The Bolter Page 9

  This was devastating news for Euan and Idina. Their plans for a riotous four months together were dissolving before their eyes. If this doctor was right, Idina would be stuck in bed and Euan would be alone in Cambridge. Clearly desperate to rescue the situation, Idina refused to accept his recommendation. And when he left, she got out of bed.

  That evening Idina went out with Euan. They dined at the Berkeley Hotel and went to a show called Nothing but the Truth, which Euan thought ‘most amusing’. For three more days, darting here, dining there, she kept up the pace. On Sunday morning they went to church at the chic Chapel Royal at the Savoy, and then took three friends to lunch at the Ritz. That night they dined at Claridge’s again and, the theatres being closed for Sunday, had ‘a small party’ afterwards at Connaught Place, ‘some people playing Poker and some singing’. And on Idina went.

  Two days later Idina and Euan ‘motored down to Sandhill to see the children’. They left at ten-thirty and ‘got there before one’. Almost as soon as the car stopped the boys came bounding up, ‘both looking very well and in good form’. The straight-haired David, at three and a half no longer a baby at all but very much a boy, was growing lean and stretched, old enough to chatter nineteen to the dozen. A year younger, Gerard, his head a mass of fair curls, still had legs fat enough to make him lollop from one side to another as he ran. Idina and Euan stayed for two hours: time for nursery lunch and a romp around the lawns. At three-fifteen they left in order to reach London for the evening as a couple of friends were coming to dine.

  After five hours of windswept motoring along country lanes at full tilt, Idina lasted through dinner and then, already dressed to go out, hair up, gown to the floor, white arms bare, she sank. Euan stood clutching four tickets for the theatre that night. ‘Dina,’ he wrote, ‘felt too tired to go, so I picked up Barbie and she filled the vacant seat.’

  Idina stayed in bed on Wednesday morning. Euan, ebullient after his evening with Barbie – ‘awfully good play’ – went out to a lunch party at Dorchester House in Park Lane, the home of Stewart’s stepfather, the multi-millionaire Sir George Holford.

  After lunch Euan went up to St John’s Wood to play tennis with Barbie. The rest of the day in his diary is blank.

  On Thursday Idina hauled herself out of bed again. She went with Euan to dinner at a friend’s house and then on to Carmen at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. In the second interval, her legs buckled. Euan, missing the climactic last act, ‘brought her away’.

  The following day was Good Friday, a bank holiday. Idina was still unable to get up after the night before. Avie entertained Euan and that night the two of them dined quietly together at a supper table set up at one end of the drawing-room ‘as Dina went to bed, feeling rotten again’.

  By Saturday Idina had agreed to Dr Beecham’s ‘small’ operation. It was booked for Monday morning, requiring Idina to go into the nursing home the night before, Easter Sunday. Once this had been fixed she hauled herself out of bed and spent the morning out shopping with Euan in the Calcott. They went back home to have lunch with a couple of friends and then afterwards, as Idina lay down to rest, Euan climbed back into ‘the little car’ and headed out of London. He and Idina had been invited to a weekend Easter house party. Even if Idina could not go, he did not want to spend the holiday weekend kicking around an empty London with a sick wife. He drove off.

  The operation was postponed. Idina, sitting alone in Connaught Place, called Euan’s house party just before dinner. And at noon the next day he scooped Idina up from Connaught Place and took her to a family lunch at 24 Park Lane. Avie was already there. She needed, she said, a fourth man for tennis that afternoon. Euan volunteered. After lunch he and Avie dropped Idina back home and headed up to St John’s Wood. Barbie was waiting there.

  Euan didn’t see Idina again until Friday. He went from the tennis courts to the Ritz to the sleeper for Glasgow without going back to see his wife before he went away.6 When he returned on Thursday evening he went straight out to the Ritz, with another man, Avie and, of course, Barbie. The four of them went on to a show, The Boy, ‘which was excellent again’. Euan then came back to Connaught Place. But he didn’t go up to Idina. Instead he dashed up to the first floor, picked up the gramophone, carried it back out to the car and drove to Barbie’s new house in Montagu Street, just the other side of Marble Arch.

  Barbie still lived with her parents. The Lutyens family had, until a week or two previously, been living in a vast house in Bloomsbury’s Bedford Square. However, financial pressures had forced them to sell and move on – in this case far closer to Park Lane and Mayfair and the fast set to which Barbie yearned to belong.

  Barbie had the house more or less to herself. Her mother had taken the younger children to Shropshire to escape the bombs. Her father meanwhile was spending most of his time during the week in London with Idina’s cousin, Lady Sackville,7 and every weekend at her Sackville ancestral home of Knole – a palace of seven courtyards, fifty-two staircases and 365 rooms. This left Montagu Street empty and a perfect venue for an impromptu party.

  Euan set up the gramophone and the four of them ‘danced till 12.30 am’.

  The following day, Friday, was Euan’s last before going up to Cambridge, and one of Idina’s greatest girlfriends came to tea. Eva Belper was godmother to Idina’s elder son, David. She was just a few months older than Idina, and the two women had been ‘out’ as debutantes at the same time. They were both from industrial dynasties (Eva’s family had discovered vast coalfields under their Glamorganshire estates) who had become Liberal politicians and then peers of the realm in the new industrial aristocracy. However, within a couple of months of Idina’s launch into society, Eva had married. Her husband was Algernon Strutt, the eldest son of the 2nd Lord Belper and another scion of a Liberal political dynasty that had risen from an industrial fortune. Shortly before the war Algernon’s father had died and Algernon had succeeded him as the 3rd Lord Belper. Algernon and Eva’s marriage was not, however, running smoothly. After six years together, over half of these before the war, there were still no children. The two of them were heading, slowly and steadily, towards divorce.

  Through all this Idina and Eva had remained close and, after Idina had wandered back upstairs, Eva stayed and ‘talked’ to Euan ‘for half an hour’. That night Euan went out again with Avie, Barbie and another man and ended up at Barbie’s house, where, with the slight thrill of being servant-free, ‘we made some supper & danced & played the gramophone’. The gramophone was Euan and Idina’s, which he had installed in Barbie’s home. ‘Stayed till nearly 2 am,’ he wrote.

  Sometimes it is not what is recorded in a person’s diary that counts, but what is not. Idina’s operation was on 8 April, two days after Euan left for Cambridge. The operation went well and Euan scribbled at the end of the page in his diary: ‘Heard Dina alright after op.’ But Idina did not make a rapid recovery. She remained bedridden and needing daily ‘treatment’ by a physiotherapist called Mrs Rigden to try to dislodge the infection from her lungs. And as she lay in that again near-empty cavern of Connaught Place, she seemed slowly to slip out of her husband’s consciousness.

  Euan came back to London from Cambridge every weekend. On a Saturday night he had an early dinner in his college, Caius, and then caught the 9.10 p.m. train to Liverpool Street, arriving just after 11.30. The first Saturday, Avie met him at the station and whisked him straight to Barbie’s house, ‘where an informal party lasted till pretty late’. Euan eventually reached Connaught Place in the early hours, long after Idina had fallen asleep, and he crept into his dressing room to sleep. He then appeared in Idina’s room for breakfast the next morning, ‘at 8.45’. But she was still indisputably an invalid.

  After an hour Euan left. Idina had to lie there and watch him go. It was inconceivable that she might ask him to stay longer with her when he had so little time to enjoy himself. Stuck in bed, Idina was powerless to do anything but watch her husband dash out of the house to keep
up with his new crowd of lively young girls.

  Euan went to visit a cavalry colleague of his, Viscount Ednam, the eldest son of the Earl of Dudley, who had been invalided home and was coming out of hospital that morning. He and Avie drove around to Eric Ednam’s family’s townhouse to join the party to welcome him back and listen to his ‘thrilling account of the Brigade in recent fighting’. Eric had an audience of half a dozen: Euan, Avie, Barbie, Cimmie Curzon, the younger, beautiful sister of Irene, and Eric’s sister, Morvyth Ward, who called herself ‘Dickie’. Dickie was a statuesque English beauty with well-defined features and a well-defined sense of have-a-go fun. That night Euan rounded up a couple of other officers on leave and took all the girls out to dinner at Claridge’s before catching the train back to Cambridge.

  The next Saturday was Euan’s birthday. After ‘a bottle of champagne for dinner to celebrate’ at Caius, he again caught the evening train to London, ‘came by tube from Liverpool Street to Marble Arch’ and, instead of walking fifty yards east to Idina in Connaught Place, turned north to Barbie’s house, ‘where Avie and Barbie had a small party lasting fairly late, which was great fun’.

  He had breakfast in Idina’s room the next morning, the news of what he had been up to inevitably revealing how much he was enjoying being caught up in his new gang of her younger sister’s friends.

  But this Sunday, at least, it was ‘raining like the devil’, wrote Euan. For once he stayed in. Idina started to spend a precious morning with him. But it was a short morning. By lunchtime Barbie had dropped in.

  Euan then vanished. He went out to lunch with another crowd and Barbie came back at teatime with Avie, Dickie and three or four others: ‘they played piano and danced and sang till after 6!’ Idina meanwhile was upstairs, again being pummelled by the brutal arms of Mrs Rigden.8

  The following weekend Euan again went ‘to Barbie’s’ for what had become ‘the usual Saturday evening party’. The next morning, Sunday, he awoke at ten, immediately ‘did some telephoning’ and was at Barbie’s house at eleven. That night, when he left the gang’s Sunday-night dinner at Claridge’s halfway through to catch the train back to Cambridge, ‘Barbie came to see me off’.

  This weekend there was no mention of Idina.

  Barbie was beautiful, interested yet tantalisingly unavailable. She wanted a rich husband, not a rich lover. Fooling around in bed with a man would not guarantee her position in society. Misbehaving in that way was for the girls who did not have to make her journey up the social ladder. And while Idina lay in bed and Barbie kept herself just of reach, Euan began an ‘Edwardian friendship’ with somebody else. According to the Edwardian mores with which both Idina and Euan had been brought up, having a passing affair with a married friend was accepted behaviour. However, the new wartime morality had stretched this to ‘friendships’ with single girls. While a single girl might not risk pregnancy by having full intercourse, it still left open a wide field of sexual behaviour.

  Ten days later, in the second week of May, Euan received a letter from Dickie Ward inviting him to Dunkeld, her family’s sporting estate in Scotland, for the coming long bank-holiday weekend. Dickie was not as beautiful as Barbie but she was both attractive and lively and, unlike Barbie, was totally socially and financially secure. Her father was an earl and her family was in possession of not only, like Euan, a vast coal-mining fortune but a country home regarded as one of the very finest houses in Europe. Witley Court in Worcestershire was a palace. Dickie’s grandfather had reputedly spent more money on the house than had been spent on any other home in Britain or even in Europe. It had one hundred bedrooms and endless columns, sweeping staircases and balustrades linking them. Its gardens were laid out in great vistas of fountains and marble statues. An invitation to Dunkeld was not an invitation to Witley. But it was a first step along the way.

  Euan rang Avie that morning to ask if she would, in effect, chaperone him. She ‘said she would decide by tea-time’. When she agreed Euan proceeded to telephone Idina. This was his first mention of her in his diary for three weeks and it would be the last for another three. He told her that he would not be coming home for his leave after all.

  It was not Idina’s style to protest. She was clearly still proud and it was not the done thing to play the possessive wife – indeed it would have been humiliating to have done so.

  On Friday 17 May Euan and Avie boarded the early-evening sleeper to Scotland. They reached Dunkeld at seven-fifteen the next morning and were met at the station by Dickie and Barbie in the car. On reaching the house they changed and walked over to the stables. By mid-morning the four of them, and another man, Ralph Burton, who was also staying, were riding out with a picnic lunch. For three days they lived the old, pre-war life. They went for ‘glorious rides over the hills’, fished and swam in the River Tay, played furious tennis on grass and hard courts, booby-trapped one another’s bedrooms and took the gramophone outside after dinner, danced until the early hours and bonded themselves in a group that Euan tells us they named ‘the Black Gang’. On Euan’s last day, Monday, the Black Gang spent several hours lounging in the shade as they posed for photos to commemorate the weekend. ‘The best 3 days I have had for many months,’ he wrote.

  There were more ‘best days’ to come. One week later, back in Cambridge, Euan ‘got a long wire from Dunkeld, suggesting Maidenhead on Sunday’. He wired Dickie on the spot to accept.

  CHAPTER 8

  IDINA AND AVIE WERE BOTH ASLEEP UPSTAIRS AT Connaught Place when, on Saturday 1 June, Euan arrived shortly after eleven at night. One of the servants let him in but, before his footsteps had passed the first floor, the doorbell rang again. It was the Black Gang: Dickie and Barbie, together with two more of its members, Dickie’s brother Eric Ednam and a friend of theirs called Lionel Gibbs. The four of them swarmed up to the drawing room, chuckling and whooping, and lifted the lid of the piano. Euan dashed upstairs. It was six weeks since he had last seen Idina but he came back down with Avie, leaving his wife undisturbed. This Saturday night the ‘usual party’1 was at his house. But, aware that Idina was trying to sleep upstairs, he pushed them out after half an hour.

  The next morning Euan picked up Dickie at ten-thirty and drove her to Paddington. By eleven, Euan, Dickie, Avie and an admirer of Avie’s called Mike were on the Maidenhead train. Shortly after noon, having signed in at the Boat Club and selected a punt, Euan was punting them upriver: ‘We lay under the trees and ate strawberries for a bit.’

  This time Idina followed her husband and her sister’s friends. In the six weeks since she had last seen Euan she had recovered considerably and was now clearly determined to join in his social life. She dressed and picked up the telephone. Shortly afterwards, she piled into a car with Barbie, Dickie’s brother Eric and a couple of others and arrived at Maidenhead Boat Club in time for lunch. Euan’s punt came back to meet them. They ate in the packed dining room: ‘saw lots of people at the Club,’ wrote Euan, ‘quite like old days.’

  After lunch they all went out in a flotilla of punts. They drifted in and out of the shade, closed their eyes, dangled their hands in the cool water and listened to the quacks and whistles of the birds floating by. Then they bumped into another gang, ‘the Grenfell party’, and the calm was shattered. The men pushed the punts to the banks, the two sexes disappeared behind their own bushes and emerged, the women in bloomers and camisoles, the men in underpants if anything at all, and ‘had a good bathe’. Idina, having been regularly tossed into the English Channel from her mother’s mixed-sex bathing beach in Bexhill since the age of three, and keen to prove that she was on her way to being as fit and well as any of the other girls, plunged in.

  The Black Gang decided to stay and dine at the club, leaving Euan to go back to London ahead of them in order to reach Cambridge that night. He had agreed to travel there with Idina’s brother Buck. It was Buck’s eighteenth birthday. Buck had, as a consequence, long planned to remove himself from Eton that morning and, as a conscientious objector, he
ad immediately to Great Yarmouth to enlist as an able seaman on a minesweeper.

  ‘Dina and I went back by the 5.22 train,’ wrote Euan. The following week Idina was taking the children to the seaside for a month and this train journey was her opportunity to try to persuade him to join them. They were going to Frinton in Essex. Several other people she knew were taking houses there with their children. It was not far from either Cambridge or London. The boys would love to see him. So would she.

  Idina was not a woman who either pleaded or threatened. She just made things sound as enticing as she could. But at this point her and Euan’s lives were running in barely parallel grooves. First Euan’s absence had left Idina to build a life for herself and her children on her own. It was a life that Euan had played no part in, and the names of her own new friends held little attraction for him.2 And when she had been ill, he had built his own life – and had done so with such success that he now appeared to forget that he had a wife and children.

  The next weekend Euan went not to Frinton but to London to see the Black Gang. He arrived by teatime on Saturday and went to Dorchester House. He ‘dined with Eric E at Claridges – party 12. Ave, Dicks, Barbie etc etc’, went to a show and then, with Idina away in Frinton, held ‘the usual Saturday night party’ at Connaught Place: ‘danced to the gramophone for 2 hours’.

  Euan didn’t go back to Cambridge until Monday morning. On Sunday the dozen of the night before headed off for Maidenhead again. There, after a long lunch, and much to the consternation of the more traditional members of the Boat Club, they hired a motor launch and towed several punts up the river behind it. At the end of the day they squashed six into each car and motored back to London, ending up again at Connaught Place: ‘good dance to gramophone until 1.30’. At 1.30 a.m. Euan left his own party and took a taxi to the Liverpool Street Station Hotel. He went to bed at five past two and was woken less than three hours later to catch the 5.53 train to Cambridge. It slunk him into the station at 8.15, so he had time enough to rush back to his room and emerge again as though he had been there the night before. However, despite his efforts at discretion, Euan’s weekend exploits had not gone unnoticed by his senior officers. Sunday’s japes at Maidenhead had alerted a wide audience to the activities of the Black Gang.