The Bolter (27 page)

Chapter 17

D
espite all Idina’s efforts, Joss had already met the woman for whom he would leave her. While Idina had been in the hospital after the birth of Diana, Joss had driven back to Slains with only his Kenyan valet, Waweru, leaving Fred and Alice behind. 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 in 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 there. 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, modeled 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. Ramsay-Hill’s wife, 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 French pornography consisting of both books and erotic pictures by 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 Masai 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 Molly, he clearly made up his mind to spend as much time as he could at the house.

Molly Ramsay-Hill was born Mary Maude in London in 1893. Her father worked at the 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 asset was 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 pounds a year for her son. Four years later she surfaced in Cairo, apparently in possession of a fortune, which she claimed came from the well-known and extensive British chain of pharmacies named Boots. 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. Her white skin, green eyes, Titian hair, and strong jaw gave her a classical beauty, unlike Idina. Dark red lipstick and nail varnish also lent Molly 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 thirty thousand pounds from which she derived an extraordinarily efficient income of eight thousand pounds.

Oserian

Joss commented that, after three years, a lover becomes “a drain on one’s vitality.”
¹
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.
²
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 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 things were 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 airplane returned, bearing fruit, she rolled up her sleeve mid-conversation and injected herself with a silver syringe.

Molly Ramsay-Hill

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 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.
³
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.”
⁴

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.”
⁵

Joss at Gilgil with Gerry and Kiki Preston and friend

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 traveling 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 crisscrossed 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 behavior 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 monthlong 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 halfhearted 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!”
⁶

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 soul mate 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 return. 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.