The Bolter (28 page)

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, and 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 organizer of the Happy Valley crowd—was earning the country an international reputation as a “love colony.”
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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 womanizer; and Jack Soames—a louche Old Etonian with a penchant for voyeurism.
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As well as these harder partiers were the inner set’s houseguests, John “Chops” Ramsden, who owned a large estate over toward 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.

In theory, the annual party was one big night and the morning after (although in practice stragglers would remain for up to a week at a time) with not a soul rising before ten-thirty and so allowing the servants ample time to clear up and prepare a cold brunch of salad, Bromo-Seltzer, and prairie oysters. These hangover remedies were needed. The custom became for the hosts to supply the food but the guests to bring the alcohol. This resulted in innovative and near-lethal concoctions, the principal being Black Velvet—a beguilingly drinkable mixture of champagne and stout. To add to the excitement, by the time of their very first annual party, in effect their housewarming in
1926, the de Janzés had acquired a substitute for the children they had left behind in France. This was a lion cub they had found, survivor of a pride which had made its home on their farm. When they found him, Alice and Fred carried him back to the house and named him Samson.

Idina and Alice in Idina’s garden in Kenya

Samson was not small when he arrived. By the time of the party he was even less so. And somehow—although that somehow had two likely coconspirators—before dinner Samson managed to find his way under Molly’s chair, where he lay unseen. Dinner began. The guests were enthused by the cocktails, and the noise of conversation rose to pound off the walls and corrugated-iron roof of the farmhouse.

As the fish course was being served, one of the houseboys let out a shriek and dropped a bowl of mayonnaise down Molly’s back. He had tripped over Samson’s just extended paw, and as Molly herself rose to dab the egg paste off her, she too stumbled over the cub, being caught by her neighbor “just in time to prevent a heavy fall.… The good lady took a lot of pacifying,” as Fred wrote.
⁹

The party moved on to the veranda. There they played the gramophone while “plying bottles far into the night.”
¹⁰
They stunted and drank, they drank and stunted, “until no one cared whether they were good or bad, even if they existed or were just illusions”
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and eventually, at six o’clock, just as dawn was breaking, all fell into bed.

These few months, with Joss, the husband whom she adored, their tiny child, and her best friend, Alice, all with her in Kenya, were one of the high points of Idina’s life. It was indeed that better life which she had worked so hard to create.

But it was all too brief and fleeting. Almost as soon as Idina had pulled these strands of her life together, they unraveled. Having herself bolted twice, Idina would now find out what it felt like to be bolted from.

Chapter 18

T
oward the end of 1926 Cyril Ramsay-Hill left for Europe on a long shopping and hunting expedition. Although he took with him two Somali servants—whom he outfitted in Savile Row suits
¹
—he did not take Molly. She was therefore left completely free for Joss’s attentions. To make matters worse, the unsuspecting Ramsay-Hill asked Joss, his so-called good friend, to keep an eye on his wife. As Fred de Janzé put it, “her husband told him to go up and see her as often as he could: ‘Do her good not to be always alone.’ ”
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On the pretext of taking “a month’s shooting leave,”
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Joss left Slains, only to pitch camp on the shores of Lake Naivasha, in Molly’s garden.

Even when Idina heard that her husband’s safari was a purely sexual adventure, she had little choice but to accept it, but she could console herself that Cyril Ramsay-Hill was returning after Christmas. His reappearance should put an end to Joss’s expedition. And despite his involvement with Molly, Joss saw Alice’s presence in Kenya as hard to resist and he kept popping back to the Wanjohi Valley.

It was a far from satisfactory situation for Idina, and there were immediate practical ramifications: “bad debts that he had run up in her name with the Indian merchants” and prolonged absences that threatened to “disrupt her social programme.”
⁴
Not to mention that she was relying on a friend’s sexual attractions to keep her husband home.

˙  ˙  ˙

SHORTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS
an old friend of Idina’s arrived in Kenya. Idina had known Raymond de Trafford and his brothers for many years. And, however badly Idina had behaved, Raymond had outstripped her. He gambled away any money that passed through his hands. He drank himself into violent outbursts of temper. And, as it became clear, he appeared not to give a damn about the happiness of anyone around him.
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Since the end of the war he had “stunted” all over London and Paris and now that the Kenyan Highlands’ reputation for its Happy Valley was spreading in Europe it was almost inevitable that Raymond should end up there. His deeply Catholic family in Britain were pleased enough to see him go that they gave him some money with which to set himself up with a farm. As well as Idina, Raymond knew Lord Delamere’s eldest son, Tom Cholmondeley: like the Delameres, the de Traffords were a Cheshire landowning family. Raymond therefore turned up at Muthaiga and immediately headed off on safari before returning to spend the Christmas period between the Delamere ranch down at Elmenteita and Slains, up in the hills. And there, at Slains, was Alice.

The attraction was both mutual and immediate. They sprawled on the lawns in the afternoon sun. A photograph taken at this time shows them sitting on the grass, Alice’s eyes half closed, the pair of them flirting and teasing. And when, shortly afterward, Fred left on a short hunting expedition, Alice and Raymond vanished together.

Fred returned to discover that they had gone. A few days later they came back, but Raymond’s volatility and the suddenness of his temporary elopement with Alice shook Fred. Whereas Alice’s affair with Joss had become a predictable part of the establishment and would never lead to anything, Raymond was obviously different. Fred took Alice away to Paris immediately.

Alice and Fred’s departure was a serious blow to Idina. She not only lost her closest friend, it also marked the end of the happily extended Hay–de Janzé ménage.

Joss, however, was not going to leave with Molly yet. He had fallen in love with Molly’s house at least as much as he had fallen for her—and that remained firmly in the ownership of Cyril Ramsay-Hill. Living, or rather camping, with Molly at Oserian was evidently a delight. However, leaving the comforts of Slains for nowhere in particular was less
appealing. When Cyril returned to Kenya shortly after Alice and Fred’s departure, Joss slid back home to Idina. They had a beautiful home, each other, and a child. Idina had converted a guest bedroom at one end of the house into a nursery wing for Diana and a new English nanny. Now a year old, Diana was making her first tottering steps across the lawn at Slains and struggling to utter the three long syllables of her name: Di-an-a, ending up with “Dinan”—a name that stuck. Photographs show Idina dancing around the garden, Dinan in her arms, as she twirled her daughter round and showed her off to friends. It was at least the appearance of domestic bliss.

Raymond de Trafford and Alice de Janzé on the lawn at Idina’s house

It lasted for two months after Joss’s return. Then, at the end of March, appalling news reached them from Paris. Alice had shot both Raymond and herself.

WHEN THE DE JANZéS HAD ARRIVED
in Paris, Alice had told Fred that she wanted a divorce in order to marry Raymond. She then promptly moved out of the family apartment and into one lent for the purpose by Fred’s American mother, who perhaps was trying to do what she could to keep the marriage together. Raymond, however, simply moved in with Alice.

Fred then capitulated—not even a change of scene as dramatic as that from Kenya to Paris had shaken his wife’s resolve to leave him. He set in motion the exclusive divorce open only to Europe’s grandest Catholic families: a papal annulment. In theory this should avoid the inconvenience of either party being classed as a divorcé. When a marriage is annulled, it is as though neither had been married in the first place.

In the third week of March 1927 Raymond returned to England to speak to his family about marrying Alice. On the twenty-fifth he
arrived back in Paris and went straight to Alice’s apartment. There he told her that, divorce or annulment, his strictly Catholic family had forbidden him to marry her and that he had to end the relationship, or they would cut him off.

Alice begged him to stay with her. He refused. “I immediately,” said Alice later, “determined upon suicide.”
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The next day “we took a last luncheon together,” she said.
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She again asked Raymond to stay with her. Again he refused, telling her that he was leaving Paris by train within a couple of hours.

Alice offered to see Raymond off but told him that she needed to visit an armorer’s that afternoon. Together they went shopping. Alice bought a pistol and a round of bullets. “Raymond’s phlegmatic English type suspected nothing in this incident, evidently thinking that I was doing an errand for my husband,” she would say later in her statement to the investigating judge.
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Raymond stood beside her and bought himself a pair of hunting knives. They then took a taxi to the Gare du Nord. There Alice disappeared into the station lavatories, where she “had an opportunity to load the weapon,”
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and emerged to say goodbye. “It was during the anguish of the last moment’s separation as we embraced that I suddenly acted on impulse. Slipping the revolver between us, I fired upon him and then upon myself,” Alice testified.

The first bullet hit Raymond in the chest, narrowly missing his heart and lodging itself in his kidney. Alice’s second bullet hit her in the “lower abdomen.”
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The story made headlines the world over. “
AMERICAN COUNTESS SHOOTS ENGLISHMAN AND SELF IN PARIS
,” shouted the front page of
The New York Times.
¹¹

When the news reached Idina she packed her bags. It was clear that Alice needed her in Europe—that is, if she was still alive when Idina reached her, for both she and Raymond had been severely wounded. The single glimmer of light on this otherwise bleak horizon was that Joss agreed to come too.