The Bolter

by Osborne, Frances

  On Tuesday evening around seven o’clock, just as he was changing for dinner, Euan heard a knock at the door of his room. He opened it to find his CO, Gore Brown, standing there. He wanted ‘a word’. Euan invited him in. Gore Brown asked Euan how he was, how things were generally, how were his wife and children? And then he started talking to Euan about the Black Gang.

  Gore Brown had heard that Euan was moving in a very fast set. Now a chap was entitled to enjoy himself on leave but the episode with the motor launch and punts on Sunday had upset quite a few people at the Boat Club. Not to mention all that bathing together the week before. He gathered that the japes didn’t stop at that. It wasn’t quite the done thing for a married officer to be careering around town and country with a group of young single girls. It was time to start thinking about ‘breaking up the Black Gang’.

  Euan had little choice but to agree. In any case, there was only a week or so left of the course in Cambridge. He would stay up the next weekend and keep away from London. Then he had only a couple of weeks before he went back to France. And he followed Gore Brown into dinner.

  Ten days later, on Thursday 20 June, ‘after a most excellent lecture on the Strategical Situation by the Duke of Northumberland’ and ‘lots of drinking and bearfighting’, followed by an impromptu ‘concert in Broadwood’s room until 12.15 am’, Euan packed up his things, said his goodbyes and caught the train to London. He arrived in time for a ‘dinner party of 12 at the Savoy (“Black Gang” & 6 others)’.

  Dickie, however, was not there. She was down at Witley, preparing the way for the Gang’s arrival on Saturday for a week’s haymaking on the farm. After this Euan would return to London for the Buckingham Palace investiture of the Military Cross he had just been awarded and leave for France the next day.

  But on Friday afternoon Euan came back to Connaught Place after tea with his mother to find ‘a wire from Dickie altering all our plans for Witley. Frantic telephoning till dinner.’ Faced with an empty Saturday-to-Monday alone in London, Euan decided that he might as well visit Idina and the boys at Frinton.

  CHAPTER 9

  ‘SATURDAY 22ND JUNE’

  ‘Caught 10am train from Liverpool Street to Frinton, arriving 12.33. Had to travel most of the way in the guards’ van. Dina met me and we walked to St. Patricks.’1

  Idina was standing on the platform when the steaming seaside train, overflowing with children, hats and brown paper packages, pulled into Frinton. Engine and passengers screeched to a halt, doors were yanked open, string-tied suitcases and toddlers were passed through windows. For a minute or two the platform was swarming with life. And then it cleared in search of lunch. Euan, her Brownie,2 was standing at the far end. He’d stepped out of the guard’s van. Even there, as he later wrote, it had been standing room only.

  Idina was now glowingly fit. She had walked to the station, as if to make the point to Euan. This weekend was her chance to prove how well she was and what a good time he could have with her.

  It was good walking weather, good walking air, clearer than Cambridge, down in the Fens. They were lunching at the golf club, St Patrick’s. They walked there and as they strode, side by side, Idina was able to fill Euan in on who was around, what she’d been up to, what the children had been up to and their plans for the weekend.

  Waiting for them at the club were a man called Ian Maxwell and a girlfriend of Idina’s, Dorry Kennard. Euan had heard of them but didn’t know them. ‘Lady Kennard’ was how he referred to Dorry in his diary, surprisingly formally, as she was barely a year older than him. The year before, Dorry had published a book about her travels alone in Rumania. She had completed her march towards independence by, just six weeks earlier, in early May, divorcing her husband. Sir Coleridge Kennard had been a former Secretary at the British Legation in Stockholm. He and Dorry had met and married in Tehran in early 1911. When Dorry had given birth to their second son in April 1915, Sir Coleridge was on ‘a motor-car tour’ with an actress whom he had moved into the same block in which he kept a flat for ‘private literary work’.3 Dorry’s petition for divorce ‘on the ground of her husband’s desertion and adultery’4 had therefore been easy to prove.

  As the weekend passed, the gap between Idina and Euan’s lives widened. The talk at lunch was of travel: of the travels that Dorry had done; and of the travels that both she and Idina longed to do. When the war was over, if the war was ever over, they both wanted to go a long, long way away, as far from war-torn Europe as they could.

  Idina and Dorry had other like-minded friends to talk of too, such as Rosita Forbes: ‘Mrs Forbes’, Euan called her. Rosita had also divorced her husband and wanted to travel, traverse deserts and continents and write about it afterwards. The pre-war era had been the age of the ‘gentleman explorer’. This new vogue for travel among Idina’s girlfriends was the female response to this.

  When lunch had come to an end, and the conversation to a pause, the four of them played a round of golf. And on the day went, Idina making sure the hours were busy enough and social enough for Euan not to be bored. After golf there was a tea party back at Idina’s house, and ‘good tennis after’. Then they went out to dinner. Euan found a four for bridge. Idina played poker. ‘Home about 12.’ Now that she wasn’t coughing so much, they could share a room again: a knot of Little One and Brownie in bed.

  On Sunday morning Idina watched Euan play ‘with David in the garden’. Playing ‘Bears’ was their favourite game. Up and down the paths, round and round the bushes, on all fours, growling. It was raucous, squealing, three-year-old fun.

  Idina took Euan down to the sands before lunch. She ran into the water, its ice-cold waves stinging her legs. Then she was bobbing several yards out, blinking salt out of her eyes, the wind whipping low across her cheeks. Dorry was beside her, both of them waving at Euan, laughing, calling him to come in.

  ‘After some hesitation, bathed with Dina and Lady Kennard,’ he wrote later.

  The whole glorious afternoon they played tennis, before and after tea. Idina and Euan were back in their old pair, playing their old game. They knew each other’s serves and shots, which part of the court to cover, when to rush over, when to leave it to the other. Euan was having a good time. ‘Dina and I played Blake and Lady Kennard – 3 of the best “mixed” sets I have ever had.’

  Dinner was like it used to be. Their hostess, Mrs Loeffler, knew how to lay on a spread: tender meat; vegetables from soil that hadn’t yet been bled to a vacuum from overplanting; pastry that crumbled, that actually tasted of something. ‘Absolute pre-war dinner!’ wrote Euan. Then he and Idina ‘danced to the gramophone’, its needle scratching away in the corner.

  ‘Home 12.30.’ They were alone together again. And the next day was Midsummer’s Eve, lovers’ night.

  But Euan wasn’t going to spend it with her.

  He was leaving, Idina learnt, at the crack of dawn on the 7.32. That way he could go the War Office to arrange the investiture of his Military Cross, then have lunch with Avie and the two of them would get down to Witley by the end of the afternoon. But he’d be back in London in a week. For the investiture and the whole charade. She needed to come with him to Buckingham Palace. Why didn’t he meet her back there then?

  Idina was now well, and fully able to keep her soldier husband entertained.

  But he, it appeared, felt his life was elsewhere.

  CHAPTER 10

  EUAN AND AVIE REACHED WITLEY STATION AT 5.30 TO find Barbie and Dickie waiting for them. They drove to the house. When they arrived it was half shut up, half in use as a Land Army base. Here and there sheets hung out of the windows. Across former lawns and flowerbeds ran the corduroy lines of freshly turned earth. Nonetheless, in the afternoon light the house and its colonnades glowed.

  The tennis court was still in use. They squeezed a good couple of hours in before ‘high tea’ with the land girls. After eating, the four of them, Euan, ‘Avie, Barbie, Dickie’,1 went out again and walked around the park until sunset. Euan hoo
ked a shotgun over his arm and the girls took it in turns to take pot shots at rabbits. Back at the house they held their own Midsummer’s Eve party, singing and dancing until midnight when the girls, all three of them, announced they were going not up to bed but out to bed. They dragged mattresses out on to the vast, porticoed verandah, and slept there.

  As at Dunkeld, it was just like the old times, a sweeter, simpler old times chequered with wartime novelties. With all the grooms off at the war, they caught their own ponies before breakfast: ‘some job!’ wrote Euan afterwards. They exercised them all morning and mucked them out themselves. After lunch they went haymaking on the farm – ‘real hard work’ – until the heavens opened at teatime. There was more rabbiting after tea, followed by dinner, then a couple more hours out on the horses, cantering at hedges in the fading light. They came back to dance to the gramophone and for ‘a little piano’. Then they fell into a deep sleep before midnight.

  On Tuesday the enigmatic Barbie said she had to leave, and went. Euan walked to the village to find a telephone and make a call – not to Idina, but to Stewart. The rest of the week rolled by in a rural idyll. They went haymaking again. They helped out at a fête: Euan and Dickie staggered around together with a large picture, whooping with laughter and selling raffle tickets. Dickie and Avie ‘fixed up a “ghost”’ in Euan’s room ‘with a string & reel of cotton’. Various other friends came and went. And then, on Monday, Euan, Avie and Dickie took the train back to London, lunched at Claridge’s, spent the afternoon shopping together and all went back to Connaught Place.

  Idina was waiting for Euan when he tumbled into the house for tea with Avie and Dickie. He was leaving for France on Thursday – in three days’ time. Idina gave it one last try. Tea duly arrived in the drawing room and in between the chatter Idina told Euan she had four tickets for Fair and Warmer that night and that she had asked a friend of his who had popped round, a chap called Whinney. Avie was staying at Connaught Place. They couldn’t go out without her. Dickie withdrew. Idina won.

  The show was good, very good. ‘Most amusing’, wrote Euan. But when they returned to Connaught Place he didn’t follow Idina upstairs. Instead he stayed in the drawing room with Avie, going over their week at Witley and ‘talking till 12.45am’. And the following morning he went out shopping with Avie and Dickie.

  On Wednesday 3 July Idina went to Buckingham Palace with Euan and his mother. For two hours Euan sat beside her tapping his heels and shuffling his cuffs to glimpse his watch. ‘Long slow business,’ he wrote. On the walls around her, oversize portraits of rulers stared down on all sides, the decorated columns that separated each panel rising like imprisoning bars. She was sitting next to her husband, her first true love, whom she’d written to almost every day of the years they had been apart and who had now not only lost interest in her but was quite publicly pursuing her younger sister’s unmarried friends.

  Before the war an unfaithful Edwardian husband showed his love for his wife by putting her first in public and only, and discreetly, making love to married women who would return him. Extramarital affairs had been accepted because, if nobody divorced, they were just a passing thing and could not break a marriage. That was the system. But that was not what was happening here. The situation had now changed. People were starting to divorce and men were starting to have affairs with not-yet-married women, making an affair potentially more permanent and marriage-breaking. Over the next few years this would lead to a shift in morality that would make these new high-risk affairs no longer acceptable. But now, during the war, this had not yet happened. Extramarital affairs were both still acceptable and newly risky.

  That evening was Euan’s last night in England. He dined with Idina ‘quietly at home at 8’, their conversation leaping the chasm between their lives. Then they went to ‘Ally’s dance at the Beauforts’ house’. The dancefloor was packed with giants in uniform and silk: ‘all the best and beautifullest there,’ Euan wrote. He disappeared into the throng, his big, brown eyes locking on to a succession of girls in Avie’s crowd.

  Given her own childhood, Idina clearly decided that, if her marriage was going to fall apart, it would at least be she who did the leaving rather than being the one left behind.2 And when Euan returned to France the next morning she left it to Barbie and her friend Cimmie Curzon to see him off.3

  Back at the war, Euan no longer bothered to write to Idina. When he picked up his pen in free time snatched between inspections and conferences and piles of paper, it was to Dickie that he wrote. Dickie, in whose Scottish and Worcestershire homes Euan had spent his most idyllic times since the war had begun. Dickie, besotted and hoping for some sign of a future together,4 wrote back ‘a long letter’. Euan, perhaps now remembering that he was married and officially taken, struggled to put together a reply and ‘spent half the morning answering’ her. Dickie kept on writing.

  Three weeks after Euan had returned to France, he received a letter from Idina: ‘An important letter,’ he wrote. But, however poor the state of his marriage, just three weeks after the best part of four months back in England, there was little that Euan could do about it now.

  Even for those who hadn’t been home, leave was thin on the ground. For the next three months everyone was kept busy with orders for ‘desperate schemes’ and ‘death-rides’ being proposed and most of them, ‘Thank God, cancelled’. But not all. Stuck on the pit-scarred Somme battlefield, the ways ahead and behind jam-packed with troops and unable to move off the narrow tracks that divided the shell holes and trenches, the Life Guards found themselves sitting targets for the enemy: ‘heavily shelled for 35 mins. 2 OR hit: horses stampeded and several killed.’ They had lost several officers and men the day before when the Brigade HQ had been shelled. Now half Euan’s horses were gone and he didn’t even have a saddle left. But at last the Allies were on the offensive.

  And then, finally, early on the morning of 11 November, the 6th Cavalry Brigade left its billets in the Belgian border village of Ramecroix and assembled in Barry, just a mile along the road, and set off east. At ten o’clock, just as Euan was entering the next town, Leuze, the ‘Cavalry Corps Car arrived with news that HOSTILITIES CEASE 11AM!’

  The streets filled. Every door opened and women stepped, children ran, infants toddled, old men hobbled down on to the cobblestones in a chattering, bubbling, screaming mass. ‘Great demonstration,’ Euan wrote, ‘in LEUZE square.’ The cavalry left them to it. They moved east of the town ‘to clear road’ and waited. At a quarter to one an ‘aeroplane message was dropped ordering us back to last night’s areas’. Euan returned to Ramecroix, ‘where we now have a lovely chateau and celebrated with a big hot bath and gala dinner; finished all the champagne’.

  Four days later, on Saturday 16 November, he ‘got two letters which decided me to go home as soon as possible’. The first was from Stewart, asking Euan to be best man at his wedding to Avie in ten days’ time.

  The other was from Idina.

  CHAPTER 11

  IDINA HAD TAKEN A LOVER. HIS NAME WAS CHARLES Gordon and she had met him at the flat of a woman called Olga Lyn. Olga Lyn was a professional singer and singing teacher, and Lyn was not her real name. She had changed her surname from Löwenthal on moving to London from Germany.1 Keen to be invited to the parties at which she was hired to provide the after-dinner entertainment, socially she was a busy bee of a woman, given to emotional outpourings and intense friendships, and was widely ‘suspected of being a Sapphist’.2 She lived in a large house in Catherine Street, a Georgian terrace in the shadow of Parliament. She filled it with guests, for drinks, for dinner, for the night. It was a crossroads where art collectors mixed with actors, dancers and the pleasure-seeking end of high society. There was always some sort of party going on in the evening at Oggie’s, as her friends called her.

  When Euan went back to France, Idina found herself going round to Oggie’s. Whenever Idina turned up, the tiny Oggie threw her arms open and let out a whoop of joy. And there, in a haze of cigare
tte smoke and champagne, Idina met Charles.

  Like Euan, Charles Gordon was a Scot who had been sent south to Harrow School. Although he was four years older than Euan, they had overlapped – Charles was in his last year when Euan was in his first – but the age gap had been too great for them to have been friends. Also like Euan, Charles was pale-skinned, dark-haired, good-looking. However, for Idina his attraction was very different from Euan’s. Whereas Euan could hardly let a minute slip by without filling it with some social activity, Charles took a distinctly – perhaps overly – relaxed view of life.3

  He and his slightly older brother Jack had been orphaned by the age of eight. The rest of their childhood had been spent being shuffled around boarding schools in term time and maiden aunts in the holidays. At the age of twenty-one Charles and Jack had each inherited from their father a share of a house in Aberdeenshire and the money required to keep the house and land going. Unfamiliar with the property, the two young men had felt no attachment whatsoever to the house. They therefore started to celebrate their new-found freedom from dormitories and spinsters by spending the money on a life free from labour and care.

  Dormitories and spinsters had, however, ill equipped Charles and Jack for the pitted maze of London life. The money ran through their fingers as fast as they extracted it from the bank. Jack, who was the more insular of the two and tended to avoid romantic entanglements, found a steadying hand among the incense sticks and reverberating chants of the Catholic Church. He decided that, if his pot ran out, he would take holy orders and retire to a monastery rather than dampen his brow in the world of wage-bearing work.4 As a consequence, he battened down the hatches of expenditure and stopped passing over a single penny more than was strictly necessary.