The Bolter (20 page)

Idina fell in love with the landscape, dazzled by its beauty and the
sense of adventure it offered. This was to become her longest love affair. British East Africa (shortly to be renamed Kenya) would be “her adopted country”
¹
and she would “muster wholesome fury against those who she thought were trying to damage the land.”
²
Time and time again she would return to make a new life here, until she simply stayed.

At first they lived under canvas, sleeping with at least two dogs, a shotgun, and a rifle beside them. The first buildings to go up were grass
bandas—
huts walled with tree trunks and roofed with grass—and mud
rondavels
which rose from dried cow-dung floors. In the meantime they wriggled out into the six o’clock dawn and damp morning mist, washing in a tent thrown up for the purpose and slipping behind another for the lavatory. Then they pulled themselves up onto their horses, saddled and waiting. By the time they returned to their camp for breakfast a couple of hours later, the large sun rising steadily through the sky had burnt the clouds and dew away, leaving a lush landscape in a kaleidoscope of green, each leaf, each blade of grass, so vibrant that it looked as though it had a light inside it.

By day they walked and rode around their farm, or stopped and bent double on their hands and knees, clearing the land for crops and grazing. They decided which breeds to order from England. They plotted and planned how to re-create up here, thousands of miles from home, the Edwardian agricultural dream of their childhoods. And, once their farm plans were under way, they went on safari with friends. For a month at a time, half a dozen white men and women clad in cotton suits the color of sand walked and rode through head-high grass harboring unseen beasts. Behind them trotted ten times their number of barefoot porters, balancing swaying bundles upon their heads. At night they sat cross-legged around the fire, flames licking their toes, hearts racing with the excitement of danger. Out there they were as hunted as they were hunters. A single rogue elephant, buffalo, big cat, or invisible snake could end their lives as rapidly as they could pull a trigger, and their ears pricked at the sound of a heavy rustle. But once they had emptied their glasses—whisky safer than water—fears dissolved and fingers stretching toward well-oiled rifles relaxed.

Idina and Charles came back to their farmland and started to build a single-story house. A hybrid between a villa and a mountain lodge, it would be small and charming. There they would settle down into their rural life. And, on a fraction of the scale of both the houses and the
lifestyle she had tried to maintain with Euan, life with Charles would surely be sweeter, simpler, and more likely to last. It was an idyllic existence. Or, rather, it would have been.

For, within a few months of Idina’s arrival in Kenya, her second marriage started to go wrong.

Given the circumstances in which Idina had married Charles Gordon, this was not altogether surprising. She had lost her husband’s love, and her children, and had rushed into Charles’s arms and run off to Africa.

Idina, like Euan, was driven, busy, a doer. Too busy. The laid-back Charles had presented a welcome change. But here in Africa, as the months passed and the list of daily tasks on the farm lengthened, Charles was too relaxed. He did not have a fraction of her or Euan’s drive—in any sense. “Idina was a nymphomaniac,” he later complained to his third wife.
³

Before, Idina had taken lovers while her husband had been away. Now she needed them, it appeared, even when he was around.

Charles, it turned out, took a different view of marriage. Moreover, British East Africa was a small place. When the settlers rebounded from their farms and into the colony’s towns and cities they packed themselves tightly into the few bars they frequented. The stories spread.

Charles was, by nature, a saver of lost souls.
⁴
Later in life he would recklessly hand over money he couldn’t spare to people who said they needed it and come home to his waiting (third) wife and child empty-handed. “He couldn’t stop himself,” his daughter said, “even when we really needed the money too.”
⁵
He had found a lost Idina in Oggie’s flat and must have thought he had saved her.

But, as the gossip made its way around, it became evident that, far from being saved, Idina was falling further—and taking their marriage down with her.

In February 1920, after ten months of marriage, Idina took the curious step of leaving sun-drenched Africa for an England still in the throes of winter. It took three weeks to travel home, and in March, a year after her divorce and remarriage, her twelve-month exile abroad after creating a scandal would be over.

It is unlikely that Idina cared much about whether or not she would be partly accepted back into society. Her demimondaine friends were not the type to be bothered. Euan’s friends, however, were quite different. And Idina knew all too well how much he cared about his social
life. A year after their divorce, his exile was over, too, and Idina surely suspected—she may even have known for certain—that he would be returning to England.

Can Idina have been so foolish as to think that it was not too late to turn the clock back and return to both Euan and her children? It is still extraordinary today to divorce a second husband and go back to the first. But some people have done it. And Idina—who would notch up five divorces by the end of the Second World War—was hardly bound by any conventional view of marriage. If anyone could contemplate such a scheme, it was she.

STILL SINGLE, EUAN HAD BEEN
both socially and romantically busy during his year abroad. He had spent the first few months at Washington evening swimming parties with the young Franklin Roosevelt, weekend house parties at the Joe Leiters’ with Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, the Loews, the Dukes, and a Vanderbilt or two. He had stormed up and down the East Coast on its grand railcars with drawing rooms as well as sleeping cabins, with his batman (and likely inspiration for the name of P. G. Wodehouse’s famous fictional creation) Wooster in tow. He had golfed in Atlantic City; sailed in Newport, Rhode Island, with the Cushings; spent weekends on farms stocked with endless ponies; dined with Teddy Roosevelt on Long Island; and nearly had to propose after he had driven a girl home, the tires on his Buick two-seater had burst, and he had been stuck there, unchaperoned, for the night. Eventually, in late September, the Americans agreed to allow a single British agent to remain in Washington as a liaison officer. According to Euan’s diary: “We got the scheme nearly all fixed up over some whiskey.”
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When he’d done that, Euan had been sent to New York to organize the Prince of Wales’s visit that autumn. He’d found a showgirl named Dolores onstage in the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic, a “tophole show.” She was quite “the loveliest thing you ever saw.” Then he’d left her for Ottawa and its Governor-General, the Duke of Devonshire, who needed another aide-de-camp. Euan had moved into an apartment in Government House. The air was flush with engagements. The future British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who was ADC-ing there, too, had just proposed to the duke’s daughter Dorothy. “Macmillan and Dorothy Cavendish are very much in love: this was obvious to us all last week: we think it is all OK and really settled.” Euan took Harold back to New York, where he “helped choose [an] engagement ring.” Euan focused his attentions on Dorothy’s eighteen-year-old cousin
Alix but found himself summoned to see the duchess for “an interview… which was very interesting as showing the difference in people’s points of view.” Whatever the size of his bank balance, Euan was still a divorcé. Marriage to a duke’s eighteen-year-old niece was out of the question.

Euan landed in Liverpool on 22 March. Idina had skipped off the boat at Marseille, taken the train north through France, and gone straight on to London, to stay with Olga Lynn, who was still at the center of a social whirl that Idina again needed. But, if Idina had plans to rebuild her old life, she was already too late. Less than a week after returning to England, Euan was engaged.

He had arrived back in the country on a Monday. Barbie had come round that first evening. By Friday he had proposed. On Sunday, after “a long and serious discussion,” Barbie accepted. Euan was ecstatic: “so happy I nearly burst.” Avie helped the two of them choose a ring and Barbie imparted the news to her previous fiancé, “the heartbroken Christopher,” as Euan called him in his diary.

Little did Euan realize that it was a heartbroken Barbie, too. Six weeks later, on the eve of her wedding to Euan, Barbie would sit up all night crying because she was, said her sister, “still in love with another man.”
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Christopher, however, did not have all those millions of pounds.

Euan took Barbie down to Eastbourne for lunch to break the news to the boys that their aunt Avie’s great friend would be their new mother. The two of them then went back to London to sort out their living arrangements. At the very least, Barbie insisted upon living in a house other than Idina’s in London. Kildonan was not, however, a house she could abandon—yet.

On 9 April 1920, “Barbs and I went all over Connaught Place in the morning with Mrs Milne & Maple’s head man, despatching furniture to Scotland,” wrote Euan.

After this day, in the remaining twenty volumes of his diary (which, once Barbie and not Idina was buying them for him, changed from a sleek blue to an imperial red), he never made another reference to his life with Idina.

It is one thing to close a door behind you. It is quite another to have somebody else lock it shut from the other side. Particularly if the person wielding the key is the woman with whom your husband fell in love when he was married to you. To aggravate the situation, Idina would be expected to be grateful to Barbie for agreeing to bring up her
sons, while Idina had adventures abroad. And now that her boys had a new mother there could be no question of Idina maintaining any contact with them whatsoever. To do so would be regarded as destabilizing to the children, selfish of Idina, and unfair to Barbie, who had to establish her own relationship with them.

Idina went back to Africa. She had to salvage what she could of her life with Charles Gordon.

THE BRITISH EAST AFRICA
protectorate had become the Crown Colony of Kenya, named after the towering Mount Kenya. The settlers had held the first elections to their Legislative Council. As a state, Kenya was booming. The farming industry, however, was not. In 1919, when Idina and Charles had bought their farm, both the aftermath of war and excessive flooding early in the year had inflated food prices to exceptionally high levels, making it appear easy to run a farm at a profit. However, by 1920, more normal weather conditions and the influx of new farmers had collapsed the market for crops to a level at which farmers were unable to earn even the cost of production. Idina and Charles’s dreamt-of farm had been all that was still holding their marriage together. And as the farm failed, Idina and Charles’s marriage went with it.

Euan Wallace and Barbie Lutyens on their wedding day, 10 May 1920, in the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens’s house in Mansfield Street, London

Idina remained in Kenya with Charles for another year. She kept herself busy going on safari after safari. But by the summer of 1921 the marriage was well and truly over. She and Charles parted amicably, and decided to make their own ways back to Europe.

That autumn Idina organized a farewell safari: “an all-woman hunting and exploring expedition.”
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Among her guests was the Countess of Drogheda, born Kathleen Moore in Scotland. Kathleen was a woman of many talents. A “dashing automobilist,” she was “one of the best known sportswomen in society.” She had played tennis in the Wimbledon
Championships and “flown over Trafalgar Square in an airship” in 1918. She had also “attracted attention at Deauville…by her daring at the Baccarat table.” But her crowning exploit, according to
The New York Times
later on, was nonetheless “to go on a big game shooting expedition in East Africa with Lady Idina Gordon.”
⁹

But not even the companionship of Kathleen, who, like Idina, was heading for the social stigma of divorce,
¹⁰
could disguise the fact that Idina had given up her children, husband, and homes for a life that had quickly fallen apart. And now she was quite alone. She would not forget how it felt. Years later, she wrote to her son David: “I… know the feeling of loss and utter loneliness.”
¹¹

The expedition over, in November 1921 Idina sailed from Mombasa. In her arms was a serval cat that had replaced the late Satan.

On her finger was the large pearl ring that Euan had bought for her in Paris.