John began a new book The Shoemaker of Merano. She smoked thirty-five cigarettes a night as she worked. Una became spiteful when, by the second chapter, the wife in it was Evguenia. But John’s consolation, as Evguenia slipped from her control, was to bind her to her in fiction. She promised Evguenia that never again would the three of them live under the same roof. ‘I think of what might have been but what is not. Could there have been friendship between you and Una?’
‘If you want to live in Italy you may’, John said to Una. In spring they all moved to Florence. They booked in at the Hotel Gran Bretagne. The rate of exchange was good and John was exempt from paying tax in England. The plan was to stay until it got too hot in summer. Evguenia would then go to Paris, and John and Una to Rye. Evguenia would join John for a holiday in England, then they would all return to Florence in October.
John found a flat for the autumn. It was in Lungarno Acciaiuoli, overlooking the Arno. It had French windows, parquet floors, timbered ceilings, a fine view, maids’ rooms and a large bathroom. Evguenia made it clear that under no circumstances would she live in it too. John’s chief wish was that Evguenia should winter with her in the warm. ‘My chief wish,’ Una wrote in June, ‘is to get home as quickly as possible and have a rest from Evguenia and her surly nigger face.’
Paris, by contrast to Italy, was expensive. Natalie, Una thought, ‘talked a lot of half-baked nonsense about the tyranny of fascism and of the Catholic church’. Evguenia renewed her work permit for nursing. John felt threatened and feared such independence would separate them: ‘Don’t you think you have a right to rest on your oars?… You have earned the security that has come to you. This is the way I see it my beloved. You owe me nothing but love, if you feel that you can still give it.’
It had become difficult for Evguenia to manage without John. Her quest for naturalization was more convoluted than ever. It now involved some back-door deal and the payment of 6,000 francs. To renew her Italian visa, to gain a visa for England, required payments and guarantees. Evguenia was uncertain about where to go or what to do. She was depressed at committing herself to September in Rye or winter in Italy. She wanted a holiday with her Russian friends. She wanted Paris and work, but not as a nurse. She wanted not to leave John but to see her without Una.
John found parting from her for eight weeks and returning to Rye unbearable. On the journey she spoke only of her. She sent a wire from the ship, stopped at Rye post office to send a telegram, then spent a day writing to her. ‘This was our home coming after a year and a half’, Una said. ‘The cottage looks more lovely than ever,’ John wrote to Evguenia, ‘and were you here I could be in heaven, but heaven is not for such as me – at all events not on this earth.’
She was in limbo with Una:
Oh Evguenia, Evguenia – there are no words to express what I feel. I can only say to your half of our heart: ‘Love me, cling to me, understand me. Understand my love, my desire to protect, my anxiety, my poor broken life.’ No one on earth can know all this but you, since you are the reason for my joy and sorrow. Ten o’clock and no letter from you.
She dreamed of a future where Evguenia too lived in Rye in a house of her own. As ever, she shared this dream with Una. Una trod on it hard. She would not have John visiting Evguenia at all hours and ‘scandal among our own class and the working people’. They had an ‘angry discussion’. Una asked St Anthony to ‘rescue John from the tentacles of this sterile and intolerable predicament’.
Una filled the house with sweet peas and roses, read aloud the 15,000 words John had written of The Shoemaker of Merano and tried to recapture past time. She hoped their resumed social life would oust the significance of Evguenia. They went to the Smallhythe barn show – scenes from Shakespeare and a buffet supper. Edith Evans was Mistress Page and Sybil Thorndike King John. A small fire broke out backstage and there was an adder somewhere under the seats. John found concentration difficult. The ‘Smallhythe lot’ seemed older. Edy Craig was in a wheelchair. Vita Sackville-West looked ‘stout and crimson’. Christopher St John had recovered from her passion for her. Ethel Smyth seemed frail and very deaf. Tony Atwood was excited because the Tate Gallery had bought one of her pictures.
Una invited Olive Chaplin and her new lover, Lucy Gower, to dinner at the Forecastle. Olive was now fifty. Lucy was twenty-seven, called herself Lucian, wore a man’s lounge suit and ‘looked like hell in it because she was fat’. Una gave them cocktails, iced consomme, roast duckling, apple sauce, peas, new potatoes, cherries with syrup, brandy and cream, 1924 Châteauneuf du Pape and then liqueurs. Olive got out her Tarot cards. She said John’s future lay over the water and that Una was not happy.
Andrea visited for a day. She had no work and her marriage had failed. Her husband drank and had lost money in property deals. Una continually called Andrea, Evguenia, which disconcerted John: ‘She seemed incapable of doing otherwise. Every few minutes it was Evguenia this and Evguenia that until at last I said: “My dear your child’s name is, or used to be Andrea!”’
Andrea went with Una to visit Minna. She was living in Slough in the ‘dreadful little villa with hideous furniture’ of her aunt by marriage, Audrey Nash. The pictures on the walls were by her aunt’s two stepsons, Paul and John
