The Bolter (31 page)

Newspaper report of Idina’s fourth marriage, to American Donald Haldeman. These images and the following feature were widely syndicated across the North American continent
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The plot of land Idina and Donald arranged to buy was not in the Wanjohi Valley—Happy Valley—but on the far side of “Chops” Ramsden’s farm. It was up on the shoulders of a mountain whose peak rose between two broad wings that appeared to flutter in the haze of sun and mist and which the Kikuyu called the Kipipiri—the Butterfly. The Kipipiri was lush, thick-forested, and higher than Slains. Tall green bush and jungle sprouted from every inch allowed it and rustled with brightly colored birds and belligerent beasts. Here the mist hung over the giant, dark-green leaves for most of the morning before the sun finally drove it off, yet, even at the height of the day, the peak of the Butterfly remained tinged with the purple stain of altitude. Idina decided to call the home she would build Clouds.

Halfway up the mountain, most of Idina’s new farm was sloping, but just beyond and below Chops’s house, she found a spot for a house. This consisted of a few acres that had plateaued out and clung precariously to the side of the mountain above a steep drop toward the distant, dry, yellow Rift Valley below. She decided to position the house at the back of this area, so that it could take shelter from the mountain slope behind and leave room for a sprawling expanse of lawn and garden leading to the cliff edge. This she left fringed with eucalyptus, thronging with the company of large, beautiful, humanoid colobus monkeys. Between the trunks it was possible to glimpse a kaleidoscope of green foothill and amber valley floor, but this view little prepared a visitor for the shock of walking through the trees to suddenly stand on the edge of a mountain-forest world and look beyond to a grassland stretching almost as far as the eye could see.

Donald and Idina’s wedding

Up in the hills, most of the settler farmers, even Alice and the Happy Valley set, lived in cottages with corrugated-iron roofs. The few grand houses in Kenya, like Oserian or Kiki Preston’s Mundui, were confined to the shores of Lake Naivasha or the outskirts of Nairobi. Idina, however, had no intention of seeing her new husband leave her for a grander house.

Clouds was a mountain house, an African house, its single story dwarfed by its high-vaulted roof, but this roof was not, like the one at Slains, made of the standard corrugated iron but of thousands of handsome dark cedar shingles. The house itself was square and entered from the back, the mountain side. Here Idina spread a large gravel drive and surrounded it with beds of hibiscus, rose, and bougainvillea bursting with red and orange, purple and white—which distracted from the sprawl of stables and dairies to the side. And sprawl it was, as, for all that it had the traits of a pleasure palace, Clouds was a working dairy and pyrethrum farm. As Europe and the United States spiraled into the
mass unemployment and bankruptcy of the Great Depression, Idina, perched on a mountain ledge thousands of feet up under the Equator, was slowly building, this time, a Jersey herd.

Clouds, the house Idina built when married to her fourth husband, Donald Haldeman. She remained there after the marriage fell apart
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The entrance to the house was through an archway leading to a central grassy courtyard. Around the edge of this ran an open passageway like a cloister walk linking a series of doors. The lawn was divided into four squares by two straight paths crossing in the center, where a bird-bath stood framed by four circular urns overflowing with greenery. Idina loved birds, and in the rose garden outside her bedroom a bird-house of several stories perched on a high pole in the middle of a pond. As a consequence, Clouds was alive with Egyptian geese, crested cranes, herons, storks, guinea fowl, a peacock, and a very lazy peahen, who always laid her eggs on the thatched dairy roof, to save building her own nest. The eggs invariably rolled off. And there was Kasuku, a red-and-gray African parrot with a wide vocabulary. He would call out “Boy” in Idina’s voice and one of the servants would come running. He also imitated the clinking of empty glasses being carried back to the pantry.

Clouds, wrote Rosita Forbes, who stayed with Idina there, and copied some of the design for her own retreat, in the Bahamas, was an
“entrancing” house. “It was the last word in comfort, and it was clever too—in the way that the rooms fitted.… A house should be planned like a coat and skirt.… It should fit and suit the people who are going to live in it. Dina’s low grey house on rising ground about the tawny plain fulfilled these conditions. It was welcoming and at the same time, mysterious.”
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On either side of the courtyard ran two long bedroom wings, like the rest of the house a single room deep, and in all containing six guest bedrooms, each with its own bathroom and hot-water tank heated by a bonfire outside. Inside each there was a fireplace too; a deep, wide fireplace that shared a chimney with the adjoining room and through which—if a fire was not lit—a guest could crawl to his neighbor. The bedrooms, indeed, the entire house, were paneled to give the same matte, dark effect that Idina had planned for Kildonan fifteen years earlier. She furnished them with four-poster beds and tapestries, each with furniture of a different period and style. At one end of these rooms were two others—a nursery for Dinan and an adjoining room for her governess, a lady called Joan Trent who had come with them from England.

The main rooms spread across the front. On the far right a dining room looked out from the corner of the house. This led into a drawing room paneled not only on the walls but on the ceiling too, giving it the air of a sixteenth-century farmhouse in some English rural retreat. Inside, Idina had put high-armed sofas around the wide fireplace and cushions over the deep window seats looking out over the lawn and Rift Valley beyond. On one side French doors led onto a terrace scattered with chairs and tables and surrounded by both Idina’s plants and flowers and a great panorama of African animal scents and sounds. Back inside, a thick velvet curtain hung across the archway into the library, the walls laddered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a deep white sofa piled high with cushions also facing out to the lawn.

Beyond this, in the far wall, was a door to Idina’s bedroom. It was a large room, almost the size of the drawing room, but, sited on the corner of the house, it again had windows on two sides. Near the door lay an enormous bed covered in a rug of wildcat skins and above which hung a childhood photograph of herself, Avie, and Buck (pictured on page 31). Beyond its sleeping area was another “room,” space for a writing desk and chair, another sofa even, all looking out to the view beyond. The door was left propped open by a tortoiseshell-topped elephant’s foot, to allow her dogs to wander in and out. Toward the rear of the house was another door from Idina’s bedroom that led into a vast
bathroom. Along one wall stretched a bath, a shining lion’s-head tap above it. Next to this was a mirrored wall which, when pushed, led to the water closet. To the side ran twenty feet of walk-in closets, with rails above and, below, a staircase of shoe racks containing Idina’s dozens and dozens of barely worn shoes. In the far corner of this room there was another door. Almost invisible in the wall next to the bath, it led into another room.

Idina, right, dressed for a Rift Valley picnic with her friend Paula Gellibrand—Cecil Beaton’s “living Modigliani”—who married Idina’s former lover, Boy Long

Clouds was, for a mountain lodge, palatial. It could take a dozen guests overnight and, remoter than Slains, it needed to; once guests had arrived they had to stay. In the rainy season, when the roads were impassable, its only access was by airplanes landing on the wide, open lawn. Idina made it worth the journey. The French housekeeper, Marie, had
come back to Kenya with Idina and again they trained up a cook and kitchen staff to produce soufflés. The familiar silk pajamas and whisky bottles lay on the pillow, fires raged in the fireplaces, hot water bucketed out of the taps, and champagne brimmed from glasses. In the evening Idina appeared in a dark blue velvet kaftan to keep out the night cold: it was colder and higher than at Slains up here. By day she wore corduroys, an open-necked white shirt and, as ever, her feet were bare.

Idina and Donald entertained from the start. Familiar faces from the twenties, and a few new ones, turned up by car, by plane, on horseback, some even on foot at the end of a planned safari to the house. The tables and sofas filled. Alice, who had eventually married Raymond and then, three tempestuous months later, separated from him, returned to Kenya from a Europe plunged into Depression. Even her and Idina’s favorite clothes designers were suffering. From their hill farms the two women were now sending regular financial aid to Paris. In return they received pieces from the latest collections in which they continued to dress exquisitely, even for picnics down on the floor of the Rift Valley.

Up at Clouds the lights were kept on well past the usual ten-thirty generator shutdown. At first, even these late evenings were proper enough to invite Dinan’s sequence of governesses to. (One, Joan Trent, thus met and married Boy Long’s brother Dan.) But, as it became clear, Idina, whisky flowing through her veins, soon felt the old “beasts” return. Donald was tall, classically handsome, if with a hairline that receded a little far for his thirty-odd years. But Donald was not enough.

One evening Chops Ramsden went to gently warn Dinan’s replacement governess, Peggy Frampton, who was already dressing for dinner, “There’s a bit of a party going on in here, Peggy, you had better not join us tonight.”
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The following morning Marie calmly told Peggy that there had been an “orgy” the night before. Peggy, equally calmly, saw no signs of it and equated Marie’s description to her frequent hand-wringing and exclamations:
“Cet affreux Afrique! Cet affreux Afrique!”
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Donald, however, did not take Idina’s infidelities in quite such a matter-of-fact way. Instead, his previously appealing protectiveness erupted into ferocious anger. When in late 1933 he returned early from a safari to witness a half-dressed man leaping into a car and skidding away, Donald swung his ever-loaded gun and fired at the departing car until Idina arrived to restrain him.