Free The Bolter by Frances Osborne Page A

catching the train back to Cambridge.
    The next Saturday was Euan’s birthday. After “a bottle of champagne for dinner to celebrate” at Caius, he again caught the evening train to London, “came by tube from Liverpool Street to Marble Arch” and, instead of walking fifty yards west to Idina in Connaught Place, turned north to Barbie’s house, “where Avie and Barbie had a small party lasting fairly late, which was great fun.”
    He had breakfast in Idina’s room the next morning, the news of what he had been up to inevitably revealing how much he was enjoying being caught up in his new gang of her younger sister’s friends. But this Sunday, at least, it was “raining like the devil,” wrote Euan. For once he stayed in. Idina started to spend a precious morning with him. But it was a short morning. By lunchtime Barbie had dropped in.
    Euan then vanished. He went out to lunch with another crowd and Barbie came back at teatime with Avie, Dickie, and three or four others: “they played piano and danced and sang till after 6!” Idina meanwhile was upstairs, again being pummeled by the brutal arms of Mrs. Rigden. 8
    The following weekend Euan again went “to Barbie’s” for what had become “the usual Saturday evening party.” The next morning, Sunday, he awoke at ten, immediately “did some telephoning,” and was at Barbie’s house at eleven. That night, when he left the gang’s Sunday-night dinner at Claridge’s halfway through to catch the train back to Cambridge, “Barbie came to see me off.”
    This weekend there was no mention of Idina.
    BARBIE WAS BEAUTIFUL , interested, yet tantalizingly unavailable. She wanted a rich husband, not a rich lover. Fooling around in bed with a man would not guarantee her position in society. Misbehaving in that way was for the girls who did not have to make a journey up the social ladder as she did. And while Idina lay in bed and Barbie kept herselfjust out of reach, Euan began an “Edwardian friendship” with somebody else. According to the mores with which both Idina and Euan had been brought up, having a passing affair with a married friend was accepted behavior. However, the new wartime morality had stretched this to “friendships” with single girls. While a single girl might not risk pregnancy by having full intercourse, that still left open a wide field of sexual behavior.

    Euan (right) and friends (at Dunkeld)

    Avie, Dickie, and Barbie (at Dunkeld)

    Off for a ride over the Scottish hills

    The Black Gang

    Off for walk

    Picnic time

    Dickie, Barbie, and Avie letting their hair down
    Ten days later, in the second week of May, Euan received a letter from Dickie Ward inviting him to Dunkeld, her family’s sporting estate in Scotland, for the coming long bank-holiday weekend. Dickie was not as beautiful as Barbie but she was both attractive and lively and, unlike Barbie, was socially and financially secure. Her father was an earl and her family was in possession of not only, like Euan, a vast industrial fortune, but also of a country home regarded as one of the very finest houses in Europe. Witley Court in Worcestershire was a palace. Dickie’s grandfather had reputedly spent more money on the house than had been spent on any other home in Britain or even in Europe. It had endless bedrooms and rows of columns, sweeping staircases, and balustrades linking them. Its gardens were laid out in great vistas of fountains and marble statues. An invitation to Dunkeld was not an invitation to Witley. But it was a first step along the way.
    Euan rang Avie that morning to ask if she would, in effect, chaper-one him. She “said she would decide by tea-time.” When she agreed Euan proceeded to telephone Idina. This was his first mention of her in his diary for three weeks and it would be the last for another three. He told her that he would not be coming home for his leave after all.
    It was not Idina’s style to protest. She was clearly still proud and it was not