The Bolter (40 page)

I can write no more for I am crying with you—anything you can write me about him do please—your children look so lovely. Bless you and your children are in heart broken heart [sic].

Idina

Pru wrote back to Idina. She sent her a photograph of herself and Idina’s tiny granddaughters, now two and three. She passed on what details she had of David’s death and that he had been buried in the Greek village of Paramythia. She told Idina that Anthony Eden himself had written an obituary for David in the
Times
, saying that “he was destined to be one of the leaders of his generation. Had he lived to take up that political career upon which he had set his heart, no position would have been beyond his reach.”
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She enclosed a copy of the full text, and of the other tributes in the press. The Greeks had declared him the “modern Byron,”
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saying that “a new name has been added to the pages of Greek history” and he “died like a hero at Menina, falling in action like a true Greek.”
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On his tombstone the guerrillas had carved: “The soil of Greece is proud to offer hospitality to this hero.”

To Pru, however, his death felt less than heroic.
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David had recklessly walked straight into the line of fire. It felt even less heroic when the British Embassy at which he had been working returned all his papers, including a love letter and photograph from his mistress with “From a sleek domestic pussy” written on the back.

And then Barbie asked Pru to move out of the gardener’s cottage. She needed it, she said, to lend to Pamela Churchill, Winston’s daughter-in-law, who wanted somewhere for her baby son, also named Winston, to live far from the bombs falling on London.

IN KENYA, IDINA ABSORBED HERSELF
in her lost sons. She ordered a copy of a new novel,
The Sea Eagle,
²⁰
about a man fighting with the Greek guerrillas, and curled up and read every word of what David’s last days might have been like. And she began to fall apart again. The brief rally which had enabled her to write to Pru subsided and a latent frailty took hold. The then ten-year-old Ann remembers that Idina stopped eating and “she became what would now be called anorexic.” One evening, Ann was alone with her, chatting before dinner, when Idina, who had been standing with her back to the fire, suddenly collapsed. Ann tried to lift her onto the sofa but wasn’t strong enough and so rushed off into the bathroom where Arnold Sharp was immersed, shouting that “Dina has died!” As the two of them lifted Idina onto the sofa, she came around. It was now that she first began to talk to Ann and Tom about her past with David and Gee. “But she never divulged that she left them when they were four and three,” Ann says. She simply said that “it was so tragic that she had had to be separated from them.” Ann still finds it hard to believe that Idina had gone willingly,
for she was “so loving and kind and compassionate”—in contrast to Ann’s own mother, whom she found, when reunited with her at the age of eighteen, “a cold fish.”

In February 1945, Idina began to suffer knife-sharp electric shocks running down her arms, her legs, up her neck. Her nervous system had collapsed. The doctor blamed her inability to recover on the fact that, since Gee’s death, she had not descended from the high altitude of Clouds and her body was no longer able to cope with prolonged periods at eight thousand feet. If she wished to live she would have to leave her home and go down to sea level.

Idina started to pack. Her reclusive mountainside life had come to an end. She could visit Clouds, but it could no longer be her main home. She would, however, continue to come back for Ann and Tom’s holidays—they were now both in boarding school. Ann was at Roedean, in South Africa. For the moment, Tom was closer—at Pembroke House in Gilgil, just down the road from Clouds. Her marriage to Lynx was, however, over. As she later wrote to Pru: “I was not in the best of form as I had my divorce against Lynx which I hated—he wants to marry someone from South Africa and it is no good hanging on. We were so happy but it is the war.”
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Nonetheless, Ann and Tom stayed on with Idina. She was, says Ann, “the only mother I ever knew until I was quite grown up.” And even Ann’s signature is a daughter’s mimic of Idina’s style.

Shortly before she moved down to the coast, Idina received another letter from Pru. It contained more photographs of Pru with David’s two daughters, some newspaper clippings from his death (including Eden’s obituary), and a copy of his memorial service sheet. And Pru’s new address.

Idina wrote back immediately:

Clouds

February 27th

[1945]

Pru dear—

Your very wonderful letter and enclosures came yesterday—thank you so so much—I still think you are grandly brave & everything that David would want you to be but I know how unutterably lonely you must be in your heart.

I, too, would love to know you talk to you & hear so much from you. I wonder so what David would have felt about the situation in Greece—it is so hard to understand it from here—one just feels the ghastly futile & tragic waste of it all. Have you read “Sea Eagle” I thought it marvellous—one feels so terribly for those unflinching guerrillas.

I often look at the photograph of you and the children & I long to see them. I am so glad Laura liked Dinan—it is now over 6 yrs since I last saw her—it’s hard to imagine her grown up. Do you see much of Elizabeth? What a terrible time she has had.

I do think Anthony’s appreciation of David is lovely to have & I am so glad you have some of his diary—it must have been enthralling. You are right, he did go off gaily—Lynx saw him just before. Why is it in war the best are always taken—it seems to be inevitable, some cruel fate marks them down—as Anthony said a future leader that apart from all his sweetness that we knew. What an utter blank life must seem to you. Thank God you have the children.

Am going to the Coast to recover from a slight nervous break down followed by neuritis & the Dr says I must get down to sea level —8000 feet for 2 yrs is too long.

Bless you Pru—I often think of you & wish I could help but no one can only Time can soften the pain. My love to you & my grandchildren—

Idina

Idina moved down to the coast, into a bungalow near Mombasa, where she started to plant a tropical garden. But she never fully recovered. Nor did she ever meet either David’s daughters or Gee’s wife. When the war ended, with neither Gee nor any children to live for, Elizabeth committed suicide. Pru, alone and having fallen out with Barbie, took David’s two little girls back to live in Greece. Eventually she would return to England and marry a Welsh squire, moving straight to his tumbledown castle and rambling estate in the hills near the Black Mountain town of Hay-on-Wye, far from Idina’s orbit.

DINAN HAD SPENT
her wartime teenage years continuing to live with Avie, have her lessons with Zellée, ride her ponies around, and spend her holidays with her cousins, Buck’s children. Idina had sent her regular
letters packed with photographs of Clouds, each with an inscription on the back, but by the end of the war Idina hadn’t seen her daughter for so long that it was, as she had written, “hard to imagine her grown up.”
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Yet, grown up she had, and in 1946, before Idina could visit Britain, the now twenty-year-old Dinan became engaged to be married.

Her fiancé was a twenty-seven-year-old named Iain Moncreiffe, who was, like Dinan’s father, Joss, a Scot. Iain had been a captain in the Scots Guards during the war. Since being decommissioned, also like Joss, he had spent six months as the private secretary to a British Ambassador. Iain had gone to Moscow. After half a year in the Soviet Union he had decided not to pursue a career in the diplomatic corps. When he had returned to Britain he had met Dinan.

Avie was organizing the wedding. Among the guests invited were the queen—a great girlfriend of Avie’s—and the two young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret.
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There was no question of Idina’s also being able to attend, as it was thought that neither the queen nor either of the princesses could be introduced to a woman now five times divorced.

But the presence of the Royal Family may have been more of an excuse than a reason not to invite Idina. Dinan had by now not seen her mother for eight years. She had last said good-bye to Idina as a twelve-year-old girl. Now she was a twenty-year-old—and the Countess of Erroll in her own right—and about to be a married woman. Idina had been absent for the entirety of her daughter’s growing up. Dinan’s mother figure had instead been Avie. Moreover, Dinan’s teenage years had been spent under the shadow of Joss’s murder and both of her parents’ misbehavior, to the extent that there were still widely held doubts as to who her real father was. It was hardly surprising that she wanted little more to do with Idina.

Sadly, Idina understood the situation. A lunchtime guest at Clouds remembers Idina showing her around. Idina stopped by a large photograph of a young woman.

“That’s my darling daughter,” said Idina, “but she doesn’t speak to me, she doesn’t approve of me.”
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The war had taken both Idina’s sons. It had separated her from her daughter, too.

The following year, Lynx wrote to Idina to tell her that he and his new wife, Grace Sleddon, had established a proper home together. This was in southern Tanzania, hundreds of miles from Clouds across the
African bush. From now on, it would be there that Ann and Tom would go during their school holidays. They never returned to Clouds, leaving their childhood possessions behind with Idina.

IDINA DID NOT GIVE UP
on Dinan. However, now that Dinan had married, Idina no longer received the income from her daughter’s share of Muriel’s trust. Nor, as she was no longer able to run the farm at Clouds herself, was she earning much money. A trip to England had become a barely affordable undertaking. It took Idina two trips to meet her daughter again. The first time, she arrived at her brother’s house, Fisher’s Gate, with a new escort, a tattooed former sailor called James, or Jimmy, Bird, who managed her farm in Kenya. Idina introduced Jimmy and explained to her bemused brother that he would be very happy staying while Idina went to see her friends in houses to which it might be a little difficult to take him along. She then sashayed into the drawing room where she kicked off her shoes, curled up in a chair and asked for “a little ginnies.”
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And another. Despite the attentions of a succession of young men as well as Jimmy, Idina had not had a good time since the war. By now that “slight nervous breakdown” was joined by cancer of the womb. It took more than just one little ginnies to numb the pain.

But Dinan would not see her. And, several weeks later, having visited a number of her friends (leaving Jimmy behind with her brother each time), Idina returned to Kenya, rejected. She had left her sons when they were small, but she had not left her daughter. Of her three children, it was Dinan, the one from whom she had been separated for so long by the war rather than by her own hand, who presented the most difficult relationship to recover.

It was 1950 before Idina saw Dinan again. This time, Buck had a plan. He knew that Dinan’s husband yearned to become a writer. He therefore tempted both Iain and Dinan down to his house in Sussex with the promise of lunch with Idina’s cousin, the writer Vita Sackville-West, and her publisher husband, Harold Nicholson.

Dinan and Iain arrived with their two-year-old son, Merlin, toward the beginning of August. It was twelve years since Idina had said goodbye to a twelve-year-old Dinan before the war. Idina and her daughter now stood facing each other. Both were petite, with the same eyes and hair, but Dinan, with softer, more rounded features than her mother, was as retiring as the far more glamorous bottle-blond Idina was bold.
But, at last face-to-face, Idina managed to win her daughter around. Idina followed their meeting with effusive correspondence, each letter bursting with praise: “What a success my little Dinan is, and her Mummie loves her so much, with all her heart and she mustn’t go out of my life again.”
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Idina by one of her landscaped ponds in front of Clouds

By the time Idina left for Kenya, plans had been made for a safari the following year, and they had even slipped into a familiar mother and daughter correspondence about whom Dinan should remember to write to: “I went to see poor Row
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yesterday … a letter and a snap of Merlin she would love.… Buck and I are going again this morning,”
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wrote Idina. James Dunn, who thirty-five years earlier had commissioned
Orpen to paint Idina, had offered to give the portrait to Dinan: “Of course I will write to him & very plain that you should do so too… and send him one of your most glamorous photographs.”
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