The Bolter

by Osborne, Frances

  Idina did not remain in bed for a moment longer than necessary after the birth of her daughter. In her experience, marriages did not wear bedridden brides well and, even with Alice and Fred to keep him company, Joss was tapping his heels. Within a few weeks of Diana’s birth, Idina went on safari with Joss, Alice and Fred. They rose at dawn and walked through the bush, ears pricked for both predators and prey, until the kali sun was at its height. Then they ate and rested in the shade until the early afternoon, when they continued. They pitched camp at teatime, sipping hot drinks to cool them down as their innumerable porters raised tents. Before dark each had taken their turn in the hand-pumped shower tent or, occasionally, a tin bath filled with fire-heated water. As the sun set at six, they crawled into their tents and dressed for dinner.

  At seven they gathered around the camp fire, cocktails in hand, and started an evening of story and word games. They dealt poker hands to see who should begin with the standard line: ‘Once upon a time Kenya was not Kenya but British East Africa . . .’ And they composed poems.

  It was a long month. Fred accepted Alice’s affair with Joss but spending an isolated month in such a jagged foursome was not undiluted pleasure. In Paris, Fred had been used to playing these word games with literati. Here he had to listen to Joss, whom he called ‘the Boyfriend’,10 reciting limericks along the lines of:

  There was a young lady from Nyeri

  Whose lusts were considered quite eerie,

  On the night that she came,

  And we both did the same,

  It was fun, until I said, ‘Kwaheri’ [goodbye].

  Even Idina wanted to move the conversation on. ‘Let’s be jolly,’ she would interrupt, ‘and think of Paris tonight.’.11

  The party returned to Slains before the long spring rains turned the dirt roads to mud, and settled down to long, cosy evenings together. They were joined by two other Kenya-based friends: Michael Lafone and the future aviatrix Beryl Purves, better known by her later name of Markham. Then, in the last week of April, Joss started running a high temperature. At first Idina and the Janzés put it down to a side effect of a cure he was taking for malaria. However, after five days ‘he got so bad and his heads so terrific’, wrote Idina to his parents, ‘that the Dr was sent for.’12

  The rains had set in, making ‘the roads almost impassable’, and the doctor eventually reached them at eleven-thirty at night. He took one look at Joss, diagnosed malaria and bundled him into his car to drive him straight to the nearest hospital, in Nakuru. Idina and Beryl went with the two men.

  Joss was critically ill. Nakuru was, in the dry season, two and a half hours’ drive. The doctor’s car swam slowly along the sodden roads, Idina in the back with a barely alive Joss in her arms. The journey took seven hours. The party reached the hospital shortly after dawn. Joss was still alive – just. Shortly before dusk, Beryl, who had slipped away earlier, returned to find Idina at Joss’s bedside. Beryl had found a tent and pitched camp for the two of them on the Nakuru racecourse. For the next ten days Idina spent the daylight hours with Joss and the nights curled up with Beryl. Joss was ‘terribly and gravely ill, darlings’,13 wrote Idina. He was running a temperature of between 103 and 105 degrees Fahrenheit and was ‘at times very delirious – in fact he is never quite right in his mind’.14 The principal risk was that he might start bleeding internally. The doctors told Idina that the immediate danger period would last two weeks, and then Joss would not be allowed to leave hospital until he had been ‘normal’ for ten days. Idina was finding it tough watching Joss slip in and out of consciousness. ‘It is all too awful,’ she wrote, ‘& I am nearly off my head . . . nothing matters at the moment except to get the child well.’15

  Joss was, at least, a ‘wonderfully good patient (partly because he is terrified poor darling, it is too pathetic)’.16 Eventually his temperature subsided, taking him out of danger, but he was kept in hospital for observation. Idina drove back up to Slains to check on her baby daughter, her house guests and the farm. There she discovered a whole new set of shauries.

  All was in chaos at Slains. Being trapped indoors during the long rains had been too much for Diana’s nanny, who said that ‘she hates the place’, wrote Idina to Joss’s parents, ‘and God knows where I am going to find a replacement’.17 The farm accounts, which Joss had taken over since the birth of Diana, were in dire straits. Finally, a rogue bull elephant had wandered across the lawns and Michael Lafone and Fred de Janzé had foolhardily chased it off but it had turned and charged them: ‘it picked up Fred, threw him and went off – only breaking one rib – can’t think why he wasn’t killed.’18 Having calmed the situation down as far as she could, Idina returned to her camp on Nakuru racecourse.

  In early June, Joss was allowed home for Idina to nurse him slowly back to health: ‘he hasn’t even the strength to cut his nails,’ she wrote, ‘it breaks my heart to see him – just like a pathetic frightened child.’19 The return of the two of them to Slains was met by some good news. The neighbouring Wanjohi Farm was up for sale. It sat slightly lower than Slains, about five miles away. Rather than standing proud on the mountainside, the farm buildings were down on the banks of the ice-cold Wanjohi ‘river’, a large stream barely six feet wide and both as refreshing and as cold as ice. There the house and its occupants were sheltered in a beguiling haven of bobbly green slopes, rough grasses and twisted mountain trees and bushes.

  Alice and Fred had visited Wanjohi Farm, fallen in love with it on the spot and set in motion the arrangements to buy it. Shortly afterwards they left for France, promising to return to their new Kenyan home by the start of winter. Idina waved goodbye to her friends. In the few months before they returned she could focus her attention on the fast-recovering Joss to make sure that he was fully entertained and did not wander off somewhere for good. She was, however, already too late.

  CHAPTER 17

  DESPITE ALL IDINA’S EFFORTS, JOSS HAD ALREADY MET the woman for whom he would leave her. While Idina had been in hospital after the birth of Diana, Joss had driven back to Slains without Fred and Alice and with only his Kenyan valet, Waweru. On the way they had stopped at the water-splash in the Kedong Valley where drivers refilled their engines with water and piled a couple of spare canisters in the boot before grinding their way up the two-thousand-foot Rift Valley escarpment. While Joss and Waweru were waiting another European turned up with his gun-bearer. The newcomer’s name was Cyril Ramsay-Hill. He was a thirty-five-year-old former cavalry officer turned rancher, who had spent his youth between Spain, British Guiana and a minor English public school. Ramsay-Hill had just moved into a house he had built on the shores of Lake Naivasha. The two men struck up a conversation and, boasting with pleasure over the new home he had built for his second wife, Ramsay-Hill invited Joss to stay the night at his house. Already aware that a vast new house was being built on the spot and intrigued by Ramsay-Hill’s descriptions of the place, Joss accepted.

  He was not disappointed. The house was a sprawling, whitewashed, arabesque palace, modelled on Ramsay-Hill’s Spanish grandmother’s house in Seville. The roof rose and fell in a series of Moorish domes. A fountain-filled courtyard was surrounded by wisp-thin, white-marble pillars. The floors and walls were teak and both wood and marble had been carved into a myriad of fine decorative features by Punjabi craftsmen from among Kenya’s fifty thousand Indians. Inside, the house was equally extraordinary. The main fireplace was large enough to have seats inside it and the house was filled with fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish furniture, pictures and tapestries, its ceilings painted. Molly had decorated the main bedroom with a lighter touch, filling it with French furniture but then adding a sunken bath surrounded by black and gold mosaics. Water was pumped up from the lake to a reservoir above the house to provide a decent pressure for this and the other baths and showers. The house’s treasure trove, however, lay in a small room entered through a heavy door beside the library and kept firmly locked. Here was a collection of eighteenth-century original
French pornography consisting of both books and erotic pictures with which Boucher, Fragonard and Watteau had supplemented their income.

  Joss fell in love with the house on the spot. Ramsay-Hill had given it the name Oserian after the Maasai name for the land it stood on. ‘Oserian’ meant ‘place of peace’, but it was more a place of drama. Ramsay-Hill’s house eclipsed Slains in every dimension. Even its setting, on the balmy shores of the hippo-filled lake, mountains hovering in the distance, reeked of indolent pleasure as opposed to the hillside-farming routine of Joss’s life with Idina. And when, that evening, he met Ramsay-Hill’s wife, Molly, he clearly made up his mind to spend as much time as he could at the house.1

  Molly Ramsay-Hill was born Mary Maude in London in 1893. Her father worked at Crystal Palace but by the time she was fifteen he had been sacked and bankrupted for embezzling season-ticket funds. Acutely aware that she had to fend for herself, Molly discovered that her greatest assets were her looks. By sixteen she was pregnant with the child of a twenty-eight-year-old boyfriend, Guy Hughes. Both sets of parents forced a marriage in July 1910 and Hughes took the outbreak of war as his path to freedom, joining up on the spot. When he returned in 1918 they separated, Molly exchanging an allowance of £425 a year for her son. Four years later she surfaced in Cairo, apparently in possession of a fortune, which she claimed came from Boots, the family chemists. There she met the already married Ramsay-Hill. Two years later, having divorced their respective spouses, they married in London and then set off for Kenya.

  Molly was, like Idina, petite, fair-skinned and, although eight months younger than Idina, still several years older than the twenty-four-year-old Joss. Unlike Idina, her white skin, green eyes, Titian hair and strong jaw gave her a classical beauty. Dark-red lipstick and nail varnish lent her the air of an exotic who took an equal pleasure in her husband’s esoteric artistic tastes. It was widely believed in Kenya that she had a fortune of £30,000 from which she derived an extraordinarily efficient income of £8000.

  Joss commented that, after three years, a lover becomes ‘a drain on one’s vitality’.2 He and Idina had been married for two years and lovers for three. Since they had built Slains they had been examining a variety of sexual positions in the mirror they had put in the ceiling above their bed.3 Having just given birth, Idina cannot have been at her best sexually. And Joss might just as well as have been referring to financial as to sexual vitality.

  Joss knew that the rate at which he and Idina were living was not sustainable. The Brassey inheritance was not immediately forthcoming: Muriel was only in her fifties and spending and siphoning cash at a rate of knots into her joint passions of Theosophy and George Lansbury’s political career.

  Molly, on the other hand, offered novel sexual pursuits, a new supply of funds and, if carefully finessed, one of the most beautiful houses he had ever seen.

  Joss made Cyril Ramsay-Hill his new greatest and closest friend. Each time he passed on the way to and from Nairobi or made a trip to Naivasha, he dropped in at Oserian. He had plenty of cover for this. At Slains Alice and Fred had been replaced by another American girlfriend of Idina’s, Kiki Preston, and her banker husband Gerry. Kiki had slept with Rudolph Valentino and been a lover of the Prince of Wales. She was now an overt morphine addict and chartered her own plane and pilot to take off from the lawns at Slains in search of supplies. When the aeroplane returned, bearing fruit, she rolled up her sleeve mid-conversation and injected herself with a silver syringe.

  Kiki and Gerry were building a Dutch-style house just along from Oserian on the shores of Naivasha. While Kiki was lolling in a stupor on the Slains lawns and Gerry fretting around her, Joss could offer to go down and take a look at the building works.

  When Joss’s absences at Naivasha grew more protracted, Idina, perhaps to remind her husband that he was not the only one of them who could all but disappear from the marriage, started looking for sexual company.

  Caswell Long, known as ‘Boy’, was, alongside Joss, the other leading glamour boy of the Highlands. On auction days Joss wore his tartan kilt, Boy wore ‘brilliantly coloured corduroys, a flame coloured Somali shawl and large pirate earrings with a huge sombrero shading his handsome face’, remembers one young woman.4 Another, Elspeth Huxley, remembers him with ‘dark, curly hair, a ruddy complexion, lively dark eyes and [looking] like an English country squire with a dash of the cowboy . . . Women adored him.’5

  Boy was married. But his wife, Genesta, was off and away trying to make a name for herself as a travel writer. She and Idina loathed each other. In her memoirs Genesta cannot bring herself to mention Idina by name, simply referring to ‘The hostess’ and ‘one of Her Parties’. When, later, Genesta married Lord Claud Hamilton, Idina remarked: ‘Some women will do anything to get a coronet on their knickers.’6

  Idina and Boy began an intense affair. It took Idina several hours to drive down to Lake Elmenteita to reach Boy. His job as a cattle rancher on Lord Delamere’s vast estate meant that his days were spent travelling around that part of the Rift Valley. He met Idina in deserted rondavels on the edge of the lake thick with pink flamingos, or in the long grass. The scent of danger added to the thrill. Sometimes their rendezvous were planned. At other times Idina simply drove down and along the miles of flat, white soda-ash tracks that criss-crossed the Elmenteita estate until she found him.

  In theory, having her own affair while Joss chased Molly should have rebalanced Idina’s relationship with her husband – that after all was part of the point of agreeing to have an open marriage. At best it would have reminded him that he could not take Idina for granted and needed to turn his attentions to home to keep his wife. Joss obviously did not see it this way. If anything, Idina’s preoccupation appears to have reassured him that she was quite happy while he was away, giving him more room to pursue his own interests down in Naivasha. Idina in turn spent more time with Boy.

  In late 1926 Joss was brought homeward not by any jealousy over Idina’s behaviour but by the arrival of Fred and Alice de Janzé at their new house in the Wanjohi Valley. The de Janzés threw themselves into Highlands life. They farmed a bit and rode a lot. They competed with Idina and Joss for the fastest time from the Wanjohi Valley down to Muthaiga for Race Weeks, each in their own cloud of dust. Idina and Alice concocted a new fashion for wearing long velvet trousers to combat the cold mountain nights. The de Janzés spent almost every other weekend up at Slains, with Idina and Joss coming down to Wanjohi in between. The four of them went off on month-long safaris. And Alice and Joss took up their affair again. It was erratic and intense. They would suddenly disappear for a couple of days at a time, leaving Idina and Fred by themselves in their respective farms. It appeared rather unstylish for one abandoned spouse to ride over to the other but Idina and Fred did, occasionally and probably out of sheer loneliness, end up in bed together at the end of a party. Fred describes their half-hearted liaisons in Vertical Land:

  She sits by my side laughing up at the boy. Amber liqueur; amber glass; pink nails; white skin; cream silk shirt and red kekoi.

  Her warmth by my side tingles my skin . . .

  Her hand creeps around my waist but she smiles up at another.

  Someone begins to hum the tune and we all throb to it. The melody of the corn crakes rises in the room. The buffalo horns shine and bow, the rhythm twisting about them. Smoke hangs around the backs of the chairs. Her foot nods to the time. Her nails sere [sic] my flesh. A turn of her head, a breath of a word: ‘tonight!’7

  Joss’s resumption of his affair with Alice was, however, reassuring. Joss and Alice’s comings and goings were a safe, established pattern. And Alice was Idina’s best friend. Alice was the neurotic, Idina the steadying hand. Alice needed Idina possibly more than she enjoyed Joss’s company. Idina was her rock, Joss her addiction. And in return Alice provided Idina with a soulmate during Joss’s continuing trips to Naivasha to see Molly Ramsay-Hill. The two of them wandered around the garden at Slains hand in hand, waiting for him to retur
n. Kiki, with silver syringe ever at the ready, kept them company. Visitors to Kenya started to return to Europe with tales of wild parties, abundant narcotics and strange ménages of approved infidelities and potentially Sapphic bonds, all occurring within the Wanjohi Valley. The gossip columnists seized upon the stories, reprinting them, as was the practice then, with clear descriptions but no precise names, and rechristening the place ‘Happy Valley’.

  Idina and her inner set found this faintly amusing. The other white settlers, together with the colonial administration, were appalled. Both wanted to build up Kenya’s reputation and political backing as a country: the settler farmers had worked hard to make Kenya their home and scratch a living from the land; the colonial administration was, in the eyes of the British Government, responsible for all the goings-on. Meanwhile Idina – and Idina was very much regarded as the chief organiser of the Happy Valley crowd – was earning the country an international reputation as a ‘love-colony.’8 Back in England, the joke ‘Are you married, or do you live in Kenya?’ was doing the rounds.

  A couple of months after their arrival the de Janzés took their turn hosting an annual party – a custom that was growing up among Idina and Joss’s friends. Each couple would invite the twenty or so friends in their group to camp on their lawns. These consisted of the half-dozen-odd core members of the inner set: Idina and Joss, undisputed King and Queen of Happy Valley; Kiki and Gerry Preston; Fred and Alice de Janzé; Boy Long – when Genesta was away on her travels; Michael Lafone, a general womaniser; and Jack Soames – a louche Old Etonian with a penchant for voyeurism.9 As well as these harder partiers were the inner set’s house guests, John ‘Chops’ Ramsden, who owned a large estate over towards the Kipipiri mountain; the farmers Pat and Derek Fisher; and the newcomers Cyril and Molly Ramsay-Hill – Cyril, as it turned out, oblivious to what being a member of the inner set included, but Molly quite well aware.