Their Christmas tree that year was in Evguenia’s hotel room, the customary creche for Christ was in John and Una’s. They went to mass in the unheated Duomo and sat in the front pew. John gave Una onyx and gold cufflinks in the shape of the fascio – a bundle of rods and an axe. To Evguenia she gave cultured pearls. Una gave Evguenia handmade Tyrolean shoes. Evguenia gave Una an embroidered nightgown case. John said to Una, ‘My darling Squiggie thank you for being on earth.’ They watched the sun set behind the snow peaks and John talked of them all making a home in the Florentine hills.
OUR THREE SELVES
33
An empty fiction
Una wept with pride on the day in January 1937 when a soldier came to the hotel and delivered the signed photograph of the Duce. Mussolini had dedicated it to Lady Troubridge. John had it framed in Fascist colours and they drank the Duce’s health in vermouth. A week later they both wept with sorrow when the canary Gabriele d’Annunzio died. John wrapped him in a lace handkerchief and Italian flag and buried him with a medal of Notre Dame de Lourdes in the garden of the Sisters of the Holy Cross in Merano.
At the town’s celebrations to mark the eighteenth anniversary of the founding of the Fascist party, she and Una were given prominent seats. Their table was draped with the Italian flag. Una was thanked for the presentation of her rifle, the moschettieri fired blanks, drums rolled, there was much denouncing of the Bolshevik enemy and chanting of Duce Duce Duce. Una wrote in her diary: ‘The teaching fascism gives these children is moral, honourable, courageous and self sacrificing, and the crucifix is there on the wall in the Casa Ballila and in the refectory a prayer to God in great letters.’
Una practised her Italian with a pro-regime nun called Sister Suoraghebarda. They lamented that Hitler lacked the Duce’s religious conviction. John was appalled when the British government invited Haile Selasse, Emperor of Abyssinia, to the coronation of King George VI.
Despite her enthusiasm for the Pope and the Duce, John felt uprooted. Tired of hotels, she wanted a home but only if Evguenia was with her. Caring for her while she was ill had strengthened her affection for her. ‘I want her with the burden of her distress’, she said to Una. Una wanted ‘to be two and not a crowd’. She longed to be at the Forecastle but not with ‘a disappointed and melancholy John’ pining for her Chinkie Pig. Una would not hear of Evguenia joining them in Rye. She would sooner float anonymously round Europe living out of suitcases. At least in England the legend she had promoted was intact. Evguenia fantasized about studying medicine at Oxford or Cambridge. Una, she said, ‘knew very well how to persuade John not to let me do it’.
Evguenia did not want to leave John in any permanent way. She talked of an invisible thread that bound them together, a spiritual and physical link, a definite union. ‘No matter where I was I could always come back to her.’ But Una’s sport was to deride her. She called her a ‘glutinous embryonic creature’, chronicled everything she ate, watched ‘with horror’ as she dipped her spoon into cream, mocked her efforts at typing letters for John. Evguenia said she wished she had bottles and bottles of vodka to drink.
The more goaded Evguenia was by Una, the more she tried to break free from John. When she rejected John, John rejected Una. The more habitual their contact, the more reflex their responses. John told Una that she had clung too tight, that she should have stayed in Rye and let her go to Paris every fortnight to be with Evguenia.
I pointed out that such a programme would have reduced our home and union to an empty fiction and would have meant that we would have lost one another for if I was to be neither wife nor companion she knew it would mean returning home merely to work and await the next spree. Annie the maid could fill my place.
Una had not minded reducing Mabel Batten’s home and union to an empty fiction, then refabricating the story in a meretricious way. She grieved to see John haggard and trapped but she would never relinquish her, not for a day. She endured it when John accused her of spoiling the relationship with Evguenia. She endured hearing her say she wished she had let her have the Forecastle and money and left her. Una lost John in all but the habit of partnership. Mabel Batten might have cracked under the insult of such rejection, but not Una. She would maintain her position as wife and companion. Her determination to win never faltered.
News of their mothers reached their hotel. Mrs Visetti was eighty-three and depressed by her financial difficulties and at living in a cheap London hotel. Her doctor wrote to John and offered to try to effect a reconciliation. Una replied, asked for more details and suggested Mrs Visetti move to a convent home.
From Andrea Una heard that her own mother had cancer of the rectum and had had a colostomy. Viola asked Una to pay half the medical expenses. ‘I cannot and I will not’, was Una’s response. It was grisly, she said, that Minna was ‘crazy to live at any price’. She had not seen her mother for four years, she told Viola. Minna had never done anything for her financially or in any other way. It was up to Viola to care for her now she was desperate. ‘I am terribly sorry for mother but she is
