The Bolter (32 page)

After that Idina employed a manservant to sit with a view of the road for miles down the hill and a tom-tom under his fingertips. The moment he saw the cloud of dust that marked an approaching car he
was to beat the drum, giving Idina’s visitors time to leave by another route before her husband returned. It wasn’t enough. Whenever Donald returned, footsore and camp-tired, from leading an expedition through the bush, he would find something to make him suspect that Idina had taken a lover in his absence. Idina began to fear the outbursts of violence that accompanied his return home. After an unpleasantly effervescent Christmas in 1933, Idina realized that his devotion had evolved into obsession. Donald was now trying, quite literally, to shoot any man he suspected might be her lover. For the first time in her life Idina had to consider that life alone was an option preferable to life—or possibly death—with a gun-toting husband. She decided to tell Donald that she was leaving.
⁷

Idina and her eight year-old daughter, Diana Hay, known as Dinan, in 1934

Early in the New Year Donald left on a monthlong safari. In his absence Idina made preparations to leave for Europe for several months without him. With bullets flying around the house and garden and the now eight-year-old Dinan in need at least of some company of her own age and species (wildlife wandered through the house, sometimes semi-tamed, sometimes creating a great deal of panic), Idina decided that her daughter should return to England, as her friends were doing. For the past few years Idina had organized exchanged visits with Gemma St. Maur, a young cousin of Chops Ramsden, and Robin Long, Boy and Genesta’s son. Both of these children, and nearly all other European and American eight-year-olds in Kenya, were now being sent away to boarding school or back to England to be educated.

Sending children back Home from the far reaches of the British Empire was standard practice. It was regarded as Not Good to bring a child up under a raging sun. When Dinan had been small Idina had cared enough about this to dress her not only in a wide-brimmed sun hat and long sleeves but also in the thick spine-pad that helped to counter the sun. Boarding schools would take children from as young as four and even keep them over the holidays if they had no relations to
visit in England. Many middle- and upper-class British children at this time conducted a purely postal relationship with their parents for years at a stretch.

Idina did not, however, have to send Dinan to boarding school. Buck’s daughter, Kitty, was also eight. While Kitty’s elder brothers had been sent away to school, Kitty, as was the custom among the families who could afford to, was being educated at home by a governess. Buck invited Dinan to live with them, to share lessons with Kitty and provide some company for her. He added to the generosity of his offer by allowing Idina to keep the income from Dinan’s share of the capital until Dinan married, on the basis that Clouds, even if Dinan rarely managed to visit it, would remain her maternal home.

Idina bought a pair of tickets, packed her and Dinan’s clothes, and waited for Donald to return from safari. She intended to tell him that their marriage was over, she was going away, and that when she returned she expected him to have left the house. In sharp contrast to the end of her previous marriages, Idina had this time decided that she would stay living at the house she had built in Kenya, even if it meant living alone. She might be moving on from Donald, but she had invested too much of herself in Clouds to let it go. It had become clear that the only way to hang on to a better life was not to stake it upon the survival of a marriage. In any case, the new craze for airplanes meant that she was just a short flight from Nairobi—the planes could land on the lawns in front of Clouds. Life alone on a Kenyan farm was no longer such a lonely prospect.

A couple of days before Donald was due back Idina began to contemplate what his reaction to her departure might be. On 11 February 1934 she sent a message to Cockie, who had by now not only married but left the incessantly faithless Bror Blixen, to come up to Clouds to give her moral support and to bring reinforcements. Cockie in turn asked Nellie Grant, Elspeth Huxley’s mother, to come too. Even though Donald was, in Nellie’s own words, “given to fits of violence,” she decided to go. “Have just agreed to go with Cockie to Clouds tomorrow for one night only as Dina wants moral support in facing Donald,” she wrote. “Anyway shall get some garden loot even if Donald does shoot us all.”
⁸
The garden loot consisted of bundles of clippings, which Idina and Nellie had been exchanging for a decade and a half.

Thus reinforced, Idina told Donald and then left for England immediately. She reached Fisher’s Gate in early March and installed Dinan in the care of Buck and his wife. After a few days she left for Paris, where,
as the American newspapers reported, she ordered some new clothes: “Lady Idina Haldeman, before leaving for Cairo, ordered a peach crinkled crepe satin evening dress with peach ostrich feather cape from Molyneux. Peach chiffon covers the shoulders and the feathers begin midway between shoulder and elbow. Very pale at first they deepen into almost orange and the tips curl up like inverted question marks.”
⁹
Idina went on to Egypt for Easter at the beginning of April and, toward the end of the month, returned to London. She would spend three months in England catching up with old friends and then return to Kenya to live, as she had settled upon, without a husband.

It seemed as though at last, as she entered her forties, Idina had found confidence in herself. She was showing an emotional stability that she had not displayed since her early marriage to Euan. But, in the first few days of May, amid the mêlée of cocktail and dinner parties that marked the beginning of the London Social Season, Idina received a note from a friend that would turn this new state of affairs on its head.

The name of the friend was Sheila Milbanke. Sheila was a glamorous society beauty, generally described as “quite the nicest thing ever to have come out of Australia.”
¹⁰
She had arrived in England in her late teens and made an early marriage. Like Idina, she had divorced, and was now married to the considerably older Sir John Milbanke, known as Buffles and a military hero who had won Britain’s greatest award for bravery, the Victoria Cross. Being Australian, Sheila was engagingly unconcerned by some of the rules of British society and approached life and the people around her in a straightforward, matter-of-fact way. As Cockie had done on safari in Kenya, Sheila had thus entranced the Prince of Wales and made herself a name as a Court favorite.

In the note Sheila asked to meet up with Idina. When they met, Sheila was characteristically direct. Sheila and Buffles were extremely close friends of Euan and Barbie’s. They spent a great deal of time staying with them and Sheila had therefore spent a great deal of time with Idina’s two sons, David and Gerard, who were now nineteen and eighteen, together with their three much younger half brothers, Barbie’s children.

Idina, in contrast, had not been allowed to see her sons since she had first left for Kenya with Charles Gordon. Barbie had become mother to Idina’s children, too, leaving Idina with no right to see them herself.

But right or no right, Sheila told Idina, David now needed to see her, his real mother.

Idina’s two sons had “totally different characters,” as Barbie’s sister
Ursula Lutyens had spotted a dozen years earlier.
¹¹
While Gerard was “the most determined, obstinate little fellow with a will of iron,” David was “affectionate” and “very easily influenced… you can get him to do anything by showing him a little love.” Life, Ursula had predicted, “will probably be harder for him than for G.”

She was right. Both David and Gee, as Gerard had become known, were extremely bright and had jumped a school year at Eton, which they had now left. Along with many of his generation, Gee’s imagination had been captured by the Air Force. He sat the exam and passed into Cranwell, the training academy, in second place, winning a prize cadetship. He settled in well, was utterly content, and within a month flew solo.

David, meanwhile, sat the Oxford entrance exam. He narrowly missed a scholarship but took a place at the aggressively academic Balliol College to read Greats, consisting of Philosophy, Latin, and Ancient Greek. He had been there since the previous October and was now burning with both brilliance and anger. He scorned his parents’ lifestyle as he did their politics—Euan was a Conservative MP and government minister, Barbie a political hostess—to the extent that he was no longer able to have a rational conversation with either of them. He was currently agonizing over whether or not to become a celibate “Christian Socialist” priest and, Sheila believed, he desperately needed to confide in somebody outside his parents’ circle.

For fifteen years Idina had not heard her son’s voice, seen his face, or touched his skin. David, Sheila said, really needed to talk to somebody who understood the “fire” he was in,
¹²
and who could listen.

Idina could certainly do that.

Chapter 21

D
avid Wallace by no means kept every letter he was sent, although a few sets of intense correspondence with fellow undergraduates survived him. From Barbie, he kept very few letters, and only two from this difficult time in his life. The first was written to him on his year abroad, saying that he should stick out his time away, however miserable he felt. The second was about his passionately held political beliefs and the emotional crisis he was in. It was not a warm letter. Its coolness had so incensed him that he had picked up a pen and scrawled his own comments over it:

Mayfair 6212

19 Hill Street

Berkeley Square WI

Monday

My darling David,

Thank you for a [“Oh!” scrawled by David] letter I got this morning. I realized all these holidays that you were going through some sort of mental change and hesitated several times whether to talk to you about the outward signs of it, which seemed to be a sort of intellectual air of snobbery and superiority and lack of effort [“largely ‘ability’ ” added by David] to talk or mix with anyone.

Darling, whatever you may do in the world one has to get on with one’s fellow men—either you are going to lead them or you are going to serve them. In either case you have got to understand them and get on with them and even the people you may despise as frivolous, idle or anything else you like probably have something in them that is fine and lovable so try never to judge hardly. And it is the typical soldier sailor type, which you may find very antipathetic at the moment which have yet, in the past, almost more than anyone made possible the life that you and your generation enjoy.… You are quite right to be dissatisfied with the present capitalist system which has obviously partially failed and quite right to wish to alter some of the awful inequalities of life but please don’t just say you’re a communist just to startle and frighten me [underlined and “NO!” added by David]. In the first place it doesn’t a bit, in the second place [“Oh!” added by David] what do you mean by it, and what are you going to do about it? If you wish to put down the present system you must replace it with a thought-out system of Communism and plan to bridge the transition stage—it is no good being mearly [sic] destructive but you must be sure of your constructive plan as well. Then do you think Communism does away with inequalities, poverty etc? Certainly conditions in Russia, which is the only country that has tried it, are far worse, specially those of the poorest.

Don’t you think perhaps more could be done by trying to improve the present system under which with all its faults the standard of living has undeniably improved every 10 years.

Please if you want to be a communist or a socialist or anything be a constructive one not just a rather priggish critic of the present system, from which you’ve drawn every advantage [underlined and “Did I ever deny it?” added by David].

I wonder if you would like to go up to Blagdon for part of the holidays and work in some of the very poor parts round Newcastle.

I’m sure you would be harrowed and perhaps you could help. Anyway you would see a little of conditions and know more what you were talking about. I hope this letter makes sense to you but I’m not too good with the pen as you know [“I certainly do!” added by David].

With love from
Mother.

With love from Mother. Barbie had been “Mother” to David and Gee ever since the day she appeared in Eastbourne with Euan, twisting the heavy new ring upon her finger. Euan had come down a week earlier with Aunt Avie and before that had been away for so long that the two boys could barely have remembered who he was. For a year their life had been a rotation of habitats: Granny Muriel’s, where they kept their ponies; Euan’s sister’s, “Aunt Jean’s,” where they had spent a long summer bouncing through heather and tunneling through bracken; and Eastbourne. The seaside town was a place of endless damp sand and shingle, a wide, open sky and wind that required coats to be buttoned up when outside and lips when inside—an inevitably gray boarding-house, its dining room filled with walnut faces emanating disapproval.