Charles, by contrast, as his daughter later said, found a life of such fiscal and other abstinence less than appealing. His eye automatically followed an attractive woman as she crossed the room. And, more often than not, the attractive woman, once she had noticed Charles, his dark hair, his height, his strong cheekbones and jaw framing a pair of twinkling, inviting eyes, recrossed the room towards him. With his air of falling back into a comfortable chair, Charles invited approach. He had broad shoulders, a long attention span and an endless supply of handkerchiefs. If help was needed, he took enormous pleasure in providing it.5
Idina fell back into his comfortable chair. Here was a man interested in only her. Instead of glancing over her shoulder for the next invitation he showed no ambition for anything except an easy, pleasant life. Charles showered her with attention and sympathy. With the prospect of her husband returning to her appearing unlikely, Idina slept with Charles not just once or twice but again and again and again. At first it was covert adultery: endlessly changing rooms and flats. But crossing town at unearthly hours was a tiresome business. They began to go out together, ceasing to care if anyone saw them, or what anyone said. They went down to Brighton, where Idina had spent so many months the year before, and moved into the Metropole Hotel. There the two of them could lie side by side and whisper of the life they might have had if Idina were free, if she had met Charles first, if there wasn’t a war on. Charles told her about East Africa, which he had visited: it was a continent with gardens of Eden clinging to the slopes of its mountains, limitless fresh, sweet food that came in harvests not once but two, three, four times a year, and wide, open plains where animals ran free, uncaged.
Within a few weeks Charles had filled the space that Euan had left open.
In October it became clear that there was not much of the war left. Euan would soon be home. Idina had to consider the prospect of trying to rebuild a life with a man whom she loved but who might any day leave. During her years apart from Euan each of them had developed lives so separate that it was hard to imagine pulling them back together again. Like Euan, Idina could have simply drifted from lover to lover. But she feared the future, and what old age might bring.6 Her paramours would cease to visit. Euan, if he hadn’t already left her for another wife, would be out at the latest social occasion or in some mistress’s arms, and with all that money, however advanced his years, he would never be short of either mistresses or would-be wives.
Idina had been scarred by Euan’s semi-disappearance. She felt that there was something very wrong about her husband being targeted by women who wanted not just to sleep with him (which she could put up with), but to take him away from her altogether and marry him. However many lovers she would have in the years that followed, it was said of her that ‘she never stole other women’s husbands, but might pick them up if they were left lying around’.7 To Idina ‘left lying around’ would show itself to mean either sanctioned by their wives to sleep with whoever they chose, or abandoned by wives adventuring abroad. It would not mean husbands who were at a loose end while their wives were sick.
In the autumn of 1918 Idina was twenty-five. Her life had hardly begun yet the life she had been planning with her husband appeared over. Twenty-five, however, was young enough to start again and, in the aftermath of a war that had broken both a continent and a generation, everyone who could was starting over, including several of Idina’s closest friends, among them Dorry Kennard and Rosita Forbes. These women were not retracing their steps to a time before the war in order to relive the same marital disharmony: they were setting off on great adventures and new lives. Idina, through whose pulsating veins flowed a great deal of her explorer grandmother’s blood, decided to join them. Somewhere there had to be a better life than this one, painfully married to a man she still loved but who no longer seemed to love her, in a country heavy with grief.
Idina suggested to Charles that they go to Africa.8 They could have a farm. On three harvests a year they could make it pay. And there they could live the English idyll that this terrible war had fought so hard to destroy. They could spend their mornings riding, their days farming and their evenings under the stars.9 It would be a life of paradise where what money they had would go a long way.
On 11 November, the day the Armistice was signed, as the nation celebrated and her sister, Avie, was planning her marriage to Stewart, their own best man, Idina wrote to Euan asking for a divorce.
On Wednesday, 20 November, Euan reached Charing Cross Station at ten to three in the afternoon, surprised to find nobody there to meet him. ‘Got a taxi home: Dina had never got my wire,’10 he wrote, as if unable to understand what asking for divorce meant.
Idina was waiting for Euan at home. She hadn’t seen him for five months, almost half a year. Yet his face was still the same one that she had spent years wanting to reach out and touch.
But, before either of them had a chance to talk, tea arrived. Rapidly burdened with a saucer and a cup full to the brim with scalding liquid in one hand, and a sandwich plate in the other, neither was able to say anything of any meaning whatsoever until after it had all been cleared away.11
Then they sat by the window overlooking Hyde Park and its plains of dulling green autumn grass pockmarked by brown mulch pools of leaves, bare-armed trees reaching above. The light was almost gone. They spoke about their marriage. ‘Important discussion with D after tea,’ Euan wrote. It would be five years the following week. Five years, two children, a not yet half-built house several hundred miles away and not quite a year and a half of that time on the same side of the Channel, during a war that they thought had been the beginning of the end of the world.
Idina did not want to remain married to a man who had so openly forgotten he had a wife.12 She didn’t mind what anyone thought, but she wanted a divorce and a chance to start again. Euan would easily find witnesses to win him a divorce from her, if that is how he wished to do it.
The light outside had gone, but when Idina looked up she would have seen that this discussion had come as a relief to Euan: ‘explains much, thank goodness,’ he wrote later of their afternoon’s conversation. His reaction was not surprising, considering that, if Idina had tried to divorce him by claiming desertion, he would have been thrown out of the Life Guards.
Euan returned from his best man’s dinner with Stewart, Avie and Muriel, just after eleven. Idina, too, had dressed for dinner. She’d had time to have a drink or two. Euan had too.
He tried to persuade her to stay: ‘Long talk to Dina . . .’
Euan had some strong points to make. For one, Idina would lose any right to the money in the marriage trust. Her mother was still emptying her own bank account into the Socialists’ and Theosophists’ pockets. Charles Gordon couldn’t have much left to rub together. That meant no Lanvin, no Claridge’s, no Ritz. If Idina insisted upon going, she would be giving up a fortune.
But Idina clearly didn’t give a damn about money. She wouldn’t have been leaving Euan if she had. In any case, she had a little money in her own right. When she had married Euan her mother had given her £10,000 from a Brassey trust. It wasn’t a fortune but, if she went abroad, it would be enough to live on.
The children were more difficult. Euan was, after all, the one with the money to support them and give them the best lives they could have. Besides, no gentleman wanted his children living in another man’s house. Even if he had seen them just twice in the past twelve months, he certainly was not going to allow Idina to take them to Africa. What they needed was an English education. In any case, before they could blink the boys would be seven and off to boarding school. What would either see of them then?
For the past four and a bit years, the major part of their short pre-boarding school life at home, Idina had been the one making sure the children were well, taking them to the doctor, taking them to the seaside, finding somewhere for them to live when fevers struck and bombs fell, hiring and firing nannies, nursery maids and cooks. She had done all that she was exp
ected to do as an Edwardian mother. Yet, if she refused to leave them with Euan, he could refuse the divorce. And, as he had not in fact deserted her, Idina would have been extremely unlikely to win a divorce from him. An unhappy mother was not a good mother. Idina herself had grown up with only one, preoccupied parent and Rowie, her divinity of a governess. She and her younger sister and brother had spent their childhood ricocheting between boarding school and Old Lodge with Rowie. It had seemed, happily, to be quite enough. Her mother was still at Old Lodge, as was Rowie, to keep an eye on things. And, now that the war was over, they would have Euan. When he was there he was very good with them. Africa, on the other hand, was not a place for children. As painful as it might be, giving her boys to Euan clearly seemed the best thing for them.
But Euan didn’t just want the children to stay with him. He didn’t want any coming and going. What they needed was stability. If Idina insisted upon leaving with Gordon, she would have to go and never return. She couldn’t hop in and out of their lives on a whim.
The alternative to all this was to find a way to make their marriage work again.
Emotions deepen late at night. And it was ‘far into the night’ by now.
Idina softened into indecision.13
Their conversation was not over.14 Idina had been so certain but now, seeing Euan again, she was not so sure. She had fallen in love with Charles and therefore believed she ought to marry him. But she still loved Euan too.15
The sky outside was late-autumn pitch.
It was not an hour to make promises that might be hard to keep.
Idina spent the next day with her friend Eva. The moment Euan had left to grip his mother’s shoulders while she wrung her hands with all the agony of a soothsayer ignored, Idina had called Eva who had come round and the two women had talked all morning. Then, when Euan returned, they went out to lunch – Euan gave them a lift – and talked some more.
That night, when Euan returned from another pre-wedding dinner followed by a show with Avie, Idina was waiting for him again. ‘Another talk to Dina lasting two and a half hours.’
Even though Idina had conducted her affair with Charles so publicly, as good as living with the man, Euan was prepared to have her back on a sole condition – that she never saw Gordon again.16 If she did, he would divorce her and she would never see the children.
It was a big promise to ask Idina to make. Euan gave her two weeks to decide.17
The next morning Euan went to his lawyers, Williams’ and James’, ‘eliciting a great deal of information about the general position’. He could start divorce proceedings against Idina in Scotland, as far as possible from the Fleet Street press. A single hearing, a couple of witnesses, was enough.
He then went shopping, eventually returning to Connaught Place to talk to Idina for half an hour before a lunch party at Dorchester House. Behaving as though he thought his threats might work and Idina would be coming back to him, he returned ‘home at three and picked up Dina and drove her to Victoria in the little car’, her own car,18 gas bag still teetering on top. He pulled up outside and called a porter for her bags.
They stood facing each other, the train whistles filling the space between them. The station was heaving, every step across the concourse blocked by muted tweed, worn leather and khaki still bobbing around. The air stank. Coal, grease, shoe polish, Brylcreem, unfinished sandwiches, half-digested meat pies and human sweat were being steamed up to the top of the high glass arches, where they condensed against the freezing air outside and fell back in erratic, noxious droplets.
They said goodbye. Idina then swung on her heels and tripped off in the direction of the Brighton train.
Through the smoke, Euan could see Rosita Forbes waiting on the platform.19
CHAPTER 12
IDINA’S TWO WEEKS TO DECIDE SLID THROUGH HER fingers. She left Euan on Friday 22 November. Five days later she sneaked up to London on the day before Avie’s wedding to see her mother and sister. She admired Avie’s dress, examined the wedding presents on display and slipped away back to Brighton. She would not be returning the next day. A sister in the throes of a divorce – particularly when it involved the best man – was not auspicious at a wedding.
As Idina retreated from her own family, Euan slipped further into its bosom. An hour after Idina had gone he arrived for the bride’s ‘reception to view presents’.1 He stayed until the end of the party, then took Stewart out to the Ritz for his final dinner before the big day. At ten-thirty he took Stewart back to Dorchester House and went straight on to the Albert Hall, where a Victory Ball was being held and where he had a rendezvous with the chief bridesmaid for the next day – Dickie. They danced until two-thirty in the morning.
Twelve hours later Euan was best man at Idina’s sister’s wedding to the man who had been his and Idina’s best man almost exactly five long, war-torn years earlier. The two weddings could not have been more different. While Idina and Euan had wed in a tiny church tucked away in a Mayfair backstreet, the church in which Avie and Stewart had chosen to marry, St Martin-in-the-Fields, towered over the north-eastern corner of Trafalgar Square. The pews were packed and the central aisle was lined on each side by men of the 2nd Life Guards. Just after two-thirty in the afternoon Avie appeared. Idina had worn the traditional blue-serge travelling dress in which to leap on a train and vanish on honeymoon. Avie wore a silver-and-white brocade, medieval-style gown. She wore a wreath of orange blossom over her veil and carried a bouquet of mauve orchids. Beside her walked Buck, his able seaman’s uniform aggressively plain against the red and gold of the cavalry officers and troopers lining the centre aisle. Then came Dickie and four others dressed in ‘ruby chiffon velvet with bronze Dutch caps and gold shoes’.2 They were also carrying orchids – an even more colourful combination of red, white and purple. ‘Felt rather like crying,’ wrote Euan.
That night he co-hosted a dance ‘to console the bridesmaids’. He stayed until two-thirty in the morning, when he took Dickie home. But even after he returned to Connaught Place he could not sleep. He ‘wrote letters till 4.30am’, lay in bed for a couple of hours and then got up again at 6.30. He wrote more letters, packed and after breakfast left the house. He picked up his mother from Grosvenor Street and went on to Euston to take the train to Scotland. They went first to Old Glassingall, where he and Minnie met an estate agent and sorted out the furniture. Then he went on to Kildonan. The house was still a building site and he stayed in Duisk Lodge, one of the estate houses at the bottom of the garden, on the river. In the middle of the week a bachelor party of just two other 2nd Life Guards officers turned up to shoot. For two days they shot pheasant. And the two-week deadline Euan had given Idina passed – without a single word from her.
On the morning of 7 December Euan was back in London and by teatime he was at Idina’s mother’s house, Old Lodge. The newly-wedded couple were already there: ‘am Stewart and Ave’s first guest, apart from my own children, who are here permanently.’ Stewart and Avie’s second guest was Dickie.
On the Monday Euan returned to London and, giving Idina no leeway on those two short weeks, the next morning he saw his lawyers again ‘and decided to go to Edinburgh tonight . . . to get things satisfactorily started’. But when he tried to book a ticket, ‘The berths were full.’ Euan, however, was clearly keen to show Idina that, if she did not give up Gordon, he meant business. Instead of waiting just a day for a bed, he travelled overnight in ‘a corner seat’.
Euan returned to London and waited to hear from Idina. Clearly by now losing hope that she might return, he started packing up Connaught Place: ‘very busy till 11.30 sorting out masses of old books & papers & photos in my room’. He went out to a dance but ‘felt very unlike dancing, so went home’. The next weekend he drove back down to Old Lodge with just Stewart and Avie, where they had ‘a strenuous time playing “bears” with the children’. On Sunday morning he and Stewart took David for a walk and then, after lunch, Buck set off on a mission for Euan: to see Idina in B
righton. Euan was willing, even now, to stop the divorce. But Buck ‘came back at 7.15 with no news’. Idina, it seems, had still not made up her mind.
Idina rang Euan in London late the next evening. He had come back to Connaught Place with Stewart, Avie and Dickie after the theatre. The four of them were drinking, dancing, chatting about the play they had seen. But it was to Stewart that Idina spoke on the telephone; she would, she said, meet him for lunch at the Ritz the following day.
Whereas the Ritz in Paris slithered back in long passageways from a snippet of the Place Vendôme, the London Ritz was, and still is, a palace stretching an entire block along Piccadilly at the corner of Green Park. That day its cavernous atria echoed with jangling chandeliers, their lights reflecting off mirrors and white walls. Even in December the dining room was light and airy, overlooking the manicured lawns and almost neatly leafless trees in the park below. Idina sat across the table from Stewart. Fifteen months earlier they had been sharing a table at the Ritz in Paris. There had still been a war on. She and Euan had still had a marriage.
Had it been the war itself that had infiltrated their marriage? So much of their time had been spent apart, neither of them sure whether they would see the other again. Even their times together had been abnormal, driven by a frenzied obligation to enjoy themselves as much as they could. Perhaps they had forgotten how to be married in any other way.
From Idina’s twenty-five-year-old perspective her marriage to Euan was not recoverable. She was not coming back. She was, she told Stewart, going to move on and make herself a new life instead.3
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