The Bolter (42 page)

My sister tells me that, since she has been at the school, she has heard of a rumor that the house is cursed. She shows me a large, leveled lawn fifty feet away from the main house. It is where the old, sixteenth-century house stood. The man who built it had made a fortune in piracy and had been just as unpleasant at home. He had raped a housemaid, making her pregnant. She died in childbirth. Her father stood at the gates of the house and cursed it with the wish that no male heir should ever live to inherit. Even though that house burnt down and this eighteenth-century building was raised on a different spot, in four hundred years no son, it is said, has inherited. When Barbie and Euan bought this house they had five sons between them. It occurs to me that Barbie may have heard this rumor as well, but too late. And this was why she did not leave her dower house to my mother and her sister, with a son apiece.

I FOUND IDINA IN HER KENYAN HOME
, Clouds. I saw it five years ago, on its way to ruin. It had taken half a day of lumping and bumping uphill to reach it from Gilgil, still a frontier-town collection of low-built frames, some with corrugated-iron roofs and shops advertising themselves as barbers, tailors, and general stores. The mud road up was so deeply rutted that our Land Rover shuddered and spluttered as I willed it around each turn. Solomon, our guide, sat in the front, hesitating at each unmarked junction, before raising his long, thin fingers to indicate left or right. A couple of times we had to give up and turn back, find another way. How on earth, I ask, did Idina drive her Hispano-Suiza along here? The roads, I am told, were better back then. The graders, bulldozing machines that scrape the surface of the tracks flat, still came up here. But just after the rains, as we are now, even then the roads were not much better than this.

After a couple of hours of hesitations, and wheel-spinning turns and reversals, the road started running straight along the side of a hill coated in foliage and grass vibrantly green enough to be lit from the inside and rising out of thick, cloddy earth glowing a deep orange. Every now and again the bushes beside the road trembled and Solomon murmured an animal name. Eventually we reached a barbed-wire-surrounded compound. Inside was Clouds, now the home of several
generations of a single Kenyan family. In we went, across the dusty courtyard, and into Idina’s drawing room. The memory is still vivid.

THE FLOOR IS THICK WITH EARS
of maize. I hop across the room from gap to gap, under the gaze of Peter, to whose family the crop belongs. He tells me that these main rooms are too large to feel comfortable living in, and so they are using them for storage. Instead each of his siblings has taken one of the six guest bedrooms around the courtyard of the single-story house, in which to live with their spouse and children. The room I am standing in is indeed not for sleeping in. It is one of three interconnecting spaces that stretch some eighty feet from the dining room on my far right to the end of the library on my left. But the ceilings are low, the walls wood-paneled, and the rooms have a homely feel, reminiscent of the farmhouses back where I live in England’s Peak District.

I sit down on the wooden window seat in the maize-strewn room and feel curiously in place. I pull some photographs out of my pocket that show the room lightly furnished with high-armed Knole sofas and velvet curtains. They are no longer here but, apart from that, these rooms where my great-grandmother spent her days and evenings have not been touched since she left them fifty years ago. It is very much still Idina’s house.

Leaning back on the seat I look down through the wooden archway at the far room and there I see something that makes my heart stop. I jump up and trip through the maize to the far end. I stand facing the wall opposite the window and run my fingers through the dust covering Idina’s bookshelves. The photograph I am holding shows them packed and overflowing. Now they are bare but I can still feel the weight of her books upon them.

I walk on through, now going toward the back of the house, and find Idina’s bathroom. A large bath sits along one wall, a lion’s-head tap still ready to gush water hanging above it among the tiles. Next to it is a door that, were it not firmly locked, would take me discreetly into the adjoining bedroom. And then, along one wall, are Idina’s cupboards. The hanging space stretches for twenty feet. I imagine it again full of her clothes.

I pull my jacket around me. We may be almost on the Equator but it is cold up here, at Clouds, and nobody has lit a fire in these rooms for decades. The floor is littered with dried leaves and dust, the furniture is
gone. I am standing in the middle of the scene conjured up by Vita Sackville-West’s obituary of Idina.

I close my eyes. Like silk, my feet rustle in the leaves on the floor. Standing here in this house which Idina built, loved, and lived in for two and a half decades, I feel that I have found her. It is the end of a long journey for me.

I open the French doors into the garden and walk out onto what was once a paved terrace and has been roughly, recently, cut back. Ahead of me stretches what was, in my photographs, a vast lawn. Now the lawn is where the maize and other vegetables are grown, thriving with the irrigation system and series of ponds Idina created here over half a century ago. We walk across the vast vegetable patch to the eucalyptus trees at the end. Here, Solomon tells me, as we stand surrounded by grass, flowers, even nettles, three times the size of their English cousins, we may see colobuses, the large, beautiful black-and-white monkeys that he is fighting to save from extinction. But beyond these trees lies the most startling sight. The ground gives way and I realize that this paradisical spot is truly precariously perched on a ledge of the looming, forested Kipipiri. Ahead of me stretches the great Rift Valley and, in sharp contrast to the lushness around me in the hills, the distant valley floor below is a dry yellow, clouded with the shadows of its diminishing herds.

I FELT MORE AT HOME
at Clouds than I ever did in a couple of dozen visits to Barbie’s. Yet as I think about Idina, my thoughts go immediately to my own children. I can’t bring myself to say that Idina should have stayed in an unhappy marriage. But maybe, if she had been a little older, she could have seen a way to make it work. In one of Idina’s letters to Dinan, written at the end of her life, I find an echo of just how hardhearted she had found Euan all those years before when she decided she had to leave him. She is writing to Dinan about Sir James Dunn; Jimmie Dunn, Idina calls him. He was the man who had commissioned Orpen to paint Idina, along with two or three other striking women of the day, back in 1915. At the time Idina wrote, in the late 1940s, Dunn had offered to give Dinan this portrait of her mother. “He is a sentimental old man,” wrote Idina, “in spite of being a millionaire.”
¹
After Euan, Idina avoided rich men.

I never met Idina. She would have been seventy-five when I was born, but she had died thirteen years earlier. Nor did I meet, until I began to write this book, any of Dinan’s four children, whose ages
range from close to my mother’s to my own. A few months after David’s death, Buck invited Pru and the two- and three-year-old Davina and Laura to Fisher’s Gate. It clearly meant a great deal to Idina that the family had met, as she wrote: “I am so glad Laura liked Dinan.”
²

Idina

But that was the end of it. Pru and the girls went to live in Greece and then Wales. None of them saw Dinan until Davina, aged eighteen, met her at a Highland Ball in Scotland. The two of them were introduced and stood there, neither knowing what to say—then the flow of dancers and music swept them away from each other.

And thus, with Idina dead, her family remained separated. Her role as a grandmother was split between the two women whose actions several decades earlier seem to have torn apart her marriage to Euan Wallace—setting her life off on its “turbulent”
³
course. Dinan and her children visited Avie. David’s widow, Pru, sent her daughters to stay with Barbie. At one stage Barbie and Avie had been best friends. Now
neither mentioned the other. And both sets of Idina’s grandchildren grew up believing they didn’t have any cousins at all. We played games, my mother said to me, in which we would pretend we had cousins. “So,” said Merlin Erroll when I first met him, “did we.”

But now, of course, this book has in a way brought Idina back to life. And with her long, manicured fingernails resting on my forearm, her family is finally coming together. Maybe, one day, we will all go on that Kenyan safari Idina so longed to arrange.

On that note I shall end. Sitting here at my desk in my hillside farmhouse overlooking the vast stretch of the Cheshire Plain, I can hear my two small children scampering back indoors. It is time I stopped writing and went to them.

Notes

CLARIDGE’S HOTEL, MAYFAIR
, 1934

1
. Wallace, David, personal diary, 1934.

2
. Interviews with Davina Howell and Pru de Winton, David’s daughter and wife (author’s mother and grandmother).

CHAPTER
1

1
. Sunday
Times
, 7 November 1982.

2
. Trzebinski, Errol,
The Life and Death of Lord Erroll
(Fourth Estate, London 2001), p. 76.

3
. Fox, James,
White Mischief
(Penguin, London 1984), p. 31.

4
. Sunday
Times
, 7 November 1982.

5
. Wallace, Euan, personal diaries, 1917.

6
.
New York Times
, 25 June 1929.

7
. Interview with Frank Giles, Corfu, August 2007.

8
. The
Times
, 10 November 1955.

9
. Interview, 2004 (source wishes to remain anonymous).

10
. In particular, Lady Eileen Scott, who also lived in Kenya.

11
. Forbes, Rosita,
Appointment in the Sun
(Cassell & Co., London 1949), p. 274.

12
. Ibid., p. 278.

13
. Telephone interview, Ann McKay (née Soltau), July 2008.

14
. Forbes, Rosita,
Appointment in the Sun
(Cassell & Co., London 1949), pp. 274–9.

15
. Fox, James,
White Mischief
(Penguin, London 1984), p. 30.

16
.
Forbes, Rosita,
Appointment in the Sun
(Cassell & Co., London 1949), pp. 274, 275.

17
. Mitford, Nancy,
Don’t Tell Alfred
(Penguin Books, London 1963), p. 17.

18
. Mitford, Nancy,
The Pursuit of Love
(Penguin Books, London 1945), p. 176.

19
. Forbes,
Appointment in the Sun
, p. 278.

20
. Interview with Ann Douglas, a later wife of Chris Langlands, London, 2004.

21
.
A Woman of Affairs
, directed by Clarence Brown, 1928.

22
. For example,
Nevada State Journal
, 18 April 1934.

23
. Errol Trzebinski interview with David Fielden, Kilifi, Kenya, 1996.

24
. Forbes, Rosita,
Appointment in the Sun
.

25
. Philippa Neave to the author, 11 June 2008.

26
. Ibid.

27
. Interview, Nairobi, June 2004 (source wishes to remain anonymous).

28
. Arlen, Michael,
The Green Hat
(Robin Clark, London 1991), p. 23.

29
. Interview with Molly Hoare, Surrey, U.K., 2004.

30
. Interview with Paul Spicer, London, 2005.

31
. Interview with Patsy Chilton, London, 2004.

32
. Interview, Kenya, 2004 (source wishes to remain anonymous).

33
. Interview with Molly Hoare, Surrey, U.K., 2004.

34
. Idina to Pru de Winton (then Mrs. David Wallace), 13 September 1944.

CHAPTER
2

1
. Elliott, Geoffrey,
The Mystery of Overend and Gurney
(Methuen, London 2006), p. 186.

2
. Brassey, Annie Allnut,
A Voyage in the
“
Sunbeam
” (Longmans, Green & Co., London 1878).