The Bolter

by Osborne, Frances

  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.

  The rest of 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 dancefloor 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 multi-millionaire industrialist Sir James Dunn, a collector of many things, including vivacious women.

  Dunn paid an unheard-of £750 for the portrait. Idina wore a black velvet evening dress with a plunging neckline that fell in folds to the floor. Idina’s was Orpen’s second full-length portrait, but the first full-length one he had done to commission. He 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 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 in Scotland would allow Euan to retreat to his dressing room and then slip off down the passageways without passing her door. However, the line of the outside wall in Idina’s bedroom allowed for a deep cupboard, repeated in the smoking room below, as the first plans had shown. Now, instead, a staircase was sketched into this space. 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

  THE 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 travelling 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 dates and the rates a gentleman, or lady, 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 fox hunting, 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 licence; and a comprehensive table of their servants’ agreed annual salaries of between £1 and £100 showing what they had to pay them each day, week and month.

  But by the time Euan started to write, many of those hunters and shooters were themselves riddled with bullets and shrapnel. For over a year the two armies, 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 mechanised tanks steadily crawled past them on the shell-pitted tracks leading men to the front line and bringing 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, January 1.

  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 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 th
e 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 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 the post failed to arrive 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 towards 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 9pm 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, harbouring 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 a cavalry 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 Ferguson had gone back to Windsor, Euan was the one officer who couldn’t go too.

  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, now 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 starched-hatted nannies, nurses and nursery maids. A few familiar faces came to the house, the piano keyboard was bared, bottles were cracked open. And then they 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 white-out 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 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.’

  Tuesday 27 February, 1917 . . . ‘Left Rang du Fliers by 3pm train for Paris. Slow journey but punctual. Train not very crowded. Arrived 11pm and got a share of a taxi to the Ritz where I found Dina wide awake.’

  Idina had been waiting for her husband for a day. A day and a half if she counted back to the time on Monday morning that her mother strode out of 24 Park Lane and swung herself into the thick upholstered back of the car beside her.

  By the time the two women reached Victoria Station they had joined the war. Idina and Muriel picked their way across a concourse swarming with brushed khaki and polished leather. Above them high glass arches reverberated with a low-pitched murmur.

  They flitted like shadows into a first-class carriage. It was three hours to Folkestone: stopping and starting and chuffing and grinding, their heads knocking into the high, padded seat backs. Three hours of repeatedly tugging and releasing the leather window strap to see where they had reached, what was happening outside; then yanking the window up again as soot and steam curled back along the train.

  The boats were running. The women followed their leather suitcases and hat boxes up the gangplank. The crossing had taken ninety stomach-turning minutes of the hull rocking up to one side, pausing and falling back again with the swell as the boat steamed slowly over the black water. At Calais they had been swept with the soldiers off the Leave Boat and on to the army trains heading east to Flanders. They peeled themselves away to the Paris train, escorted by a handful of officers, the red tabs on their uniforms revealing their smug administrative and non-combat staff postings in Parisian HQs.

  Paris was a city of façades: brushed pavements, manicured parklets, rows of little shop fronts and grand colonnades. Its web of cobbled alleyways, passages and petites rues led from the damp, sweet air of bakeries to the rich aromas of cafés before tumbling out into long, wide boulevards. Here proud, pale-stone bâtiments descended in classical lines to the ground, where suddenly the archways and wrought-iron gates broke into curls and twisted vines – pure, shivering, Parisian elegance.

  Before the war, before her marriage, Idina had been to Paris with her mother half a dozen, maybe a dozen, times. They had gone for exhibitions, concerts, grands bals and to order their clothes. Before the war, every good idea had been had in Paris. Marcel Proust had pushed the literature to extremes; André Gide had taunted the establishment; Debussy had ignored every operatic tradition; Picasso had started to paint in the straight lines of Cubism; and Paul Poiret had started to design his new, corset-free dresses. The Café de Flore and the Deux Magots on the Boulevard St-Germain bubbled with smoke and ideas. On the pavements outside, women had stepped past, every detail of their costume at the perfect angle. Paris had been at the cutting edge of all that was new. ‘Ici même les automobiles,’ wrote the poet Apollinaire, ‘ont l’air d’être anciennes.’2 But, on the afternoon of Monday, 26 February 1917, Idina stepped out of the railway terminus of St-Lazare into a strange city.

  Shell craters dotted the avenues, the perfect terraces now broken by buildings in rubble. Shop after shop was shuttered, messages that the proprietor had gone to war chalked on the doors. Here and there flashed traces of military uniform. Empty sleeves pinned to their chests, crutches and canes at the ready, the mutilés de guerre advanced slowly along the streets. Around them the women walked slowly too, their pace weighed down as if by the heavy black of their mourning clothes.

  The first few streets of gr
and apartment blocks beyond the station were still, their owners cowering in their country houses. In the early days of the war, as the German army had bombed the city, the wealthy had fled. Even now, the guns were not much further away. Close enough, on a fine day, for the sound of the thudding of shells to drift across the rooftops. Nonetheless, over the past twelve months, as the war had grown into a way of life, Paris had started to fill again. The theatres and music-halls, the cinemas and galleries, had begun to reopen. The cafés were once more overflowing on to the streets, every table crammed with glasses and coffee cups, assiettes pour les croissants, a boulevard beach of military caps in every shade from pale blue to black nodding above them.

  Half a day’s journey from the Front, close enough to make something of forty-eight hours’ leave, Paris had become a soldiers’ city. Even the long hallway of the Ritz was crammed. Men in khaki uniforms perched on red velvet benches and sofas, mirroring the marble statues of classical heroes in the patio garden that ran alongside. Water cascaded through stone lions’ mouths in the garden, while alcohol, which had been banned, arced out of the silver spouts of teapots indoors.

  Above the rows of desks and doormen, a wide staircase curled steeply up to vast, silk-wallpapered rooms. Most heavenly of all, however, were the bathrooms. The Ritz had been the first hotel in the world to attach one to every room. No maids and steaming buckets carried up six flights of stairs, but swimming pools of enamel tubs with swan’s-head taps producing endless hot water en suite.

  When Idina arrived, she was caked in soot, steam and saltwater and must have been longing to slip into a hot bath. There she could just reach out for the tap and spend hours submerged until the tips of her fingers had blanched and shrivelled. The only trick to master was keeping her cigarette dry on its way to the holder and the ash out of the water.