The Bolter

by Osborne, Frances

  Slowly, a gap seemed to open up between Idina and her Brownie. In Paris they had been living together in a hotel room, with nobody but each other to talk to, every moment of their day in tandem. In London, however, they were in a house spread over seven floors and twenty rooms, with children to see – although in his diary Euan mentions only David and only once – and a stream of servants and daily business. This time he didn’t give Idina his diary to write in. He had reason not to: Barbie appears on every single page for the rest of his leave.

  That Friday evening Euan and Idina had fourteen for dinner and fifty to dance. ‘A great success,’ wrote the ever socially aware Euan, ‘cutting out three other dances which were taking place the same night.’ Barbie took herself home at dawn but, the following afternoon, when he and Idina drove down to Wimbledon to play tennis they ‘found Avie and Barbie there’.

  And so it went on. On Sunday Barbie arrived shortly after breakfast for a lift to the Maidenhead Boat Club, where she slipped herself into Euan and Idina’s punt. When the boats stopped for tea, Idina succeeded in swapping Barbie for one of her own girlfriends. But the next day, Euan’s last in London, Barbie came back to tea at Connaught Place with Avie and Euan asked both girls to say goodbye to him over lunch the next day. They came. By the time they went back to their nursing home, Idina had less than an hour with him left.

  But Idina had not yet lost Euan. When he returned to France he continued to write at length, if marginally less frequently than before. And, ten weeks and several dozen scribbled letters later, he was given some Paris leave. On Friday 24 August Idina crossed the Channel to meet him. After the near-constant presence of her younger sister’s eager single female friends in London, Paris offered Idina a chance to spend some time alone with her husband.

  However, when Idina reached the Ritz she discovered that she and Euan would not be alone after all. Instead of a flock of single girls, wings flapping, beaks at the ready, she found Stewart Menzies – Euan’s almost ever present and too adoring friend. Stewart and Euan were bonded by the Life Guards and their Scots blood. Away from each other for too long, one would twitch, make his way to the nearest telephone and track the other down. Stewart could be found through GHQ. And GHQ could always find Euan for Stewart. If Euan needed a sought-after car ride, a pass, a place for the night, he called Stewart. And Stewart provided. Now, having not seen Euan for several weeks, Stewart had come to Paris to meet him.

  Idina dined with Stewart in the hotel while waiting for Euan to arrive.

  The following morning Idina managed to take her husband out alone and they were back as they had been six months earlier, only this time baking, not freezing, as they trotted around the streets, the wide brim of Idina’s sun hat waving as they strutted along. They lunched at the Ritz, spent the afternoon walking again, in the Bois de Boulogne. That night they went back to the Café de Paris. Stewart, however, came too. The three of them went on to a show and back to the hotel. Idina and Euan went up to their room. Stewart followed them. And, frustratingly for Idina, he stayed – for hours. He ‘talked until about 1 am!’ wrote Euan, as if his friend’s prolonged company was almost too much even for him.

  Eventually Stewart left. But that night Euan fell sick. The following morning he was still unwell. ‘Felt very ill,’ he wrote the next day, ‘have got poisoned by something.’ He spent the morning in bed but a lunch party – irresistible to Euan – beckoned. Shortly after noon he and Idina were heading south to Versailles for lunch and on to the tennis club at St Cloud. Euan’s illness receded: ‘we had some excellent tennis’. They came back for dinner in the hotel, for which Stewart joined them. This time, at least, he did not follow them upstairs, but by the time Idina and Euan reached their room Euan was again as white as a sheet: ‘another bad night,’ he wrote.

  Idina was struggling to find time alone with her husband. But the next day, at last, Stewart left and they went out shopping. They wandered off to Callot’s, whose shelves had barely improved, and then to a jeweller’s. Idina led Euan in. She gazed, asked, tried, admired – and they left. They dined à deux at Larue, went on to the nude show at the Mayol, and went straight back to the hotel.

  When Euan sat up to write his diary the next morning, Idina again tugged it from him. Here in Paris she was going to make the most of the proximity of living together in just one room. And here, as she wrote, Idina ‘extracted a large pearl ring – by everything as only she knows how!’

  A large pearl ring. One of the things a woman does when she wants to know how much a man loves her is see how large a piece of jewellery she can persuade him to buy. One of the things a man does when he feels guilty is to buy it. The next morning Idina led Euan back to a jeweller’s where she had seen a vast moonstone of a pearl ring. She left the store with it on her finger.

  Idina wore that pearl ring through thick and thin. Five husbands later, the ring Euan had given her was still on her hand.

  The morning after Euan had bought Idina the ring, she wrote in his diary again, filling the bottom of the page. It wasn’t the done thing for a woman to worry about fidelity in an upper-class marriage. Their money and property were bound for life. But Idina, as much as she enjoyed her sexual freedom, had had a father who had simply left.

  She wrote, ‘Little One the only woman, wicked little creature’, reminding him that no glacial beauty could offer what she did in bed.

  They had three days left in Paris: more shopping, more lunching, more tennis. They visited Sturges and his pet, now more lion than cub. They dined in a group and found a gramophone to dance to. Little One and Brownie dined alone together at the low-brow streetside café-concert of Les Ambassadeurs on the Champs-Elysées, just around the corner from the Ritz. They watched the vaudeville, listened to an operetta and slid on to a show called Hello Boys. But Idina clearly still felt insecure. She tried to see just how much money she could persuade Euan to spend on her on an evening out – and then made a point about it. ‘Little One very sweet,’ she scrawled in his diary, pretending to be Euan, ‘but I was certainly taken for my high class keep.’

  But, as entertaining as Idina made herself, Euan was still drifting from her. This time he resented having to escort her around the permit office, the prefecture and railway station for all the pieces of paper she needed to travel back to England: ‘took all morning,’ he wrote. And at breakfast time the next day he packed her on to the London train.

  But within three weeks Euan was back in London. On 25 September he reached Victoria at six for another fortnight’s home leave. Idina’s first move was to order a new car to be brought around for a test drive. It was a Calcott and the latest wartime fashion accessory: a small car, half the size of the Rolls, it was powered by a four-foot-high rectangular gas bag perched above the roof. The Calcott arrived at Connaught Place at lunchtime. As soon as they had finished eating they leapt into it, ‘tried it for half an hour,’ wrote Euan, and then drove off in it to play a couple of sets of tennis. At tea time they returned home, where ‘the man from Cambridge’ who had brought it down was still waiting. They persuaded him to exchange the Calcott for their old Singer.

  At first the arrival of a fun new car seemed to have done the trick. For the next few days, as Euan wrote in his diary, he and Idina were barely out of it. They went shopping ‘in the Calcott’, they drove out to lunch, to tea, to dinner, ‘in the Calcott’. They went off to play tennis at Queen’s Club, at the Ranelagh, at Prince’s ‘in a covered court, in the Calcott’. They ‘went out again’ and drove around for the hell of it ‘until tea, in the Calcott’. On Sunday the two of them took off together in it ‘down the Guildford Road’. They ended in Ockham, found somewhere to eat and ‘went for a walk in the woods after’. And their gas-powered Calcott was such an intensely fashionable car that it was photographed for the Illustrated London News.5

  Even back in London, with her husband in reach of all those young girls, Idina appears to have been enjoying a new honeymoon with Euan, and the shadows that had crowded in on t
heir marriage three months earlier seemed to have faded away.

  But halfway through Euan’s leave Barbie reappeared.

  She was brought to tea by Avie. Euan immediately set up the gramophone and they all ‘danced till nearly 7’. The next evening, when a crowd of friends gathered at Connaught Place to go to a party at the Tagg’s Island Hotel, in the middle of the Thames at Molesey, Euan handed over the keys to his Rolls and he and Idina climbed into the cosy Calcott. Barbie climbed in with them.

  And then Barbie vanished again. For the next four days, his last in London, Euan didn’t mention Barbie. He and Idina threw another dance for fifty, ‘kept up till nearly 4’, and went out in small groups, great groups and à deux. They decided to move the boys out of London away from the air raids and rent a house for them, their nanny and nursery maids, an hour and a half west of London in the tiny Buckinghamshire village of Sandhill.

  Then, as Euan left for France, Idina asked her sister to move in properly, treat the place as her own, ask her friends round. Whether she extended the invitation out of loneliness now that the children had gone or in a miscalculated attempt to keep her potential enemies in sight, it would turn out to be an unwise move.

  It was January 1918 before Idina had a chance to see Euan again. For him the three months in between had been long, cold and miserable, punctuated by an influenza that had been making its way around the army. Throughout October and November his regiment was moved, on horseback and in buses, in and out of the trenches. By the time they were relieved from the trenches in mid-December, the lorries had not been able to drive the troops home: ‘the snow in places up to our waists and mules’ bellies,’ he wrote. And they had had to walk. Eventually back at base, he had ‘sat up till 10.45, talking about the war, and cursing the people in high places’.

  Then, two days before Christmas 1917, Euan received a wire promoting him to the post of Brigade Staff Captain. This was a post for which he had been lobbying for some time, since as a member of the General Staff he would stay away from the action. It was not, however, the glorious job he had been hoping for. He joined the General Staff on Christmas Eve and the next afternoon found himself alone and lonely in the Orderly Room, ‘going through old files and taking over’. He had an early dinner, wrote a letter and went to bed at 10.30 pm: ‘It snowed again in the afternoon and was a very cold night.’ It was also Christmas Day, but Euan doesn’t mention it. As New Year approached, the snow deepened and the temperature dropped still further. Euan’s new workload – much of it either financial or the unhappy task of summarising prosecution evidence for courts martial – ‘three 1st LG are being tried for sleeping on sentry’ – now stretched into the evenings. He had little time for long mess dinners and, in any case, none of his old colleagues with whom to make them jolly. When, in the third week of January, Idina cabled him suggesting that they meet in Paris in ten days’ time, he applied for leave on the spot.

  But two days before Euan was due to set off for the Ritz to meet her, Idina cabled him again to say that she was too ill to travel. It was not like Idina to be ill. She may have been small in stature but she was physically tough. Euan waited three long weeks but, to his surprise, Idina didn’t make a quick recovery. She had had a cough that had turned to bronchitis and now stubbornly sat on her chest. Instead of going to Paris, she had had to go to Brighton to gasp the sea air and have her chest pummelled for an hour a day to prevent it turning fatally pneumonic.

  The weeks passed and Idina remained unwell. In mid-February Euan gave up waiting for his wife to recover and decided to go to Paris with one of his unmarried fellow officers. The two of them took rooms at the Ritz, breakfasted in bed, had their hair washed and nails done by M. Combes, did a bit of shopping, popped into a lunch party or two and by mid-afternoon were in the first of their day’s shows of scantily clad dancing girls: at the Folies Bergère ‘there was such a crowd we couldn’t get a seat’. On the second night the two of them ended up with the dancing-partners at Madame de la Barondière’s. By teatime on day three Euan had whisked his young friend ‘off to Passy & introduced him to Solange!!’

  Two days later Euan returned from the whirl of Paris to Brigade HQ to find some astounding news waiting for him. He was, at last, being posted back to England. He would be there for almost four months.

  CHAPTER 7

  SHORT OF THE WHOLE BEASTLY WAR COMING TO AN end, the prospect of four months with Euan was about as good news as Idina could hope to receive. He was being sent back to England to attend a training course for Staff Officers. The course was a twelve-week affair that would mean living as a student at a Cambridge University college, dining in the college hall, attending lectures and writing essays. In a rapid-fire exchange of letters and wires, Idina, although not yet fully well again, planned to join him. It was a taste of the university life that neither of them had experienced. Idina would take a house or some rooms in a hotel, and they would spend as much time as they could together. And, on either side of the course, Euan would have a whole fortnight’s home leave. In theory it should give the two of them much-needed time together to strengthen their relationship. But Euan’s return would not make, but destroy, their marriage.

  On 21 March 1918 Idina took a late-lunchtime train from Brighton to London. She reached Victoria just after three, hailed a taxi and arrived at Connaught Place half an hour later to discover that Euan had wired from Folkestone at one. One of their household servants, driving the Calcott, had already left to pick him up from Victoria, giving Idina just a few minutes to do her face and conceal how ill she was still feeling. On her dressing table was spread an array of silver-topped glass jars and pots, an armoury of brushes, pencils and powder puffs between them.1

  Whatever she did, it was not enough. When, twenty minutes later, Euan came in he was dismayed: ‘Found Dina had just got up from Brighton and is still not looking at all fit,’2 he wrote that evening.

  It was obviously not a thunderbolt of a reunion. Euan was clearly disappointed that Idina was not yet well. In a sense it had been her wartime duty to recover for her husband’s return. She appeared to have neglected it. Brighton, where she had supposedly been recuperating, was full of fresh sea air, but it was also full of bright young things on jaunts out of London. Once they realised what precious little entertainment the town held for them, these jaunts would end in drunken and often morphine-fuelled bottle parties in hotel rooms. Idina had been there, a beacon to their friends, waiting to be visited, cheered up and entertained.

  Euan insisted they dine ‘quietly upstairs’ at a small table at the end of the drawing room and when the evening paper arrived he seized it. Idina watched him pore over its pages. The long-expected great German offensive had begun. He had made it back to England just, and only just, in time. Here in London all he had to fight for – apart from avoiding the bombs – was palatable food. Not only bread, but now meat, butter and sugar were tightly rationed and, first thing the next morning, before Idina had had time to dress, Euan was off to hunt down his ration tickets. Then, he told her, he would visit his mother.3 Idina stayed in bed.

  Euan’s mother, Minnie Wallace, was a disapproving, dour and tight-fisted woman, ironically so, given that she lived at 9 Grosvenor Street, an elegant townhouse barely twenty yards from the extravagances of the Bond Street shops. Since the death of her husband, Jack Wallace, Minnie had depended on her son for money. She had been widowed ten years earlier at the age of forty after a twenty-year marriage that had produced a single son: her darling Euan. Old Mrs Wallace – though she was still barely fifty – spent her days exercising her terrifying memory in the playing of bridge and labelling every item in her possession with her name and address. On one occasion a small black umbrella was returned to her after she uncharacteristically left it on one of her many economical journeys on London’s buses.

  She could not have been more different from her daughter-in-law, Idina, and her eccentric family. Socialism and suffragettes, cults and cancan dancers, not to mention divorce, all
sent shivers down Minnie Wallace’s spine.4 If Euan had not been twenty-one and therefore ‘of age’ when he married Idina, Minnie’s parental consent might well have been withheld.

  Euan came home for lunch. Idina, still obviously in need of rest but equally obviously determined to show her husband she was well enough to keep him company, was up and dressed.5 After lunch Euan drove her out in search of milk. The supply of fresh milk had ground to a standstill, so there was no need to ration it. It simply wasn’t there. Instead the two of them drove to the Nestlé shop. Powdered milk it was, or no milk at all. Idina went in alone and bought as many tins of milk as they would allow her. It would be mixed with water for breakfast in London and for the children, who were still down in the country. Then, as if to prove that she was not as ill as she looked, Idina set off with Euan and ‘walked to various shops’. They then had friends to tea and went out on the town with others, dining at Claridge’s with a couple of women, one taking the name of ‘Charles’ to even the numbers, before going on to the theatre.

  However, even this first day of keeping Euan entertained had proved too much, too soon, for the still-unwell Idina. When they awoke on Saturday morning she looked terrible and could barely move. Euan insisted that she see a doctor. Doctors, however, were thin on the ground. Anyone young enough to be sent to the Front had been. One of the household knew of a doctor just around the corner in Connaught Square. Euan sent for him.

  Two hours later Dr William Beecham turned up. A man in his sixties, he was neither a General Practitioner nor a society doctor. Instead he had qualified at Liverpool University and was licensed by, rather than a Fellow of, the Royal College of Surgeons and Physicians. He specialised in skin diseases and gynaecology. Nonetheless, he examined Idina’s chest and, as surgeons often do, diagnosed her as in need of bedrest and, Euan recorded, ‘a small operation next week’. Beecham also announced that Idina was so unwell that she ‘could not possibly come to Cambridge’.