The Bolter Page 22
She was Dina to him. That was how she had introduced herself. It had been too long for ‘Mummie’. While ‘Mother’ had, of course, been taken by Barbie. Sitting beneath that Medusa’s head, into the dining room for pea soup, Dover sole and back again to the serpents, they ‘talked for three hours’.
Three hours was long enough for Idina to tell him about her farm in Kenya, where Heaven appeared to brush the earth. There was a lot to tell: trees full of colobus and leopard; bushes full of birds and rhino; zebra, elephant and giraffe, their tiny heads swaying tens of feet above the ground; the sun hovering in the sky; and the smell of life that has existed for millennia. However, the pure-white, starched tablecloth stretching between them, there was much about her life that could not be said. Instead, when the conversation needed to be nudged on, she asked him what he was reading at the moment.5
David had a copy of Herodotus in his pocket. It made him ‘long to go to the East and see some of these places of which H speaks’.
Idina had just come from Egypt. There she had floated slowly down the great river to temples where, at night, reverberated the echoes of three thousand years ago.
David sat and listened, entranced. He had inevitably heard some stories about his mother as the newspapers had followed the most recent of her messy divorces and remarriages. But now here she was in front of him, the temptress Eve, describing her life in the Garden of Eden itself with such a heartfelt passion that she seemed an innocent. And she was so unlike Barbie. She was, as he put it in his diary, ‘very sweet’. He knew already, he was quite ‘sure’, that this was the beginning of something, and they would be ‘very fond of each other’. He explained to her the future that he believed in. There the poor wouldn’t starve, sick children would see doctors and the self-interested capitalist class would cease to keep the working man down. And he told her ‘how the church alone can meet the needs of these people’.
Idina listened and tried to tell him that all is not black and white, there are shades of grey in this world. That if you burn bridges between yourself and the people you love, they are hard to rebuild.
But David’s views were deeply entrenched, and not to be overturned in a single afternoon: ‘She tried long and hard to persuade me not to go into the church, but her arguments were so shallow.’
Her arguments might not have worked that afternoon but, now she had found her son, Idina did not let go. Before they parted, she suggested ‘coming to spend a night in Oxford later’.
Three weeks later Idina arrived at Oxford and found David waiting at the station. They walked up the hill, along Broad Street and into Balliol. He showed her his room, of which he was very proud, and, as he later wrote, they ‘talked for hours’.
The next day he walked with her around the colleges. As Idina stepped along beside her tall, handsome son, her crêpe-sleeved arm slipped through his. ‘Though we do not agree on much,’ he wrote that evening, ‘I find her very easy to talk to.’ Idina clearly hung on her son’s every word.
At three o’clock David took her back to the station. She asked when she could see him again. He told her that he was off to work at a Boys’ Club camp and then he would go on a religious retreat. The next night he would be free, he calculated, was three more weeks away. Idina invited him to come and dine with her in the London flat she had taken, and to stay the night, just as if they were mother and son.6
David arrived in London on the morning of 9 July. It was, he later wrote, a ‘pleasant journey, dreadful day’. He had come straight from the Boys’ Club camp via a retreat at Canterbury Cathedral and had ‘too much to do all day’. He ‘hurried thro streets’ and, as he was dining with Idina that evening, ‘had to hire dinner jacket’. There were several hanging in the cupboards at his parents’ grand house in Mayfair’s Hill Street, where a vast mural by Barbie’s darling, Rex Whistler, dominated the hall. But he had not spoken or written to either Barbie or Euan since he had felt such ‘a terrible misfit’ in the middle of April, almost three months earlier. So he went to the gentleman’s outfitters Beale & Inman, on the corner of Bond Street and Grosvenor Street. He came out clutching a suit and, as he did so, the heavens opened, soaking him. His grandmother’s house was across the street. He could see the front door from where he stood. ‘Sad & wet & weak,’ as he later wrote, he rang the bell. ‘Afraid it was silly. Of course I found Mother there.’
Barbie loomed in the hallway. David was appalled to see her: ‘I was frankly sorry and thought it disastrous.’ By some unfortunate chance Barbie had been at that moment visiting her mother-in-law, with whom she found much in common, unlike Idina. She might not have seen David for three months, but she started by showing no sign of being pleased to see him now, as he recorded:
She was a little cold, very surprised, thought my clothes disgraceful. I had to tell her my plans. Quickly, boringly. She did not understand. I felt she never could . . . It is all horrible. Then I said re Dina. I saw she was hurt. So I asked her if she minded. And she said, in practice, yes. And I said how much more she was to me and I how I would never see Dina again and I suddenly found myself crying and we were in each other’s arms and I was glad and glad I went and I felt that a first step had been taken in healing the breach, we had come together a little though it was not over and we were divided. I must talk to her more, become intimate, and we may come to understand each other better again.
His eyes wet with tears, and having promised never again to see his real mother, Idina, David eventually prised himself from Barbie’s arms. As he had arranged, he went to Idina’s flat for the first, and now the last, time. Buck, his wife Diana and Avie were already there to see him. ‘Fun, nice seeing them again, they are sweet,’ David wrote. It was only after they all left that he could spend some time with Idina alone: ‘I had a long talk to her in my bedroom.’
David had a chance to tell Idina what he had been up to. How at the Boys’ Camp, designed for healthy outdoor pursuits and exercise, all the boys had wanted to do was ‘permanently to go into Swanage and stay there late at night’. How that, when it had rained for days on end, drenching every piece of camping equipment, he and his fellow Oxford undergraduates had tried to amuse the boys by giving ‘an entertainment . . . Pain and grief it cost us to compose it and it was as flat as a pancake.’ How he had been on retreat, spending a week digging potatoes and studying texts, with hours of prayer at Canterbury Cathedral: ‘I preached my faith to her.’ And how he had ‘become far clearer in my vocation since I last saw her’. And that ‘I now feel fundamentally that, barring some unforeseen change, I shall be ordained priest.’
Then he must have told her what had happened that afternoon in Grosvenor Street.
For, when he awoke the next morning, Idina had gone.
CHAPTER 23
IDINA HAD ONCE MORE BOLTED TO KENYA. SHE HAD perhaps been just as idealistic as her son in thinking she might be able to slot back into his life. But, however little Barbie might understand David, she had made herself his mother and had no intention of allowing Idina to share him.
David was, initially, perhaps too wrapped up in himself to think anything of Idina’s abrupt departure. But it seems to have had an effect. By the end of his morning alone in her flat, his religious fervour of the night before was beginning to waver. He had promised to spend a week helping in a religious order in south-east London but, as he ‘lunched alone at Dina’s [he] wished I had not said I would go’.1 Maybe she had shown him that the Church was not the only source of tenderness and love. He reached the Brotherhood of the Holy Cross that evening and ‘from the start it was disillusioning’. He spent the days walking ‘around the poor parts of the parish, ghastly poverty and squalor, God knows what inside, wretched children playing in alleys, nowhere else’. He was deeply shocked by what he saw: ‘Oh God it is intolerable.’ Then he returned to help out with the chores: ‘every sort and kind of work, garden labour in the boiling sun, washing up, sweeping rooms, dusting, helping cook, ironing, washing, all sorts’.
; When, as Barbie had demanded,2 he returned to the house his parents were renting in Sunningdale, the contrast of what he had seen with the luxury of his own life sent him reeling further:
How empty, barren, rotten this home life is . . . with all this artificiality, selfishness, utter blindness that cannot see or feel the needs of others and wallows in its slough[?], chucking away money that could be used to such good and they do not even lead a cultured life; it is not even[?] luxuriousness nor the nouveau riche blatancy, and it is utterly material and sensuous, Herod and Pilate, it cares for none of the finer things of life. It is incomparably worse than even the cultured self-indulgence of the intelligentsia. It is degrading beyond all words. I can not endure it. The worship of Mammon must always lead to inequality and division and strife and oppression. How cruel it is. Truly men’s hearts are hardened. Oh God . . .
Every day I feel the gulf widening between me and mother and daddy. We are poles apart. I never see them alone. They never make any advances to me. I have not for months opened my heart to them. I feel almost that I never could and they could not understand . . . It is all I can do to be polite to their friends. I am a Christian and a Socialist. They are pagans, hedonists, Conservatives (of what they’ve got). How can there be peace between us? I am bored by their silly gossip. I am probably dull and they could not appreciate the things that mean most to me. Some of them, I wonder if they have ever given a thought to Beauty, Truth or Goodness, never mind God. This society is rotten to the core and I hate it. These people stand for everything to the fighting of which my whole life will be dedicated.
What made David’s feelings all the more acute was that, unlike Idina, nobody at home appeared to want to listen to him.
Three days after he arrived at Sunningdale, David decided to talk to some people who might care about the same things as he did. He went up to London to spend a night on the Embankment with the crowds of down-and-outs. He ‘walked for miles and miles round London: Embankment, Fleet St, St Paul’s, St Martin in the Fields crypt and Strand’. Shortly after midnight he entered a ‘Salvation Army hostel at Blackfriars, not bad, large, fairly clean, rather smelly and hot, I hardly slept at all. Cup o’ tea and off again.’ He slept there for four hours and sat around for more, talking about the injustices of the world.
On Wednesday 25 July he decided to join his new friends. He packed a rucksack, took a train to Gloucester and set off ‘on the road’:
16 miles to Ross on Wye; very hot. To my surprise and delight was approached by several chaps on the way as a fellow tramp and we had a few words: I talking with a Scots accent when I could remember and clad in old shooting shoes, tan socks, corduroys, string, collarless blue shirt and P Robinson coat; having ‘A Sheepskin Lad’ Wordsworth’s selected poems given me by Chute, a handkerchief, knife and stub of pencil, a tiny crucifix, matches and a few Woodbines.
A week later Gee tracked David down to Worcester Cathedral. He fed his elder brother lunch and packed him into the car. They headed north. A hundred and eighty miles later they stopped for the night at a ‘farmhouse just short of Kendal’. There David found a sharp reminder about the extent of the troubles being faced by other people in the world: ‘Read old newspapers all about Austrian trouble. Ghastly story the murder of Dolfuss. I wonder what the Germans knew?’
They reached Kildonan at four the following afternoon, in time for a ‘Delicious tea and dinner.’ David had always relaxed at Kildonan. This time was no exception. He was back in the bosom of his family. Gee was there, to whom he could talk at length. With his stomach full, David’s rage against injustice began to soften.
But the next morning Barbie arrived. To what must have been her intense horror, when she saw David his skin was inflamed and breaking out in open sores.
The doctor arrived within the hour. He examined David and asked what he had been up to recently. David told him about the Embankment and his week sleeping rough. The doctor went back downstairs to Barbie in the morning room and told her that David had scabies, a mite infestation of the skin. It was highly contagious and all his clothes, towels and bedding should be boil-washed or burnt. It would take a week or two for the infections in his sores to subside and the rash to disappear. ‘I was popped into bed with my plague,’ wrote David that day, ‘where I remained covered with sulphur.’
The following morning ‘Daddy rang up v angry’, he wrote.
In his own diary for that day, Euan put his side of the story: ‘Barbie telephoned to say that David has got scabies as a result of sleeping in casual wards! Spent most of morning talking to Drs and decided to get him South tonight and put him in a home, where 4 days intensive treatment ought to cure it. We can’t risk,’ he added, ‘keeping him at K.’3
Euan could not. It was 3 August. In less than ten days’ time Kildonan would come into its own with the start of the grouse season on the Glorious Twelfth. Before that the house would fill with fifteen of his and Barbie’s guests and the servants they brought with them. If he remained at Kildonan, David would be either prowling the lawns and passageways looking like a leper or locked upstairs like the Monster of Glamis. But Euan’s greatest concern that day does not appear to have been his son. The time he had spent on David’s illness, he wrote, ‘ruined my chances of clearing up by 12 and going to lunch with Maureen and playing a round of golf after with Basil’.
Up at Kildonan, Barbie too, as it became abundantly clear,4 had not been happy with the prospect of David staying in Scotland. It was hardly surprising. Her three boys, Peter, Johnny and Billy, aged between seven and twelve, were running riot over the house: recently they had imprisoned poor Nanny Sleath on the top floor for a full three hours before she had been discovered.5 If David remained they could not be prevented from going in to see him and the darlings might then catch scabies.
Barbie ordered the rear seat of one of the cars to be covered in towels and loaded David in. As she did so, ‘after 2 agonizing failures’ David apologised and, perhaps thinking of Idina, asked if he ‘could begin again under a happier state of affairs’. Barbie looked straight at him and said ‘so sweetly, that all the while she had felt I was emotionally concerned with myself, self-centred, superior, uncongenial company, inverted snob, ignorant of life’. David fell back into the car, and drifted in and out of sleep. The following afternoon he reached London.
A skin specialist was waiting for him in the nursing home, and confirmed it was scabies. As he left, Barbie’s GP, Kirkwood, whom she called ‘Kirkie’,6 came in to talk to David. He ‘gave me a long lecture of how . . . class based on fundamental biological difference’.
David was in the nursing home a week while the rest of his family chased one another around the grounds at Kildonan. The one highlight of his arrival was a ‘charming’ nurse, ‘Miss Fenhall’. On his second day there the formidable Minnie Wallace turned up to visit David. After one glimpse of how her grandson gazed at Miss Fenhall, she had her ‘transferred to another floor’.
David found Miss Fenhall again. On Wednesday evening he dressed and ‘took Miss Fenhall to the Ballets Russes; we saw Senola de Ballo, Choreastium, and Contes Russes. I thought it one of the loveliest things I have ever seen.’ By the time he went ‘North on 8 o’clock’ sleeper two days later he ‘was quite sorry to leave the home. I am glad,’ he wrote, ‘I have met Miss Fenhall. I wonder what her Christian name is. I thought of asking her but did not dare.’
David returned to spend another six weeks at Kildonan. The days were spent shooting grouse or driving the party around in the bus Euan had bought for his guests and which the children had christened ‘George’. They played golf at the Turnberry Hotel, went fishing for mackerel and dug sandcastles by the sea. When it rained they went to Girvan, where Gee took his young brothers ‘to a most unsuitable film’, wrote Euan.
Apart from this, David and Gee joined in with the adults, though David still felt ‘a real goof here at times, dumb as a fish, I think (probably rightly) that others think me so too’. Some of Barbie’s friends David fou
nd easier than others. ‘Dinner then long talk in hall with Diana Cooper, who is I think very nice. She teased me a little before. I had rather wanted to work.’
But something in David had changed. One afternoon when everyone else was busy – ‘G a bad foot, Guy a cold, Mike a headache’ – David picked up ‘a most enjoyable book “The Legacy of Greece.” Particularly like Heath’s and Burnett’s and Gardner’s articles and Zimmern’s.’ The following evening another of Barbie’s girlfriends engaged him: ‘Quite an interesting dinner conversation with Nin Ryan on Greece.’ By the time he finished the book two days later he was smitten. Ancient Greek was, after all, what he was reading at Oxford, not God. He could immerse himself in Greece, sink into the people and politics and philosophy and let its waters close over his head. Two days later he picked up another book: ‘Hall’s History of the Near East. It is absolutely enthralling.’
David had found a new set of beliefs and way of life for which he could ‘live and die fighting’.
This new God Idina would be able to share.
By the time Idina reached Clouds that summer, Donald had been gentleman enough to have moved out, and she had the house to herself. Too much to herself. Not even Dinan was around, running in and out with the latest animal she had picked up to show ‘Mummie’.7 With Dinan had gone the stream of twenty-something governesses to chat to over dinner. Marie, however, was still there, still wringing her hands, still muttering, ‘Cet affreux Afrique’ as she tracked down Idina with the day’s domestic disaster. And there was her farm manager. But, in between dealing with whatever daily shaurie reared its head, doing her morning horseback barefoot rounds of the shamba and step-by-step trawl of the flowerbeds and lawns, Idina was very much alone. She had friends to stay and, in turn, went to stay with them. She went down to Muthaiga, she went to Mombasa, she went on safari. But with nobody to discuss her next plans for the garden, day-to-day life felt empty.