The Bolter (34 page)

David Wallace in the early 1930s

This visit ran a little less smoothly. “Mother,” wrote David that evening, “wants us to call Daddy ‘Father.’ ” “Mother” wanted a bit more than that too. In her eyes David’s appearance was giving the impression that the family had, like some of their friends, slipped into financial ruin. On the train to Paddington she complained to Euan that David was a mess. Euan, perhaps seeing only what he wanted to see, wrote that night, “David seems well and happy and looks no dirtier or untidier than his colleagues!”
¹³

But by the time David returned home at the Easter vacation and looked around his parents’ dining-room table, packed, as ever—“Duff Coopers and Lord Titchfield there,” Barbie glowering at one end—David confessed to his diary that he “felt a terrible misfit.”
¹⁴

Three weeks after that he received that first letter from Idina. Having learned his mother’s surname from Sheila, David replied and, on Friday, 25 May, he wrote in his diary:

To London to see Dina, my mother, whom I had not seen for 15 years.

Chapter 22

O
n Friday, 25 May 1934, Idina stepped into Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair shortly before a quarter to one. Ahead of her stretched a maze of sofas and tables, chairs and kissing chairs. In the center a vast glass Medusa’s head of a chandelier writhed above serpents of cigarette smoke curling up toward it. Idina sat down, lit a breakfast cigarette and ordered a cocktail. The weather was still turning in that haphazard English way and feather boas and entire dead foxes bobbed around, crisscrossing the lobby, with the odd “sorr-eh” exhaled through motionless lips. The hallway echoed with steps accelerating and hesitating across the marble floor and up the wide staircase that wrapped around the walls. Here and there a head turned back toward her with a look of surprise.

At least there was no chance of a direct confrontation. Sheila had very deliberately taken Euan and Barbie for a long lunch at the Ritz.
¹
Idina had been left to face only the life she might have had.

When she saw the red carnation, she knew it was her son. He was taller than his father. Six foot two, a long, pale neck rising from a pair of shoulders strong enough for Idina to trace the blades through the back of his leather-patched jacket when he turned—and an Adam’s apple that danced as he glanced this way and that, swallowing. The four-year-old boy she had said good-bye to was now a grown man. It seemed that, as her youth had drained, so his had blossomed. He had her high cheekbones and thick hair, a curl or two trying to kick through the Brylcreem. There was the Sackville slope to his eyes but, in
a rather charming contrast to his hair, they were, as they always had been, Euan’s deep, dark brown.

The foyer of Claridge’s Hotel, Mayfair, where Idina met her son David in 1934

Fifteen years on, however, this “Brownie” needed her.

David “loathed Claridges.” It epitomized all that he abhorred: “vulgarity, servility, the abasement of men’s lives before the very rich,”
²
he wrote in his diary. But as he stood in the lobby he saw a woman approaching him, wearing a haze of peach
³
and a deep, wide, intimate smile. She kept on walking, if you could call her sway walking, straight at him. Her hair was the color of corn and she barely reached his shoulder, but her bright-blue eyes were locked on to his, smiling. He “did not recognize her.” But she knew him. And as she raised her face and opened her lips and started to speak, the hard edges of David’s world began to melt.

She was Dina to him. That was how she had introduced herself. It had been too long for “Mummie,” while “Mother” had, of course, been taken by Barbie. Sitting beneath that Medusa’s head, then into the dining room for pea soup and Dover sole, and back again to the serpents, they “talked for three hours.”

Three hours was long enough for Idina to tell him about her farm in Kenya, where Heaven appeared to brush the earth. There was a lot to tell: trees full of colobus and leopard; bushes full of birds and rhino; zebra and elephant; giraffe, heads swaying tens of feet above the ground; the sun hovering in the sky; and the smell of life that has existed for millennia. However, the pure-white tablecloth stretching between them, there was much about her life that could not be said.

David sat and listened, entranced. He had inevitably heard some stories about his mother as the newspapers had followed the most recent of her messy divorces and remarriages. But now here she was in front of him, the temptress Eve, describing her life in the Garden of Eden itself with such a heartfelt passion that she seemed an innocent. And she was so unlike Barbie. She was, as he put it in his diary, “very sweet.” He knew already, he was quite “sure,” that this was the beginning of something, and they would be “very fond of each other.” He explained to her the future that he believed in. There the poor wouldn’t starve, sick children would see doctors, and the self-interested capitalist class would cease to keep the workingman down. And he told her “how the church alone can meet the needs of these people.”

Idina listened and tried to tell him that all is not black and white; there are shades of gray in this world. That if you burn bridges between yourself and the people you love, they are hard to rebuild.

But David’s views were deeply entrenched, and not to be overturned in a single afternoon: “She tried long and hard to persuade me not to go into the church, but her arguments were so shallow.”

Her arguments might not have worked that afternoon, but now she had found her son, Idina did not let go. This young man needed her. Now realizing just what she had forfeited by giving up being his mother, she had fifteen lost years of love to give him. He, as headstrong and emotional as she was herself, would clearly love her in return. And, unlike her husbands, he would neither fall out of that love nor leave her for another woman.

The following week she wrote to him: “Beloved Child of Mine—how I adored your note & the thought that prompted it. Those things mean so much. Yes, Sweet Friday was all heaven—I was so entirely
happy we seemed to touch perfection. Surely having found those heights we can never lose them again. Such complete understanding & oneness. Darling will ring you up Tuesday morning to arrange when I can come to Oxford on adventure. Bless you dearest Heart, your own
Dina.
”
⁴

Two weeks later Idina arrived at Oxford and found David waiting at the station. They walked up the hill, along Broad Street and into Balliol. He showed her his room, of which he was very proud, and, as he later wrote, they “talked for hours.”

The next day he walked with her around the colleges. As Idina stepped along beside her tall, handsome son, her crêpe-sleeved arm slipped through his. “Though we do not agree on much,” he wrote that evening, “I find her very easy to talk to.” Idina clearly hung on her son’s every word.

At three o’clock David took her back to the station. She asked when she could see him again. He told her that he was off to work at a Boys’ Club camp and then he would go on a religious retreat. The next night he would be free, he calculated, was three more weeks away. Idina invited him to come and dine with her in the London flat she had taken, and to stay the night, just as if they were mother and son.

David arrived in London on the morning of 9 July. It was, he later wrote, a “pleasant journey, dreadful day.” He had come straight from the Boys’ Club camp via a retreat at Canterbury Cathedral and had “too much to do all day.” He “hurried thro streets” and, as he was dining with Idina that evening, “had to hire dinner jacket.” There were several hanging in the cupboards at his parents’ grand house in Mayfair’s Hill Street, where the hall was dominated by a vast mural by the well-known artist Rex Whistler, whom Barbie adored to the extent that he stayed with Barbie and Euan for years. But he had not spoken or written to either Barbie or Euan since he had felt such “a terrible misfit” in the middle of April, almost three months earlier. So he went to the gentleman’s outfitters Beale & Inman, on the corner of Bond Street and Grosvenor Street. He came out clutching a suit and, as he did so, the heavens opened, soaking him. His grandmother’s house was across the street. He could see the front door from where he stood. “Sad & wet & weak,” as he later wrote, he rang the bell. “Afraid it was silly. Of course I found Mother there.”

Barbie loomed in the hallway. David was appalled to see her: “I was frankly sorry and thought it disastrous.” By some unfortunate chance Barbie had been at that moment visiting her mother-in-law, with
whom she, unlike Idina, found much in common. She might not have seen David for three months, but she started by showing no sign of being pleased to see him now, as he recorded:

She was a little cold, very surprised, thought my clothes disgraceful. I had to tell her my plans. Quickly, boringly. She did not understand. I felt she never could.… It is all horrible. Then I said re Dina. I saw she was hurt. So I asked her if she minded. And she said, in practice, yes. And I said how much more she was to me and how I would never see Dina again and I suddenly found myself crying and we were in each other’s arms and I was glad and glad I went and I felt that a first step had been taken in healing the breach, we had come together a little though it was not over and we were divided. I must talk to her more, become intimate, and we may come to understand each other better again.

His eyes wet with tears, and having promised never again to see his real mother, Idina, David eventually prised himself from Barbie’s arms. As he had arranged, he went to Idina’s flat for the first, and now the last, time. Buck, Diana, and Avie were already there to see him. “Fun, nice seeing them again, they are sweet,” David wrote. It was only after they all left that he could spend some time with Idina alone: “I had a long talk to her in my bedroom.”

David had a chance to tell Idina what he had been up to. How at the Boys’ Club camp, designed for healthy outdoor pursuits and exercise, all the boys had wanted to do was “permanently to go into Swanage and stay there late at night.” How when it had rained for days on end, drenching every piece of camping equipment, he and his fellow Oxford undergraduates had tried to amuse the boys by giving “an entertainment.… Pain and grief it cost us to compose it and it was as flat as a pancake.” How he had been on retreat, spending a week digging potatoes and studying texts, with hours of prayer at Canterbury Cathedral: “I preached my faith to her.” And how he had “become far clearer in my vocation since I last saw her.” And that “I now feel fundamentally that, barring some unforeseen change, I shall be ordained priest.”

Then he must have told her what had happened that afternoon in Grosvenor Street.

For, when he awoke the next morning, Idina had gone.

Chapter 23

I
dina had bolted back home to Kenya. She had perhaps been just as idealistic as her son in thinking she might be able to slot back into his life. But, however little Barbie might have understood David, she had made herself his mother and had no intention of allowing Idina to share him.

David was, initially, perhaps too wrapped up in himself to think anything of Idina’s abrupt departure. However, Idina had shown him that the Church was not the only source of tenderness and love, and by the end of his morning alone in her flat, his religious fervor of the night before was beginning to waver. He had promised to spend a week helping in a religious order in southeast London but, as he “lunched alone at Dina’s [I] wished I had not said I would go.”
¹
He reached the Brotherhood of the Holy Cross that evening and “from the start it was disillusioning.” He spent the days walking “around the poor parts of the parish, ghastly poverty and squalor, God knows what inside, wretched children playing in alleys, nowhere else.” Then he returned to help out with the chores: “every sort and kind of work, garden labour in the boiling sun, washing up, sweeping rooms, dusting, helping cook, ironing, washing, all sorts.”

When, as Barbie had demanded,
²
he returned to the house his parents were renting in Sunningdale, the contrast of what he had seen with the luxury of his own life sent him reeling further:

How empty, barren, rotten this home life is… with all this artificiality, selfishness, utter blindness that cannot see or feel the needs of others and wallows in its slough, chucking away money that could be used to such good…

Every day I feel the gulf widening between me and mother and daddy. We are poles apart. I never see them alone. They never make any advances to me. I have not for months opened my heart to them. I feel almost that I never could and they could not understand.… It is all I can do to be polite to their friends. I am a Christian and a Socialist. They are pagans, hedonists, conservatives (of what they’ve got).… This society is rotten to the core and I hate it. These people stand for everything to the fighting of which my whole life will be dedicated.