MY JOHN, MY JOHNNIE
38
Mine for ever
Una adapted well to John’s death and the inheritance of all her money. There were obituaries in The Times and the Telegraph. She arranged low mass at Westminster Cathedral and then a requiem mass at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Farm Street. About a hundred people attended, though few of the friends of former years. John’s coffin was placed next to Ladye’s in the vault at Highgate Cemetery. This did not imply their easy reunion. Una installed a marble slab inscribed with lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet ‘How do I love thee?’
AND, IF GOD CHOOSE,
I SHALL BUT LOVE THEE BETTER AFTER DEATH. UNA.
She said if God came to her with the offer, You may have her back if you want to, she knew she ‘would have the strength to say, No, No, No, Lord. You keep her happy and safe for me’. The last decade with John had been extraordinarily punishing. All her love had been for Evguenia. With her dead and Evguenia so punished, Una was set free.
She worked to regild the legend of their perfect love. ‘I feel I must leave an unequivocal record of our life and love, just as the Ladies of Llangollen did, to cheer and encourage those who come after us.’ John’s poor inverts, she felt, needed their role model of good relationship.
Una called herself the ‘guardian of the lamp of John’s genius and our enduring love’. The first thing she did in this dual role was to burn The Shoemaker of Merano manuscript. ‘Such a decision rested exclusively with the writer herself and I had no alternative to that of honourably carrying out her wishes … I gave her my promise, and after her death I lost no time in carrying out that promise.’
It was a heinous act. Worse than the consigning of The Well of Loneliness to the king’s furnace by Joynson-Hicks and his friends. They only delayed publication for twenty-one years. Una prevented it for all time. She left a fragment of the manuscript – about thirty pages. ‘There is nothing there to give away anything personal & it is one of the loveliest things you ever wrote.’ It was enough to show the compelling tone of the writing, the fatal attraction of the main characters Ottfried and Ursule. Una also burned all Evguenia’s letters to John. She omitted to burn her own diaries, though when John was dying she had promised her she would do so. She could destroy John’s work but not her own. She had a great conceit about her diaries and enjoyed rereading and annotating them. They were, in her view, on a par with Pepys and she wanted their publication. Here she thought was ‘a fine record of a deep, loyal and lasting inverted love, and how triumphantly that love weathered all adversity’. And here, she said, chronicled as nowhere else, was the truth about John and Evguenia.
My diary shows how entirely you subordinated your own desires to her needs, how when she became ill you became lovingly and eagerly her celibate nurse, night and day, how, in spite of my misery and jealousy I helped and supported you throughout. And how, in spite of your overwhelming infatuation for her, your deep and devoted love for me remained and survived it all … Darling, that record of mine must survive.
And survive it did. After Radclyffe Hall’s death Una called her diary entries ‘Letters to John’. She addressed her in a tone of complicity as if certain of endorsement of all she said and did. John was now as Una thought she ought be. John, it now transpired, had thought Evguenia so dull she never knew what to talk about to her, but she was ‘fond of the poor mutt’. In her final illness ‘everything went completely into focus’. She and Una understood each other entirely. They decided to share the burden of Evguenia and ‘were perfectly happy over it’.
Only Evguenia might contradict this version of events and Evguenia had no money or clout. Catholicism helped Una reshape the world. John had never been more all right than she was now: ‘You are with Him in Paradise. You are young, well, free and active. You can use your creative genius to its full extent and to the glory of God. It blossoms without obstacle. You are not lonely, you have me in your life.’ Una wished that they had had a ‘beloved and loving child of our own’ – a son, to whom eventually to leave all their treasures. She was not too forlorn about it. ‘It won’t matter when we are together’, she wrote.
As for John’s absolute trust in Una’s absolute discretion over provision for their mutual friend Evguenia, that was no problem. Una knew just what John wanted: to give Evguenia minimal funds with a great deal of goading and humiliation. She said she knew John’s wishes because she had discussed them with her ‘exhaustively’ before her death. She told Evguenia she had no legal obligation to give her anything. Before John’s body had left the embalmers, Garstin’s of Baker Street, for Westminster Cathedral, Una could not resist telling Evguenia the terms of the will. Evguenia told her it was John’s money, not hers, and it was always John’s intention that she, Evguenia, should have a share of it. Una’s sentiments to Evguenia were: ‘Cards on the table, Evguenia & no more pretence: you never after a first physical flare loved John. Even her terrible suffering never moved you. You were and are infuriated that you did not make a bigger financial haul from her will.’
Evguenia lost her job with the Foreign Office the day after John died. She had taken too many days off while John was ill. She told Una she hoped to get
