The Bolter (16 page)

On Tuesday evening around seven o’clock, just as he was changing for dinner, Euan heard a knock at the door of his room. He opened it to find his commanding officer, Gore Brown, standing there. He wanted “a word.” Euan invited him in. Gore Brown asked Euan how he was, how things were generally, how were his wife and children? And then he started talking to Euan about the Black Gang. Gore Brown had heard that Euan was moving in a very fast set.

Now, a chap was entitled to enjoy himself on leave, but the episode with the motor launch and punts on Sunday had upset quite a few people at the Boat Club. Not to mention all that bathing together the week before. He gathered that the antics didn’t stop at that. It wasn’t quite the done thing for a married officer to be careering around town and country with a group of young single girls. It was time, said Gore Brown, to start thinking about “breaking up the Black Gang.”

Euan had little choice but to agree. In any case, there was only a week or so left of the course in Cambridge. He would stay up the next weekend and keep away from London. Then he had only a couple of weeks before he went back to France. And he followed Gore Brown in to dinner.

Nine days later, on Thursday, 20 June, “after a most excellent lecture on the Strategical Situation by the Duke of Northumberland” and “lots of drinking and bearfighting,” followed by an impromptu “concert in Broadwood’s room until 12:15 am,” Euan packed up his things, said his good-byes, and caught the train to London. He arrived in time for a “dinner party of 12 at the Savoy (‘Black Gang’ & 6 others).”

Dickie, however, was not there. She was down at Witley, preparing the way for the Gang’s arrival on Saturday for a week’s haymaking on the farm. After this Euan would return to London for the Buckingham Palace investiture of the Military Cross he had just been awarded and leave for France the next day.

But on Friday afternoon Euan came back to Connaught Place after tea with his mother to find “a wire from Dickie altering all our plans for Witley. Frantic telephoning till dinner.” Faced with an empty Saturday-to-Monday alone in London, Euan decided that he might as well visit Idina and the boys at Frinton.

Chapter 9

SATURDAY 22ND JUNE

Caught 10am train from Liverpool Street to Frinton, arriving 12:33. Had to travel most of the way in the guards’ van. Dina met me and we walked to St. Patricks.
¹

I
dina was standing on the platform when the steaming seaside train, overflowing with children, hats, and brown-paper packages, pulled into Frinton. Engine and passengers screeched to a halt, doors were yanked open, string-tied suitcases and toddlers were passed through windows. For a minute or two the platform was swarming with life. And then the passengers cleared in search of lunch. Euan, her Brownie, was standing at the far end. He’d stepped out of the guard’s van. Even there, as he later wrote, it had been standing room only.

Idina was now glowingly fit. She had walked to the station, as if to make the point to Euan. This weekend was her chance to prove how well she was and what a good time he could have with her.

It was good walking weather, good walking air, clearer than Cambridge, down in the Fens. They were lunching at the golf club, St. Patrick’s. They walked there and as they strode, side by side, Idina was able to fill Euan in on who was around, what she’d been up to, what the children had been up to, and their plans for the weekend.

Waiting at the club were a man called Ian Maxwell and a girlfriend of Idina’s, Dorry Kennard. Euan had heard of them but didn’t know
them. “Lady Kennard” was how he referred to Dorry in his diary, surprisingly formally, as she was barely a year older than he was. The year before, Dorry had published a book about her travels alone in Romania. She had completed her march toward independence by, just six weeks earlier, in early May, divorcing her husband. Sir Coleridge Kennard had been a former secretary at the British Legation in Stockholm. He and Dorry had met and married in Tehran in early 1911. When Dorry had given birth to their second son, in April 1915, Sir Coleridge was on “a motor-car tour” with an actress whom he had moved into the same block in which he kept a flat for “private literary work.”
²
Dorry’s petition for divorce “on the ground of her husband’s desertion and adultery”
³
had therefore been easy to prove.

As the weekend passed, the gap between Idina’s and Euan’s lives widened. The talk at lunch was of travel: of the travels that Dorry had done, and of the travels that both she and Idina longed to do. When the war was over, if the war was ever over, they both wanted to go a long, long way away, as far from war-torn Europe as they could.

Idina and Dorry had other like-minded friends to talk of, too, such as Rosita Forbes: “Mrs. Forbes,” Euan called her. Rosita had also divorced her husband and wanted to travel, traverse deserts and continents and write about it afterward. The prewar era had been the age of the “gentleman explorer.” This new vogue for travel among Idina’s girlfriends was the female response. For Idina, the company of these women pursuing lives beyond their families and social circles was one in which she could feel totally at home. The paths that both her mother and her grandmother had taken, providing them with fulfilling and meaningful lives, had shown Idina that motherhood did not have to be a woman’s ultimate aim. The heritage of these two women reverberated through Idina’s life. She had spent most of it surrounded by the political echoes of her mother’s drawing room, and many hours wandering through the Durbar Hall museum at the back of the house on Park Lane, examining the costumes, weapons, and geological samples that Annie had brought back from her travels. It had left Idina with a longing for her own adventures.

When lunch had come to an end, and the conversation to a pause, the four of them played a round of golf. And on the day went, Idina making sure the hours were busy enough and social enough for Euan not to be bored. After golf there was a tea party back at Idina’s house, and “good tennis after.” Then they went out to dinner. Euan found a four for bridge. Idina played poker. “Home about 12.” Now that she wasn’t
coughing so much, they could share a room again: a knot of Little One and Brownie in bed.

On Sunday morning Idina watched Euan play “with David in the garden.” Playing “Bears” was their favorite game. Up and down the paths, round and round the bushes, on all fours, growling. It was raucous, squealing, three-year-old fun.

Idina took Euan down to the sands before lunch. She ran into the water, its ice-cold waves stinging her legs. Then she was bobbing several yards out, blinking salt out of her eyes, the wind whipping low across her cheeks. Dorry was beside her, both of them waving at Euan, laughing, calling him to come in.

“After some hesitation, bathed with Dina and Lady Kennard,” he wrote later.

The whole glorious afternoon they played tennis, before and after tea. Idina and Euan were back in their old pair, playing their old game. They knew each other’s serves and shots, which part of the court to cover, when to rush over, when to leave it to the other. Euan was having a good time. “Dina and I played Blake and Lady Kennard—3 of the best ‘mixed’ sets I have ever had.”

Dinner was like it used to be. Their hostess, Mrs. Loeffler, knew how to lay on a spread: tender meat; vegetables from soil that hadn’t yet been bled to a vacuum from overplanting; pastry that crumbled, that actually tasted of something. “Absolute pre-war dinner!” wrote Euan. Then he and Idina “danced to the gramophone,” its needle scratching away in the corner.

“Home 12:30.” They were alone together again. And the next day was Midsummer’s Day.

Euan wasn’t going to spend it with her.

He was leaving, Idina learnt, the next morning on the 7:32. That way he could go to the War Office to arrange the investiture of his Military Cross, then have lunch with Avie, and the two of them would get down to Witley by the end of the afternoon. But he’d be back in London in a week. For the investiture and the whole charade. She needed to come with him to Buckingham Palace. Why didn’t he meet her back there then?

Idina was now well, and fully able to keep her soldier husband entertained.

He, it appeared, felt his life was elsewhere.

Chapter 10

E
uan and Avie reached Witley station at 5:30 to find Barbie and Dickie waiting for them. They drove to the house. When they arrived it was half shut up, half in use as a Land Army base. Here and there sheets hung out of the windows. Across former lawns and flower beds ran the corduroy lines of freshly turned earth. Nonetheless, in the afternoon light the house and its colonnades glowed.

The tennis court was still in use. They squeezed a good couple of hours in before “high tea” with the Land Girls. After eating, the four of them, Euan, Avie, Barbie, and Dickie,
¹
went out again and walked around the park until sunset. Euan hooked a shotgun over his arm and the girls took it in turns to take potshots at rabbits. Back at the house they held their own Midsummer’s party, singing and dancing until midnight when the girls, all three of them, announced they were going not up to bed but out to bed. They dragged mattresses out onto the vast, porticoed veranda, and slept there.

As at Dunkeld, it was just like the old times, a sweeter, simpler old times checkered with wartime novelties. With all the grooms off at the war, they caught their own ponies before breakfast: “some job!” wrote Euan afterward. They exercised them all morning and mucked them out themselves. After lunch they went haymaking on the farm—“real hard work”—until the heavens opened at teatime. There was more rabbiting after tea, followed by dinner, then a couple more hours out on the horses, cantering at hedges in the fading light. They came back to
dance to the gramophone and for “a little piano.” Then they fell into a deep sleep before midnight.

On Tuesday the enigmatic Barbie said she had to leave, and went. Euan walked to the village to find a telephone and make a call—not to Idina, but to Stewart. The rest of the week rolled by in a rural idyll. They went haymaking again. They helped out at a fête: Euan and Dickie staggered around together with a large picture, whooping with laughter and selling raffle tickets. Dickie and Avie “fixed up a ‘ghost’ in Euan’s room “with a string & reel of cotton.” Various other friends came and went. And then, on Monday, Euan, Avie, and Dickie took the train back to London, lunched at Claridge’s, spent the afternoon shopping together, and all went back to Connaught Place.

Idina was waiting for Euan when he tumbled into the house for tea with Avie and Dickie. He was leaving for France on Thursday—in three days’ time. Idina gave it one last try. Tea duly arrived in the drawing room and in between the chatter Idina told Euan she had four tickets for
Fair and Warmer
that night and that she had asked a friend of his who had popped round, a chap called Whinney Avie was staying at Connaught Place. They couldn’t go out without her. Dickie withdrew. Idina won.

The show was good, very good. “Most amusing,” wrote Euan. But when they returned to Connaught Place he didn’t follow Idina upstairs. Instead, he stayed in the drawing room with Avie, going over their week at Witley and “talking till 12:45 am.” And the following morning he went out shopping with Avie and Dickie.

On Wednesday, 3 July, Idina went to Buckingham Palace with Euan and his mother. For two hours Euan sat beside her tapping his heels and shuffling his cuffs to glimpse his watch. “Long slow business,” he wrote. On the walls around her, oversized portraits of rulers stared down on all sides, the decorated columns that separated each panel rising like imprisoning bars. She was sitting next to her husband, her first true love, whom she’d written to almost every day of the years they had been apart and who had now not only lost interest in her but was quite publicly pursuing her younger sister’s unmarried friends.

Before the war an unfaithful husband showed his love for his wife by putting her first in public and only making love to married women who would return him to her. Extramarital affairs had been accepted because they were usually just passing things and would not break a marriage. That was the system. But that was not what was happening here. The situation had changed. People were starting to divorce and
men were starting to become involved with not-yet-married women, making the relationships potentially more permanent and marriage-breaking. Over the next few years this would lead to a shift in morality that would make these new high-risk affairs no longer acceptable. But now, during the war, extramarital affairs were still acceptable and newly risky at the same time.

That evening was Euan’s last night in England. He dined with Idina “quietly at home at 8,” their conversation leaping the chasm between their lives. Then they went to “Ally’s dance at the Beauforts’ house.” The dance floor was packed with giants in uniform and silk: “all the best and beautifullest there,” Euan wrote. He disappeared into the throng, his big, brown eyes locking on to a succession of girls in Avie’s crowd.

Given her own childhood, Idina clearly decided that, if her marriage was going to fall apart, it would at least be she who did the leaving rather than being the one left behind. And when Euan returned to France the next morning she left it to Barbie and her friend Cimmie Curzon to see him off.
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BACK AT THE WAR
, Euan no longer bothered to write to Idina. When he picked up his pen in free time snatched between inspections and conferences and piles of paper, it was to Dickie that he wrote. Dickie, in whose Scottish and Worcestershire homes Euan had spent his most idyllic times since the war had begun. Dickie, besotted and hoping for some sign of a future together,
³
wrote back “a long letter.” Euan, perhaps now remembering that he was married and officially taken, struggled to put together a reply and “spent half the morning answering” her. Dickie kept on writing.