The Bolter (23 page)

Idina and Joss announced their engagement in Venice at the beginning of September. They were staying at the Palazzo Barzizza on the Grand Canal with Oggie, who had rented the house for her usual end-of-summer gathering. The photographers followed them. A picture of the two of them, walking barefoot along the Lido, the thirty-year-old, twice-divorced Idina in a Grecian-style tunic and the twenty-one-year-old Joss wearing a pair of brightly colored silk pajamas that were the fashion of the day, was the front cover of the
Tatler
the following week. Both of them were grinning—a wide-mouthed, lips pressed, smirking sort of grin at the small storm of scandal they had whipped up between them. “A snapshot taken recently at a well known Italian resort …” ran the caption. “… The engagement of Lady Idina Gordon and Mr. Josslyn Hay was announced a short time ago.”
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Ten days later, on 22 September, they married in the Kensington Register Office in London. Idina wore a cloche hat and a knee-length brocade coat trimmed with fur. As a final gesture flying in the face of tradition, she had had her outfit made in the traditionally unluckiest color for brides—green. It was a tiny wedding and only half a dozen guests followed them across town to the Savoy Grill. They included Joss’s best man, Philip Carey, and Idina’s brother, Buck, but not his young wife, Diana, either Muriel or Avie, or anyone from Joss’s family. The society hostess Brenda Dufferin was there and a “Prince George of Russia,”
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together with a young couple who had been with Idina and Joss at Oggie’s house party in Venice when their engagement was
announced. Their names were Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley, known to their friends as Tom and Cimmie.

Idina and Joss on their wedding day

At this stage of his political career Tom Mosley was a young Conservative Member of Parliament, on his way to his first transformation into a Communist. He shared with Idina a similar level of sexual appetite and, even amid the flush of her engagement to Joss, the two of them were instantly attracted to each other.

Cimmie was someone Idina had known far longer. Before she married she had been Cimmie Curzon, Avie and Barbie’s best friend. She was still Barbie’s bosom pal, and Tom and Cimmie were frequent guests at the new house that Idina had poured so much into but had never seen: Kildonan. Perhaps with a tinge of guilt, Cimmie gave Idina an extravagantly generous present. It was a gilt and crystal-encrusted Cartier dressing-table set, engraved with Idina’s new initials.

FOR THE NEXT THREE MONTHS
Idina and Joss cavorted around London and Paris as the latest scandal of the day. Their ignominy blossomed thanks to the added misbehavior of both Idina’s siblings. Stewart and Avie’s marriage had not been a success. After a couple of misplaced hopes, Avie had not become pregnant. Gradually the two of them had started to wander. Stewart had an affair with Barbie’s younger sister Ursula, whom he had met staying at Kildonan in August 1921. The affair had started a year later and Ursula had wanted Stewart to
divorce Avie and marry her—mirroring Euan’s path from Idina to Barbie. Stewart had refused and after a year the affair fizzled out and Ursula married another man. Avie, however, had found out about it and begun to console herself with a string of lovers whom she failed to conceal. While Stewart sat at his desk in Whitehall, Avie, extremely publicly, rushed around the country with a succession of different men, but Stewart remained resolutely married to her.

The tide of change that was sweeping across the world in the aftermath of the war was bringing uncertainty as well as excitement. Hard hit both financially and by loss of life, the upper classes felt vulnerable. In repeatedly divorcing, Idina was regarded as a class traitor—just like Muriel, who was still financially and vocally supporting George Lansbury and his Socialist causes. And then Buck caused the greatest stir when, at the start of 1924, he became the first member of the House of Lords to accept an appointment as a minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s Socialist government. As far as British society was concerned, the Sackvilles were out to destroy it.

In February of that year, Idina and Joss went back to Koblenz to see his parents. Victor Kilmarnock had exploded with anger when he heard of the wedding. Idina and Joss had given him three months to calm down. Now they had come to say good-bye before leaving for Kenya. Faced with a farewell for what might be several years, Joss’s parents brought themselves to make some sort of peace with the couple. Idina charmed them, promising to take care of their precious “child” in Africa. By the time she and Joss left a few days later, she was on good enough terms with her parents-in-law to call them Darlings when she later wrote to them.
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The affection was clearly returned. As a tribute to the happy couple, when Idina and Joss walked out of the Residence, fur-stoled and buttoned up against the biting January cold, Victor gave them a traditional Scottish exit for newlyweds and had them piped out by his tartan-clad sentry.

Within weeks Idina and Joss had crossed France to Marseille and boarded a boat for the two-and-a-half-week passage to Mombasa.

At first the journey was a novelty for Joss. On board he and Idina were surrounded by colonial officials and farmers, big-game hunters and missionaries, all dutifully studying the local lingo before they arrived. But by the end of the first week Joss was bored. While Idina was having a drink before dinner in the ship’s cocktail bar, he slipped into a female passenger’s cabin. Her husband, like Idina, had already changed and gone for a drink. The woman deftly unbuttoned Joss’s
trousers and fell to her knees. Her husband returned to the cabin door to ask why she was taking so long to change for dinner. Equally deftly, the woman pulled Joss into the bathroom with her and locked it, calling through the door that she would be along just as soon as she had finished.
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Joss laughed about the incident with Idina, who, in turn, made light of it.
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While her husband openly stalked other women, Idina recounted the story to show how little she cared. It was her fault, she said, and, as if in an attempt to regain power over the situation, claimed that she had taught him to behave like that.
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But the open marriage to Joss was already steadily heading out of her control.

The couple reached Mombasa in May and took the train straight up to Nairobi, the Hispano-Suiza they had brought with them from Europe strapped onto an open carriage. Once they had reached the capital they checked into Muthaiga and started putting the word out that they wanted to buy a farm. By the time the long spring rains had dried up, they were back up-country at Gilgil. Idina had found two thousand acres of grazing and forest land a few miles northwest of her old farm. This new property was, however, at a slightly higher altitude and right at the foot of the steep slopes of the Aberdares, twenty-five miles from Gilgil.

The
shamba
was called Lion Island, “because the lions used to breed there,” wrote Joss to his mother in Koblenz.
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He and Idina had not bought the farm outright but had leased it “at a very reasonable price, 15 shillings [three-fourths of a pound sterling] an acre on terms over ten years.”
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Idina and Joss’s aim was “to be entirely self-supporting; killing our own sheep, beef etc. growing our own maize, wheat oats, barley etc, and to make money in dairy farming.”
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They bumped the Hispano-Suiza across the countryside and up to the highest flat spot on their new land, immediately hiring 150 local adult “boys” to help them clear it and raise a long, grass-roofed
banda
to live in until their house was built. It was hard work: “We neither of us have a vestige of a tummy left.”
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And at night when they fell into bed it was in the privacy of their own canvas tent, along with both dogs and guns to fend off any returning lion or adventurous leopards.

By the end of June they had dug the foundations for a low, single-story house, with a short stretch of veranda-fronted main rooms flanked on either side by bedrooms and—as was always the case in Kenya—a separate building for the frequently fire-ridden kitchen. The predominant feature of the house was its roof—vaulted to keep the rooms cool,
eaves protruding over the windows to provide shade. The walls were bricked and whitewashed to the top of these windows, and above that were cedar-shingled up to the roof, which was of corrugated iron. It had English cottage bay and casement windows and the simple layout of a French villa. It was almost quaint, and deeply unpretentious. It was, at last for Idina, a home. Joss insisted that they call the house Slains after his family’s recently sold ancestral castle.

Idina and Joss clearing ground: “We neither of us have a vestige of a tummy left.”

Idina filled the house with furniture shipped to Mombasa, transferred onto the Iron Snake and offloaded at Gilgil onto heaving oxcarts which nearly toppled as they swayed their way up to the house. Their cargo was an eclectic combination of rustic pieces, the antiques Idina had bought in Koblenz, a few more that she had found in Naples on the boat journey down, and Sackville family furniture. There were sixteenth-century painted dressers, gleaming Napoleonic tables with intricately carved feet, studded Zanzibar chests, Persian carpets, and high-winged sofas
that her grandfather had taken from Knole when his brother had moved into the house. At one end of the main living room sat a wide fireplace, a pair of buffalo horns twisting up the wall above. At the other, she covered the walls, floor to ceiling, in bookshelves. Week by week the latest novels arrived from England. Idina turned the pages until she shut down the generator at ten-thirty each night. She filled the rooms with fresh flowers, paintings, photographs, and a large mirror, its frame carved and colored with flowers. Idina fixed it to the ceiling above her bed: “So,” she explained to one of the house’s later occupants, “I could see all the different positions.”
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Around the house rough grassland was mown into gently sloping English lawns. A path led down to them from the veranda through an explosion of pansies, roses, and petunias. Cedars encircled the grass and, at their roots, daffodil bulbs were scattered. At first sight, it could have been an English hillside, until the nettles, looming over a man’s head, trembled with an unseen animal’s roar. Or the ground shook with the giant gray pads of a rogue elephant pounding its way across the grass.

A hundred yards down the hill they built a red-brick dairy. “Dairying,” wrote Joss to his mother, “is apparently going to be a very paying thing here, and we seem to have come at the right moment, the beginning of the boom.”
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A large “creamery combine” was being started at Gilgil. Idina and Joss’s neighbor, Sir John “Chops” Ramsden, who owned seventy thousand acres, was planning on milking a thousand head of cattle.

Muriel sent them half a dozen of her prize Kerry cattle as a wedding present. They bought another fifty local cattle “to grade with Friesian bulls”
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and started building up a dairy herd, sending the churns back down the hill to Gilgil. Encouraged by their early success with cattle, Idina and Joss had a flock of sheep shipped over from Scotland but, once installed, they started to die. Trying to work out what was so different in this otherwise Scottish landscape, Idina concluded that it was the strength of the sun. The Europeans in Kenya were fanatically sun-shy Children wore not just wide-brimmed hats but thick spine pads under their clothes to stop the sunlight harming their backs. Idina wrote to her brother and asked him to send down a hundred knitted wool sun hats. She made holes for the sheep’s ears and dressed each sheep. Still, the animals continued to die—from an unseen African parasite.