The Bolter (29 page)

During the two months he had been back at Slains, Joss had been going off by himself from time to time. It was unlikely that he had genuinely ended the affair with Molly as abruptly as he had appeared to when Cyril returned from Europe, but his willingness to rush away for several months—even given that it was to Alice’s bedside—suggested that it had cooled considerably.

IDINA AND JOSS LEFT
at the start of the April rains and reached England in May. They took Dinan to stay with Buck and his wife, Diana,
Dinan’s namesake, at their house on the De La Warr estate, the relatively modest Fisher’s Gate. The pretty, dark-red-brick and white-windowed farmhouse, even if generously sized, was more appropriate for a minister in a Socialist government than the ancestral home of Buckhurst. After two sons, Buck and Diana, too, had had a girl in the past year, providing a playmate for Dinan. And having installed their daughter in the Fisher’s Gate nursery, Idina and Joss could dash over to Paris to see Alice.

By then both Alice and Raymond were out of danger, but Alice, once she had recovered sufficiently, had been charged with Raymond’s attempted murder and had been moved to the women’s hospital section of the Saint-Lazare Prison—where she was much in need of visitors. Raymond, on the other hand, had been flown back to England to convalesce. From there he was making statements to the press that suggested the love affair was far from over. “ ‘I told her,’ he said, ‘that all was over between us but this decision is not irrevocable.’ ”
¹²

Joss and Idina followed Raymond back to England and scooped up Dinan to take her over to Koblenz to see his parents. By the middle of May, Alice was out of prison, albeit temporarily. She was allowed to retire to the French country estate of Fred’s still surprisingly understanding mother, “until in sufficiently good health to appear in court.”
¹³
A month later Fred obtained a straightforward divorce in the Paris courts. He was granted custody of their two daughters. Meanwhile Alice remained at his mother’s house, where her friends could visit her until she stood trial.

With Alice and Fred settled, Idina and Joss returned to London. For a couple of months they had a chance to wind back the clock to their old pre-Kenyan days. There they could dash around town together visiting friends, spend evening after evening in the theater, and go out dancing at their old haunts. It appeared to be very much a family visit. Joss’s grandfather died in July, which gathered everyone together for the funeral and brought a couple of changes to their lives. The first was that Joss’s parents became the new Earl and Countess of Erroll and he and Idina stepped into their shoes as Lord and Lady Kilmarnock. The second was that Joss came into the modest but not negligible sum of three hundred pounds a year of his own.

Although this eased the financial strain on their lives back at Slains, it also gave Joss a potentially dangerous sense of independence. He was no longer reliant on his parents’ approval for money—and they had
clearly come to approve of Idina. What Idina did not realize was that Molly Ramsay-Hill was in London too.

Instead of Joss’s needing to drive for several hours to find her, never sure when Cyril might be in, in London Molly was just a few minutes’ cab ride away. At some point during these months, Joss and Molly settled upon a plan to marry and live in Oserian together.

Idina and Joss returned to Kenya in September. Molly remained in London for a further month, arriving at Oserian in November. It was vital for the scheme that she and Joss had concocted that no suspicion of their affair should reach Cyril’s ears.

Once back at Naivasha, Molly started entertaining lavishly at Oserian, her houseboys dispensing liquor from a specially designed, hand-painted bar underneath one of the house’s domes. Cyril was becoming annoyed with the Happy Valley crowd using his house as a watering hole and an incessant flow of “unwelcome guests who began drinking immediately after breakfast,” as he later wrote,
¹⁴
and he failed to see through the cover that it provided for his wife’s affair. The parties continued for six weeks. Then, on 17 December 1927, Molly took her husband into Nairobi to visit their solicitor, Walter Shapley of Shapley, Schwartze and Barratt. There, perhaps now slightly less enamoured of the house, he signed over “an undivided half share and interest” in Oserian for which, “in consideration of the Vendor’s natural love and affection for his wife,” he accepted the nominal sum of just ten shillings.
¹⁵
Molly had her half share of the house and she and Joss were now ready to elope.

But within less than a week, Alice stalled Joss’s departure. On 23 December she stood trial in Paris for the attempted murder of Raymond. Alice’s impassivity flummoxed the judge, “who seemed to think the pretty young woman did not quite realize the nature of her offense”
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and chastised her for leaving her children. “To leave one’s husband is perhaps understandable, but really, Madame, one has no right to leave one’s children like that.”
¹⁷
Alice’s response was that “I was carried away by passion.”
¹⁸
The judge was charmed. Alice was given a six-month suspended sentence for having committed a
crime passionnel
and fined four dollars for carrying a firearm without a license. The verdict made as many headlines as the shooting: “Countess Who Shot Lover and Self Gets Off with $4 Fine in French Court.”
¹⁹
And, having again shocked the world, Alice immediately and publicly set off to return to Kenya. Joss waited for her to arrive.

Alice reached Kenya in January 1928 to what must have been Idina’s great relief. Idina’s antennae were more finely tuned than Cyril Ramsay-Hill’s and, even if she did not know the details of the transfer of the half share of Oserian, she knew that Molly was clearly far more than a passing infatuation for Joss. It must have been becoming abundantly clear to Idina that it was only a matter of time before her “child” left home for good.

Alice’s reappearance, however, meant Joss and Alice started careering around the country together. Far from upsetting Idina, her husband’s disappearance with her best friend was just as she had hoped. According to the old Edwardian morality to which Idina still clung, extramarital affairs were acceptable as long as they did not become “serious” and hence threatening either to the other spouse’s primary position or to the marriage itself. This of course worked for men and women alike. Idina believed, correctly, that unlike Joss’s entanglement with Molly, his affair with Alice would never become serious. In the meantime she was free to pursue her own “not serious” liaisons. With luck Joss would forget Molly, inevitably tire of Alice, and then return to Idina. It was a far from ideal situation but Idina was still very much in love with Joss and it may have appeared her best chance of saving her marriage—at least from the claws of Molly Ramsay-Hill.

ON ONE OF HIS TRIPS
at the end of February 1928, Joss bumped into Tania Blixen in Nairobi. Less than a year earlier she had avoided his company and referred to “Idina and her current husband.”
²⁰
Now she seemed only too eager to see him and invited him out to her house for “a bottle” that afternoon. Joss asked whether he could bring the notorious Alice. Tania readily agreed “and thereby acquired a tea-party that was really so comical that I lay in my bed that night laughing about it.”
²¹

Shortly before Joss and Alice were due to arrive, another car pulled up. This contained a pair of prurient Government House types and, wrote Blixen, “two really huge and corpulent old American ladies” from a cruise ship moored in Mombasa. They had come up-country “in the hope of seeing a lion” but, squeezed into Tania’s chairs, they immediately “started to discuss all the dreadfully immoral people there were in Kenya… and as the worst one of all, they mentioned Alice.” Blixen, mischievously, let the group chatter in “great detail about it.” Five minutes later Joss and Alice arrived. “I don’t think the Devil himself could have had a greater effect if he had walked in; it was undoubtedly better than the biggest lion.”
²²

Not all of Kenya was as thrilled as Idina and Tania at Alice’s return. Lady Grigg, the wife of the then governor, Sir Edward Grigg, was particularly horrified.
²³
Having made headlines for almost a year, Alice was still being followed in the world’s press with ongoing speculation as to whether, having shot Raymond, she was now going to marry him.
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Her choice of Kenya as her refuge and her extremely public parading with Joss reinforced the London view that the country was little more than a love colony. Lady Grigg persuaded her husband to issue an order for Alice’s deportation.
²⁵
In March 1928 Alice was sent back to Europe. Within days Joss had decided that he, too, was going. A few weeks before, on 20 February, his father had died suddenly at the age of fifty-two. Joss was still cavorting with Alice in Nairobi over a week later. However, now that Alice had gone, his mother’s shock at his father’s death—she was apparently ill enough to be unable to attend the memorial service in St. Margaret’s, Westminster
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—gave him a pretext, if not a need, to leave Kenya.

Idina was not included in the plans for the trip.
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It is not clear where she was on the day Joss disappeared from Slains, or whether he had even told her that he was leaving. But it is possible that he avoided seeing Idina face-to-face. If so, she would not have heard that her husband had finally left her until the scandal that was about to erupt had broken.

Joss left Slains, drove down to Gilgil, and boarded the train for Nairobi and then Mombasa. The train stopped at Naivasha, a long stop, for a meal. Joss slipped off the train and went to fetch Molly. Shortly afterward the two of them slipped back on board. Molly was clutching a suitcase and a pair of first-class tickets for Marseille.

At about exactly the moment that Molly was boarding the train just a few miles away, Cyril Ramsay-Hill returned to Oserian early from a hunting trip to find his wife gone. One of his servants explained to him that his wife had just left to board the train with Joss. Furious, Ramsay-Hill grabbed a pistol and raced to the station to discover that the train had already left. Calculating that he could still beat it to Nairobi station, he turned straight onto the Nairobi road and put his foot down on the gas pedal. By the time Joss and Molly’s train reached the city, Ramsay-Hill was there. As the train drew in, he ran onto the platform but dropped the pistol. “I had thought of killing him,” Ramsay-Hill later wrote, “but a friend advised me that losing a wife was preferable to losing one’s life by hanging.”
²⁸
Instead he grabbed a rhino-hide whip from a waiting horse and carriage, asking, as he took it: “May I borrow your
kiboko
a moment? I’ve got to whip a dog.”

As Joss descended, Ramsay-Hill collared his trusted friend and “in full view of the other passengers”
²⁹
whipped him. Then he let the man who had cuckolded him go. Bruised and bleeding, Joss rejoined Molly to continue their journey to London.

This was a far greater scandal for the Kenyan administration than just another irritating story of adultery and elopement. A crucial sociopolitical boundary of colonial power had been broken. A large crowd of native Kenyans, all rooted to the spot by the spectacle on the station platform, had seen a white man humiliated.
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YEARS LATER, WHEN SLAINS
had fallen into other hands, Idina returned for lunch and asked if she could spend an hour or two alone in her and Joss’s old bedroom “to remember the old times.” She went in and shut the door. When she came out, glowing, she declared it “Heaven, darling,” and sauntered away.
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But back in March 1928, at the moment Joss left in such a thick cloud of scandal, Idina had a hard truth to face. She was thirty-five years old and, for the second time in her life, a husband she loved had fallen for another woman. And this time she had been the one abandoned. The Wanjohi Valley without Joss, without Alice, without Fred, and without any prospect that they might return, was suddenly a lonely enough place for Idina, too, to decide to leave. Three weeks later, just before she would be trapped by the onset of the long April rains, Idina sailed for England, taking Dinan with her.

Chapter 19

I
n London Idina was very openly a deserted wife. The story of Joss’s horsewhipping was doing the rounds in England, to great delight. Determined to hold her head high, Idina went straight to Buck’s house, Fisher’s Gate, parked Dinan with her cousins, and headed up to the fray in the capital, showing the world that she was still alive and kicking.

She moved into Oggie’s new house in Glebe Place, a Chelsea street buzzing with artists’ studios, and within days she had rounded up a host of admirers and had embarked on a raging affair with one of the most sexually attractive—and active—men in London.

Tom Mosley was in England what Joss was in Kenya: physically magnetic and a renowned philanderer. His wife, Euan and Barbie’s old friend Cimmie Curzon, professed not to mind. Tom, Cimmie knew, would always come back to her. He was wealthy in his own right and lived in a dreamy, rambling Tudor manor house, Savehay Farm, in Den-ham, Buckinghamshire. Tom was very much part of Oggie’s crowd—he and Cimmie had been at Idina and Joss’s wedding—and, having been first elected a Conservative Member of Parliament, he was now a Labour MP and a close colleague of Buck’s; both were regarded by fellow members of the upper classes as Communists. And in both cases the sense of danger this came with increased their appeal to the opposite sex—which they manipulated to their advantage.