Register Office wedding, after which Frieda bestowed an earlier-wedding ring on Katherine (who wore it to her grave). A regular matter the four discussed was Lawrence's developing plan to flee from England and establish a community of like-minded souls - his 'Rananim' - in America, or almost anywhere else than England. Needless to say, Katherine's colonial interests lay in the opposite direction - '[…] I felt very antagonistic to the whole affair,' she noted in her Journal.9

On the literary front, Lawrence's mind was transforming The Sisters - the Italian fragment that became The Rainbow and Women in Love - into his next literary project, in which Katherine and Murry were to play not-inconsiderable parts. An incident from Christmas 1914 provided some literary fodder. Katherine, Murry, Koteliansky, the artist Mark Gertler, Lawrence, and Frieda were all staying at Gilbert Cannan's windmill cottage in Buckinghamshire, when someone suggested putting on an improvised play. Things got out of hand - the gathering was so inebriated that they were unable to carve the Christmas pig - and the play descended towards a bacchanalia, with Katherine flirting outrageously with Gertler. This incident gave Lawrence the episode in Women in Love, where Gudrun goes off with the artist Loerke.10

The friendship continued into 1915, though October was a bad month for both Lawrence and Katherine. His new novel The Rainbow was suppressed, and Katherine's younger brother Leslie was blown up in France. Yet in 1916 the relationship between the Lawrences and the Murrys initially flourished, while Lawrence was writing Women in Love and (unbeknown to them) basing part of the characters of Gudrun Brangwen and Gerald Crich on Katherine and Murry. The previous year Katherine and Murry had met the 'the Blooms Berries' (as Katherine called them) and had been enjoying the attractions and divertissements of Lady Ottoline Morrell's bucolic salon at Garsington. But in October 1916 the increasingly-impoverished Lawrences (Sons and Lovers was not a commercial success) were obliged to retreat to Cornwall, where Katherine and Murry soon joined them at Higher Tregerthen, in what Lawrence (now that he was prevented by the military authorities from going to America) hoped would be an interim way-station on the road to Rananim.

Yet the ménage a quatre at Higher Tregerthen did not prove a happy one. Frieda was pining for the children she had left behind, while Lawrence seemed to prefer the company of a local farm boy to that of Frieda (when the two weren't throwing pots and pans at each other).11 As well, Lawrence was pursuing his new-found interest in 'dark gods', which took the form of fostering a 'blood-brotherhood' with Murry (to the disapproval of Katherine). To add to the general atmosphere of stress and anxiety, the Lawrences were under surveillance by the military, who thought that Frieda might be signalling to German submarines in the Bristol Channel. Lawrence, too, was being harassed by the army, which was keen for him 'to do his bit'. Finally, it was all too much for Katherine, and she and Murry decamped to a less-remote cottage on the other side of Cornwall (where there were 'less rocks').12

Nevertheless, her belief in Lawrence was unshaken. In August 1916, when she overheard in the Cafe Royal a group of people deriding his recently-published book of poems Amores, she went up to them and snatched the book away, before stomping out - an incident Lawrence put into Women in Love in the chapter 'Gudrun in the Pompadour'.

The last time Lawrence and Katherine saw each other in theflesh was in October 1918, after the Murrys had taken a house in Hampstead, only to find that the Lawrences were

already ensconced nearby. When Gertler told Katherine the Lawrences were 'just around the corner', she confided to Ottoline her fear that quarrels would once more break out between Lawrence and Murry. 'Every time the bell goes I hear Frieda's 'Well Katherina - here we are! And I turn cold with horror.' 13 Yet a few days later Katherine also reported to Ottoline that Lawrence had been 'running in and out all week'.

The following year Katherine's chronic tubercular condition worsened, and she once more attempted to find relief in Italy. Lawrence and Frieda themselves went abroad in late 1919. But there was to be no meeting with Katherine. A low-point in their relationship came a few months later when Katherine apparently received a letter from Lawrence, who was on Capri. (We only have Murry's - somewhat suspect - word for what it might originally have said.) He quotes Katherine: 'Lawrence sent me a letter today. He spat in my face and threw filth at me and said: 'I loathe you. You revolt festering in your consumption [...]. You are a loathsome reptile - I hope you will die.'14

Notwithstanding that, Katherine and Lawrence once more healed their fractured relationship, and on 20 January 1922 she noted in her Journal: 'I suppose it is the effect of isolation that I can truly say I think of de la Mare, Tchehov, Kotelianksy, Tomlinson, Lawrence, Orage, every day. They are part of my life….' 15 She also wrote to Murry, just before ending up at Gurdjieff's 'clinic' at Fountainebleu, saying, 'Yes, I care for Lawrence. I have thought of writing to him and trying to arrange a meeting after I leave Paris - suggesting I join them until the spring'. 16 But this was not to be, and Katherine died at the clinic on 9 January 1923.

Yet for Lawrence, those five eventful years - 1913-1918 - had been highly creative ones. Much of the time he was composing and polishing what were to become his two major novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love. And it was with these novels that he began to encounter problems when using actual people - his friends and acquaintances - as character-models for his 'fiction'. That Lawrence based his novels on real people and actual events is widely recognised (as his childhood friend, George Neville, for one, confirmed 17). His main patron of the time, Lady Ottoline Morrell, was especially angry over her portrayal as Hermione Roddice in Women in Love 18. Her husband Philip threatened to sue, as did another 'model', Philip Heseltine, whom Lawrence depicted as Halliday in the same novel. Thenceforth, however, Lawrence was more scrupulous with his various methods of camouflage.

The method he mainly used was combining parts of one or more other real people to construct a composite fictional character. In Women in Love, for example, Gudrun is not a full portrait of Katherine, but rather an amalgam made up of some of her characteristics and portraying her in episodes based on actual events (such as the Cafe Royale incident). He also portrayed aspects of Katherine in several short stories, such as Smile, and more particularly in the guise of Anabel in his 1920 play Touch and Go - alongside Gerald, who is clearly a composite depiction of Murry.19 Though these representations of elements of Katherine's personality have been acknowledged by others, there is a depiction of Katherine in another Lawrence novel that, I believe, has not been previously identified.

When I first read The Lost Girl 20 some years ago I was struck by the name Lawrence had given the 'Red Indian' troupe of performers in the novel - the Natcha-Kee-Tawara. To my antipodean ear, the name ' Lawrence had given the 'Red Indian' troupe of performers in the novel - the Natcha-Kee-Tawara. To

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