The Bolter (21 page)

Chapter 14

I
dina returned to London in 1921 with no other apparent plan than to stay a step ahead of loneliness. At twenty-five she had had everything. Now, three years later, she did not even have a place of her own to live in. In search of company, she again moved into Olga Lynn’s house in Catherine Street. London had become a city in frantic pursuit of the new. Its pleasure-seekers had not, after the mayhem of the war, returned to the stately pace of Edwardian fine living. Instead, in noisy motorcars driven full pelt around London’s narrow streets, they chased the latest fashion, the latest restaurant, the latest dance craze, and the latest nightclub. Nightclubs were the new venue for dancing. The sons of the families living in the private palaces lining London’s parks had been decimated in France and these houses were being sold and demolished, their ballrooms and vast drawing rooms with them. And, having lived independently as soldiers, nurses, and Land Girls during the war, the surviving young were moving out of their parents’ homes into flats as soon as they could afford to. These became places for smaller impromptu gatherings where friends drank vast amounts of alcohol and experimented with morphine and cocaine and played the gramophone to learn the latest dance steps before hitting the floor at Ciro’s, the Café de Paris, the Savoy, and the archetype of them all, the Embassy. Here, in the same groups that had gathered to dine at the Ritz and Claridge’s during the war, the young, rich, and beautiful turned up to dance and push the boundaries of behavior as far as they dared in front
of tables packed with the young trying to be old and the old trying to be young.

This desire to overturn every previous code of behavior overflowed into all areas of both the public and the private domain. In restaurants the young crowd was louder, attempted to drink more champagne than anyone had before, and danced on the tables, the women sometimes wearing nothing under floating skirts. Nudity was all the rage. Women appeared in transparent dresses. A fashion began, perhaps led by Idina, for receiving guests while still in the bath and then openly and slowly dressing in front of them. One hostess, Mary Mond Pearson, waited one evening until all her guests had arrived at her Belgrave Square mansion and then descended the curving staircase wearing nothing but a famous string of family pearls which reached her pubic hair.

Oggie’s had become the Piccadilly Circus of the artistic and louche. Actresses, dancers, and musicians, passing through London and either preferring the ceaseless company of the Catherine Street house or lacking the means to pay for a hotel, moved in. One of them, the actress Gladys Cooper—at one point the most photographed woman in Britain and, like Idina, very publicly divorced—stayed when her performances ended too late to return to her children and their hordes of nannies, whom she had housed in Surrey.

These houseguests were followed through the door by their admirers. Between lunchtime and dawn the front door at Oggie’s opened and closed, glasses clinked, cigarette lighters flared. Dinners were thrown for twenty at a time, the guests having to prove their worth with witty epigrams or outrageous stunts designed to entertain the others. Artists and impresarios chatted and argued, fell in and out of love, and in and out of bed. Lovers were no longer hidden, as they had been during the war, but flaunted. Nor did all girls wait until they were married. In 1921 Marie Stopes published
Wise Parenthood
, a book that made available to anyone who could afford and dared to buy it the contraceptive secrets that had hitherto been confined to quiet whispers between educated women. If that didn’t work, again those women who could afford to—the rest had to rely on haphazard backstreet fumblings—slipped over to nursing homes in France on the pretext of nervous exhaustion. The only social crime here was dullness.

By the time Idina returned to London, being divorced was no longer an insurmountable scandal. Before the war, England and Wales had witnessed about five hundred divorces a year. In 1920, the year before Idina’s return, this number had leapt to more than three thousand as
war-damaged marriages were officially brought to an end. Several society marriages had finished this way: those of Idina’s friends Rosita Forbes and Dorry Kennard and Gladys Cooper among them. Divorce was still seen as destabilizing a class system already ravaged by the war but, in these difficult times, making a single mistake by marrying the wrong person was forgivable.

Idina in the newspapers with the serval cat that replaced her pet Pekinese, Satan, May 1922

But Idina’s mistake was in having left Euan, not in having married him. Unlike Dorry’s husband, Euan was not considered to have behaved badly. He had neither abandoned Idina nor moved in with another woman. She had been ill; he had entertained himself. He was still popular, handsome, and extremely rich. Idina appeared to have behaved utterly irrationally. Now it was obvious to all and sundry that her marriage to Charles Gordon was also over, and it would be only a matter of time before he, too, divorced her.

As the year passed, the rate of divorces continued to rise (it would peak at 3,500) and Idina appeared to be making a very direct personal contribution to this unwelcome wave of change. She had shown herself to be not a woman who had erred once but an errant woman. She had
crossed a threshold that separated her from her once-only divorced friends and she was left off aristocratic invitation lists and avoided in public. Years later she wrote to her son David, describing herself as an “out-law” but adding, “I, myself, feel no wrong—I wonder why it is?”
¹
From now on, social exile was where Idina would feel at home, and she made the most of it. Michael Arlen, whose best-selling 1920s novel
The Green Hat
portrays Idina as the tragic heroine Iris Storm, was a member of Oggie’s set. In the book he, too, describes Iris as having “outlawed herself.”
²

Iris Storm is a tawny-haired, shingled-headed, big-blue-eyed aristocrat who was a fictionalization principally of Idina.
³
This was so widely acknowledged that another member of the crowd, the poet Frédéric de Janzé, refers to Idina as “the Green Hat” in his later roman à clef about Kenyan life,
Vertical Land—for Horizontal People.
⁴
But Arlen himself seals the link between fiction and reality with the use of Idina’s initials, I.S., for Iris Storm—at one time a common way of identifying the real individuals on whom fictional characters were based. Arlen portrays himself even more simply: as a nameless narrator who happens to be an author, and who meets and has an affair with Iris Storm. He writes that, having very publicly “kicked through every restraint of caste and chastity, there’s the whole world open to her to play the mischief in, there’s every invention in the world to help her indulge her intolerable little lusts.”
⁵

Idina decided she might as well be as bad as she could. Like her mother and grandmother before her, she was pushing at boundaries. She had her hair shingled to razor-thin shortness at the back and painted her fingernails green. With her new pet, the serval cat, on a leash, she stayed out all night and slept all day. She flitted to and from Paris at an indecent pace. In July the demimonde went south to the Riviera. Idina went with them. At the end of August they moved on to Venice, where Oggie took a palazzo for a month. They sunbathed on the Lido and drifted along the canals by night, stripping and leaping into the water, their naked bodies glistening in the moonlight.

Back in England, and still in possession of some of the ten thousand pounds her mother had given her on her marriage to Euan, Idina bought herself a Hispano-Suiza (Iris Storm’s was canary yellow) with a vast bonnet and a silver stork on the front and careered around London in it, sober, drunk, or somewhere in between.

And there were the men. They came and went. Both physically and emotionally, Idina needed somebody in bed with her.
⁶
Each new body
provided not only some degree of sexual satisfaction but also a physical reassurance that she was not alone—at least not for those hours. Craving love, she made the age-old mistake of confusing sexual company for it. And time and time again she was disappointed. She kept moving on.

But moving on to where? Unlike her mother and grandmother, Idina had no clear aim in sight. Her grandmother Annie’s voyages had had a beginning and an end and her passionate efforts on behalf of women’s suffrage had had a potential conclusion: women being allowed to vote. Idina’s mother’s political campaigns similarly aimed for—and succeeded in—bringing about changes in the laws of the country. All that Idina’s actions appeared to be arguing for was that women could behave with the recklessness long allowed men. This could be achieved only by altering the entrenched views of the entire population: a slow transformation that would certainly take longer than her impending self-destruction. But, as long as she was occupied, or looking forward to the next amusement, she had no time to look back. “Wait until you are so free,” says Iris Storm, “that you can see the four walls of your freedom and the iron-barred door that will let you out into the open air of slavery, if only there was someone to open it.”
⁷

“You don’t know,” says Arlen’s I.S., “the bodyache for a child, the ache that destroys a body”
⁸
“I am not the proud adventuress who touches men for pleasure, the silly lady who misbehaves for fun,” she tells Arlen’s narrator. “I am the meanest of them all, she who destroys her body because she must.”
⁹
Iris sleeps with the narrator on the first night she meets him. She has come looking for her brother, who lives in the apartment above him. They find her brother drunk into a stupor, and Iris comes into the narrator’s apartment for “a glass of cold water!”
¹⁰
After some minutes of conversation the narrator leaves to talk to a policeman outside who is complaining that Iris’s car has blocked the road. When he returns she has vanished from his sitting room. He finds her in his bedroom, where “she lay coiled on the bed,”
¹¹
asleep. However, when he climbs in beside her, “hair that was not my own was pressed against my ear, and fingers that were not my own took the cigarette from my mouth, and teeth that were not mine bit my lip… and a voice as clear and strong as daylight said: ‘but enough of this hell!’ ”
¹²

The next morning Iris proffers some explanation for her behavior. “There are dreams, and there are beasts. The dreams walk glittering up and down the soiled loneliness of desire, the beasts prowl about the soiled loneliness of regret.”
¹³
Her sexuality is the beast that haunts her life, not the desire that drives it. That desire, she says, is what they call
“the desire-for-I-know-not-what. They will find it one day when we are dead and all things that live are now dead. They will find it when everything is dead but the dream we have no words for. It is not chocolate, it is not cigarettes, it is not cocaine, not opium, nor sex. It is not eating, drinking, flying, fighting, loving. It is not love’s delight, it is not bearing children, though in that there are moments like jewels. There is one taste in us that is unsatisfied. I don’t know what that taste is, but I know it is there. Life’s best gift, hasn’t someone said, is the ability to dream of a better life.…”
¹⁴
This was a woman, writes Arlen, who “walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself.”
¹⁵

The outside world, however, saw none of the torment and only the scandal in Idina’s life. As she moved from bed to bed to satisfy her cravings—all of them: not just for sex but for company, affection, and perhaps in the hope that this new liaison might be “the one” who would change her life again—her reputation as a seductress spread. She was “reputed to have had lovers without number”
¹⁶
and be an expert on the erotic use of lingerie, teaching at least one man how to touch four strategic points on a skirt that would make a pair of stockings slide to the floor.
¹⁷
And her name became a byword for disreputable behavior. Only those who cared little for their own reputation would wish to be seen “in the company of such dubious figures … as Lady Idina Gordon.”
¹⁸

The worse a woman behaves, the better she needs to look in order to hold her head high. Idina looked immaculate. In a dramatic contrast to the stories circulating about her, Idina made sure that she dressed at the leading edge of fashion: she had her clothes made for her by a new designer, an Irishman called Molyneux (pronounced
Molynukes)
. She bound her bosom, flattening it into the androgynous style of the moment, and wore the wraparound dresses that he designed for her, making her look long, thin, serpentine, and almost tall.
¹⁹
Over these she wore the furs she had been given as wedding presents, remodeled, and the jewelry she had been given both then and by Euan. On her hand, she still wore that pearl ring.