3
Come in kid
In her teens, Marguerite hung about the room next to Visetti’s studio where students met before and after lessons. It became her hunting ground. She heard them sing arias by Wagner, Verdi, Mozart and linked these ‘passionate declarations of love to their flustered faces’. Her ‘ardent temperament’, she said, ‘wallowed in an atmosphere of false emotion, of sensation called up at will to suit a role’.
Ardent wallowings took different forms. Sometimes it was Visetti and a favoured pupil, once she saw two girls kiss but more often it was a girl and a young man. Talk of liaisons and conquests fired her imagination:
I came to realise that the desires which had tormented my childhood and which I was told by my mother were wicked, were merely the usual feelings that animated most of my fellow beings, were indulged in as a matter of course and pandered to as the essentials of an artistic temperament. This was a great revelation and one which filled me with excitement.
She emerged from childhood seeking more complex consolation than kisses and chance caresses, though the desires that tormented her had been ordinary enough. They were to do with love and pleasure. But she wanted to free herself from the web of her mother’s malice and to kiss and hold hands with girls.
When she was fifteen she pushed up the sleeve of a student in a silk dress and kissed her arm. The girl laughed, seemed apprehensive but interested, so Marguerite kissed her on the lips. She ‘repeated the exercise at every opportunity’ – until the girl left to study in Paris.
Visetti’s star pupil, a soprano Agnes Nicholls, called her ‘a queer little kid’. Marguerite told her to shut up, felt embarrassed and went to her room. Visetti favoured Agnes Nicholls and promoted her career. He taught her for five years. ‘Next season what a triumph’, he would say. They flirted, she chafed him in bad French, he included her in the daily life of the house. She had won a scholarship to the College in 1894 and sung at Windsor Castle, with Queen Victoria in the audience, in Delibes’ opera Le Roi l’a dit.
She was plump: ‘her voluptuous figure appealed to my youth’, wrote Marguerite. She had white skin, blue eyes, auburn hair, a large appetite and ‘the voice of an angel, unlike any other’. Marguerite contrived to be always at the studio at the time of her lessons. She felt disturbed by her and by ‘the look in her eyes. These lessons became the focus of my existence. I lived for them, like the victim of a drug.’
By turns, Agnes Nicholls ignored and claimed her. If Marguerite flattered her, she appeared indifferent. If she flirted with the girl in the silk dress, Agnes became proprietorial, sent her on errands, gave her presents or told her to come and sit beside her. ‘And when I did sit by her she would sometimes slide her hand down where mine lay between us and I think it amused her to see the little shiver that her touch produced for she would bend forward to watch my face at such moments.’
Radclyffe Hall was intrigued by the compulsion and power of sex. This first adventure held components of domination, jealousy, manipulation and of humiliating Visetti. She still sought flirtations in the anteroom but it was Agnes Nicholls whom she wooed. ‘Her music and her thrilling voice stirred my passion unendurably … I longed to dominate her, to hurt her, to compel her, to kiss her mouth.’
Agnes Nicholls was to become a star. She won the College gold medal and at twenty was singing solo in concert halls and at music festivals. Marguerite went to all her recitals, waited for her in the artists’ room, held her bouquets, cloak and throat spray. She absorbed the aura of performance and fame, the ‘stagy compliments’ of other artists, ‘the hysterical outpouring’ of young fans, the ‘bold flirting’ of young men.
She felt like her ‘special property’. After concerts they drove to Agnes’s home in Putney. Marguerite sat close in the carriage, held her bare arm under her cloak, was her escort and swain. Agnes talked of herself. She lived, Marguerite said, in a world of her own creation. One night she was the prima donna, her career assured, wooed by men from the peerage. The next she was a failure, ungifted and without prospects. Sometimes she would weep: her performance had been a fiasco, she would never sing again, a top note had failed, the conductor had let the orchestra drown her voice, the music reviewer from The Times was there, he would give her a bad notice next day. At other times, she would brag of how she had amazed the audience that night, and could have sung for ever, had Marguerite seen Lord so and so – she could marry him if she liked but would not sacrifice her career for a man.
Marguerite was swept along:
I bobbed like a cork on the torrent. I could neither steady Agnes nor myself being only seventeen. I wept with her, rejoiced with her and grew daily more under her influence. If my people disliked this friendship they were too eager to pander to the star pupil to say so. Moreover I’m sure they looked on it as quite innocent which indeed it was at this time. It certainly interfered with my studies and developed in me an unwholesome craving for excitement.
Agnes Nicholls lived with her mother. Her father had managed a drapery business in the Midlands. He died leaving unexceptional funds. There was enough for her brother to go to Oxford and for her to study music. Alberto Visetti, proud of his tutelage, made no charge for
