The Bolter

by Osborne, Frances

  We draw up at the back door, for the front is never used. Across the yard are two empty cottages, the glass falling from their windows. I walk into the house and scamper straight into the old-fashioned kitchen on the right. I am just tall enough to lean my elbows on the battered wooden table so vast that I have since played table tennis on it. Mrs Claydon is there. She is round, two buns stuck on top of each other, her head a perpetually smiling mouthful, her thick right arm in endless wooden-spooned motion over pottery bowls. Today, however, she is making trifle and I watch the layers of cream, fruit and sponge accumulate through the engraved sides of the glass bowl.

  Claydon, who has now shed his driver’s cap for his butler’s attire, leads me down the long passage to the breakfast room in which we are to eat an informal lunch. If it were not an informal meal, we would be eating in the dining room with its walls hung with faded tapestries. Informal means relaxed yet I have never felt at ease with Barbie. I never will. I am not sure whether it is her height, the coolness of her blue eyes and grey hair or that she is still imposingly beautiful. She is a survivor from an age when women were more glamorous, I have been told, than I can imagine. Her best friend was the legendary beauty Diana Cooper. Barbie has spent her entire life among people who never had to dream of earning a living and dressed only in couture. When she married Euan Wallace she became one of them.

  But I don’t know this then. All I know is that she is very rich and lives a very different lifestyle from us. The year is 1980 and she still has a lady’s maid, Knightie. Knightie’s real name is Miss something Knight, but the world has lost track of what that something might be as, being a lady’s maid still, at eighty-odd herself, she is known only by her surname of Knight, the ‘ie’ added as a sign of affection in exchange for long and faithful service. I adore Knightie. When my sister and I stay here alone, trembling with manners, Knightie looks after us. Whenever I am in the house and frightened or feeling lost it is to Knightie’s room that I go.

  This time I am here alone, in the breakfast room, with Barbie and Herbert. Herbert Agar is Barbie’s second husband. He is American, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and concocter of lethal cocktails, which my father calls Herbert Specials. They bring a dazed grin to Dad’s face. Barbie says very little to me. She doesn’t do children, I’m told. Not since her sons all died childless and young.

  After losing Euan, Gee and David (whom she claimed as her own), the first of her sons, Peter, went down in his plane in November 1944. Eighteen months later, the war over but still ‘on active service’, Johnny never woke up from an anaesthetic for an operation on his sinuses. Only Billy, too young to fight, survived – for the moment. A dead husband and four dead sons made Barbie such a nationally tragic figure after the war that Manny Shinwell, the great Glaswegian Socialist and Labour Cabinet Minister, posted an annual In Memoriam notice to them in The Times.

  Herbert loves children. He talks to me, chatters away. The news is full of the disaster of an aeroplane falling out of the sky, killing its hundreds of passengers. Nobody knows why. It all depends, says Herbert, on what it says in the Black Box and whether they can find it. He explains to me all about Black Boxes. But each time I ask a question I sense Barbie stiffening. I concentrate on the highlight of my day: Mrs Claydon’s miniature roast potatoes. These are perfect tiny circles that have been laboriously scooped out of half-boiled potatoes, turned into immaculate spheres and roasted. They are the most delicious potatoes I have ever eaten. Mrs Claydon produces them every time I visit. As yet, I have never seen them anywhere else. When I am ten I simply believe that this is how very rich, very beautiful and very old people eat their roast potatoes.

  After lunch I follow Barbie and Herbert down to the end of the passage and the drawing room that stretches right across the front of the house. The drawing room is full of both old-fashioned modern furniture, designed by Barbie’s father, Edwin Lutyens, and don’t-touch treasures: Dutch flower paintings, Herring’s portrait of the racehorse Queen Bee and a row of Rex Whistler’s fairy-tale cartoon faces that metamorphose when turned upside down. I sit on my hands and don’t touch while Barbie and Herbert sip coffee from paper-thin, brightly coloured china cups.

  I look out of the windows of Barbie’s drawing room and across its small lawn to the rolling lawn of the manor house beyond. Barbie’s house is called Beechwood. It is the dower house for the main building, Lavington, which she bought with Euan Wallace in 1936. Dower houses were built for the owner’s widow – the dowager – to retire to when her husband died and her son inherited. When the main house was requisitioned for the Second World War, the family moved into this. At the end of the war, with just Billy to rattle around the rooms, Barbie sold the main house to be a boarding school.

  When I am here with my sister we escape outside for as long as we can. First we run through the beautiful, walled, wild garden adjoining the house. The grass here is not mown but left deliberately long, with half-crushed paths to scamper through. The trees hang low, their branches brushing the grass. Light scatterings of berries and wild flowers catch our eyes as we race around this English jungle, every inch of which is a potential den in the face of the danger that lurks nearby.

  Over recent years there have been a number of sightings of escaped pumas in this part of Sussex. The hill behind the house is the north face of the South Downs and it rises, almost perpendicular, behind us. It has been shaved into a field almost to the top and then it explodes into forest. It is definitely, our father has assured us, glowing with the goodness of a Herbert Special, the type of forest that an escaped puma would choose to live in. And yes, escaped pumas certainly eat children. We run faster and faster around the garden, shivering with the delight of fear. This garden is the one place here that we do not feel ill at ease. This is strange as it is the place where my mother was born, in the gardener’s cottage, in the middle of the war. And we, our baby brother and my mother’s sister’s two children, are Barbie’s only family. Everyone else, each of her sons, has died, Billy too, who did not even last as long as Euan, dying of cancer at the age of forty-seven. The only one to have children was my mother’s father, David. This was his home. Whereas on the Welsh farm upon which we have spent every holiday since we could walk, which we can navigate blindfold, we are merely interlopers as it belongs to our mother’s stepfather and his family.

  Our breath exhausted, my sister and I dare ourselves to walk up into the puma-ridden woods. As the trees close behind us we hear a rustling sound and our eyes stretch with fear. Two schoolboys emerge, cigarettes in hand. They see us and jump. We jump too and the two groups pound back down the hill in opposite directions. My sister and I return to the lawn at the never-entered front of Barbie’s house and gaze through the railings at the school and its mysterious children.

  I remember this when, twenty-five years later, I return to Barbie’s house. This time I am looking through the railings from the other side. Within a year of my discussion of the Black Boxes with Herbert Agar, both he and Knightie died. The next time my mother visited, Barbie walked her around her rose garden and said that she had ‘had a lovely life’. One evening soon after, as Claydon locked up, Barbie told him not to come to her in the night, whatever he might hear. When he came in with her tea the following morning she was lying in bed, her skin as white as her ermine bedspread, an empty bottle of sleeping pills on her dressing table.

  We did not move into Beechwood. Barbie did not leave my mother and her sister the house in her will. Instead she gave it to Billy’s childless widow, Liz, who sold it, and the pink house, with its green windows and magical long-grassed garden, slipped from my view.

  But, twenty-five years later, by one of those strange coincidences that people like to call fate, my sister and her husband have come to live and work at the boarding school. Their apartment consists of the grand first-floor rooms in the main house that, once upon a time, were Barbie’s and Euan’s bedrooms. I walk around the grounds. For the first time I see the outside of the gardener’s
cottage where my mother was born. I look at the entrance hall of the main house, remodelled by Barbie’s brother. My brother-in-law takes me upstairs to the attics, which the school is about to renovate. There are murals sketched in paint on the walls in the bathrooms, pictures of the classical sea-gods, with the naughty parts painted out. The cartoony style more than strongly resembles Rex Whistler’s drawings for his godsons, Peter and Johnny Wallace, that hang on my mother’s kitchen wall.

  I walk with my sister’s two sons to the chapel. It is a small, old chapel, built for a large household and servants rather than a school. To the right of the altar the wall is covered in five stones bearing the same name, my mother’s name, Wallace. A family wiped out, one by one.

  My sister tells me that, since she has been at the school, she has heard of a rumour that the house is cursed. She shows me a large, levelled lawn fifty feet away from the main house. It is where the old, sixteenth-century, house stood. The man who built it had made a fortune in piracy and had been just as unpleasant at home. He had raped a housemaid, making her pregnant. She died in childbirth. Her father stood at the gates of the house and cursed it with the wish that no male heir should ever live to inherit. Even though that house burnt down and this new eighteenth-century building was raised on a different spot, in four hundred years no son, it is said, has inherited. When Barbie and Euan bought this house they had five sons between them. It occurs to me that Barbie may have heard this rumour as well, but too late. And this was why she did not leave her dower house to my mother and her sister, with a son apiece.

  The pink-and-green dower house is attractive but I prefer Idina’s Kenyan home, Clouds. I saw it three years ago, on its way to ruin. It had taken half a day of lumping and bumping uphill to reach it from Gilgil, still a frontier-town collection of low-built frames, some with corrugated-iron roofs and shops advertising themselves as barbers, tailors and general stores. The mud road up was so deeply rutted that our Land Rover shuddered and spluttered as I willed it around each turn. Solomon, our guide, sat in the front, hesitating at each unmarked junction, before raising his long, thin fingers to indicate left or right. A couple of times we had to give up and turn back, find another way. How on earth, I ask, did Idina drive her Hispano Suiza along here? The roads, I am told, were better then. The graders, bulldozing machines that scrape the surface of the tracks flat, making the roads ‘graded’, still came up here then. But just after the rains, as we are now, then it was not much better than this.

  After a couple of hours of hesitations, and wheel-spinning turns and reversals, the road started running straight along the side of a hill coated in foliage and grass vibrantly green enough to be lit from the inside and rising out of thick, cloddy earth glowing a deep orange. Every now and again the bushes beside the road trembled and Solomon murmured an animal name. Eventually we reached a barbed-wire-surrounded compound. Inside was Clouds, now the home of several generations of a single Kenyan family. In we went, across the dusty courtyard, and into Idina’s drawing room. The memory is still vivid:

  The floor is thick with ears of maize. I hop across the room from gap to gap, under the gaze of Peter, to whose family the crop belongs. He tells me that these main rooms are too large to feel comfortable living in, and so they are using them for storage. Instead each of his siblings has taken one of the six guest bedrooms around the courtyard of the single-storey house, in which to live with their spouse and children. The room I am standing in is indeed not for sleeping in. It is one of three interconnecting spaces that stretch some eighty feet from the dining room on my far right to the end of the library on my left. But the ceilings are low, the walls wood-panelled and the rooms have a homely feel, reminiscent of the farmhouses back where I live in England’s Peak District.

  I sit down on the wooden window seat in the maize-strewn room and feel curiously in place. I pull some photographs out of my pocket that show the room lightly furnished with high-armed Knole sofas and velvet curtains. They are no longer here but, apart from that, these rooms where my great-grandmother spent her days and evenings have not been touched since she left them fifty years ago. It is very much still Idina’s house.

  Leaning back on the seat I look down through the wooden archway at the far room and there I see something that makes my heart stop. I jump up and trip through the maize to the far end. I stand facing the wall opposite the window and run my fingers through the dust covering Idina’s bookshelves. The photograph I am holding shows them packed and overflowing. Now they are bare but I can still feel the weight of her books upon them.

  I walk on through, now going towards the back of the house, and find Idina’s bathroom. A large bath sits along one wall, a lion’s-head tap still ready to gush water hanging above it among the tiles. Next to it is a door that, were it not firmly locked, would take me discreetly into the adjoining bedroom. And then, along one wall, are Idina’s cupboards. The hanging space stretches for twenty feet. I imagine it again full of her clothes.

  I pull my jacket around me. We may be almost on the Equator but it is cold up here, at Clouds, and nobody has lit a fire in these rooms for decades. The floor is littered with dried leaves and dust, the furniture is gone. I am standing in the middle of the scene conjured up by Vita Sackville-West’s obituary of Idina.

  I close my eyes. Like silk, my feet rustle in the leaves on the floor. Standing here in this house which Idina built, loved and lived in for two and a half decades, I feel that I have found her. It is the end of a long journey for me.

  I open the French doors into the garden and walk out on to what was once a paved terrace and has been roughly, recently, cut back. Ahead of me stretches what was, in my photographs, a vast lawn. Now the lawn is where the maize and other vegetables are grown, thriving with the irrigation system and series of ponds Idina created here over half a century ago. We walk across the vast vegetable patch to the eucalyptus trees at the end. Here, Solomon tells me, as we stand surrounded by grass, flowers, even nettles, three times the size of their English cousins, we may see colobuses, the large, beautiful black-and-white monkeys that he is fighting to save from extinction. But beyond these trees lies the most startling sight. The ground gives way and I realise that this paradisical spot is truly precariously perched on a ledge of the looming, forested Kipipiri. Ahead of me stretches the great Rift Valley and, in sharp contrast to the lushness around me in the hills, the distant valley floor below is a dry yellow, clouded with the shadows of its diminishing herds.

  I felt more at home there, in Clouds, than I ever did in a couple of dozen visits to Barbie’s. Yet as I think about Clouds and Idina, my thoughts go immediately to my own children. I can’t bring myself to say that Idina should have stayed in an unhappy marriage. But maybe, if she had been a little older, she could have seen a way to make it work. In one of Idina’s letters to her daughter Dinan, written at the end of her life, I find an echo of just how hard-hearted she had found Euan all those years ago when she decided she had to leave him. She is writing to Dinan about Sir James Dunn; Jimmie Dunn, Idina calls him. He was the man who had commissioned Orpen to paint Idina, along with two or three other striking women of the day, back in 1915. At the time Idina wrote, in the late 1940s, Dunn had offered to give Dinan this portrait of her mother. ‘He is a sentimental old man,’ wrote Idina, ‘in spite of being a millionaire.’1

  I never met Idina. She would have been seventy-five when I was born, but she had died thirteen years earlier. Nor did I meet, until I began to write this book, any of Dinan’s four children, whose ages range from my mother’s to my own. A few months after David’s death, Buck invited Pru and the two- and three-year-old Davina and Laura to Fisher’s Gate. It clearly meant a great deal to Idina that the family had met, as she wrote: ‘I am so glad Laura liked Dinan.’2 But that was the end of it. Pru and the girls went to live in Greece and then Wales and it was not until the younger, Davina, was eighteen that she again saw Dinan. This was at a Highland Ball in Scotland. The two of them were introduced and stood there,
neither knowing what to say – then the flow of dancers and music swept them away from each other.

  And thus, with Idina dead, her family remained separated. Her role as a grandmother was split between the two women whose actions several decades earlier seem to have torn apart her marriage to Euan Wallace – setting her life off on its, as she would have described it, ‘turbulent’3 course. Dinan and her children visited Avie. David’s widow Pru sent her daughters to stay with Barbie. At one stage Barbie and Avie had been best friends. Now neither mentioned the other. And both sets of Idina’s grandchildren grew up believing they didn’t have any cousins at all. We played games, my mother said to me, in which we would pretend we had cousins. So, said Merlin Erroll when I first met him, did we.

  But now, of course, this book has in a way brought Idina back to life. And with her long, manicured fingernails resting on my forearm, her family is finally coming together. Maybe, one day, we will all go on that Kenyan safari Idina so longed to arrange.

  On that note I shall end. Sitting here at my desk in my hillside farmhouse overlooking the vast stretch of the Cheshire Plain, I can hear my two small children scampering back indoors. It is time I stopped writing and went to them.

  Notes

  CLARIDGE’S HOTEL, MAYFAIR, 1934

  1 Wallace, David, personal diary 1934.

  2 Interviews with Davina Howell and Pru de Winton, David’s wife (author’s mother and grandmother).

  Book One: Edwardian London

  CHAPTER 1

  1 Sunday Times, 7 November 1982.

  2 Trzebinski, Errol, The Life and Death of Lord Erroll (Fourth Estate, London 2001), p. 76.

  3 Fox, James, White Mischief (Penguin, London 1984), p. 31.