweeping out of undesirables. At night Fascisti shouted catcalls and rang bells outside. ‘Fascist anti-bolshevism is turning its attention to these communist jew elements’, Una wrote in her diary. ‘I’m inclined to think they may be right but we must have our rest at night.’
The English papers were full of the King’s proposed abdication so that he could marry Mrs Simpson. Una saw a parallel with the intrusion of Evguenia. ‘The king is captured, like my John, by a worthless woman with whom he is infatuated.’
‘God bless the Duce’, Una said and sent him a photograph of himself which she asked him to sign. John and she deplored the civil war in Spain. ‘So long as this terrible anti-God bolshevism continues it must be met with and conquered by force’ was the view they both held. For 120 lire Una bought a rifle for one of the ten-year-old moschettieri in Merano to learn to use. Her name was engraved on the barrel and it was given to a boy named Norberto Roeregger.
It may shock one’s spirit to see children taught to use a rifle, but I have lived to see the alternative – children taught to
