The Bolter (26 page)

FOR ALL HER NONCHALANCE—
photographs show her lolling on the lawn, a book balanced on her bump—the pregnant Idina’s life was full of, as the Kenyans called them,
shauries
(worries). However active she remained, when the baby arrived, shortly after Christmas, she would be forced to lie low for several weeks, leaving Joss unattended to. And Joss, it had become clear, needed constant female attention. As long as he
returned from his liaisons, that was fine. But he might not. Especially if he found a wealthy woman willing to pay for his lifestyle. Idina and Joss had been vastly outspending the allowances that she received from her brother and he from his parents. Idina’s other income had vanished, as any capital not plowed into the farm had been spent, and the shortfall had been made up in loans taken out against it. Suggesting that they rein in their expenses might be precisely the trigger to send Joss careering off for good. If she did not, however, they would end up bankrupt and then, however much she loved him, he would certainly leave her. But Idina’s most immediate worry was that she needed to keep Joss occupied around the birth of their child. She sent a letter to Paris, asking friends to come out and join her for a couple of months. The friends were Alice and Frédéric, known as Fred, de Janzé.

Idina, Raymond de Trafford, Alice de Janzé, Joss

In her four years of marriage Alice had produced two daughters, and the prospect of visiting one of his wife’s old lovers did not bother Fred. He agreed to go. In December 1925 the de Janzés arrived at Slains and were immediately captivated by Kenya’s wide, open sky and the promise of danger rustling in the undergrowth. Alice and Joss resumed their affair. For Idina this was a relief. Joss was happily busy and would not stray any farther. And Alice would never take him from her: Alice was much too neurotic for Joss ever to want to marry her. Alice and
Idina had what was, in matters of infidelity, known as “an understanding.” Asked whether she minded that her husband was openly sleeping with Alice, Idina replied, “But Alice is my best friend.”
⁵

Just before Christmas, the four of them bumped their way up the roads to Nairobi to wait for the birth of Idina’s baby. They checked into Muthaiga, where a series of Christmas parties were in full swing. By day, Idina sat around while the other three played in the fiercely competitive and permanently ongoing club squash tournament. On Christmas Day they drove out of Nairobi to picnic “with Denys Finch Hatton, in the Ngong Hills,” as Joss wrote to his mother while he waited to become a father. “I hope it will be over soon, this waiting is nerve-racking.”
⁶
The baby was late. New Year passed. And then, four days later, Idina went into labor.

Idina gave birth to a girl. Both Idina and Joss were delighted. Joss had no need of a male heir. There were no ancestral estates to take over, simply a name. And that name was so ridiculously grand that, like very, very few other British titles, it could be inherited by a woman. They called her Diana Denyse. The first name, Diana, was after Idina’s brother Buck’s wife, just as Idina had been named after the wife of her uncle, Tom Brassey. The second name was an almost taunting feminization of fellow Kenyan Denys Finch Hatton’s first.

Denys Finch Hatton was at this time the lover of Karen Blixen, who would later write the autobiographical book
Out of Africa
. She was known to her friends as Tania. When Diana was born, Tania was in her native Denmark, where she’d been for the previous ten months, leaving Denys to wander in Kenya. There was no love lost between the author and Idina. One of Idina’s closest friends, Cockie Birkbeck, had been having an affair with Tania’s husband, Bror Blixen, for over five years.

Bright-brown-eyed Cockie was just a few months older than Idina and a frequent guest at her more intimate, and wild, gatherings. Both she and Idina had both first arrived in Kenya with soldier-settler husbands in 1919. Like Idina, too, Cockie had a perpetually girlish air. (Her final gesture would be an explicit request to be late for her own funeral and that the reading should be the story of Jesus’s turning water into wine.) However, Idina’s girlishness was one of irrepressible naughtiness, whereas Cockie’s was a beguiling, though utterly misplaced, air of innocence. When on safari with the Prince of Wales she so charmed him with her fascination with his Crichton ice-making machine—never before seen in Kenya—that he asked her, even though she had
never fired a shot in her life, to take a gun. When he returned to England he sent her an ice-making machine.

Within a few months of arriving in Kenya with her husband, Ben Birkbeck, Cockie had gone with him on one of Bror Blixen’s safaris. Bror, like many white hunters, made a habit of trying to seduce the women he led into the bush, especially those trembling on their first safari, feeling a hair’s breadth from mortal danger at every turn. His reassuring air of experience and control proved almost irresistible. Cockie fell out of her husband’s arms and into Bror’s, where she had been ever since. Bror had insisted that Tania divorce him a couple of years earlier so that he might marry Cockie. Tania had agreed, believing that Denys Finch Hatton would marry her. He had not so far done so. The fact that Bror and Cockie had been equally slow to reach the altar—or rather the register office, being divorcés—provided Tania with little consolation. Cockie was still there, always about to marry Bror and become the next Baroness Blixen in Tania’s place.

Idina’s ex-husband Charles Gordon and his new wife, Honor, had meanwhile moved to a farm next to Tania’s coffee plantation at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The three of them had become firm friends, and Charles and Honor had made Tania godmother to their daughter, Lukyn. However, Idina had also remained close to Charles and when, a year after Diana Denyse’s birth, she and Joss visited the Gordons’ farm around the same time that Tania’s mother was visiting from Denmark, Tania wrote, “European standards of behavior are so quickly forgotten out here, and I do take so much delight in having Mother get to know the people I know and associate with here, but when we invite ourselves to tea with Charles and Honor Gordon and then hear that Idina and her current husband are staying there I am obliged to try to recall my civilized way of thinking and out of consideration for the dignity of an elderly, distinguished Danish lady, to postpone the visit.”
⁷

The baby Diana was, however, clearly Joss’s, although the hard evidence only produced itself several decades later when Diana’s eldest son, Merlin, grew into the spitting image of his grandfather.

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 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 themselves down as their innumerable porters raised tents. Before dark each had taken his or her 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 campfire, cocktails in hand, and started an evening of stories 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,”
⁸
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
” [good-bye]
.

Even Idina wanted to move the conversation on. “Let’s be jolly,” she would interrupt, “and think of Paris tonight.”
⁹

The party returned to Slains before the spring rains turned the dirt roads to mud, and settled down to long, cozy evenings together. They were joined by two other Kenya-based friends, Michael Lafone and 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.”
¹⁰

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,”
¹¹
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.”
¹²

The principal risk was that he might start bleeding internally. The doctors told Idina that the immediate danger period would last two weeks, and after that Joss would not be allowed to leave the 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.”
¹³

Joss was, at least, a “wonderfully good patient (partly because he is terrified poor darling, it is too pathetic).”
¹⁴
Eventually his temperature subsided, taking him out of danger, but he was kept in the hospital for observation. Idina drove back up to Slains to check on her baby daughter, her houseguests, 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.”
¹⁵
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.”
¹⁶
Having calmed the situation down as far as she could, Idina returned to her camp on the Nakuru racecourse.

Joss was still unwell: “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.”
¹⁷
In June, he came home for Idina to nurse him back to health. The return of the two of them to Slains was met by some good news. The neighboring 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, in reality a large stream barely six feet wide. There the house and its occupants were sheltered in a 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 afterward they left for France, promising to return to their new Kenyan home by the start of winter. Idina waved good-bye 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.