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  The weekend – or Saturday-to-Monday – house parties varied. There were the staid ones, where Idina and Joss had invited people they knew less well, or those who were well behaved. These included European grandees in more conventional marriages such as the writer Elspeth Huxley’s parents Joss and Nellie Grant, Lord and Lady Delamere, unattached men such as Gilbert Colvile and Berkeley Cole, and the odd colonial official or District Commissioner or two.

  The evenings began with cocktails: White Ladies, Whisky Sours, Bronxes and gins in varying colours and effervescences. Eight thousand feet up, in that thin air, the alcohol hit hard and fast and the conversation quickened.30 Dinner was at a long, polished table laid with a platoon of silver knives and forks and crystal glasses, linen napkins folded around each. Back in England few of even the grandest houses raised their culinary threshold above English suet. Here, halfway across the world, up in the skies, Idina and Marie coaxed four-course French meals out of a shack of an outdoor kitchen. All that was missing were copious clarets and Burgundies. Wine was harder to come by than in Europe. It was there, somewhere. But even if brought out it didn’t mix well with the spirits before and after. Instead they drank more whisky – and glacial beer.

  Conversation, just as on landed estates back in England, centred on farming methods: the latest ones attempted; the old ones discarded. They talked of gardens, what would and wouldn’t grow. How to manage their lawns, irrigate ponds. And they talked about books. With no cinema around the corner and the only theatre in Nairobi a day’s journey away, books, which could be posted, carried, lent and exchanged, formed the cultural currency. As if one vast, loosely arranged reading group, the Kenyans strove to read what everyone else was reading – and talking about. In their half-pioneer, half-prisoner lives, the latest published theories and stories were their peephole to the rest of the world. And Idina, her shelves overflowing, with a view on each one and compulsively recommending and lending the latest she had enjoyed, was Kenyan queen of books: ‘No-one knew more about contemporary literature than Idina.’31 She could devour a novel a day, falling into the characters’ emotions, living their adventures vicariously from her deep sofa halfway up an African mountain.

  And, halfway up that mountain, Idina threw different sorts of parties too. To these, she and Joss invited more carefully chosen friends and acquaintances. These had usually spent some time in London and Paris since the war. They had been to parties where the hostess turned up naked, they had joined in the after-dinner stunts designed to shock, they had drunk too much, ended up group skinny-dipping at midnight (years of boarding-school dormitories had whittled away any sense of body-shyness) and, as they had been brought up to do, they had fallen in and out of bed with their friends. Having a good time meant going as far as they dared. And then a little beyond that.

  Idina and Joss’s friends arrived, bathed, slipped into their pyjamas, were handed a cocktail and were ushered through into the memsahib’s bathroom. There Idina lay simmering in green onyx, ever-present cigarette holder and crystal tumbler on standby, welcoming them in. She chattered as she washed, climbed out, dried herself and dressed. They drank and chattered and the pace of their chatter quickened as the alcohol flowed through their veins. A gramophone would be brought in, its handle wound, a record put on – the latest jazz arrived from England with Idina’s pile of books – and off they went, dancing in pyjamas almost as soon as the sun had set. Formality broke into the evening with dinner. The same, four-course French feast, washed down by whisky. Cocktails again. The alcohol and altitude together sent them as high as kites, with almost no need for the odd line of cocaine.

  Frédéric de Janzé, who would be a frequent guest of Idina’s, describes the after-dinner scene at Slains in Vertical Land, named after the hillside rising sharply up behind the house. ‘The dark hall around’,32 only the firelight would be flickering. Idina would stand ‘with her back to the fire, gold hair aflame’, wearing not pyjamas but Kenyan tribal dress of a ‘red and gold kekoi’ that matched both the flames and the colour of her hair. Naked, she tied the long cloth around her and over her breasts. Her face was ‘framed by the dull beam, topped by buffalo horns. Like a weird lily swaying on a Japanese screen, she alone is living in that room.’ Her guests, burning with alcohol and physical frustration, sprawled around her, ‘sunk in chairs, legs crossed on the floor, propped up against the wall, our eyes hang fascinated on that slight figure . . . always the same power. Men leave their ploughs, their horses are laid to rest, and, wonderingly, they follow her never to forget . . . The flames flicker; her half-closed eyes awaken to our mute appeal. As ever, desire and long drawn tobacco smoke weave around her ankles, slowly entwining that slight frame; around her neck it curls; a shudder, eyes close.’ And then she started the games.

  One short Saturday-to-Monday with no chance of surreptitious lunches and teas in between concertinaed the time available to select a new bed companion. Games – British after-dinner games with a twist – were a way to move matters on. Back in London, at Oggie’s, at everywhere broad-minded enough to invite Idina, they had ‘stunted’ after dinner. Here these games were Idina’s stunts. They had another purpose too. Games with Idina the master of ceremonies were a way of her exercising some control over with whom Joss would inevitably sleep – or appearing to do so.

  Joss did not drink alcohol. He said, quite openly, that he did not want ‘to impair my performance’.33 Instead he circled the room filling the glasses, while Idina decided upon the game for that evening. They started with word games, such as which was the real first line to which book, then charades, a bit of acting, singing, dancing, then more dancing to the gramophone. Happy swing, soulful jazz, blues that hollowed out a listener’s insides. More alcohol. Then back to Idina. Standing in front of the fire, long, black cigarette holder at her lips. The tension around her mounted.

  The bedrooms were locked, each guest with a key, Idina with another for each room. She spread these out on a table and with the roll of dice, the turn of a card, the blow of a feather across a sheet stretched between the guests’ trembling hands, each would win a new room key and partner for the night.

  And then, exactly one year after Idina had brought Joss to Kenya, after just about the length of time her marriage to Charles Gordon had lasted there, Idina discovered she was pregnant.

  CHAPTER 16

  RUMOURS WERE RIFE THAT IDINA’S BABY WAS NOT HER husband’s. She had made as many enemies as friends in Kenya. Stories of wild parties at Slains were hotly debated – often genteelly avoiding the detail of the subject matter itself. Those outside Idina and Joss’s charmed circle of invitees were split. Some, especially those who had been received more conventionally by Idina, refused to believe that such an elegant and intelligent woman might behave in this way – or how they could have failed to spot the signs of such salacious activity. Others nursed grudges over being left off the invitation list – even if events were a little too fast for their taste.

  Idina’s geographical neighbours, whom she barely knew, found themselves being quizzed as to the goings-on up at the Hays’. One, Mrs Case, was so embarrassed at her ignorance that she sent her watu up to Slains to talk to the servants. Tales of confusion as to whom the laundry collected from each bedroom should be returned raced back down the hill to be widely disseminated. These were fuelled by Joss’s bragging about his conquests at Muthaiga, dividing the women he had slept with into ‘droopers, boopers and super boopers’.1 And Kenya’s chattering classes began to worry.

  Just as the upper classes back in Britain feared the publicity of divorces among their ranks, so the middle-class settler farmers and the more prudish émigré aristocrats feared that the Hays’ misdemeanours undermined the settlers’ cause. The farmers were ceaselessly at loggerheads with the colonial government over how much control they themselves could have over the colony and the extent to which their interests should be balanced against those of the native Kenyans and the other immigrant population flooding in from India. The settler
farmers’ argument was that they had worked extremely hard to turn virgin land into good farming soil and that they had therefore earned some legal and physical protection for their interests. If the settlers were seen to be a bunch of wife-swapping sybarites and in any sense ‘going native’ they would lose their moral authority and appear less safe pairs of hands for the British colony.

  British colonial authority had, like class divisions back Home, long been based upon notional difference. And these differences must, the colonial ethos went, be adhered to. Whatever the greater comfort of the native way of life, the Englishman abroad must not succumb. British hours must be kept – no siesta – British food must be served and British standards of dress must be adhered to, however kali (burning) the sun. For men this was suits. For women, skirts or dresses. These must suggest a life of propriety and hard work. It was also vital that sun hats were worn at every opportunity to emphasise the superior fragility of white skin. These were the rules. And, in addition to the persistent stories that Idina was ‘going native’ sexually (many of the native Kenyans had several wives and her rumoured bed-hopping was seen to mirror this), she flaunted the sartorial norms: she wore trousers every day, just like a man. When she started to wear shorts it was, however, too much for one settler’s wife.

  Lady Eileen Scott was the wife of Lord Francis Scott, the younger son of the Duke of Buccleuch. Francis had come out in 1919 on the same soldier-settler scheme as Charles Gordon but Eileen and Idina could hardly have been more different. In the words of the Kenyan writer Elspeth Huxley: ‘Eileen Scott lingers in my memory draped in chiffon scarves, clasping a French novel and possibly a small yappy dog, and uttering at intervals bird-like cries of “Oh François! François!”’2

  Eileen was a daughter of the former Viceroy of India, the Earl of Minto, and had been brought up to believe in the Englishman’s divine right and duty to rule. Eileen could not stand Idina, whom she regarded as undermining this principle at every turn: ‘Most of the women,’ she wrote in her diary in despair, ‘wear shorts, a fashion inaugurated by Lady Idina who has done a lot of harm in this country. It is very ugly and unnecessary.’3

  Yet, whatever Idina wore, she could please neither Eileen Scott nor her like-minded white Kenyan farmers. Dressing up to the nines met with as much approbation as the shorts. For glad rags gave an equally damaging impression that Kenyan life was frivolous. After a day’s racing at Nakuru, Eileen wrote: ‘Lady Idina was there in an Ascot gown with a lovely brown ostrich feather hat. Why she didn’t die of sunstroke I can’t conceive.’4

  Idina’s nonchalance in the heat and dust appeared worryingly unBritish. The settlers were besieged by sun, dust and insects and were offered little in the way of physical comfort as relief. While many women struggled to make themselves presentable, Idina appeared unperturbed. This drove Eileen to a fury: ‘Most of the women in this country, except Lady Idina, are burnt brick-red . . . I wonder how Idina will enjoy trying to eat this type of food and washing out of a cracked old tin basin . . . Everything is so intensely dry, it splits the face and hair.’5

  But Idina cared as little about these things as she did about whether other people knew whom she had slept with the night before. She simply lived by an entirely different set of rules: ‘she was somehow outside the comic, squalid, sometimes almost fine laws by which we judge as to what is and what is not conventional’.6 Most settlers regarded sitting down to dinner late (thus failing to keep British hours) and keeping their servants up as flagrant mistreatment – whereas flogging them to within an inch of their lives for cleaning the family silver with Vim was par for the course. Idina did the opposite. Her pre-dinner drinks occasionally dragged on, but she didn’t flog her watu. Instead they regarded her with awe as she walked barefoot around the farm with them – not out of necessity, as her cupboards contained rows and rows of shoes – but for the sheer pleasure of it. This excess of unworn shoes hardly endeared Idina to the Lady Eileens of Kenya, who couldn’t bring themselves to recount the rumours of Somali drivers leaving her employ out of fear of being asked to sleep with her. But, when the long-dreaded native Kenyan uprising did come with the Mau Mau and these, other settlers found their houses being razed to the ground, Idina’s was left standing.

  For all her nonchalance – photographs show her lolling on the lawn, a book balanced on her bump – the pregnant Idina’s life was full of, as the Kenyans called them, shauries (worries). However active she remained, when the baby arrived shortly after Christmas, she would be forced to lie low for several weeks, leaving Joss unattended to. And Joss, it had become clear, needed constant female attention. As long as he returned, that was fine. But he might not. Especially if she was wealthy. Idina and Joss had been vastly outspending the allowances that she received from her brother and he from his parents. Idina’s other income had vanished as any capital not ploughed into the farm had been spent; and the shortfall had been made up in loans taken out against it. Suggesting that they rein in their expenses might be precisely the trigger to send Joss careering off for good. If she did not, however, they would end up bankrupt and then, however much she loved him, he would certainly leave her. But Idina’s most immediate shaurie was that she needed to keep Joss occupied around the birth of their child. She sent a letter to Paris, asking a friend to come out and join her for a couple of months. That friend was Alice de Janzé.

  In her four years of marriage Alice had produced two daughters, and the prospect of visiting one of his wife’s old lovers did not bother her husband Frédéric. He agreed to go. In December 1925 the de Janzés arrived at Slains and were immediately captivated by Kenya’s wide, open sky and the promise of danger rustling in the undergrowth. Alice and Joss resumed their affair. For Idina this was a relief. Joss was happily busy and would not stray too far. Alice was far too neurotic for him ever to want to marry her. In any case, Alice and Idina had an understanding. Asked whether she minded that her husband was openly sleeping with Alice, Idina replied: ‘But Alice is my best friend.’7

  Just before Christmas, the four of them bumped their way up the roads to Nairobi to wait for the birth of Idina’s baby. They checked into Muthaiga, where a series of Christmas parties were in full swing. By day, Idina sat around while the other three played the fiercely competitive club squash ladder. On Christmas Day they drove out of Nairobi to picnic ‘with Denys Finch Hatton, in the Ngong Hills’, as Joss wrote to his mother while he waited to become a father. ‘I hope it will be over soon, this waiting is nerve-racking.’8 The baby was late. New Year passed. And then, four days later, Idina went into labour.

  Idina gave birth to a girl. Both Idina and Joss were delighted. Joss had no need of a male heir. There were no ancestral estates to take over, simply a name. And that name was so ridiculously grand that, like very, very few other British titles, it could be inherited by a woman. They called her Diana Denyse. The first name, Diana, was after Idina’s brother Buck’s wife, just as Idina had been called after the wife of her uncle, Tom Brassey. The second name was an almost taunting feminisation of fellow Kenyan Denys Finch Hatton’s first.

  Denys Finch Hatton was at this time the lover of Karen Blixen who would later write the autobiographical book Out of Africa . She was known to her friends as Tania. When Diana was born, Tania was in her native Denmark where she’d been for the previous ten months, leaving Denys to wander in Kenya. There was no love lost between the author and Idina. One of Idina’s closest friends, Cockie Birkbeck, had been having an affair with Tania’s husband, Bror Blixen, for over five years.

  Bright-brown-eyed Cockie was just a few months older than Idina and a frequent guest at her more intimate, and wild, gatherings. Both she and Idina had both first arrived in Kenya with soldier-settler husbands in 1919. Like Idina too, Cockie had a perpetually girlish air to her. (Her final gesture would be an explicit request to be late for her own funeral and that the reading should be the parable of turning water into wine.) However, Idina’s girlishness was one of irrepressible naughtiness, whereas Cocki
e’s was a beguiling, though utterly misplaced, air of innocence. When on safari with the Prince of Wales she so charmed him with her fascination with his Crichton ice-making machine – never before seen in Kenya – that he asked her, even though she had never fired a shot in her life, to take a gun. When he returned to England he sent her an ice-making machine.

  Within a few months of arriving in Kenya with her husband, Ben Birkbeck, Cockie had gone with him on one of Bror Blixen’s safaris. Bror, like many white hunters, made a habit of trying to seduce the women he led into the bush, especially those trembling on their first safari, feeling a hair’s breadth from mortal danger at every turn. His reassuring air of experience and control proved almost irresistible. Cockie fell out of her husband’s arms and into Bror’s, where she had been ever since. Bror had insisted that Tania divorce him a couple of years earlier so that he might marry Cockie. Tania had agreed, believing that Denys Finch Hatton would marry her. He had not so far done so. The fact that Bror and Cockie had been equally slow to reach the altar – or rather the register office, being divorcees – provided Tania with little consolation. Cockie was still there, always about to marry Bror and become the next Baroness Blixen in Tania’s place.

  Idina’s ex-husband, Charles Gordon, and his new wife, Honor, had meanwhile moved to a farm next to Tania’s coffee plantation at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The three of them had become firm friends, and Charles and Honor had made Tania godmother to their daughter, Lukyn. However, Idina had also remained close to Charles and when, a year after Diana Denyse’s birth, she and Joss visited the Gordons’ farm, Tania changed her plans: ‘European standards of behaviour are so quickly forgotten out here, and I do take so much delight in having Mother get to know the people I know and associate with here, but when we invite ourselves to tea with Charles and Honor Gordon and then hear that Idina and her current husband are staying there I am obliged to try to recall my civilized way of thinking and out of consideration for the dignity of an elderly, distinguished Danish lady, to postpone the visit.’9 The baby Diana was, however, clearly Joss’s, although the hard evidence only produced itself several decades later when Diana’s eldest son, Merlin, grew into the spitting image of his grandfather.