The day before she left she had lunch at the Wayside. At John’s request there was soup, roast lamb, redcurrant jelly, sprouts and roast potatoes, baked apples with apple jelly, Swiss pastries and coffee. ‘She sat there fat, bloated and slit eyed’, Una said.
In December 1941 John went to London to see Lord Dawson and Dr Williamson Noble about her eyes and general health. She and Una booked in at the Rembrandt Hotel, Knightsbridge, opposite Brompton Oratory. Dawson told her there were two components to her illness, one organic, the other depressive. Her gums were infected and her lungs in a bad way from all those years of smoking. Noble advised against further operations on her eyes. He said entropium was a difficult condition to treat, that the spasm in her eye was incurable and that it was better to endure pulling out lashes than to have another drooping lid. John had given him a copy of The Well of Loneliness which he was reading.
John told Una she wanted to see Evguenia in London. There was a flare-up. ‘I simply prayed and implored and also protested’, Una wrote in her diary. ‘She capitulated. She said she must be fair to me and she gave me her promise. The Mongol idiot is to come for a day and then is to be told to remain away.’
On the day of Evguenia’s visit John waited eagerly for her from early morning. At lunch Una took off her spectacles ‘so as to avoid seeing her horrid face’.
37
John’s Calvary
John was very ill in the Rembrandt Hotel. A chest infection developed into pneumonia and pleurisy. She became irrational, spoke of malevolence all around her and asked constantly if there was post from Evguenia. Una got out her relic of the true cross, made the sign of the cross over her, then put the relic on the mantelpiece behind a lit candle. She gave her Bengers with brandy and told her Evguenia was ‘a primitive undeveloped creature, incapable of any true impulses or affection’.
Una’s grip tightened like a vice. She forbade Evguenia to visit. She told her to write cheering letters every day, send affectionate telegrams and not to mention anything worrying or refer to symptoms of her own. Una’s signature was now on the cheque for Evguenia’s monthly allowance. ‘I am acting on John’s authority at the Bank.’ She read Evguenia’s letters aloud to John with her own intonation and omissions. ‘The bitch doesn’t even write every day and when she does the letters have about as much feeling in them as flat soda water. Even in this dire stress she does not seem to try even to ape humanity.’ Evguenia turned up at the hotel unannounced. Una told her to stand inside the door of John’s room. When she tried to approach the bed, she was ‘removed’.
Una kept guard night and day. She sat beside John, holding ‘her dear tired hand’. She made professional nursing impossible. The night nurse said, ‘I don’t see why Lady Troubridge should be in here at all.’ The day nurse quit. John cried when she heard she was leaving. When her replacement wanted time off, Una would not allow it. She took the woman into her own room so that John could not hear.
I told her that the patient was not so well on account of her having upset her. I told her quietly that she must not raise her voice as the patient would hear her and she need not trouble about an evening off as I had already arranged for a new nurse. She flew into a rage and stormed. Then I went straight to the telephone and obtained a new nurse from the Cowards agency … I called the nurse from her room to mine told her to pack her case, bring me her account, and to go at once.
Una went out only to get food, which John did not want. She waited outside Harrods in the mornings for the food hall to open. At the meat counter she grabbed one leg of a poussin while another woman grabbed the other. ‘And I triumphed and bore it off.’ She won the contest for sea kale and was ninth in the queue at the toffee counter. The new nurse thought it would be better if she arranged Miss Hall’s food. Una told her Miss Hall would starve if left to her efforts.
Una wrote daily notes to Evguenia, ostensibly on John’s behalf, about expectoration, purée potatoes, John’s nerves and how she, Una, had to keep her very quiet. The main problem, Una told Evguenia, was John’s bowels. ‘She is terribly flatulent’ with ‘an absolutely unmanageable irregularity of her bowels’. Glycerine suppositories, hot ginger drinks, olive oil and turpentine enemas did not work and English doctors were hopeless.
For six weeks John saw no one but Una. She was desperate to see Evguenia. ‘I am almost too depressed to live’, she wrote of herself when well enough to do so.
These are grim days for the whole world and my own troubles pour heavy upon me – there is so little to look forward to, or so it seems to me. I am patient, or try to be, but so many dreary weeks in this damned hotel bedroom – all too awful … But Piggie Hall is coming on Friday & perhaps will cheer me up – yes, yes, it will cheer me up – it will go out to buy Pig-pants & so on. No more now dearest.
Your John
Father Munster came to give her communion and she asked him for an interpretation of the text ‘Make Ye Friends to Yourselves of the Mammon of Unrighteousness’, but received no satisfactory reply.
