The Bolter
Authors: Frances Osborne
ALSO BY FRANCES OSBORNE
Lilla’s Feast
To my mother
Contents
The Marriages of Idina Sackville
Claridge’s Hotel, Mayfair, 1934
BOOK ONE
Edwardian London
BOOK TWO
Kenya—Happy Valley
Illustrations
(Frontispiece) Idina Sackville in the 1920s (author’s photograph)
Idina Sackville standing between a pair of elephant tusks (courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
Idina as painted by Sir William Orpen in 1915
Nancy Mitford (Topfoto)
Idina and Euan’s sons, Gerard (“Gee”), left, and David (author’s photograph)
Idina’s great-grandfather Thomas Brassey (Getty Images)
Idina’s grandparents Annie and Tom Brassey Jr. (courtesy of Bexhill Museum)
Annie and children pulling specimens out of the South Seas (courtesy of Bexhill Museum)
Gilbert Sackville (courtesy of Bexhill Museum)
Muriel (née Brassey) (courtesy of Bexhill Museum)
Idina, her sister, and her brother in their pony cart, drawn by miniature Shetland ponies bred by their mother (courtesy of the 11th Earl and Countess De La Warr)
Idina; her sister, Avie; and their brother, Buck (courtesy of the 11th Earl and Countess De La Warr)
Idina the debutante, February 1913
Euan Wallace (author’s photograph)
Idina’s engagement photo
Spy
cartoon of Idina’s father, Earl De La Warr, the motoring enthusiast (author’s photograph)
Kildonan House, Ayrshire (
The Builder
124, 15 June 1923)
Idina and Euan’s sons, David and Gerard (“Gee”) Wallace
The
salon d’essayage
at Lanvin in Paris (courtesy of Lanvin)
Stewart Menzies, the best man at Idina and Euan’s wedding (courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
Idina’s gas-bag-powered Calcott car (
Illustrated London News
)
86–87 Euan Wallace and friends at Dunkeld, 1918 (all courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
Idina’s friend the travel writer Rosita Forbes (
Appointment in the Sun
)
Euan and his sons after Idina’s departure (courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
Idina’s second husband, Charles Gordon (courtesy of the de Trafford family)
Euan Wallace and Barbie Lutyens on their wedding day (author’s photograph)
Idina in the newspapers with the serval cat
Tallulah Bankhead (Getty Images)
Idina and her third husband, Joss Hay (courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
Idina and Joss on their wedding day (Topfoto)
Idina and Joss clearing ground (courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
Idina and Joss’s house, Slains (courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
Idina with her Hispano-Suiza in Kenya
A Happy Valley picnic (courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
Idina and Joss (courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
Idina, Raymond de Trafford, Alice de Janzé, Joss (courtesy of the de Trafford family)
Oserian (courtesy of the de Trafford family)
Molly Ramsay-Hill (courtesy of the
East African Standard
)
Joss at Gilgil with Gerry and Kiki Preston and friend (courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
Idina and Alice in Idina’s garden at Slains (author’s photograph)
Raymond de Trafford and Alice de Janzé (courtesy of the de Trafford family)
Newspaper report of Idina’s fourth marriage, to American Donald Haldeman (
Nevada State Journal
)
Donald and Idina’s wedding (Planet News)
Clouds, the house Idina built when married to her fourth husband, Donald
Idina, dressed for a Rift Valley picnic with her friend Paula Gellibrand (courtesy of the late Robin Long)
Idina and her eight-year-old daughter, Diana Hay (courtesy Errol Trzebinski)
Idina’s son David Wallace (author’s photograph)
David Wallace (author’s photograph)
The foyer of Claridge’s Hotel, Mayfair (courtesy of Claridge’s)
215 Kildonan House, Ayrshire, from the southwest (
The Builder
124, 15 June 1923)
Kildonan House (
The Builder
124, 15 June 1923)
David traveling in Greece (author’s photograph)
Idina’s son David at his wedding to Pru Magor (author’s photograph)
Idina at her fifth wedding, to Vincent Soltau (“Lynx”) (author’s photograph)
Joss’s body in his Buick (courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
Dinan in her early teens (courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
David at home in England (author’s photograph)
David Wallace’s wife, Pru, and Idina’s two granddaughters, Davina and Laura (author’s photograph)
Idina’s son Gerard Wallace, “Gee,” at his wedding to Elizabeth Koch de Gooreynd (author’s photograph)
Idina by one of her landscaped ponds in front of Clouds (courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
Portrait of Idina, 1922 (courtesy of the 24th Earl of Erroll)
Idina’s brother, Buck (courtesy of the De La Warr Pavilion)
Idina Sackville (private collection)
Claridge’s Hotel, Mayfair, 1934
DIARY OF DAVID WALLACE, AGED NINETEEN:
BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD, FRIDAY 11 MAY 1934
Had letter from Sheila, saying had seen my mother, who wanted to meet me. All v. queer.… Not seen for 15 years. In some ways indifferent. Yet in others I long to see her. I certainly look forward to it immensely. I objectify it all, picture to myself. Young Oxford graduate, meeting mother after 15 years, moving scene, and not me.
BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD, THURSDAY 17 MAY 1934
Letter from my mother; I knew it at once; suggesting meet Claridge’s next week; had to write to Sheila to find out her name.
1
O
n Friday, 25 May 1934, the forty-one-year-old Idina Sackville stepped into Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair shortly before a quarter to one. Her heels clipped across the hallway and she slipped into a chair in the central foyer. The tall, mirrored walls sent her back the reflection of a woman impeccably blond and dressed in the dernier cri from Paris, but alone. She turned to face the entrance and opened her cigarette case. In front of her, pairs of hats bobbed past with the hiss of a whisper—she remained, it was clear, instantly recognizable.
Idina tapped a cigarette on the nearest little table, slid it into her holder and looked straight ahead through the curling smoke. She was waiting for the red carnation that would tell her which man was her son.
2
IT HAD BEEN TWO WEEKS since she had been told that David needed to see her, and a decade and a half since she had been banned from seeing him and Gee, his younger brother. All that time, she had stayed away. Had it been the right thing to do?
Would she do it the same way again?
That afternoon at Victoria Station when she had said good-bye to a husband she still loved was a lifetime behind her. And the reality of what that life might have been was minutes, maybe seconds, ahead. The cigarette finished, Idina lit another.
And then, as she leant forward, a disheveled young man came through the revolving doors. Six foot two, lean, she could see that he had her high cheekbones and unruly hair. His eyes, like Euan’s, were a deep brown.
In his buttonhole was a red flower.
For a decade and a half Idina had been searching for something on the other side of the world. Perhaps, all along, here was where it had been.
BOOK ONE
EDWARDIAN LONDON
Chapter 1
T
hirty years after her death, Idina entered my life like a bolt of electricity. Spread across the top half of the front page of the
Review
section of the
Sunday Times
was a photograph of a woman standing encircled by a pair of elephant tusks, the tips almost touching above her head. She was wearing a drop-waisted silk dress, high-heeled shoes, and a felt hat with a large silk flower perching on its wide, undulating brim. Her head was almost imperceptibly tilted, chin forward, and although the top half of her face was shaded it felt as if she was looking straight at me. I wanted to join her on the hot, dry African dust, still stainingly rich red in this black-and-white photograph.
I was not alone. For she was, the newspaper told me, irresistible. Five foot three, slight, girlish, yet always dressed for the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, she dazzled men and women alike. Not conventionally beautiful, on account of a “shotaway chin,” she could nonetheless “whistle a chap off a branch.”
1
After sunset, she usually did.
The
Sunday Times
was running the serialization of a book,
White Mischief
, about the murder of a British aristocrat, the Earl of Erroll, in Kenya during the Second World War. He was only thirty-nine when he was killed. He had been only twenty-two, with seemingly his whole life ahead of him, when he met this woman. He was a golden boy, the heir to a historic earldom and one of Britain’s most eligible bachelors. She was a twice-divorced thirty-year-old, who, when writing to his parents,
called him “the child.” One of them proposed in Venice. They married in 1924, after a two-week engagement.
Idina had then taken him to live in Kenya, where their lives dissolved into a round of house parties, drinking, and nocturnal wandering. She had welcomed her guests as she lay in a green onyx bath, then dressed in front of them. She made couples swap partners according to who blew a feather across a sheet at whom, and other games. At the end of the weekend she stood in front of the house to bid them farewell as they bundled into their cars. Clutching a dog and waving, she called out a husky, “Good-bye, my darlings, come again soon,”
2
as though they had been to no more than a children’s tea party.