The Bolter (39 page)

Shortly after Lynx returned to Cairo, Gee received his orders to leave Britain for the war. And, having lost three lives close to her, Idina was now brought a new one. Gee was sent to Mombasa. With his father no longer around to be upset, and Barbie several thousand miles away, he wrote to Idina.

THEY MET AT MUTHAIGA
, at one of those heaving, balloon-filled dances with couples’ chests pinned to each other, legs flying out in all
directions. To a newcomer the place appeared a maze of dance halls and dining rooms, sitting rooms and bars—somewhere in which was a mother Gee hadn’t seen for twenty-five years. He asked a senior officer if he knew Lady Idina.

“Well,” the officer replied, “everyone knows of her. She has a dreadful reputation and it wouldn’t be wise for you to be seen about with her.”
¹⁶

Gee saluted, turned, and walked away.

He found her himself.

THERE WAS TOO MUCH TO SAY
to know where to begin. In the years since Idina had last seen him, Gee had grown from a toddler to a great bear of a man of twenty-eight. Idina was tiny next to him. For, like David, he was tall but, unlike him, far from slender, almost round with joviality. Idina took Gee’s large hand in hers and led him onto the dance floor, put her head against his chest, and let her son’s thick arms wrap around her back. They “were seen dancing most amorously.”
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Gee was good at hugs. He was a warmer, cozier character than David, able to smooth any social situation. In the latter regard, particularly, he was very like his father, Euan, extraordinarily so. As David’s wife, Pru, later said of him, “You never met a lovelier man in your life. He was so funny, charming, always good-humored.”
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Idina had never had Euan in Kenya, the country she had come to adore. In his place had come their son: a living, breathing part of Euan who, unlike his father, had a great deal of love to show her. They swayed together for hours.
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The war, which was wrenching so many apart, had brought the two of them together. As when she had met David at Claridge’s nine years earlier, this was for Idina the beginning of a new, loving relationship. Gee was a steadying character, and now he was here to steady her.

For Gee, Idina offered something similar. The war had taken the father he loved, spread his family across the globe, and separated him from his wife. But here at last he had his mother, his real biological mother, who had borne him and cradled him in her arms. He held her tight.
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The next day, Gee was hauled up in front of the senior officer.

“Look here,” he told Gee, “I have warned you about Lady Idina.… She’s old enough to be your mother.”

“She is my mother,” was the reply.
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Chapter 25

A
nd thus Idina and her second son came to know each other. For days at a stretch Gee would be down at his base at Mombasa, piloting a Catalina flying boat on sea patrols. At weekends they could meet in Nairobi or, with enough days of leave ahead of him, Gee made the long drive up to Clouds. Whenever he visited, Idina was beside herself with excitement. She was “literally ecstatic both at the mere prospect of one of his visits, and throughout his stay,” says Ann. “I, too, adored him, for he played with us and gave us piggyback rides around the garden.” By day, Idina showed off her mountain paradise to her “darling son.”
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In the evening, they curled up on sofas in front of a roaring fire, talking through the night.

David had offered her a headstrong and intense filial love. Theirs had been a relationship in which Idina adored and David burnt—both himself and her. Gee, on the other hand, was a rock who could give Idina the feeling that he would always be there for her. In her own son Idina had found the constant love that she had been searching for.

But, on 25 August 1943, four short months after Gee had arrived and just long enough for the sharp newness of their relationship to begin to soften into permanence, a thin line of dust appeared along the hillside road leading to Clouds. As the minutes passed, the dust filled out into a cloud that eventually came to an abrupt halt at the gates. The usual small swarm of fezzes appeared. The gate was opened. The dust-covered car rattled in among the flower beds. Out climbed Dorothy
Blin Stoyle. Dorothy had come to Kenya eight years earlier when her husband, Herbert, had been sent out to be Chief Mechanical Engineer on what was now called the Kenya and Uganda Railway. She had become friends with Idina. She had invited her and her current flame, whoever it was, to her parties—pointedly ignoring the raised eyebrows among the rest of her guests.
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Dorothy’s daughter Molly was working as a nurse in Mombasa. One of Molly’s friends had become Gee’s “girlfriend”
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and had invited Molly, since she knew Idina, to come and meet him for dinner. Two days earlier the two girls had gone to the air base to pick him up for the evening. When they arrived they were told that he had taken a crew out on an exercise in a Catalina that afternoon and had not yet returned. Molly and her friend decided to wait. They waited. Dinnertime passed and they continued to wait. Eventually, at around eleven o’clock in the evening, they were told that Gee had now been posted as missing.

Dorothy had come to tell Idina for, as she later said, “I couldn’t think who else would.”
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Idina drove down to Mombasa. Two days later, when she arrived, Gee had still not returned. Her “darling son,” so full of life and with so much to live for, was dead.

Idina somehow found the strength to buy a plot of land in the cemetery close to the ocean. Between the great, round, purple trunks of the baobabs, she raised a stone: “To my beloved son, Wing Cmdr G E Wallace, who flew from here to the unknown, and to his crew.”

She then drove back through Nairobi to Clouds. She stayed up there in the hills with Ann and Tom. She didn’t come down to Nairobi for dances, not even to the club at Gilgil. She stopped eating and exercising. Surrounded by flowers continuing their relentless Kenyan bloom, Idina wilted.

David Wallace’s wife, Pru, and Idina’s two granddaughters, Davina and Laura, 1943

Idina’s son Gerard Wallace, “Gee,” at his wedding to Elizabeth, née Lawson, who had been married to one of Euan and Barbie’s friends, Gerard Koch de Gooreynd

As though she were cursed, the touch of her affection appeared fatal. She was “genuinely devastated,” says Ann, and turned her emotions to objects that she could not kill: she lit endless cigarettes and watched the bottoms of bottles clear. “I should never,” she said to anyone who visited, “have left Euan in the first place.”
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At the end of December that year David wrote to his wife, Pru, “Saw Lynx, in Cairo, who tells me Dina is wasting away.”
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Throughout her turbulent life Idina had, so far, managed to bounce back. The deaths of Joss, Euan, and Alice had weakened her but she had nonetheless managed to absorb herself in a new wartime farming life. The death of her son was, however, too much for even the resilient Idina to bear. As she would shortly write: “I am not very brave any more.”
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Idina was not the only one wasting after Gee’s death. Two months beforehand, in June, David had been parachuted behind the German lines in Greece. The Foreign Office thought that what SOE was doing risked a rise of Communist power in the country. David had met up with both the Greek guerrilla leaders and Brigadier Myers, the head of the British SOE in Greece. There he had at last learnt that behavior did not come in black and white. The Greek guerrillas could be an unruly bunch, yet the other British officers were deliberately turning a blind eye in order to keep them on their side. He was obviously shocked, wrote Myers.
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On 9 August, David, Myers, and half a dozen representatives from almost as many guerrilla factions had been picked up from a makeshift airfield and flown to Cairo. After six weeks with SOE, David had been convinced that Myers was not enabling a Communist takeover of Greece. When he reached Cairo he told the ambassador this.
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The ambassador was furious and spent several days trying to persuade David to change his mind. In the middle of this, David heard that Gee had been killed.

David gave up battling his boss. Anthony Eden ordered him to come back to England immediately three days ahead of Myers, in order to report on what he had seen. David saw both Eden and Churchill. But, deeply upset by his brother’s death, he ended up in an argument with Churchill “about the Greek monarchy.”
¹⁰

When he returned to Cairo he was still reeling. Perhaps due to the absence of a mother’s love, he and Gee had been as close as many twins, and now this other half of him was missing. And he had gone while doing a proper, fighting, job in the war. David’s new job in Cairo was a desk job in the Embassy. He felt he wasn’t doing anything useful, anything that counted.
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Like Idina, he began to waste. But, instead of being “not very brave any more” he started an affair with one of the secretaries in the Embassy. And then he asked the ambassador to send him back into Greece.

Eventually the ambassador agreed. David was elated. And his misery over Gee’s death swung into ebullience. Lynx saw him just before he left, reporting to Idina that he was in high spirits. But it was a reckless, dangerous high.

This time David went in by sea, from Italy. He spent the first two weeks of August observing guerrilla operations. On 14 and 15 August he sat down and wrote his report. On the 16th the group of guerrillas he was with planned an attack for the next day on a German garrison at the town of Menina. It was David’s first chance to pick up a gun and
fight in this war. He loved the Greeks he was with, as they both loved and appreciated him. And David, said his wife, was fearless. Just like Idina.

On 17 August the Greeks broke into Menina, where, just inside the town, they met a heavy line of German resistance fighting “from fortified houses.”
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Rifle in hand, David walked toward the center of the town. A rifle fired from one of the houses. The bullet went straight through his neck.
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The message was brought up to Clouds from the telegraph station at Gilgil. Telegrams in wartime rarely bring other than devastating news. It was almost exactly a year to the day since Gee had died. When she read the message inside, Idina collapsed.
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For several days, high up on her mountainside, Idina felt as though she, too, must surely die from grief.
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It took a week for her to find the emotional and physical strength to scribble a short note to the woman she had met in a bank in Cairo two and a half years earlier.

She sat at her desk at the far end of her cedar-paneled bedroom, under a window looking out across her manicured lawns and hedges, framed by the dust of the Rift Valley beyond. She took a piece of transparent airmail paper, almost as fragile as she now was, and finally picked up a pencil. This time, her violin-stroke script was so light that it was barely visible:

Clouds

Sept 13th

Dearest Pru,

There is so little I can say for what are words when one has lost all one loves—thank God you have the children—I have been completely shattered since I got Buck’s cable last week—I couldn’t write to you before—I am afraid I am not very brave any more & this on top of G, has nearly killed me. But I do want you to know how my whole heart goes out to you—you are young and you must have planned so much together for the future & I know how he adored you & how little happiness you had together—always a turbulent unsettled life—so little peace & home happiness.