Ladye endured frailties too. She was overweight, had chest pains, was breathless on exertion and lamented the hills of Tuscany and the stairs in the hotel. She was ‘flooding’ and found no relief from Dr Dakin’s haemorrhage pills and proprietary medicines for ‘the change of life’. She disguised her discomforts because they made John anxious. Dolly Clarke joined them for a week. ‘She is quite a nice little thing and mad about Rome.’ Thirty years younger than Ladye, she was a more sprightly sightseeing companion for John.
And then John became ill with what sounded like glandular fever. Ladye said she had come out of the hot tearooms of the Grand Hotel and did not put on her coat. She was wretched with anxiety. John became irascible with the hotel staff and complained that her room was unhealthy. She decided impulsively to leave Rome for Viareggio then Monte Carlo, though Ladye had hoped to stay for the Ambassador’s Ball.
Her attitude to Ladye changed. She was less patient with her pains and limitations. At Viareggio she told her she expected her to house-keep when they returned to England. She complained when they visited a Mrs Brock in a fifth-floor flat and Ladye was carried up the flights of stairs in a chair. Offended by the insinuation of indolence, Ladye became breathless and slept badly. At Monte Carlo John gambled and lost money. Distressed, Ladye mislaid things – her rosary in the casino, the jade button from her ermine tie.
In London, they resolved to be less exclusive and to socialize more. They left a great many visiting cards. They lunched with Sir Edward Elgar, played poker with Ernest Thesiger and had tea at Rumpelmayers with the Princesse de Polignac’s sister-in-law, Isadora Duncan. In an endeavour to be industrious, Ladye interviewed cooks and pasted recipes into George’s recipe book. To cheer herself she bought a black and mauve lace afternoon frock at Lavenders. She and John went to a lecture by Annie Besant on India and theosophy and were delighted at the good reviews Songs of Three Counties received. At the end of the year, at an Arabian Nights ball, Mabel was the Lady of Baghdad, John her Persian slave boy.
But for John the hedonism of this privileged life had palled. She pleaded unchannelled energy and the gulf in their age. In May 1913 she lunched with Phoebe and Oliver Hoare. Phoebe was a close friend of Dolly Clarke. Her husband was the younger son of Sir Samuel Hoare of Sidestrand Hall in Cromer, Norfolk and, like his father, a partner in the family bank of Barnetts, Hoare & Company of Lombard Street. She married him in 1906, the year Radclyffe Hall ‘fell head and heart and soul in love’ with Mabel Batten. They lived at Gloucester House, Park Lane and had no children. John invited them both to Tosca at the Opera House and Phoebe to lunch at the Berkeley. On 15 June they all four went to Ascot. John wore a Fortuny cloak of black and gold.
And then John and Phoebe began to meet alone most afternoons. There was an understanding between them that each had partners to whom they were committed. But it mattered to John that she was preferred to the cuckolded husband, that she succeeded where he failed. For Ladye, the days of grace were over, the great devotion tarnished. For this was an affair, with the usual ingredients of excuses, absence, disappointment and pain.
Phoebe’s meetings with John took place on weekdays at Dolly Clarke’s house when Oliver Hoare was at the bank. It was more problematic for John. Ladye was always at home. ‘I never kept anything from her,’ she said after Ladye’s death, ‘and I never told her an untruth except for once.’ Such openness was a mixed virtue. Unattached to a commitment to sexual loyalty, it had a lacerating edge. It meant Ladye was treated to details of John’s infidelity.
‘Every appointment, every engagement, was made with the proviso “if I can fix something for Ladye”’, John said. Such parity assuaged her conscience. Ladye would visit people whom she did not want to see so that John should not feel discomfort or guilt. While Ladye complained of a boring time in Hampstead with Sir Edward and Lady Elgar, John took Phoebe Hoare to dinner and to Within the Law at the Wyndham’s Theatre. While John lunched with Phoebe at Swan Walk, Ladye lunched with Mrs Draper and Betty Carstairs. Often John brought home a placatory gift – a carved emerald ring, a diamond pin – or made some compensatory gesture when she returned.
Phoebe had the status of mistress. She was an aspect of the construction of the personality of John. When the first Mr Batten was alive, John was the romantic poet, the virile lover, Ladye her perfect woman whom destiny made her meet. After his death, for four years her role was the better husband, provider of an ideal home, ‘true grit … a real poon … so kind and darling’. She wished to father children. Both declared themselves ‘thrilled to the bone’, ‘wildly excited’, when in 1913 Cara became pregnant with her third child. They hoped for a boy. ‘Johnnie almost feels like the father’, Ladye the grandmother wrote.
Time passed and with an emphasis on domestic comfort the town and country house, the winters in the sun, Ladye became the ideal mother, always there, encouraging of talent, forgiving of wayward behaviour. But John was no longer ‘as wax in her hands’, nor so kind and darling, nor quite the real poon. Twenty-four years younger, she was more the rake, the roué, the Rat, ‘blatantly and crudely unfaithful’. But unlike Mary Jane Hall, Ladye kept faith with her man.
The semblance of their life stayed intact. They still went to mass at Brompton Oratory, lunched at the Ritz, dined at the Hyde Park Grill. Both were caught by the Russian craze when the Ballets Russes came to Covent Garden in spring 1913. Ladye
