The Bolter Read online

  She needed to fill the gap. This time she decided to fill it with a boyfriend rather than a husband.

  Chris Langlands was a pilot who ran an air-charter service called the Blue Bird Flying Circus. He was athletic, blond, innocently blue-eyed and a few years younger than Idina. Chris had spent most of the year before, 1933, trying to persuade the enigmatic and profoundly sexually confident aviatrix Beryl Purves, now Markham (as she had become following her second and already defunct marriage), to marry him. Beryl had spent several months considering it. At the time Chris had been living with a couple called Grenville and Sylvia Temple on their dairy ranch in an arrangement widely believed to be a ménage à trois. Chris did have a job there – he was running the Temples’ milk delivery service – but he had also been engaged to Sylvia until the older, richer Grenville had appeared. When Chris told Sylvia that he had proposed to Beryl, the older woman invited Beryl to move on to the ranch too, hoping that over-exposure would cure the pair of them. It cured Beryl. One full moon Chris tried to impress her by showing her how he could land his De Havilland Puss Moth at night. He clumsily crashed it in front of her, and Beryl moved on.

  Chris cast around for another woman to pursue to distract him. He found one in the house of Idina’s arch-enemy, Lady Eileen Scott. The Scotts had their young niece, Alice, staying with them. Chris, both metaphorically and literally, swooped in in one of his aeroplanes and started to woo Alice. However, in the middle of this pursuit he accepted another charter to fly a friend of Idina’s up to Clouds. He landed the plane outside the house and clambered out. Idina sauntered across the lawn to greet her guest, took one look at Chris and – further incurring Eileen Scott’s wrath – invited him to remain for the weekend too. He stayed for two years.

  Chris’s arrival perked up Idina. They wandered off on safari, flying from camp to camp in his plane and when they returned to Clouds they started to work on the garden. At weekends they packed the house with their friends. Idina’s letters to Dinan from ‘Mummie’ started to include photographs of tents in the bush and the family pets beside the vast new series of ponds and waterfalls that were being dug along the edge of the lawns at Clouds, with Idina and Chris standing together – just like a married couple.

  Only they weren’t. Chris was the first man Idina had openly lived with without being about to marry. At the point at which she had broken up with Donald the idea of a husband had not been attractive. Living with a boyfriend had appeared the perfect way to balance her longings for adventure – and domesticity, which ‘Idina, fragile and frail’, yearned for. And, unthinkable when Idina had been born – even her father had bothered to marry twice more – in the mid-1930s people were beginning to live together.

  However, the reality of doing so was less easy than expected. Marriage, even to the four-times-married Idina, offered the promise of permanence, of looking after each other in the dreaded old age. A boyfriend, particularly a younger one living in a home that was very much hers, was disturbingly temporary.

  She suggested that they marry. Chris was far from sure that this was a good idea.8 The role of Idina’s fifth husband was not a compelling one. To aggravate the situation, Donald Haldeman might have moved out of Clouds, but he and Idina were not yet divorced and he remained on a trigger-happy warpath against any lovers of the woman who was still legally his wife. Eileen Scott’s niece Alice had rapidly recovered from Chris’s disappearance and married King George V’s third son, the Duke of Gloucester. She turned up at the Delameres’ house on her honeymoon, wandered into the drawing room and sat down only to be advised immediately to move to the other end of the sofa, out of range of the man with the gun in the tree outside: Haldeman waiting to shoot Idina’s boyfriends.

  Soon, far from prolonging their affair, Idina’s idea that she and Chris should marry destroyed it. By the end of 1936 he had moved on, leaving Idina alone again.

  It was not a good time for Idina to be alone. All around her the old Happy Valley set were sinking into a haze of drugs and alcohol. Kiki Preston had been generous with her supplies of morphine. Joss’s new wife Molly, who was desperately trying to give him a child and failing, was already racked by the addiction that would soon kill her. Idina’s friend Alice de Janzé, now Alice de Trafford, but again separated from Raymond, had also taken to regularly injecting herself with a silver syringe. Initially this had been to manage the pain of the operation she continued to need after the shooting. But, like Molly and Kiki, she now had a drug habit that was out of her control.

  The weekend parties with the old crowd were starting to become, even for Idina, a little unhinged. The ‘sheet game’ took a new turn. A sheet was strung up across the room. One gender would hide behind, a single representative of the other would grope, in a sort of blind man’s buff, to work out which of the figures on the other side was who, and select a partner. As cocktails were sunk, the game developed further. Holes were cut into the sheet. Hands, feet, elbows, noses were stuck through for identification. More cocktails were drunk. A new sheet was pulled across the room. New holes were cut. The men unbuttoned their trousers.

  At one party Derek Fisher, somewhat the worse for wear, agreed to be locked into one of Idina’s wicker laundry chests. By the time he decided he wanted to escape, everyone was too deafened by the gramophone and full of alcohol to notice. Eventually a young woman sat down on the chest and started to kick her heels against it as she chattered away. Derek, like all Kenyans, had a ‘bushman’s friend’ knife attached to his belt. He drew it and thrust it through the chest’s lid to attract attention. The blade went straight into the woman’s bottom and she ran out of the room screaming. Idina followed her to her bedroom and gave her some lint and plaster and a looking glass with which to apply the bandage before taking the sleeping pill she had with her. When, an hour or so later, Idina returned to check on her, she found the girl out for the count, a pool of blood on the floor, and the lint and plaster stuck, with great care, on to the looking glass.

  Idina decided she needed to find someone, anyone, to move in. Within weeks another young man, ‘Precious’ Langmead, came to make love to Idina one afternoon and found himself staying at Clouds. Precious, as it would soon become clear, was not a man with whom Idina would fall in love. For that moment, however, he would do. And then, as if to her rescue, came Idina’s old friend Rosita Forbes. In early 1937 she arrived at Clouds with her second husband, Arthur McGrath.

  By that time Rosita had published several books covering her travels in North Africa and the Middle East and been made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. She had first made her name in 1921 when, disguised as an Arab woman, she had been only the second Westerner to reach the oasis of Kufra in the centre of the Sahara. At the start of 1937 she and Arthur had decided to take advantage of the inflated London rents for the coronation year and let their house to the Maharajah of Jaipur before setting off to stay with Idina. They brought with them a letter from the Belgian Ambassador to London, who ‘prided himself on having “made the world safe for gorillas”.’9 The letter was addressed to the Belgian authorities in the Congo, instructing them to take Rosita, her husband and their friends gorilla-watching.

  Rosita, Arthur, Idina and Precious left for Rwanda, where, as Rosita describes in her book Appointment in the Sun,10 they climbed up into the forests and installed themselves in a government rest house to wait for the sighting of a gorilla. After a few evenings the news came that one had been heard crashing through the forest. They set off at dawn, much to Rosita’s disquiet, unarmed apart from a single rifle that ‘looked suitable for peppering rooks . . . So stringent were the regulations against killing the rare gorilla that the hundreds of spear men acting as beaters were warned not to use their weapons, except as a last desperate measure in self-defence.’ As they scrambled deeper into the forest a Belgian official warned them not to move if a gorilla charged them, ‘Then he may not kill you.’ By the time their party had caught up with the rustling bushes, Rosita was terrified.

 
; The expedition proved worth it. ‘The branches parted. Out came a delicious shaggy creature on all fours about the size of a Shetland pony. It looked kind and soft’ and was followed by two cubs, ‘exactly like nursery toys’. Then, suddenly, the father appeared: ‘a great silver-streaked male . . . stood upright and glared at us, beating his breast’. The four friends, obeying instructions, froze until, a few moments later, the silverback ‘dropped and shambled after his family’.

  After the gorillas they went deep into the Congo jungle, to meet a pygmy tribe. Finding the tribe was easy enough but the people were shy of the strangers and kept disappearing into the trees until Idina, even though deep in the jungle, somehow ‘produced ice out of a thermos bottle’. One of the men stopped to watch. Idina gave him a fragment of ice. ‘He dropped it as if it had been a live coal. But when he saw that we handled it with safety, he put it very carefully between two leaves and left it in the sun.’ Half an hour later it had vanished. The poor man fled ‘gibbering, into the tree depths’.

  That evening, back at their government rest house, ‘an inn consisting of a whole family of huts, large and small’ in the depths of the jungle, the party bumped into the society millionairess Edwina Mountbatten – the future Vicereine of India – and her reputedly bisexual sister-in-law, Lady Milford Haven. They were accompanied by a man known as ‘Buns’ Phillips. Edwina had inherited a vast sum of money. Once married, she had embarked on a series of affairs and had now vanished with her sister-in-law for several months. ‘We sat upon skin rugs and talked unceasingly. Except for our trousers,’ wrote Rosita, ‘it might have been a party in London.’ Idina, surrounded by the other women melting and perspiring in the heat, emerged from her hut for the evening looking ‘as if she had just come out of tissue paper’.

  Precious’s company on the trip, however, had been, Rosita noted, ‘rather a nuisance mid-river upon an inadequate raft’. When, on their way back to Kenya, the four travellers reached Uganda, Rosita’s husband left them to fly back home across the Sahara. Idina seized the moment and ‘discarded Precious’, enabling herself to finish the journey with just Rosita.

  In 1918 Idina had gone to Rosita when she split up from Euan. Now, just over eighteen years later, it was with Rosita there to provide encouragement that she decided that, this time, she would not be defeated by Barbie and would try to resume her relationship with David.

  She now had not seen him for almost three years and, although God had been replaced with a passion for Greek culture and history, David’s desire for political revolution had not abated. Whenever David went home he came face to face with a world that he believed, quite simply, to be wrong. The year before he had been arrested with two friends for shooting a policeman with an air-gun. The shot had come from the windows of the student house they shared in Oxford’s Beaumont Street. They were known as ‘rather an elite group of Socialists’.11 and the shooting appeared to be a form of protest. The policeman had been only slightly hurt and was therefore capable of telephoning for help. Within minutes, armoured cars and the Oxford police force had surrounded the house and the three young men were dragged out in their pyjamas at one in the morning. David saw again only too clearly that there was one law for the rich and another for the very rich: they avoided jail and, a few weeks later, he graduated from Oxford with a then extremely rare First Class degree. He also won a travelling fellowship from Merton College to go to Greece, where, in the late spring of 1937, he was living. Idina obtained his address and wrote to him, suggesting that she visited him there. David agreed.

  Shortly after returning to Clouds from the Congo, Idina left for Europe. She boarded the Marseille boat at Mombasa, left it at Italy, crossed from Brindisi to Piraeus and met David in Athens in early May. She bought a car for them to travel in – open-topped for the morning and evening, with a shade for the middle of the day. They clambered in and drove off.

  Side by side in the open-topped car they made an unlikely pair. David, never out of thick-rimmed glasses, looked intently serious, and Idina, tiny, bottle-blonde and short-skirted, beside him, looking almost young enough to be his utterly inappropriate wife.

  Their first stop was on the coast a few miles south of Athens, where a girlfriend of Idina’s, Balasha, was living with the author Patrick Leigh Fermor, then just twenty-two years old. Their house was a single-roomed watermill and the four of them camped together on the floor. By day they walked around packed local markets, Idina’s short skirt parting the crowd; by night they sat around having ‘extremely racy conversations.’12 It was one thing for Leigh Fermor to watch his girlfriend’s friend talk like this. It must have been quite another for David to watch his mother.

  After a week Idina and David left the couple and set off sightseeing. But by the time they had hauled themselves around half a dozen ancient monuments, each miles from the next, in the baking sun, they were at loggerheads.13

  David had inherited every ounce of Idina’s headstrong attitude as well as her easy charm, and at times the first could override the second. Idina’s attempts to find a modus vivendi for the two of them were not successful. David was not a young man she could flirt with. Nor was he either a biddable child or fully adult. He still saw the world in stark contrasts of black and white, refusing this time to take any criticism of Greece and believing his point of view to be the only one viable. Idina had to bite her lip. But she was not always quick enough. The dreams of both of a perfect filial reunion began to evaporate in the heat.14

  But something in Idina had changed. Maybe, now she was forty-four, it was her outlook on life. Idina perhaps now realised that if she kept moving on, she would reach nowhere. And, in any case, children, unlike husbands, could not be easily replaced. (David’s brother Gee had made it quite clear that he felt his loyalty lay with Barbie and his father and had not come to meet Idina in England.) Whatever it was, this time Idina did not fly away from her fallout with David. Instead she held firm. And, before she left Greece a month later, she had persuaded her son to come and see his sister Dinan when he returned to England later that summer.

  Dinan had also not had the easiest time staying with her Uncle Buck. It appeared that her parity of age with her cousin Kitty had, far from making them best friends, turned them against each other. The Christmas before, when Buck had taken his family to stay with Avie, Dinan had stayed on with her aunt when the others returned to Fisher’s Gate. The move, it appeared, had been a success. Dinan continued to make frequent trips to Fisher’s Gate to see her cousins in the holidays. For the rest of the time Avie had found a young French governess, Mademoiselle Ida Bocardo, universally abbreviated to Zellée, whom Dinan adored. And, to what must have been both Idina’s comfort and torment, Avie, who did not have any children herself, was bringing Dinan up as her own daughter. At least Avie was no longer bosom buddies with Barbie for, when Avie had left Stewart for her new husband, Frank Spicer, the two women had drifted apart.

  Idina took David down to Avie’s in August, in the vain hope that the two of them might find some bond. It was not obvious. They had met before. Euan and Buck knew each other through politics and Euan occasionally rented Fisher’s Gate from Buck. Buck had also, on two occasions while David and Gee had still been at Eton, persuaded Euan to let the boys come and stay with their cousins and sister (although clearly on the understanding that it would not be during one of Idina’s visits). Buck had even sent his own car and driver to pick the boys up and ferry them back.

  Dinan was now a shy eleven-year-old and David a twenty-two-year-old academic. In a group of two rather than six cousins, it was harder to see that they would get on. They had nothing in common apart from a mother they hardly knew. To David, one of five boys and educated in single-sex boarding schools from the age of eight, girls – as it was clear from his encounter in the nursing home with Miss Fenhall – were a foreign species.

  Somehow, however, perhaps driven by Idina’s determination now to pull her family together, or swayed by their mother’s delight at seeing the two of
them side by side, they managed to find a common ground. As Dinan later said, she had been ‘very fond’ of one of her brothers.15 And, for the precious two days of this visit, Idina was surrounded by two of her three children and could pretend that her life had never kept them apart. She had made mistakes in the past and run from them. Yet here, out of that very past and those very mistakes, were these two.

  At the end of August, Idina left for Oggie’s annual house party in Venice. She stayed for a couple of weeks and then wound her way back through Europe, reaching England again at the beginning of October. David had gone back to Greece to pursue his research fellowship, leaving Idina to spend the next couple of months visiting Dinan and both buying and equipping a car according to a list of detailed instructions that she had extracted from Rosita. And at the end of November, as the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere dropped, Idina persuaded a recently widowed girlfriend, Charlie Dawson, to accompany her, and they drove to Kenya – all the way home.

  The two women reached Lisbon alone. There Idina picked up a young man called Emmanuele. After a couple of nights together she asked him whether he felt like driving through the Sahara. He asked if his identical twin might come too. There was, Idina assured him, plenty of room.

  The party of four now crossed to North Africa. By the time they reached Alexandria, Emmanuele’s twin had given up all hope of making the same progress with Charlie Dawson that Emmanuele had with Idina, and left. The three of them headed south, camping, as Idina had done with Euan twenty-four years earlier, beneath the emptiness of the vast night skies. And, for Idina, now, the past must have been a relatively sweet place to look back to.