The Bolter

by Osborne, Frances

  All that was missing was Euan.

  In the year since her second son, Gerard, had been born, Euan had found it hard to come home. The long months in between had been lonely. Euan’s diaries show that she and Euan were still very much in love.3 Nonetheless, Idina had taken other lovers. Friends home on leave. Friends who hadn’t gone over the Channel at all. All had, as was quite proper in the circumstances, been transient and discreet.

  Now, however, she was waiting for the man she loved.

  He hadn’t come on Monday. Idina and Muriel had dined downstairs in the hotel and found there a couple of familiar faces with whom to celebrate her twenty-fourth birthday, fingers crossed that Euan might turn up ahead of a wire – a birthday surprise.

  The next day she had waited. She couldn’t stray too far from the Ritz – just in case. An afternoon, or even an hour or two, was too precious to waste. At least it gave her time to prepare the room and ask the hotel to push together the twin powder-and-gilt beds, making them up into a vast bouncing double. He could appear at any moment, her Brownie,4 the husband she’d come to save from the trials of taking his turn with the dancing partners at the charming Madame de la Barondière’s, or traipsing all the way to Passy to visit the exotic-sounding woman he would refer to in his diary simply as ‘Solange!!’

  Then, on Tuesday night, just as Idina was not quite asleep, Euan had slipped through the door.

  And when, the next morning, Euan started spending some of their precious moments bent over a small volume on his knees, scratching away, Idina slid her fingers over the book he was writing in and pulled it from him.5 When she flicked through the pages she could see the days rolling by under her eyes, packed with polo matches, toboggan runs, exercising the horses on the sands, lunches in Le Touquet and long dinners in the officers’ mess. And she suggested that, while they were together, she would write the diary for him.6

  Breakfast arrived. A feast of coffee, croissants, des oeufs pour les anglais, spread out over a thick, white, starched tablecloth that hung to the floor. Then she dressed for Paris: a tunic coat, a single row of buttons running down over her left breast to just below her knee. Paris’s wartime fashion, like London’s, preached the art of the subdued, a small hat – for a small woman. ‘Little one’, she called herself in a pencilled French script that curled between the lines on Euan’s pale-blue diary page.

  They set off apace. Paris was made for walking. And they ‘walked miles’, arm in arm in the freezing cold, heels ringing on the pavements, the echo bounding up the shuttered buildings on either side. They searched for open shops, peering into each one, looking for something, anything, to buy together. Searching in vain. The city of glittering treasures was tarnished, as dull as the sky that hung above them. Even the boulangeries were empty – the making of pâtisserie, featherweight, sugar-topped cakes was now against the law.

  ‘Desultory shopping,’ wrote Euan.

  They went back to Callot Soeurs, that Aladdin’s Cave of stores. The Callot sisters were famous for twisted lace around the edges of blouses, camisoles and cami-knickers, cut gowns out of swaths of gold and silver lamé. The store was known to glisten. There had to be something in there.

  But the shelves were bare. Here and there the odd pile of dark fabric, mourning cloth, beckoned like a sad song. It was, wrote Euan, a ‘Bloody dreadful sight’.

  They lunched at the Ritz and after lunch, wrote Idina, ‘Antoinette picked us up and we went to Lanvin’ in the rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, five minutes’ walk around the corner from the Ritz. Lanvin, unlike Callot’s, was overflowing with samples of silks, muslins and beading in the latest designs, its eighty seamstresses’ fingers still flying in its ateliers. With fighting spirit, Jeanne Lanvin, la plus haute des couturiers, had even designed a nurse’s uniform, with its Red Cross armband, for les plus élégantes of Parisiennes doing their bit. The skirt this year, Madame, ran the vendeuse’s patter, will be a little straighter, to meet with the new fabric restrictions, très simple, très chic. Paris, Antoinette had revealed to them, still had its treasures. At least for those who knew where to find them – and had the money to buy.

  The salon d’essayage was the size of a small drawing room, panelled to waist height and scattered with prints of drawings and designs from this season and last. Euan and Antoinette sank back into the wood and velvet armchairs and the heady scent of polish and rose oil, as the tassels on the lampshades swung with the to and fro of women clutching fabrics, feathers and measuring tapes. Yes, Madame, the sales assistant continued, en huit jours, a week, your order will be cut, stitched, embroidered, fitted and finished. And ‘a small one,’ wrote Idina in their hotel room later, ‘ordered 2 dresses and a hat! Came back for tea.’

  That night they dined at the Café de Paris, with its huge gilt mirrors and low, tasselled lights on each table, theirs covered with plates of escargots and petites mousses that slithered down their throats, the band blasting in the corner. ‘Little one,’ wrote Idina, ‘realised she liked Champagne. After a large dinner, among all the other cocottes, we came home to bed.’

  ‘Cocotte’, a neat pun, was French for both ‘my pet’ and ‘tart’. In Euan’s company, Idina styled herself the latter, and a ‘little one’ at that. In the Café de Paris, however, they were surrounded by professionals. Some company for the evening, others just for the hour. Underneath its veil of restraint, Paris, like any soldiers’ city, was a town where sex was in demand and for sale. Sometimes in private, where widows and hardened veterans of skirmishes between the sheets priced themselves for an overheated market at an astronomical £8 an interview. Elsewhere, on the stage, in a variety of cabarets deemed ‘unsuitable for ladies’ by the travel guides of the time.7 The thigh-flashing cabaret at the Folies Bergère was too crowded to find a seat. At the Mayol, the women on stage did not bother to wear any clothes at all. That night, when the restaurant closed for its nine-thirty curfew, Idina, her husband’s ‘cocotte’, took him straight back to bed.

  And so it went on. Idina, self-styled ‘cocotte’ by night, rose each day and, she wrote, ‘walked miles in the morning’. Then they went to a lunch party and, giggling, off to the cinema or ‘Grand Guignol in the afternoon’. ‘The Big Puppet Show’, as its name translated, had become a theatre of horror, the success of each short piece measured by the number of people who fainted. From a box fenced in by a jail-like iron grille, Idina and Euan watched children being murdered by their nannies and heroines scalped, disembowelled and guillotined – the convulsions on the decapitated faces played out in full. ‘2 very bloodcurdling pieces’, wrote Euan, who turned to find ‘Muriel and Tom . . . in the next box’.

  Afterwards, wrote Idina, ‘all had tea at the Mirabeau’ and then the Café de Paris again, followed by the real theatre, where they ‘went to see Guitry’s play Jean La Fontaine – very good’. Or they feasted at Ralph Lambton’s, at Madame Ste Allegonde’s and with Sturges who, the next day, after a Sunday outing to the British Embassy Church, brought his lion cub to lunch with them at the Ritz.

  That night, Sunday, it was just the two of them again, once more at the Café de Paris. Idina had wrapped him back around her little finger – ‘very amusing’, wrote Euan. But, when she awoke the next morning to discover that a cold had wriggled its way through layers of linen and blanket, he was up, off and out without her. His last precious days of leave were not, after all, a time to stay in and nurse a sick wife: a man needed to enjoy himself before heading back to war. And he rushed off to find a telephone to call Stewart, his best man and closest friend.

  He told Idina that he’d be back for twelve-thirty. Wallace Cuninghame was coming over then, to go to lunch at Madame Barrachin’s.

  And he was gone.

  Two days later, on Wednesday, the two of them went first to the permit office, then to the prefecture ‘to get her Passports done’, wrote Euan. Not that Idina could travel yet. The U-boats were hitting their targets and the boats had been stopped. ‘Harben promised to let her know when they would start.
’ They lunched ‘upstairs at 12’. For forty minutes they chattered about everything except the war and when, or if, they might see each other again. And at twenty to one precisely Idina grazed her lips on Euan’s moustache, closed the door behind him and listened to the sound of his motor taxi rattling across the cobbles of Place Vendôme and away.

  But it was not the war that would take him from her.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE NEXT TIME IDINA SAW EUAN WAS IN LONDON, ON 1 June 1917. He arrived more or less straight from a week in the trenches which, this time, hadn’t been as bad: ‘Nice little dugout: no rats.’1 And he was only a day late coming home. The relief hadn’t arrived until a quarter to three the morning before and by the time he had reached HQ there were no cars left to take him to the station that day. So he had come on Friday, in the General’s car and via GHQ. He caught the 7 p.m. boat from Boulogne and reached Victoria at 11 p.m. ‘Dina had got my wire from Folkestone and was there to meet me.’

  London at night was quiet. The streets were dark, windows blacked out and lamps extinguished or covered in dark-blue paint. The traffic, which had thinned by day, was, by the evening, barely evident. A week earlier the first bomb-bearing aeroplanes had reached the Kent coast and opened their carriages, killing just short of one hundred. London – today, tomorrow, in a week or two’s time – would be next.

  The few who ventured out in the blackness scuttled between darkened doors. Barely a household remained untouched, each held an empty bed or chair of somebody who was no longer there. Those who were at home, khaki cuffs scratching their wrists, white knuckles clenching roll-ups, felt their names churning in the great tombola of death across the Channel. Which would it be: slowly, ‘from wounds’, in a French field hospital; mustard gas – the worst, especially if it didn’t take a man at once; or the swift, merciful obliteration of a direct shell that would leave not a shred of skin at all?

  Yet life went on. One hundred feet underground Tube trains rumbled through the city’s veins. Behind the scarred front doors and blinds, lights flashed on and off, babies were born, old folk died and young couples married, quickly, desperately, before they said goodbye. Restaurants, limited to two courses at lunch, three at dinner and no meat on Tuesdays, were still open until their 10 p.m. curfew. And they were full.

  Any man home on leave deserved a good time. Great groups of friends gathered in the best place they could afford. The women fluttered around, at lunch, at tea, then dressed for the evening, in elegant, subdued hues and long, dark lines that dropped from below their busts to a few inches above the floor. They ate early and went to one of the dozens of light-hearted musicals in town: Bing Boys, Bing Girls, Bubbly, Topsy Turvy, The Maid of the Mountains or The Daughter of the Gods. But even these were curfewed and at half past ten they were out on the streets again, hunting for the hidden entrance to one of Soho’s hundred-odd illegal nightclubs where they could sip whisky from coffee cups until dawn.

  The young drank anything, and anywhere they could. When the Government imposed curfews on the serving of it, and the nightclubs had opened, patrols were sent around the streets to stop drunken behaviour and heavy petting in public. Where they could, friends piled into houses for ‘bottle parties’,2 in some cases also to inject morphine together – and to spend the night. The new duty to show a man who was about to die a good time began to override the old mores of virginity until marriage. Especially as marriage itself became an ever-retreating possibility. There were fewer and fewer men left to marry. Girls began to call themselves by boys’ names as nicknames: Euan’s diary reverberates with ‘Jonathan’ and ‘Charles’ in inverted commas. Any man who came back from France in more or less one piece found himself surrounded by a gaggle of girls. Even the married women became more predatory in a near-frantic need to prove themselves still able to attract a new man, should their own not return. Any man, single or married, was fair game.

  Some nights there were dances in private houses. One of the great hosts of the day, the writer George Moore, strewed white lilies over dozens of tables, hired two bands and kept his guests dancing until dawn. He opened his doors almost as often as it was still decent. Each time, some guests would go back to France and never return. The evenings became known as the Dances of Death.

  Idina, glowing, at the front of the crowd on the station platform, watched Euan walk towards her. His cap was straight, shoulders still square, feet stepping briskly forward. Idina had a glorious twelve days with her Brownie3 ahead of her: almost two whole weeks of strange wartime married life, in which Euan’s duty was to have as good a time as he could and Idina’s was to keep him entertained with a frenzy of social and sexual activity.

  They rattled back through the empty streets to Connaught Place and ran upstairs.

  Euan’s diary records how the next day the frenzy of social activity began: on Saturday it was just a lunch party, an afternoon walk in the Park with friends, dinner at the Carlton and the hit show of the year, The Maid of the Mountains, ‘where we occupied the enormous stage box!’ On Sunday they set out ‘in the Rolls’, picked up two friends and drove west out of London and into a barely recognisable countryside. Every inch of rolling green field and sloping lawn had been ploughed brown and planted with corn now turning gold. Baggy-trousered Land Army girls wearing knotted headscarves and with rolled-up sleeves were bent double at work. Outside Slough they burst a tyre and ‘had some trouble putting on the new wheel!’ Half an hour later they reached Maidenhead Boat Club for lunch, where they then went on ‘the river in an electric launch until 7pm. Took tea with us.’

  For a wartime afternoon, it was idyllic. Idina had succeeded in giving Euan a good time: ‘Dined at the Club (Lags joined us for dinner) and had a ripping run back after: car going beautifully.’ It must have appeared the perfect start to a perfect fortnight.

  But, on Monday morning, after barely more than a scrabbled-together twelve months of married life in the same country, the trouble began.

  It began with Idina’s sister, Avie. Avie came to lunch at Connaught Place. Now nineteen, she was tiny like Idina but heavier-boned. Her shoulders were square, her cheekbones, nose and jaw angular. She had hard, classical English features that made her handsome but not, the press rather unkindly pointed out, as attractive as her elder sister. However, the friend she brought with her was beautiful: given her ambition and the extent to which Euan enjoyed her company, disturbingly so.

  Barbie Lutyens was eighteen years old and the eldest child of the most renowned architect in Britain, Edwin Lutyens. Lutyens had designed dozens of ‘modern’ country houses in Britain, public buildings all over the British Empire and was now working on the new Viceroy’s Palace in Delhi, a monumental building with several miles of passageways. Like Idina and Avie’s mother, Muriel, Barbie’s mother, Emily Lutyens, was an ardent Theosophist. When Krishnamurti had come to England in 1911 he had lived at Idina and Avie’s house but spent his summer holiday with Barbie’s family. There was also another connection between the two families. Emily Lutyens had formally broken off sexual relations with her husband. And over the past year Edwin Lutyens had become close friends with one of Idina and Avie’s Sackville cousins: Victoria, Lady Sackville. Unlike the Sackvilles, however, the Lutyens family was, comparatively, frustratingly poor and Barbie’s family and her parents’ relationship were constantly beset by money worries.

  Barbie was tall and slender with endless legs, ice-blue eyes and dark hair. Her skin was porcelain, her jaw sculpted. Her mouth was wide, childlike, giving her the air of a doe in some woodland glade. But this aura of treat-me-like-a-Ming-vase concealed a determination of steel. Barbie was embarrassed by her mother’s Theosophy and social reticence and by her father’s endless jokes. She was irritated at the way in which the family lurched from financial crisis to crisis, moving into ever-smaller homes. She wanted a rich husband and a glamorous social life. As her sister, Mary, wrote in her biography of their father: Barbie ‘was determined to get out of her milieu’ and had an ‘ambition of
being accepted in smart society’.4

  After leaving the co-educational King Alfred’s School in Hampstead the year before, Barbie had gone to Miss Wolff’s, a smart finishing school in South Audley Street, Mayfair. Upon leaving she had joined the middle- and upper-class nursing service of the Voluntary Aid Detachment and trained at a hospital near Aldershot. The moment her training was complete she had moved to Mayfair, where her aunt, the Countess of Lytton, had started a nursing home for officers in Dartmouth House, a mansion in Charles Street. Barbie had found Avie working there. The two of them had become firm, inseparable friends: Avie bitterly aware of being less attractive than her sister, and Barbie bitterly aware of being less wealthy than her friends. For Idina, this was to prove a fateful combination.

  Two tennis-packed days later, Barbie reappeared. She accompanied Avie to tea at Connaught Place. Tea – the great British at-home social moment of the day – continued unabated, almost as an act of wartime defiance. Flour was grey; butter, sugar and eggs scarce. Nonetheless, ashen sandwiches, scones and transparent jam were arranged around the gently diminishing stacks of an empty cake platter, carried in by uniformed servants also bearing engraved trays laden with silver teapots and delicate porcelain cups and saucers.

  Barbie, with her swan neck and big eyes, folded herself into a chair for an hour or so. It was not a long visit, but it was long enough: Euan was clearly hooked.

  He had to spend the next day, Thursday, at his barracks in Windsor, and Idina went with him to keep him company. But back in London on Friday morning, Euan dashed out by himself first thing. He took Idina’s small discreet Singer car and ‘visited Avie and Barbie at their hospital’.