Other Women (25 page)

It was five or six years later that Evguenia entered the lives of John and Una, in much the same way as Una had into John and Mabel’s. It wasn’t as a guest that the Russian woman became known to them but as a nurse to Una when she got food poisoning. John was smitten in exactly the manner that she had been with Una. Passion, lust and infatuation.

The couple of weeks spent nursing Una gave time for John to observe and discover her feelings for Evguenia. The couple went on a date after Una was convalescing and Evguenia asked John to kiss her. From there the affair escalated quickly. John sent Evguenia numerous little gifts. Then she began to pay for her rent and living expenses. With the financial support came John’s desire to dominate her new lover. Evguenia was not allowed to work, she was not allowed to do this or that, or to see whomever she wanted. If John was holding the purse strings then Evguenia had to comply with her wishes. One solution would have been to refuse to accept the money, although Evguenia confessed it made life a lot easier not having to earn for oneself. When Evguenia did not do what John requested or ordered John would punish her in some way as if she were a child (although such punishments were childish in themselves, as if the two women were playing at being father and daughter).

Manipulation worked both ways and Evguenia was just as clever at keeping John on tenterhooks. She would tell John she was unsure of her true sexual nature, that she did quite admire men so perhaps she wasn’t a real lesbian. She would also suggest that there were other attractive women options around.

Una was unhappy during all of this. John would want to agonise to her over Evguenia but Una didn’t want to know, she was jealous and hurt, just as Mabel had been all those years before when John had felt the same way about Una.

The three went on holiday, just as John and Una had with Mabel. Una tended to be left out, just as her predecessor had been. However, Evguenia was not particularly happy either. She tired of John’s games and her possessiveness, and she didn’t know if she really did want to continue in a lesbian affair, and certainly not in a jealous threesome.

In amongst the violent tantrums that John displayed in front of Evguenia when she didn’t get her own way, and when she was not moaning and groaning over not seeing her, John would tell Una how much she still loved and needed her, the mainstay of their relationship, in the way she had reassured Mabel.

By 1937 and with war looming in Europe, Evguenia became more interested in world affairs. John could not understand that there could be something more consuming than herself. She had sponsored Evguenia so she could live in England as the war broke. Evguenia took a typing course, against John’s wishes, and got a job with the Foreign Office. The position was important and interesting and John resented it because it meant that Evguenia was living independently of her – and if that happened then John might be in danger of losing her, which she was. Evguenia was truly sick of the situation; she had borne it for nine years already and it was time to stop.

Evguenia kept in touch with John and would chide Una for not watching John’s alcohol consumption. Una still hated Evguenia, even if she was right about John’s health. She saw the woman as nothing but an intrusion on what had been a blissful domestic union. When John had an operation on her eyes and was left unable to read or write for a few weeks, Una took care of all correspondence, including letters to Evguenia. Una at last had some control herself and made sure that much of what John dictated was heavily edited.

In 1943 John’s health had deteriorated even more and she was finally diagnosed with bowel cancer. It was the ever faithful Una who nursed her, although Evguenia would visit when she could. Una didn’t like her coming and tried to prevent her from touching John if she could. On her deathbed John, who had once in a fit of deep love told Evguenia she’d leave her a large sum of money when she died, revoked that wish and left her whole estate and fortune to Una on the condition that she make an allowance for Evguenia.

Una mourned her partner deeply and even had her suits cut to size so that she could wear them. She styled herself on John for many years afterwards. Finally Una found a new object to fawn over and serve in the way she had John. This time it was an Italian opera singer and he was male.

Evguenia ended up marrying a Russian émigré with whom she lived in poverty. She called on Una’s charity and compassion when she was also diagnosed with cancer but Una, still hurting from John’s betrayal, refused. Evguenia had her meagre allowance and that was all she was going to get from Una.

Una died in 1963.

The last section of this book was extremely difficult to write. I needed to find stories of ordinary men with ordinary mistresses who led ordinary lives; not princes, or dukes or poets but businessmen, shopkeepers, teachers or taxi drivers. Their histories are not recorded in the same way or to the same extent because they are not famous. The scandals caused by their sexual indiscretions are not the stuff that newspapers are made on, unless they involve perversion or murder or something sensational. Where does one turn to for stories about these men and women?

Thank goodness for the Internet and social networking media! A single call out across the world for help and often it is given. In choosing to rely on word of mouth accounts from living people about their friends and relatives the writer has to be very careful. First, permission has to be sought from the narrator and the family, where possible. Second, names and other identifying information need to be sorted out as to whether real names or substitute ones are given. Third, there is no guarantee that the stories or the details of the stories are true unless there is documentation.

In my own family history there is mention of a remittance man on my mother’s side. The mother of the boy was paid to leave England for Australia with her illegitimate son and never to return or try to reconnect with the child’s father. No news stories were to appear concerning the child’s parentage and a fair sum would be given for them to start a new life on the other side of the world. The family story is that it was the bastard son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, later to be Edward VII. And the mother was probably some poor maid who took the roving eye of a prince and got put in the family way. But we don’t know. The mother of the child did as she was paid to do and kept her previous history a secret.

On telling my first cousin this story we amazed each other in discovering that she also had a similar tale only with someone from her father’s side, and to whom I am no blood relation, perhaps. Now, maybe the stories were made up to help gloss over the truth that girls got pregnant when they shouldn’t and by someone they shouldn’t (possibly just the boy up the road) and they invent a fairy tale myth to help take the sting out of the truth. Or perhaps there are many similar tales told all over Australia because Edward VII, as king and prince, had a notorious appetite for pretty women.

The first tale I am going to relate was told to me by an acquaintance of mine. It is not something from her own family but her husband’s family and she has asked me to cover up the identities of those concerned, although she admitted that names hadn’t been given when she heard the story.

At the beginning of the Great Depression there was huge unemployment, in Australia just as in Britain or the US. Men had to travel across the country looking for work or they were put on to work programmes in return for a pension. Among the unemployed there were many men who had fought in the First World War, thus there was bitterness and desperation.

The family of the woman concerned in this account lived in and around a large country town, west of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales (which in turn are immediately west of Sydney). It was a big Catholic family with numerous cousins and aunts, uncles and extras (sometimes in these families babies born to girls before they get married are absorbed into the general chaos of the family and no one is ever sure who the baby belongs to).

One of the teenage daughters of the family, called Jane (not her real name), went to work at a neighbour’s dairy farm. She didn’t get paid much but it all helped. She would have had to get up early in time for the first milking. They had milking machines but the cows had to be got into their bales and the machines attached to the udders, then everything had to be cleaned out afterwards. My mother’s family had a dairy farm in a different part of the state and she said it was hard getting up so early, especially in winter, when her hands would get frozen.

There were other people employed by the farmer and some of them were itinerant workers. One of these was a young man called Geoff (not his real name). He made himself very amiable to the other workers and people he met in the town. Dances were held regularly at the church hall and, as there weren’t many places for young people to go for amusement it was a very popular and well-attended event. Jane would go with two or three of her siblings. Apparently she and Geoff became very friendly and were soon thought to be an item. Days off were spent together; he was introduced to Jane’s family – her brothers got on with him, her mum liked to feed him up and he played with the little kids.

Geoff came from Sydney, he said. His father had been killed in the First World War and his mother lived with her mother and father in a cramped semi-detached house in Chippendale. Geoff’s grandad wasn’t well and his grandmother wasn’t too good either, it was a lot for his mum to take care of. She also took in washing and ironing for people.

When Geoff lost his job at the brewery he felt he had to go looking for work out of town. There was nothing for someone like him in the city and he didn’t want to be a burden to his mother. He did miss the city though, he admitted. Of course he was full of stories about Sydney. Its delights and entertainments and its dangers, possibly exaggerated to enhance his exoticism. He told them he’d never seen a cow till he got off the train in the country. Another bit of leg pulling probably.

Jane’s family wanted to know what he was planning to do when things looked up. Would he stay in the country and get work there or would he go back to Sydney to his old job? Or would he move on somewhere else? The answers were evasive but that may have been because he truly didn’t know what the future would hold in the way of job prospects.

Then one day Jane came home from work in tears. Geoff had gone. He’d left. There was no forwarding address, no Sydney address, nothing. Jane was inconsolable. After a few weeks it became apparent as to why she didn’t get over it. In a little while Jane went to visit an aunt who lived further away. She’d be staying a while to recover from her broken heart. When she returned, low and behold, somehow another child had appeared in the crowded household. Everyone believed it to be a late baby of Jane’s parents, one last one.

Jane did settle down, she did get over the disappearance of Geoff, and maybe even she started thinking that the youngest member of the family was a sibling rather than her own child. After a couple of years Jane got married to a local boy, John (not his real name) and they had two children of their own.

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War Geoff returned; he was his old affable self and full of apologies and regrets. His mother had written to him telling him his grandad had died and she needed him back home. He’d left as quickly as he could, which meant he couldn’t say goodbye. And then he’d been offered a job at a printers and he couldn’t refuse an opportunity like that. Then his mum had got ill with cancer and he’d had to help nurse her and work too. Things kept preventing him from coming back to see his friends. After a while, he thought, they’d have forgotten about him and he ended up marrying someone from his work.

Jane had thought she was happily settled with her reliable husband and their children. She no longer had to work on the dairy farm and she was well looked after. Whether anyone thought about the baby she’d had, and that he was probably Geoff’s son, wasn’t mentioned and Geoff didn’t seem to have been made aware of him. Geoff stayed in town for a week and then left, making sure to say his farewells this time. And everything went back to normal. Until a month later when Jane suddenly left her husband and kids. She didn’t leave a note but she was seen catching a train to the city.