The Bolter Page 24
When they reached Kenya, Emmanuele followed her up to Clouds.
A few months later, in the autumn of 1938, David became engaged to a fair-haired, bright-blue-eyed former actress three years older than him. She was the daughter of tin miners turned tea planters, who divided their time between Calcutta and Essex, not far from Frinton. David had, however, met her in the café at the British School at Athens. Her name was Prudence Magor, known as Pru. Expected to follow her older sisters and become a debutante, Pru had run away from home at the age of seventeen to audition for a student place at the Old Vic in London – the theatre where John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier were playing their first lead roles. She won a place and called her parents from a telephone box with the news. They were horrified. But Pru was a tough negotiator. Eventually, over the course of the conversation they agreed to support her if, for the first twelve months, she lodged at the house of a woman they knew in Bayswater – a long bus ride from the theatre.
By the time she met David, Pru had toured the world with various theatre companies. The countries to which the stage hadn’t taken her, she had taken herself off to – further horrifying her parents by working as a salesgirl in dress shops to earn the money for her tickets. She was now living in Athens, studying to be an archaeologist.
It is said that men marry their mothers. Yet David was a man with two mothers. The woman he chose to marry, however, was certainly not like Barbie. Pru and she would not, as it became clear, get along.
On his wedding day in London in January 1939, his other mother sent him a telegram: ‘My thoughts with you, all love and happiness to you both. Dina xx.’ And then, as if in response, two months later she herself married again – for the fifth time.
Idina’s new husband was, in Rosita’s words, ‘a delectable pilot’.16 His name was Vincent Soltau, but he was universally known as Lynx ‘because he had the eyes of a lynx when flying’.17 In the wedding photograph that Idina proudly sent to David, he appears to bear an uncanny resemblance to Euan Wallace.
They married near Lynx’s RAF base in Mombasa. After the ceremony they held a small lunch at the Mombasa Club and posed for their photograph on its wide, white wooden steps outside: for this moment, Idina’s life appeared complete again. She had children, a husband and a beautiful farm in the wilds of Africa – both domesticity and adventure.
Then, towards the end of 1939, six months after her marriage, as it had long been threatening to do, war came again. Non-troop travel ground to a halt. Mail sank to the ocean floor. Kenya and Europe were once again thousands of miles apart.
CHAPTER 24
WHEN THE WAR STARTED, IDINA STAYED UP AT CLOUDS. She had by now built up one of the strongest Guernsey herds in Africa. She kept them breeding, calving and being milked, sending great churns rattling down the hill to feed the troops and their support staff. During the week she ran the farm, at the weekend she entertained, trying to keep everyone jolly while the world tore itself apart.
In the middle of 1940 Lynx was moved from Mombasa to Cairo. From there back to Clouds took two days’ flying: Cairo to Khartoum, Khartoum to Kisumu on Lake Victoria. Each flight involved waiting around for a seat that wasn’t prioritised to somebody else, then for the plane itself to be working and then for the fuel. The trip could take several days and, even when Lynx reached Kisumu, it was another long day’s drive down to Gilgil and up the hill. And for Idina to find the spare seats to take her up to Cairo was near impossible. Lonely at weekends, Idina started to travel up to Muthaiga. The club was no longer waiting for Race Week for its parties. Every weekend there was a band and a dance, the floor packed with young officers, most of them Air Force, who had driven from Kisumu and Mombasa desperate to have a good time on what might be their last night out. But Lynx wasn’t there.
Idina spent the evenings on the dancefloor, careering from one pair of young arms to another, gathering up invitees for a weekend at Clouds and, at the end of the evening, tripping up the wide stone staircase, her fingers, with their dark-red nails, entwined with a younger hand.
Joss was at those parties too. A couple of years earlier, in 1938, he had embarked on an affair with a woman called Phyllis Filmer. Phyllis was, like Idina, petite and large-breasted with short, blonde hair. She was the wife of the local managing director for Shell and lived in the company house, which was just around the corner both from Muthaiga and therefore close to the bungalow by the club into which Joss and Molly had moved at the start of the year. The move from Oserian had been prompted by two reasons: Joss’s career in the Kenyan Legislative Council, and the need for the ailing Molly to live nearer to medical care.
Drugs and alcohol had killed Molly in the first few days of the war. Joss had not, however, proposed to Phyllis. He had joined the Kenya Regiment as a second lieutenant and had been rising through the military ranks. In June 1940 he had been made Staff Captain to the East Africa Force, soon becoming the Force’s Assistant Military Secretary. And although he continued his affair with Phyllis, it was not an exclusive arrangement. He swanned around Muthaiga’s dancefloor, a widower who could make some lucky woman his third Countess of Erroll.
Phyllis, besotted by Joss, accepted her new role as the woman he was unfaithful to until a month or so before Christmas 1940, when she was suddenly replaced by a recent arrival to Kenya, Diana Delves Broughton.
The young Diana had been married to her fifty-seven-year-old husband, the wealthy Sir Jock Delves Broughton, for all of a week when they reached Kenya in November 1940. Jock came from a grand farming family in Cheshire and had acquired land in Kenya under the 1919 Soldier Settlement Scheme. Ostensibly he had now come out to farm it and produce food for the troops.
Delves Broughton was Diana’s second husband. Her first marriage, to a man called Vernon Motion, had been made under the mutual misconception that the other was wealthy. The union had barely lasted a fortnight and Diana had resumed work by day as a model in a London fashion house and by night at a cocktail bar just off Berkeley Square, called the Blue Goose and a happy hunting ground for rich men. Diana was a woman who knew how to make the most of herself. She dyed her mousy hair a bright blonde, applied her lipstick with expertise and learnt how to walk across a room. She had started off as Delves Broughton’s mistress, and he had installed her in a cottage in the grounds of the family stately home, right under his former wife’s nose.
While they looked for a house to rent, the Delves Broughtons had moved into Muthaiga. They hosted a large dinner to introduce themselves and began settling into Kenyan life. Almost immediately Joss started an affair with Diana. At first they were reasonably discreet. Joss used the cover of being an old friend of Delves Broughton’s. Then Diana started finding excuses to slip away from her husband for a couple of days. But by early January 1941 both Joss and Diana no longer appeared to care. They clung to each other for hours at a time on Nairobi’s plentiful dancefloors – any venue with the space had drafted in a band to satisfy the wartime frenzy for a good time. Jock Delves Broughton, however, was not having a good time. While his new young wife danced with one of his friends, he sat to the side, drink in hand and a sad smile on his face. By the middle of January he had almost ceased to bother to go out with Diana, remaining at home.
On the morning of 24 January 1941, Joss was found slumped in the footwell of his car near a crossroads a few miles outside Nairobi. His arms and legs were tucked beneath him and there was a patch of congealed blood behind his ear, and more flecks of blood were spattered across the windscreen. He had been there some time and his corpse was beginning to stiffen.
He had been killed by a bullet that ‘passed inwards through the soft tissues of the neck, and passed between the first vertebra and the base of the skull, through the medulla of the brain from left to right and out of the spinal canal . . . The bullet [was] in two parts in the ligament attaching the vertebra to the base of the skull, lying in a mass of blood clot underneath the skin.’1 Death would have been ‘instantaneous’.2
Joss had been
murdered.
Idina was at Clouds when she heard the news. She leapt into her car and pounded up the road to Nairobi and into Joss’s bungalow by Muthaiga. The week before, Diana had been wearing the exquisite Erroll family pearls. These were the only heirloom that Dinan might ever receive from her father and Idina did not trust Diana not to steal them too. She walked in and searched for the necklace. It was not to be found.3
Idina returned to Clouds in what must have been a state of both grief and anger. She and Joss had remained friends, seeing enough of each other to keep her affection alive. And she had still been enormously fond of him.4
Idina was not alone. After seventeen years in Kenya, Joss had had affairs with many of the women there, nearly all of whom had retained a soft spot for him. Barely a female eye at Muthaiga was dry. Alice almost immediately again attempted suicide by taking an overdose of pills. And then, fifteen days later, when Idina had hardly had a chance to dry her eyes, she received a cable from Buck that sent her reeling yet further: Euan, too, had died.
When Winston Churchill had become Prime Minister in May 1940, Euan, who had served as Minister for Transport in Neville Chamberlain’s wartime Cabinet, had been devastated by Churchill’s failure to keep him on in his new Cabinet. Longing to return to a senior government post, Euan had turned down a peerage but accepted a job as Senior Regional Commissioner for London. He had then spent several months secretly building up a supply of coffins and burial grounds for the deaths that they expected to come with the Germans’ impending aerial bombardment of London. At the end of the summer it had come. BLITZKRIEG, Euan had scratched in red ink at the top of his diary page. Every evening after that he listed, in red, the numbers killed and, in blue, the numbers wounded in the previous twenty-four hours. Each one, he felt, it had been his responsibility to keep alive and safe.
In October he had begun to lose his appetite. On a trip back to London from Athens – where they were working in the British Embassy – Pru and David had had dinner in a nightclub with Euan. Euan, Pru remembers, uncharacteristically refused pudding, saying that he hadn’t been feeling so good recently and had ‘a bit of a stomach ache’. It was the first time she had ever heard him complain of being ill. But by the end of the month, after eight weeks of bombs and several thousand deaths, Euan collapsed. The doctors told Barbie that Euan had stomach cancer. She had decided, as was the custom then, not to tell him that he was dying. For three months he believed he was recovering and would soon be back at his post.5 On 8 February, in a haze of pain-relieving morphine, he had finally closed his eyes.
Euan had been forty-eight – too young to die. And Joss had been even younger: thirty-nine. Unlike the relationship Idina had enjoyed with Joss, there had not been a trace of amiability between her and Euan since their divorce. Once Idina’s decision to leave him was final, Euan had not wanted to hear her name mentioned again. Married to Barbie, he had started a new life.
Now Euan was dead, taking with him any lingering wonder at the life she might have had. In theory, his death should have closed a chapter for Idina that had been open too long. But he, as well as Joss, had been the father of her children. All three of them, David, Dinan and Gee – whom she had not seen for over twenty years – had now become fatherless within a fortnight. Idina, trapped in Kenya by the war, was frustratingly and upsettingly unable to do anything to help them.
It took another month for the police to make an arrest for Joss’s murder. The story continued to give rise to salacious headlines, about which, back in England, Avie and her husband Frank Spicer were doing what they could by carefully cutting them from the newspapers before they reached Dinan at the breakfast table. But Dinan saw the news in the complete versions sitting on the counter in the village shop. And, when an arrest was made, the suspect was not some highway robber, but Diana Delves Broughton’s husband, Sir Jock.
There was something particularly tragic about the idea that this sad old man might have been driven to such misery that he had murdered someone as young and vibrant as Joss. And this was the beginning of a serious decline for Idina. She was shaken enough to try to cross a war-torn Africa in search of a few days’ consolation from her husband. And she drove to Kisumu airfield to see if she could cadge a lift north to Cairo, and Lynx.
Cairo was to the Second World War what Paris had been to the First. It was a city held by the Allies but surrounded by battlefields. Six months earlier there had been a few thousand troops in the city. Now there were thirty-five thousand – in every Allied denomination and all in search of diversion. The shops were full, Groppi’s café was still roasting its own coffee and the white-gloved waiters at Shepheard’s Hotel were filling glasses with wine and champagne. In the spring of 1941, however, when Idina arrived, the city was welcoming a new flood of immigrants from the Balkans and Greece. The accommodation, cafés, restaurants, every facility, were straining at the seams and the heat was steadily rising. The hot khamseen desert wind and dust were suffocating the streets. And Lynx was immersed in airforce activity. After a few lonely days in the bar at Shepheard’s Idina decided to return to Kenya for Jock Delves Broughton’s trial. She had in any case promised to accompany the still-suicidal Alice to the courtroom to watch. On her last day in the city Idina went to join the long queue in the bank to withdraw cash. As, after the best part of an hour, she reached the front, she heard the woman ahead of her give her name to the cashier: ‘Mrs David Wallace.’6
Idina approached the woman. She turned to face Idina. It was David’s wife Pru and, to what must have been Idina’s great joy, she was heavily pregnant. Pru had been evacuated from Athens, where she and David had been working in the Embassy. She had sat in a small boat rocking its way out of Piraeus harbour, clutching a white Moses basket filled with things for her unborn child. So many bombs had fallen so close to the boat that she was frankly surprised to have made it to Cairo alive. But she didn’t yet know where David was, or whether he would reach her before the baby came. It was a big baby, she had been told. And it could arrive any day. She would tell David, when she saw him, that she had seen Idina. Then Idina watched her daughter-in-law turn firmly back to the cashier. Pru didn’t suggest that they stopped for a coffee or meal, or even exchange addresses in order to meet another time. She was, Idina could see, just managing to cope with survival and impending childbirth in this strange, hot, dusty city. It was quite clear that she didn’t need or want to deal with anyone else too.7
Pru certainly didn’t. As she later said, she already had one tricky mother-in-law, Barbie, back in England. The last thing she wanted then was another to deal with. Especially one who had not only abandoned her husband as a child but who, as far as she could see, would now do neither him nor the child she was carrying any good whatsoever,8 as both the murder of one of her husbands and her own dissolute lifestyle were being plastered over the world’s press.
It was Idina’s turn at the cashier. She walked forward, withdrew her money and headed off to the airfield to see if she could find a flight home. Her first encounter with her daughter-in-law had not been promising. Idina being all too aware of the extent of a wife’s influence, Pru’s coldness can hardly have filled her with hope of seeing much of what would be, once born, her first grandchild.
Idina returned to Kenya to find not just Alice but also Phyllis Filmer in a state over Joss’s death. Phyllis’s husband’s unsurprising inability to sympathise with her on this had finally cracked their marriage and she needed somewhere to live. Idina invited her to move into Clouds until she had somewhere else to go. She stayed for four years.
The trial began on 26 May. Idina, Alice and Phyllis turned up each day, dressed up to the nines. They sat in the gallery and hung on every word of evidence given, their eyes burning holes in the back of Diana’s neck as their lives were pored over, scribbled down by court reporters and wired back to the London and New York press. Regardless of who had actually pulled the trigger, as far as Idina was concerned, it was Diana who had killed her darling Joss.
Idina’s once Happy Valley was now truly over.
The war, however, was not. Idina and Phyllis settled into being their own land army, running the farm during the week and, when they didn’t have friends up to stay, still careering down to Gilgil and Nairobi for weekend dances. From time to time Lynx came home on leave but the gaps in between his appearances lengthened. Idina filled the emotional vacuum that followed this cascade of painful and violent deaths of people she loved; she was vulnerable enough to need to.11 And she became increasingly indiscriminate in her choice of lovers, as if flailing around for reassurance. Precious Langmead, for one, started walking over again in the afternoons. And when Precious couldn’t make it, Idina invited up the airmen she met at dances.