The Bolter (11 page)

1917. TUESDAY, 27 FEBRUARY
. “Left Rang du Fliers by 3 pm train for Paris. Slow journey but punctual. Train not very crowded. Arrived 11 pm and got a share of a taxi to the Ritz where I found Dina wide awake.”

Idina had been waiting for her husband for a day. A day and a half if she counted back to the time on Monday morning that her mother strode out of 24 Park Lane and swung herself against the thick upholstered back of the car beside her.

By the time the two women reached Victoria Station they had joined the war. Idina and Muriel picked their way across a concourse swarming with brushed khaki and polished leather. Above them high glass arches reverberated with a low-pitched murmur.

They flitted like shadows into a first-class carriage. It was three hours to Folkestone: stopping and starting and chuffing and grinding, their heads knocking into the high, padded seat backs. Three hours of repeatedly tugging and releasing the leather window strap to see where they had reached, what was happening outside; then yanking the window up again as soot and steam curled back along the train.

The boats were running. The women followed their leather suitcases and hatboxes up the gangplank. The crossing took ninety stomach-turning minutes of the hull rocking up to one side, pausing, and falling back again with the swell as the boat steamed slowly over the black water. At Calais they were swept with the soldiers off the Leave Boat and onto the Army trains heading east to Flanders. They peeled themselves away to the Paris train, escorted by a handful of officers, the red tabs on their uniforms revealing their smug administrative and non-combat staff postings in Parisian HQs.

Paris was a city of façades: brushed pavements, manicured parklets, rows of little shop fronts and grand colonnades. Its web of cobbled alleyways, passages, and tiny streets led from the damp, sweet air of bakeries to the rich aromas of cafés before tumbling out into long, wide boulevards. Here proud, pale-stone buildings descended in classical lines to the ground, where suddenly the archways and wrought-iron gates broke into curls and twisted vines—pure, shivering, Parisian elegance.

Before the war, before her marriage, Idina had been to Paris with her mother half a dozen, maybe a dozen times. They had gone for exhibitions, concerts, balls, and to order their clothes.

Before the war, every good idea had been had in Paris. Marcel Proust had pushed the literature to extremes; André Gide had taunted the establishment; Debussy had ignored every operatic tradition; Picasso had started to paint in the straight lines of Cubism; and Paul Poiret had started to design his new, corset-free dresses. The Café de Flore and the Deux Magots on the Boulevard Saint-Germain bubbled with smoke and ideas. On the pavements outside, women had stepped past, every detail of their costume at the perfect angle. Paris had been at the cutting edge of all that was new.
“Ici même les automobiles,”
wrote the poet Apollinaire,
“ont l’air d’etre anciennes.”
²
But, on the afternoon of Monday, 26 February 1917, Idina stepped out of the railway terminus of Saint-Lazare into a strange city.

Shell craters dotted the avenues, the perfect terraces now broken by buildings turned to rubble. Shop after shop was shuttered, messages that the proprietor had gone to war chalked on the doors. Here and there flashed traces of military uniforms. Empty sleeves pinned to their chests, crutches and canes at the ready, the war-wounded advanced slowly along the streets. Around them the women walked slowly, too, their pace weighed down as if by the heavy black of their mourning clothes.

The first few streets of grand apartment blocks beyond the station were still, their owners cowering in their country houses. In the early days of the war, as the German Army had bombed the city, the wealthy had fled. Even now, the guns were not much further away. Close enough, on a fine day, for the sound of the thudding of shells to drift across the rooftops. Nonetheless, over the previous twelve months, as the war had grown into a way of life, Paris had started to fill again. The theaters and music halls, the cinemas and galleries, had begun to reopen. The cafés were once more overflowing onto the streets, every
table crammed with glasses and coffee cups, croissant-covered plates, a boulevard beach of military caps in every shade from pale blue to black nodding above them.

Half a day’s journey from the Front, close enough to make something of forty-eight hours’ leave, Paris had become a soldiers’ city. Even the long hallway of the Ritz was crammed. Men in khaki uniforms perched on red velvet benches and sofas, mirroring the marble statues of classical heroes in the patio garden that ran alongside. Water cascaded through stone lions’ mouths in the garden, while alcohol, which had been banned, arced out of the silver spouts of teapots indoors.

Above the rows of desks and doormen, a wide staircase curled steeply up to vast, silk-wallpapered rooms. Most heavenly of all, however, were the bathrooms. The Ritz had been the first hotel in the world to attach one to every room. No maids and steaming buckets carried up six flights of stairs, but swimming pools of enamel tubs with swan’s-head taps producing endless hot water en suite.

When Idina arrived, she was caked in soot, steam, and saltwater, and must have been longing to slip into a hot bath. There she could just reach out for the tap and spend hours submerged until the tips of her fingers had blanched and shriveled. The only trick to master was keeping her cigarette dry on its way to the holder and the ash out of the water.

All that was missing was Euan.

In the year since Gerard had been born, Euan had found it hard to come home. The long months in between had been lonely for Idina. Euan’s diaries show that she and Euan were still very much in love.
³
Nonetheless, she had taken other lovers. Friends home on leave. Friends who hadn’t gone over the Channel at all. All had, as was quite proper in the circumstances, been transient and passed unnoticed.

Now, however, she was waiting for the man she loved.

He hadn’t come on Monday. Idina and Muriel had dined downstairs in the hotel and found there a couple of familiar faces with whom to celebrate Idina’s twenty-fourth birthday, fingers crossed that Euan might turn up ahead of a wire—a birthday surprise.

The next day she had waited. She couldn’t stray too far from the Ritz—just in case. An afternoon, or even an hour or two, was too precious to waste. At least it gave her time to prepare the room and ask the hotel to push together the twin powder-and-gilt beds, making them up into a vast bouncing double. He could appear at any moment, her Brownie,
⁴
the husband she’d come to save from the trials of taking his
turn with the dancing partners at the charming Madame de la Barondière’s, or traipsing all the way to Passy to visit the exotic-sounding woman he would refer to in his diary simply as “Solange!!”

Then, on Tuesday night, just as Idina was not quite asleep, Euan had slipped through the door.

And when, the next morning, Euan started spending some of their precious moments bent over a small volume on his knees, scratching away, Idina slid her fingers over the book he was writing in and pulled it from him.
⁵
When she flicked through the pages she could see the days rolling by under her eyes, packed with polo matches, toboggan runs, exercising the horses on the sands, lunches in Le Touquet, and long dinners in the officers’ mess. And she suggested that, while they were together, she would write the diary for him.
⁶

Breakfast arrived. A feast of coffee, croissants, eggs if available spread out over a thick, white, starched tablecloth that hung to the floor. Then she dressed for a city whose wartime fashion, like London’s, preached the art of the subdued: a tunic coat, a single row of buttons running down over her left breast to just below her knee, a small hat—for a small woman. Little One, she called herself in a penciled French script that curled between the lines on Euan’s pale-blue diary page.

They set off apace. Paris was made for walking. And they “walked miles,” arm in arm in the freezing cold, heels ringing on the pavements, the echo bounding up the shuttered buildings on either side. They searched for open shops, peering into each one, looking for something, anything, to buy together. Searching in vain. The city of glittering treasures was tarnished, as dull as the sky that hung above them. Even the boulangeries were empty—the making of pâtisserie, those featherweight, sugar-topped cakes, was now against the law.

“Desultory shopping,” wrote Euan.

They went back to Callot Soeurs, an Aladdin’s Cave of stores.

The Callot sisters were famous for twisted lace around the edges of blouses, camisoles, and cami-knickers, gowns cut out of swaths of gold and silver lamé. The store was known to glisten. There had to be something in there.

But the shelves were bare. Here and there the odd pile of dark fabric, mourning cloth, beckoned like a sad song. It was, wrote Euan, a “bloody dreadful sight.”

They lunched at the Ritz and after lunch, wrote Idina, “Antoinette picked us up and we went to Lanvin” in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, five minutes’ walk around the corner from the Ritz. Lanvin,
unlike Callot’s, was overflowing with samples of silks, muslins, and beading in the latest designs, its eighty seamstresses’ fingers still flying in its workrooms. With fighting spirit, Jeanne Lanvin, the top French couturier, had even designed a nurse’s uniform, with its Red Cross armband, for the best-dressed Parisiennes doing their bit. The skirt this year, Madame, ran the vendeuse’s patter, will be a little straighter, to meet with the new fabric restrictions,
très simple, très chic
. Paris, “Antoinette” had revealed to them, still had its treasures. At least for those who knew where to find them—and had the money to buy.

The
salon d’essayage
at Lanvin in Paris

The
salon d’essayage
was the size of a small drawing room, paneled to waist height and scattered with prints of drawings and designs from this season and last. Euan and Antoinette sank back into the wood and velvet armchairs and the heady scent of polish and rose oil, as the tassels on the lamp shades swung with the to and fro of women clutching fabrics, feathers, and measuring tapes. Yes, Madame, the sales assistant continued, in a week your order will be cut, stitched, embroidered, fitted, and finished. And “a small one,” wrote Idina in their hotel room later, “ordered 2 dresses and a hat! Came back for tea.”

That night they dined at the Café de Paris, with its huge gilt mirrors and low, tasseled lights on each table, theirs covered with plates of escargots and mousses that slithered down their throats, the band blasting in the corner. “Little One,” wrote Idina, “realised she liked Champagne. After a large dinner, among all the other cocottes, we came home to bed.”

“Cocotte,” a neat pun, was French for both “pet” and “tart.” In Euan’s company, Idina styled herself the latter, and a “little one” at that. In the Café de Paris, however, they were surrounded by professionals. Some company for the evening, others just for the hour. Underneath its veil of restraint, Paris, like any soldiers’ city, was a town where sex was in demand and for sale. Sometimes in private, where widows and hardened veterans of skirmishes between the sheets priced themselves for an overheated market at an astronomical eight pounds an interview. Elsewhere, on the stage, in a variety of cabarets deemed “unsuitable for ladies” by the travel guides of the time.
⁷
The thigh-flashing cabaret at the Folies Bergère was too crowded to find a seat. At the Mayol, the women on stage did not bother to wear any clothes at all. That night, when the restaurant closed for its nine-thirty curfew, Idina, her husband’s
cocotte
, took him straight back to bed.

And so it went on. Idina, self-styled cocotte by night, rose each day and, she wrote, “walked miles in the morning.” Then they went to a lunch party and, giggling, off to the cinema or “Grand Guignol in the afternoon.” “The Big Puppet Show,” as its name translated, had become a theater of horror, the success of each short piece measured by the number of people who fainted. From a box fenced in by a jail-like iron grille, Idina and Euan watched children being murdered by their nannies and heroines scalped, disemboweled, and guillotined—the convulsions on the decapitated faces played out in full. “2 very bloodcurdling pieces,” wrote Euan, who turned to find “Muriel and Tom … in the next box.”

Afterward, wrote Idina, “all had tea at the Mirabeau” and then the Café de Paris again, followed by the real theater, where they “went to see Guitry’s play Jean La Fontaine—very good.” They feasted at Ralph Lambton’s, at Madame Ste. Allegonde’s and with “Sturges” who, the next day, after their Sunday outing to the British Embassy Church, brought his lion cub to lunch with them at the Ritz.

That night, Sunday, it was just the two of them again, once more at the Café de Paris. Idina had wrapped him back around her little finger—“very amusing,” wrote Euan. But, when she awoke the next morning to discover that a cold had wriggled its way through layers of
linen and blanket, he was up, off, and out without her. His last precious days of leave were not, after all, a time to stay in and nurse a sick wife: a man needed to enjoy himself before heading back to war. And he rushed off to find a telephone to call Stewart, his best man and closest friend.