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  Idina was not included in the plans for the trip.27 It is not clear where she was on the day Joss disappeared from Slains, or whether he had even told her that he was leaving. But given that he had certainly waited for Cyril Ramsay-Hill’s absence hunting, it is possible that he also avoided seeing Idina face to face. If so, she would not have heard that her husband had finally left her until the scandal that was about to erupt had broken.

  Joss left Slains, drove down to Gilgil and boarded the train for Nairobi and then Mombasa. The train stopped at Naivasha, a long stop, for a meal. Joss slipped off the train and went to find Molly. Shortly afterwards the two of them slipped back on board. Molly was clutching a suitcase and a pair of first-class tickets for Marseille.

  At about exactly the moment that Molly was boarding the train just a few miles away, Cyril Ramsay-Hill returned to Oserian early from his hunting trip to find his wife gone. One of his servants explained to him that his wife had just left to board the train with Joss. Furious, Ramsay-Hill grabbed a pistol and raced to the station to discover that the train had already left. Calculating that he could still beat it to Nairobi station, he turned straight on to the Nairobi road and put his foot down. By the time Joss and Molly’s train had reached the city, Ramsay-Hill was there. As the train drew in, he ran on to the platform but dropped the pistol. ‘I had thought of killing him,’ Ramsay-Hill later wrote, ‘but a friend advised me that losing a wife was preferable to losing one’s life by hanging.’28 Instead he grabbed a rhino-hide whip from a waiting horse and carriage, asking, as he took it: ‘May I borrow your kiboko a moment? I’ve got to whip a dog.’

  As Joss descended, Ramsay-Hill collared his trusted friend and ‘in full view of the other passengers’29 whipped him. Then he let the man who had cuckolded him go. Bruised and bleeding, Joss rejoined Molly to continue their journey to London.

  This was a far greater scandal for the Kenyan administration than just another irritating story of adultery and elopement. A crucial socio-political boundary of colonial power had been broken. A large crowd of native Kenyans, all rooted to the spot by the spectacle on the station platform, had seen a white man humiliated.30

  Years later, when Slains had fallen into other hands, Idina would return for lunch and ask if she could spend an hour or two alone in her and Joss’s old bedroom ‘to remember the old times’. She would go in and shut the door. When she came out, glowing, she would declare it ‘Heaven, darling’ and saunter away.31 But, back in March 1928, at the moment Joss left in such a thick cloud of scandal, Idina had a hard truth to face. She was thirty-five years old and, for the second time in her life, a husband she loved had fallen for another woman. And this time she had been the one abandoned. The Wanjohi Valley without Joss, without Alice, without Fred and without any prospect that they might return, was suddenly a lonely enough place for Idina, too, to decide to leave. Three weeks later, just before she was trapped by the onset of the long April rains, Idina sailed for England, taking Dinan with her.

  CHAPTER 19

  IN LONDON IDINA WAS VERY OPENLY A CUCKOLDED spouse. The story of Joss’s horsewhipping was doing the rounds in England, to great delight. Determined to hold her head high, Idina went straight to Buck’s house, Fisher’s Gate, parked Dinan with her cousins and headed up to the fray in the capital, showing the world that she was still alive and kicking.

  She moved into Oggie’s new house in Glebe Place, a Chelsea street buzzing with artists’ studios, and within days she had rounded up a host of admirers and had embarked on a raging affair with one of the most sexually attractive – and active – men in London.

  Tom Mosley was to England what Joss was to Kenya: physically magnetic and a renowned philanderer. He was married, but his wife, Euan and Barbie’s old friend Cimmie Curzon, professed not to mind. Tom, Cimmie knew, would always come back to her. He was wealthy in his own right and lived in a dreamy, rambling Tudor manor house, Savehay Farm, in Denham, Buckinghamshire. Tom was very much part of Oggie’s crowd and, having been first elected a Conservative Member of Parliament, he was now a Labour MP and a close colleague of Buck’s; both were regarded by fellow members of the upper classes as ‘communists’. And in both cases the sense of danger this came with increased their appeal to the opposite sex – which they manipulated to their advantage.

  It was almost inevitable that, at some point in their wide-ranging sexual careers, Idina and Tom should sleep together. In any case, Idina owed nothing to Cimmie.

  On Saturday 26 May 1928 Idina drove down to the Mosleys’ for the extended bank holiday of Saturday to Tuesday, instead of the usual Monday. The need for discretion had subsided. Divorce had become common and some marriages, such as that of Tom and Cimmie Mosley, even seem to have found a certain strength in their open acceptance of sexual infidelity – if it wasn’t treated as serious, it somehow remained not serious.

  Even though Idina had already found a new admirer, she was not yet confident enough to turn up alone. She also knew that, given Tom’s reputation, it was unlikely that she would be the only flirtation he had lined up for the weekend. She arrived with Ivan Hay, Joss’s uncle.

  One of Idina’s rivals, who was slinking into Tom’s sight lines, was the twenty-three-year-old Georgia Sitwell, wife of the writer Sacheverell and now sister-in-law to the writers Edith and Osbert. Inspired by the literary circles into which she had married, Georgia kept a detailed and opinion-rich diary. When she arrived at Savehay that Saturday afternoon to discover Idina, her hackles rose: ‘Lady E [Idina was now Lady Erroll1] has been married 4[sic] times and is reputed to have had lovers without number . . . a fair heavily made-up face covered with blue-white powder, chic, empty; dissipated, hungry-looking spoilt and vicious. She has dyed hair and no chin but with all looks like a pretty chicken, the same colour, the same contours, the same consistency.’2 Fair or foul, it was, however, Idina, twelve years older than Georgia and with the experience behind her of all those husbands and lovers without number, who won the battle for Tom.

  On Sunday morning the dozen or so guests arose to the first baking-hot day of the year. After breakfast Cimmie Curzon produced an array of bathing suits. They changed with alacrity: ‘Tom evidently fancies himself very much in bathing shorts & displays with pride a sun-burnt muscular torso.’ Whereas another guest, the photographer Cecil Beaton, looked ‘dangerously thin in a bathing suit which hung off him in folds’. As for Ivan Hay, whom Georgia could not stand, partly through his arrival with Idina and subsequent failure to keep her occupied and away from Tom, he displayed an ‘enormous pot belly’. The party leapt into the river at the end of the garden and ‘shot the weir on rubber mattresses, very good fun’.

  Then, just as Georgia was emerging from the water, Idina appeared. She had risen neither for breakfast nor for the swimming expedition, thus implying that she had needed to recover from an active night before. Now, ‘she sauntered down elegantly at about 11.30, very chic in black and white chiffon’. Tom, parading his pecs and biceps, gave her his full attention until midday, when another car rattled up to the house and out stepped Irene Curzon. She had inherited the title of Lady Ravensdale and with it the nickname ‘Raveners’, and with her was Edith Baker, newly married to a scion of a banking dynasty known as ‘Pop’ d’Erlanger.

  Edith Baker was ‘very pretty and so young looking’. Tom started ‘trying it on with her’ straight away, wrote Georgia. This was a situation Idina could handle. She threaded her arm through Tom’s and chattered, giving ‘him as little opportunity as possible’ to pursue Edith. Edith was not, however, as much the ingénue as she looked. At twenty-eight she reckoned she could hold her own against Idina (poor Georgia Sitwell was now very much on the sidelines) and after lunch Edith Baker sat down at the piano and played. One guest sat ‘enthralled for hours’. It wasn’t Tom, but it was a male admirer and one was all it took to raise Tom’s competitive hackles. At the end of the afternoon some guests suggested an expedition to the boat club at Bray for cocktails. Idina announced that she would like to
go too and Tom started to follow her automatically, but as he did so Edith piped up that she needed to wait behind for her husband to arrive. ‘Tom was torn between the two,’ wrote Georgia, who ‘heard Cimmie in an aside say that she really could not choose between them for him’. In the end he stayed. So Idina remained too. And when the cocktail expedition finally returned at 9 p.m., Tom sat himself between the two women at dinner. As Tom flirted with Edith, her new husband ‘Pop’, sitting opposite, grew ‘angrier and angrier’. Pop could not cope with either Tom’s flirtation with Edith or the crowd of friends. He found Cecil Beaton mystifying, asking in an extraordinarily loud voice: ‘Is C.B. a fairy?’ Eventually Pop insisted upon driving Edith back home that evening instead of staying the night. The way was open for Idina.

  The following evening the house party was joined by the poet Stephen Spender, who ‘arrived from London looking beautiful’. Cimmie served cocktails as her guests unpacked the dresses her mother had worn as Vicereine of India before she had died twenty-two years earlier. They were ‘gorgeous beyond words being Edwardian, being for the Indian court, being for a Vicereine, & being for Lord Curzon’s wife. Yards of brocade, gold tissue, embroidery, tulle & every exquisite material imaginable.’

  Cimmie had planned that her guests should wear them at dinner that night. The waists were, however, only nineteen inches around. Georgia Sitwell alone managed to do one up properly: ‘It was torture but well worth it.’ The rest of the guests, men included, each chose a dress and clambered into it as they could. Cecil Beaton and Stephen Spender were ‘at their best in these fantastic dresses. Stephen had a wreath of artificial flowers in his hair & Cecil had picked every blossom from Cimmie’s lilac walk & stuck it either in his “bosom” or on his head.’ Tom abstained from the cross-dressing. Instead he matched the level of decoration by appearing ‘as a sort of toreador.’ At dinner he sat again beside Idina but, Edith Baker having been whisked away, Georgia found herself promoted to his other side. As the meal ended, neither woman moved. The three of them sat there discussing ‘young men’ until Stephen and Cecil rose, resplendent in their vicereinal attire, and ‘went through all their stunts’ until 3.30 a.m. The next morning Georgia left with her husband. Idina stayed on with Tom.

  Neither Idina nor her sexual appeal had diminished. However, the fallout of her split from Joss was far from over.

  While Cyril Ramsay-Hill finally divorced Molly, citing her adultery with Joss, Idina stayed in London, at Oggie’s, until the end of July, making occasional trips to Fisher’s Gate to see Dinan. Joss, too, was in England, checking into hotels with Molly under the pseudonym Mr and Mrs Hay. On 23 November he sailed for New York on the United States Lines’ Leviathan, also under the name of Hay instead of the now ignominiously whipped Erroll, and alone. On 24 November Molly followed on the Cunard liner Aquitania. Six weeks later, at the beginning of January 1929, Idina’s bankers in Kenya foreclosed on Slains. She did not return. Every brick and stick of furniture there had been put together for a life with Joss. That was over. Slains was put up for auction.

  The same month the Daily Express printed a lead article headlined ‘Earl’s wife as mannequin’.3 It claimed that Idina was about to leave London for the French Riviera, where the winter season was in full flow, to work as a mannequin for Molyneux. Her job would be to parade clothes up and down the catwalk at his morning and afternoon défilés for customers. This was no surprise, the Daily Express continued, as Idina had ‘a much-envied gift for wearing clothes attractively. It has been remarked of her that the simplest gown becomes distinguished when she puts it on, and a Paris dressmaker once offered to dress her for nothing if she would only wear his creations.’ It would be only ‘a minor excitement in a life . . . little hampered by convention’.4

  In 1929 the suggestion that Idina was about to become a leading model was far from flattering. Instead it implied that she had become so penniless that she needed to earn a living and that she was going to do so by displaying her body. The allegation was akin to calling her a prostitute. Idina, a woman who did not usually give a damn about what the papers said about her, sued.

  Joss then asked for a divorce so that he might marry Molly. Idina instigated proceedings. And, for the next six months, she was in and out of the law courts. It was during this time that Beaton photographed her. Idina, quite literally, sat on a mirrored floor. Her knees are bent, one foot tucked under her, the other extended to the side, her shoe pulling at the footstrap of her silk jodhpurs. Her arms fall by her sides, her hands, hidden in long chiffon sleeves, steadying her balance. Under her chiffon jacket she wears a sequin-embroidered vest, a single string of thick pearls around her neck. Her hair is short, coiffed in lacquered waves over her ears, around her face and across her forehead. She is looking to the side, and far into the distance, not even the glimmer of a smile on her lips.

  On 25 June 1929 Idina obtained a decree nisi from Joss ‘on the ground of his adultery with Mrs. Edith Mildred Mary Agnes Ramsay-Hill at an address in Sloane-street in April, 1928’. After a decade of exuberance Idina had reached a nadir. The sole comfort – apart from Dinan – was the settlement from the Express a fortnight later, which at least provided her with some money. In the summer of 1929 any money at all, it was felt, could be turned into a small fortune. For the past ten years, while the flappers had danced until dawn in city nightclubs and on country-house lawns, the stock market had climbed. All one needed, it was said, was a little capital and guts and nothing could go wrong. But two months after Idina’s life had hit this new bottom, the world’s stock markets too began to tremble and in late October 1929 Wall Street crashed. The Roaring Twenties, all their excess of money, music and mollifying liquor, and Idina’s Kenyan dream with them, had been reduced to a whimper.

  CHAPTER 20

  EVEN AFTER THREE FAILED MARRIAGES, IDINA STILL believed that she might find the right husband with whom she could make a life. If anything, broken-hearted as Idina certainly was by Joss’s departure with Molly, her marriage to him had shown that it was possible to have a dream life. But 1930 did not start well for Idina. In February Joss married Molly in London and the two of them returned to Kenya to live in Oserian – Ramsay-Hill gave up his share in the house. Six months later Idina’s mother Muriel died of tuberculosis. She had sold Old Lodge and all its contents to raise funds for the Labour Party and moved into a house in Wimbledon. As a last eccentricity, as she lay dying Muriel asked a friend, the society hostess Lady Cunard, to dine. Together they ate pâté de foie gras with shoehorns. Shortly afterwards Muriel died. She was only fifty-eight.

  Muriel left most of her money to the politically active Buck, ‘knowing he will make good and wise use of same’.1 Avie, who had originally been left £10,000, now found herself cut out of Muriel’s will; perhaps because she had recently left Stewart Menzies and eloped with a country squire called Frank Spicer who had inherited a substantial sum himself. Idina was left some money – not outright but as an interest in a Brassey family trust. The amount itself was tiny, £5000, and Idina could not even touch the capital but was entitled only to the income. Muriel had left more money, however, to Dinan – £20,000of the trust and the income from this to be used for her upkeep until she married, when the £20,000capital would become hers. Charles Gordon and Joss had already eaten their way through the £10,000of Brassey capital that Muriel had already given Idina. Giving the money to Dinan instead was a device that would prevent any future husband Idina might take from spending the rest.

  In the interim Idina and Dinan could together live well, especially if they went back to Kenya. Idina had no desire to live a single life on a farm several miles from her nearest neighbours, and three months after her mother’s death she married for the fourth time. Unlike her previous three Scotsmen, Donald Haldeman, sometimes known as ‘Squashy’, was the English-born son of an American shirt manufacturer. Divorced himself, he had been a white hunter leading safaris in Kenya for several years and, like Idina, adored the country.

  On 22 Novem
ber 1930 they wed in the register office in the small Sussex town of Steyning. Buck gave his sister away for the second, if not third, time and witnessed the marriage. The new couple then left for a honeymoon in the United States, whose press shivered with anticipation at the marriage of such an infamous woman to one of their own. ‘Idina has been the wife of two captains, an earl and now has become the bride of an American resident. All inside seventeen years and she’s still young and beautiful’ ran a widely syndicated story entitled ‘Love Failures of the Countess’.2 And after that, for the third time in just over a decade, Idina sailed to build a home in Kenya with a brand-new husband.

  Idina was clearly in love with Donald. And enough in love to think that this new husband was a man to whom she could be faithful – or to have no understanding of what Donald expected from marriage. Like Joss, Donald had been educated at Eton. Unlike Joss, he was not a compulsive womaniser, ready to wander off a moment’s notice. Quite the opposite: he was fiercely protective of Idina. For the sexually driven Idina to marry a protective husband was nothing short of folly.

  The plot of land Idina and Donald arranged to buy was not in the Wanjohi Valley – Happy Valley – but on the far side of ‘Chops’ Ramsden’s farm. It was up on the shoulders of a mountain whose peak rose between two broad wings that appeared to flutter in the haze of sun and mist and which the Kikuyu called the ‘Kipipiri’ – the Butterfly. The Kipipiri was lush, thick-forested and higher than Slains. Tall green bush and jungle sprouted from every inch allowed it and rustled with brightly coloured birds and belligerent beasts. Here the mist hung over the giant, dark-green leaves for most of the morning before the sun finally drove it off, yet, even at the height of the day, the peak of the Butterfly remained tinged with the purple stain of altitude. Idina decided to call the home she would build Clouds.