The Bolter Page 13

  Idina and Charles came back to their farmland and started to build a single-storey house. A hybrid between a villa and a mountain lodge, it would be small and charming. There they would settle down into their rural idyll. And, on a fraction of the scale of both the houses and the lifestyle she had tried to maintain with Euan, life with Charles would surely be sweeter, simpler, and more likely to last. It was an idyllic existence. Or, rather, it would have been.

  For, within a few months of arriving in Kenya, Idina’s second marriage started to go wrong.

  Given the circumstances in which Idina had married Charles Gordon, this was not altogether surprising. She had lost her husband’s love, and her children, and had rushed into Charles’s arms and run off to Africa.

  Idina, like Euan, was driven, busy, a doer. Too busy. The laidback Charles had presented a welcome change. But here in Africa, as the months passed and the list of daily tasks on the farm lengthened, Charles was too relaxed. He did not have a fraction of her or Euan’s drive – in any sense. ‘Idina was a nymphomaniac,’ he later complained to his third wife.3

  Before, Idina had taken lovers while her husband had been away. Now she needed them, it appeared, even when he was around.

  Charles, it turned out, took a different view of marriage. Moreover, British East Africa was a small place. The foreign population of colonials and farmers was thin when stretched out across its hundreds of thousands of square miles. However, when these men and women rebounded back into its towns and cities they packed themselves tightly into the few bars they frequented. The stories spread.

  Charles was, by nature, a saver of lost souls.4 Later in life he would recklessly hand over money he couldn’t spare to people who said they needed it and come home to his waiting (third) wife and child empty-handed. ‘He couldn’t stop himself,’ his daughter said, ‘even when we really needed the money too.’5 He had found a lost Idina in Oggie’s flat and must have thought he had saved her. But, as the gossip made its way around, it became evident that, far from being saved, Idina was falling further – and taking their marriage down with her.

  In February 1920, after ten months of marriage, Idina left sun-drenched Africa for England still in the throes of winter. It took three weeks to travel home, and in March, a year after her divorce and remarriage, her twelve-month exile abroad after creating a scandal would be over.

  It is unlikely that Idina cared much about whether or not she could be partly accepted back into society. Her demi-mondaine friends were not the type to be bothered. Euan’s friends, however, were quite different. And Idina knew all too well how much he cared about his social life. A year after their divorce, his exile was over too and Idina surely suspected – she may even have known for certain – that he would be returning to England.

  Can Idina have been so foolish as to think that it was not too late to turn the clock back and return to both Euan and her children? It is still extraordinary today to divorce a second husband and go back to the first. But some people have done it. And Idina – who would notch up five divorces by the end of the Second World War – was hardly bound by any conventional view of marriage. If anyone could contemplate such a scheme, it was her.

  Still single, Euan had been both socially and romantically busy during his year abroad. He had spent the first few months at Washington evening swimming parties with the young Franklin Roosevelt, weekend house parties at the Joe Leiters’ with Mrs Wilson, the Loews, the Dukes and a Vanderbilt or two. He had stormed up and down the East Coast on its grand railcars with drawing rooms as well as sleeping cabins, with his batman and namesake of P. G. Wodehouse’s later creation, Wooster, in tow. He had golfed in Atlantic City; sailed in Newport, Rhode Island, with the Cushings; spent weekends on farms stocked with endless ponies; dined with Teddy Roosevelt on Long Island; nearly had to propose after he had driven a girl home, the tyres on his Buick two-seater had burst and he had been stuck there, unchaperoned, for the night. Eventually, in late September, the Americans agreed to allow a single British agent to remain in Washington as a liaison officer. According to Euan’s diary: ‘We got the scheme nearly all fixed up over some whiskey.’6

  When he’d done that Euan had been sent to New York to organise the Prince of Wales’s visit that autumn. He’d found ‘Dolores’ on stage in the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic, a ‘tophole show’. She was quite ‘the loveliest thing you ever saw’. Then he’d left her for Ottawa and its Governor-General, the Duke of Devonshire, who needed another aide-de-camp. Euan had moved into an apartment in Government House. The air was flush with engagements. Harold Macmillan, the future prime minister, who was ADC-ing there too, had just proposed to the duke’s daughter Dorothy. ‘Macmillan and Dorothy Cavendish are very much in love: this was obvious to us all last week: we think it is all OK and really settled.’ Euan took Harold back to New York, where he ‘helped choose [an] engagement ring’. Euan focused his attentions on Dorothy’s eighteen-year-old cousin Alix but found himself summoned to see the duchess for ‘an interview . . . which was very interesting as showing the difference in people’s points of view’. Whatever the size of his bank balance, Euan was still a divorcee. Marriage to a duke’s eighteen-year-old niece was out of the question.

  Euan landed in Liverpool on 22 March. Idina had skipped off the boat at Marseille, taken the train north through France and gone straight on to London, to stay with Olga Lyn, who was still at the centre of a social whirl that Idina again needed. But, if Idina had plans to rebuild her old life, she was already too late. Within less than a week of returning to England, Euan was engaged.

  He had arrived back in the country on a Monday. Barbie had come round that first evening. By Friday he had proposed. On Sunday, after ‘a long and serious discussion’, Barbie accepted. Euan was ecstatic: ‘so happy I nearly burst’. Avie helped the two of them choose a ring and Barbie imparted the news to her previous fiancé, ‘the heartbroken Christopher’, as Euan called him in his diary.

  But little did Euan realise that it was a heartbroken Barbie, too. Six weeks later, on the eve of her wedding to Euan, Barbie would sit up all night crying because she was, said her sister, ‘still in love with another man’.7 Christopher, however, did not have all those millions of pounds.

  Euan took Barbie down to Eastbourne for lunch to break the news to the boys that their aunt Avie’s great friend would be their new mother. The two of them then went back to London to sort out their living arrangements. At the very least, Barbie insisted upon living in a house other than Idina’s in London. Kildonan was not, however, a moveable feast – yet.

  On 9 April 1920, ‘Barbs and I went all over Connaught Place in the morning with Mrs Milne & Maple’s head man, despatching furniture to Scotland,’ wrote Euan.

  And, after this day, in the remaining twenty volumes of his diary (which, once Barbie, not Idina, was buying for him, changed from a sleek blue to an imperial red) he never made another reference to his life with Idina.

  It is one thing to close a door behind you. It is quite another to have somebody else lock it shut from the other side. Particularly if the person wielding the key is the woman with whom your husband fell in love when he was married to you. To aggravate the situation, Idina would be expected to be grateful to Barbie for agreeing to stay in England and bring up her sons, while Idina had adventures abroad. And now that her boys had a new mother there could be no question of Idina maintaining any contact with them whatsoever. To do so would be regarded as destabilising to the children, selfish of Idina and unfair on Barbie, who had to establish her own relationship with them.

  Idina went back to Africa. She had to salvage what she could of her life with Charles Gordon.

  The British East Africa Protectorate had become the British Crown Colony of Kenya, named after the towering Mount Kenya. The settlers had held the first elections to their Legislative Council. The new Kenya was booming. Idina’s marriage to Charles was, however, shot. Neither house nor farm nor Charles’s appetite for humiliation had made any significant p
rogress in Idina’s absence.

  Idina remained in Kenya with Charles for another year. She kept herself busy going on safari after safari. But by the summer of 1921 the marriage was well and truly over. She and Charles parted amiably, and decided to make their own ways back in Europe.

  That autumn Idina organised ‘an all-woman hunting and exploring expedition’.8 Among her guests was the Countess of Drogheda, born Kathleen Moore in Scotland. Kathleen was a woman of many talents. A ‘dashing automobilist’, she was ‘one of the best known sportswomen in society’. She had played tennis in the Wimbledon Championships and ‘flown over Trafalgar Square in an airship’ in 1918. She had also ‘attracted attention at Deauville . . . by her daring at the Baccarat table’. But her crowning exploit was nonetheless ‘to go on a big game shooting expedition in East Africa with Lady Idina Gordon.’9

  But not even the companionship of Kathleen, who, like Idina, was heading for divorce,10 could disguise the fact that Idina had given up her children, husband and homes for a better life that had so quickly fallen apart. And now she was quite alone.

  The expedition over, in November 1921 Idina sailed from Mombasa. In her arms was a serval cat that had replaced the late Satan.

  On her finger was the large moonstone of a pearl ring that Euan had bought her in Paris.

  CHAPTER 14

  IDINA RETURNED TO LONDON IN 1921 WITH NO OTHER apparent plan than to stay a step ahead of loneliness. At twenty-five she had had everything. Now, three years later, she did not even have a place of her own to live. In search of company, she again moved into Olga Lyn’s house in Catherine Street. London had become a city in frantic pursuit of the new. Its pleasure-seekers had not, after the mayhem of the war, returned to the stately pace of Edwardian fine living. Instead, in noisy motor cars driven full pelt around London’s narrow streets, they chased the latest fashion, the latest restaurant, the latest dance craze and the latest nightclub. Nightclubs were the new venue for dancing. The sons of the families living in the private palaces lining London’s parks had been decimated in France and these houses were being sold and demolished, their ballrooms and vast drawing rooms with them. And, having lived independently as soldiers, nurses and land girls during the war, the surviving young were moving out of their parents’ homes into flats as soon as they could afford to. These became places for smaller impromptu gatherings where friends drank vast amounts of alcohol and experimented with morphine and cocaine and played the gramophone to learn the latest dance steps before hitting the floor at Ciro’s, the Café de Paris, the Savoy and the archetype of them all, the Embassy. Here, in the same groups that had gathered to dine at the Ritz and Claridge’s during the war, the young, rich and beautiful turned up to dance and push the boundaries of behaviour as far as they dared in front of tables packed with the young trying to be old and the old trying to be young.

  This desire to overturn every previous code of behaviour overflowed into all areas of both the public and the private domain. In restaurants the young crowd were louder, attempted to drink more champagne than anyone had before, and danced on the tables, the women sometimes wearing nothing under floating skirts. Nudity was all the rage. Women appeared in transparent dresses. A fashion began for receiving guests while still in the bath and then openly and slowly dressing in front of them. One hostess, Mary Mond Pearson, waited one evening until all her guests had arrived at her Belgrave Square mansion and then descended the curving staircase wearing nothing but a famous string of family pearls which reached her pubic hair.

  Oggie’s had become the Piccadilly Circus of the artistic and louche. Actresses, dancers and musicians, passing through London and either preferring the ceaseless company of the Catherine Street house or lacking the means to pay for a hotel, moved in. One of them, the actress Gladys Cooper – at one point the most photographed woman in Britain and, like Idina, very publicly divorced – stayed when her performances ended too late to return to her children and their hordes of nannies she had housed in Surrey.

  These house guests were followed through the door by their admirers. Between lunchtime and dawn the front door at Oggie’s opened and closed, glasses clinked, cigarette lighters flared. Dinners were thrown for twenty at a time, the guests having to prove their worth with witty epigrams or outrageous ‘stunts’ designed to entertain the others. Artists and impresarios chatted and argued, fell in and out of love, and in and out of bed. Lovers were no longer hidden, as they had been during the war, but flaunted. Nor did girls wait until they were married. In 1921 Marie Stopes published Wise Parenthood, a book that made available to anyone who could afford and dared to buy it the contraceptive secrets that had hitherto been confined to quiet whispers between educated women. If that didn’t work, again those women who could afford to – the rest had to rely on haphazard backstreet fumblings – slipped over to nursing homes in France on the pretext of nervous exhaustion. The only social crime here was dullness.

  By the time Idina returned to London, being divorced was no longer an insurmountable scandal. Before the war, England and Wales had witnessed about five hundred divorces a year. In 1920, the year before Idina’s return, this had leapt to over three thousand as war-damaged marriages were officially brought to an end. Several society marriages had finished this way: those of Idina’s friends Rosita Forbes, Dorry Kennard and Gladys Cooper among them. Divorce was still seen as destabilising a class system already ravaged by the war but, in these difficult times, making a single mistake by marrying the wrong person was forgivable.

  But Idina’s mistake was in having left Euan, not in having married him. Unlike Dorry’s husband, Euan was not considered to have behaved badly. He had neither abandoned Idina nor moved in with another woman. She had been ill; he had entertained himself. He was still popular, handsome and extremely rich. Idina appeared to have behaved utterly irrationally. Now it was obvious to all and sundry that her marriage to Charles Gordon was also over, and it would be only a matter of time before he, too, divorced her.

  As the year passed, the rate of divorces continued to rise (it would peak at 3500) and Idina appeared to be making a very direct personal contribution to this unwelcome wave of change. She had shown herself to be not a woman who had erred once but an errant woman. She had crossed a threshold that separated her from her once-only divorced friends and she was left off aristocratic invitation lists and blanked in public. Michael Arlen, whose bestselling 1920s novel The Green Hat portrays Idina as the tragic heroine Iris Storm, was a member of Oggie’s set. In the book he describes Iris as having ‘outlawed herself’.1 And that is just what Idina had done: she had become a social outlaw.

  Iris Storm is a tawny-haired, shingled-headed, big-blue-eyed aristocrat who was so widely believed to be Idina that another member of the crowd, the poet Frédéric de Janzé, refers to Idina as ‘The Green Hat’ in his later roman à clef about Kenyan life, Vertical Land – for Horizontal People.2 But Arlen himself seals the link between fiction and reality with the use of Idina’s initials, I. S., for both Iris Storm and Idina Sackville – at one time a common way of identifying the real individuals on whom fictional characters were based. Arlen portrays himself even more simply: as a nameless narrator who happens to be an author, and who meets and has an affair with Iris Storm, a woman who is publicly regarded as having ‘kicked through every restraint of caste and chastity, there’s the whole world open to her to play the mischief in, there’s every invention in the world to help her indulge her intolerable little lusts’.3

  Socially outlawed and branded a wicked woman, Idina clearly decided she might as well be as bad as she could. She had her hair shingled to razor-thin shortness at the back and painted her fingernails green. With her new pet, the serval cat, on a leash, she stayed out all night and slept all day. No longer needing endless permits and prefecture visits to cross to Paris, she flitted to and fro at an indecent pace. In July the demi-monde went south to the Riviera. Idina went with them. At the end of August they moved on to Venice, where Oggie took a palazzo
for a month. They sunbathed on the Lido and drifted along the canals by night, stripping off and leaping into the water, their naked bodies glistening in the moonlight.

  Back in England, and still in possession of some of the £10,000her mother had given her on her marriage to Euan, Idina bought herself a Hispano-Suiza (Iris Storm’s was canary yellow) with a vast bonnet and silver stork on the front and careered around London in it, sober, drunk or somewhere in between. When she wanted to stop somewhere she left it, often motor humming, in the middle of the road.

  And there were the men. They came and went. Each new body provided not only some degree of sexual satisfaction but also a physical reassurance that she was not alone – at least not for those hours. And Idina kept moving on, for, so long as she was occupied, or looking forward to the next amusement, she had no time to look back. ‘Wait until you are so free,’ says Iris Storm, ‘that you can see the four walls of your freedom and the iron-barred door that will let you out into the open air of slavery, if only there was someone to open it.’4