The Bolter (35 page)

What made David’s feelings all the more acute was that nobody at home, unlike Idina, appeared to want to listen to him. Three days after he arrived at Sunningdale, David decided to talk to some people who might care about the same things he did. He went up to London to spend a night on the Embankment with the crowds of down-and-outs. Shortly after midnight he entered a “Salvation Army hostel at Black-friars, not bad, large, fairly clean, rather smelly and hot, I hardly slept at all.”

Nonetheless, on Wednesday, 25 July, he decided to join his new rough-living friends by becoming a tramp himself. He packed a rucksack, took a train to Gloucester and set off “on the road”:

16 miles to Ross on Wye; very hot. To my surprise and delight was approached by several chaps on the way as a fellow tramp and we had a few words: I talking with a Scots accent when I could remember and clad in old shooting shoes, tan socks, corduroys, string, collarless blue shirt and P Robinson coat; having “A Sheepskin Lad” Wordsworth’s selected poems given me by Chute, a handkerchief, knife and stub of pencil, a tiny crucifix, matches and a few Woodbines.

A week later Gee tracked David down to Worcester Cathedral. He fed his elder brother lunch and packed him into the car. They headed north.

They reached Kildonan at four the following afternoon, in time for a “delicious tea and dinner.” David always relaxed at Kildonan. This time
was no exception. He was back in the bosom of his family. Gee was there, to whom he could talk at length. With his stomach full, David’s rage against injustice began to soften.

Kildonan House, Ayrshire, from the southwest

The next morning Barbie arrived to find David covered in the pullulating sores of scabies, a mite infestation of the skin.

“Spent most of morning talking to Drs,” wrote Euan, “and decided to get him [David] South tonight and put him in a home, where 4 days intensive treatment ought to cure it. We can’t risk, keeping him at K.”
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It was 3 August. In less than ten days’ time Kildonan would come into its own with the start of the grouse season on the Glorious Twelfth. Before that the house would fill with fifteen of his and Barbie’s guests and the servants they brought with them. If David remained at Kildonan, he would be either prowling the lawns and passageways looking like a leper or locked upstairs like the Monster of Glamis. But Euan’s greatest concern that day does not appear to have been his son. The time he had spent on David’s illness, he wrote, “ruined my chances of clearing up by 12 and going to lunch with Maureen and playing a round of golf after with Basil.”

Barbie ordered the rear seat of one of the cars to be covered in towels and loaded David in. As she did so, “after 2 agonizing failures” David apologized and, perhaps thinking of Idina, asked if he “could begin again under a happier state of affairs.”
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Barbie looked straight at him
and said “so sweetly, that all the while she had felt I was emotionally concerned with myself, self-centred, superior, uncongenial company, inverted snob, ignorant of life.” David fell back into the car, and drifted in and out of sleep. The following afternoon he reached London.

Kildonan House

A skin specialist was waiting for him in the nursing home, and confirmed it was scabies. As he left, Barbie’s GP, Kirkwood, whom she called Kirkie, came in to talk to David. He “gave me a long lecture of how… class based on fundamental biological difference.”

David was in the nursing home a week while the rest of his family chased one another around the grounds at Kildonan. The one highlight of his arrival was a “charming” nurse, Miss Fenhall. On his second day there the formidable Minnie Wallace turned up to visit David. After one glimpse of how her grandson gazed at Miss Fenhall, she had her “transferred to another floor.”

David found Miss Fenhall again. On Wednesday evening he dressed and “took Miss Fenhall to the Ballets Russes; we saw Senola de Ballo, Choreastium, and Contes Russes. I thought it one of the loveliest things I have ever seen.” By the time he went “North on 8 o’clock” sleeper two days later he “was quite sorry to leave the home. I am glad,”
he wrote, “I have met Miss Fenhall. I wonder what her Christian name is. I thought of asking her but did not dare.”

David returned to spend another six weeks at Kildonan. But something in him had changed. One afternoon when everyone else was busy—“G a bad foot, Guy a cold, Mike a headache”—David picked up “a most enjoyable book ‘The Legacy of Greece.’ Particularly like Heath’s and Burnett’s and Gardner’s articles and Zimmern’s.” The following evening another of Barbie’s girlfriends engaged him: “Quite an interesting dinner conversation with Nin Ryan on Greece.” By the time he finished the book two days later he was smitten. Ancient Greek was, after all, what he was reading at Oxford, not God. He could immerse himself in Greece, sink into the people and politics and philosophy and let its waters close over his head. Two days later he picked up another book: “Hall’s History of the Near East. It is absolutely enthralling.”

David had found a new set of beliefs and way of life for which he could “live and die fighting.”

This new God Idina would be able to share.

BY THE TIME IDINA REACHED CLOUDS
that summer, Donald had been gentleman enough to have moved out, and she had the house to herself. Too much to herself. Not even the eight-year-old Dinan was around, running in and out with the latest animal she had picked up to show “Mummie.” With Dinan had gone the stream of twenty-something governesses to chat to over dinner. Marie, however, was still there. And there was her farm manager. But, in between dealing with whatever daily
shaurie
reared its head, doing her morning horseback barefoot rounds of the
shamba
and step-by-step trawl of the flower beds and lawns, Idina was very much alone. She had friends to stay and, in turn, went to stay with them. She went down to Muthaiga, she went to Mombasa, she went on safari. And she continued to write to David. But with nobody beside her to discuss her next plans for the farm and garden, day-to-day life felt empty, as, for Idina, living with nobody to love and, more important, nobody to love her, presented little purpose. Whereas her grandmother Annie Brassey’s life had been brimming with purpose, and her mother, Muriel, had carried this political banner further, Idina had filled her life with only a search for affection. It was an aim that was bound to fail repeatedly. When, toward the end of 1934, a young pilot called Chris Langlands landed on the lawn at Clouds, Idina turned to him. Chris ran an air charter service called the Blue Bird Flying
Circus and had been bringing Idina a houseguest. Chris was athletic, blond, innocently blue-eyed, and a few years younger than Idina. She invited him to remain for the weekend. He stayed for two years.

Chris’s arrival perked her up. They wandered off on safari, flying from camp to camp in his plane, and when they returned to Clouds they started to work on the garden. At weekends they packed the house with their friends. Idina’s letters to Dinan from “Mummie” started to include photographs of tents in the bush and the family pets beside the vast new series of ponds and waterfalls that were being dug along the edge of the lawns at Clouds, with Idina and Chris standing together—just like a married couple.

Only they weren’t. Chris was the first man Idina had openly lived with without being about to marry. At the point at which she had broken up with Donald the idea of a husband had not been attractive. Living with a boyfriend had appeared the perfect way to balance her longings for adventure and domesticity, which “Idina, fragile and frail,” yearned for. And, unthinkable when Idina had been born—even her father had bothered to marry again—in the mid-1930s people were beginning to live together.

However, the reality of doing so was less easy than expected. Marriage, even to the four-times-married Idina, offered the promise of permanence, of looking after each other in the dreaded old age. A boyfriend, particularly a younger one living in a home that was very much hers, was disturbingly temporary.

She suggested that they marry. Chris was far from sure that this was a good idea.
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The role of Idina’s fifth husband was not a compelling one. Donald Haldeman might have moved out of Clouds, but he remained on a trigger-happy warpath against Idina’s lovers. One of Chris’s former girlfriends, Eileen Scott’s niece Alice, had married King George V’s third son, the Duke of Gloucester. Alice turned up at the Delameres’ house on her honeymoon, wandered into the drawing room, and sat down, only to be advised immediately to move to the other end of the sofa, out of range of the man with the gun in the tree outside: Haldeman, waiting to shoot one of Idina’s boyfriends. Far from prolonging their affair, Idina’s idea that she and Chris should marry destroyed it. At the beginning of August 1936, she wrote to David: “Chris has left me—yesterday—so forgive me for not writing more—I am completely knocked out & can register nothing but pain.”
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It was not a good time for Idina to be alone. All around her the old Happy Valley set were sinking into a haze of drugs and alcohol. Kiki
Preston had been generous with her supplies of morphine, sharing them with friends. Joss’s new wife, Molly, who was desperately trying to give him a child and failing, was already racked by the addiction that would soon kill her. Idina’s friend Alice de Janzé, now Alice de Trafford, but again separated from Raymond, had also taken to regularly injecting herself with a silver syringe. Initially this had been to manage the pain of an operation she had needed after the shooting. But, like Molly and Kiki, she now had a drug habit that was out of her control.

The weekend parties with the old crowd were starting to become, even for Idina, a little unhinged. The “sheet game” took a new turn. A sheet was strung up across the room. One gender would hide behind; a single representative of the other would grope, in a sort of blindman’s buff, to work out which of the figures on the other side was who, and select a partner. As cocktails were sunk, the game developed further. Holes were cut into the sheet. Hands, feet, elbows, noses were stuck through for identification. More cocktails were drunk. A new sheet was pulled across the room. New holes were cut. The men unbuttoned their trousers.

At one party Derek Fisher, somewhat the worse for wear, agreed to be locked into one of Idina’s wicker laundry chests. By the time he decided he wanted to escape, everyone was too deafened by the gramophone and full of alcohol to notice. Eventually a young woman sat down on the chest and started to kick her heels against it as she chattered away. Derek, like all Kenyans, had a “bushman’s friend” knife attached to his belt. He drew it and thrust it through the chest’s lid to attract attention. The blade went straight into the woman’s bottom and she ran out of the room screaming. Idina followed her to her bedroom and gave her some lint and plaster and a looking glass with which to apply the bandage and a sleeping pill to take afterward. When, an hour or so later, Idina returned to check on her guest, she found her out for the count, a pool of blood on the floor, and the lint and plaster stuck, with great care, on the looking glass.

Idina decided she needed to find someone, anyone, to move in. Within weeks another young man, “Precious” Langmead, came to make love to Idina one afternoon and found himself staying at Clouds. Precious, as it would soon become clear, was not a man with whom Idina would fall in love. For that moment, however, he would do. And then, as if to her rescue, came Idina’s old friend Rosita Forbes. In early 1937 she arrived at Clouds with her second husband, Arthur McGrath.

By that time Rosita had published several books covering her travels
in North Africa and the Middle East and been made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. She had first made her name in 1921 when, disguised as an Arab woman, she had been only the second Westerner to reach the oasis of Kufra in the center of the Sahara. At the start of 1937 she and Arthur had decided to take advantage of the inflated London rents for the Coronation year and let their house to the Maharajah of Jaipur before setting off to stay with Idina. They brought with them a letter from the Belgian Ambassador to London, who “prided himself on having ‘made the world safe for gorillas.’ ”
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The letter was addressed to the Belgian authorities who controlled the Congo, instructing them to take Rosita, her husband, and their friends gorilla-watching.