The Bolter

by Osborne, Frances

  After this much, my mother raised a wall of noisy silence.

  Idina was not, she said, a person to admire.

  In 1990, when I was twenty-one, Billy Wallace’s widow, Liz, died and we received a pile of photograph albums and some cardboard boxes. I sat on the floor of my parents’ London sitting room and ferreted through them with my mother. The albums fell open to reveal endless pictures of Billy and his mother, Barbie, picnicking with the Royal Family; the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret as children outside Barbie’s house; and a large black and white photograph of a young and beautiful Princess Margaret in the passenger seat of an open-top car, Billy behind the wheel.

  My eyes widened.

  ‘Aah, is this why your paths didn’t cross?’

  My mother nodded. ‘Different lives,’ she added. ‘Now I need your help with this.’

  She lifted the lid off one of the cardboard boxes and scattered the contents on the floor. In front of me lay the photographs of five young Second World War officers. Their hair was slicked down under their caps, their skin unblemished, noses and cheekbones shining. The portraits were unnamed.

  ‘There must,’ my mother continued, ‘be some way of working it out.’

  She could identify her father from the other photographs she had. She had also known Billy well enough to pick him out. The three that remained were all RAF pilots: bright-eyed, smiling pin-up boys in their uniforms. They were my mother’s uncles, Johnny, Peter and Gee Wallace. Yet we didn’t know who was who. Each one of them had died shortly afterwards, and this was all of their brief lives that survived. Apart from my mother and her sister, who had been toddlers when they had died, the only relative left to ask was my mother’s mother. And, even fifty years on, these deaths still upset her almost too deeply to raise the matter. After a couple of hours of puzzling, we slipped the pictures back into the mass grave of the box.

  ‘I was only two when my father went,’ my mother murmured.

  ‘Not went, died. Nobody left you. They all simply died, one by one.’

  There was a theory, my mother continued, that it was the pink house. Pink houses are unlucky. They moved into that pink house and then they all went.

  I nodded. My mother was not having a logical moment. The best thing to do was to nod.

  Then, softly, I broke in. ‘Idina didn’t die then, though. Did you ever meet her, Mum?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, it would have been disloyal to Barbie, who brought up my father. In any case, Idina wasn’t interested in my sister and me. She didn’t care.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She was not a nice woman.’

  ‘Why, Mum? You’re not that old-fashioned. Just having a few lovers doesn’t make you a bad person.’

  ‘Well, it’s not exactly the best, or happiest, way to behave, but you’re right, that didn’t make her a bad person.’

  ‘Then what did?’

  My mother turned and looked me straight in the eye. ‘My grandmother was a selfish woman, Frances. In 1918, when my father was four and his younger brother, Gerard, just three, she walked out on them and her devoted husband and disappeared to live in Kenya with someone else.’

  Then she went upstairs and came down again with another photograph. It was a black-and-white picture of two tiny boys in thick woollen and collared jerseys and knee-length shorts. Their hair has been tidied for the photograph but on each is bounding back in its own direction. Instead of looking at the photographer, they are huddled next to each other, eyes wandering up and to the side.

  It took me another decade and a half to realise the full horror of that photograph and what I had been told Idina had done. Another decade and a half of simmering fascination until, in the first years of this century, I had two small children of my own, of whom I possessed innumerable photographs standing side by side, at the same age that my grandfather and his brother had been when Idina had left. I thought of those little boys often at my own children’s bedtime, which caused me to linger, casting excess kisses into my little ones’ hair and giving in to their unending ‘Mummy, I need to tell you something. Just one last thing.’ Idina, the person whom I yearned most to meet in an afterlife, had, according to my mother, done something that now made me feel quite sick.

  But Idina was beneath my skin.

  Just as I was beginning to fear the wear and tear of time myself, stories came to me of Idina’s ability to defy it. In her fifties, she showed not a trace of self-consciousness when removing her clothes; even after three children ‘she still had the full-breasted body of a thirty-five-year-old’.27 At parties, she would walk into a room, ‘fix her big blue eyes on the man she wanted and, over the course of the evening, pull him into her web’.28

  One evening, in the 1940s, Idina sauntered into the rustic bar in the Gilgil Country Club, where an officers’ dance was in full swing. She slipped off her gold flip-flops and handed them to the barman, Abdul, asking him to ‘take these, and put them behind the bar’, walked across the floor, showing off still-perfect size-three feet, and folded herself on a pile of cushions next to the twenty-something girl who would later tell me this story. Idina raised her hand, always heavy with the moonstone of a pearl she wore, lit a cigarette and, blowing immaculate smoke rings, informed the girl that ‘We share a boyfriend,’29 making it clear that she held a both prior and current claim that she did not intend to relinquish. The boyfriend in question was a twenty-four-year-old Army captain, thirty years younger than her.

  A great-grandmother sounds a long way away but in Idina’s case it was not. Most families grow into a family tree branching out in several directions. The family between Idina and me, however, had been pollarded until all that was left was my mother and her sister, and several ungainly stumps where living relations should have been. Far from driving me away from her, the horror of what Idina had done in leaving her children magnified my need to know why she had left a husband she loved, and what had happened to her next.

  And, oddly, stories abounded of that kindness referred to by Rosita Forbes and also of a woman who exuded maternal affection, wearing a big heart on her sleeve. ‘While my parents were away,’ said one female friend, younger than Idina, ‘she looked after me so tenderly that I find it impossible to believe that she was anything but an adoring and excellent mother.’30 This same woman made Idina godmother to her eldest child. So what had made her bolt from a husband she loved? Was there a story behind it, or was it just some impulse, an impulse that one day might resurface in me?

  Eventually my mother handed me a large tin box containing Euan Wallace’s regimented diaries bound in blue and red, together with two worn briefcases overflowing with photographs and letters.

  Some were from Idina. She always wrote in pencil. She couldn’t stand the mess of ink.

  Her script was long and fluid, each letter the stroke of a violin bow, curling at the end. Her words, lurching across the page, thickened in my throat. ‘There is so little I can say for what are words when one has lost all one loves – thank God you have the children . . . how unutterably lonely you must be in your heart’; her words to her daughter-in-law trembled upon her son’s death.31 Even within the breezeless still of a shuttered dining room, I held her letters tight, folded them, put them back in a pile weighted down, lest they should flutter away.

  And out of these, and several other people’s attics of house and mind, tumbled a story of a golden marriage slowly torn apart during the First World War, and a divorce that reverberated throughout Idina’s life and still does today.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE FIRST UPHEAVAL IN IDINA’S LIFE CAME EARLY. SHE was four years old and her younger sister, Avice, called by all Avie at most, and Ave at worst, had just been born. Their mother, Muriel, exhausted from childbirth and her breasts overflowing with milk, was therefore not at her most sexually active. Idina’s father chose that moment to leave her for a cancan dancer.

  Gilbert Sackville, Idina’s father and
the eighth Earl De La Warr (pronounced Delaware) left the manor house in which he was living with his family in Bexhill-on-Sea. He moved a couple of streets away and into another property he owned. In this second house he installed the ‘actress’ whom he had first espied through a haze of whisky and cigar fumes in the music-hall on the seafront; a seafront which had been heavily subsidised with his wife’s family’s money. The year was 1897.

  Idina’s parents had married each other for entirely practical reasons. Idina’s mother, Muriel Brassey, had wanted to become a countess. Gilbert, known as ‘Naughty Gilbert’ to the generations that followed, had wanted Muriel’s money.

  In a society that valued the antiquity of families and their money, Gilbert’s family was as old as a British family could be. Eight hundred years earlier they had followed William the Conqueror over from Normandy and been given enough land to live off the rent without having to put their hands to earning another penny. This is what was expected and, with just a couple of exceptions, in the intervening centuries the family had done an immensely respectable little other than live off the fat income discreetly generated by its vast estates. The exceptions were two crucial flashes of glory in the now United States. One Lord De La Warr had rescued the starving Jamestown colonists in 1610, been made governor of Virginia and then given his name to the state of Delaware. Another ancestor had been an early governor of New York, earning the earldom as a reward. But these men of action aside, Gilbert’s family had been remarkably quiet and, after eight hundred years, the money was running out.

  Muriel’s family money had, in contrast, been made very recently and in the far less respectable middle-class activity of ‘Trade’, as it was snootily referred to by the upper classes who did not have to earn a living. And Muriel’s family’s trade was now, far from discreetly, criss-crossing Britain in brand-new thick black lines. Muriel’s grandfather, Thomas Brassey, had employed eighty-five thousand men, more than the British Army, and had built one in every three miles of the railways laid on earth in his lifetime, making more money in the process than any other self-made Englishman in the nineteenth century. Upon his death in 1870, his financial estate, excluding any of his properties, was £6.5 million, ‘the largest amount for which probate has been granted under any one will’, wrote Lord Derby.1

  Muriel’s own parents, Thomas Jnr and Annie, had built one of the world’s largest private steam yachts, the Sunbeam, and piled the family (a schoolroom had been one of the specifications) on board. Annie had then become the first person to circumnavigate the globe by steam yacht. Muriel and her siblings, Mabelle, Marie and Thomas, had thus spent formative days quite literally being washed overboard and rescued as they collected botanical specimens in the South Seas, and their evenings climbing volcanoes to feast with local chieftains. They were then turned into worldwide child celebrities, for Annie had kept a detailed diary of these adventures and her accounts were published, reprinted dozens of times and translated into seventeen languages2 after her death from malaria somewhere off the coast of Mauritius at the age of forty-eight. The book, A Voyage in the Sunbeam, is still in print today.3

  Before this sea-burial, Annie had dispatched her husband to Parliament with the task of promoting the controversial cause of women’s suffrage. Thomas Brassey Jnr therefore entertained Gladstone and his entire Cabinet at Normanhurst Court, his sprawling mock-French château in Sussex, and his double-width house in Park Lane. At the back of the latter he had put up a two-storey Indian palace, known as the Durbar Hall, bought from a colonial exhibition in London. He used it to display the trophies Annie had collected from her travels and, after her death, proudly opened it to the public twice a week. And, by the time Muriel married Gilbert, her father Thomas Brassey, son of a railway builder, Member of Parliament, had become Sir Thomas, then Lord Brassey, and was not quite yet an earl himself.

  But he still wasn’t grand enough for Gilbert’s parents. Eight hundred years on, the Sackvilles remained ardent courtiers. Their darling son had, after all, been a childhood playmate of the next king but one4 and should not be marrying into a non-aristocratic family who had had to make their money in Trade. Even more upsetting for them was that this Trade and the newness of the Brassey money was so obviously displayed. For a start there was all the soot and dirt and steam of the railways. And then there was Normanhurst Court, with all its bright-red brick, ornate ironwork, gratuitous church spire, general Francophilia and even its name reeking of ill-judged effort. And it was right on the De La Warrs’ doorstep in Sussex. The two families vied constantly over who should be Mayor of Bexhill. The old Earl and Countess De La Warr refused to attend their son’s wedding.

  Thus disapproved of, Idina’s parents had careered through their marriage at speed. Idina arrived within a year. She was named after the wife of Muriel’s brother, Tom, but was fashionably given a first name, Myra, by which she would never be called. By the time Idina was three, Muriel was pushing the boundaries of traditional society by opening Britain’s first mixed sea-bathing area at Bexhill; hitherto men and women had been separated not just by balloonesque bathing dresses and machines, but beaches too. And, together with her husband, she had started racing the brand-new motor cars along the seafront. And that same year, Gilbert’s father, perhaps reeling from the shock of all these modern goings-on, died. Gilbert therefore inherited the title of Earl De La Warr and Muriel became a countess at last.

  The following year, Muriel’s second child, Avie, was born and her husband left. Three years after that, in 1900, Muriel surprisingly gave birth to her husband’s son and heir, Herbrand, called Buck as a shortening of his earl-in-waiting title of Lord Buckhurst. She then, as if to prove her parents-in-law’s prejudices right, launched what was seen as an attack upon the upper-class establishment by divorcing Gilbert.

  For Muriel, divorce promised both practical and political progress. Practical because divorce would prevent Gilbert spending any more of her money on other women. Political in that it would show that a woman need not be tied to an unsatisfactory husband.

  For Idina, however, her parents’ divorce would be less beneficial. It set the example that an unsatisfactory husband could be divorced and introduced her to the idea that husbands and fathers can leave. Both patterns of behaviour Idina herself would repeat, while reaching out for constant physical reassurance that she too would not be left alone.

  For the young child of divorced parents in Edwardian England, life was not easy. The divorce immediately set Idina and her siblings well apart from their peers, for it was, in 1901, extremely rare – even though, among a significant tranche of the Edwardian upper classes adultery was rife. It was, along with hunting, shooting, fishing and charitable works, one of the ways in which those who did not have to work for a living could fill their afternoons. The term ‘adultery’ is chosen carefully, for it applies only to married women. And it was married, rather than unmarried, women who were likely to pass the couple of hours between five and seven (known as a ‘cinq à sept’) in the pattern set by Queen Victoria’s pleasure-loving son, King Edward VII and his coterie of friends. This group had been named ‘The Marlborough House Set’ after the mansion Edward had entertained in as the Prince of Wales before becoming king.

  The choice of this hour of day was purely practical. It took some considerable time for a lady to unbutton and unlace her layers of corsets, chemises and underskirts, let alone button and lace them up again. Lovers therefore visited just after tea, when ladies were undressing in order to exchange their afternoon clothes for their evening ones.

  Where the King went, society tended to follow. If he took mistresses among his friends’ wives, then so could and would those of his minions with both the time and the inclination (although many remained appalled by his behaviour). Married women were safer. First, they were not going to trap a man into marriage. Second, if they became pregnant, the child could be incorporated within their existing family. For this reason a married woman was expected to wait until she had produced two sons
for her husband (‘an heir and a spare’) before risking introducing somebody else’s gene pool among those who might inherit his property.

  As long as a high-society married woman followed these rules of property protection and kept absolute discretion, she could do what she liked. In the oft-cited words of the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell: ‘It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.’ The boundary between respectability and shame was not how a woman behaved, but whether she was discovered. If so, her husband could exercise his right to a divorce: for a man to divorce his wife, she had to be proved to have committed adultery.

  For a woman to divorce her husband, however, she had not only to be wealthy enough to support herself afterwards but also needed to prove one of the extreme grounds upon which a woman could obtain a divorce. His infidelity counted for nothing since any illegitimate children he produced would stay outside both the marriage and inheritance rights. A woman who wanted to escape an unhappy marriage had therefore to choose between two equally difficult options. The first was to prove not only that her husband had committed adultery but that the adultery was incestuous or that he had committed bigamy, rape, sodomy, bestiality or cruelty, or had deserted her for two years or more. Or she had to be branded an adulteress herself.

  Even if she was the innocent party herself, a woman who obtained a divorce faced exclusion from the somewhat hypocritically bed-hopping high society. She was seen as spoiling everyone else’s entitlement to fun as, once affairs had the potential to lead to divorce, it dangerously upped the stakes of illicit sex. And, by taking a case through the divorce courts she had opened her bedroom door to the eyes of anybody who could read a newspaper. The reaction of Queen Victoria to her son’s being called as a witness in a divorce case summed up the upper classes’ fear of divorce: his ‘intimate acquaintance with a young married woman being publicly proclaimed will show an amount of imprudence which cannot but damage him in the eyes of the middle and lower classes’.5