The Bolter Read online

  ‘You don’t know,’ continues Arlen’s I. S., ‘the bodyache for a child, the ache that destroys a body.’5 ‘I am not the proud adventuress who touches men for pleasure, the silly lady who misbehaves for fun,’ Iris Storm tells Arlen’s narrator. ‘I am the meanest of them all, she who destroys her body because she must.’6 Iris sleeps with the narrator on the first night she meets him. Iris has come looking for her brother, who lives in the apartment above him. They find her brother drunk into a stupor, and Iris comes into the narrator’s apartment for ‘a glass of cold water!’7 After some minutes of conversation the narrator leaves to talk to a policeman outside who is complaining that Iris’s car has blocked the road. When he returns she has vanished from his sitting room. He finds her in his bedroom, where ‘she lay coiled on the bed’,8 asleep. However, when he climbs in beside her, ‘hair that was not my own was pressed against my ear, and fingers that were not my own took the cigarette from my mouth, and teeth that were not mine bit my lip . . . and a voice as clear and strong as daylight said: “but enough of this hell!”’9

  The next morning Iris proffers some explanation for her behaviour. ‘There are dreams, and there are beasts. The dreams walk glittering up and down the soiled loneliness of desire, the beasts prowl about the soiled loneliness of regret.’10 Her sexuality is the beast that haunts her life, not the desire that drives it. That desire, she says, is what they call ‘the desire – for-I-know-not-what. They will find it one day when we are dead and all things that live are now dead. They will find it when everything is dead but the dream we have no words for. It is not chocolate, it is not cigarettes, it is not cocaine, not opium, nor sex. It is not eating, drinking, flying, fighting, loving. It is not love’s delight, it is not bearing children, though in that there are moments like jewels. There is one taste in us that is unsatisfied. I don’t know what that taste is, but I know it is there. Life’s best gift, hasn’t someone said, is the ability to dream of a better life . . .’.11 This was a woman, wrote Arlen, who ‘walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself.’12

  The outside world, however, saw none of the torment and only the scandal in Idina’s life. As she moved from bed to bed to satisfy her cravings, all of them: not just for sex but for company, affection and perhaps in the hope that this new liaison might be ‘the one’ who would change her life again, her reputation as a seductress spread. She was ‘reputed to have had lovers without number’.13 and be an expert on the erotic use of lingerie: teaching at least one man how to touch four strategic points on a skirt that would make a pair of stockings slide to the floor.14 And her name became a byword for disreputable behaviour. Only those who cared little for their own reputation would wish to be seen ‘in the company of such dubious figures . . . as Lady Idina Gordon.’15

  The worse a woman behaves, the better she needs to look in order to hold her head high. Idina looked immaculate. In a dramatic contrast to the stories circulating about her, Idina made sure that she was dressing at the leading edge of fashion: she had her clothes made for her by a new designer, an Irishman called Molyneux (pronounced Molynukes). She bound her bosom, flattening it into the androgynous style of the moment, and wore the wraparound dresses that he designed for her, making her look long, thin, serpentine and almost tall.16 Over these she wore the furs she had been given as wedding presents, remodelled, and the jewellery she had been given both then and by Euan. On her hand, she still wore that moonstone of a pearl ring.

  That ring plays a part of its own in The Green Hat. Arlen transmuted it from pearl to emerald but, then, he had to change some of Idina’s story a degree or two: much of the truth was too shocking to write literally, even when Arlen put pen to paper at the end of 1923. The divorce law had just changed, allowing at long last a wife to divorce her husband for infidelity, but public morality had not yet caught up. Instead of being twice divorced, Iris Storm is twice-widowed.

  Iris’s ring was given to her by her second husband because it was, like her, ‘beautiful but loose’.17 The ring will stay upon her finger only so long as she remembers to curl it. If she becomes distracted and forgets the ring, and her husband, it will fall to the floor as she herself will be falling from grace. For, as her husband tells her: ‘that is the sort of woman you are.’18 Shortly after Iris loses the ring, she dies.

  Idina wore the moonstone pearl Euan had given her until, long after Arlen had written, she too died.

  At the beginning of 1923 a new twenty-year-old American actress moved into Oggie’s house. She had arrived in London to star in a show called The Dancers. One evening she appeared on the stage at the beginning of the play with long hair but by the final act had bobbed it to the micro-length of the day. Within weeks she had gained herself a large following of female cockney fans, many of whom sheared their own hair during the performance, throwing locks on to the stage. Her name was Tallulah Bankhead.

  Tallulah was one of Oggie’s new finds. She was exuberant and wild, inclined to shock given half a chance and certainly not dull but, compared with the practised sophistication of the European women by whom she was now surrounded, an ingénue. Oggie and Idina took her under their wing. They taught her about food and wine, showed her how to diet off her puppy fat, took her to Molyneux for her clothes and taught her how to be decadent with style. And then either Idina or Tallulah taught the other (for they both became known for doing this) how to empty several crates of champagne into a bath and climb in – with somebody else to keep them company.

  Bathing in champagne was not the only way in which Idina and Tallulah’s lives became entwined. In The Green Hat Arlen borrows the name of a boyfriend of Tallulah’s for the subject of the thirty-year-old Iris’s fatal romance with a younger man. The man in question, Napier, is starting his career in the Foreign Office and is being lined up to marry a debutante. Napier was the name of the 3rd Baron Alington and the owner of eighteen thousand acres of Dorset, with whom Tallulah had an on-off affair. Tallulah loved the story and played the part on the London stage (Garbo took the role in the film19). Indeed, as Tallulah’s Napier did, Arlen’s Napier ends up marrying the suitable young debutante who had been lined up for him. For, in order to keep his heroine within the bounds of acceptability, Arlen has Iris demonstrate her overwhelming love – ‘if people died of love I must be risen from the dead to be driving this car now’20 – by taking her own life and so freeing her lover to marry his debutante instead of ruining him by taking him herself.

  But just before Arlen wrote, the now thirty-year-old Idina had done quite the opposite. She had at last found that ‘better life’ in the form of one of Britain’s most eligible, albeit penniless, bachelors. He was a tall, blond, twenty-two-year-old man just starting on his career in the Foreign Office. His name was Josslyn Hay and he would one day inherit Scotland’s leading earldom. Idina amicably divorced Charles Gordon, who wished to marry a friend of hers, and married the young Josslyn. She then took him away from the debutantes, away from the Foreign Office and back to Kenya. ‘I have done with England,’ says Iris Storm, ‘and England has done with me.’21

  CHAPTER 15

  IDINA DIDN’T HAVE TO MARRY JOSS. SHE COULD SIMPLY have continued as his lover. Doing so would have been less shocking than taking a third husband. Idina’s greatest sin was not her need for new sexual excitement but that ‘she insisted upon marrying her boyfriends’, as her brother and others said,1 thus shaking the traditional social structure grounded on lifelong marriages. There were, however, several reasons to have made Idina want to marry again. One may have been the wish to play up to her role as a socially outlawed femme fatale. For, to the outside world, her third marriage, to a much younger man, was truly shocking. Another reason, and perhaps to Idina the most important of all, was that she was clearly very deeply in love with Joss. As she neither expected nor hoped for fidelity from him,2 being married was a way to hold on to him. For ‘Idina, fragile and frail’, as she would shortly be described,3 the obvious solution was to marry Joss, but to have an open marriage.4 Each of
them could then have sex with whomsoever they felt like without their marriage being destroyed. And, after two years of living at Oggie’s, Idina had become used to having a variety of sexual partners. For this to work, nothing could be allowed to become too serious. It was the well-tried and tested formula for upper-class marriage that they had grown up with.

  Having, for over two years, lived from party to party, looking no further than the next pair of arms, Idina now started to plan her life. She and Joss would return to Kenya. They would buy a farm, raise a house and build themselves a life out there and, this time, she would make it work.

  The odds on this marriage being a success were, however, not in Idina’s favour. As well as her own less than encouraging track record there was the large age gap between her and Joss to contend with. Idina chose not to ignore this. Strangely, she appears to have mothered Joss at the same time as being his lover: ‘the child’, she calls him throughout her only surviving letter to his parents.5 At two-thirds of Idina’s age, Joss appears to have been filling not just the gap left by Euan but also the one left by her children.

  Joss was serially unfaithful from the start. Idina professed not to mind.6 She had, in any case, started off sharing Joss. She had met him at the same time as another woman, an American called Alice Silverthorne, who was married to the young French Count Frédéric de Janzé, a then sometime racing driver, sometime politician and member of Paris’s literati crowd of Marcel Proust, Maurice Barrès, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce as well, of course, as being a friend of Oggie’s.

  Alice was a beauty. She was raven-haired and porcelain-skinned, with violet eyes in a wide face. An orphan, she had inherited more money from an American meat-packing fortune than she knew what to do with and, as if bending under the weight of her riches, she appeared both fragile and almost frighteningly unpredictable. Joss and Alice yo-yoed in and out of bed with each other. Sometimes he went off with her for a few hours, sometimes a few days. But he always came back to Idina. Idina began to rely on Alice to return Joss to her, and Alice relied on Idina’s acquiescence whenever she and Joss had a fling. Gradually the two women became friends, waiting together for him to return from whichever third bed he had slipped off to.

  Golden-maned with strong, aquiline features carved on to a languid and slightly weak-chinned face, Joss had a direct gaze and thick, wide lips that he curled up and down into grins and sneers – whichever, for that woman, would do the trick. At twenty-one he had the confidence of the women twice his age with whom he had been sleeping since a teenager. His grandfather was the Earl of Erroll, the hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland, his father was his heir, Lord Kilmarnock, and, as they died, Joss would climb the aristocratic tree. The only hitch was that there would not be a penny for him to inherit. The family had lost all its money, his father worked in the Foreign Office and, shortly before Joss married Idina, even the ancestral Erroll home, Slains Castle, was sold for scrap. Although his parents could still afford to give him an allowance, it was not enough to live off. Joss would either have to work for a living or marry a woman who would support him. Idina could.

  Although not as rich as Alice, Idina still had some of her £10,000, a generous mother and an allowance from her brother, who had inherited a large amount of money in 1919 when her uncle, Tom Brassey, had been knocked down by a London taxi. And eventually Idina should receive a share of the great Brassey fortune outright from her mother. In the meantime she certainly had enough to live well, as they planned, in Kenya. At least for a while.

  Joss’s career had so far pursued a curious path. At the age of fifteen he had been expelled from Eton for being caught having sex with a housemaid twice his age. He had then joined his parents in Le Havre, where his father was based, and finished his education there. At eighteen he had slipped straight into the Foreign Office and a posting as private secretary to the British Ambassador in Berlin – to where his father, Victor (Lord) Kilmarnock, had just been posted as Chargé d’Affaires. Three years later, in 1923, he again followed his father, this time to the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission, situated in the picturesque German town of Koblenz. Idina, not quite divorced, had followed him there.

  Victor Kilmarnock was now the British High Commissioner in Koblenz and Joss lived with his parents in the British Residence. This was an appropriately imposing creeper-clad, stone-walled and fishscale-tile-roofed building, surrounded by tall trees on the banks of the Rhine. Around it stood half a dozen similar edifices belonging to the French, Dutch, Belgian and American embassies, whose inhabitants had turned the town into a hive of international social activity: there were boats to row, horses to bet on, a theatre with a kaleidoscopic programme that made it worth visiting at least once, if not twice, a week and endless parties.

  Idina’s arrival shocked the staff at the Residence.7 Not only was she much older than Joss but her hair was cut in a boyish ‘Eton crop’8 and ‘Her figure resembled that of a boy, too, very very slim,’ said one of the other guests at the Residence at the time, who thought that Idina and Joss ‘seemed like brother and sister; there was something alike in them.’9

  And Joss’s behaviour went haywire. One evening, while the household was bathing and changing before a reception for Monsieur Tirade, the French High Commissioner, Idina and Joss sneaked downstairs and strung up a line of their own carefully prepared bunting – a long row of bras and knickers dyed red, white and blue into an enormous tricolour flag. Joss’s father was deeply embarrassed.10 He ‘begged Joss not to marry Idina, even making him promise’.11 At least, Victor Kilmarnock must have comforted himself, Idina would not be around for long. She was openly planning to return to Africa and make a home.12 In Koblenz she spent her days hunting down antiques and linens for the house in Kenya and even ordering a vast bath made from green onyx. What Victor Kilmarnock did not realise was that, regardless of promises, she was going to take his son with her.

  Idina and Joss announced their engagement in Venice at the beginning of September. They were staying at the Palazzo Barizizza on the Grand Canal with Oggie, who had rented the house for her usual end-of-summer gathering. The photographers followed them. A picture of the two of them, walking barefoot along the Lido, the thirty-year-old, twice-divorced Idina in a Grecian-style tunic and the twenty-one-year-old Joss wearing a pair of brightly coloured silk pyjamas that were the fashion of the day, was the front cover of the Tatler the following week. Both of them were grinning. A wide-mouthed, lips pressed, smirking sort of grin at the small storm of scandal they had whipped up between them. ‘A snapshot taken recently at a well known Italian resort . . .’ ran the caption. ‘. . . The engagement of Lady Idina Gordon and Mr. Josslyn Hay was announced a short time ago.’.13

  Ten days later, on 22 September, they married in the Kensington Register Office in London. Idina wore a cloche hat and a knee-length brocade coat trimmed with fur. As a final gesture flying in the face of tradition, she had had her outfit made in the traditionally unluckiest colour for brides – green. It was a tiny wedding and only half a dozen guests followed them across town to the Savoy Grill. They included Joss’s best man, Philip Carey, Idina’s brother Buck, but not his young wife Diana, either Muriel or Avie, and nobody from Joss’s family. The society hostess Brenda Dufferin was there and a ‘Prince George of Russia’,14 together with a young couple who had been with Idina and Joss at Oggie’s house party in Venice when their engagement was announced. Their names were Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley, known to their friends as Tom and Cimmie.

  At this stage of his political career Tom Mosley was a young Conservative Member of Parliament, on his way to his first transformation into a Communist. He shared with Idina a similar level of sexual appetite and, even amid the flush of her engagement to Joss, the two of them formed an instant attraction.

  Cimmie was someone Idina had known for longer. Before she had married she had been Cimmie Curzon, Avie and Barbie’s best friend. She was still Barbie’s bosom pal, and Tom and Cimmie were frequent guests at the new house that
Idina had poured so much into but had never seen: Kildonan. Perhaps with a tinge of guilt, Cimmie gave Idina an extravagantly generous present. It was a gilt and crystal-encrusted Cartier dressing-table set, engraved with Idina’s new initials.

  For the next three months Idina and Joss cavorted around London and Paris as the latest scandal of the day. Their ignominy blossomed thanks to the added misbehaviour of both Idina’s siblings. Stewart and Avie’s marriage had not been a success. After a couple of misplaced hopes, Avie had not become pregnant. Gradually the two of them had started to wander. Stewart had an affair with Barbie’s younger sister, Ursula, whom he had met staying at Kildonan in August 1921. The affair had started a year later and Ursula had wanted Stewart to divorce Avie and marry her – mirroring Euan’s path from Idina to Barbie. Stewart had refused and after a year the affair fizzled out and Ursula married another man. Avie, however, had found out about the affair and begun to console herself with a string of lovers whom she failed to conceal. While Stewart sat at his desk in Whitehall, Avie, extremely publicly, rushed around the country with a succession of different men but Stewart remained resolutely married to her.

  The tide of change that was sweeping across the world in the aftermath of the war was bringing uncertainty as well as excitement. Hard hit both financially and by loss of life, the upper classes felt vulnerable. In repeatedly divorcing, Idina was regarded as a class traitor – just like her mother Muriel, who was still financially and vocally supporting George Lansbury and his socialist causes. And then Buck caused the greatest stir when, at the start of 1924, he became the first member of the House of Lords to accept an appointment as a minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s Socialist government. As far as British society was concerned, the Sackvilles were out to destroy it.