The Bolter (10 page)

By Christmas he was well enough to be sent to live at home. Two months after the birth of her son, Idina would have been more than ready to resume a sexual life. It was also clear that she would have Euan in her bed only until he was fit enough to go back to the Front. As he was making just the occasional trip to the barracks at Windsor, she made the most of having him around. And within the first few weeks of their reunion, barely three months after giving birth for the first time, she was pregnant again.

During the day Idina trotted and Euan hauled himself up the long stone stairs of Connaught Place, plotting and planning Kildonan, the home they would have when this was all over. By night, they stepped out into the dark London streets. The few lights still in use had been covered over, leaving only a dim glow.

They scampered to that night’s dance—inevitably busy, full, frantic. The excitement of war was already dissolving into desperation to seize any remaining moments. A great many of Idina and Euan’s friends had been professional soldiers. By now over half of these had been killed or crippled. The colleagues they had left behind could make no sense of the fact that they, so far, had been spared. Those soldiers, on returning to England and passing through town, needed to be entertained, danced with at every opportunity. The new captain Euan Wallace, proud bearer of not just dashing good looks and an immense fortune but also a war wound and a Mention in Dispatches, inevitably found himself surrounded by a flock of femininity longing for a dance, at the very least.

Euan, a lifelong admirer of attractive women, was not a man to resist working his leg back into shape by taking to the dance floor with each and every one. And, in a succession of other women’s arms, he showed Idina the direction in which her marriage would eventually shift when
her husband, following the established pattern, took lovers among her friends.

Her own childhood having been shaped by her father’s departure, Idina clearly settled upon a strategy to keep her marriage together. This was not to hide the extent to which she, too, was in demand. At the beginning of March 1915, as Euan rejoined his regiment in France, she accepted an invitation to sit for the society painter William Orpen. The portrait had been commissioned by an admirer of hers: the multimillionaire industrialist Sir James Dunn, a collector of many things, including vivacious women.

Dunn paid an unheard-of 750 pounds for the portrait. Idina wore a black velvet evening dress that had a plunging neckline and fell in folds to the floor. Orpen sat her up on a raised throne of a chair, the thick black material of her dress sweeping the black-and-white tiles of his studio floor, and her Pekinese, Satan, peeping out from underneath.

Orpen was a flirt, and more. Idina looked across at him, chin upward, defiant. When Euan had left Idina the previous August, she had been eight months pregnant and not in a position either to want or find a lover. This time her pregnancy was, as yet, barely visible and she had suddenly gone from having frequent and satisfying sex to an empty marital bed. Ninety years on, electricity still fizzes from the portrait.

And when she next met with James Miller to work on the plans for Kildonan, Euan’s dancing with every girl in town before returning to France was obviously fresh on Idina’s mind. As the rooms had been arranged, their bedroom apartments in the new house would allow Euan to retreat to his dressing room and then slip off down the passageways without passing her door.

In those first plans, the line of the outside wall in Idina’s bedroom allowed for a deep cupboard, repeated in the smoking room below. Now, however, a staircase was sketched into this space instead. It would allow a friend to detach himself from the rest of the house party with the excuse of heading off for a final cigarette, and then slip straight upstairs to her.

Unlike her mother, Idina was not going to allow herself to be left while her husband was out having fun elsewhere. If Euan wasn’t going to be there, Idina needed somebody else to be.

Chapter 5

T
he first diary is smaller than my outstretched hand. It is bound in smooth-grained leather, navy blue and worn away on each corner. It is a traveling diary, with a flap that comes over the open edge and a broken strap that once held it down. Inside it is pristine, with a rigid wormhole of a holder for one of those impossibly thin diary pencils. The endpapers are stiff and marbled in rich swirls of blue and gold. The pages within are pale blue, featherweight, but tightly woven. Frank Smythson’s, I read, “
PREMIER
”
DIARY. 1917
. Nineteen seventeen was a terrible year in British history. Not a year to be a soldier.

Euan’s name comes first, inked with neat flamboyance. Then come seventeen printed pages of useful information: the calendars, the important information that gentlemen, or ladies, in possession of a private income and struggling to fill their waking hours, had needed to know before the war: lists of the royal children’s names and birthdays (seven forenames for the Prince of Wales, shrinking to a mere three for his youngest brother); Empire Day, Queen Mary’s Birthday, the King’s Birthday, and the Prince of Wales’s Birthday. When the Royal Academy closed for the summer. When grouse, partridge, and pheasant shooting, and foxhunting, began. When the dividends on the government stocks they lived off would be paid; that black-bordered mourning envelopes could not be insured; that their male servants needed a fifteen-shilling license; and a comprehensive table of servants’ annual
salaries (between a pound and one hundred pounds), showing what had to be paid them each day, week, and month.

But by the time Euan started to write, many of the hunters and shooters such diaries were produced for were themselves riddled with bullets and shrapnel. For over a year the two sides, each stuck in its own stinking, mud-filled trenches, had faced each other across an Armageddonesque wasteland, with soldiers occasionally venturing out to be mown down by machine guns within seconds. Kitchener’s entire volunteer army had crossed to France and been slaughtered in the Somme. Asquith had given way to a new prime minister, the sprightly David Lloyd George. Controversially, unhappily, and reluctantly, the government had issued an order for compulsory conscription. Not even the horses were spared. Any four-legged equine that could pull a cart was shipped over to the battlefields. Gun carts and mess trucks were given the first available horses. Euan’s gleaming Cavalry received the last. It was shrinking to a regiment that marched on two legs like the rest: the new mechanized tanks crawled steadily past them on the shell-pitted tracks that led men to the frontline and brought only memories of them back.

AT THE BEGINNING OF 1917
Euan was stationed on the coast of northern France, spending day after day exercising horses on the sands, inspecting troops, and waiting, just waiting, for the next attempt to leap the trenches and barbed wire a week’s march east—and the inevitable short, sharp exchange of a few hundred yards of territory for tens of thousands of lives.

1917. MONDAY, 1 JANUARY
.

Idina’s name was on the first page of Euan’s diary: “
DOG TAX DUE
.” Then a thicket of ink: “Rode around by Cregny & C. Vieille in the morning. Had large post. At lunchtime…”
¹
At lunchtime she appeared. Not in person in the wet-dog smell of damp khaki wool in Euan’s makeshift, windswept, here-today-gone-tomorrow Army camp, but back in London, in the choking pea-souper fog belched out by the coal smoke of hundreds of thousands of worn brick chimneys. Idina was wandering up and down the wide stone staircase of Connaught Place with their now two tiny sons and aching for Euan. “At lunchtime got Dina’s wire saying she had ‘every reason to hope’ I would be home in the middle of Jan. So I suppose the CO has really arranged for me to change places with him.”

In this war without end, leave was all Euan had to look forward to. It took just a day to return to England and be able to pull the blankets up over himself and Idina and pretend that the war was nothing but a freezing, muddy dream. Each day trains rattled along the veins of the French railway system to Calais, where the Leave Boat, a wide, tarpaulin-topped ferry, its nooks and crannies hiding illicit games of Crown and Anchor, rocked its way to Folkestone over the heads of the U-boats. There Euan sent a wire to Idina, asking her to meet the Victoria train he was about to leap on.

But now, here in January 1917, that last leave, last touch of each other’s skin, clearly seemed a long way away. Euan was trying to get home. “Tuesday, January 2, CO is going to send me back for 10 days to Windsor!!” But four days later: “Saturday 6 January, Mark rather threw cold water on my chances of going home: but I am still hopeful.” And for the next fortnight Euan’s and Idina’s hopes and fears flew across the Channel. Every spare minute that Euan had he spent scribbling to Idina: “wrote to Dina until lunch… wrote to Dina until dinner… wrote to Dina for a couple of hours and then bed.” Idina’s letters had come flying back, and each day that the post failed to arrive was marked glumly on Euan’s pages, followed by elation when, at last, they arrived: “good mail, got 3 letters from Dina!!”

At the beginning of 1917 Euan and Idina were dangerously in love. Dangerously because at any moment Euan might ride into a hail of bullets and never return: enough to make a man, or his woman, a little reckless, inclined to take a step too far toward anything that might dispel this thought. Dangerously because their marriage, a tender, three-year-old shoot of a marriage between two people still in their early twenties, was precariously top-heavy with grandeur—that mansion in London, the estates in Scotland—and time apart.

“1917. Saturday 20 January, General Portal rang up at 9 pm and told me that W had decided I could not go home ‘on duty’ as all CO’s had been recalled. Hell!”

Hell. A year earlier Euan had been promoted again. Stewart Menzies and his infinite capabilities for knowledge, finding it out, harboring it, and knowing just when to pass it on, had been requisitioned by Intelligence. Euan had been promoted to adjutant in his place. He was now the right-hand man of Lieutenant Colonel Algernon Ferguson, the commanding officer. Ferguson was a cousin by marriage to Menzies and an officer of the old school who, in the face of tanks and machine-gun fire, still clung to the belief that no modern method of warfare was a
match for a Cavalry charge. So far he had been wounded seriously enough twice to be sent back to England. Both times he had bounded back to duty.

Under his charge, Euan was responsible for all regimental administration, discipline, and requests for leave from HQ. And now that Ferguson had gone back to Windsor, Euan was the one officer who couldn’t go too.

Idina and Euan’s sons, David and Gerard (“Gee”) Wallace

Another month passed. February arrived and the weather turned cold. Back in Connaught Place, deep fires were lit. Euan and Idina’s sons, David and Gerard, two and a half years and eighteen months old, scampered down the stairs, over the road to the park, and back with their cavalcade of starchedhatted nannies, nurses, and nursery maids. A few familiar faces came to the house, the piano keyboard was bared, bottles were cracked open. And then Idina and her friends went out: there were shows to see, those dinners out in great gangs, as they had had before the war, and dancing back at home.

But Euan wasn’t there.

He was still in France, with the snow and the threat of a more permanent whiteout falling thick around him.

“The General and I motored to Royon, where we picked up his golf clubs and Ricardo and then on to Torcy. We found too much snow to play.” So he had tried something else. “Nib Pill Miles Dragon Alec Marc and self went tobogganing on a hill NW of the town in the afternoon. We have now 2 toboggans and very good sport was obtained.”

And then, on 20 February, Euan bumped into Idina’s uncle, Tom Brassey, at the Divisional School, where they were both attending a lecture. Tom told Euan that Muriel was coming over to meet him in Paris the following Monday, six days away.

Euan leapt at the idea. “I decided to try and get Dina too.” Paris leave, it appeared, was easier for Euan to come by. He would be only a few hours away from the regiment, not potentially stuck on the other side of the Channel while the U-boats wreaked havoc. “Squared the
leave with Bill on the spot.” That afternoon he wrote out a wire to Idina and “took it into Berck on the bike.”

Would she come over, could she come over? A night of hoping was followed by a morning of panic. All it took was a passing comment in the officers’ mess: was he luring his wife to a watery grave? Germany had declared unrestricted submarine warfare at the start of the month. Not even civilian ships would be spared. Not that they had been, in any case. The moment the early-afternoon drill was over, the brigadier gone, Euan was up and off. Full tilt on the bike. The wind bit into his cheeks and chin, the goggles pressed into his face. “Sent another wire to Dina from Berck warning her not to attempt to come out if it was considered unsafe.”