The Bolter (41 page)

Portrait of Idina, 1922, after she had separated from Charles Gordon

Dinan kept the letters. And when Idina announced that she was considering marrying Jimmy next, an inevitably horrified Dinan asked her not to. Instead of taking a sixth husband, why didn’t Idina simply return to her maiden name of Sackville, and keep it?
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Idina agreed, and mother and daughter appear to have exchanged promises. Dinan was pregnant with her second child and Idina asked her, if the child were a boy, to give him Euan’s name.
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Although Idina returned to Kenya under the name of Sackville and
with a vow not to marry again, Jimmy stayed with her, becoming known in Kenya as James VI. In reality he tolerated Idina’s still-wandering sexual appetite and pursued his own with the same sex.
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It was a non-marriage of convenience. “Drunk,” said one young woman who knew Idina then, “she would frequently end up in bed with my father.”
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When Dinan gave birth to a boy in February, she kept her promise to her mother. She chose Peregrine for his first name, and then gave him both of Euan’s: Peregrine David Euan.
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In 1951, just when Idina had planned her daughter’s trip, a wave of violent killing broke out in Kenya. The first victims were “loyalist” Kikuyu chieftains. A gang of Kikuyu extremists, who called themselves the Mau Mau, were going around the villages demanding that the headmen take oaths of violence and murder against the white settlers. Oathing was a traditional Kikuyu form of ceremony that took the place of legal contracts in Kikuyu society, and an oath-breaker was subject to magical retribution. However, not only were the Mau Mau’s oaths violent in form but their ceremonies consisted of a combination of both obscenity and bestiality. Those chieftains who did not agree were hacked to pieces with machetes. Dinan’s visit to Kenya was postponed.

The murders of white settlers began in the autumn of 1952. On 3 October a European woman was stabbed to death on a farm outside Nairobi and a state of emergency was declared in Kenya. In January 1953 a farmer’s wife died as her unborn child was ripped from her womb. Two months later, on a single night, ninety-seven inhabitants of an African village were butchered or burnt to death. Between excursions the Mau Mau retreated to the Aberdares, where they proved impervious to military assault.

That autumn, as Kenya disintegrated around Idina, her cancer tightened its grip. In December she was told that she needed a hysterectomy. But the Mau Mau had brought any income from the farm at Clouds to a standstill and, even at Kenyan prices, the operation was expensive. Buck, however, came to the rescue and offered to pay. Idina was admitted to the Princess Elizabeth Hospital in Nairobi and operated on immediately.

“My darling,” she wrote to Dinan on 20 December,

I am progressing marvellously—record patient—but still feel very weak & tired so forgive this short scrawl to wish you a Happy Xmas & a lucky New Year—also to send you a miserable Xmas present—things are still such a muddle owing to Mau Mau I can’t do more at the moment [the Christmas present was clearly a check] but there are one or two schemes on foot [sic] which pray God will materialize. Heaven to think Buckie is coming out on the 28th. Bless you my darlings—how I long to see you again.

Your devoted Mummie xxxx.

Buck arrived, and Idina rallied. The writer Errol Trzebinski was working as a student nurse on the ward in which Idina was a patient. “Her room,” she remembers, “was filled with flowers, glamorous people visited her every day at all hours; merry laughter could be heard along the corridors. She was charming to care for and, of course, I had not the least clue that I was helping to fetch and carry as a probationer for a legend.…”
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When Idina left the hospital she gave a case of champagne to the nursing staff. Trzebinski drank hers from a teacup: “And swore never to submit to that again… nor have I!”
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Idina moved back to her bungalow outside Mombasa with Jimmy Bird still by her side. Despite the hysterectomy, her cancer returned. “Poor Dina,” wrote Elspeth Huxley’s mother, Nellie Grant, as it was “a desperate cancer for a long time.”
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A year after Idina left the hospital, however, in January 1955, the Mau Mau emergency at last was coming to an end with the colonial government’s invitation to the insurgents to surrender without punishment. Twelve thousand Kenyans had been murdered; of these not even a hundred were white. Each white death, however, had created a storm of publicity and within the small settler community everyone knew someone who had been killed. It was the beginning of the end of colonial rule.

For Idina, however, the end of the Mau Mau meant a chance to make another plan for Dinan to visit. But in January 1955, Dinan was pregnant with her third child. It would be born in July. The safari was therefore set for early the following year.

At the end of October Idina wrote to Dinan, giving her a list of clothes she and Iain would need to bring for the heat of the day and the cold of the night. But after a couple of pages her writing gave way to another hand. It was Jimmy’s—after five divorces it was the man whom she didn’t marry who stayed with her.

Jimmy finished the letter and its safari instructions. Idina lay back on her pillows, Euan still gazing at her from the photograph beside her
bed. She could relax. She was now confident that her daughter would know exactly what to pack.

Five days later Idina died. She left a dozen silver-and-glass face-cream and scent bottles, half as many hairbrushes and nail files, a silver glove stretcher, a cocktail dress, an evening gown, and a large black taffeta bow.

Idina had never wanted to be an old woman. By dying at just sixty-two, she seems to have had her way. As Nancy Mitford puts it in
The Pursuit of Love
when the Bolter visits her daughter shortly after the birth of her first child, and when her wickedly behaved niece Linda has just died giving birth to hers:

Idina’s brother, Buck

The Bolter came to see me while I was still in the Oxford nursing home where my baby had been born and where Linda had died.

“Poor Linda,” she said, with feeling, “poor little thing. But, Fanny, don’t you think it is perhaps just as well? The lives of women like Linda and me are not so much fun when one begins to grow older.”
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Buck flew down to Kenya to bury his sister. He designed a headstone: “In loving memory of a warm, generous and courageous person.” It gives only the date of her death, November 5, 1955—no birthday to age her by, leaving her forever young.

He laid her under the stone that she had raised for Gee.

Where she still is.

FOUR DAYS AFTER IDINA’S DEATH
Vita Sackville-West placed the following obituary in the
Times:

No more succinct or better epitaph could be given to Idina Sackville than the following lines from the Chinese poet Wu-ti, 157–87 B.C., translated by Arthur Waley:

The sound of her silk shirt has stopped.
On the marble pavement dust grows.
Her empty room is cold and still.
Fallen leaves are piled against the doors.
Longing for that lovely lady
How can I bring my aching heart to rest?

V. S-W
.
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Chapter 26

A
s a child, all I knew of this family, apart from my mother and her sister—David’s two little daughters—was Barbie. And I clearly remember being just ten years old, and standing outside the front of a boarding school in Sussex, waiting for Barbie’s butler, Claydon, to drive me to her house.

The house is square, pink, and has green window frames. We draw up at the back door, for the front is never used. Across the yard are two empty cottages, the glass falling from their windows. I walk into the house and I am led down the long passage to the breakfast room in which we are to eat an informal lunch. Informal means relaxed, yet I have never felt at ease with Barbie. I never will. I am not sure whether it is her height, the coolness of her blue eyes and gray hair, or that she is still imposingly beautiful. She is a survivor from that age when women were more glamorous, I was told, than I can imagine. Her best friend was the legendary beauty Diana Cooper. Barbie has spent her entire life among people who never had to dream of earning a living and dressed only in couture. When she married Euan Wallace she became one of them.

But I don’t know this then. All I know is that she is very rich and lives a very different lifestyle from us. The year is 1980 and she still has a butler, a cook, and a lady’s maid, Knightie, who started working for her when she married Euan, accompanying her on honeymoon, along with Euan’s valet. Knightie’s real name is Miss Something Knight, but the world has lost track of what that something might be as, being a
lady’s maid still, at eighty-odd herself, she is known only by Knight, the “ie” added as a sign of affection in exchange for long and faithful service. I adore Knightie. When my sister and I stay here alone, trembling with manners, Knightie looks after us. Whenever I am in the house and frightened or feeling lost it is to Knightie’s room that I go.

This time it is just me, in the breakfast room, with Barbie and Herbert. Herbert Agar is Barbie’s second husband. He is American, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and concocter of lethal cocktails, which my father calls Herbert Specials. Barbie says very little to me. She doesn’t do children, I’m told. Not since her sons all died young. Peter and Johnny followed Gee and David to their deaths in the Second World War. And even Billy, too young to fight, died childless of cancer at the age of forty-seven, leaving a widow, Liz.

After lunch I follow Barbie and Herbert down to the end of the passage and I look out of the windows of Barbie’s drawing room and across its small lawn to the rolling lawn of the manor house beyond. Barbie’s house is called Beechwood. It is the dower house for the main building, Lavington, which she bought with Euan in 1936.

When I am here with my sister we escape outside for as long as we can.

The garden is the one place here that we do not feel ill at ease. This is strange, as this is the house at which our mother was born, in the gardener’s cottage, in the middle of the war. And, Liz aside, we, our baby brother, and my mother’s sister’s two children, are Barbie’s only family.

IN 1981, BARBIE WALKED
my mother around her rose garden and said that she had had “a lovely life.” One evening soon after, as Claydon locked up, Barbie told him not to come to her in the night, whatever he might hear. When he came in with her tea the following morning she was lying in bed, her skin as white as her ermine bedspread, an empty bottle of sleeping pills on her dressing table.

Barbie did not leave my mother and her sister the pink house in her will, and it slipped from my view.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER
, by one of those strange coincidences that people like to call fate, my sister and her husband have come to live and work at the boarding school. Their apartment consists of the grand first-floor rooms in the main house that, once upon a time, were Barbie’s and Euan’s bedrooms.

I walk with my sister’s two sons to the chapel. It is a small, old chapel,
built for a large household and servants rather than for a school. To the right of the altar the wall is covered in five stones bearing the same name, my mother’s name, Wallace. A family wiped out, one by one.