The Bolter Read online

  In theory, the annual party was one big night and the morning after (although in practice stragglers would remain for up to a week at a time) with not a soul rising before ten-thirty and so allowing the servants ample time to clear up and prepare a cold brunch of salad, Bromo-Seltzer and prairie oysters. These hangover remedies were needed. The custom became for the hosts to supply the food but the guests to bring the alcohol. This resulted in innovative and near-lethal concoctions, the principal being Black Velvet – a beguilingly drinkable mixture of champagne and stout. To add to the excitement, by the time of their very first annual party, in effect their housewarming in 1926, the de Janzés had acquired a substitute for the children they had left behind in France. This was a lion cub they had found, survivor of a pride which had made its home on their farm. When they had found him, Alice and Fred had carried him back to the house and named him Samson.

  Samson was not small when he arrived. By the time of the party he was even less so. And somehow – although that somehow had two likely co-conspirators – before dinner Samson managed to find his way under Molly’s chair, where he lay unseen. Dinner began. The guests enthused by the cocktails, the noise of conversation rose to pound off the walls and corrugated-iron roof of the farmhouse. As the fish course was being served, one of the houseboys let out a shriek and dropped a bowl of mayonnaise down Molly’s back. He had tripped over Samson’s just extended paw and as Molly herself rose to dab the egg paste off her, she too stumbled over the cub, being caught by her neighbour ‘just in time to prevent a heavy fall . . . The good lady took a lot of pacifying,’ as Fred wrote.10

  The party moved on to the verandah. There they played the gramophone while ‘plying bottles far into the night’.11 They stunted and drank, they drank and stunted, ‘until no one cared whether they were good or bad, even if they existed or were just illusions’.12 and eventually, at six o’clock, just as dawn was breaking, all fell into bed.

  These few months, with Joss, the husband whom she adored, their tiny child and her best friend Alice all with her in Kenya, were one of the high points of Idina’s life. It was indeed that better life which she had worked so hard to create.

  But it was all too brief and fleeting. Almost as soon as Idina had pulled these strands of her life together, they unravelled. Having herself bolted twice, Idina would now find out what it felt like to be bolted from.

  CHAPTER 18

  TOWARDS THE END OF 1926 CYRIL RAMSAY-HILL LEFT for Europe on a long shopping and hunting expedition. Although he took with him two Somali servants – whom he outfitted in Savile Row suits1 – he did not take Molly. She was therefore left completely free for Joss’s attentions. To make matters worse, the unsuspecting Ramsay-Hill asked Joss, his so-called good friend, to keep an eye on his wife. As Fred de Janzé put it: ‘her husband told him to go up and see her as often as he could: “Do her good not to be always alone.”’2 On the pretext of taking ‘a month’s shooting leave’,3 Joss left Slains, only to pitch camp on the shores of Lake Naivasha, in Molly’s garden.

  Even when Idina heard that her husband’s safari was a purely sexual adventure, she had little choice but to accept it, but she could console herself that Cyril Ramsay-Hill was returning after Christmas. His reappearance should put an end to Joss’s expedition. And despite his involvement with Molly, Joss saw Alice’s presence in Kenya as hard to resist and he kept popping back to the Wanjohi Valley.

  It was a far from satisfactory situation for Idina, and there were immediate practical ramifications: ‘bad debts that he had run up in her name with the Indian merchants’ and prolonged absences that threatened to ‘disrupt her social programme’.4 Not to mention that she was relying on a friend’s sexual attractions to keep her husband home.

  Shortly before Christmas, an old friend of Idina’s arrived in Kenya. Idina had known Raymond de Trafford and his brothers for many years. And, however badly Idina had behaved, Raymond had outstripped her. He gambled any money that passed through his hands. He drank himself into violent outbursts of temper. And, as it became clear, he appeared to give not a damn about the happiness of anyone around him.5 Since the end of the war he had ‘stunted’ all over London and Paris and now that the Kenyan Highlands’ reputation for its Happy Valley was spreading in Europe it was almost inevitable that Raymond should end up there. His deeply Catholic family in Britain were pleased enough to see him go to give him some money with which to set himself up with a farm. As well as Idina, Raymond knew Lord Delamere’s eldest son, Tom Cholmondeley: like the Delameres, the de Traffords were a Cheshire landowning family. Raymond therefore turned up at Muthaiga and immediately headed off on safari before returning to spend the Christmas period between the Delamere ranch down at Elmenteita and Slains, up in the hills. And there, at Slains, was Alice.

  The attraction was both mutual and immediate. They sprawled on the lawns in the afternoon sun. A photograph taken at this time shows them sitting on the grass, Alice’s eyes half closed, the pair of them flirting and teasing. And when, shortly afterwards, Fred left on a short hunting expedition, Alice and Raymond vanished together.

  Fred returned to discover that they had gone. A few days later they came back, but Raymond’s volatility and the suddenness of his temporary elopement with Alice shook Fred. Whereas Alice’s affair with Joss had become a predictable part of the establishment and would never lead to anything, Raymond was obviously different. Fred took Alice away to Paris immediately.

  Alice and Fred’s departure was a serious blow to Idina. She not only lost her closest friend, it also marked the end of the happily extended Hay–de Janzé ménage.

  Joss, however, was not going to leave with Molly yet. He had fallen in love with Molly’s house at least as much as he had fallen for her – and that remained firmly in the ownership of Cyril Ramsay-Hill. Living, or rather camping, with Molly at Oserian was evidently a delight. However, leaving the comforts of Slains for nowhere in particular was less appealing. When Cyril returned to Kenya shortly after Alice and Fred’s departure, Joss slid back home to Idina. They had a beautiful home, each other and a child. Idina had converted a guest bedroom at one end of the house into a nursery wing for the new English nanny and Diana. Now a year old, Diana was making her first tottering steps across the lawn at Slains and struggling to utter the three long syllables of her name: Di-an-a, ending up with ‘Dinan’ – a name that stuck. Photographs show Idina dancing around the garden, Dinan in her arms as she twirled her daughter round and showed her off to friends. It was at least the appearance of domestic bliss.

  It lasted for two months after Joss’s return. Then, at the end of March, appalling news reached them from Paris. Alice had shot both Raymund and herself.

  When the de Janzés had arrived in Paris, Alice had told Fred that she wanted a divorce in order to marry Raymond. She then promptly moved out of the family apartment and into one lent for the purpose by Fred’s American mother, who perhaps was trying to do what she could to keep the marriage together. Raymond, however, simply moved in with Alice.

  Fred then capitulated – not even a change of scene as dramatic as that from Kenya to Paris had shaken his wife’s resolve to leave him. He set in motion the exclusive divorce open only to Europe’s grandest Catholic families: a Papal Annulment. In theory this should avoid the inconvenience of either party being classed as a divorcee. When a marriage was annulled, it was as though neither had been married in the first place.

  In the third week of March 1927 Raymond returned to England to speak to his family about marrying Alice. On the 25th he arrived back in Paris and went straight to Alice’s apartment. There he told her that, divorce or annulment, his strictly Catholic family had forbidden him to marry her and that he had to end the relationship, or they would cut him off.

  Alice begged him to stay with her. He refused. ‘I immediately,’ said Alice later, ‘determined upon suicide.’6 The next day ‘we took a last luncheon together’, she said.7 She again asked Raymond to stay with her. Again he refused, telling her
that he was leaving Paris by train within a couple of hours.

  Alice offered to see Raymond off but told him that she needed to visit an armourer’s that afternoon. Together they went shopping. Alice bought a pistol and a round of bullets. ‘Raymond’s phlegmatic English type suspected nothing in this incident, evidently thinking that I was doing an errand for my husband,’ she would say later in her statement to the investigating judge.8 Raymond stood beside her and bought himself a pair of hunting knives. They then took a taxi to the Gare du Nord. There Alice disappeared into the station lavatories, where she ‘had an opportunity to load the weapon’,9 and emerged to say goodbye. ‘It was during the anguish of the last moment’s separation as we embraced that I suddenly acted on impulse. Slipping the revolver between us, I fired upon him and then upon myself,’ Alice testified.

  The first bullet hit Raymond in the chest, narrowly missing his heart and lodging itself in his kidney. Alice’s second bullet hit her in the ‘lower abdomen’.10 The story made headlines the world over. ‘AMERICAN COUNTESS SHOOTS ENGLISHMAN AND SELF IN PARIS,’ shouted the front page of the New York Times.11

  When the news reached Idina she packed her bags. It was clear that Alice needed her in Europe, that is if she were still alive when Idina reached her, for both she and Raymond had been severely wounded. The single glimmer of light on this otherwise bleak horizon was that Joss agreed to come too.

  During the two months he had been back at Slains, Joss had been sloping off by himself from time to time. It was unlikely that he had genuinely ended the affair with Molly as abruptly as he had appeared to when Cyril had returned from Europe, but his willingness to rush away for several months – albeit to Alice’s bedside – suggested that it had cooled considerably.

  Idina and Joss left at the start of the April rains and reached England in May. They took Dinan to stay with Buck and his wife Diana, Dinan’s namesake, at their house on the De La Warr estate, the relatively modest Fisher’s Gate. The pretty, dark-red-brick and white-windowed farmhouse, even if generously sized, was more appropriate for a minister in a Socialist government than the ancestral home of Buckhurst. After two sons, Buck and Diana too had had a girl in the past year, providing a playmate for Dinan. And having installed their daughter in the Fisher’s Gate nursery, Idina and Joss could dash over to Paris to see Alice.

  By then both Alice and Raymond were out of danger but Alice, once she had recovered sufficiently, had been charged with Raymond’s attempted murder and had been moved to the women’s hospital section of the St-Lazare Prison – where she was much in need of visitors. Raymond, on the other hand, had been flown back to England to convalesce. From there he was making statements to the press that suggested the love affair was far from over. ‘“I told her,” he said, “that all was over between us but this decision is not irrevocable.”’.12

  Joss and Idina followed Raymond back to England and scooped up Dinan to take her over to Koblenz to see his parents. By the middle of May, Alice too was out of prison, albeit temporarily. She was allowed to retire to the French country estate of Fred’s still surprisingly understanding mother, ‘until in sufficiently good health to appear in court’.13 A month later Fred obtained a straightforward divorce in the Paris courts. He was granted custody of their two daughters. Meanwhile Alice, his now ex-wife, remained at his mother’s house, where her friends could visit her until she stood trial.

  With Alice and Fred settled, Idina and Joss returned to London. For a couple of months they had a chance to wind back the clock to their old, pre-Kenyan days. There they could dash around town together visiting friends, spend evening after evening in the theatre and go out dancing at their old haunts. It appeared to be very much a family visit. Joss’s grandfather died in July, which gathered everyone together for the funeral and brought a couple of changes to their lives. The first was that Joss’s parents became the new Earl and Countess of Erroll and he and Idina stepped into their shoes as Lord and Lady Kilmarnock. The second was that Joss came into the modest but not negligible sum of £300a year of his own.

  Although this eased the financial strain on their lives back at Slains, it also gave Joss a potentially dangerously liberating sense of independence. He was no longer reliant on his parents’ approval for money – and they had clearly come to approve of Idina. What Idina did not realise was that Molly Ramsay-Hill was in London too.

  Instead of Joss’s needing to drive for several hours to find her, never sure when Cyril might be in, in London Molly was just a few minutes’ cab ride away. At some point during these months, Joss and Molly settled upon a plan to marry and live in Oserian together.

  Idina and Joss returned to Kenya in September. Molly remained in London for a further month, arriving at Oserian in November. It was vital for the scheme that she and Joss had concocted that no suspicion of their affair should reach Cyril’s ears.

  Once back at Naivasha, Molly started entertaining lavishly at Oserian, her houseboys dispensing liquor from an especially designed and hand-painted bar underneath one of the house’s domes. Cyril was becoming annoyed with the Happy Valley crowd using his house as a watering hole and an incessant flow of ‘unwelcome guests who began drinking immediately after breakfast’, as he later wrote,14 and he failed to see through the cover that it was for his wife’s affair. The parties continued for six weeks. Then, on 17 December 1927, Molly took her husband into Nairobi to visit their solicitor, Walter Shapley of Shapley, Schwartze and Barratt. There, perhaps now slightly less enamoured of the house, he signed over ‘an undivided half share and interest’ in Oserian, ‘in consideration of the Vendor’s natural love and affection for his wife the purchaser and in consideration of Shillings Ten’.15 Molly had her half-share of the house and she and Joss were now ready to elope.

  But within less than a week, Alice stalled Joss’s departure. On 23 December she stood trial in Paris for the attempted murder of Raymond. Alice’s impassivity flummoxed the judge, ‘who seemed to think the pretty young woman did not quite realize the nature of her offense’16 and chastised her for leaving her children. ‘To leave one’s husband is perhaps understandable, but really, Madame, one has no right to leave one’s children like that.’17 Alice’s response was that ‘I was carried away by passion.’18 The judge was charmed. Alice was given a six-month suspended sentence for having committed a crime passionnel and fined four dollars for carrying a firearm without a licence. The verdict made as many headlines as the shooting: ‘Countess who shot lover and self gets off with $4 fine in French court.’19 And, having again shocked the world, Alice immediately and publicly set off to return to Kenya. Joss waited for her to arrive.

  Alice reached Kenya in January 1928 to what must have been Idina’s great relief. Idina’s antennae were more finely tuned than Cyril Ramsay-Hill’s and, even if she did not know the details of the transfer of the half-share of Oserian, she knew that Molly was clearly far more than a passing infatuation for Joss. It must have been becoming abundantly clear to Idina that it was only a matter of time before her ‘child’ left home for good.

  Alice’s reappearance, however, meant Joss and Alice started careering around the country together. With luck Joss would forget Molly, tire of Alice and then return to her.

  On one of his trips at the end of February 1928 Joss bumped into Tania Blixen in Nairobi. Less than a year earlier she had avoided his company and referred to ‘Idina and her current husband’.20 Now she seemed only too eager to see him and invited him out to her house for ‘a bottle’ that afternoon. Joss asked whether he could bring the notorious Alice. Tania readily agreed ‘and thereby acquired a tea-party that was really so comical that I lay in my bed that night laughing about it’.21

  Shortly before Joss and Alice were due to arrive, another car pulled up. This contained a pair of prurient Government House types and, wrote Blixen, ‘two really huge and corpulent old American ladies’ from a cruise ship moored in Mombasa. They had come upcountry ‘in the hope of seeing a lion’ but, squeezed into Tania’s chair
s, they immediately ‘started to discuss all the dreadfully immoral people there were in Kenya . . . and as the worst one of all, they mentioned Alice’. Blixen, mischievously, let the group chatter in ‘great detail about it’. Five minutes later Joss and Alice arrived. ‘I don’t think the Devil himself could have had a greater effect if he had walked in; it was undoubtedly better than the biggest lion.’22

  Not all of Kenya was as thrilled as Idina and Tania at Alice’s return. Lady Grigg, the wife of the then Governor, Sir Edward Grigg, was particularly horrified.23 Having made the headlines for almost a year, Alice was still being followed in the world’s press with ongoing speculation as to whether, having shot Raymond, she was now going to marry him.24 Her choice of Kenya as her refuge and her extremely public parading with Joss reinforced the London view that the country was little more than a love colony. Lady Grigg persuaded her husband to issue an order for Alice’s deportation.25 In March 1928 Alice was sent back to Europe.

  Within days Joss had decided that he, too, was going. A few weeks before on 20 February his father had died suddenly at the age of fifty-two. Joss was still cavorting with Alice in Nairobi over a week later. However, now that Alice had gone, his mother’s shock at his father’s death – she was apparently ill enough to be unable to attend the memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster26 – gave him a pretext, if not a need, to leave Kenya.