It was a day that stayed with her. Her dyslexia was neither recognized nor understood. The ramifications of it were huge. She was imaginative and from the age of three had been inventing rhymes. But her manner of reading and writing was unpredictable and laborious. She floundered academically. In later years as a writer she was either dependent on lovers to make sense of her spelling, or she dictated to typists. She had difficulty in deciphering her own writing and for years could not use dictionaries. Even after winning literary prizes she hid her original manuscripts and talked of destroying them out of embarrassment over her inability to spell.
Walking home at the end of that first day at school her satchel felt like a ton weight. Her mother asked her how she had got on. All right, she replied. She was rebuked for her diffidence and sent to her room. Problems at school and home made her naughty. Her naughtiness was responded to with beatings and she became withdrawn and asthmatic.
Mary Jane grew more irritable by the day. She was socially isolated. The English climate oppressed her with its winter fogs, sunless days and long black nights. She breakfasted alone by the light of a gas-burner. Servants, perpetually hectored, gave notice. There was an atmosphere of exasperation ‘like an unpleasant electric current’.
And the Case dragged on. Mary Jane wanted to divorce Radclyffe, get his money and see him punished. She spent afternoons ensconced in the drawing-room with a solicitor or private detective. In 1886 she ‘ascertained’ that Radclyffe was living at the Norfolk Hotel, Paddington with an unnamed woman. He moved with this woman to a house in Eastbourne. Mr Bowles, manager of the Paddington hotel, agreed to give evidence. Mary Jane sued for divorce on the grounds of adultery. The decree was granted in November 1887, seven years after the separation. Dispute over alimony and custody continued.
One afternoon in 1887 when Marguerite came home, her mother was arguing with a fair-haired man in a tweed suit and white spats. His voice was dictatorial. He kissed Marguerite and smiled at her. He was Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall, her father. His invisibility had proved another problem at school. She had not known how to explain it and it was one more issue to mark her out as strange. ‘She knew that she would like to have a father. She had been to tea with other children once or twice. Apparently they all had fathers … A father seemed to give one a certain importance in the world she noticed.’
One girl’s father was a colonel in the army. Another’s was a mayor with a gold chain and fur on his gown. Another’s drove to the city each morning in a green phaeton with grey horses. Marguerite admitted that she did not know what her father did and could not remember having seen him. She was teased. One wag, who had seen Hall above a sweet shop in the Portobello Road, suggested this was his occupation.
Excited by evidence of a real father, his smile and blue eyes, she hoped to see him more. He gave her a boat to sail on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. He promised a cream-coloured pony that never materialized. He invited her to stay with his mother in Devon and to learn to horseride.
Mary Jane wept and said she would see her daughter dead and buried rather than let her near Esther Hall, who had insulted her and accused her of ruining her son’s life. The scene ended with Radclyffe slamming the front door in rage. His subsequent efforts to see Marguerite were blocked. She was told he was wicked and that she should say he was dead.
She had imagined ‘a kind, self-satisfied, important father like the other children had’. Instead, there was Radclyffe who swept into her life then disappeared, leaving confusion behind him. But she kept faith with her fantasy. Thoughts of him and of the kind of life she imagined she might have had with him stayed with her as wistful regrets.
She thought other children were talking about her and laughing at her behind her back. Her personality fragmented into aspects of the family psychodrama. She thought that, had she been Radclyffe’s son, he might have stayed or taken her with him. Her mother was proof of how unsatisfactory it was to be female. In later years she played at being faithful husband, protective mother, indulgent lover, then subverted these roles like a troubled child.
The decree absolute for the divorce was made on 4 December 1888 by Sir Charles Parker Butt, a high court judge at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. Marguerite was ten. Her father was found guilty of ‘adultery coupled with cruelty to the petitioner’. The case was written up in The Times and the Telegraph and his name blackened. He sailed to France in his yacht after this finding. He sent Marguerite a signed photograph of himself in hunting clothes, which she kept on her desk. She blamed her mother for his absence. ‘She it was who had driven father from the house with bitter angry words.’
Mary Jane Hall set about repairing her own social position. She wanted marriage. Her daughter was an encumbrance and proof of emotional failure. Her past, in society’s terms, was littered with indiscretions. ‘The men who came to the house did not often bring their wives or sisters.’ She wooed her singing teacher, Alberto Antonio Visetti, known as ‘the Maestro’. Her voice was off-key and her capacity for practice poor, but she was pleasure-loving and dramatic and he fell for her.
Flamboyant, mercurial, half-Italian, Visetti was forty-three
